Mexico City blues

JESSICA ABEL’s graphic novel “La Perdida” tells the story of Carla Olivares, a twentysomething American woman who travels to Mexico in hopes of discovering her heritage. Although Carla resents her mostly absent Mexican father -- in seventh grade, she even changed her surname to “Oliver” on school documents -- she also feels disconnected from what she calls her Anglo roots. When a college art history course introduces her to Frida Kahlo, it fuels a desire to lay claim to her identity. She concocts a plan to visit her “trustafarian” ex-boyfriend, Harry, who has recently moved to Mexico City to write, fancying himself a modern-day Jack Kerouac or William S. Burroughs.

Carla arrives with a few hundred dollars and no resident visa and immediately recognizes the Mexico of her imagination, “where the hard truth about the crime rate, and the pollution, and the disappearance of traditional culture, just didn’t apply.” She quickly grows restless, however, with Harry and the other members of an expatriate community that lives isolated from native Mexicans (not a single Mexican friend in sight). Longing for something more vivid, she attaches herself to a group of radical anti-capitalists, who seem to Carla to represent pure Mexican culture -- without the taint of U.S. consumerism or values. Yet even as she finds what she thought was authentic, Carla feels more lost than before.

Abel has an intuitive ability to create tension between the visuals and the text of her narrative. Her drawings are minimal, yet filled with detail and emotional nuance. She evokes the architecture and street life of Mexico, often crowding her frames with so much activity that you feel the hustle of the city, just as Carla does. At the same time, she conveys subtle facial expressions and gestures, even with simple lines and (often) nothing but ink dots for eyes. Throughout the book, her characters’ bodies and faces betray sensations and meanings not revealed by text or dialogue alone. Early on, Carla returns from the Frida Kahlo Museum and stands in front of the mirror, braiding her hair Kahlo-style. Kahlo, Carla notes, “was half-Mexican, half-German, like me, but she grew up [in Mexico], and that’s what counts.” Suddenly, Harry comes home, and Carla nervously removes her braids. Is she ashamed at how badly she wants to be Mexican? Is she ashamed of her admiration for Kahlo? We get the sense that she is not sure herself, which only makes her more sympathetic and real.

A very different kind of tension emerges from the subtle misunderstandings between the American expats and native Mexicans. At times comic, the broken Spanish and English also reflect the great differences among the characters. These cross-cultural tensions heat up when Carla grows closer to the anti-capitalists, who sell political T-shirts and drugs to scrape by. The radicals are led by Memo, who seems more interested in having a North American girlfriend than in fomenting any revolutionary activity. Carla, ever the naive idealist, fails to see Memo for who he is, although she manages to avoid a romantic relationship with him despite his constant innuendos and overtures..

One of the most heartbreaking and profound moments comes when Memo tells Carla she will never be authentic. “You come in here bringing your cultural assumptions, and then you think you can pick and choose the nice bits of our messy culture!” he screams. Her big apartment -- just the right size for a Mexican family, but enormous for Carla -- reflects her sense of bourgeois entitlement. According to Memo, she has too many things. She loves Kahlo, an artist so thoroughly “co-opted by the late-capitalist male power structure” that she has become nothing but kitsch. Carla, desperate to prove her pure intentions, tears her Kahlo poster to shreds, shatters a jar and cries, “I’m NOT a conquistadora! I’m NOT!!” As the scene ends, Abel offers a large single-frame drawing of the broken jar, an image that fills an entire page. The implication is that it is Carla who has shattered, and the damage may be irreparable. She no longer knows who she is because her identity has shifted to satisfy Memo’s political agenda.

The irony is that Carla has found no more of a “true” experience here than she did with Harry. She has chosen a different kind of isolation than the expats, but it is isolation all the same. It takes a series of extreme events for her to realize the vastness of the divide that separates her from her beloved Mexico. At one point, she realizes that she could have searched for her family instead of crashing at Harry’s apartment. It is a telling moment.

But “La Perdida” is much more than a story of a young woman’s search for identity. In a post-globalization, post-colonial and even post-9/11 world, this graphic novel represents what is likely the only viable narrative for a new generation of expat writers: to get hopelessly, irretrievably lost.

By the end of the story, Carla has rejected Kahlo as her ideal woman and taken Joan Burroughs (the wife Burroughs shot and killed in Mexico City during a drunken game of William Tell) as a code name. Stripped of everything she previously knew and wanted to become, she sees herself in a new light: the willing victim, complicit in the destruction of her dreams.

When she arrives home in the United States, it is under circumstances that prevent her from ever going back. She cannot quite bring herself to declare that she’s in exile, because Mexico was never her country; “not permitted” is all that she will say. She is “not permitted” to return to a country she never really knew in the first place. She is no longer Carla Olivares, but la perdida, the lost. *