Cuahtémoc Méndez
Eagle in Flight
This bilingual edition of Eagle in Flight brings together two of Méndez’s books of poetry in a single volume: Use and Abuse, written in the late 1970s, and Net Weight, from the 1990s. Cuauhtémoc Méndez (1956-2004) was a Mexican poet, journalist, and founding member of the Infrarealist movement. This neo-avant-garde movement emerged in Mexico City in the mid-1970s, challenging the literary mafias and establishments, and sought a new aesthetic and ethics in the production of poetry. Regarding his poetry, Mario Raúl Guzmán noted that Méndez used to say, “Be natural/ Don’t make a fuss/ Speak as if you were in real life.” He effortlessly achieved this goal, and what others often failed to do: “establishing the epigram in Mexico and making the rhythmic playfulness of his sarcastic spirit feel natural. In Use and Abuse and Net Weight, Méndez aimed to leave these ballads ringing in the air of the era.”
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—Rubén Medina
“Is there a poetry of peace?” asked Denise Levertov with an eye to the pacifist movements of the sixties, and immediately it was she herself who cleared the field to open, without saying it, the real question: is there peace? The poetry of Cuauhtémoc Méndez, at least, did not know that peace; neither did we. There are utopias, good people, science fiction, and poems that even yearn for it, but no, we do not know (nor will we know, as long as we live) what peace is. To enter the conflict zone and remain there could constitute an endless individual struggle within a broader collective belligerence; Méndez manages to articulate his own poetic inflection among the handful of voices gathered, under a single ethic, in the infrarrealista movement, but like everyone else, he will go alone: “a kite raised in the darkness”.
- Martín Cinzano
Biography - Cuahtémoc Méndez
A poet, journalist, and political activist, he studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), initially focusing on Literature before switching to Sociology. In the mid-1970s and 1980s, he worked as a union organizer and activist in the Socialist Trotskyist Party (PRT). He was one of the founders of Infrarealism and one of the youngest poets in the group. Between the ages of 18 and 20, he wrote Uso y Abuso and later the unpublished extensive poem Versos sueltos del verso continuo de la vida. After facing repression and imprisonment because of his political activism, he turned to journalism in the mid-1980s. He later moved to Morelia, Michoacán, where he contributed political editorials (Joyas de la Mitología) and articles to La Voz de Michoacán and Cambio de Michoacán, and worked as a reporter for Alarma!, the notorious crime magazine. Throughout the 1990s, he served as the editor-in-chief of XEI Radio’s news programs and wrote Peso Neto until his untimely death in 2004, just two weeks after his mother passed away. Ediciones Sin Fin, a small publishing venue in Barcelona, published Use and Abuse and Neigh Weight posthumously in one volume in 2017. Several of his poetry manuscripts remain unpublished, such as Morras & Mazomorras, Sin Comas, and 5+ (Five More).
Ariadna Méndez, Translator
is a translator from Mexico City. She studied Literature at the Universidad de las Américas, Puebla. Later, she earned a master’s degree in Translation from El Colegio de México, where she developed an interest in the poet and translator Ulalume González de León and her translations of nonsense poetry. Her interests also include the Mexican literary scene of the sixties and seventies.