Text vs Text. The Materiality of the Archive or the Questioning of Capitalism and Violence in Hugo García Manríquez’s Documentary Poetry

Within the recent “archival” and “documentary” turns experienced in the arts, this essay examines the interaction of documents and poetry in Hugo García Manríquez’s documentary work. Focusing on Anti-Humboldt. Una lectura del Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte (2014), a bilingual artifact composed entirely of selectively extracted NAFTA passages, the poem reveals the treaty’s contradictions: historically, Mexico’s full immersion into neoliberalism; socially, the intensification of its diasporic condition. By resemanticizing the document, the work exposes these violent tensions, enacting a social and political resistance that repoliticizes poetic language while confronting readers with a textual battlefield that mirrors the rift between society, capital, and language.