from Bleeding from All 5 Senses

Born in the Mixcoac area of Mexico City on December 24, 1953, Mario Santiago Papasquiaro came of age during the period of ruthless political repression known as the Dirty War. The late 1960s were also a time of revolutionary ferment in Mexico, a time when hundreds of thousands of workers, artists, students, and intellectuals took to the streets to demand change. As the government made lavish preparations for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, public dissent intensified. Tensions reached a crisis on October 2, when roughly 10,000 high school students, university students, and other peaceful protesters who had gathered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas were surrounded by military tanks, helicopters, and armed troops that opened fire on the crowd, killing hundreds.

Even in a climate in which dissent was routinely suppressed and state-sponsored killings had become almost commonplace, the government’s illegal massacre of these protesters sent shockwaves through a generation. According to Mexican law, it was not a crime to publicly express or to publish one’s opinions. But if one’s opinions diverged from those of the ruling party, the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), access to the cultural platforms and media channels for disseminating those ideas was out of the question. When he started writing seriously in the early 1970s, Santiago Papasquiaro was well aware that he would have to create a context for his work outside the tightly policed borders of the academy and the official literary establishment.

In 1973, Santiago Papasquiaro gave his first public reading and, in early 1974, he published Zarazo, a tabloid-format journal combining Surrealist and Dada texts with contemporary Marxist theory and works by the Beats and the experimental Peruvian poets of Hora Zero. A year later, he met the young Chilean, Roberto Bolaño, and, along with a handful of friends and co-conspirators, founded the radical poetry movement Infrarealism. Bound together by their resistance to the dominant artistic, literary, and political culture, the Infras spurned institutional acceptance and professional advancement, committing themselves instead to the uncompromising integration of art and life at all costs. This commitment took many forms, from endless walks through the city declaiming their poems to sabotaging the lectures, book releases, and cocktail parties of prominent literati. As a result, the Infras were condemned by Mexico’s cultural élites as a group of puerile, ignorant, depraved troublemakers. 

In 1977, following the advice of André Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto,” Santiago Papasquiaro decided to “drop everything” and “take to the road.” He was a thief in Paris, a dishwasher in Barcelona, a fruit picker in Lérida, a fisherman in Port-Vendres, a political prisoner in Vienna, and a kibbutznik in Israel. When he returned home at the end of the decade, Mexican literary society was unchanged, and as hostile to him as ever. He wandered the labyrinths of Mexico City day and night, reading voraciously, composing aloud, and writing, always writing as he walked—in the margins of borrowed books and the pages of newspapers, on flyers, magazines, receipts, coasters, napkins, matchbooks, paper bags—on any available surface, however impermanent. Poetry was not simply a vocation or a passion for Santiago Papasquiaro; it was his way of moving through life, of sensing and physically collaborating with the currents and convulsions of the world. It was, as he wrote in his 1976 “Infrarealist Manifesto,” the total fusion of art and life, the realization of Antonin Artaud’s demand for “a culture in the flesh.”

Although publication was a largely secondary consideration for Santiago Papasquiaro, a number of important works appeared in independent magazines and anthologies throughout the 1970s and 1980s, beginning with his groundbreaking long poem of 1975, Consejos de 1 discípulo de Marx a 1 fanático de Heidegger (Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic). In 1994, Santiago Papasquiaro and the journalist Marco Lara Klahr created the imprint Al Este del Paraíso (East of Eden), which subsequently released the only two books to be published during his lifetime, Beso eterno (Eternal Kiss, 1995) and Aullido de cisne (Swan’s Howl, 1996). On January 10, 1998, Santiago Papasquiaro was hit by a car and killed on one of his habitual rambles through the streets of Mexico City.

In the years since his death, several volumes have appeared that begin to reveal the full extent of Santiago Papasquiaro’s poetic output, most notably the collection Jeta de santo (2008), coedited by Mario Raúl Guzmán and the poet’s widow, Rebeca López. Critical appreciations and translations of his work have multiplied in recent years and his impact on a rising generation of poets can be seen across Mexico, as well as in Chile and the United States. Santiago Papasqauiro’s presence also continues to inform the work of those writers who had the good fortune to know and interact with him in person—among them, Roberto Bolaño, Carmen Boullosa, Rubén Medina, Guadalupe Ochoa, José Peguero, and Juan Villoro. Without a doubt, Santiago Papasquiaro’s searing irreverence, full-throated lyricism, and wild lucidity are as urgently necessary today as they were in 1975. His work forcibly reminds us that even if “we forget it / overwhelmed by the pain of not knowing ourselves . . . 1 poem is occurring every moment . . . & with every appearance of becoming Epic History” (Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic).