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The day he was able to earn more money as a writer than as a journalist, Mexican Antonio Ortuño (Zapopan, Jalisco, 44 years old) left the newsrooms. Not the pages of the newspapers, where he has been publishing columns for years, now every Monday in the Mexican edition of EL PAÍS. Many are in the volume The Illustrated Cannibal (Dharma Books), which he has recently published.
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Question. She's been writing opinion pieces since 1997. Does she have so much to say?
Reply. If I didn't think I had something to say I would have shut my mouth many years ago. It is much more civic to be just a reader. What he didn't want was to keep reading arteriosclerotic language in the newspapers. When I started writing, most of the newspapers in the country and in my city had a code from the 1940s or 1950s. These useless metaphors had been created whereby a copyeditor said not to repeat the word water and used the vital liquid .
Q. What are your codes?
R. I try to use personal language and not buy the language of the powers that be. There are many words that are empty from being used so much or full of shit. When I write journalism I try to limit the mentions to privacy or matters that are only interesting to me. Journalism cannot lose the dimension of the public square. At the fifth Foucault quote that I read in a column, I fall, especially if it is in the second paragraph.
Q. You have resisted calling them essays.
R. Because they are not intended as rehearsals. When I write a text for a newspaper or magazine, I am thinking of [Jorge] Ibargüengoitia or Julio Camba, not Alfonso Reyes. It would be dishonest to pass off something I write every Monday as an essay. My own way of thinking matches more with the article writing, where you can think of the same thing many times, from different angles. Whoever writes an essay does so thinking for eternity, it seems that they write it with a chisel; I don't think of journalism that way.
There is a lot of Mother Teresa in the Mexican narrative. It busts me
Q. What is your ideal format?
A. Part of what I like about the articulation is that it corresponds to the structure of a Ramones song: in three minutes you say everything you have to say and you do it loud, loud and hard so that you get some kind of reaction, but do not extend much more.
Q. Is it easier to deal with journalists or writers?
A. The common place wants writers to be terribly arrogant, while journalists are the ones in the trench, but I have met infinitely more arrogant journalists than writers. The ego of someone who reports notes or covers a City Council very badly is not less than that of the type who smudges a few pages and composes a little novel.
Q. What does it mean not to be from the capital in a country as centralist as Mexico?
R. For a long time, which simply did not exist in literary terms. They never gave me the scholarship for young creators, because you had to send some letters of recommendation from well-known characters to support your career and mine were all journalists. I didn't like the courtly spirit of the capital and that's why I never left. I wanted to believe that I could write to and from where I was and that implied many things, such as that I didn't publish until I was 30 years old, while the average writer in La Roma or La Condesa [two neighborhoods in Mexico City] at 16 already has two books of poetry, four scholarships, six residencies and at 20 a contract. I struggled in the desert for a long time. I was lucky that an editor published me and then I was able to choose from various editorial offers. It cannot be denied that one must have a certain relationship with that centralism, because there are the editorial offices, the editors and a very large nucleus of first-line intelligence that is worth relating to. I have tried to establish a fair trade relationship: I give them the best texts that I can and they publish me in the best way they can.
An article lasts as long as a Ramones song: three minutes
Q. You have a Spanish family. What bothers you about what is thought of Mexicans in Spain and vice versa?
R. You have to understand that, for Mexican public education, for decades talking about Spain and the Spaniards was like talking about Darth Vader, the Empire and the Death Star for Star Wars fans . The moment we changed the model of public education, from revolutionary nationalism to nothing, it was seen that this relationship did not have to be so bad. What amazes me is how little is known about Mexico in Spain. Still many people write it with jota. There are many distortions with respect to the image you have. They don't have many references until the narco arrived. In recent trips, people asked me about El Chapo; that didn't happen before.
Q. You have written about racism, drug trafficking ... Is it impossible to flee from the reality of Mexico?
R. I try to think about what is worth telling about each one's country and it is not usually the deli restaurants or the meetings of parents from schools, but this that is out of the average. Counting the average is something that I leave to the French provincial writers; They do it incredibly well and find it interesting to do so. I don't think I could narrate things without narrating Mexico. And there are many ways to do it. I have disliked the nuance that Mexican cinema and certain Mexican narratives have had for a long time, those stories that the rich and aristocrats tell about the most miserable, redemptive and condescending stories. I could not write from the Olympus of the favored. I don't think my job as a writer is to redeem anyone. There are too many Mothers Teresa of Calcutta in Mexican narratives, in cinema, literature, journalism. And it blows me away.