{"id":39455,"date":"2025-03-29T15:42:07","date_gmt":"2025-03-29T21:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/2025\/03\/texas-the-great-theft-translated-by-samantha-schnee\/"},"modified":"2025-04-09T22:15:46","modified_gmt":"2025-04-10T04:15:46","slug":"texas-the-great-theft-translated-by-samantha-schnee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/2025\/03\/texas-the-great-theft-translated-by-samantha-schnee\/","title":{"rendered":"Texas: The Great Theft, translated by Samantha Schnee"},"content":{"rendered":"

An imaginative writer in the tradition of Juan Rulfo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Cesar Aira, Carmen Boullosa shows herself to be at the height of her powers with her latest novel. Loosely based on the little-known 1859 Mexican invasion of the United States,\u00a0<\/span><\/em>Texas<\/span>\u00a0is a richly imagined evocation of the volatile Tex-Mex borderland. Boullosa views border history through distinctly Mexican eyes, and her sympathetic portrayal of each of her wildly diverse characters\u2014Mexican ranchers and Texas Rangers, Comanches and cowboys, German socialists and runaway slaves, Southern belles and dancehall girls\u2014makes her storytelling tremendously powerful and absorbing.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Shedding important historical light on current battles over the Mexican\u2013American frontier while telling a gripping story with Boullosa\u2019s singular prose and formal innovation,\u00a0<\/span><\/em>Texas<\/span>\u00a0marks the welcome return of a major writer who has previously captivated American audiences and is poised to do so again.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

____________________________<\/span><\/p>\n

Over in Matas\u00e1nchez there\u2019s also only one person who doesn\u2019t know about the insult Shears dared to throw at Nepomuceno: Magdalena, a pretty young woman from Puebla.<\/span><\/p>\n

Her story, in brief: just before her sixth birthday her mother died. Her father, the son of Spaniards, left her with her aunt and returned to the land of his ancestors, or so he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

The aunt took in Magdalena partly out of duty to her (deceased) sister, but also for the money. In exchange for looking after and educating the girl (or providing for blah blah blah) she receives a monthly stipend, which is a godsend because she has twelve children and always needs more than her husband provides. That\u2019s how things were, and how they would have stayed until Magdalena became an old maid, if not for a lawyer named Gutierrez. He came from the north, had a lot of land, and money too, or so folks said. He was the most prominent lawyer in Matas\u00e1nchez, and he came to Puebla to wrap up some business for a gringo client. Gutierrez heard about the beautiful orphan girl, her faraway father, her aunt\u2019s money problems, the girl\u2019s good breeding, and he knew without asking that she would be a virgin.<\/span><\/p>\n

Magdalena was a sure thing for Gutierrez, an unsullied woman for him and him alone, with no mother, no attachments, no one to come asking for a handout. Since she was young he could mold her as he liked. The ideal wife. She would give him children, and he would finally settle down.<\/span><\/p>\n

He showed up and made them an offer they couldn\u2019t refuse. He didn\u2019t ask her aunt for a dowry; in fact he offered them a lump sum payment as a gesture of good faith and promised three more payments over the course of the next ten years. He wanted it to be clear that, once his offer was accepted, Magdalena would be his to the full extent of the law. She would become his exclusive property. There would be no visits, requests, or other nuisances. No favors, no exchanges. He would invite her relations to the wedding, but after the day of the ceremony that would be it. No interference in his life. His only condition for the purchase of the girl was that they leave them in peace.<\/span><\/p>\n

The aunt (and her family) would lose the monthly stipend from Spain, but they weren\u2019t killing the golden goose. Despite the fact the three lump sums amounted to slightly less than the total of the stipend for the same period, there would be no associated costs. Plus, what if Magdalena\u2019s father stopped sending the stipend? It had been ages since he\u2019d written or sent a gift. What if he died and left her unprovided for? Sooner or later, the girl would become another mouth to feed. And she was useless as a maid.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d the aunt thought, \u201cgiven such an opportunity, we should accept immediately. If nothing else, for the girl\u2019s welfare; my brother-in-law will be indebted to us. It\u2019s a good match, and we\u2019ll relieve ourselves of this burden.\u201d She didn\u2019t have to think twice. She accepted the money, signed the contract, and wrote to inform the girl\u2019s father. She wisely omitted telling him about the payment to leave the Spaniard wondering if she\u2019d had to marry the girl off quickly for an unspeakable reason. The matter was settled once and for all, no strings attached.<\/span><\/p>\n

So Magdalena left with this lawyer from the north, Gutierrez. But she didn\u2019t go alone. She couldn\u2019t be alone with him until they were married. Her aunt had no desire to go to Matas\u00e1nchez, her world was limited to Puebla\u2014she\u2019d never been to Veracruz, Mexico City, or Havana, why would she go to Matas\u00e1nchez?\u2014but she accepted the lawyer\u2019s invitation to send a chaperone and sent the girl\u2019s godmother instead\u2014a woman her own age who was also past her prime but looked years younger because she hadn\u2019t given birth twelve times or married an idiot and suffered from poverty and the misfortune of not hearing from her brother for years, despite the fact he was in Bruneville.<\/span><\/p>\n

It had been ten years already.<\/span><\/p>\n

Gutierrez celebrated the wedding with a party to show off his pretty bride, and the cream of Matas\u00e1nchez society showed up to see her. At the end of the evening he took his new wife home in a horse-drawn cart. On the short trip he kept telling her, \u201cTake a good look at Matas\u00e1nchez, Magdalena, because you\u2019ll never see it again.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

She heard these words, but she didn\u2019t get it. It took some time before she realized Gutierrez was never going to let her set foot out of the house again. \u201cYou have to lock up a woman, there\u2019s no shortage of cuckolds in the world, and there\u2019s no such thing as a female who can keep her legs closed.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The wedding night terrified the poor girl. She had no idea what men did to women or what part women were supposed to play. She wasn\u2019t old enough for what seemed to be repulsive, cruel gymnastics. But she didn\u2019t call it gymnastics\u2014the poor girl had never even been to the circus\u2014she had no idea what to call this bouncing exercise in which he used her as a trampoline. Gutierrez, on the other hand, who was twelve years older than her (and had gotten around), had his first lover at seventeen.<\/span><\/p>\n

And that\u2019s how it was for four years, until the lawyer got bored and found somewhere else to wet his dick.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cStupid girl, you\u2019re all dried up.\u201d How could he fail to realize he might have been the problem, after so many years of whoring without producing a single bastard child? Although, of course, there\u2019s Blas, but who knows whether or not he\u2019s his. \u201cI\u2019m not going to use you anymore, you bag of bones; you can\u2019t have children. I should never have married you. We\u2019ll see if you ever bear fruit.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Gutierrez never stopped to think that when he began to use her, she still hadn\u2019t begun to menstruate.<\/span><\/p>\n

Due to the shock of what he did to her, Magdalena\u2019s body took longer to mature. When she got her first period four months after he had rejected her, Magdalena thought she was bleeding for two reasons: because Gutierrez had ruptured her insides by doing what he had done to her so many times, and because he had stopped doing it. She felt guilty for the second reason.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m bleeding and it\u2019s my fault, my own grievous fault.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It was a while before she understood what the accusation of a barren womb meant. Josefina, the old cook, who was kind to her out of pity, explained.<\/span><\/p>\n

Magdalena was full of resentment when she realized that\u2019s why he had begun to hit her. He began to embellish his farcical trampoline routine by hitting her afterwards. For any reason at all, or for no reason, because the table wasn\u2019t ready when he arrived (\u201cMagdalena, lazy, lazy!\u201d), or because he didn\u2019t like the soup, or because he\u2019d had a problem at work, although Magdalena had nothing to do with it, or because she became more beautiful each day, or because she laughed easily and had fun with the servants, the needlework, the house-keeping, and the cooking.<\/span><\/p>\n

She might as well have lived on the moon, yet even his blows couldn\u2019t dampen her innate joy. Who knows where it came from.<\/span><\/p>\n

The day Shears insults Nepomuceno, Magdalena doesn\u2019t know a thing. And even if she heard the news it wouldn\u2019t matter, because she has no idea who Nepomuceno is.<\/span><\/p>\n

(Wagging tongues say the lawyer Gutierrez had a fling with Magdalena\u2019s godmother. They say he gave her a son, which was a miracle, a barren land yielding a flower; she called him Blas, a pompous old name, which suits a bastard to a T.)<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Translated by Samantha Schnee<\/span><\/h5>\n
Excerpt used with permission by Deep Vellum.<\/span><\/h6>\n

 <\/p>\n

Texas: The Great Theft <\/span><\/i>by Carmen Boullosa, translated by Samantha Schenee, is now out via <\/span>Deep Vellum<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An imaginative writer in the tradition of Juan Rulfo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Cesar Aira, Carmen Boullosa shows herself to be at the height of her powers with her latest novel. Loosely based on the little-known 1859 Mexican invasion of the United States,\u00a0Texas\u00a0is a richly imagined evocation of the volatile Tex-Mex borderland. Boullosa views border […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":40225,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2893],"tags":[5254],"genre":[],"pretext":[],"section":[],"translator":[2513],"lal_author":[1486],"class_list":["post-39455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adelantos-de-traduccion-y-novedades-editoriales","tag-numero-33","translator-samantha-schnee-es-2","lal_author-carmen-boullosa-es"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39455"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40186,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39455\/revisions\/40186"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39455"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=39455"},{"taxonomy":"pretext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pretext?post=39455"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=39455"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/translator?post=39455"},{"taxonomy":"lal_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lal_author?post=39455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}