Álvaro Enrigue’s Now I Surrender Is a Celebration of Apache Resistance

The Mexican novelist Álvaro Enrigue has a flair for bringing historical figures to life in fresh, unforgettable ways. In You Dreamed of Empires (2024), the emperor Moctezuma stalks his palace in 1519 Tenochtitlan—today’s Mexico City—in a fog of psychedelic-induced delirium, glammed-out like an Aztec David Bowie. In his latest work, Now I Surrender (out last month), the Apache war shaman Geronimo takes center stage, an incandescent presence from his first appearance as a young boy until his ultimate surrender, in his late fifties, in 1886. He is electric, tightly-coiled; even later in life, he can freeze you in his fierce gaze. “Geronimo is all turbulence,” Enrigue writes. “He’s like nitroglycerin: you touch him and he explodes.”

Despite its title, Now I Surrender is a celebration of Apache defiance and resistance, and the last vestiges of “an enormous world full of wonders.” (Geronimo’s full statement to U.S. General Nelson Miles was even more eloquent in its terseness: “Once I moved like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all.”) To talk to Enrigue about Apachería—that vast swath of land straddling Mexico and the U.S. that was home to various Apache clans in the 1800s—is to watch him transformed, his inner child awakened. Voluble and irrepressible, he thrills at the mention of Apache giants like Mangas Colorado, Cochise, Geronimo, and Nana.

It’s a fascination, he says, that has been with him since he was young. “As a nine-year-old, I just loved the image of Cochise never surrendering, and Mangas Colorado defeating—again and again and again—the Mexican army,” he explains excitedly, as we sit in the cavernous rotunda of the National Museum of the American Indian in downtown New York. Growing up in Mexico City in the 1970s, he says, he was exposed to the richness of the indigenous past, visiting temples, ruins, and archives with his family. But he was also aware that, not far from the capital, Mayan culture was still very much “alive and kicking.”

The lore of the Apaches, and their fraught relationship to Mexico, struck a special chord with him. Apachería seemed almost mythic, “an Atlantis, an in-between country,” Enrigue writes, “where Sonora, Chihuahua, Arizona, and New Mexico meet today.” The Mexican government—despite viewing the Apaches as citizens—were particularly brutal with them, a part of their history the Mexicans have preferred to overlook. As Enrigue writes: “The gringos may have been cruel to the Apaches, but Mexicans were left motherless by what we did to them, and we remain motherless. We’ve forgotten them, and the hole in our memory diminishes us.”

Rather than rehash American myths of the West, Enrigue set out to explore its Mexican angle. “This is a story that has only been told from the Rio Grande up,” he argues, “yet it involved, to our shame, the Mexicans as well. A fundamental part of writing this novel for me was to write from the Mexican point-of-view, which was the only legitimate place I can stand to tell this story.”

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Enrigue’s books, of course, are never straightforward historical fiction. They’re percussive experiments—they sizzle and pop with pivotal encounters—blending past and present in looping narratives, often with authorial intrusions. “I’m always interested in leaving a mark of who wrote the novel and where and under what conditions,” he says. “I think it’s the honest thing to do.” Critics have called his books “deliciously gonzo,” “bawdy,” and “brainspinning.”

Now I Surrender is no exception. The novel careens across three main storylines and is populated by a bustling cast of characters, both real and imagined, culminating in an operatic crescendo (the last section is entitled “Aria”). One narrative follows a Mexican Lieutenant Colonel named José Maria Zuloaga—a real historical figure—who is in pursuit of a band of Apaches that have abducted a local woman, Camilla (invented), from the border town of Janus in 1836 (“when Mexico was a nine-year-old republic and the United States was a nervous throb on the far side of Texas”). Zuloaga heads up a ragtag troupe—including a zarzuela singer in a nun’s habit, twin convicts, and a dance instructor—that resembles more “a trapeze act,” as Enrigue writes.

Enrigue’s books, of course, are never straightforward historical fiction. They’re percussive experiments—they sizzle and pop with pivotal encounters—blending past and present in looping narratives, often with authorial intrusions.

Interwoven with their mission are two other journeys: the final march of Geronimo’s dwindling band of followers in the days before their surrender at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona; and a modern-day writer’s roadtrip across the Southwest with his “scattered, split-up family” while researching a book on Apachería. Will his children be as moved as he is? Will the stories of Geronimo and others resonate, even though traces of their past have long been erased?

“By then Apachería was just a blank spot in the desert,” Enrigue writes. “No one remembered it was ever there. No one remembers it now, America. And that is all.”

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Now I Surrender, originally published in Spanish in 2018, had its own winding path to publication in English. Enrigue, who teaches Latin American Literature at Hofstra University, is  a slow and chaotic writer by his own admission, squeezing in writing bursts between parental and petcare duties (he has four children, four cats, and a dog). “I’m not worrying about literature,” he chuckles. “I’m worrying about dinner, about helping with homework. I have a very small window to write.”

In any case, Enrigue treated the English version of Now I Surrender as a “second opportunity,” and worked closely with translator Natasha Wimmer to create something new—not exactly a different novel, but one slightly rearranged. Meanwhile, during the pandemic, he had also written a new book, shorter and more streamlined. His publishers thought it made more sense to release You Dreamed of Empires as the follow-up to his 2016 novel, Sudden Death, and wait on the denser Now I Surrender.

Enrigue agreed. The book was the culmination of decades of obsessive reading and research—why rush it now? He saw the three books as a cycle, “a solid piece of work that speaks about the state of my soul in a period of time.” They were all written after moving back to the U.S. from Mexico more than a decade ago (he had done graduate work at the University of Maryland in the early 2000s), and are filled with a sense of “nostalgia for lives and worlds left behind.” How they are linked thematically, Enrigue admits, is “almost a Freudian question.”

Yet what is clear from all of them is the depth Enrigue brings to his historical research. For Now I Surrender, he says, he combed through countless archives in the U.S. and Mexico; hunted down small, academic titles across the Southwest; poured over old diaries, letters, and newspaper articles. He even managed to interview descendants of the book’s actors. He researched “like crazy,” he exclaims. “I like writing, but I like doing research even more!”

As for the book’s structure and parallel storylines, Enrigue cites the influence of writers like Cristina Rivera Garza and especially Roberto Bolaño, who he sees as a bridge to the formative Latin Boom writers of the 1960s and 70s. “We grew up in the church of the Boom, this world in which Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa were like priests of a religion,” Enrigue says. And though he claims he doesn’t “worship at the temple of Bolaño,” he admits to being “marked with fire” by his work, particularly The Savage Detectives. It is yet another connection he shares with Wimmer, the leading translator of Bolaño: “We are all branded!”

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Interlude: About midway through our conversation, a stampede of schoolchildren pass through the museum’s corridors on their way to an exhibit entitled “Infinity of Nations: Art and History in the Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian.” (Alvaro’s quick critique: the artifacts ignore the living indigenous cultures in Latin America.) The children are giggly and boisterous, their voices ricocheting off the walls around us. Enrigue delights in their energy, laughing: “Now you’ll also have their voices on your recording, and they’ll live forever!”

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The figure of the writer in Now I Surrender, in many ways a mirror of Enrigue, is partially a fictional creation, too. He serves a structural purpose, Enrigue explains, offering a tool to understand the arc of the lives of Geronimo, Cochise and others. “This book is made up of so many testimonies and needed someone to embody the larger frame of the Apache Nation and its conflicts,” he says. “There are parts that are clearly me, but once you’re in the machine of a novel everything is part of the work. Of course, I see the faces of my children. Of course, it’s somehow an homage to them, their amazing freedom, their wonderful disconnection from reality—during most of the trip, we were playing pirates and not Apaches.”

Enrigue’s own roadtrip across the haunted landscape of the Southwest was transformative, he says, coming after so many years of studying the history of the Apaches and Apachería. Together with his family, he visited the graves of Nana and Geronimo (in the Oklahoma concentration camp where he died in 1909), Cochise Pass in Arizona, and other meaningful spots along the way. “For me, it was like a religious experience, it was hallowed ground,” says Enrigue, who came to see the trip as an exercise in atonement and communion. “As a Mexican, it was a way to say, ‘I’m sorry.’ I felt I just needed to go those those places, especially those cemeteries, and say, ‘Nana, I wish I had known you. I would have been on your side, my children would have been on your side.’”

Ultimately, his children fell under the spell of the Apache stories as well, and were compelled to call out their names into the echoing canyons—a chicken-skin moment captured in the book’s final pages. “Not all the stories of the trip to the Southwest are true,” Enrigue confesses. “But the shouting is real: Geronimo, you will not be forgotten! That is real. And as I’m telling you now, I’m about to cry again because it was so beautiful. Cochise, you will not be forgotten!”

Enrigue pauses, before breaking into a sly, self-effacing grin. “I’m a lousy father—I cook awful meals, I fall asleep while helping with homework—but at least I did one thing right on that trip.” And that is all.