Will Noah
Álvaro Enrigue’s latest novel intricately weaves Mexican-western pastiche with autofiction and historical research.
Now I Surrender, by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer, Riverhead Books, 456 pages, $30
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The Chiricahua Apache are often imagined as exemplars of recalcitrance. This is thanks in large part to the band led by Geronimo in one of the last campaigns of armed Indigenous resistance against the US’s westward expansion. As the Army subdued the final theaters of the Indian Wars, Geronimo refused to be confined to a reservation, organizing a series of breakouts that only ended in 1886, after thousands of US and Mexican troops pursued him and his remaining followers—just a few dozen men, women, and children—into the Sierra Madre south of the border. American pop culture helped secure this legacy of defiance, in distorted form: half a century after his defeat, Geronimo served as the villain in the John Ford western that would set the benchmark for the cinematic genre, Stagecoach (1939). He’s not so legendary in Mexico, though he spent much of his life in combat with that country’s frontier settlements. For Álvaro Enrigue, a Mexican author long domiciled in the US, Geronimo and the Chiricahua he led hold a special fascination. Their “sole possession was the thing that in the end the rest of us give up to get ahead: dignity.”
Enrigue’s sprawling novel Now I Surrender—published this month in a sharp English translation by Natasha Wimmer—opens with a scenario cribbed from another Ford western, The Searchers (1956): in 1830s Mexico, a widow named Camila has been carried away by an Apache raid, the rest of her family slaughtered. Army officer José María Zuloaga—one of many real figures who populate the book—sets off in the unlikely hope of finding her. At first, Zuloaga appears every bit the John Wayne type, pushing local government around, conscripting drunken townsfolk for his posse, and dispensing stern discipline to the adolescent Raramuri boy he adopts as his aide-de-camp. Soon, though, as his misfit band of searchers shapes up—folding in a pistol-toting nun, a pair of Yaqui prisoners, and a mysterious dance instructor—their leader reveals himself to be a fairly decent sort, willing to get flexible with his authority if that’s what it takes to reach the Apache stronghold. In the role of the captive, Camila proves an even more surprising figure: she just might be suited to the Apache lifestyle.
Where US authors seeking to revise the myths of the West have often dialed up the bloodshed (think Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian), Enrigue’s preferred twist is a wry strain of humor. Though there’s no shortage of flayed skin and charred flesh in Now I Surrender, the tone hovers between impish and elegiac. The Mexican-western pastiche outlined above is only one thread in Enrigue’s intricate weave. There’s also an autofictional strand, one that allows the narrator to relay the legends of the great Apache chiefs and involves a sentimental family road trip through the American Southwest—the book’s weakest link, and a curious mirror image of Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019), which draws on some of the same material (the authors were married at the time he wrote this novel).
Eventually, Enrigue leaves Zuloaga and Camila suspended on a cliff-hanger, shifting focus to the US Army’s final campaign against Geronimo’s Chiricahuas a half century later. The narration begins to leap among a multiplying roster of perspectives, forming a mosaic of the great warrior through miniature portraits of his pursuers. Enrigue’s deft handling of his densely researched material shines here, as do his cheeky departures from the historical record. Most obviously counterfactual is a chapter that places a young Pancho Villa at the scene of Geronimo’s surrender, provocatively framing the Chiricahua as forerunners of the Mexican Revolution’s armed insurgents.
At one point, an observer beholding Geronimo wonders if this is “how the Spanish felt when they finally saw Emperor Moctezuma: a king, but also something different, something that defied explanation.” In You Dreamed of Empires (published in English in 2024), Enrigue restages that earlier, pivotal moment of European invasion, when Hernán Cortés arrived at Tenochtitlán, the site of present-day Mexico City. That novel’s omniscient third-person narrator roams freely among characters Spanish and Indigenous alike, eavesdropping on the private scheming of both parties. But in Now I Surrender (actually the earlier book, published in Spanish in 2018), Enrigue limits himself to inhabiting the perspectives of his Mexican and American characters; the Apache themselves are seen only from the outside, through the eyes of their contemporaries or the prism of the author-narrator’s historical research.
The difference is telling: Moctezuma is as much a symbolic father of the Mexican nation as Cortés, so the Mexican novelist feels free to handle both characters intimately and irreverently. This is in keeping with the Mexican ideology of mestizaje, which thinks of Indigenous life as assimilated into the mixed-race nation (often at the expense of recognizing the autonomy of living Indigenous communities). Geronimo, by contrast, was never assimilated; he died in 1909 still unrecognized as a US citizen, like the vast majority of Native Americans at the time. An outsider to the body politic, he can only be glimpsed from a distance, in fear, wonder, or curiosity. The novel’s various strands don’t come together until the closing section, when Enrigue returns to the mock-western plot and we realize that Geronimo has been present there all along, seen from Camila’s point of view as one of her abductors—the young warrior-in-training who teaches her the Apache ways and language.
Enrigue’s corrective to the mythology of the western therefore doesn’t derive from a frontal critique reclaiming the Apache side of the story. Instead, the book stages a dialectical conflict between the two nations that swallowed up Apachería. By jumping back and forth between the perspectives of Mexican and American characters—as well as the immigrant narrator, whose experience spans both countries—he brings their visions of the Apache enemy, along with their self-justifications, into unbearable tension with each other. Witnessing Geronimo’s final surrender, a Mexican officer recognizes this gulf: “To the gringos, these twenty-seven Chiricahuas were an enemy army. What we had to offer them was a fitting death for their warriors and assimilation for their children, absorption into the particular Mexican fabric of sorrows and joys. What the Americans had to offer was a life of humiliation, but one in which their difference would be recognized.”
Later, an American counterpart experiences a vision of mass migration to come, “waves and waves of Indians coming from Mexico and beyond.” Mestizaje might not save the Apache, but it will ultimately render the US campaign of ethnic cleansing futile. The nation is a ready supplier of comforting illusions, but in Enrigue’s telling, these narratives are constantly undermined by those of our neighbors. When you strip away the fictions of Manifest Destiny and la raza cósmica (which posits the Mexican as a kind of mestizo Übermensch), what you’re left with is men and women making their own decisions, not knowing what the future might remember or forget about them.
The novel’s title quotes one of Geronimo’s most famous phrases—“Now I surrender to you and that is all”—from his speech at the Cañon de los Embudos in 1886. Significantly, it wouldn’t be his last surrender; it would take another five months for the Army to lure him into custody permanently. The finality of the statement is deceptive, pointing to the paradox at the center of this book. Apachería “still exists,” the narrator insists, “but was erased from the maps.” “There are still Apaches, Geronimo,” he says in the book’s concluding pages, as if trying to address the Chiricahua directly, “and your name will not be forgotten.” Something of the meaning of this warrior’s life is still recoverable: much has been lost, but surely that is not all.
Will Noah is a writer and translator based in Mexico City. His work has appeared in the Baffler, BOMB, n+1, and the New York Review of Books, and he is a member of the Criterion Collection’s editorial staff.