Sergio González Rodríguez (26 January 1950 – 3 April 2017) was a Mexican journalist and álezRodríwriter who was best known for his works on the femicides in Ciudad Juárez from the 1990s to the 2000s, such as Huesos en el desierto (Bones in the Desert) and The Femicide Machine. González Rodríguez was a writer who worked in many literary genres, producing literary journalism or crónicas [es], novels, essays, and screenplays for documentaries. His writing was recognized with several awards in Mexico and Spain.
Life
González Rodríguez was born in Mexico City in 1950. His mother died while he was in the third grade and his father abandoned his family, forming another family. González Rodríguez studied modern literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico from 1978 to 1982. Apart from his writing career he was a rock musician, playing bass with some of his brothers in a band named Enigma.
Following the publication of Huesos en el desierto, González Rodríguez was kidnapped via taxi and beaten by assailants who warned him that his work was being "closely monitored"; he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and survived the attack, continuing his journalistic work.
González Rodríguez died in hospital on 3 April 2017 from a heart attack.
Career
González Rodríguez made his career as a critic, narrator, essayist, literary historian and scriptwriter.
After graduating, he worked at the Historical Studies Department of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia from 1985 to 1988. From 1990 to 1992, he was an assistant of the Exhibition Coordination of CONACULTA, working on a multimedia production called "Asamblea de ciudades, la Ciudad de México 1920–1950". His work in journalism includes editing at the Estudio de Salvador Novo A.C. and at the Biblioteca de México magazine from 1993 to 2000, as well as serving as editor and photographer at the Luna Córnea magazine from 1992 to 2002. When the Reforma newspaper was founded in 1993, he joined as editor and columnist for both the regular paper and its cultural supplement, called El Ángel. He has also worked for La Jornada.
González Rodríguez was best known for his investigative work about the femicides in Ciudad Juárez in the 1990s and 2000s. He began as an investigative reporter, making his first trip to the area in 1995 for Reforma. His series of articles served as the basis for the book Huesos en el desierto (Bones in the Desert), published in 2002, which mixes reporting, essay and reflective writing. This work was a finalist at the Lettre Ulysses International Prize of Literary Reporting in Germany and was translated into Italian and French. It influenced other writing on the topic, including a direct collaboration with writer Roberto Bolaño, who was writing the novel 2666 in the early 2000s as well. González Rodríguez blamed the murders of the women on machismo and misogyny in Mexico. This examination of violence led to two other books that form a trilogy on modern violence, El hombre sin cabeza (The Headless Man) and Campo de guerra (Field of Battle) which examine drug-related violence and the role of international politics, respectively.
As a screenwriter, he wrote for the television series México, Siglo XX, and a documentary called Nacional Dominical which he also directed with Roberto Diego Ortega. In 1993 his script for the documentary Los bajos fondos, produced by UNAM, won first prize at the third Festival y Muestra Nacional de Televisión y Video at the Instituciones de Enseñanza Superior en México.
He worked as a professor at the Doctor José María Luis Mora Research Center.
Works
González Rodríguez wrote or co-wrote over twenty books, also contributing to the Anales de Literature Hispanoamericana of Universidad Complutense, Biblioteca de México, El Nacional Dominical, Ínsula (Spain), a supplement of the Siempre! magazine called La Cultura en México, La Jornada Semanal, Letras Libres, Nexos, and the Revista Universidad de México.
His novels included El triángulo imperfecto (2003), El plan Schreber (2004), La pandilla cósmica (2005) and El vuelo (2008). In 2014, he published a novel called El artista adolescente que confundía el mundo con un cómic, which integrated elements of graphic novels and comics into both the literary style and the storyline. Other titles included the essays Los bajos fondos, el antro, la bohemia y el café (1988), El Centauro en el paisaje (1992), De sangre y de sol (2006) and El hombre sin cabeza. He also edited Viajes y ensayos by Salvador Novo (1997).