La ciudad oculta en los cuentos de Pacheco

The text comments on Mexican writer José Emilio Pacheco’s relationship with Kafka’s work, mentioning his journalistic texts on the subject, but concentrating mainly on his short stories. Pacheco’s vision of the city in which and “other” world opens up, submerged beneath the everyday, alludes to Kafka. In the fantastic stories — “La fiesta brava”, “Tenga para que se entretenga” and others- Pacheco develops the theme of subway spaces, uncertain and logically inexplicable. In the other thematic line of his short stories, with the characters of children and adolescents, the Mexican capital and its Roma neighborhood undergo a change of modernization so inadequate that it casts doubt on the very existence of the remembered world of childhood. In turn, in the short novel Las batallas en el desierto, the story of the boy in love opens other accents in the relationship between the son and the father and power. The same way of narrating opposes the freedom of art to the opaque authoritarian world.