‘Silence Is Not the Absence of History’: A Review of A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire
A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire
By Yuri Herrera
Translated by Lisa Dillman
June 2020
ISBN: 978-1911508786
120 pages
Reviewed by Elizabeth Gonzalez James
One hundred years ago, eighty-seven men died when a fire raged through the El Bordo mine in Pachuca, Mexico. Many down in the shafts initially didn’t believe there was a fire, assuming the smoke to be powder dust from a recent blast. The fire was noticed at 4:30 in the morning...or 5:00...or 6:00. No alarm bells rang, even though they were later found to be in perfect working order. The miners who managed to escape said the fire started in one of the 200-meter levels...or maybe the 300. Every eyewitness account that mine administrators bothered to write down contradicted the others. A few hours after the fire was reported, the American officials who operated El Bordo as a subsidiary of the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company were confident that only ten men were left behind down in the shafts, and they ordered the entrances sealed shut. How they arrived at the number ten was never explained—just one of many mysteries and confusions left in the wake of the tragedy. When the mine was reopened six days later, investigators found not only eighty-seven bodies, but seven survivors as well.
In A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire, acclaimed novelist Yuri Herrera sifts through a century’s worth of lies, coverups, inconsistencies, and silence to discover what really happened the morning of March 10th, 1920 and restore dignity to the men and their families in the form of a thorough investigation. But as Herrera and his readers discover, the truth is not so easily surfaced.
Aside from conflicting accounts given by eyewitnesses—who were understandably more concerned about escaping the mine alive than determining the exact location of smoke and heat—it is clear from the evidence assembled by Herrera that a coverup as to the nature, location, and cause of the fire was immediately undertaken by mine administrators. J.F. Berry, the American superintendent of the company, was adamant in the first few hours after the fire was discovered that only ten men had perished because he had seen the last man exit the mine himself. This contradicts estimates from his own subordinates that many more men were trapped below, but Berry apparently did not pay this information any mind. He also stated to reporters that the fire was already extinguished, despite the fact that carbide canisters could be heard exploding below. And despite that Berry assured reporters the fire was already out, he announced that they would be hermetically sealing the El Bordo shaft, just to be safe. To what end Berry made these confident and erroneous pronouncements, Herrera leaves unclear.
It is this frustrating lack of evidence and accountability that plagues Herrera as he assembles the fragments of the narrative, and it frustrates us as readers, as most of us are used to being led to neat conclusions. Usually in investigative pieces, clues and justifications are laid like breadcrumbs, and at the end of the trail we find the culprit. Even if we know the villain got away with his crimes, there is catharsis in being able to point our fingers and indict. Cold-case investigators often speak about wanting to grant posthumous peace to victims, as though the assignation of blame can quiet a disturbed spirit. But what if the culprit is capitalism? The state? Postcolonialism? Herrera asserts that the eighty-seven men who died in the fire were murdered, but he rests the blame on so many shoulders that it is unsurprising a rigorous investigation was never conducted at the time of the fire. Who must be punished when everyone is a bad actor?
On March 12th, investigators unsealed one of the entrances to the mine, but the smoke was so thick it was clear that the opening had reinvigorated the fire, and they quickly resealed the entrance before attempting to reenter four days later. In the short time they were inside however, they found forty bodies near the entrance. Men had still been trying to escape as this mine entrance was being sealed on March 10th. One reporter from Excélsior who was on the scene described the bodies arrayed in such a way that one can guess at the miners’ horrific final moments: “the stiff arms of some raised to the heavens as though begging for mercy; other bodies looked to be kneeling; those farther away looked to have lost their lives while scratching at the walls, searching for a manway to save them.” But despite witnessing the carnage firsthand, this same reporter is quick to divert blame from the mine company: “If they are guilty of neglect, which is not thought to be the case, they will be forced to pay a fine and to compensate the bereaved. In fact, the management has already spontaneously offered to do so.” He also takes the venomously elitist position that the miners themselves held their lives in little regard: “Scads of workers coming and going stared at me in surprise, as though wondering, ‘Does the death of a few men really merit sending a journalist all the way from Mexico City?’” Manipulating public opinion appeared to be an immediate priority, though at whose behest we can only guess.
Apparently in response to the dangerous conditions encountered by the first men who’d entered the mine on March 12th, the district judge overseeing the government investigation ordered the mining company to disinfect El Bordo before investigators would reattempt to tour the damage, an outrageous condition in what was essentially a criminal inquiry. And so when the experts entered on March 22nd, they found everything clean and in working order. Nothing suspicious, nothing out of place. The official inspector, José Aurelio García, commissioner of the Ministry of Industry, Commerce, and Labor, was tasked with writing the government report, but as he only saw the mine after it had been scrubbed and repaired, after the bodies had been removed along with anything evidentiary or incriminating, his conclusions are dubious. Herrera writes, “A whole series of authorities had laid the ground; they and he had both been tasked with translating the vestiges of the fire into a language suited to the construction of an innocuous version of it.”
Foreign investment in Mexico’s mines accelerated rapidly under the long regime of late-nineteenth century president, Porfirio Díaz, a man who expropriated vast swaths of his countrymen’s land and sold it to American interests and corporate entities. American investment in Mexican infrastructure was seen as a quick way to modernize the country, as well as a boon to Mexican elites who could line their own pockets with bribes and commissions. But as Herrera shows, the comfortable relationship between the American mining company and the Mexican government was a further impediment to uncovering the causes of the fire.
The Mexican government was not only not interested in conducting a thorough investigation; in Herrera’s account, it never had the ability to even do so. Weighing the claims of disenfranchised and uneducated miners against the full pressure of a self-sustaining sphere of elites, it is clear justice was never going to be served. Five months after beginning his investigation, García “requested that the case be dismissed, since as per the report it was impossible to determine the cause of the fire and there was, therefore no crime to prosecute and no person who might be held criminally responsible.” No cause means no crime means no criminal—it’s a particularly disquieting chain of logic.
Mining companies the world over have an abysmal record when it comes to worker safety and labor rights. My own great-grandfather was on strike from the Calumet & Hecla Mining Company in Michigan in 1913 when seventy-three striking miners and their families (including fifty-nine children) were killed at a Christmas Eve party when anti-union allies of mine management shouted, “Fire!” into the crowded building and incited a stampede. Investigations over what has come to be known as the “Italian Hall Disaster” were scanty, and no one was ever punished for their involvement, least of all the mine company. Mexico is not exceptional in its acquiescence to business interests over its own citizens.
So with no cause, no crime, and no criminal, is A Silent Fury an investigation or an elegy? It is a little of both. It is also an exorcism, one with a particularly personal meaning for Herrera. “I am from Pachuca,” Herrera writes, “and I still don’t know what this unspeakable crime—and those before it, and those that followed—did to us, but there’s something there.” Reading the ways in which lies were accepted as facts, contradictions ignored as a matter of course, and officials failed to grant the citizens under their jurisdiction even the barest bit of human decency, it is tempting to draw parallels with our present time. What makes the book all the more unsettling is how universal it feels, and how incomplete. As Herrera states in his introduction, silence is the enemy of truth: “Silence is not the absence of history, it’s a history hidden beneath shapes that must be deciphered.” What Herrera has brought out of the depths and into the sunlight is calculating, hard-hearted, and cowardly. We may only hope that this history will not be repeated, that faced with the cruelest human impulses, we may choose to do better in the future. It is but a small hope.
Born in Actopan, Mexico, in 1970, Yuri Herrera studied Politics in Mexico, Creative Writing in El Paso and took his PhD in literature at Berkeley. His first novel to appear in English, Signs Preceding the End of the World, was published to great critical acclaim in 2015 and included in many best-of-the-year lists, including The Guardian's Best Fiction and NBC News’s Ten Great Latino Books, going on to win the 2016 Best Translated Book Award. He is currently teaching at Tulane University, in New Orleans.
Elizabeth Gonzalez James’s (@unefemmejames) stories and essays have appeared in the Ploughshares Blog, The Idaho Review, The Rumpus and elsewhere, and have received multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. Her debut novel, MONA AT SEA, was a finalist in the 2019 SFWP Literary Awards judged by Carmen Maria Machado, and is forthcoming, Summer 2021, from Santa Fe Writers Project. Originally from South Texas, Elizabeth now lives with her family in Oakland, California. Learn more at elizabethgonzalezjames.com.