Silvia Moreno-Garcia on the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, Occultism, and the Pitfalls of Ethnocentrism
originally Published: Jul 24, 2023The prolific author discusses her newest release, "Silver Nitrate."
After Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic became a massive hit, eventually landing on the New York Times best-seller list in 2020, you might think she would rest easy for a while. But this was not the case. “You don’t get just one book that does well, and then you can sit back and never do anything ever again,” she says. “Unless I guess it’s like To Kill a Mockingbird or something like that. But I don’t want to write just one book.” So, she stayed at her full-time job, using vacations and weekends to attend literary events and interviews while squeezing in writing time and publishing a book a year since 2015. And on the heels of the critically acclaimed and commercially popular Mexican Gothic, Moreno-Garcia was able to quit her job this year and focus entirely on her writing.
Moreno-Garcia grew up in Baja California with parents who worked in radio, and she moved to Canada in her early 20s with her husband, where she earned a master’s in science and technology studies from the University of British Columbia. She stayed in Vancouver to work for the school in communications for the faculty of science, writing on the bus or during lunch breaks. With her latest release, this month’s Silver Nitrate, Moreno-Garcia, 42, has published nine novels, a nonfiction book about how to write speculative fiction, three short story collections, three chapbooks, and dozens of individual short stories. She also has a micropress that releases the occasional short story anthology or novella, and she edits various literary magazine issues.
Silver Nitrate follows discontented childhood best friends Montserrat and Tristán as they near their 40s in 1990s Mexico City. Montserrat, an inveterate horror fan and film buff, is an analog sound editor who’s getting pushed out of her job thanks to sexism and technological advancement. Tristán, once a soap opera star on the rise, has struggled to string together acting gigs after a tragic car crash left his girlfriend dead and his reputation in tatters. Their friendship is also rocky, since they both know Montserrat is a little in love with Tristán, and he only calls her in between girlfriends.
But when Tristán discovers his new neighbor is cult-famous horror director Abel Urueta, he knows Montserrat will be thrilled. Much like our leading pair, Urueta hasn't had a great last decade or two. Unlike Tristán and Montserrat, he's confident that he knows exactly how to fix it. He just needs their help finishing a horror movie he began more than 30 years before he met them. The film was written by Wilhelm Friedrich Ewers, a German occultist who may or may not have had Nazi connections, and Ewers built a ritual into the story that he promised would act as a good luck spell. When Ewers was murdered by muggers during filming, funding was pulled, and the film was never finished.
Urueta believes that the aborted spell is to blame for all their bad luck, and he thinks he can turn things around if they finish the audio on the last scene of the movie. Montserrat's expertise is especially important, as the only remaining copy of the movie is on silver nitrate film stock, a volatile compound liable to catching on fire. (That detail isn't part of the fantasy. Silver nitrate burns quickly and persistently. A silver nitrate fire in 1937 wiped out an entire archive of silent films in New Jersey. Another at a Parisian charity bazaar in 1897 killed 126 people and injured hundreds of others.)
Montserrat and Tristán are skeptical but agree to humor their new friend, and initially the spell seems to work as intended. All three see near miracles occur in their personal and professional lives. But then, Urueta has a vision of his death, Tristán sees his dead girlfriend's ghost, and Montserrat begins to believe she's haunted by Ewers himself. When Ewers' old associates begin threatening the trio on the mortal plane, Montserrat sets out to unravel the occultist's past and the source of his magic in order to undo the spell.
Silver Nitrate takes up some of Moreno-Garcia's consistent concerns (the plight of Mexican women in a time of change, white supremacy as a cult, colonialism, and exploitation of Indigenous people and knowledge), and it's just as tightly situated in a specific historical moment as most of her work (she's written books set in Mexico in the 1920s, '50s, '70s, '80s, 2000s, and now '90s, jumping between genres with nearly every book). This novel brings together levels of outdated technology and evolving cultures in a retrospective kaleidoscope of a story that pulls in details from three distinct eras.
If you've read any of Moreno-Garcia's novels, it probably won't be a surprise to hear she's a classic film buff, so she had a firm foundation in the topic before beginning to write. "I like watching very old movies," she says. "I subscribe to the Criterion Channel. It's probably one of the only things that I watch." But oddly enough, the issue of switching from analog to digital moviemaking was one of the hardest eras she's yet researched. It was such a self-evident change that nobody bothered to write about it. so she had to track down sound editors who had worked through the shift and interview them.
She did, however, find plenty of information on the way Nazis "fostered certain occult practices while suppressing others." Moreno-Garcia says the Nazis banned astrology but tried using other divinatory practices, like searching for the location of Allied ships by using pendulums. "It's overblown at times and oversimplified, but there was definitely an interest in the occult in Nazi circles because it was a way of creating a glorious past for the regime," she says. If they could be supernaturally as well as naturally "superior," why wouldn't they?
But Moreno-Garcia is quick to note that the Nazis weren't all that unique. "There's many connections between occult practices and racism before the Nazi rise, actually," she says. "In many parts of the world, one of the things that I found is that they seem to oddly go hand in hand together. And it's still around nowadays." In the novel, Ewers believes his occult powers are a sign of superiority and is shaken to find magic accessible to People of Color in South America. He decides they must be something apart from humans with Atlantean royal heritage.
The alchemical mix of occult practices and film is a combination that she's been playing with for years. Moreno-Garcia published a short story in 2010, "Flash Frame," that connects old films and magical effects. This idea remained stuck in her mind, and when she began writing Silver Nitrate, she found that "The connection between sound and magic always seemed pretty obvious to me. Once you start getting into occultism and occult practices of the early and mid-20th century and how some of that works, it [all] revolves around ritual, which is repetition of certain movements and gestures, and a lot of them also rely upon an audience, whether it's one person or several people," she says.
One of the most discussed and foundational elements of Moreno-Garcia's work is the way she switches genres so fluidly (check out the baffled Goodreads reviews on a few of her novels). Mexican Gothic and Silver Nitrate are supernatural horror, Gods of Jade and Shadow pulls its magic from an ancient Maya epic, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau is a magic-less sci-fi retelling of an H.G. Wells novel, The Beautiful Ones is a period romance in a world almost like ours but with telekinesis, Untamed Shore is a crime thriller, and Velvet Was the Night is a straightforward noir with no magic at all. Part of Moreno-Garcia's genre jumping is an eagerness to challenge herself. In her childhood home in Mexico, books from all over the world overfilled shelves with no strict delineations between literary fiction and fantasy. So as a writer, she always felt comfortable pulling from whatever genre she needed. "Dracula could coexist perfectly well with a collection of works by [Jorge Luis] Borges in my household," she says. "And so, therefore, it wasn't a great leap to do that. And I just use whatever I need to use without really caring what its provenance is and whether it's considered a valid genre or not."
Moreno-Garcia says this lack of hierarchy between literary and genre fiction in her household mirrored the wider Mexican publishing landscape. While U.S. and some U.K. presses put out reams of cheap pulp fiction in the 20th century that were distinctly separate from their literary counterparts, she says, Mexican publishers just didn't. "There is not enough of a market that would enable that," Moreno-Garcia says. "One reason is because poor people are not going to read, or they can't read. It's a much more difficult task than in the United States, so we don't have genre imprints." Great Latin American writers like Borges, whose work plays in the fantastic, were taken as seriously as writers of realism. Writing for literary magazines as opposed to pulp outlets allowed fantasy writers to tackle serious topics. "It concerns itself a lot with things like the political, with feminism, with gender," she says. "Things are changing for genre writers in North America today, but it's been a long battle. If there was something fantastical that I was finding, it was probably sitting on the literary shelf in Mexico."
Less often discussed than the many genres in which she works is the way Moreno-Garcia has written a historical novel set in nearly every decade of the 20th century in Mexico. While fiction isn't a history class, her books are popular enough that plenty of readers aren't familiar with the times and places she's writing about. That's fine with her, as long as they're willing to learn. "I don't write books in a tactical sense to teach anybody anything," she says. "There's just information in there that might be interesting to people." Most readers she's interacted with have been kind and eager to learn about Mexico from her work, but she's met a few who have been frustrated that the Mexico she portrays doesn't match foreign stereotypes they hold about the country. "I don't mind that people come to something without knowing anything about it because I've come to many books without knowing anything about a certain time or place or writer," Moreno-Garcia says. "It's just a process of discovery. I think the problem is when people come loaded with preconceptions of something, and they want something other than what you're going to give them."
Every novelist gets questions and critiques about their work, but Moreno- Garcia has had readers and publishers alike criticize her books because they don't match their understanding of Mexico. She's heard that she includes too many Spanish words, not enough Spanish words, names that are too difficult to pronounce, too many Mexican characters who are not poor, not enough American characters, and too many Mexican characters who are from cities instead of farms. "It's a type of ethnocentrism when you just think that your culture is the only one that matters, and therefore you don't have anything to learn from everybody," she says.
And this pushback wasn't just from readers. Editors said "Silvia Moreno Garcia" was too long of a name for a book's spine, that there was a limit on how many consonants you could put in a character's name, that the names were simply just too weird, "or people are going to have trouble connecting with that character, which is code for this person is not white," she says. That fear that anything unfamiliar won't sell is particularly frustrating when it's in a gatekeeper. "It's simply exotic because people haven't seen anything like it before, right?" she says. "And that's part of the problem with editors. They think, 'Well, nobody's gonna read a book set in Mexico with Mexican characters because it's just too weird. But then they never gave a book set in Mexico with Mexican characters a chance to make it into the market. Part of the role of editing and publishing is taste-making and finding audiences." As a former marketing professional, Moreno-Garcia would never refuse to market a product simply because it was unfamiliar. "You don't just say, 'Well, this microwave. I've never seen a microwave before. So, I can't write any ad copy for it. We're gonna give up,"' she says. "No ad agency would do that. And sometimes it seems that that is what publishing companies tell you."
Hopefully, Moreno-Garcia's success is helping to show the industry the possibilities beyond what's deemed "unmarketable." Mexican Gothic spent months on the New York Times best-seller list, sure, but her sustained prolific agility as a writer proves that was more the culmination of years of craft, or a series of canny leveling up decisions on her part, rather than an accident. Readers are willing to learn about paramilitary groups killing protesters in Velvet Was the Night, 19th-century life among the cenotes in The Daughter of Dr. Moreau, and a British-run mine in Mexican Gothic. And now, they’ll be able to enter the world of the golden age of Mexican cinema and the shifting landscape of 1990s Mexico with Silver Nitrate. And if there's one thing we know for certain with a deft, incisive visionary like Moreno-Garcia, there are surely more inventive worlds on the horizon.
Email: shelbi.e.polk@gmail.com
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