The Beats in Mexico

DAVID STEPHEN CALONNE

“This close study of Beat writers in the context of their experiences in Mexico is a revelation many times over. The author has plumbed the depths, discovering whole new dimensions in the US avant-garde, with an emphasis on women Beat writers long overdue. What we have here is a critical classic in the making, a must-read for anyone interested in the saga of the Beats.”

—Paul Buhle, co-editor, with Harvey Pekar, of The Beats: A Graphic History

“With The Beats in Mexico, David Stephen Calonne nally lls a critical gap in Beat Generation scholarship—tracing not only the in uences of Mexico on the major Beat writers, but on their predecessors, followers, and contemporaries. We devoured this thoroughly-researched, beautifully written study. Highly recommended!”

—Arthur S. Nusbaum, Third Mind Books

“Calonne’s book brings together a mass of description, information, knowledge and quotation to form a wide-ranging compendium of Mexican connections across the Beat eld. It should inspire scholars to examine in more depth a literary history too often chronicled in only the colourful but reductive terms of Beat biography.”

—Oliver Harris, Professor of American Literature at Keele University and President of the European Beat Studies Network

Mexico features prominently in the literature and personal legends of the Beat writers, from its depiction as an extension of the American frontier in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to its role as a refuge for writers with criminal pasts like William S. Burroughs. Yet the story of Beat literature and Mexico takes us beyond the movement’s superstars to consider the important roles played by lesser-known female Beat writers.

The rst book-length study of why the Beats were so fascinated by Mexico and how they represented its culture in their work, this volume examines such canonical gures as Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lamantia, McClure, and Ferlinghetti. It also devotes individual chapters to women such as Margaret Randall, Bonnie Bremser, and Joanne Kyger, who each made Mexico a central setting of their work and interrogated the misogyny they encountered in both American and Mexican culture.

The Beats in Mexico not only considers individual Beat writers, but also places them within a larger history of countercultural gures, from D.H. Lawrence to Antonin Artaud to Jim Morrison, who mythologized Mexico as the land of the Aztecs and Maya, where shamanism and psychotropic drugs could take you on a trip far beyond the limits of the American imagination.

DAVID STEPHEN CALONNE is the author of many books, including The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats and Diane di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions. He has also edited ve volumes of prose by Charles Bukowski as well as interviews with Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg. Calonne lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan and has taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago. He currently teaches at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti.

266 pp 10 b/w, 10 color images 6.125 x 9.25 978-1-9788-2872-8 cloth $29.95T

April 2022

Literary History

“Calonne takes readers on a much-needed tour through the complex, often surprising relationship between the Beats and Mexico, offering insight after insight into numerous writers and their works—a book the size of the Pyramid of Kukulcán.”

—Steven Belletto, author of The Beats: A Literary History

Table of Contents

Introduction

1 Lawrence Ferlinghetti: The Mexican Night

2 William S. Burroughs: Something Falls Off When You Cross the Border into Mexico

3 Philip Lamantia: A Surrealist in Mexico

4 Margaret Randall: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary, and El Corno Emplumado

5 Jack Kerouac: The Magic Land at the End of the Road

6 Allen Ginsberg: I Would Rather Go Mad, Gone Down the Dark Road to Mexico

7 Bonnie Bremser: Troia: Mexican Memoirs

8 Michael McClure and Jim Morrison: Break On Through to the Other Side

9 Joanne Kyger: Phenomenological Mexico

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index