Sergio Fong’s short stories and the infraworld of Mexican (counter)culture

Abstract

From the 1970s to the present, Sergio Fong has stood out as one of the most important representatives of Guadalajara’s vibrant counterculture thanks to his key role in activist initiatives such as the BUSH movement (Bandas Unidas del Sector Hidalgo) and the Tianguis Cultural de Guadalajara, his alternative publishing activities from the zines of his adolescence to his work as editor of La Rueda Cartonera (2009-present), one of the most active and active cartonera publishers in Mexico, and his urban writing represented by some five collections of short fiction. Despite this – or perhaps because of the underground character of his cultural production – this is the first academic article dedicated in full to his work. In this paper, Bell relates Fong’s social, cultural and political life and actions to his literary work in order to reveal the deep connections between his everyday praxis and the marginal underworld of his short stories. Through close readings of the short story collection Cuentos de Varro (2017), she argues that this “literature in action” sparks a unique mode of critical thinking that relates to the Zapatista philosophy that has influenced Fong’s work since the 1990s and to the decolonial theory driven by Latin American Indigenous activisms.