Los Conspiradores

"This book is set in a Mexican revolution, but not the Mexican Revolution. “The” Mexican Revolution was from 1910 to 1920; this book is about the Mexican War of Independence, or Revolution for Independence. Los Conspiradores is a historical novel that fictionalises the early parts of the Mexican War of Independence and, in particular, the conspiracy led by Father Miguel Hidalgo, the parish priest of Dolores in Guanajuato. It fictionalises these events in part by giving fictional names to all of the characters and to all of the towns in which it is set. At the same time, it is very recognisable that these are real historical figures, even though Ibargüengoitia changes some details for dramatic or ironic purposes. He stays fairly close to the real history and especially to what we know of Hidalgo, the central figure in that history. In the novel, that figure is called Domingo Perignon and he’s also a parish priest. He seems incredibly and perhaps culpably naive and almost easy-going about this momentous enterprise to rise up against the Spanish colonial power. At the same time, and paradoxically, he also seems incredibly farsighted. He is alone among the conspirators who populate the pages of this novel in realising that they’re putting in motion events that they won’t be able to control, and who seems to be aware of the fact that the likeliest outcome is that this is going to end in death. Hidalgo/Perignon is the main link between the conspirators and the popular classes of New Spain because he’s the parish priest of a small provincial town. He also realises from the very beginning that once you call ordinary Mexicans—farm workers, tenants, mine workers, etc.—to insurrection, you’re not going to be able to control exactly how they’re going to behave. He’s very sanguine about that, to the horror of some of his co-conspirators. He’s a mysterious figure, attractive in his idealism and lack of respect for social conventions, but also frightfully careless about the violence and the loss of life and the destruction that he’s helping to unleash. It’s very accessible, it tells a lot of human stories, and it is very alive to irony. It’s an attempt at demystification written at a time when, in Mexico, it was still very hard to see the independence movement as anything other than wholly heroic. It was difficult to discuss their flaws or discuss in any detail who the conspirators really were, and Ibargüengoitia situates them very believably in an elite provincial social world. He was writing at a time when Latin American writers, including Mexican writers like Carlos Fuentes , were trying quite hard to make sense of their countries’ history but did so in a somewhat grandiose and perhaps, in their less successful works, almost pompous manner. Ibargüengoitia writes about history with more irony and detachment. He tries to humanise it. “ Los Conspiradores is…very much a story of provincial Mexico changing the course of Mexican history” Los Conspiradores is also very much a story of provincial Mexico changing the course of Mexican history. It would be an exaggeration to say that the War for Independence in Mexico started in a marginal location. It started in what was the most agriculturally fertile part of colonial Mexico, a part of Mexico that also had many mines, so in that sense it was quite rich.But it certainly was quite a distance away from Mexico City, which was the locus of colonial administrative power. And the small town (today called Dolores Hidalgo) where, famously, Hidalgo rang the church bells and called his parishioners to arms—which is a moment that is retold in this novel—is a very small, insignificant village on the edge of that agricultural breadbasket. It’s not a place where you would imagine transcendent historical events to originate. It was published in 1982. It was the last novel he completed writing."