José Agustín Ramírez (Guadalajara, Jalisco, 1944) died this Tuesday at the age of 79 due to a long illness due to various health conditions, one of his sons, Andrés Rodríguez, confirmed to the newspaper. The Day. The writer's death took place at his home in Cuautla, in the State of Morelos, about 80 kilometers from Mexico City, where he moved with his family more than 40 years ago and where he remained in bed surrounded by his loved ones. dear ones. His literature—which he began publishing at the age of 16—has marked a watershed in Mexico that broke with the literary canon of the time and that burst with force thanks to the colloquial, traditional and casual language that gave identity and place to thousands of young Mexicans. who for the first time saw in national literature a space in which they felt represented. His work, which converges with the popular culture of the time, soundtracked by the rock and the authors who most influenced him, was classified as part of what he himself later tried to define as the Mexican counterculture.
One of the most representative authors of Mexico has died. One of the last greats of national literature of the 20th century, whose books can be found in almost all bookstores of any type in the country. José Agustín embodied in life and work the naturalness and rebellion of what it meant to be young in the sixties and seventies in the country. At a time when the traditional values inherited by the Mexican Revolution still permeated the skies of national morality, he gave life to characters who questioned their place in the world, and who did so with the same words with which they Young people faced day by day a society and a world that was changing rapidly. His work has been, without a doubt, one of the best representations of what is known today as a youth novel, made by and for the young people of his time, told in its forms and nuances and with enough sincerity and naturalness to fit and transcend. “There was a frank clash in the family environment, because the family environment was very repressive and authoritarian,” said the author for a documentary about his life in Channel eleven.
The writer, who was born in 1944 in Jalisco, never recognized himself as Jalisco. Shortly after his birth, he and his family moved to the State of Guerrero, and settled in Acapulco. “I am proudly from Guerrero and proudly from Acapulco,” he said. Most of his readers identified with the way in which he portrayed the country at a time when any hint of difference was branded as rebellion and depravity, – as shown by the legendary headline in a local newspaper about the so-called Mexican Woodstock, the Avándaro rock festival in 1971: Hell in Avándaro: framing, marijuana use, sexual degeneration, dirt, hair, blood, death.— Some others applauded that at last an author dared to narrate with cynical and adventurous naturalness the things that happened to everyone at a certain age, when the world is a constant promise of pleasures and adventures. An infinite number of possibilities. Others condemned him and labeled his literature that did not fit with the academy, the formality and seriousness of that ancient idea of what it was to be a writer. A serious writer, “a good writer.”
Under the tutelage of the Jalisco writer and editor Juan José Arreola, he published the novel Tomb (1964), which he finished writing when he was 16 years old—and was published a couple of years later—and which marked the beginning of a vast list with titles such as Inventing what I dream, (1968), It's getting late (1973), The king approaches his temple (1977), deserted cities (1982), Near the fire (1987), two hours of sun (1994), Life with my widow (2004), among many others. He also wrote plays, essays, stories, film scripts, journalistic works and also wrote his autobiography titled Prison rock: “This is the memory of a man who stands up in the middle of a world that was leaking everywhere, willing to search for himself among his reflections,” says the description of the work from the publisher Penguin Random House.
“It was the joy in literature, the ingenuity, the new way of writing, it opened a door, new air came in,” the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska described in an interview, in 2014, about Agustín, the author who said by the writer Mexican Margo Glantz, led a literary movement that she herself named as The wave. Regarding that, the author has said: “I am not responsible for that term, Margo Glantz was the one who put it that way. It is a minimization of what the idea of that literature was. If the rules did not respond to what they wanted, then they were of no use,” he says in an interview for Channel 22, with journalist and presenter Silvia Lemus. Agustín refused to belong to “a literary current” that sought to group together the concerns, he said, that authors like him and the Mexicans René Avilés Fabila, Gustavo Sáinz and Parménides García Saldaña, began to express and that completely left the molds of words. formalities and the academic vocabulary that prevailed at the time.
In 2009 José Agustín had an accident during a book signing at the Teatro de la Ciudad de Puebla. The fall, from about two meters high, caused severe fractures to his skull and ribs and kept him in intensive care for more than 20 days. Since then he had remained away from the public eye, until last April, when he reappeared in public at the presentation of the reissue of his work.
Last Tuesday night, January 2, one of his sons made public his father's farewell to a priest “friend, Catholic, Zapatista, liberation theologian” who gave him last rites while he lay in his bed, in his house in the State of Morelos, surrounded by his wife and his other children. “With this, my work here is ending,” Agustín said, according to his first-born son. The publication was deleted a few hours later, while confirming that, although delicate, his father was still alive. With him, leaves one of the last greats of that generation sacrificed in rebellion, rock, drugs and that constant mantra that believed in a certainty that the world could be changed and that nothing was impossible.
In a profile of his father, in the magazine Process In 2021, his son Agustín Ramírez Bermúdez, in a tone very similar to what his father wrote, said: “…he changed the rules in the way of writing in this country, he freed them from their archaic limitations. He prevailed over his poisonous detractors and adversaries, while José Agustín's books enjoy full health and authority, and continue to be read, thanks to the genuine taste of the knowledgeable public, to the intrepid and determined appreciation of good-natured readers.
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS México newsletter and receive all the key information on current events in this country
#José #Agustín #writer #gave #face #identity #entire #generation #Mexico #dies
