On Literature, Politics, and Privilege

A Public Response to Nicolás Medina Mora

One of the reasons I launched this Substack a week ago is because I wanted a space to write things that I didn’t believe the American liberal media would print. Over the past twelve years, I’ve published in peer-reviewed journals, public-facing online venues, and academic and literary blogs. Yet increasingly I’ve felt that what I most want to express—and that what most people would actually want to read—simply will not pass through the filter of contemporary progressive outlets (and I have no desire to write for conservative ones). A culture of self-censorship dominates our media ecology. Liberal outlets will print the most vituperative attacks on Donald Trump, his circle, and the MAGA movement, but rarely publish anything incisive about prominent figures of the left/liberal cultural scene. My own view is that such intra-left/liberal analysis is healthy, and that the failure of progressives to engage in it is a liability rather than a strength. Of course, I’m not referring to internet takedowns or hit pieces like Levi Vonk’s review of América del Norte. I’m talking about reasoned attempts to make sense of complicated—and often uncomfortable—intellectual topics and contradictions.

In that spirit, I want to respond to several criticisms of my piece, “Two Paths for the Whitexican Novel,” that Nicolás Medina Mora communicated to me in a series of emails he sent to me over the weekend. Let’s just say that the emails were not kind. I won’t reproduce them in their entirety here, in part because Medina Mora expressly declined to discuss my piece publicly, saying that he was only writing because “I feel compelled…to say that you should be ashamed to call yourself a literary critic.” I will not attempt to guess his rationale for using such language, but it did compel me to address the substance of his accusations, since to do otherwise would mean giving into what I see as an effort to intimidate me. I have chosen not to alter my original piece to reflect his criticisms, as I have no intention of backtracking on my views. To be clear, I’m not calling for his cancellation in any way. I’m fine, I’m an adult, I can handle the pushback against a hard-hitting piece. What I won’t do is have this dispute play out as literary gossip. So here are my clarifications about several points he raised. If Medina Mora or his editors at n+1 wish to respond, I’d be happy to provide them space on my Substack to do so. I’m also willing to have a dialogue elsewhere about the issues raised by my piece.

One of the main things Medina objected to was the following line: “On the one hand, I believe that Medina Mora could have been more explicit about his ideological affiliations in Mexico when writing in the US prior to the novel’s publication, and n+1 also has some accounting to do for elevating Medina Mora as its Mexico specialist without (I assume) fully comprehending the political bent of Nexos, where he is currently employed as a senior editor.” There’s a lot in this sentence, and I admit that I could have been clearer in spelling out what I meant by this. I’ll try to do that here. The passage builds on my earlier claims, following those of Vonk in his review, that Medina Mora was not fully forthcoming in divulging his family history and the role that he continued to play in political debate in Mexico.

Let me give a concrete example of this. In 2020, n+1 published a nonfiction essay by Medina Mora, titled “Two Weeks in the Capital,” which details the author’s everyday activities in Mexico City as a child of the Mexican elite. It's clear from this essay (later incorporated, in modified form, into América del Norte) that Medina Mora’s father is an important politician, and that Medina Mora himself has a bodyguard because of the threats his father has received. What the article does not reveal is exactly who Medina Mora’s father is. And that matters. From 2000 to 2005, Eduardo Medina Mora was the head of the Mexican Civil Intelligence Agency during the government of the conservative PAN president Vicente Fox; from 2005 to 2009, he served as the attorney general to PAN president Felipe Calderón during the “war on drugs” that led to the death of an estimated 100,000 Mexicans. It is true, as Medina Mora emphasized in his emails, that his father was eventually exonerated by the Fiscalía General de la República of the money-laundering charges that caused him to resign from his post as Justice of Mexico’s Supreme Court in 2019. I did not mean to suggest in my piece that he was guilty of those crimes. But it seems to me that if the son of a high-ranking right-wing US politician associated with one of the most contentious policy decisions in the history of the country wrote an autobiographical essay for a left publication like n+1, especially an essay that discusses in depth the political and cultural affinities of that “father’s generation,” the editors of the magazine would ask for some account of the actual politics of the father in question. In any case, the point I was trying to make in the larger context of the piece is that, in their search for authentic “voices” to speak in English about Mexico and its diaspora in the US, progressive publications like n+1 privilege the most elite writers from that country and allow them extraordinary latitude in how they choose to describe their backgrounds. I made a mistake by assuming n+1 was not aware of the facts of Medina Mora’s family history (I’ll get to his work at Nexos in a moment)—I shouldn’t have speculated on what I didn’t know. Perhaps they were aware of the controversy surrounding Medina Mora’s father and simply felt that the information wasn't necessary for their readers.

The other related point that Medina Mora disputed is my characterization of his work at Nexos magazine in Mexico, where he served as a senior editor until earlier this year. Specifically, he was upset at my claim that he “has been able to ‘pass’ as a progressive when writing for venues such as n+1 and The Nation” while “retain[ing] his ties in Mexico to institutions aligned with the PAN and the PRI.” He identifies as a progressive and believes that it is unfair for me to say that his father’s politics disqualify the work he has done in Mexico and the US to expose the past two Morena administrations (AMLO and Claudia Scheinbaum’s) as authoritarian neoliberal regimes. I’ll certainly acknowledge that he has not explicitly positioned himself as a reactionary in his writing for Nexos. When I said that he “retains his ties in Mexico to institutions aligned with the PAN and the PRI,” I was specifically referring to the fact that the longtime director of Nexos, Héctor Aguilar Camín, publicly supported Xóchitl Gálvez, the PAN’s coalition candidate, in the 2024 election. Those who would like to know more about Medina Mora’s work at Nexos can judge for themselves how to interpret his politics by reading the bilingual special issue of the magazine on NAFTA that he helped edit in 2024.

My overall sense from Medina Mora’s emails, however, is that his real problem with my piece concerns my reading practice. He thinks I should understand that fiction is fiction, and reality reality, and he takes issue with what he sees as my propensity to read his novel in an autobiographical vein. I have no qualms with accepting the premise that fiction and autobiography are distinct discursive categories. My point throughout the essay is that the specific kind of autofiction practiced by Luiselli and Medina Mora—one that substantially incorporates their nonfiction work and relies on positions their authors have publicly taken in real life—demands an analysis of the relationship between fiction and real life. And here I’ll go beyond my initial criticism of América del Norte. I believe there’s something tonally off about the way that Medina Mora uses his paratextual statements to forestall criticisms of his ruling-class family. In the “Note on Facts” section that Medina Mora appends to the novel, he writes that “any attempt to identify nonfictional equivalents that they do not have is a gross misreading that runs contrary to my authorial intentions.” In my first reading, I took this to be a joke, albeit a questionable one given the ethical issues involved with writing about a public figure as notorious as Eduardo Medina Mora. Yet Medina Mora’s emails to me suggested that he was quite serious about the claim; he directly impugned my standing as a literary critic based on his belief that I am unable to detect “the existence of irony” or recognize “the fact that novels are works of fiction even if some of their characters are based on historical figures” (emphasis his). He seems to have forgotten that, since the time of the New Criticism (or Borges’s Discusión—take your pick), authors don’t get to assert the seigniorial privilege of dictating to critics what they can and can’t say. I’ll admit, somewhat perversely, that Medina Mora’s confusion of registers was likely what drew me to América del Norte in the first place. The novel compulsively discloses the biases, egotisms, and sheer lordliness of Mexican (and American) elites in ways few books have dared to do before his—certainly none that I’m aware of in English. It’s one of the reasons that I won’t stop recommending América del Norte, despite its author’s treatment of me. It lies too close to my own obsessions.

At core, the question raised by Medina Mora’s novel, my piece on his novel and his emails about that piece, is who has a right to speak for Mexico, the United States, and the continental landmass (América del Norte) on which both these geopolitical entities reside. In Medina Mora’s highly critical review of Jeaninne Cummings’s American Dirt for n+1, he enshrines a select group of non-Mexicans who have written about Mexico insightfully, and includes one American, the revolutionary John Reed. Medina Mora writes that the difference between these authors and Jeaninne Cummings is that they “understood that Mexico is an infinite subject to which one must dedicate a lifetime to understand that it is impossible to understand it.” It’s a convenient definition, because it respects the formal proposition that “nobody can deny that it is possible to write well about Mexico without being Mexican” while also allowing Medina Mora the ability to determine who among the gringos truly measures up. I was somewhat surprised that he pressed this charge so vigorously against me, since he knows I’ve spent years of my life in Mexico, studied its literatures extensively, and written a novel in Spanish that partly takes place in the country. I would never presume to say that he shouldn’t have published a nearly 500-page novel about the United States, even though he hasn’t lived here for years. I take it for granted that nobody knows everything about Mexico, nobody knows everything about the United States, and nobody is banned from writing about either of them, though everyone is subject to scrutiny for what they put on the page.

This brings me to my final point, which is in fact a point that Medina Mora made to me in one of our emails. He observed that “one of the perennial complaints about the US media is that it’s run by nepo babies who went to Yale” (Medina Mora went to Yale), and he asked me, rhetorically, whether these Americans should have to account for their pasts as he has accounted for his. It’s a great question. As I tried to explain in my piece, my real target was not these two privileged writers from Mexico but the US cultural system itself—a system that is, in effect, dominated by people who went to a handful of Ivy League schools. It’s a problem that has been extraordinary difficult to address publicly, even on the left, in no small part because people from these institutions have a virtual stranglehold on progressive media, including—especially—small magazines like n+1. I know this in part because I am, like Medina Mora and Luiselli, a nepo baby: my mom is a well-known academic who did her undergraduate degree at Yale and her doctorate at Columbia; my dad is a university doctor who got his MD from Harvard. I did my undergraduate at Amherst College and received my PhD from Princeton. For me to suggest that people from this background shouldn’t write would be absurd and hypocritical. However, I absolutely think that those of us who come from this milieu need to own up to our position within the US cultural field. It is one of the significant ironies of the past fifteen years that, as the American media has increasingly turned toward anti-elite messaging, the world of little magazines has become an ever more tightly knit Ivy League clique. What concerns me more than anything else right now is that so few people within this coterie culture have been willing to reckon with the true scope of the failure of the dominant progressive strategy of anti-Trumpism. From the 2016 to the 2024 election, Trump increased his voting share for every demographic except white men and women, and his advantage among non-college-voters jumped from 7% in 2016 to 14% in 2024. We exist in a world in which the most privileged cultural figures continue to speak the language of resistance, while those who don’t enjoy those advantages are increasingly abandoning ship.

How did we arrive at this situation? Part of the reason for that is undoubtedly historical. As public funding for higher education dried up in the era of neoliberal governance starting in the 1980s, public universities—with the notable exception of a few celebrated flagship institutions—have been unable to sustain the same level of cultural influence as previously. Furthermore, with the crisis in academic hiring that began during the Great Recession, institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Columbia quietly started funneling many of the graduates who might earlier have gone into academia into legacy media. These institutions have always been gateways to the New York cultural elite, but that process has accelerated over the past decade and a half, especially as the number of little and para-academic magazines has exploded. If you look at the mastheads of the most prestigious magazines in this country, you will find an ocean of Harvard surrounding several continents of Yale and Columbia, with important island chains of Brown, Princeton, Penn, Chicago, and George Washington (let’s not forget that our one true left media mogul, Bhaskar Sunkara, is a graduate of GWU).

An equally important reason for the failure to confront the rampant elitism of US liberal/left media, however, has to do with a crisis of narrative within the media establishment itself. As I have argued in a recent academic article, the social movement cycle that began with Occupy Wall Street in 2011 completely transformed the US cultural scene. I continue to believe the years between 2011 and 2016 were a true opening, when the merger between grassroots activists, non-elites (including students from non-prestige institutions), and the little magazines remained a practical possibility. However, with the defeat of the first Bernie campaign and Trump’s presidential victory in 2016, those possibilities narrowed, and, to my mind, Biden’s DNC-aided victory in the 2020 presidential primary put the final nail in the coffin. It’s not that there were no significant victories for on-the-ground progressive movements in the US (at Rutgers we won a major strike campaign), or that little magazines like n+1 weren’t publishing anything interesting. It’s simply that the potential for a multi-racial, class-based coalition, which the n+1 editors had influentially dubbed a “left populism” in their first post-Occupy issue of 2012, had receded definitively. What has surprised me these past few years is that, for all their handwringing about Trump’s blend of “outsider’s paranoid antipathy“ and “insider’s moneyed entitlement” (n+1 editor Mark Krotov’s words), the liberal/left cultural magazines have almost completely failed to confront the contradictions of their own entitled insiderism.

Jon Baskin, the editor of The Point, has been one of the few people in the little magazine world who has consistently focused on this problem. In a recent Substack conversation with David Sessions, Baskin remarks on the challenges that the “millennial left” encountered in the post-Occupy years “of bridging the gap between [themselves] and a class of people with very different educations, work experiences, and (in most cases) class backgrounds”:

I first encountered it in a 2013 n+1 editorial about “the proletarianization of intellectuals,” which suggested that graduate students, assistant professors, and some magazine editors were, far from being part of an elite, on their way to becoming part of a downwardly mobile segment of the middle class (or PMC) and therefore increasingly in class alignment with the traditional working class—in other words, not really insiders at all. If you believed this, then it followed that writers for magazines like n+1 could be what you, quoting Gramsci in an article for the New Republic four years later, called “organic intellectuals,” who were licensed to speak for the broader working class by the fact that they were dealing with similar economic conditions.

Insofar as I understood it, I always found this argument dubious. For one thing, I knew enough about at least some of these grad students and magazine editors to know they were not living economically precarious lives, and certainly not lives that had anything in common with, say, Amazon warehouse workers. Secondly, and more importantly from my perspective, the argument seemed to elide the significant cultural differences between the intellectual left and the majority of the people this left often claimed to speak for—differences that, I believed at the time and believe even more strongly now, cannot simply be subsumed into some solidaristic economic project, even if such a project could be agreed upon.

This assessment strikes me as spot on. And although I’m perhaps more of a believer than Baskin that this solidaristic economic project could have come to fruition if the Bernie-inspired progressive wing of the Democratic Party had won out over the center-right represented by Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, the reality is that it didn’t. We are where we are now, with the Democrats increasingly turning into the party of the multicultural elite, and Trump’s Republican Party increasingly turning into an authoritarian oligarchy with growing support from the working class of all racial and ethnic backgrounds.

What I would add to Baskin’s account is that the failure of the millennial left’s economic and cultural project led to a demand for a particular type of literary narrative, one that in my view helps explain the trajectories of Medina Mora and Luiselli along with other transnational cultural elites that resemble them. Given the implicit challenges to little magazines presented by the successive waves of Occupy, BLM, #MeToo, and the post-Trump immigrant rights movement, those magazines needed to speak compellingly to the political demands of popular mobilizations. But because they remained beholden, both intellectually and financially, to the liberal coastal elite, they were obliged to draw their “experts” on these movements from that elite. It makes sense that Medina Mora’s most influential piece for n+1, “An American Education,” largely revolves around the plight of undocumented migrants, and also that it begins with a textured phenomenological rendering of how it feels to be a Mexican (any Mexican) passing through the Orwellian machinery of the US state apparatus (“I sat in silence for what felt like hours, trying to decide whether the feeling that I was about to have a heart attack was evidence of my fragility or an adequate response to the times”). In her 2017 nonfiction essay Tell Me How It Ends, Luiselli had already modeled how to use one’s situational precarity to bridge the gap between her (elite) readers and the Central American migrants who were ostensibly at the center of story she was telling. Her interviews with the “refugee children” are regularly punctuated by a side plot involving an inexplicable bureaucratic snafu that prevented her from receiving her green card at the expected time. It is this unforeseen period of insecurity that, in Luiselli’s eyes, authorizes her to speak on behalf of the migrant children: “It was thanks to my lost green card, and thanks to my lawyer abandoning my case, that I became involved with a much more urgent problem. My more trivial pursuits as an ‘alien writer’ or ‘pending Mexican’ took me into the heart of something larger and more important.”

In their respective accounts, both Luiselli (who had recently finished a PhD at Columbia) and Medina Mora (who had recently received his BA from Yale) display a certain skepticism toward the very task that they are entrusted with carrying out, namely, employing their elite Mexican subjectivities as conduits to the far more vulnerable bodies of the undocumented migrants. The metadiscursive premise of Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends, that it was her daughter’s curiosity about the migrant children that drew her deeper and deeper into their lives, finds a correlate in Medina Mora’s framing of “An American Education” as a narrative not just about the migrants themselves but about his reporting assignment to cover the story for an unnamed magazine. The tension inherent in the construction of these texts is palpable: these are first-person accounts by two of the most privileged Mexican writers in the US about the most economically distressed populations of their region. In Luiselli’s case, this shift toward “representativeness” was a departure from her earlier Spanish-language writing (in particular, her early books Papeles falsos and Los ingrávidos), where she had unapologetically embraced a post-identitarian cosmopolitan aesthetic. Both Tell Me How It Ends and Lost Children Archive read as calculated appeals to liberal American sentiment that studiously combine concern for the downtrodden with the appropriate level of guilt at being (slightly, but not too much) more privileged than they. The commercial success of Lost Children Archive, which appeared on Obama’s year-end list of best books in 2019, offered a blueprint for how to succeed as an English-language Mexican writer in the NYC publishing world. I continue to give Medina Mora credit for having broken with Luiselli’s formula in América del Norte, for having exposed the bad faith of the US liberal establishment toward the Mexican diaspora in a way that Tell Me How It Ends and Lost Children Archive refused to do. Medina Mora—and not Vonk—initiated a desperately needed conversation in the US about Mexican race and class dynamics; he put himself on the line.

I have less sympathy for the editorial machinery that stands behind him. In one of his emails, Medina Mora asked me whether I thought his friends in the US media should be subjected to a “Maoist struggle session” because of their own intimate ties to the ruling elite. Maybe. But since my apartment in Brooklyn isn’t big enough to fit everyone, I would suggest that an effort at serious self-scrutiny would be a good start. While I’m as angry as everyone else at Trump’s multi-pronged assault on cultural institutions these past few months, I refuse to pretend that Republicans are the only ones with an elite populism problem. In the final paragraph of his post-mortem of the 2024 election, “The Victory of the Worst,” Krotov asks of the impending Trump years, “How will we take care of one another?” I would respond to Krotov’s question with a question of my own. On behalf of what “we” does n+1 claim to speak?