Carlos Monsiváis obituary

The writer, critic and activist Carlos Monsiváis, who has died at the age of 72, made Mexico understandable to Mexicans – or at least helped them laugh about it. He was admired for the intelligence and the intricate ironies of his prose, recognised for his principled support of leftwing causes, and famed for his crumpled appearance and adoration of cats. It is a measure of how popular he was that even the favoured targets of his acerbic wit rushed to include themselves among his admirers upon news of his death. Felipe Calderón, the country's rightwing president, announced: "We Mexicans will miss his critical, reflective and independent vision."

Born in Mexico City just nine years into the 71-year-long rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Monsiváis belonged to a generation of writers that includes Carlos Fuentes and José Emilio Pacheco. He was less well known than them internationally, but arguably even more revered at home. Part of his appeal was the ease with which he entwined highbrow references with frankness, sincerity and a fascination with popular culture. His rejection of airs and graces endeared him further to an audience far wider than the one usually enamoured of the intelligentsia.

His best-known chronicles chart events in the long and slow rise of the civic society that would eventually push the PRI regime to disintegration, such as the 1985 earthquake that killed thousands and spawned a spontaneous solidarity movement in the absence of government action. "Among the ruins we discovered something new, the existence of society," he recalled. "It was a discovery in the most physical sense of the word."

Monsiváis was delighted when the PRI finally fell, through elections won by the opposition in 2000. But it wasn't long before he was lambasting the new rightwing president, Vicente Fox, for stumping the consolidation of democracy in Mexico. Monsiváis was particularly concerned to unmask what he saw as the rolling back of a 150-year-old tradition of strict separation of church and state with the creeping rise of the political influence of the country's Catholic bishops. While Monsiváis was always identified with the left, he could not be relied upon to toe any line there, either. He was an early supporter of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in 1994, but less than a decade later was accusing the movement's balaclava-clad leader, Subcomandante Marcos, of "cheap jokes and radical vanity".

He was a vocal supporter of gay rights, but never discussed his own sexuality in public, keeping his private life to himself apart from the odd reference to an underlying melancholy. "My life is not characterised by an abundance of happy moments," he said after describing the fall of the PRI as one of these. "I have a rather desolate idea about getting up, and about going to bed as well."

Monsiváis's steadfast support of feminism and minority rights was often said to be rooted in his experience of growing up in a Protestant family in an overwhelmingly Catholic country. Reading the Bible introduced him to the subtleties of the written language. His favourite literary genres as a child were detective stories and Greek myths. He would eventually accrue a near-legendary encyclopedic knowledge on almost everything except for sport, which he didn't like. Aside from chronicling the key moments in modern Mexican political and social history, he wrote about the cinematic icon Pedro Infante, analysed the role of enfant terrible 1990s pop star Gloria Trevi and published a biography of the eccentric early 20th-century poet Salvador Novo.

Monsiváis had studied at the faculties of economics and arts and letters at the National Autonomous University of Mexico from 1955 to 1960. He went on to write for almost ever major Mexican newspaper and magazine, but was particularly associated with the pioneering left-leaning magazine Proceso and the daily La Jornada. In his longest-running column, entitled For My Mother Bohemians, he relentlessly exposed the shortcomings of the political elite to the full force of his sarcasm by quoting their words back at them. The column was published first between 1972 and 1987 in the cultural section of the magazine Siempre, which he edited. It was printed in La Jornada from 1989 to 2001, and resurfaced in Proceso in 2006.

Monsiváis's first book, Días de Guardar (Days to Keep, 1971) delved into the student protest movement and the Tlatelolco massacre before the Olympics in 1968. What he didn't write about, he talked about – in endless interviews on radio and television. He was also an avid collector of Mexican kitsch and popular art, much of it displayed at the Estanquillo Museum, in Mexico City, which he helped set up in 2006.

Monsiváis was often interviewed surrounded by the mountains of books and papers that filled his home where he lived alone, aside from a dozen or so cats whom he saddled with characteristically multilayered names. Friends say his favourite was called Mito Genial, which means Brilliant Myth and is a reference to a comment on inflation made by a finance minister in the 1990s. The cat died two days before his owner.

Carlos Monsiváis, writer, born 4 May 1938; died 19 June 2010

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