Heavens on Earth

Carmen Boullosa

4 ideas

1. Three nested readers of one manuscript

   In the sixteenth century, Hernando de Rivas, an Indigenous Latinist trained at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, writes a Latin chronicle of the college as colonial authorities abandon its project. In twentieth-century Mexico City, Estela translates that manuscript into Spanish. In the future colony L'Atlàntide, Lear, one of the last in her community still clinging to words, reads Estela's translation in secret, so each narrator survives only by being read by the next.

2. Abolishing language and memory abolishes personhood

   L'Atlàntide seeks peace by stripping away language and memory, which it treats as the sources of violence and grief. As its members give up words, they lose the ability to think, remember, and be distinct selves, so the perfect society turns into a bodily, animal existence. The utopia rots because what it removes as a flaw is what made its members human.

3. Utopias fail by repeating erasure

   The Tlatelolco college, which set out to make Indigenous nobles into Latin scholars, and L'Atlàntide, which sets out to make humanity innocent, are both engineered ideal communities. Each is undone by the same move: overwriting what people already are, whether native tongue, history, or speech, in favor of a planned purity. Read this way, any project to perfect people should be judged by what it requires them to forget.

4. Translation as a refuge against oblivion

   Each narrator translates or reads a dead or dying language in order to find a home that their own time denies them. Hernando writes in Latin because Nahua scholarship is being shut down, Estela escapes a decaying Mexico City into a sixteenth-century text, and Lear keeps language alive by reading when her society has abandoned it. Translation works as a relay of memory across ruptures, and a text lives only as long as someone keeps carrying it forward.

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