In Katabasis, two graduate students at a magical version of Cambridge University go to Hell to rescue the soul of their adviser so he can give them a letter of recommendation. Anyone who has spent time in graduate school will understand the joke entailed in this premise, and also the extent to which it really isn’t a joke. Possibly most graduate students who have tried to go into the academy afterward—at least during the past few decades, when the perpetual scarcity of academic jobs has fallen to catastrophic lows—have understood themselves, in one way or another, to be going through Hell in order, as their prize, to get more of it.

This is a novel that plays with two genres at once. On the one hand, it faithfully adheres to what readers expect of romantasy: a genre, hugely popular with the readers of BookTok who can make a book a bestseller, that combines romance plots with fantasy settings. On the other hand, it’s a satire of academia in the vein of David Lodge, Elif Batuman, or, especially, Susanna Clarke.

Which places the novel in the interesting position of drawing from a specific experience but being marketed primarily to readers who haven’t had that experience. The aesthetic called dark academia—which, for reasons we’ll get into, is the frame through which readers on social media will likely encounter the book—is one of the fastest-growing categories in publishing. The term only started appearing in deal announcements on Publishers Marketplace in 2022, but it has already accrued a long shelf of titles, including Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (retroactively), Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, M. L. Rio’s If We Were Villains, and Kuang’s own Babel. It also pervades TikTok, Tumblr, and Instagram hashtags. Think Gothic corridors, gloomy libraries, deadly secret societies, marble busts of authors watching you with knowing eyes.

Generally, the dark in dark academia refers to safely improbable things, like murder. Some people theorize that the appetite for dark academia started with the Harry Potter books, which gave young readers a taste for old stone dormitories, magical books, and late-night study sessions in the library’s Restricted Section. Regardless of whether that’s true, it is true that dark academia tends to present a vision of academic life that has far more to do with fantasy than reality. Dark academia is magical, murderous, melodramatic. It tends to be interested in Gothic questions, like whether we can bury a sin for good. The characters don’t care about the particularities of the academic job market. They’re more interested in questions like who murdered their classmate and whether the evidence points to a poisoned book or the necromantic rituals of a secret society.

But Kuang uses the confluence of these elements—romantasy, academic satire, and dark academia—to pose a more interesting set of questions. To wit: What is the magic that scholars find in the academy? (Kuang holds degrees from Georgetown, Cambridge, and Oxford, and is currently taking a PhD at Yale.) What are the wrongs they’re asked to quietly endure—the things that make academia, so to speak, dark? And is the magic worth the darkness? Her novel has the obligatory murders, but there’s an allegorical resonance that comes from its setting in an academic world that graduate students and professors would recognize.

For instance, the adviser the protagonists seek is a celebrity scholar who enjoys seeing his advisees suffer, plays them against each other, and likes to remind them that without him, their careers are nothing. (We’ve all met the type.) Kuang’s magical Cambridge includes impoverished graduate students, professors who place their own names on papers their students wrote, sabotage, snobbery, sexual harassment, and bureaucratic machinery that readily crushes whoever gets in its way. Magic is, in fact, just another academic discipline there, like philosophy or literature; and, as in those disciplines, graduate students are so desperate to get one of the few tenure-track jobs that they’re willing to walk through fire. The protagonist, Alice Law, reflects on her situation in words that would fit in any of those unhappy essays that former tenure-track hopefuls write when they leave the academy: “She had trained her entire life to do this one thing, and if she could not do it, then she had no reason to live.”

If the devotion scholars feel toward their work is intense and sometimes irrational, it’s because this is one of the last spaces of unalienated labor. It’s precisely because the work is so powerful that younger scholars are willing to put up with bad actors for the chance to keep doing it.

The magic system is based on how academia works. Magicians work with the hermeneutics of interpreting statements and philosophical problems; if the interpretation can be jinked in such a way that the impossible seems possible—even for a moment—then the impossible will happen. (It’s the old author’s boast: fiction is magic.) Their methods of doing this split them into factions as quarrelsome as the panels at an MLA convention: “Over in America, visual illusions and flashy showmanship were all the rage. In Europe they were going on about things called postmodernist and poststructuralist magick, which seemed to involve lots of spells doing the opposite of what their inventors wanted, and spells that did nothing at all, which everyone claimed was very profound.”

That someone can only be a magician if they work in academia may seem odd, given all that magic has the potential to do. But that’s how it is in our world, too. Literature professors, for instance, think of what they teach as sublimely important, but most literature majors wind up in a corporate world that can find no better use for their talents than improving a brand’s SEO strategy. Some magical-PhD holders stay in the conversation, so to speak, by becoming hedge witches, but it’s the same lonely office as being an independent scholar.

And yet the magic, in the novel’s world as well as our own, is very real. Because of the nature of the magic system, every time the characters use magic, they experience it as if they were making a surprising connection or devising an elegant argument. And “the profession”—as people in academia call it, as if to suggest there is no other profession—has other enchantments, besides: the moral groundedness of doing work that might matter; the satisfaction of a really good teaching day; what historians call “the pleasures of the archive.” If the devotion scholars feel toward their work is intense and sometimes irrational, it’s because this is one of the last spaces of unalienated labor. It’s precisely because the work is so powerful, in fact, that younger scholars are willing to put up with bad actors for the chance to keep doing it.

The magic is also in the references. In the world of Katabasis, all the great stories about journeys to Hell, from Orpheus to Dante to T. S. Eliot, are nonfiction accounts that can serve as Baedeker guides for living travelers daring the same descent. Characters talk about literature and mythology constantly, which makes sense, given that any work of fiction in our world might be nonfiction in that one. And allusions wink at us above the level of the plot: the protagonists’ names are Alice, suggestive of the girl who fell into Wonderland, and Peter, suggestive of the original lost boy.

In short, the novel treats literature as a lived-in place—as it feels when you’re young enough to believe all the stories, or old enough to believe them again. (I won’t tell you how the book ends, but if you’ve read Paradise Lost or Dante’s Inferno, you know the words it ends with.)

As a satire, the novel covers plenty of academic absurdities and offenses, which readers might interpret, variously, as peccadilloes or contrapassi or minor infernal torments. In the “Pride” circle of Hell, for instance, a dean lists some of the sins that brought souls to that lesser ring: a reviewer who turned down manuscripts that didn’t cite him; a scholar who claimed to work at Oxford, when it was really Oxford Brookes; a medievalist who “made his wife call him Doctor.”

I assume the novel was written with the expectation that academics, taking the bait to treat it as a roman à clef, would amplify the conversation by quibbling over such details, which I’ll do here: I’m convinced that, in real life, the sin the professor would commit against his wife wouldn’t be having her call him Doctor, but having her work on his dissertation without giving her credit. The other sins I’ve seen. And others still: visiting fellows from outside academia who quickly update their bios to say they “teach at Prestigious University” and never update them again; archivists who growl and snap at the gates like Cerberus; undergraduates who campaign to change their grades with all the calm and wisdom of a pro se litigant.

If that were all one had to endure, the joke of the novel’s basic conceit wouldn’t land with nearly as much impact. But we all know how the soft snow of silence in this business covers over real exploitation, real abuses of power. A few pages in, there’s a piece of withheld information that made me think the adviser had committed what Americans call a Title IX violation. You’ll have to read the book to see if I was right.

And yet—Kuang very obviously loves this place, too. Like Milton, who can’t look at Eve in Paradise Lost without falling in love with her, Kuang can’t look at Cambridge without being in love with it. Or maybe a better comparison is the moment in the Iliad when the Trojan council of elders, who have seen their city ground down under a nearly decade-long war for the sake of Helen, see her approaching the city’s walls and say to each other, effectively, “I get it.”

When the protagonists first get a good look at Hell, for example, they discover that it has bent to the shape of their own “moral universe,” just as the Hell of Dante’s Inferno reflects the moral universe of 13th-century Florence. But whereas Dante saw stinking swamps and bleeding trees, reflecting his idea that suffering in Hell is just the sin itself without the illusion that made it desirable, Kuang can’t help but look with desire, even here:

So perhaps they should have expected, then, for Hell to take on a most familiar landscape: Gothic towers, courtyard walls, and winding between them, a single paved path—just wide enough for pedestrians and cyclists, not wide enough for cars. You always knew, stepping into such places, what they were for. You knew precisely where you were from the uniformity of design; the same shades of brick and stone across buildings. You knew from the lack of wide streets and shop signs; from the quiet absence of children. You knew from the arched gates that marked the boundary. Fairy gates, signaling departure. The mundane world ended here. These were not places of leisure or business. These were places to be still, to think, and to step out of time.

“Christ,” said Peter. “Hell is a campus.”

As I mentioned, the challenge that the author has set herself is to combine a satire of a very specific world with a genre novel for a much larger readership. It’s also a younger readership than the one David Lodge, for instance, wrote for, and therefore less likely to be familiar with the academic labor system. In Lodge’s time, genre fiction was written to be bought in airports or at the grocery store checkout. In the 21st century, it has undergone a consumer revolution, thanks to the rise of reading communities, mostly women in Gen Z, who talk about books on social media—the younger sisters of the readers Janice Radway discusses in her 1984 classic, Reading the Romance.

These communities are powerful—so much so that they’ve changed the very way books are made. Now book covers are designed to stand out on a phone screen, not just in the hands. Bookstores are putting out tables showcasing story categories that Gen Z is intimately familiar with, but that haven’t yet made it to the labels on the regular shelves: romantasy, cozy fantasy, dystopian romance, dark academia. In 2021, Shannon DeVito, a senior director at Barnes & Noble, told the New York Times that success on BookTok can mean “crazy sales—I mean tens of thousands of copies a month.”

Genre is a suite of expectations on the part of readers. Accordingly, this book indulges the reader with a charcuterie of BookTok bait. By page five, we’ve squarely hit the trope “enemies to lovers.” After that, we soon hit “look at me” (a trope in which one character says these words to another having a panic attack), “only one bed,” and “fake dating.” Then we get “look at me” again, this time reversing the speaker and the listener.

Likewise, the book’s presentation and marketing aim, in part, for that BookTok audience. Influencers are on the media list to receive galleys. The launch campaign will include a “deluxe limited hardcover” with illustrated fore edges—which is going to look great on Instagram and TikTok, where content creators will hold up the book for the camera and recite the story’s tropes. (These also include “slow burn,” “second-chance romance,” and “he falls first.”)

Kuang is doing well: she’s a New York Times best-selling author, and already, at 29, the kind of high-profile author whose name appears in book-deal listings as a selling point—“Pitched for fans of R. F. Kuang.” The galley of Katabasis was as hard to get as a Sally Rooney galley.

Will her Gen Z readers be interested in the question of whether the magic of academia is worth it? If she’s done the job that a novelist is supposed to do, they will. She may even inspire some of them to go to grad school—an offense for which, if there is justice in the afterlife, she will certainly have to put in some time in Purgatory. 

“The best president in the history of our country,” declared then-president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2019. “I still govern according to his example.” Standing at the foot of a giant statue of Benito Juárez (president 1858–1872), López Obrador—commonly known as AMLO—was celebrating the 213th anniversary of the birth of Juárez, speaking about the long-dead president’s inspirational leadership.

AMLO swept to the presidency in 2018, already convinced that his government would continue in the tradition of Juárez and transform the country. A popular populist, AMLO undertook signature project after signature project, pushing these to completion before the end of his sexenio—the single, six-year term for Mexican presidents—in 2024. AMLO had waited a long time to win the presidency. In 2006, he ran and was narrowly defeated, in what he called a rigged election. His opponent, Felipe Calderón, was an aloof technocrat; Cristina Rivera Garza called this government a “visceraless state.” AMLO ran and lost again in 2012. When AMLO finally won the presidency in 2018, he did so on a wave of popularity that never let up. Unlike the visceraless politics of his predecessors, AMLO knew how to talk like the people and to talk to the people. He made the ordinary people of Mexico feel seen and represented; he acknowledged their needs.

But AMLO also simplified, and, specifically, simplified Mexico’s history: the sense of what the country was and who belonged within it. He attacked anyone he considered not on the side of the people, his side: journalists who asked difficult questions, feminist activists calling out his government’s failure to address gendered violence. By the time he passed the presidential sash to his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, his impact on Mexican politics was profound, but his larger legacy remains far less certain.

As AMLO was leaving his imprint on Mexican history—insisting it moved relentlessly forward, with him as a triumphant continuation of Juárez—others were reassessing that history’s supposedly rigid trajectory. Two novels published in 2024 return to some of the best-known, canonical figures and episodes from Mexico’s past, engaging history in a very different way to AMLO, and critiquing his approach to power.

Written in Spanish by Mexican authors living in the United States, these novels uncover the overlooked intervals, the gaps in the historical record. Within these intervals, they find outsiders arriving at incredible cities. As the outsiders explore these cities, they encounter powerful forces determined to crush difference and fix history with themselves as the main characters.

You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue and translated by Natasha Wimmer is set in the imperial capital Tenoxtitlan—now Mexico City—in 1519, as Spanish conquistadors are welcomed by the emperor Moctezuma. The fates of the conquest and of the empire were far from certain during the months that the conquistadors spent in the capital. Yet the only records of the period come from Spanish voices, writing after the event to justify their actions and shore up their improbable triumph. Not a single Indigenous account of those months has survived.

Enrigue’s narrative is a riot of dreams, anachronisms, and mushroom-, cactus- and tomato-induced hallucinations. Late in the day, the emperor Moctezuma—already zonked after a visit from the chamber shaman (his sister insists he should visit the feelings shaman for therapy, rather than the chamber shaman for shrooms)—visits the shrine of the god of war. Peering into a bowl of blood, Moctezuma hears “Monolith” by T. Rex playing, and has a vision of the author Enrigue writing You Dreamed of Empires from Long Island.

Set over three centuries after Enrigue’s narrative, Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera and translated by Lisa Dillman takes place in New Orleans from 1853 to 1855: the interval that Benito Juárez spent exiled in the city. Although he left a prolific written record of his life, “Juárez says not a word about his nearly eighteen months in New Orleans, not a single one.” And yet the capable, dedicated man exiled from Mexico was not the same as the hero and visionary reformer who returned. Some transformation occurred in those silent months, setting Juárez on the path that would see him celebrated by AMLO and Herrera alike.

Herrera immerses Juárez and the reader deep within the sounds, smells, sense of New Orleans. The touches of the surreal that lace his novel are pulled, for the most part, from newspapers and other records of the time. An adopted native of New Orleans, Herrera also writes from his own experience, the feel of the quaggy terrain shifting beneath his feet.

Taken together, these two novels grapple with the complicated legacy of AMLO and his simplified approach to history. The novels satirize those who would position themselves as the main characters of history, while at times reverting back to narratives of great men and their deeds.

As he settles into exile in Season of the Swamp, Benito Juárez learns that New Orleans offers endless variations on painful, arbitrary deaths. A crowd watches on as a man falls between two boats and is disemboweled. When the season changes, yellow fever brings further ways to die in agony.

Arbitrary violence lurks in New Orleans, but highly organized violence also stalks the city. Juárez’s very first impression, as he arrives in the port, is of “the badges” beating a man and then dragging him away. The police in the city, “differentiated only by their badges,” appear indolent and indifferent, until they catch the faintest hint of disruption to this slave port’s strict racial hierarchy, and spring into ruthless action.

You Dreamed of Empires captures a moment of jeopardy in the confrontation between rival empires. The conquistadors are surrounded by thousands of eagle warriors in Tenoxtitlan, but in turn, the capital is surrounded by the encamped armies of the conquistadors’ allies. For the novel’s characters, however, the more immediate threat comes from those closest to them.

Moctezuma, despite seemingly losing his appetite to rule, still inspires terror from within his despond. He commands an orderly but utterly implacable violence: “Whose daughter are you? asked Moctezuma. Your brother Centli’s. … Moctezuma smiled at her and stroked her cheek. Run and find another Little Cousin to wait on me, he said, and you go to the guards, tell them you are to be executed in private.”

The conquistadors arrived in Tenoxtitlan with a “double filter” of two translators: Gerónimo de Aguilar and Malinalli. Conquistadors spoke in Spanish, then Aguilar translated this to Maya, then Malinalli translated this into Nahuatl for the Tenochca court.

Malinalli was not a native of this court; she came from the distant Gulf coast. Her Nahuatl was archaic, so she appeared as “an apparition, an emissary from the past.” Throughout Enrigue’s novel, translation is a source of confusion, but also power. Although Malinalli came to Cortés as a slave and spoil of war, her language is so portentous that she is more famous within Tenoxtitlan than the conquistadors.

Throughout You Dreamed of Empires, Enrigue has fun translating Spanish words for Nahuatl-speaking tongues. The Castilian conquistadors are rendered collectively as the “Caxtilteca.” Moctezuma proves a total horse guy, fascinated by caballos, which he pronounces as “cahuayos.” When Cortés proselytizes to Moctezuma, the emperor understands the Catholic god to be named “Xeetzus.” The direction of transcription makes clear that the Tenochca are rapidly picking up words from their visitors, while the Caxtilteca do not learn a word.

Except, that is, for Jazmín Caldera, the only major fictional figure in Enrigue’s novel. While Moctezuma’s court falls silent for the afternoon nap, Caldera badgers the translator Aguilar into teaching him how to dress in the fine local threads. Caldera disguises himself and slips out into the city, determined to see the wonders of Tenoxtitlan before Moctezuma has the Castilians sacrificed.

Back in Season of the Swamp, Benito Juárez is a better student than Caldera. Even though Juárez doesn’t fit neatly within the rigid racial hierarchy of the city, he finds fluency and belonging with the canaille, the unruly masses of the city. Down among the canaille—but only there—language shifts and blends. Juárez is captivated by the sound of creole: “What were they saying? What were they saying it in? He knew how to read French. … But what he was hearing now was not French. It sounded like French, but kind of bettered somehow.”

New Orleans was not Juárez’s first experience with new cities and languages. Part of his national mythos in Mexico is that Juárez grew up in a pueblo of Oaxaca, speaking the local language Didza. As he immerses himself in the canaille, his mother tongue comes back to him, slipping in among the other languages.

But not all tongues come to Juárez—or any migrant—so easily. On his first day in the port, he snatches only approximations of English dialogue: “The bureaucrat supposedly helping him had asked a question or two: Where are you from? Why have you come? What do you do? What is your name? Not all of them: one or two.”

The refrain—“one or two”—repeats throughout Juárez’s early explorations of New Orleans. Indeed, such an uncertain list captures the experience of anyone crossing any border, and suddenly having to account for themselves in a different tongue.

While Juárez finds belonging in the canaille, AMLO’s government and party offer only exclusion.

AMLO did not speak of Juárez’s exile, of his role model’s experience of crossing borders or learning to speak in new ways. This would not fit AMLO’s fixed view of history, or his government’s border control policies.

In 2019, AMLO inaugurated one of his signature projects: a new security force, the Guardia Nacional. Flanked by his Secretary of National Defense and Secretary of the Navy, AMLO inspected the assembled ranks of men and women kitted out in the characteristic white and gray of the new force. The Guardia was nominally a civilian force, but everything from the officials present to the weapons presented communicated that this was a military force, in a country that already used the military in a range of civilian functions.

Since its creation, the Guardia has been a corps in search of a mission. Guardia cruisers monitor highways and deploy traffic cones when trucks break down. Guardspeople inspect IDs and reservations in controlled hotel zones, monitor painstaking archaeological work at remote Maya sites.

The Guardia gained its most consistent mission thanks to Donald Trump. When the first Trump government threatened Mexico with tariffs if it didn’t stem the flow of unauthorized migration, AMLO deployed the Guardia to stop migrants entering Mexico at the southern border and leaving Mexico at the northern border. His government claimed that the Guardia “rescued” hundreds of Central American migrants in Mexico. But in truth, the government had simply deployed the badges to control those exiled from their home countries.

This year, when Trump returned to office and threatened Mexico with fresh tariffs, AMLO’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, responded by deploying the Guardia to police migration and target fentanyl production. The Guardia gained yet another mission when it started receiving deportees from the United States—an undertaking even less suited to a militarized security force. While Juárez finds belonging in the canaille, AMLO’s government and party offer only exclusion.

From their exile in New Orleans, Benito Juárez and his companions sip coffee and hatch plans to change the course of Mexican history. One of the companions calls for “a Meeting with a capital M, one in which all would become solemn and historical.” Herrera skewers this outlook, these men who make history some rarefied thing, and then claim to be the only serious characters in the narrative. Juárez, however, is always on the right side of the satire; Herrera portrays him as unfailingly humble, immune to the temptations of power. When another companion points out that they are, in fact, fringe players—and that the political action is taking place elsewhere—he is dismissed: “That fact wasn’t a very Historical one.”

This same solemn, self-serving approach to History characterizes López Obrador’s presidency, as the anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz shows in his 2024 book Sovereignty and Extortion:

López Obrador’s obsession with inscribing his name in the great hall of Mexican Patriotic History had as a natural consequence an almost irrepressible attraction for surrounding himself with people with last names imbued with the aura of history. … López Obrador’s cabinet and his congress are speckled with descendants of historic personages. However, the president did all this not to guarantee the legitimacy of his governing institutions, but rather to endow his personal image with the gravitas of History (with a capital H).

What does such “capital H” history look like? AMLO returned to the topic of Juárez’s legacy regularly throughout his presidency. He saw Juárez’s liberal reform in the 1850s and 1860s—which formalized the separation of church and state, among other things—as the second great transformation of Mexican history. AMLO saw his own presidency as the Fourth Transformation, which he and his party branded as the “4T.” The idea of a Fourth Transformation is very literally a history rendered in capital letters. It emphasizes a linear view of history, and ends up celebrating who is doing the transforming, rather than who or what the transformation will be good for.

Enrigue takes his satire of solemn History further, twisting it into fantasy. But in doing so, he invites the Personages back in; this is once again a history of great and powerful men. You Dreamed of Empires is organized around the briefest of intervals: one long afternoon divided into sections before, during, and after Moctezuma’s nap. This is an imperial nap; Tenoxtitlan falls silent during Moctezuma’s lie-down. But Enrigue adds one final section which occurs later the same evening, after Moctezuma and Cortés take cactus-of-tongues and trip absolute balls. The cactus breaks down translation barriers, allowing the strongmen to communicate directly by speaking Greek. This additional section takes us beyond the brief historical interval and into something new.

Cortés wakes up from his trip to find that he has dreamed the conquest of Mexico. The new history into which he awakes is one in which signs of Tenoxtitlan’s decadence and decline are, in fact, clues to a hidden revenge plot. Moctezuma has been pulling the strings all along, and there was never a threat from Spain. Moctezuma even gets his cahuayos. This is a deftly executed twist, giving the reader the unexpected gratification of a revenge fantasy in place of historical tragedy.

Moctezuma the master strategist is, however, a less compelling character than Moctezuma the fading, endlessly frustrating monarch from the previous sections. The first three sections depict the impending oblivion of the Tenochca as a contest between two violent and self-absorbed rulers: Important Personages driving History into catastrophe. The final section of the novel turns the catastrophe into a dream, but vindicates one of these Personages. Rather than an ambivalent struggle between two very different despots, this final act delivers up a hero and a villain. It was the Tenochca all along; one empire redeemed at the expense of another.

They make history contingent, a mess of disruptions and intervals, and satirize history seen only as major episodes: a straight line from Conquest to Fourth Transformation.

Despite his popularity, despite his self-assurance that he was leading Mexico into a new phase of history, AMLO retired after his single constitutionally bound sexenio. In this, he ignored the example of Juárez, who faced growing dissent, but kept a firm grip on the presidency until he died in office.

Against any conception of history as Important Personages, as great men wielding power and shaping destiny, Herrera and Enrigue offer outsiders and unruly rabble, language that shifts like uncertain ground. They make history contingent, a mess of disruptions and intervals, and satirize history seen only as major episodes: a straight line from Conquest to Fourth Transformation.

Enrigue has spoken about laughing at the powerful as a form of resistance; Enrigue and Herrera both satirize men determined to make themselves the main characters of History. Herrera brings Juárez with him, laughing at the aspiring great men in exile in New Orleans. But Enrigue’s satire ultimately picks a side, laughing at one strongman and with another. This is a dream in which one can simply pick the right strongman.

The election of AMLO fit this dream. He claimed to speak on behalf of Mexico’s canaille, and in selling this dream, he built a winning party machine. The Mexican state is now primed to call in the badges on any unruly voices or unwelcome exiles. Unlike Herrera and Enrigue—and unlike Juárez in Season of the Swamp—AMLO showed little curiosity or sympathy for any broader canaille beyond a narrow account of his own people.

The risk, in trying to translate AMLO’s legacy, is that it ends up simplified and hardened, defaulting back toward slogans like the 4T. Understanding AMLO’s power needs to allow for the many different, ambivalent accounts of him. Perhaps not all of them, but definitely more than one or two. 

Featured image: View of the tomb of Benito Juarez, Mexico City, ca. 1905-1910 / California Historical Society Collection