Carlos Monsiváis, Mexican Who Wrote of the Great and the Humble, Dies at 72
By ANTHONY DePALMA
From the NYTCarlos Monsiváis, Mexican Who Wrote of the Great and the Humble, Dies at 72
Carlos Monsiváis, the Mexican writer and cultural critic whose trenchant literary chronicles laid bare the foibles of political power brokers and gave everyday Mexican life a surreal majesty, died Saturday in Mexico City. He was 72.
Officials of the National Health Secretariat said he died of lung disease and had been hospitalized since April.
Mr. Monsiváis was not well known outside Mexico, and he never achieved the literary fame or commercial success of such contemporaries as Octavio Paz or Carlos Fuentes. But within Mexico, in newspapers, magazines and books, his five decades of observations about politics, popular culture, liberalism, and the highs and lows of the Mexican character made his voice more recognizable than that of Mexican presidents.
The current president, Felipe Calderón — with whom Mr. Monsiváis did not see eye to eye — paid tribute over the weekend. “His literary and journalistic work is a necessary reference for understanding the richness and cultural diversity of Mexico,” Mr. Calderón said in a statement. “He was a chronicler and witness for his era.”
Mr. Monsiváis’s writings helped shape Mexico’s contemporary political and cultural life. With Mr. Fuentes and others he was an exponent of the Latin American “boom” of the 1960s, a flowering of literary expression that brought Latin American writers to the attention of the wider world.
But while Mr. Fuentes and the others embraced universal themes, Mr. Monsiváis is best known for exploring the ordinary problems of common people to create extraordinarily moving sagas of the street.
His writing was often laced with irony and sarcasm. In “Mexican Postcards” (Verso, 1997), one of his few books to be translated into English, he wrote of his homeland: “A decent society with noble sentiments loves the home as if it were the nation, and venerates the nation as if it were a mother: there is no such thing as virtue outside of official engagements, no true love outside marriage, and no civic pride that is far removed from the respectful laying of bouquets and wreaths.”
Mr. Monsiváis wrote about some of the great social issues and political events of his time, often as a participant. He supported gay rights and embraced most leftist causes, starting with the 1968 student protests in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Plaza. Shortly before the start of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, scores of students were killed in a confrontation with security forces. The killings were a turning point for Mexico’s pro-democracy movement.
In 1999, Mr. Monsiváis, along with the crusading Mexican journalist Julio Scherer García, returned to the Tlatelolco episode and published a book called “War Report.” In the book they revealed documents showing that the snipers who killed the students were plainclothes members of an elite army unit assigned to the president’s office, directly implicating Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Mexico’s president in 1968.
Mr. Monsiváis also supported the Zapatista guerrilla uprising in 1994 and the 2006 presidential campaign of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who narrowly lost to Mr. Calderón. He condemned the long rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which governed Mexico for more than seven decades. But when a member of the National Action Party finally won in 2000, Mr. Monsiváis criticized that party’s leaders and their conservative views.
Mr. Monsiváis was beloved as much for his curmudgeonly image as for his wrinkled Everyman appearance. He was often pictured holding one of the many household cats he kept in his overstuffed apartment in Mexico City.
He once referred to himself as a mix of Albert Camus and Ringo Starr, as a kind of fun-loving figure with the mind of a philosopher, and he was one of the few Mexican intellectuals who would be instantly recognized on the crowded streets of his city.
At a public viewing in Mexico City over the weekend, thousands passed by his coffin, which was draped in the national flag, the flag of his alma mater, the National Autonomous University, and the gay rights rainbow flag. In a public tribute, the writer Elena Poniatowska said, “What are we going to do without you, Monsi?” using the nickname by which Mr. Monsiváis was universally known.
Carlos Monsiváis (pronounced mohn-see-VICE) was born in Mexico City on May 4, 1938. After studying philosophy and literature at the national university, he began writing literary chronicles that have been compared to the novelistic New Journalism of the late 1960s practiced in the United States.
Those articles have been gathered into a series of books, including “Days to Remember” (1970), “Scenes of Modesty and Frivolity” (1981) and “The Rituals of Chaos” (1995), that were hugely popular in Mexico. He won many literary awards, including Mexico’s National Journalism Award. His column, “For My Mother Bohemians,” ran in the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada for many years.
Mr. Monsiváis had cousins but left no immediate survivors. His ashes will be kept in Mexico City at the Estanquillo Museum, which is devoted to popular culture and which Mr. Monsiváis helped create in 2006, drawing from his own collection of objects from everyday life.
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