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🦋 Slumming

A question that occurs to me as I read García Madero's diaries: Is he slumming? My initial take on his situation is, he's coming from a comfortable family background -- I can't really tell if his uncle is wealthy or just middle class -- but at any rate in a different economic class than the poets he is hanging out with. There are several scenes early in the book where his lack of familiarity with the street is on display. Not really sure how important a role differences of socioeconomic class play in this book but it is worth keeping in mind.

I was thinking about this while I read the December 7th entry, Jacinto Requena telling him about Belano's new wave of purges from the visceral realist movement, and it occurred to me that another way García Madero is on the outside looking in, is he's not a published poet -- I get the impression most of the other poets in the movement have been published, and that García Madero sees the movement as a way to get his foot in the door. When he asks Requena if Belano said anything about him, I can hear a beat before Requena replies, nobody was talking about you for now.

posted evening of Wednesday, November 9th, 2011
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There is some good talk in this connection early in the long December 30th entry -- Pancho Rodríguez is fretting about the class divide which separates him (working class) and Angélica (upper middle class I guess?), and García Madero replies, If you're both poets, what does it matter that one of you belongs to one class and the other to another -- then while Pancho and the cab driver argue about whether this is chingaderas comunistas, García Madero thinks about what separates him from María, "not social class, but the accumulation of experience."

posted evening of November 10th, 2011 by Jeremy

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