The parody of the charro as a national stereotype. Violence and otherness in Enrique Serna’s El vendedor de silencio

Abstract

This paper analyzes the figure of the charro singer in the novel El vendedor de silencio by Enrique Serna, which emerges from Mexican cinematography at the beginning of the 20th century. A rhetorical reading of this allegory of the charro as a comic villain, represented in the journalist Carlos Denegri at key moments of the novel, is proposed. To this end, it addresses the intrinsic relationship between a supposed ontology of the Mexican and machismo as a social and political phenomenon, which has as its center of dispute the hierarchical relations of power and presupposes the virile identity of the Mexican man through said cinematographic figure. In the novelist’s narrative, humor, achieved through specific modalities such as parody and irony, constitutes a critical instrument to address the themes of violence and otherness. Fiction occurs in the shadow of the truth that is exposed in both the historical and realistic novels, which are usually related to the problem of formal categories that discuss the nomenclature of parody. Regarding the veracity of the historical fact, it would be problematic to treat parody as a stylistic model that serves as a source for the study of history. Thus, Serna elaborates a thematic and textual renovation in a rhetorical operation in which the direct, indirect or omniscient voices of the story, reupdate the stereotype already mentioned in a caricaturization of the Mexican, the power and the degrees of corruption equivalent to the behavior of associated violence, which goes indistinctly from the public to the private sphere.