Heavens on Earth (an excerpt)

In Heavens on Earth, Carmen Boullosa imagines a postapocalyptic world where spoken and written language is banned, memories are obliterated, and history is erased. The novel is narrated through the voices of three translators—Hernando de Rivas, Estela Ruiz, and Lear—who live in three different eras. Narrating from colonial Mexico, Hernando begins to write the history of El Colegio de la Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco in Latin. Five hundred years later, Estela is given Hernando's recently discovered manuscript and begins to translate it into Spanish, interweaving vignettes from her own life, family lore, and Mexican history into alternating sections of her translation. In the fragment presented here, Estela recalls her teenage years in the early 1970s when she and her friends were embracing new ideas about sexual liberation and civil rights and rebelling against what they considered to be repressive, traditional Catholic values

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