Maria de Alva (Monterrey, 1969) reveals a family story and at the same time addresses the subject of the guerrilla group Communist League 23rd of September in the 70s in Everything we don’t knowa novel published by Hachette Literature.
In an interview with MILLENNIUMthe writer says that everything started when her cousin Gabriela Villarreal Levy He sent her some pages that told the story of his father’s death, Gerardo Pilar Villarreal Garzamurdered in Monterrey in 1974, then knew he had to tell the story.
“It’s a text I tried to write before but couldn’t. In my family this case existed, not everything in the novel is exactly real life, but in essence yes: I had an uncle who was murdered in the 70s and the problem that arose in the family was that all of that became like a place of silence, I don’t know if it was because of the extreme pain, the shame, or the social gossip, but as a child I remember that there wasn’t even a photo of him. So it was difficult to talk about it because his children and his wife are alive, but I needed to do it and that’s why I decided to write the novel.”
Everything we don’t know It is a choral novel with a narrator who rescues the story, a woman diagnosed with cancer and a detective who begins an investigation, all revolving around the guerrilla group Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre.
Desacralizing the family
For De Alva, Silence surrounding painful events “does not remove the wound, it simply stays there, perhaps dormant or latent, but it does not disappear. I think that talking about it and saying it is desacralizing it and in some way taking the fact into our own hands, instead of the fact taking everything away from you.”
The interviewee comments that the 1970s were different times, a time when practically everything was hidden and when the idea of the “holy Mexican family” existed: “Murder was seen as something dishonorable, that’s how it was seen, perhaps today’s younger people can’t understand it, but that’s how it was handled.”
In the novel, the writer says: “This story has bullets and guns, police and guerrillas, a detective with a black briefcase, missing youth, some newspaper articles, a white-tailed deer in the bushes, a hijacked plane and dolls on a ledge, a stolen red car, a city dying of heat or cold, a cancer that is a metaphor but also very true.”
The guerrilla group Communist League September 23 operated in MonterreyIn fact, before the death of the writer’s uncle, the group murdered the businessman Eugenio Garza Sada in an attempted kidnapping.
“It was not only in our city, but also in Mexico City and Guadalajara, but the guerrillas were also persecuted by the government, tortured, disappeared and killed. Unfortunately, these events have become polarized by politics when in reality there are victims in many places. I think it is a decade that has been little talked about and it is transcendent. I have spoken with several kids and they understand 1968 very well, but they know nothing about it.”
For many years, documents about that movement were hidden, until In 2000, archives were opened and truth commissions on historical facts began to operate.
Despite the subject matter and the research, María de Alva says she did not want to write just a police or detective novel.
Family and guerrillas
“For me it was very important to talk about the victims, who are the family and the guerrillas. I tell some of their stories or those of their relatives and this is the crux of the matter: if we do not talk about the victims and their families we are not making amends. For example, in the Second World War you may know that 6 million people died in concentration camps, but knowing someone’s personal story tells you more than the number because it is in that personal story that empathy and the reconstruction of the social fabric are achieved.”
In the novel there are several inquiries about the children who do not fully understand what is happening around them, the woman who has cancer, the narrator (who lives in uncertainty and tries to reconstruct the story) and the detective who cannot find a single truth.
“It is a novel that I had to build from uncertainty because that was what there was. The 70s were not concentrated only in Monterrey, there were clashes between the guerrillas and the government, there were disappearances, torture, murders in the street. The whole country suffered and I think it is about uncovering a national story, it is not just a story of Monterrey.”
The author says that Until now, not much has been said about this period and the guerrilla.which was a large movement and about which a lot of information has now been discovered.
“The novel certainly exposes many of those preconceived ideas about industrial Monterrey, about the booming Monterrey, through this as the B side or dark side of the city’s history. I also say that the only plane that has been hijacked so far in the country was by a guerrilla group.”
María de Alva believes that many times in the personal and family sphere things are revealed that are not only about the family but that concern the whole society, and many times through the private sphere things of the public end up being revealed.
“I want to break the silence and it is very important to talk about this issue because little has been done, And what worries me most is that many people ignore what happened, as if everything is concentrated on the movement of 68, which of course was a terrible thing, but there is a leap there in history and suddenly it is the 80s and what happened in the 70s? We must know about it.
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