A Silent Fury

On March 10, 1920, in Pachuca, Mexico, the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company - the largest employer in the region, and known simply as the Company - may have been guilty of murder.

The alert was first raised at six in the morning: a fire was tearing through the El Bordo mine. After a short evacuation, the mouths of the shafts were sealed. Company representatives hastened to assert that no more than ten men remained in the shafts at the time of their closure, and Company doctors hastened to proclaim them dead. The El Bordo stayed shut for six days.

When the mine was opened, in the gallery not xxx yards from the mouth of the shaft, was a sea of charred bodiesmen who had made it to the door, only to find it shut. The final death toll was not ten, but eighty-seven. And there were seven survivors.

Now, a century later, acclaimed novelist Yuri Herrera has carefully reconstructed a workers tragedy at once globally resonant and deeply personal: Pachuca is his home town. His sensitive and deeply humanizing work is an act of restitution for the victims and their families, bringing his full force of evocation to bear on the injustices that suffocated this horrific event into silence.