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Lolian asked this question about The Murmur of Bees:
Why are the depictions of the characters who are Indigenous so racist?
Sofía Segovia Hello! As the author, I can assure you this novel is only intended to be historically, culturally and sociologically factual. And of all the character…moreHello! As the author, I can assure you this novel is only intended to be historically, culturally and sociologically factual. And of all the characters only Nana Reja is referred to by the color of her skin, but that soon is dispelled, priorities set straight and the Nana is welcomed into the family fold. And her color is precisely what makes her so special in my imagination: she becomes a mythological mother earth.

Mexico is a very big, diverse country, and it cannot be told as a single story. The history if the northeast couldn't be more different than that of the south. In 1910, most people in the northeast (even field, mine, factory or oil workers) were white. Most people in the south were indigenous. Nobody can change that fact but this is not what The Murmur of Bees is about.
The struggle depicted in the Murmur of Bees is not race against race, but that of ideology versus ideology, that of one reality in the north in contrast with the other in the south. This novel shows the contrast of two historical TRUTHS: a very forward social and labour justice in the northeast and an ancient and painful social and labour injustice in the south. This is why I couldn't write Espiricueta or the Morales in a different light. Espiricueta carries ancestral pain and rancor; by their reality, the Morales are not equipped to really understand him, to their detriment.
These two truths clashed in the northeast. The southern truth invaded, prevailed and is still told today as the Mexican SINGLE story. In the Mexican Revolution, the people whom the Morales represent, lost their lives, their roots, their lands to the agrarian ideology of the south, represented here by Espiricueta. The story of the people of the northeast —their ideology or approach to social justice— has never been told as part of official Mexican history. They were big losers in the war they didn't fight. But Mexico lost too: it lost the northeastern approach to laboral justice (that by far surpassed that in the US at the time), and brought on an exodus that still goes on even today: from the fields to the cities, and from the fields to the US (and its very telling that historically, most Mexican fieldworkers in the US were/are NOT form the northeast of Mexico). Even today, I doubt indigenous people in the south have the same social and labour justice as workers did in the northeast IN 1910; hence the very southern Zapatista Movement.
Sometimes we can understand the present if we understand at the past.(less)
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The Murmur of Bees
by Sofía Segovia (Goodreads Author)
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