Professor sheds light on Latin American detective fiction

1:05 p.m., March 16, 2004--Whether teaching a class or writing a book, Persephone Braham enjoys the challenge of reaching for things beyond the obvious. Last semester, under a grant from the Center for Teaching Effectiveness, the UD assistant professor of Spanish taught an experimental Latin American cultures course that relied exclusively on problem-based learning; and this month, after years of personal sleuth work, she published a book on Latin American detective fiction.

Released by the University of Minnesota Press in February, the 169-page book, “Crimes Against the State, Crimes Against Persons,” examines the role that detective literature played and continues to play in both Cuba and Mexico.

“I’ve always liked certain kinds of detective fiction, but I was all set to do a dissertation on 19th-century literature of independence when my dissertation adviser came back from a big international book fair with this novel by a Cuban writer,” Braham explained of the project’s early stirrings. “It was fascinating and opened a whole world.”

As often occurs when interest gets sparked, Braham began to learn more and more about the genre. A Cuban colleague informed her that, under the Cuban revolution, the government actually hired writers to write detective novels for mass publication and distribution. Soon after that, Braham began to investigate the link between the Cuban revolution and the detective novel as propaganda. What she discovered was that 25 percent of the novels published in Cuba between 1972 and 1986 were detective novels. That discovery led to her thesis and then her book.

Approximately five years in the making, “Crimes Against the State, Crimes Against Persons” explores both Cuban and Mexican detective fiction and examines the culture and writers behind it.

“When I began the book, I really didn’t think that I would have enough to say about just Cuban detective literature,” Braham said. “To be honest, there’s not that much to these novels. They’re pretty much one-trick ponies, and they have just one message, which is that anyone who commits any kind of crime is attacking all the people. That’s because Cuba is a socialist system; and that’s why I chose [the words] ‘crimes against the state.’ By contrast, there’s a really burgeoning detective literature in Mexico, which is extremely critical of the Mexican government and its institutions, which are notoriously corrupt.

“Mexican intellectuals realized that the Mexican revolution and the tenets of the Mexican revolution had failed, and they became very critical of the rhetoric of the government,” Braham said. “So the idea of Cuban novels celebrating the Cuban socialist revolution and Mexican detective novels criticizing the failure of the socialist-Mexican revolution made a very nice pairing, I felt. They’re really two opposite attitudes, but with the same central cause.”

Using this dichotomy as her starting point, Braham visited both Mexico and Cuba to gather as much knowledge (and as many novels) as she could in order to forge ahead with her research.

The process, she said, wasn’t always easy. “It was much easier to research the Mexican detective novels, because it’s easy to get into Mexico and it’s easy to talk with Mexican authors,” she said. “The Cuban case was very different, because you would never find a Cuban detective novel, except by some bizarre accident, on a library shelf in the United States.”

To obtain Cuban crime fiction, Braham visited the open market in Havana, where she scooped up about 30 detective novels, which later raised the eyebrows of Cuban customs officials. “The Cuban customs people were a little uneasy about letting me out with everything, because they consider the books to be national literature,” she said. “But they did, so I got them home and started reading them, and found out they were awful! You always know who the bad guy is. The bad guy—because we’re defending socialism—is the one who has more things than everybody else; he is the guy who has a secret wish to go to Miami, and he is the nonconformist.

“Detective novels from the U.S. had been very popular in Cuba—in translation, of course—and Latin American and Spanish readers had been reading these novels as long as we had, so the government saw this as a perfect way to write fairly dogmatic, programmatic stuff and get it to the masses.”

Mexican detective literature, by contrast, Braham says, is much more subversive. Fallout from the 1968 massacre in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City, in which hundreds of civilians were murdered, caused widespread disillusionment among many Mexican citizens. “Paco Ignacio Taibo II, who’s the main writer in the genre in Mexico, writes these novels where he has a gumshoe modeled after Sam Spade, or Lou Archer, or any of those hard-boiled detectives, [and this character] goes around solving these patriotic crimes like the theft of Montezuma’s breastplate, or crimes against the people of Mexico by its institution. So, he’s defending the people against the institutions, whereas in Cuba they’re defending the institution in the name of the people.”

Although “Crimes Against the State, Crimes Against Persons” is suitable for anyone with an interest in detective literature or Latin American society, Braham said she believes that her book also will appeal to any reader interested in the general link between literature and culture. “I think people who are interested in the use of literature to express cultural or social dilemmas would be interested in Latin American detective fiction, because the genre wrestles with questions of national identity and history and ideology. The novels are much more political and ideological—and, in a way, much more literary—than some of our detective novels in which a cat is a detective,” she said.

“Also, the authors of these novels are all poets and historians and journalists. They’re scholarly, and their approach to literature is very intertextual. They take into account a whole corpus of existing detective literature, both Anglo and Hispanic, and address it in their books.”

Braham received her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. Before joining the University in 2002, she taught at Barnard College, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. She recently received a general University research grant to begin research on her upcoming book, “New World Teratologies,” a book about monsters in Latin American literature and culture, with a specific focus on the Caribbean.

She organized the recent two-day symposium, “Women in Action: Social Transformation in Latin America,” at the University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College campuses, as well as the “Killing the Girls: Unsolved Murders on the Border” lecture recently given at UD by visiting sociologist and scholar Julia Monárrez.

Braham’s book, “Crimes Against the State, Crimes Against Persons,” $19.95 in paperback and $59.95 in hardback, can be purchased online through Amazon.com.

Article by Becca Hutchinson

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