A Stab in the Dark. Facundo Bernal
sus autores y sus obras (México: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2002); Mensajeros de Heliconia. Capítulos sueltos de las letras bajacalifornianas 1832-2004 (México: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2004); and La cultura bajacaliforniana y otros ensayos afines (Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2005).
5 For more on various approaches to border and migrant modernism, see Christopher Schedler, Border Modernism: Intercultural Readings in American Literary Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2002); Ramón Saldívar, The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006); Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Rachel Adams, Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and José David Saldívar, Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012).
6 Victor Valle, “LA’s Latina/o Phantom Nonfiction and the Technologies of Literary Secrecy,” in Latinx Writing Los Angeles: Nonfiction Dispatches from a Decolonial Rebellion, edited by Ignacio López-Calvo and Victor Valle (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), p. 7.
7 Nicolás Kanellos, “A Brief History of Hispanic Periodicals in the United States,” in Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography, edited by Nicolás Kanellos and Helvetia Martell (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000), p. 32. See also Ramón D. Chacón, “The Chicano Immigrant Press in Los Angeles: The Case of ‘El Heraldo de México,’ 1916-1920,” Journalism History 4, no. 2 (Summer 1977), pp. 48-50, 62-64.
8 For an excellent overview of this entertainment industry, see Colin Gunckel, Mexico on Main Street: Transnational Film Culture in Los Angeles Before World War II (Rutgers, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2015).
9 Octavio Paz, “The Pachuco and Other Extremes,” in The Labyrinth of Solitude, translated by Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1961), pp. 9-28.
10 This trend has been well documented by many scholars. See, for example, Kanellos, “A Brief History of Hispanic Periodicals in the United States”; George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Colin Gunckel, Mexico on Main Street.
Facundo Bernal López (1883-1962)
Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz
Facundo Bernal is a man from the North. A son of Sonora, he was forced to leave his native state, and even his country, in order to escape political violence and upheaval. But Don Facundo, as his colleagues in the press would call him, was always a Sonoran at heart. He was born on October 16, 1883, in Hermosillo, the first son of Facundo Bernal Sr. and Luisa López de Bernal. His father worked for the state government, and the family’s economic situation was precarious, like that of many in Sonora in the years before the Revolution. Facundo Jr. received a secular fourth grade education from the Colegio Sonora, a public school. After the early death of Facundo Sr., the son took a government post no less dreary and miserable that the one his father had occupied. Yet he continued to educate himself with the help of his cultured mother, who ensured that no matter how difficult life was at the Bernal household, there was never a lack of books. Facundo read the poets of the Golden Age of Spanish literature — Garcilaso de la Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, Luis de Góngora, and Lope de Vega — as well as the Romantics and the Latin American Modernistas, especially Rubén Darío, Gutiérrez Nájera, and Amado Nervo. This bookishness was not uncommon in Hermosillo, which was home to small but busy communities of foreign-born residents — French, North American, and English — brought to the region by the politic ups and downs of Maximilian’s empire, as well as Don Porfirio Díaz’s campaign for foreign investment. The town was close to the port of Guaymas, and was a stop on the new railroad, which brought not only raw materials, but also books, newspapers, and magazines from the interior of the country and from abroad.
This all contributed to a vibrant cultural atmosphere. Presiding over it were Manuel Campillo and Rodolfo Campodonico (1866-1926), who were troubadours of popular verse rather than champions of Latin American Modernismo, and clearly influenced Facundo’s poetic sensibility. And there was never a lack of political disputes in the town, nor a shortage of literary salons, dances, and bohemian gatherings replete with musicians and poets improvising, mano a mano, songs and poems celebrating their respective sweethearts. It’s no surprise, then, that Facundo — like his younger brother Francisco, born on October 4, 1896 — formed closer friendships with troubadours and musicians like Chito Peralta and Campodonico than they did with writers. Culture back then meant political rallies, dances, and block parties. Naturally, it found written expression most readily in journalism.
Facundo soon became an important voice in the Sonoran press, which itself became a prime mover behind the Revolution. He published teasingly erotic romantic sonnets along with articles and sarcastic verses targeting the arbitrary decisions of politicians and the greed of the mercantile class. It’s important to note that, in Sonoran society in those days, a writer was no better than any of the other locals, serving as something like a social worker, a promoter of interpersonal relationships, and an unofficial spokesperson for the community. Facundo’s writing possessed social utility, and had direct economic benefits for him personally. Consider this early poem, a parody of Manuel Acuña’s suicidal “Nocturno a Rosario,” which Facundo wrote to protest a promotion to Manager-Collector granted to the Copyist-Correspondent of Sonora’s General Treasury Office:
So. I must
inform the treasurer,
inform him that my
sad situation overwhelms me,
for I have been only
a Manager-Collector
for three whole years;
so profoundly do I suffer,
so profoundly do I wait
for them to regale me
with a pen set, and not a broom.
I would beg that they recall
how many years past
I did request the post
which today I learned was filled;
let them know
these hopes of mine
have been dashed;
and my joys have been drained
because of that yearned-for post;
let them know
that from my precipice
the future blackens deeply.
At night, when I ponder,
(with my soul thrashing),
how others so easily do find
their station rising,
and their wages plentiful,
yet they work hardly at all,
it does spur me to ponder matters,
and in the end, my luck depleted,
I recall that another day
slaving behind the broom awaits me.
I grasp how that job
never shall be mine,
never shall I earn
those