Sci & Educ (2014) 23:541–556

DOI 10.1007/s11191-012-9514-0

‘‘Palabras de la ciencia’’: Pedro Castera and Scientific

Writing in Mexico’s Fin de Siècle

Marı́a del Pilar Blanco

Published online: 18 July 2012

 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Abstract This essay explores the career of the understudied writer Pedro Castera (1846–
1906), who is regarded as one of the first practitioners of science fiction in Mexico. A man
of many talents, Castera is one of the most eccentric and eclectic figures in the intellectual
life of fin-de-siècle Mexico City. His career took many turns: While during specific periods
he devoted himself to writing and participating within the liberal, cosmopolitan culture of
Mexico City, he often disappeared from the public eye to devote himself to the devel-
opment of inventions in the mining industry. The essay discusses the different meanings of
‘invention’ within Castera’s oeuvre, namely poetic and scientific innovation. Setting these
two concepts within the domains of literature and scientific writing in the global and local
fin de siècle, the essay investigates how Castera’s journalism and fiction (specifically his
1890 novel Querens) are representative of the wider question of scientific development in
Mexico and Latin America as a whole during the nineteenth century. Furthermore, it
explores the intersections of aesthetics and science during a critical period of modern
intellectual history, in which these two areas of knowledge were gradually defining
themselves as two distinctive cultures.

On the first page of the 30 January 1891 edition of the newspaper El Universal (Mexico
City), the far-right column is devoted to ‘‘El mundo cientı́fico’’ [‘‘The World of Science’’]
(Castera 1891). On this particular day in this recurrent news column, the author, Pedro
Castera (1846–1906), notes his main topics under three headings: ‘‘Velocidad en los trenes
de ferrocarril.—Monumentos.—Los muertos transformados en estatuas’’ (‘‘The velocity of
trains.—Monuments.—The dead transformed into statues’’). The paragraphs on the first
two topics are straightforward enough. Under the first heading, the author notes: ‘‘La Revue
Universelle des inventions nouvelles nos da á conocer las velocidades medias de los trenes
de ferrocarril que varı́a según los paı́ses y á ocasiones según la longitud de las lı́neas
recorridas’’ (‘‘The Revue Universelle des inventions nouvelles notes how the average
speeds of trains varies from country to country, and at times according to the length of the

M. P. Blanco (&)
University College London, London, UK
e-mail: maria.blanco@ucl.ac.uk

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distances traversed’’.) The second topic also conveys an item of interest in a documentary
style. Castera reports on the massive globe structure to be designed by Spanish architect
and engineer Alberto de Palacio for the purposes of the 1893 World’s Columbian Expo-
sition in Chicago: ‘‘El Sr. Palacio al idear su proyecto lo ha de haber hecho influenciado
por el recuerdo de que en alguna vez la madre España fué la reina y la señora del antiguo
mundo’’ (‘‘Mr. Palacio must have been influenced by the memory that Spain was once the
queen mother of the old world while thinking up his project’’), he notes, reminding the
reader of the American indebtedness to Spain, despite the Fair’s US location. Both of these
news items, as noted in the line quoted above, can be traced back to other publications:
while the first was taken from the aforementioned Revue, the second could have been
adapted from a variety of sources like La ilustración española y americana, which reported
on Palacio’s grandiose plans.
The third item, however, stands apart from the other two. Not only is the topic entic-
ingly obscure, it also appears to be the author’s own scientific musing and proposed
invention, given that no reference to other publication, national or international, is cited.
Castera begins:
Por más lúgubres que algunas ideas sean la ciencia ó la industria las transforman á ocasiones de tal
modo que perdiendo su aspecto fúnebre se nos aparecen risueñas, luminosas, artı́sticas y como si
hubiesen variado en su esencia y en su modo de ser. Esto es lo que pasa con con la galvanización de
los cadáveres.
[No matter how gloomy some ideas can be, science or industry transforms them in such a way that
their funereal appearance becomes cheerful, luminous, and artistic, as if their essence and personality
had changed. This is what happens when corpses are galvanized.]
This introduction to the idea of electrifying our dear dead and turn them into statues is
striking in its remarkable optimism about what science can do for the unsuspecting subject
reading the pages of this newspaper: according to the author, it can turn the most
heartbreaking facts of life into happy occasions for experimentation. The rest of the
segment on the preservation of the dead is no less eye opening, and deserves to be
reproduced here:
Efectivamente, conservar en una biblioteca, por ejemplo, los restos de las personas que nos han sido
amadas y dignas, por lo mismo, de nuestras afecciones y respetuosos recuerdos, conservarlas
transformadas en magnı́ficos bronces ó en riquı́simas estátuas de los metales más preciosos y más
caros, tales como la plata y el oro, es una idea que, además de la originalidad, se nos presenta
ataviada con todas las bellezas que puede asumir el arte.
[For example, to preserve in a library the remains of our beloved dead (who, for this reason, deserve
our affection and respectful memory) and to keep them transformed into magnificent statues made of
bronze or the most precious metals, such as silver and gold, is an idea that, besides being original, is
covered with all the beauties that art can offer.]
After relaying this quotidian fantasy of metallic relics in our home libraries, the author
explains how to go about this in detail:
Un cadáver puede hoy y por el procedimiento que explico brevemente á seguida trasformarse en
elegantı́sima estátua metálica.
Inmediatamente que la persona muere se la limpia cuidadosamente y se la aplica sobre el cutis una
solución de nitrato de plata, que sirve como la plombagina que se aplica á las sustancias no metálicas
que van á galvanizarse, y á seguida se coloca en su caja para que reciba un baño de cianuro de cobre
usando la respectiva corriente eléctrica. El cadáver se galvaniza y se cubre una capa metálica cuyo
grueso depende de la duración del baño galvanoplástico y de su riqueza de cobre. Es ahı́ el cadáver
trasformado en estatua metálica.
[At present, a corpse can be transformed into a very elegant metallic statue thanks to the procedure
that I explain forthwith.

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As soon as a person dies, one cleans the body carefully and applies silver nitrate over the skin. This
serves as the plumbago [graphite] that one applies to non-metallic substances that are galvanized.
Immediately, one places the body in a copper cyanide bath, whilst using the appropriate electrical
current. The corpse is then galvanized and covered in a metallic layer whose thickness depends on
the duration of the galvano-plastic bath and on the amount of copper. And this is how the body
becomes a statue.]
Following these instructions, Castera moves on to relay how best to care for a subject’s
uncanniest of statues:
Para evitar que los gases que se forman por la descomposición de la materia hagan estallar la estatua
se abren en la cubierta metálica pequeños agujeros que facilitan su salida…
[In order to prevent the gases that develop from the decomposition of matter from causing the statue
to burst, one should puncture the metallic casing to allow for their expulsion…]
Decaying bio-matter thus need not be a hindrance in this project of preservation, according
to him, if one takes advantage of all the scientific resources available. Castera even
provides examples of more expensive alternatives, through which the owner of the
‘‘statue’’ may first embalm the cadaver, and subsequently enjoy seeing their dear deceased
covered in a variety of precious metals:
Ocioso es agregar que sobre la cubierta de cobre puede aplicarse el baño galvanoplástico de cianuro
de plata ó el de cianuro de oro y obtener entonces estátuas metálicas de uno de [sic] ambos metales.
[It is pointless to add that on top of the copper shell one can apply silver or gold cyanide galvano-
plastic coating and thus get metallic statues of one or both of these metals.]
Castera’s language in this passage is especially curious. When he says it is ‘‘pointless’’
(‘‘ocioso’’) to even think about the options available to the consumer of this bewildering
product, he appears to be assuming that the reader is fully on his wavelength and, like him,
considering a diverse market in which the statues can represent different levels of wealth
and luxury. The proposal of the galvanization of the dead, as strange as it may sound,
responds to the patterns of consumption of an educated bourgeoisie—of individuals who
own home libraries in which they can contemplate these unique conjugations of art,
science and a modern approach to mourning.
As Castera concludes this short and unique excursion into scientific innovation, he
explains how science can be applied to ‘‘productos de la muerte’’ (‘‘death’s products’’) in
order to emerge with what he considers to be ‘‘verdaderas joyas artı́sticas’’ (‘‘true artistic
gems’’). Science, in other words, can lead to an aesthetic appreciation of life, and com-
munes with art even when they are joined in what to others may seem the uncomfortable
production of a long-lasting afterlife. By now, the reader may perhaps be wondering how
this idea ever made it to print, and especially in the front page of a respectable Mexico City
newspaper. Is this some kind of satire (the kind that was often found on the pages of Punch
magazine in Victorian Britain),1 or perhaps a disturbing inception of a ‘‘modest’’ proposal,
à la Swift, on how one could cope with death in the age of growing scientific confidence?
Is this author a tragic advocate of the Porfiriato (Porfirio Dı́az’s regime, which lasted from
1876 to 1910), and this proposition a morbid symptom of this administration’s ideas of
gilded monumental beauty? In his variable contributions to science and technology

1
Richard Noakes has noted that, ‘‘[o]ne of Punch’s most revealing approaches to the relentless number of
new contraptions was the seemingly serious article announcing a bogus invention… Just as Punch mocked
the reductionist tendency of scientific ‘progress’ by devising its own sciences of subjects that were beyond
such analysis, so these articles poked fun at the bewildering pace of technological ‘progress’ by puffing its
own inventions for performing tasks that were clearly beyond technological solution.’’ Noakes, ‘‘Repre-
senting ‘A Century of Inventions’: Nineteenth-Century Technology and Victorian Punch,’’ 158.

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columns throughout the late 1880s and the early 1890s such as the one discussed above,
Castera normally kept to the task at hand, merely translating and/or summarizing items of
interest in newspapers and magazines from France, England and the United States. It was
only in earlier, lengthier pieces, such as those he wrote for literary supplements of
newspapers like El Federalista in the late 1870s and early 1880s, where readers may have
been able to see Castera’s focus on science matters take flight into more creative discursive
territories. In March 1877, for example, Castera began a series of articles entitled ‘‘Una
palabra de la ciencia’’ (‘‘A Word of/about Science’’), in which he meditated on the
development of human understanding of notions such as light, heat and electricity. In his
article entitled ‘‘La Electricidad’’ (‘‘Electricity’’), which ran in separate installments,
Castera explores different electrical inventions such as Morse’s telegraph. He eulogizes the
North American inventor for discovering how to use science to convey words and thoughts
across space:
… cruzar los mares en el fondo del abismo, sujetar y dominar el mundo, no por la razon de los reyes,
por la fuerza brutal y bárbara, sino por la fuerza inmensa de la vida, del pensamiento y de la idea,
hacer de la humanidad una familia, de la luz una palabra… (Castera 1877)
[… to traverse the depths of oceans, to hold and rule the world, not through the wills of kings, or by
brutal and barbaric force, but through the immense force of life, of thoughts and ideas, to turn
humanity into one family, light into word…]
In these essays, which resemble the encyclopedic accounts of scientific discoveries that
could be found in international magazines and newspapers from this period, Castera
nevertheless escapes the rigors of summarization through the insertion of eloquent phrases
and earnest exclamations. He is fascinated by the glory of invention, and goes to great
lengths to describe how discovery and ingenuity become transcendental events in world
history. The entry from El Universal in 1891 that opens this essay appears to be an
extension of this fascination, albeit within the more regimented format of a column in
which the author was commissioned to write brief science notes, without straying into
tangents or extended reflections. The incorporation of his own ideas into this structure of
reportage reveals a rather unique anxiety to enter the folds of a community of invention
and inventiveness, and to propose new objects and phenomena, even if only at the level of
narrative.
While considering the historical moment in which Castera is writing (the days of Pax
porfiriana), I propose to read this strange entry of science fiction into the realm of
‘‘straight’’ reportage through several lenses that I hope will illustrate the cultural and
historical context that houses Castera’s contribution to journalism and fiction, specifically
in the final decades of the nineteenth century. As I will discuss below, Castera’s position as
one of the forgotten literary giants of the Mexican fin de siglo sparks our interest in him as
someone who moved in and out of circles populated by those other figures whose political,
cultural, and literary influence are still discussed and commemorated to this day—among
them Justo Sierra and Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera. Given his particular trajectory (explained
in further detail below), Castera would not go on to become either a cientı́fico—one of the
positivist political thinkers who, like Sierra, would influence the government’s different
approaches to national progress in Porfirian Mexico—or one of the famed literary mod-
ernistas (like Gutiérrez Nájera, aka ‘‘El Duque Job’’). However, when we look at his
extensive list of articles in publications that range from newspapers like El Universal and
La República to spiritualist magazines, we see him participating in a number of debates
that were greatly important to intellectuals in liberal Mexico at the time—among them the
questioning of positivism and materialism as valid philosophies for the development of a

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post-war liberal society. Castera’s kaleidoscopic career as a republican soldier, miner,

scientific enthusiast, spiritualist medium, newspaper editor, novelist, and poet allows us to
position him within a variety discursive networks that make up Mexican fin de siglo
society. Indeed, it is important for us to understand these different (and often conflated)
spiritual tendencies, as well as philosophical and political positions, in terms of what—in
the contemporaneous context of British intellectual culture—Roger Luckhurst has
described as a ‘‘wider episteme,’’ and not simply as a hopelessly confused and contra-
dictory set of interests (Luckhurst 2004: 125). And while it is correct to describe Castera’s
literary trajectory as an example of epochal esotericism, it is important to understand this
eclectic mix in terms of the more expansive material conditions of the period, and of the
country’s intellectual makeup at the time (the reigning philosophies that were being
championed in relation to educational reform, individual professionalization, and the
continued development of a diversified print culture). What I hope to show, through the
analysis of Castera’s journalism and his late novel, Querens (1890), is how we can come to
understand a pivotal period in the epistemological definition of the fields of science and art
in Mexico through an almost forgotten figure—one who, in his own riotously inventive
way, contributed to the formation of a public opinion on the applicability of science to art,
and not to mention society at large. In this essay, I locate Castera deeply within his
historical context, the period’s political and ideological temperament, as well as the
evolving conception of invention as scientific and aesthetic practice. Taking the word from
Clifford Geertz’s interpretation of culture, I want to read Castera as being in the
‘‘thick(ness)’’ of the time in which his name was attached to reportage and fiction on the
pages of a myriad publications, such as El Universal, El Federalista, La República and so
many others.
Without a doubt, Pedro Castera was one among many journalists reporting on
advancements in science, engineering, and other fields in Mexico. In the credits for El
Federalista from April 1877, for example, we see Francisco Dı́az Covarrubias, Alfonso
Herrera, and Gumesindo Mendoza are in charge of reporting on ‘‘ciencias aplicadas’’
(‘‘applied sciences’’). However, Castera represents a fascinating case study of how a writer
with links to the ‘‘two cultures’’ (as C.P. Snow would coin them in the twentieth century)
negotiates between the two in the fields of scientific reportage as in fiction. Throughout his
scientific essays, Castera also incorporates debates that were to be found on the pages of
science magazines throughout the Western world, such as questions about the compati-
bility of metaphysics and materialism. In addition, his science journalism contains inter-
esting discussions about the nature of authority, and especially the copyright of ideas: we
find him questioning whether scientific creation is a discursive or a technical feat, and we
see him experimenting with the collocation of scientific language alongside literary aes-
thetics. My analysis of Castera centers primarily on a literary and historical appreciation of
his work, and my research is informed by the growing amount of work devoted to the
intersections of literature and science. Whereas this field of research has largely focused on
European and North American examples, Castera offers a pathway into the more general
context of popular science writing in Mexico. To recuperate Castera from his current
obscurity allows us to reflect on a dynamic period in the history of the intersections of
science and literature in this country. It also allows us to gauge the extent to which the idea
of invention in both literature and science converse with one another on the written page.
In the sections that follow, I will explore the significance of innovation and authority in
Castera’s tumultuous career, and how they in turn reflect the scientific reality of Mexico in
the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. In connection to

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this, I explore the dialectic play between literary and scientific invention in Castera’s
journalism and in his novel, Querens, considered Mexico’s first foray into science fiction.

1 Forms of Scientific and Literary Invention

The column cited at the beginning of this essay is initially interesting to us because of the
career trajectory of its author during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. It
represents one of the very last pieces of journalism written by Castera, a writer about
whom historian Antonio Saborit notes, ‘‘… no fue el mayor aunque sı́ uno de los ex-
céntricos menos conocidos del siglo XIX’’ (‘‘he was not the biggest but definitely one of
the least well-known eccentrics of the fin de siècle’’) (Saborit 2004: 16). Until 1891,
Castera had garnered praise from his contemporaries for his poetry and fiction work,
including the romantic novel Carmen (1882)—Mexico’s answer to Colombian Jorge
Isaacs’s successful tragic novel Marı́a (1867)—and Minas y mineros (also in 1882), the
first-ever collection of short stories devoted to the depiction of mining life in the country.
To add to this, he was the head editor of La República for a brief period that same year.
However, Castera practically disappeared from the pages of newspapers and magazines
between 1883 and 1889. It was widely reported that in 1883 he had been interned in San
Hipólito psychiatric hospital, after having ‘‘lost’’ his power of reason. His unfortunate state
while at that institution was reported widely in local papers and foreign language publi-
cations such as The Two Republics and Le Trait d’Union (both published in Mexico City),
in articles from November 1883 that pleaded with members of the press to join the plight of
saving this ‘‘afflicted author’’ (as he is called in the title of the article that appeared in The
Two Republics on 2 November 1883). Although by 1884 he had come out of the asylum, it
was not until the latter part of 1889 that his name emerged again on the pages of El
Universal, specifically in the columns titled ‘‘Notas diversas,’’ which were at times
alternatively titled ‘‘El mundo cientı́fico.’’ Beginning in January of the following year, El
Universal started publishing Castera’s last novel, Querens, in a serial, or folletı́n, sold with
the newspaper. The story, a techno-spiritualist fantasy in which an erudite man is able to
communicate his thoughts to a vacuous woman telepathically through an exchange of
‘‘magnetic fluid’’ is one of, if not the first and strangest examples of Mexican science
fiction. Castera continued publishing in El Universal until April 1891, and then dropped off
the literary map for good until his death in 1906.2
In 1875, when Castera was about to publish Ensueños, a collection of poems that was
also his début book, he provided an advance copy to Cuban author and political figure José
Martı́, who was then exiled and working in Mexico City. In the latter’s review, titled
‘‘Versos de Pedro Castera’’ and which appeared in Revista Universal on 29 August of that
year, Martı́ declared: ‘‘Porque este hombre ha querido ser poeta, como ha querido serlo
todo, para consagrarse en esta forma nueva á un afecto que lo arrancó de una vida de
sombras, y lo arrojó de lleno y vigorosamente á una vida de luz’’ (‘‘This man wanted to be
a poet as he has wanted to be everything else, so that he could give this new form a feeling
that would tear him from a life of shadows and throw him completely and vigorously into a

2
In El monitor republicano (26 April 1891) the following is reported: ‘‘D. PEDRO CASTERA.—Este
conocido escritor se ha separado de la redaccion del Universal, en la que tenı́a á su cargo la sección
cientı́fica. El Sr. Castera va á consagrarse á sus negocios particulares’’ [‘‘Pedro Castera: This well-known
writer has left El Universal, where he was in charge of the scientific column. Mr. Castera will devote himself
to his particular affairs’’] (3).

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life of light’’) (Martı́ 1875: 1–2). This statement is quite interesting for several reasons, the
first being the question of how the two men met. Both were jobbing journalists with
acquaintances in common (among them Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera). Both were also united
by an interest in spiritualism: Castera was the medium for a Mexico City spiritualist circle
that bore the name of the faith’s founding father, Allan Kardec. For his part, Martı́ par-
ticipated in the series of public debates about spiritualism at the Liceo Hidalgo in April
1875, recorded on the pages of the long-running La Ilustración Espı́rita, one of two
periodicals in Mexico City devoted to all matters related to this doctrine.3 Many of Cas-
tera’s ‘‘comunicaciones’’ with spirits, avowedly done through automatic writing, are
published in the pages of this journal throughout the 1870s. Martı́’s references to ‘‘shad-
ows’’ and ‘‘light’’ in the lines from his review of Ensueños may well be allusions to the
spiritualist movement’s conscious communion with scientific enlightenment: ‘‘La ciencia
dá la luz, la luz la creencia, esta la religion’’ [‘‘Science gives us light, light gives us belief,
and belief gives us religion’’], wrote Castera in one of his séance articles, published in La
Ilustración (Castera 1872: 66).
But there is something else that is quite interesting about Martı́’s wording in these lines.
The reference to Castera’s desire to become a poet ‘‘as he has wanted to be everything
else’’ suggests that Martı́ is subtly branding Castera as a dilettante or, conversely,
describing a young aspiring polymath. However, it is fair to say that in this instance he is
giving us quite an accurate sketch of the artist. Castera had studied mineralogy and
chemistry in the early 1860s and around 1868 obtained a patent for an invention that
allowed for the extraction of nitrogen dioxide from precious metals and another for the
fabrication of alcohol using the (Charles) Derosne distillation method (Schneider 1987: 9).
Indeed, his early literary career seems to have been periodically interrupted by his return to
the pursuit of treasure and scientific invention.4 In 1879, two years after having founded
the Cı́rculo Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer salon with Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Agustı́n Cuenca
and others, he obtained a license to extract and process metals in Taxco.5 During the final
15 years of his life and after he stopped publishing articles in newspapers, Castera’s name
appeared in print almost exclusively in news briefs announcing his new patents, or his legal
battles owing to avowed obstruction of his rights as patent owner for his methods of

3
The 1 May 1875 edition of La ilustración espı́rita reports: ‘‘El debate versó especialmente sobre el punto
esencial: la existencia del Espı́ritu, y la manera con que vive en el sér humano. Hicieron uso de la palabra los
Sres. Pimentel, Baz, Cordero, miembro de la Sociedad Espı́rita, Villaseñor, Sierra Santiago, y nuestro
compañero Martı́, que por primera vez se presentaba al ‘Liceo’ y que obtuvo un triunfo envidiable’’ (148).
Martı́’s interests in the topic may have led to the mocking news brief written in La colonia española (an
Iberian newspaper in Mexico City), which reported: ‘‘Este apreciable escritor dice en La Revista que la
causa de Cuba libre prospera extraordinariamente. Como el Sr. Martı́ mantiene relaciones ı́ntimas con los
espı́ritus, nos merece entero crédito su opinion, porque los espı́ritus lo saben todo.’’ La colonia española
2:95 (14 May 1875), 3.
4
In El Federalista from 29 May 1877, for example, we find the following notice: ‘‘Tenemos una mala
noticia que comunicar a nuestros lectores. Pedro Castera, el inteligente colaborador de nuestra ‘Edición
Literaria’, se aparta por algun tiempo del cultivo de las letras para cosagrarse á sus importantes y útiles
trabajos mineros. Deseamos que este eclipse sea parcial tan solo’’ (3).
5
Schneider, ‘‘Prólogo,’’ 14. The Cı́rculo Bécquer, it is reported in El Federalista (10 May 1877), began
publishing a magazine containing the work of its members. The reporter from the newspaper writes:
‘‘Tenemos á la vista la entrega 1a, notable por la elegancia de la edicion y más que por eso, por la belleza de
las composiciones que contiene, todas escogidas y reveladoras todas de los altos talentos y de la fresca y
potente inspiracion de sus autores’’ (3). This first edition contained such works as ‘‘Escenas de la vida
minera,’’ by Pedro Castera, ‘‘Remember Me,’’ a poem by Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, ‘‘Michelet,’’ by Manuel
de Olaguı́bel, as well as translations of works by Hugo, Heine, and de Musset.

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‘‘beneficio de metales.’’ To illustrate the latter, the following warning appeared on the back
page of El monitor republicano from 11 September 1895:
PREVENCION.
Pongo en conocimiento del público, que además del beneficio de minerales de plata patentado que
estoy estableciendo en algunas negociaciones del paı́s, en sociedad con el Lic. Demetrio Salazar,
tengo tambien en mi poder la patente del sistema de beneficio Krönkhe, ya publicado, y el que
algunos ofrecen establecer, para lo que se requiere mi permiso; á los que perseguiré con todo el rigor
de la ley, llegado el caso de su infraccion á mi conocimiento, exigiendo á las Negociaciones que lo
establezcan los daños y perjuicios á que hubiere lugar.
México, Julio 16 de 1895
PEDRO CASTERA6
[ATTENTION.
I hereby publically announce that, alongside the patent for processing silver that, with Demetrio
Salazar, I am negotiating with the state, I also have in my power the patent for the already published
Krönkhe system, which some wish to employ and must request my permission to do so; I will
prosecute anyone who fails to do this to the fullest extent of the law, and I will request that any
damages and perjuries are repaid.
Mexico City, 16 July 1895
PEDRO CASTERA]
Luis Mario Schneider writes in his biographical notes on the author that ‘‘[d]e ese perı́odo
que media entre 1891 y 1906 nada se sabe de su vida, aunque es de suponer que vivı́a en la
pobreza, enfermo, transferido, es decir, en el olvido’’ (‘‘nothing is known about his life
between 1891 and 1906, but one can suppose that he was destitute, ill, and, in other words,
forgotten’’) (Schneider 1987: 18), but a look at the back pages of newspapers, and
especially at the items related to mining, tells a rather more dynamic and even frantic story
about the writer’s final years. Indeed, what emerges in bits and pieces is Castera’s zealous
pursuit of treasure and recognition as an inventor. The 23 July 1899 issue of The Two
Republics reports, for example, that ‘‘[T]he well known miner Pedro Castera has
denounced a gold mine in the Tlatlaya district, state of Mexico, and has acquired the titles
in due form from the government: he considers it so rich that he has given it the name of
the Mexican Klondike’’ (16). And in El diario del hogar from 27 April 1904, the following
brief advertisement appears:
Arrastres de hierro y acero Patentados.
Muele, repasa y beneficia sucesivamente. No hay persona alguna autorizada para contratarlo más que
el inventor, que es el dueño y es el mismo que suscribe.
México, apartado postal número 854. – Pedro Castera y Cortés. (3)
[Patented iron and steel pulverizers.
For grinding, mixing and processing. No one else is authorized to hire them other than the inventor,
who is the owner and writer of this notice.
Mexico City, post office box 854—Pedro Castera y Cortés.]
From these two items and several others we can gather that Castera, the writer and
celebrated author of Carmen, became toward the end of the century and the beginning of
the twentieth almost exclusively Castera ‘‘the well-known miner.’’ We can also see him
caught in repeated attempts to fervently protect his inventions and patents from being
misappropriated. The notion as well as the pursuit of authorship—and thus authority over
one’s own inventions—had visibly shifted from literature to science.
Which is not to say that Castera was singular for his time, as so many of his Latin
American contemporaries had other professions alongside their literary careers (to name
but two examples, Rubén Darı́o was a diplomat and, closer to Castera’s own second

6
This appeared in El monitor republicano 45:218 (11 September 1895), 4.

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profession, Chilean Baldomero Lillo, author of mining stories in his own native country,
had worked as an administrator for a mining company in Lota). When considering Cas-
tera’s fluctuations between literature, science writing, and mining (among other profes-
sions) it helps to locate his career as a scientific enthusiast within the historical
circumstances in Mexico during the second half of the nineteenth century. In her intro-
duction to Elı́as Trabulse’s volume of nineteenth-century Mexican scientific history (the
fourth in a multi-volume series), Perla Chinchilla Pawling argues that the flurry of
experimentation and dissemination in Europe, especially in France after 1848, was not to
be felt in Mexico until after 1867, after the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (ENP) opened its
doors, bringing with it a widespread advocacy of positivism as scientific doctrine (Chin-
chilla Pawling in Trabulse 1985: 11). Even with the opening of this institution, the absence
of a central university community that could harbor discussion and the facilities for
experimentation, Pawling argues, meant that Mexican scientists were ‘‘aislados autodi-
dactas’’ (‘‘self-taught and isolated’’ figures) who, unable to specialize within fields like
their European counterparts, worked in different areas of science at once (11–12). How-
ever, as Charles A. Hale has noted, at the political center of Mexican culture we can
witness an intense culture of learned debate around the time of the founding of the Pre-
paratoria. The embrace of liberalism, entangled at the time with positivist philosophy, was
first felt in Mexico in debates about educational reform and the development of a cur-
riculum for the ENP, and by 1878 had transformed itself into a model of ‘‘scientific
politics,’’ or the perception that the methods of science could be applied to economic,
cultural, and political reform (Hale 1989: 3). Some of the major players in these debates
were the group of writers that published for the newspaper La Libertad, among them Justo
Sierra and his brother Santiago (who published a short-lived weekly magazine called El
mundo cientı́fico between 2 June 1877 and 26 January 1878), Francisco Cosmes, and
Eduardo Garay. If these figures represent an epicenter of intellectual and scientific debate
during a period of educational and cultural reform in Mexico in this period, we could say
that Castera is the more erratic and slippery collaborator, who communed with some of
them (particularly Santiago Sierra) around the séance table and the capital city’s spiritualist
press, and whose own journalism would often dramatize the numerous debates that
abounded in post-1867 Mexico: among them the place of aesthetics and literature in
Comte-inspired educational curricula and political projects, the idea that extreme adher-
ence to positivism could only lead to soul-destroying materialism, and the contradictions
inherent in a political model of conservative-liberalism.
As historians Elı́ de Gortari (1963) and Ramón Sánchez Flores (1980) have noted, a
good number of important scientific associations and their adherent publications emerge—
among them La Naturaleza, which began to be published in the late 1860s by the Sociedad
Mexicana de Historia Natural, La Gaceta Médica de México, which began its run in 1864,
as well as a number of industrial publications that treated issues of mining and manu-
facturing enterprises in the country.7 But these revistas were quite distinct from the reports
found in the newspapers for which Castera wrote. As Chinchilla Pawling mentions, the
specialized science journals demonstrate an increasing sense of independent thought and
even defiance of European ideas. For the most part, the style employed by the writers in La
Naturaleza, for example, is largely descriptive and documentary. Often accompanied by

7
In Ramón Sánchez Flores’s Historia de la tecnologı́a y la invención en México (1980), the author lists a
number of publications that had short yet influential runs between the late 1830 and 1860, and the intro-
duction of North American reviews that were distributed in Mexico, such as the Revista de la crónica,
miscelánea cientı́fica, artı́stica y literaria from 1848 (289–290).

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luscious illustrations, such publications nevertheless adhered to the styles found in writing
in European science journals throughout the nineteenth century (see Gross et al. 2002). The
science and technology columns in mainstream Mexican newspapers throughout the 1880s
and 1890s seldom contained any illustrations alongside the news items, and the writers had
to do their best at both informing and instilling a sense of wonder in the readers in a limited
amount of space. Therefore, the art of picturing the wonderful discoveries and inventions
of the modern age was left to the writers’ abilities to quickly conjure images in the reader’s
minds.
More often than not and as can be seen in the first half of the ‘‘Mundo cientı́fico’’
column analyzed in the first pages of this essay, Castera’s approach to science writing in El
Universal was in line with the formulas found in US and British newspapers in the 1890s
like, for example, Scientific American. Writing about the British publication scene at the
time, Michael Whitworth describes the science columns (titled ‘‘Recent science’’) that
appeared in The Nineteenth Century during this decade:
Although the column was written by a regular contributor, Prince Kropotkin, he made no attempt to
draw the topics together, and never ventured to comment on larger trends in science. Thus the reader
would find such topics as ‘Life on the Moon’ alongside ‘Animal Psychology’, ‘Brain Structure’
alongside ‘The Approach of the Black Death’, or ‘Biological Chemistry’ alongside ‘Weather Pre-
diction’. (Whitworth 2001: 32–33)
Whitworth sees benefits as well as hindrances with this form of dissemination of news of
scientific and technological advancement: while innovation is here treated as always
happening, day by day, the lack of cohesion among items ‘‘exacerbates the sense of
fragmentation’’ (33). This ‘‘fragmentation’’ is rather intensified in Castera’s case if we
consider the circumstances under which Mexico’s ‘‘autodidactas’’ were accumulating
information about the advancement that was going on more rapidly elsewhere rather than
at home in Latin America. Indeed, these columns hurriedly move through highlights of the
latest issues of high-market and low-market science and technology journals from France,
England, and the US that had come into the author’s hands, thanks to Castera’s proficiency
in both French and English. While in England there was a market in which cursory
approaches to science in newspapers and popular magazines could be critiqued in more
middle-brow popular science publications like Science Gossip (pub. 1865–93), we cannot
speak for such a diversified print culture, or reading public for that matter, in Mexico
between the 1870s and 1890s.8 Instead, what we have during this period in Mexico are
more technical and specialized magazines like La Naturaleza on one end of the spectrum,
and scientific articles incorporated into newspapers and all-in-one reviews of science, art,
and literature on the other. Thus, while the pace of institutional specialization was not
synchronized with Europe and the US, popular scientific and literary reviews adhered to a
universal and rehearsed format. Keeping in mind the challenges to professionalization
within the scientific field, we should note that the institutionalization of literature faced an
even more uphill battle during this period. As Julio Ramos has noted, it was not until 1912
that literary courses were established in Mexico, initially in the Facultad de Humanidades
at the Escuela de Altos Estudios (Ramos 2001: 49). The absences of highly profession-
alized cultures within the literary and scientific realms pose limitations to the development

8
In Media Science Before the Great War (1996), Peter Broks quotes the warning that the editor of Science
Gossip, John T. Carrington, made in 1897, in an article entitled ‘‘Science in some magazines’’: ‘‘There is,
however, a responsibility as a teacher of the crowd attached to the editing of such a paper… We would
recommend the writer to get his facts before committing his teachings to a wider word. When will there be a
science censor for news-papers?’’ (qtd. in Broks, 33).

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of a diverse print culture, but, interestingly, they can also lead to larger freedoms of
experimentation within the publication venues that did exist during the period between
1870 and 1890. This leads us to the following question: Would a more limited amount of
gatekeepers and pure-science publications and institutions mean that more liberties could
be taken with the barriers that separate the scientific and aesthetic cultures?
In an environment where science reportage was not furiously regulated, Pedro
Castera would appear to take this realm of knowledge to a different level, allowing it
to segue into the speculative and fictitious narratives that we have come to associate
with science fiction. While thinking through the meanings of invention and authority
through a variety of lenses, be they scientific or literary, Castera practices different
modes and styles of conveying international news of advancement to a wider reading
public. In this process, he attempts to create in his writing a sense of interchangeability
between scientific invention and poetic innovation. This is illustrated in the author’s
forays into scientific fiction such as the item on the galvanized dead: we witness the
adherence to, and wild departure from, a tried formula of reportage. It does appear that,
throughout his life and given the varying degrees of editorial control he had over
several newspaper publications, the science columns become for Castera a way of
working out the compatibility of his artistic and scientific aspirations. We could thus
think of these columns as extreme forms of scientific chronicles, in the sense that they
are, as Susana Rotker has suggested, sites of literary experimentation, in which the
writer is faced with the obligation of divulging a specific content, while indulging in
his own rhetorical and stylistic choices. Alongside his contemplations on innovation, in
his science journalism Castera is also considering the different forms that technique can
take within the not-fully compartmentalized—or ‘‘two-cultured’’—intellectual life of
Mexico at the fin de siglo.
Such a study of Castera serves as a corrective to a number of assumptions that have
been made recently by critics about the inclinations of writers in the pre-revolutionary
period in Mexico. In his celebrated Mexican Modernity (2005), Rubén Gallo notes that it
was only after the Mexican Revolution of 1910 that writers and artists in this country begin
to take notice of technological innovations. Indeed, Gallo describes the cultural and social
landscape of the 1920s and 1930s thus:
During these years, an unprecedented number of intellectuals used their work to examine technology’s
impact on society and culture. While the presence of machines was not new – Porfirio Dı́az had been
an enthusiastic supporter of modern technology, and his regime sponsored the construction of rail-
ways, the import of automobiles, and the commercialization of typewriters and adding machines –
what was a novelty in the postrevolutionary years was the sudden interest that writers and artists
expressed in technological artifacts. (Gallo 2005: 4)
Gallo’s understanding of the incorporation of technology into artistic work—whether at the
level of content (where machines play a part in, say, a story’s plot) or form (when
technology actually affects the way a story is written)—as a ‘‘sudden’’ transformation that
took place well into the twentieth century should be taken to task. He understands the
revolutionary period as a kind of breakaway from the previous one (this would be a literal
acceptance of zeitgeist that recalls Virginia Woolf’s famous pronouncement that ‘‘human
character changed’’ in December 1910).9 Instead, I propose that we focus on how fin-de-
siècle society in Mexico was progressively incorporating, as well as resisting the entrance
of, science and technology into everyday life, and this in turn was affecting the themes and
forms produced in the work of writers and artists.

9
From her essay ‘‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’’ (1924).

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552 M. P. Blanco

As I have argued elsewhere, writers that have long been associated with modernismo,
like Martı́, cautiously and yet innovatively incorporate the new machines into their writing,
both in terms of describing them and their inventors, and mimicking their powers at the
sentence level (see Blanco 2010). Secondly, it would be a mistake to see the relatively
exclusive circle of the modernistas as the only practicing writers in Spanish America
during this time. That is, we should probably understand the literary scene of the fin de
siglo as more diversely populated, one in which myriad writers—local and international—
were reaching the reading public through newspapers and magazines on a daily basis.
Gallo’s view also runs the risk of overlooking the emergent science fictions of the region
(e.g. Eduardo Holmberg in Argentina; Castera in Mexico), which are some of the richest
examples of how subjects react to the growing presence of scientific vocabularies and
technological innovation around them. This is not to say that fin de siglo Mexican writing
about science and technology, especially in popular venues like the capital’s newspapers,
did not undergo a number of transformations in this journey toward the confidence that
Gallo describes. However, what we see in the writings of Castera and others interested in
divulging knowledge of science and technology in the final decades of the nineteenth
century is instead a negotiation or, better yet, an experimentation that asks how the fields of
aesthetics and science can speak of and to each other.

2 Querens: The Invention of Mexican Science Fiction

Castera’s Querens constitutes the author’s last sustained attempt at fiction. It is fascinating
in its staggering amalgamation of scientific and poetic rhetoric, as in its description of
scientific method communing with spiritualist praxis. As a story about experimentation
with the human body, we can read it as a companion piece to the kind of morbid fiction that
Castera introduced into his ‘‘Mundo cientı́fico’’ column in 1891. Serialized in El Universal
in January of 1890, it has been described by Luis Mario Schneider as ‘‘la más extraña de
todas las novelas de Castera’’ (‘‘the strangest of all of Castera’s novels’’) (Schneider 1987:
25). While his earlier Las minas y los mineros stories lauded as realist depictions of life in
the mines, in Querens we have something quite different. A Pygmalion-inspired story that
relates the experiments of a man who, through a ‘‘magnetic dream,’’ transmits his intellect
to a beautiful woman who, in her normal state, is described as intellectually and emo-
tionally inert, an ‘‘idiot,’’ Querens is often noted as one of the first examples of science
fiction in Latin America, following Holmberg’s innovations in the genre in late 1870s
Argentina.
There is an interesting—and very obvious—commentary to be made on gender repre-
sentations in this short novel, which I’ll address briefly. It is uncomfortable for us as
contemporary readers to see the male telepathic project in Querens embodied in what is a
vacuous female body. The binaries of intellect, qua masculinity, and its opposite, as well as
the opposition between male subjectivity and female objectivity are too salient in the novel
to ignore. I will briefly address some episodes from Querens to illustrate this point, before
moving on to a commentary on how we can contextualize Castera’s strange narrative.
There are gothic echoes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) in Castera’s novel, as the
brain and the body of that figure of invention are represented in terms of a disquieting and
morbid distance from one another. There is also no apparent interest in explaining where
this femina rasa could have come from, and how this man was able to keep her captive in
his laboratory/home to conduct such a perverse exercise (realism is definitely not Castera’s
aim in this often bewildering novel).

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Similarly to modernista Rubén Darı́o’s representations of female beauty as a combi-

nation of sculptural, classical and autochthonous attributes, in Querens Castera’s
description of the anonymous woman outpours into a pastoral declamation of criollo, or
autochthonous Hispanic American, beauty. The woman’s qualities evoke the virginity of
indigenous landscapes: ‘‘Era la Fornarina, pero criolla,’’ the narrator explains. Later on he
notes: ‘‘Un tipo casi indı́gena, casto, vigoroso, ardiente… Era la belleza criolla americana,
con la valentı́a de las curvas vı́rgenes, con sus lı́neas esfuminadas entre la luz dorada de
nuestras diáfanas mañanas’’ [‘‘She was like Raphael’s Fornarina, but a criolla. A type that
was almost indigenous, chaste, vigorous, passionate… She was the epitome of American
beauty, with the audacity of a virgin figure, lines that softened amidst the golden light of
our bright mornings…’’] (415). This interest in aligning autochthonous female beauty and
landscape should be read alongside modernista poetics, in an effort to produce a more far-
reaching account of the period, moving thus toward what Josefina Ludmer has called a
máquina de leer ‘‘fin de siglo’’ [method of reading the fin de siècle] (Ludmer 1994).
In Castera’s erotics of telepathic intelligence, the ‘‘magnetic dream’’ endows the woman
with a beauty that the narrator sings in the passages I have cited above. However, when the
sessions are over, she reverts to a state of idiocy. As the ‘‘inventor’’ explains to the narrator,
‘‘En su estado normal carece absolutamente de inteligencia, no piensa, no siente, no quiere,
no recuerda, es una idiota. Una mujer que tal vez juzgaréis hermosa, pero imbécil. Sola-
mente en el sueño magnético funciona en ella la vida con sus sensaciones’’ [‘‘In her normal
state she completely lacks intelligence; she doesn’t think, feel, love, remember—she is an
idiot, a woman you may judge as beautiful, but an imbecile. Only in the magnetic dream
does sentient life work within her’’] (423). The trance-state thus lends this woman a means
to connect sensation and intellect, and, as one would power off a machine, the interruption
of the ‘‘magnetic flow’’ returns her to a cadaveric state of cerebral-sensory disconnection.
The narrator remarks that he had never seen such a phenomenon, such a ‘‘paralysis’’ of
intellection, as he gazed at the ‘‘artı́stica morbidez de sus formas’’ [‘‘artistic morbidity of
her form’’] (423). While the lonesome inventor of Tlalpan will obsess over the intellectual
transmission of the ‘‘fluido nervioso’’ (‘‘nervous fluid’’: this phrase of course invites
another layer of reading), the narrator becomes obsessed with the creation of a ‘‘heart’’ in
the woman: ‘‘Él trataba de formar una inteligencia y yo de despertar a la vida del sen-
timiento un corazón… El querı́a investigar la generación de las ideas, problema bien
oscuro, y yo encontraba un corazón virgen aún en sus pasiones’’ [‘‘He tried to develop an
intelligence and I wanted to awaken feelings in a heart… He wanted to investigate the
creation of ideas—an obscure problem—while I found a virginal heart’’] (428). What
follows is thus the consolidation of a very strange ménage à trois, where one of the parties
acts as ghostly receptacle for the flow passions of the two men: both men, obsessed by the
erotic possibilities surrounding this anonymous, empty woman, set out to invent an
improved version of her, projecting onto her their intertwined passions. This magnetic
dream is also a rather thinly veiled homosocial fantasy: in her enlightened moments, the
woman speaks philosophical, poetic, and scientific ‘‘truths,’’ as they originate in the mind
of her ‘‘owner,’’ exciting only the greatest passions in the other interlocutor (the narrator).
The multiple, ever changing, necromantic perceptions ‘‘induced’’ in the narrator by this
woman produce an entanglement of physical, erotic, and intellectual desires, blurring the
lines that separate the characters (the pronouns referring to the two men become inter-
changeable as the narrative progresses). Here there is also a loss of distinction between
sexual and intellectual desire, life and death, sensory and oneiric perception. A reading of
Querens would need to embed any gender reading within a nuanced and detailed account
of the (pseudo-)scientific and philosophical currents that Castera activates in his narrative.

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As we have been doing with Castera’s journalistic output, it is also vital to locate Querens
within the cultural and intellectual landscapes of Mexico at the fin de siglo, at the time
when ‘‘pure’’ scientific discourse is debating its exclusivity from other areas of knowledge
(like spiritualism).
Castera shares with the modernistas a pervasive expressive dilemma: that of the specific
anxieties about the compatibility between words and images, and the ways that stylistic
form can transmit a full sensorium to the reader. In the fourth chapter of Querens, for
example, we find this reflection by the narrator, directed to the readers:
>Creen ustedes en las maravillas que puede producir una palabra fácil, rápida, elocuente, vibrante,
apasionada? >Creen que la palabra puede delinear, dibujar y pintar, con la pureza, tono y colorido,
que roba de los misterios de la inspiración? >Creen que los arranques de las pasiones, pueden
transmitirse a los vocablos, para que la frase se anime y las ideas vivan y brillen con inmortal llama,
encerradas en irreproachable, correcta y purı́sima forma? (396–97)
[Do you believe in the marvels that are generated by an easy, quick, eloquent, vibrant, and passionate
word? Do you think that words can outline, draw and paint, with a purity, tone and color stolen from
the mysteries of inspiration? Do you believe that the flights of passion can be transmitted to words, so
that a phrase can become animated and ideas can live and shine with immortal flame, enclosed within
irreproachable, correct and purest form?]
The role of writing here appears as the act of working through what is new in the world that
surrounds the writer, as the author searches for the most precise way to describe that world.
The ‘‘maravilla’’ (‘‘marvel’’) is used to describe the mastery of a word, as much as it
describes an actual impression. The anxieties of composition expressed by the narrator, the
desire for emotions to become ever more transmissible into our known mediums, are
translated in Castera in what is a formulation of an ‘‘electrical,’’ magnetic thematics. As
Roger Luckhurst notes, in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the aporias
surrounding the body’s nervous system were often conceived in electrical terms, with
Charles Darwin describing the subject of communication of nerves as ‘‘very obscure.’’
(Luckurst 2002: 82) Luckhurst also explains that ‘‘electricity was hardly established within
a secure scientific paradigm’’ during this period (83). This led to an explication of this
energy on the basis of analogies, and a flurry of conceptualizations of what was a confusing
‘‘science of energy’’ emerged—a ‘‘science’’ that would support the fine-tuning of the
concept of telepathy beginning in the 1870s. These different factors of mysterious
electricity and telepathic transfusion can be found in Castera’s novel, as the Tlalpan
scientist describes the aim of his experiment: ‘‘Comunicarle la electricidad de mis nervios
y las ideas de mi cerebro, para hacerla vivir con la vida angustiosa que yo vivı́a’’ [‘‘To
communicate the electricity within my nerves and the ideas in my brain, to make her live
(with) the anguished life I led’’] (428).
Castera’s dual preoccupation with understanding and disseminating the innovations of
science and the new possibilities of writing makes Querens both a treatise in artistic
creativity and a record of the evolution of popular science in his Mexican context, and
specifically the emergence and dissemination of ideas of telepathy in the last two decades
of the nineteenth century. From the 1870s toward the mid-1880s, amid the constant
attempts to discredit Spiritualism as an all-too popular science riddled with nonsense
terminologies and little to speak of in terms of the scientific method, the idea of telepathy,
studied within controlled laboratory conditions, had a certain legitimate edge—enough to
lead Edmund Gurney and Fredric Myers to note, in 1885, that it was ‘‘slowly creeping
within the circle of scientific acceptance’’ (Luckurst 2002: 73). We notice this evolution of
thought in Querens when the scientist has this to say about his three-decade long study
about the provenance of ideas and of inspiration:

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No os voy a presentar reminiscencias de las novelas de ciertos autores, en las que el magnetismo hace
un papel tan lastimoso. No voy a hacer disertaciones sobre Mesmer, Puysegur, Deleuze y otros sabios
que han estudiado las ciencias magnéticas… Presentemos someramente la teorı́a y después el
hecho… El magnestismo, como fenómeno psicológico y no como parte de las ciencias fı́sicas, ha
dado lugar a las ciencias magnéticas. Las escuelas espiritualista y la materialista se hallan, en estos
momentos, frente por frente, en ese género de discusión. (409)
[I will not present reminiscences of the novels of certain authors, in which magnetism plays such a
pitiful role. I will not dissertate about Mesmer, Puysegur, Deleuze and other wise men that have
studied the magnetic sciences… Let us only present the theory and then the fact … Magnetism, as a
psychological phenomenon and not as one of the physical sciences, has given birth to the magnetic
sciences. The spiritualist and materialist schools are, at this moment, engaged in this debate.]
In this passage, we encounter a brief history of these ‘‘magnetic sciences,’’ from
Mesmerism (which had its apogee in the 1780s but had been discredited by mid-nineteenth
century) to the contemporaneous debate between materialists and spiritualists regarding the
incompatibilities of a burgeoning psychology and the physical sciences. What is more,
Castera employs terminologies such as ‘‘doble visión’’ (double vision) (410)—terms found
in the works by psychologists like Eugène Azam and William James, who, in his
Principles of Psychology (published in 1890) used a similar term to explain the mysteries
of consciousness in mutated states such as hysteria and somnambulism. In the experiment
in Querens, the amateur scientist attempts to use this telepathic transmission of ‘‘fluid’’ to
the hypnotized woman in order to read, as if in a text, the origin of thought precisely
through this employment of double vision. In the end, the innovation of telepathy depicted
in the novel is positioned alongside the histories of successful scientific and technological
innovations in the nineteenth century: ‘‘Se le ha dado la vida nerviosa, pero como la
producida por el galvanismo; se ha practicado la transfusión de ideas, como la transfusión
de la sangre; la voz, como la copiada por el fonógrafo; el movimiento, como a la
maquinaria de un reloj’’ [‘‘Her nerves have been given life, as if galvanized; ideas have
been transfused like blood; a voice, such as the one copied by the phonograph; and
movement, as in the inner workings of the clock’’] (449). The telepathic project envisioned
in Querens thus appears to shadow a string of encounters with science and technology,
locating this new, and yet unproven practice of transference among examples of what is
already proven and evidenced.
We could dismiss Querens as a rather eccentric Mexican version of Frankenstein.
However, as I have tried to show in this essay, Castera’s novel—and his career as a
whole—is a rather unique example of fiction that is concerned with defining ‘‘innovation’’
in a dual manner: it asks how one should depict the new in terms of literary form, while it
seeks to explain innovation within the field of an emergent popular science. Castera’s life
transpired within a nexus where beliefs in a new scientific religion put him in contact with
a transnational, multidisciplinary body of writing, and where modernization was increas-
ingly felt as a political, artistic, philosophical, and scientific phenomenon. He is an
eccentric, as Saborit has described him, in every sense of the word, but one who is
nevertheless participating in some of the wider intellectual, cultural, and social debates
transpiring within and beyond the borders of liberal Mexico. Castera’s social position
became, in the 1890s and until his death, more and more marginal, and his previous
associations with the epoch’s luminaries like Gutiérrez Nájera, Manuel de Olaguı́bel, and
Justo Sierra appear to have slipped away. Nevertheless, his participation in so many
aspects of Mexican inventive life becomes a useful key in deciphering the place of the
writer and creator within the context of at-times vertiginous, at-times slow and often-
confusing modernization. And we should study his last scientific articles and published
novel Querens as reflections on what it means to represent the fantasies of discovery.

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