Memories from Lecumberri Prison (Prison Diary Excerpts, 1969-1971) translated by Amy T. Pass
Excerpts from the prison diaries of José Revueltas, the Mexican author and dissident, imprisoned in the notorious Black Palace of Lecumberri prison after the revolts of 1968 in Mexico City. With photographs and an introduction by Matt Gleeson. FREE PDF
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José Revueltas (1914-1976) loomed large in Mexico’s 20th-century cultural landscape as an author and a left-wing militant. A member of the Mexican Communist Party by the age of 16, he was sent to the prison colony on the Islas Marías twice for his activism in the 1930s. His first three novels, Los muros de agua (1941), El luto humano (1943), and Los dias terrenales (1949), arose from his experiences as a communist organizer and an inmate, but he withdrew the latter from circulation after it was excoriated by his political comrades.
Revueltas was expelled from the Mexican Communist Party
in 1943, and again definitively in 1960; his book Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza (1962) is a harsh critique of the party. But he remained active on the left, co-founding the Liga Leninista Espartaco (from which he was also later expelled) and teaching film classes in the early 1960s in Cuba. I n 1968 h e became involved with Mexico’s student movement a n d w a s incarcerated in Lecumberri Prison, where he wrote his celebrated short novel El apando (1969). Revueltas died in 1976, leaving behind him a challenging and highly original body of work.
Amy T. Pass is a Mexican-American public defender in New York City with a background in Spanish-English translation and interpretation.
Matt Gleeson is the translator of Earthly Days by José Revueltas (Archive 48, 2020), the co-translator (with Audrey Harris) of The Houseguest and Other Stories by Amparo Dávila (New Directions, 2018), and the author of Las consustanciaciones (Cuatro Triángulos, 2022). He is based in Mexico.
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