Empires of Extraction: Silver Field Ecologies and Eugenics in Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic

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• Empires of Extraction: Silver Field Ecologies and Eugenics in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic
• Colleen Marie Tripp (bio)

Introduction

In her adaptation of the Victorian haunted house, Mexican Canadian author Silvia Moreno-Garcia explores the anthropocenic history of a nation that never felt quite at home in her postcolonial, ecogothic novel, Mexican Gothic (2020).¹ If the “postcolonial Gothic references the continuation of colonial violence and its legacies, rather than its haunting remainder,” Moreno-Garcia’s portrayal of a Victorian-style manor and mine subsumed by supernatural mushrooms reveals forms of eco-imperial monstrosity that challenge what should be local, familiar, and secure.² Set in the post-revolutionary 1950s, the novel begins with Mexico City socialite Noemí visiting her newly-wed cousin Catalina at High Place, an old Victorian manor and silver mine owned by the British Doyle family in rural, northern Mexico. The decaying home is “absolutely Victorian in construction,” and the interior is eerily evocative of the family’s adjacent silver fields: “It’s always damp and dark and so very cold,” Catalina comments.³ At their nightly dinners, the Doyle family routinely contrasts topics of racial decay with its mine’s exhausted natural resources, echoing the degeneration discourses of the Victorian fin de siècle. Catalina’s husband, Virgil Doyle comments, “On occasion you need to inject new blood into the mix, so to speak” (237). Even more strangely, Noemí begins to see the moldy wallpaper of the home move, like that of the late nineteenth-century horror story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and she experiences extra-sensory dreams of the home’s centuries-old, occluded histories and people (55). The narrator pithily concludes, “This house, she was sure, was haunted” (120). In the end, patriarch Howard Doyle reveals High Place’s Lovecraftian horrors: the [End Page 229] family has instrumentalized a supernatural mushroom colony (“the gloom”) to mentally colonize the home’s Mexican visitors and miners.⁴ The Doyles control Mexicans using the mushroom gloom, from lower-class miners to the upper-class mestizas they court and wed, to sustain the future of their mine, racial lineage, and generational wealth. Mexican people and natural resources, in short, both serve the Doyles’ micro-extractive zone, an operation that depends on a future-depleting imperial episteme of slow violence and a supernatural mushroom gloom.⁵

Noemí’s fragmented dreams of the memories and occulted violence at High Place becomes an extended metaphor of the cultural experience and history of socioecological imperialism in Mexico and an important facet of Moreno-Garcia’s adaptation of the Victorian gothic. With its haunted house-silver field, Mexican Gothic uses conventions of the fin de siècle Victorian gothic to critique the genre’s early colonial othering, as well as British participation in the grotesque slow violence of extractive zones and other forms of ecological imperialism, such as eugenics, taking place in Mexico and the Global South.⁶ If extractivism functions as a future-depleting model that changes humans’ relationship to time and space,⁷ Moreno-Garcia’s novel compounds metaphors of extractivism with other future-depleting forms of slow violence, like eugenics, that intensified during the late Victorian period and reconfigured New World extraction fields and their relation to empire.⁸ Today, critics such as Benjamin Kohlmann describe the concurrent rise of a new global economy in the late nineteenth century with a form of Western imperialism rooted in “globalized speculation” during the age of extraction.⁹ Mexican Gothic joins a cache of contemporary texts whose basic narrative conceits focus on ecology and capture what it means to live in an age of ecosystemic decline and extinction under late capitalism. While fictional, the novel’s British family, which weaponizes a mushroom colony to colonize Mexicans and mine Mexico of its natural resources, becomes an extended metaphor for how a subset of humans and societies have exploited the planet to the brink of catastrophe for centuries and have been able to deny or avoid ecological facts.

Mexican Gothic marries ecological criticism with the Victorian ghost story and the genre’s emphasis on decay to emphasize the horrors of human and nonhuman world depletion claimed at the expense of future generations and...