Mexico bids farewell to José Emilio Pacheco

The great Mexican writer José Emilio Pacheco died on Sunday of a heart attack at the age of 74. This week he was remembered in his native Mexico City with funeral services worthy of a head of state.

Pacheco, born in 1939, burst on to the Mexican literary scene in the 1960s and ‘70s with several poetry and short-story collections. His 1981 novella “Las batallas en el desierto” (“The Battles in the Desert”), based largely on his own middle-class Mexico City upbringing, was a love poem to a smaller, more innocent metropolis that was later wiped out by explosive growth. Today, the book is widely read in the country’s public schools. In 2009, he won the most prestigious honor in Spanish-language literature: the Cervantes Prize.

On Monday, his casket lay in state in the Colegio Nacional, Mexico’s equivalent of the French Academy, with an honor guard, black bunting and much of Mexico’s literary establishment present.

Historian Enrique Krauze delivered the eulogy.

“This is a privilege I am grateful for; but a painful privilege,” Krauze began. “Because now, faced with his unexpected death, the poetic themes of José Emilio, the sorrow, the melancholy, the lack of hope, the grief, the implacable passage of time, all acquire a new dimension, the dimension of a prophecy fulfilled.”

Pacheco loved his native city, Krauze said, and was “genuinely hurt by the inequality and the poverty,” that had overtaken it. Pacheco was, he added, a witness of the “decay of his city, of his country, of his paradise.”

The daily newspaper Excelsior said that among the many groups and institutions sending flowers to the funeral there was a local street vendors’ association. And El Universal noted the presence of many young people, all admirers of Pacheco’s lyrical writing, including 15-year-old Emiliano Leums, who arrived carrying a backpack and a copy of Pacheco’s short-story collection “El principio del placer.” (“The Beginning of Pleasure).

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hector.tobar@latimes.com