For a hundred years now, Joyce and his corpus have furnished Latin American artists with structures capable of organizing difficult local experiences, and of translating those experiences into forms that are internationally recognizable. In an effort to emphasize both the vitality and complexity of Joyce’s legacy in Latin America, I argue that the Mexican novelist Gustavo Saínz (Mexico City, 1940-Bloomington, Indiana 2015) invokes the Joycean novel in a contestory fashion, as a challenge to hegemonic discourses that have misrepresented key aspects of the history and lived experience of Mexican subjects. After providing an overview of Latin American reception of Joyce and the tensions that surround that reception, in the first part of my talk I will focus on how Saínz’s 1968 comic novel Obsessive Circular Days depicts the phenomenon of reading Ulysses in Mexico City in the 1960s. In the second part of my talk, I turn to Saínz’s 1981 novel Aztec Ghosts: A Pre-Text. The catalyst for the novel was one of the major archaeological discoveries of 20th-century Mexico: the accidental uncovering of the Coyolxauhqui monolith in Mexico City in 1978, followed by the discovery of the Huēyi Teōcalli, the Great Temple of the Mexica people’s capital city Tenochtitlan. In my reading, the pages of Aztec Ghosts represent a site of confluence between Mexican archaeology and Finnegans Wake. Through his novelization of this archaeological discovery and the public response it generated, in Aztec Ghosts Sainz draws on Wakean forms and themes in order to challenge the authoritarian Mexican government’s reductive, romanticized depictions of the country's precolonial past. 

Casey Drosehn Gough (B.A. Williams College, PhD Northwestern University) is a Senior Lecturer of English at North Central College in Naperville, IL. She studies Modernisms and the Global Avant-Garde from a Latin Americanist perspective, and has published on Surrealism, World Cinema, Roberto Arlt, and on Odiseo, Marcelo Zabaloy's lipogram translation of Ulysses. Her current research focuses on the Latin American reception of James Joyce. With Federico Barea, she has translated works by Néstor Sánchez and William Burroughs, as well as The Criminalization of Democratic Politics in the Global South, with a foreword by Lula da Silva. She is also working on an adaptation of Ulysses set in present-day Chicagoland, an episode of which is forthcoming in the James Joyce Quarterly.