THE NOVEL

The Mexican Revolution, gender and private life

Pablo Aguirre rises from poverty to become a general in Álvaro Obregón’s army. Hugo Estrada, his childhood friend and clandestine love, becomes Isabel. Their story passes through barracks, trains, brothels, political bargains and intimate defeats while the Revolution transforms public power yet leaves a moral police intact within the characters themselves.

Por debajo del agua enters into dialogue with the literature of the Mexican Revolution and shifts its center. The general, the soldadera and military brotherhood emerge as unstable historical categories. The narrative confronts the national epic with erotic relations between men, an identity that cannot fit within the imposed name and the double standard governing private life.

The novel’s critical interest lies in the relationship between two processes: the country’s political transformation and Isabel’s personal construction.

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PUBLISHING HISTORY

From the original screenplay to the 2002 edition

The project began as the screenplay La infancia de Isabel. It received support from IMCINE/Sundance Mexico in 1998 and recognition for original screenplay at the New York Latino Film Festival in 2000. After the Sundance workshop in Tlaxcala, the story took seven years to reach its novelistic form. Plaza & Janés published it in Mexico in 2002 under its definitive title, Por debajo del agua.

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PUBLIC RECEPTION

Journalistic reception and public circulation

La Jornada, 2002

Arturo García Hernández presented the work as a possible first gay novel of the Mexican Revolution. He emphasized its panorama of the period’s sexual morality and its direct confrontation with the stereotype of the invariably macho revolutionary. Read the article and interview →

Palacio de Bellas Artes

The novel was presented in the Sala Adamo Boari with commentary by Alejandra Moreno Toscano, Fernanda Tapia, Evodio Escalante and Braulio Peralta. Alejandro Tomassi read passages accompanied by flutist Horacio Franco. The event records the institutional and cultural reception surrounding the book’s appearance.

Circulation and memory

The first edition nearly sold out within its first month. By 2004, the novel was still being described as a successful and pioneering work within narratives of the Mexican Revolution.

Two years after publication, an interview defined the book as a “serious parody” of the literature of the Revolution and emphasized the differentiated construction of its characters’ voices. The phrase identifies the novel’s deliberate relationship with the subgenre it takes as its point of reference. Read “El juego y la apropiación del lenguaje en la obra de Fernando Zamora” →

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ACADEMIC RECEPTION

Studies and lines of interpretation

The reception did not end with journalistic novelty. University theses, conferences and journals in Mexico, France and the United States have returned to the book to study its relationship with the revolutionary canon, homoerotic desire, gender performativity, trans identity and patriarchal violence.

2004 · Literatura y transgresión

The UNAM thesis Literatura y transgresión. Dos novelas mexicanas con temática homosexual studied the novel alongside the tradition opened by Luis Zapata. It highlighted Pablo and Hugo/Isabel’s experience of joy and sorrow, the precision of the dialogue, the puzzle-like organization of the story and its visible cinematic power. Consult the thesis →

2005–2006 · The return to the Mexican Revolution

María Rita Plancarte Martínez presented her study of the novel at the Tenth Conference on Contemporary Mexican Literature at the University of Texas at El Paso and at the Thirty-sixth International Congress of Ibero-American Literature in Genoa. The work appeared in the Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea under a title that identified its central problem: the return to the Revolution from a contemporary sensibility. View the bibliographic index →

2008 · “Ser Leandro es contravenir las reglas de Dios”

Antoine Rodríguez published in Lectures du genre one of the most extensive analyses of the work. The article studies two simultaneous operations: transtextuality, which turns the literature of the Revolution into a pretext, and transgenericity, which destabilizes the couple, the soldadera and the general. Rodríguez observes that simulation acts upon both literary genre and sociosexual gender. Read the complete article →

2016 · Transgender identity as performativity of the Revolution

Carolina Castellanos Gonella read the novel through theories of performativity. Her analysis shows that the macho soldier and the soldadera—two central figures of revolutionary imagery—reveal their constructed character: the general sustains a forbidden relationship, while Hugo/Isabel occupies the social position of soldadera from an identity that disorders the period’s sexual classifications. View the journal index →

2020 · Social revolution without sexual revolution

Mauricio Pulecio studied the work in A Contracorriente as an alternative to the masculinization of power. His article follows the unfolding of Isabel’s feminine identity, examines water as a space of emotional and erotic freedom and restores marginalized sexual and gender communities to Mexico’s historical imagination. Read the complete study →

2022 · Violence and the representation of a trans woman

Fernanda Carolina Ochoa Flores and Gabriel Osuna Osuna devoted an academic chapter to the construction of Hugo/Isabel. The study updates the critical vocabulary: what in 2002 was publicized chiefly as a homosexual story also appears as the process through which Isabel understands and affirms her identity within a society that responds with structural violence. Consult the academic record →

Taken together, these works place the novel within five fields of study: literature of the Revolution, LGBT literature, queer theory, trans studies and criticism of patriarchal violence.