José Joaquín Eugenio Fernández de Lizardi Gutiérrez

José Joaquín Eugenio Fernández de Lizardi Gutiérrez (Mexico City, November 15, 1776-ibidem, June 21, 1827), also known as The Mexican Thinker, was a writer from New Spain, author of the novel El Periquillo Sarniento.

He was the author of a work that was simultaneously political, literary, journalistic, historiographical and linguistic. Most of his work was developed in the field of journalistic writing, & # 34; one of the peaks of nineteenth-century prose in our language & # 34;, according to the literary critic Christopher Domínguez Michael; but he is best remembered for being the first Latin American novelist, writing in 1816 El Periquillo Sarniento.

His work has been of interest to scholars of linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, and paisology due to its description of life, language, and customs in New Spain at its end. In El Periquillo Sarniento, Fernández de Lizardi recreates the language of student slang; the speech of lawyers and doctors; the gibberish of gamblers, of thieves, of the underworld in general; the dialect of the natives; the lexical variety of food, drink and clothing. The legends, superstitions, taboos and popular speech presented by him have also been relevant to Mexican folklore studies.

Early Years

Fernández de Lizardi was born on November 15, 1776 in Mexico City, the son of the Creoles Bárbara Gutiérrez, daughter of the Puebla bookseller Agustín Gutiérrez Dávila, and Manuel Hernández Lizardi, named physicist, or doctor, in the Royal College of Tepotzotlán. It was in the same Tepotzotlán where Lizardi obtained his first studies and where he learned Latin. Later, in 1793, he would carry out his secondary and university studies at the Colegio de San Ildefonso, where he entered in 1793 and studied for five years. However, in the words of Lizardi: "I did not even graduate from Bachelor because at the time of the degrees my father who was a doctor at the Teptzotlán school got sick, I went to help him, and disemboweled the course".

After the death of his father, he obtained the position of interim judge in Taxco and, later, of a town in the district of Acapulco. In 1805 he married Dolores Orendain and it was not until 1808 when his first literary collaboration appeared: a celebratory verse, a Polaca, in praise of Fernando VII. As of November 11, 1810, when he was still acting as interim judge in Taxco, enters into correspondence with the New Spain viceroy Francisco Xavier Venegas. In his letters, Lizardi suggests to the viceroy "that to avoid a bloody raid by the rebels they should be deceived by receiving them with cheers and parties."

With the entry of the royalists in Taxco, Lizardi will be imprisoned. In January 1811, Lizardi went to Mexico City to defend himself against the viceroy and seek his freedom, which he obtained by arguing that he only sought to act for the benefit of the city's population.

Journalistic activity

After Lizardi is released, he remains in Mexico City, where he will live precariously from his work as a journalist. It is from this moment that "his work as a writer focused on social, political and satirical concerns begins." In addition, the controversy between the author and the poets linked to Mexico newspaper. This began when Juan María Lacunza published an attack against Lizardi on October 31, 1811 in that same newspaper. The conflict would last until 1817, when the Diario de México dissolved.

In March 1812, the Constitution of Cádiz was promulgated throughout the Spanish empire guaranteeing freedom of the press, to which Fernández de Lizardi founded, on October 9 of that same year, the most important newspaper at the time of Independence: The Mexican Thinker. In that newspaper, the injustices of the viceroyalty were denounced, such as the poor distribution of wealth, the terrible education or the privileges that some people enjoyed. In number 9 of El Pensador Mexicano, published on December 3, 1812, he asked Viceroy Francisco Xavier Venegas to abolish the military court for insurgent clergymen. Two days later, the viceroy abolishes the freedom of the press and orders the arrest of Lizardi, who briefly escapes, but is captured on December 12, although he continues publishing the newspaper from prison. He remains in jail until July 1813, when he is released after General Félix Calleja took office as Superior Political Chief of New Spain.

El Pensador Mexicano went out of print in 1814, the year in which the Constitution of Cádiz was abolished; however, he continued with his journalistic work, despite the censorship and threats he suffered. The newspapers that replaced the Mexican Thinker between 1915 and 1916 were the Alacena de Frioleras and the Cajoncitos de la Alacena, in addition to Las Shadows of Heraclitus and Democritus, which had two installments and in which a fictionalized dialogue between the ghosts of those two classical philosophers was presented. Later he published the newspapers El Conductor Eléctrico (1820), The Friend of Peace and the Homeland (1822), The Clown of the Newspapers (1823), The Brother of the Parrot who Sang Victory (1823) and Conversations between the Payo and the Sacristán (1824-1825), the latter is considered by some to be "his most important work" and as the "culmination of his journalism, due to the fluidity of the style, his irony and his audacity".

Lizardi did all the work to publish his newspapers, including editing, proofreading, and distribution.^{[citation needed]}

Novelistic activity

In a context in which journalism became increasingly difficult to carry out due to the Restoration in Spain, the repeal of the Constitution of Cádiz and the initial defeat of the insurgency in New Spain, Lizardi decided to carry out carry out the work that he had already been doing with journalism through other media. To this end, he wrote El Periquillo Sarniento (1816), a novel with which he was able to continue his moralizing and educational work, making use of picaresque narrationand the Horatian maxim of "teach the reader and entertain him& #34;. Written with Gil Blas de Santillana as a model, the novel is known for being the first written in Latin America, and is characterized by the introduction of plain and popular language in its prose. Its reception has been mixed: sometimes praised for its portrayal of Mexican reality, others scorned for its moralizing digressions.

Between writing the different parts of El Periquillo, Lizardi wrote three other novels: Sad Nights and Happy Days (1819, 1831), La Quijotita and her cousin (1818-1819) and the Life and facts of the famous gentleman Don Catrín de la Fachenda (1832). The Sad Nights were written in imitation of José Cadalso's Gloomy Nights, in turn an imitation of Edward Young's Nights. La Quijotita continued with the moralizing desire of Lizardi, now focused on women. For his part, Vida y hechos del famoso caballero don Catrín de la Fachenda was written by Lizardi to "demonstrate to himself and his critics that he could write a true novel without incurring in the treatise farrago (La Quijotita), edifying imitation (Sad Nights and Happy Days) or picaresque disorder (Periquillo)".

Later life and death

In 1821 he showed solidarity with the Plan of Iguala and joined the Trigarante Army, naming him director of the insurgent press in Tepotzotlán. Once the independence of Mexico was decreed, he published the controversial pamphlet Fifty questions of the thinker to whoever wants to answer them, which advocates the construction of a liberal democratic system in the new nation, earning the antipathy of Agustín de Iturbide, a member of the recent Provisional Government Junta and future monarch of the First Mexican Empire, whom he harshly attacks during the following years.

At the end of 1824, when Mexico was already a federal republic, Lizardi was appointed director of La Gaceta del Gobierno and received the salary of a retired captain for his services in favor of the insurrection.

José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi died on June 21, 1827. He was buried in the cemetery of the church of San Lázaro, but his remains have disappeared.

Lizardi in the cinema

• A vague without a trade (1958), based on The Periquillo Sarniento and directed by Zacaría Gómez Urquiza, with Pompín Iglesias like El Periquillo.
• The torch lit (1996) shows the first years of Lizardi, as well as his studies in Tepotzotlán, State of Mexico, and in the Old College of San Ildefonso in 1793. The scene is also collected where, because of the briefs, his father denounces him to the Court of the Holy Inquisition and one of his friends tells him what happened in Cuautitlán in that state.

Works

Casa de José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi en Mixcoac.

Home where Fernández de Lizardi died, Historic Center of Mexico City

• El Pensador Mexicano (1812), newspaper.
• The Periquillo Sarniento (1816).
• The Quixotita and her cousin (1818).
• Sad nights and joyful day (1818).
• Life and facts of the famous gentleman Don Catrín de la Fachenda (1832).
• The sad of Altamirano (1822).