Staff Pick
This slim volume, which chronicles the 1920 El Bordo mine fire in Pachuca, Mexico, is a brave, diligent, and heartbreakingly beautiful act of solidarity. Herrera travels back in time to restore dignity and a voice to workers who were afforded neither for nearly a hundred years; to show kindness to their families, who were questioned and humiliated as they mourned; and to condemn their employer, who declared his workers dead as they still drew breath. Recommended By Tove H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
On March 10, 1920, in Pachuca, Mexico, the Compañía de Santa Gertrudis — the largest employer in the region, and a subsidiary of the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company — may have committed murder.
The alert was first raised at six in the morning: a fire was tearing through the El Bordo mine. After a brief evacuation, the mouths of the shafts were sealed. Company representatives hastened to assert that "no more than ten" men remained inside the mineshafts, and that all ten were most certainly dead. Yet when the mine was opened six days later, the death toll was not ten, but eighty-seven. And there were seven survivors.
A century later, acclaimed novelist Yuri Herrera has reconstructed a workers' tragedy at once globally resonant and deeply personal: Pachuca is his hometown. His work is an act of restitution for the victims and their families, bringing his full force of evocation to bear on the injustices that suffocated this horrific event into silence.
Review
"By bringing moral exactitude to a story long silenced for American profit, A Silent Fury joins that most vital of canons, the literatures of witness. Reading against the grain of official documents, defining what is there by what is not, Herrera bears witness to a crime that preceded his birth by 50 years." Kristen Millares Young, Washington Post
Review
"A Silent Fury is a narrative rebellion against the archive of atrocity. Herrera subverts the archive, turns it against itself, upends its silencing mission and reveals within it the traces of corporate and governmental abuse, disregard and murder." John Gibler, author of I Couldn't Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us
Review
"A precise and devastating account that peers into the dark mouths of the El Bordo mine as if they were the gates of hell. In these pages, Yuri Herrera paints a portrait of poverty and neglect and reveals, once again, the way exploitation and abuse lurk at the source of all violence." Alia Trabucco Zerán, author of The Remainder