“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