Written with the triple diving suit of fiction, chronicle and essay, the texts of Drenajes immerse themselves in some key moments of the history of water in Mexico to emerge from there with a garland of literary wonders. From the hydraulic works promoted by Aztec Tlatoanis, Texcocan kings and presidents from the PRI (the oxymoronically named Revolutionary Institutional Party), to the humongous water transfers that supply the megalopolises of the 21st century, passing through underground pipes, polluted rivers and the drying up of hydrographic basins as a result of royal, agro-industrial, real estate or energy megaprojects, the threads visited in this book make up a mosaic that shows the uses and abuses of water in Mexico, as well as a portrait of the beneficiaries and victims of these processes. With clear literary vocation, the investigation branches out into a delta that leads to unexpected story endings, delusional character profiles, poetic digressions, philosophical depths and atypical reflections where the gaze, after delving into obscure depths, is able to emerge to sight shores previously hidden by fog.
Drenajes, the third book of essays by Diego Rodríguez Landeros, continues the literary line of research on the hydrological crisis in Mexico that the author has carried out, the first part of which is the novel Desagüe.

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“Everything starts with a whirlpool, a spiral of water that swallows lakes, rivers, people, the entire flow of a country that comes unstuck and that ends up disappearing through the drain. With a liquid and unclassifiable writing, half chronicle, half essay, Diego Rodríguez Landeros summons the memory of water by resurrecting absences, focusing on the traces left by lake or river corpses that gave life to entire communities. Dizzying, playful, bright and movingly intelligent, this work warns us, like Benjamin’s Angel of History, about the ruins brought by the hurricane of progress.” – Nona Fernández Silanes

“Diego Landeros’s prose is wonderful.” – Jorge Comensal

“…an essays collection that breaks with the established in order to be read as an adventure novel, almost a thriller!” – Revista Milenio

“A work whose stories seem taken from the mind of a hallucinated novelist and that show, however, that the bowels of the great Mexico City are built that way…What this book reflects, in addition to the most important milestones in the administration of the hydraulic paradigms of Mexico City, is absolute delirium. Mexico in its pure state.” – Zenda Libros

“I have laughed and have been delighted…Diego Rodríguez Landeros is the chronicler of buried bodies of water and diver of the urban subconscious…a pollinating bumblebee of essayism through unexpected pipes.” – Luigi Amara

 

165 pages – Original language: Spanish/Mexico-Colombia-Cono Sur (Almadía, 2022); Spanish/Audio (Scribd, 2022)