 | | Guillem Lopez/Camera Press/Redux |
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This year marks the centennial of the fire at the El Bordo mine in the eastern Mexican state of Hidalgo. You can be forgiven for not knowing what that was or why its anniversary might be worth observing. Yuri Herrera’s A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire documents the incident and its aftermath, revealing that our ignorance of the tragedy is by design.
A studied work of reporting, Herrera’s book is slim, taut, and angry—a righteous act of remembrance. The book’s form is so simple as to appear strange, like notes toward a larger work of nonfiction or indeed a novel, the genre Herrera is probably best known for. From the opening page, the author assumes the omniscience of a god who can’t quite get his story straight:
There were some who later said that they first smelled smoke at two o’clock in the morning, but it was at six that Delfino Rendón raised the cry of alarm, once he finished cleaning the chutes on level 415.
Herrera sort of explains his methodology: By collaging primary sources, he creates a prismatic view of the incident. As above, he notes the contradictions he finds and draws the logical conclusion that corporate, self-serving racism (most of the workers were Indigenous men) and a disregard for those who do this kind of dangerous work contributed both to the disaster and to the fact that it vanished from the record.
The fire was still burning when the mine’s managers—representing the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company—decided to extinguish it by sealing the mine. The record contradicts itself on when exactly this happened: “So the shafts were sealed at twenty past seven, or at ten, or at noon, or at four.” A judge ordered an inquiry not into that deadly choice but into the source of the fire. Herrera writes:
That was the purpose of the preliminary investigation opened in the very hours when they might have reasoned the most pressing question was how many people could still be alive inside the mine. |
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Six days later, the shafts were reopened, and the remains of 87 men were exhumed. Seven miners were still alive.
Writing with economy but imagination, Herrera does an impressive job of conjuring what those men’s days in the mine might have been like (that only one of the survivors gave a full statement lays bare that history doesn’t take into account unasked questions): “They made a couple of small wells at the foot of a wall with water running down it. It was spicy, muddy water, and they thought it tasted terrible at first, but in time they got used to it.”
Herrera notes that the powers (the mine physician and the local mayor) “agreed that the miners were in a perfect state of health and had no internal or external injuries, save for the fact that a few were beginning to starve to death.” A Silent Fury is a well-chosen title. The book thrums with this understated outrage at this avoidable catastrophe: The mine was sealed prematurely, the lives of its workers considered disposable, the aftermath simply a shrug.
Though not completely. The book is belated redress but also an acknowledgement that this history was never truly forgotten. “I am from Pachuca and I still don’t know exactly what this unspeakable crime—and those before it, and those that followed—did to us, but there’s something there,” Herrera writes.
The book reminded me, naturally, of the disaster that is unfolding around us at this moment. The moments we are living through seem to happen in slow motion, but that’s just a measure of our own frustration with our inability to right what we know to be wrongs.
There’s been a lot of reporting on the human fallout of the current crises in public health and the economy. This piece from The Washington Post shook me because it’s so straightforward in documenting this government’s indefensible strategy of inaction. Power doesn’t care about the powerless, Herrera shows us; he’s talking about miners a century ago but could as well be talking about a bartender today. Though often beautiful, A Silent Fury is not pleasurable reading; it is, nevertheless, essential. |
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| I loved Ryu Spaeth on Thomas Chatterton Williams’s memoir Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race; it’s the sort of thoughtful essay-cum-review I aspire to write. |
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| I reviewed Intimations, a slender new book of essays about, among other things, the current pandemic, by Zadie Smith. |
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| I listen to a lot of Annie Ross (because she appears in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, one of my all-time favorite films) but didn’t actually know much about her life and career until her obituary. |
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| I loved this dishy and dirty sneak peek at John Giorno’s memoir. |
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In this weird period of quarantine, there are many things we miss; it’s a small thing, but for me, one of those is going to the movies. This August, The New Republic is hosting a virtual film festival every Tuesday evening from 7 to 8 p.m. (EST). We chose films that illuminate this particular moment: a study of the celebrated designer Milton Glaser, who died earlier this year; a biopic of the artist Camille Claudel, who was confined to an asylum; and a documentary about The Gates, a public art project by Christo, who also died recently, and his late wife and partner Jeanne Claude. I’ll be joined by TNR’s Jo Livingstone, Alex Shepard, and the writer Kyle Chayka. Register here for one or all of the discussions.
Text Message is a twice-monthly column in newsletter form. Subscribe. Tell your friends. Drop me a line, at ralam@tnr.com. Stay healthy; stay home!
—Rumaan Alam, contributing editor |
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