Shafted – A Mexican Tale

This blog entry introduces you to my novel “Shafted – A Mexican Tale” (ISBN 978-3-7528-6610-0). The German version is available under the title “Ausgebufft – Eine mexikanische Erzählung” (ISBN 978-3-7528-5447-3).

It is not like most other novels with the word “Shafted” in the title a soft or hardcore porno novel as some people had assumed as I found out recently. That word has different connotations not always related to sex. When you tell your friends that your boss shafted you, it is quite certain that you don’t mean you were told to drop your pants, lean over the desk, and relax but that your boss ripped you off, handed you a bad deal. Right? Thus, the connoisseurs of salacious literature were very disappointed when they found out that my book is a story about the exploitation, denigration, and humiliation of miners, mill, and smelter workers kept under slave labour conditions in one the hundreds of illegal mines still in operation in Mexico.

Silver mining was in decline in Mexico for about forty years since the early 1960s but experienced a resurgence of late. Consequently, a number of shady, dubious characters that are knowledgeable of mining and have a low opinion of Mexicans in general and labourers in particular flocked to the Sierra Madre to explore the opportunities of making a fast buck by reviving some of the abandoned mines. What helped in this endeavour was the corruptibility of state officials who handed over the necessary licenses or simply shut their eyes for the appropriate wad of cash. I took that as an example for the mining operation described in my novel.

The exploitation of mine workers is not a recent phenomenon but has been going on for hundreds of years, essentially since the Spanish conquistadors first encountered the rich veins of precious metals in “them thar hills”. I became aware for the first time of the horrendous work conditions in Mexican silver mines during a visit to the mine museum Bocamina de San Ramón in Guanajato, the city in the state of the same name. For some years I believed that what I had seen in the museum was history. But in 2001, when my wife and I worked as teachers in the state of Coahuila, we had discussions and interviews with the relatives of our students on social occasions and we learned from some of the men who had worked in the illegal mines of the day that almost nothing had changed in the labour practices and conditions since the days of yore. The legal mines that are held up as examples of modern mining are often open to visitors while the illegal mines, for obvious reasons, are shut to visitors and inspectors alike. Most of them are shuttered and fenced in like prisons or concentration camps where none of the employees can ever leave until there is a violent uprising that results in the shutting down of the operation.

I took what I had learned from the former mine labourers and some incidents that had been publicised in the international press as the basis for my novel. For verification I sent the pre-publication text to friends in Mexico and received only positive responses. They were particularly gleeful about the ending of the story. But you have to read the book to find out what made them so happy.

Not only my Mexican friends like the story. One of my ardent readers, a literary critic in the UK, provided the following review of the original English version as well as the German rewrite:

Review of T.S.Aguilar’s “Shafted – A Mexican Tale” (German version: “Ausgebufft – Eine mexikanische Erzählung”)

It is a fact that the mining industry is full of inherent risks to life and limb. This applies to the extraction of most precious mineral ores. In North America, particularly as concerns precious metals such as silver, the emphasis, since the advent of NAFTA, has been on outsourcing operations to the south, over the border, down Mexico way.

“Shafted – A Mexican Tale” is an interesting uplifting story of the workers versus the “gringo” directors who decide that they will take advantage of Mexico’s laidback atmosphere where the lure of making a fast buck and the ease with which local and national officials are much easier prey to bribery and corruption has been too great to resist. Of course, the labour forces are not necessarily organised into syndicated trade unions, which makes the appeal of corporate profiteering south of the border ever greater.

The story is told in the first person from a previous victim’s point of view. His interactions with other characters, male and female, pretty soon begin to expose the grinding poverty and deprivation around the mining settlement somewhere north of Mexico City.

There are many topical references to the theme of IT control and monitoring of employees who work for the company – and this is indeed a critical issue concerned with the preservation of privacy in the information age. This issue sits comfortably side-by-side with the concept of inclusivity and diversity – also explored in the novel. For example, the economic necessity, brought on by deprivation through company penny-pinching, causes a partner in a marriage participating in activities normally classed as questionable in order to stay in the black and to keep the family intact. Additionally, the local bordello’s operatives are both male & female and supervised by a Madame whose heroic stance towards the end inspires the reader to respect her entrepreneurial activities in some collaboration, earlier, with the directors of the mine.

This is an original story about the morality of the rich northern economies ruthlessly exploiting for sheer profit the cultural differences of countries below 30 degrees N. This is indeed a dark, but very topical, theme. The author writes with a good sense of humour nevertheless and has succeeded in creating a thoughtful and entertaining book.