Gregorio Torres Quintero and His Narrative Work: Towards the Construction of the Literary Heimat of Colima

Abstract

This article examines the figure of Gregorio Torres Quintero and the deployment and instrumentalization of his literary discourse in the process of articulating a narrative and metalinguistic Heimat. It is documented how his approach to the creative and political exercise of literature brings to life a corpus whose voice amplifies the regional qualities and attributes of Colima. This process, beyond the exaltation of regional parameters, establishes Colima as a culturally autonomous region within the broader context of nation-building and the processes that characterized it during key stages of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

To this end, the relevance, and peculiarities of the term Heimat, deeply rooted in German romantic historiography, are explored as a means of approaching his poetic and narrative work. It is argued that, through this, the parameters for the creation of Colima as a literary and historical entity are set. In it, the history of Mexico and the world converge in its literary and geopolitical spheres. Similarly, these are presented as evidence of a unique self-consciousness, nourished, and defined by geographical isolation and a nineteenth-century lettered discourse in conflict with these attributes. Finally, it is posited that Torres Quintero's literature entails a paradoxical proposition: that of regionalism as universalism, a neural point of the nation if considered in the context of what Ignacio Altamirano preached as "national literature" and the romantic genealogy to which Torres Quintero's literature is affiliated.