Commonplace examines the layers of colonial and geopolitical violence that underlie both contemporary landscapes of Mexico City and the nation’s literary institutions. Literally, the Palacio de Bellas Artes is constructed over chinampas, floating platforms used by the Mexica in agricultural cultivation. In Commonplace, García Manríquez delves into the mutually-constitutive relationship between national culture and the culture of nationalism, asking if other forms of poetic and artistic production are possible given the conditions of ambient violence under which that production must inevitably occur. García Manríquez further links the Mexican state―and the cultural apparatus it supports―to ongoing ecological catastrophe, suggesting that more explicit forms of political force find their basis in the slower violence of environmental exploitation and the systematic erasure of indigenous knowledge across the Global South.
Translated by the North American Free Translation Agreement (NAFTA) a.k.a. the No America Fraught Translation Argument.
