José Agustín Ramírez (Guadalajara, Jalisco, 1944) died this Tuesday at the age of 79 as a result of a long illness due to various health problems, one of his sons, Andrés Rodríguez, confirmed to the newspaper La Jornada. The writer's death occurred at his home in Cuautla, Morelos state, about 80 kilometers from Mexico City, where he moved with his family more than 40 years ago and where he remained in bed surrounded by his loved ones. His literature – which he began publishing at the age of 16 – marked a turning point in Mexico, breaking with the literary canon of the time and exploding with force thanks to the colloquial, traditional and loose language that gave identity and place to thousands of people young Mexicans who for the first time saw in national literature a space in which they felt represented. His work, converging with the popular culture of the time and underscored by rock and the authors who most influenced him, was classified as part of what he himself later tried to define as Mexican counterculture.
One of Mexico's most representative authors has died. One of the last greats of national literature of the 20th century, whose books can be found in almost all bookstores of all kinds in the country. José Agustín embodied in his life and work the naturalness and rebellion of what it meant to be young in the country's sixties and seventies. At a time when the traditional values inherited from the Mexican Revolution still permeated the sky of national morality, he brought to life characters who questioned their place in the world, and did so with the same words they used to young people The day faced a society and a world that was changing rapidly. His work was without a doubt one of the best representations of what is now known as a young adult novel, written by and for the young people of his time, told in its forms and nuances and with enough sincerity and naturalness to transcend. “There was an open conflict in the family environment because the family environment was very repressive and authoritarian,” said the author of a documentary about his life on Canal Once.
Born in Jalisco in 1944, the writer never recognized himself as Jalisco. Shortly after his birth, he and his family moved to the state of Guerrero and settled in Acapulco. “I’m proudly from Guerrero and proudly from Acapulco,” he said. Most of his readers identified with the way he portrayed the country at a time when any hint of difference was branded as rebellion and depravity – like the legendary local newspaper headline about the so-called Mexican Woodstock, the Avándaro, shows rock festival 1971: Hell in Avándaro: framing, marijuana, sexual degeneration, dirt, hair, blood, death. – Some others applauded that at last an author dared to tell with cynical and adventurous naturalness the things that happened to everyone at once. At a certain age, the world constantly promises pleasure and adventure. Endless possibilities. Others condemned him, calling his literature unsuitable for the academy, the formality and seriousness of that old idea of what it meant to be a writer. A serious writer, “a good writer.”
Under the guidance of the Jalisco-born writer and editor Juan José Arreola, he published the novel La tumba (1964), which he finished writing at the age of 16 – and which was published a few years later – and which marked the beginning of an extensive novel List of titles such as “Inventing What I Dream” (1968), “It's Getting Late” (1973), “The King Approaches His Temple” (1977), “Deserted Cities” (1982), “Near the Fire” (1987) , Two Hours of Sunshine (1994) , Life with My Widow (2004), among many others. He also wrote plays, essays, stories, screenplays, journalistic works and also wrote his autobiography entitled Prison Rock: “This is the memory of a man who stands up and is ready in the middle of a world where there was water everywhere “For oneself is one of his considerations,” says the description of the work from the publisher Penguin Random House.
“It was the joy of literature, the ingenuity, the new way of writing, it opened a door, new air came in,” described the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska in a 2014 interview about Agustín, the author who was inspired by the… The Mexican writer Margo Glantz led a literary movement that she called La Onda. The author said: “I am not responsible for this term, Margo Glantz was the one who put it that way.” It is a trivialization of what the idea of this literature was. If the rules didn’t respond to what they wanted, then they were of no use,” he says in an interview for Channel 22 with journalist and presenter Silvia Lemus. Agustín refused to belong to a “literary current” that tried to summarize the concerns that authors like him and the Mexicans René Avilés Fabila, Gustavo Sáinz and Parménides García Saldaña began to express, and that completely abandoned the forms of words, he said . Formalities and the prevailing academic vocabulary of the time.
In 2009, José Agustín had an accident during a book signing at the Teatro de la Ciudad de Puebla. The fall from around two meters caused severe skull and rib fractures and left him in intensive care for more than 20 days. Since then he has remained away from the public until he appeared in public again last April at the presentation of the new edition of his work.
Last Tuesday evening, January 2, one of his sons made public his father's farewell to a “friend, Catholic, Zapatista and liberation theologian”, a priest who administered the last rites to him while he was in his bed in his home in the state Morelos was lying. surrounded by his wife and other children. “My work here ends,” Agustín said, according to his firstborn son. The publication was deleted a few hours later, while confirming that his father, although sensitive, was still alive. With him, one of the last greats of this generation leaves behind victims of rebellion, rock, drugs and that constant mantra that believed in the certainty that the world could be changed and that nothing was impossible.
In a profile of his father in Proceso magazine in 2021, his son Agustín Ramírez Bermúdez said in a tone very similar to what his father wrote: “…he changed the rules of spelling in this country, he freed them from their archaic restrictions. He prevailed over his critics and poisonous opponents, while José Agustín's books enjoy perfect health and authority and continue to be read thanks to the genuine taste of the knowledgeable public and the intrepid and determined appreciation of good-natured readers.
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