Obsessions with the Mexican theme: from nationalism to the universal in Jaime Labastida's poetry

Abstract

Jaime Labastida, director of the Mexican Academy will be 80 years old this 2019. With Mexico and the great human enigmas as thematic constants that articulate all his work, his work shows two different moments. While between 1960 and 1981, in line with Marxist and nationalist ideology, Labastida adopts the expression of a kind of tlatoani, since 1991, after ten years without publishing poetry, a remarkable turnaround can be perceived in his career, which became more intense in the recurrence of the universal in everything published from the last decade of the century. This change has to do with the so-called "post-Mexican" condition as defined by Roger Bartra (1999): "the nationalist political culture that had sustained the State is in crisis", for which many Mexicans feel that "the national reality is collapsing". Since Labastida's poetry responds to the social and political circumstances described, these pages propose a reading of it that takes into account its evolution as an artistic symptom consistent with the feeling of an important part of the Mexican intelligentsia of our era. Keywords: Jaime Labastida; poetry; Mexico; nationalism; universalism.