Mexican novelists have never shied away from tackling iconic moments and personalities from their history. One need look no further than the novel of the Mexican Revolution which continues alive and well in recent works such as Pedro Angel Palou's Zapata (2006) and Paco Ignacio Taibo II's Pancho Villa: una biografia narrativa (2007). Like Zapata and Villa, another larger-than-life personality in Mexican history is Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, though for all the wrong reasons: he is mainly remembered for his loss of Texas and other northern Mexican territories to the U.S. in the nineteenth century. This infamous general and frequent president is the focus of Enrique Serna's novel El seductor de la patria (1999). (1) In this sprawling tome replete with dozens of characters and historical details Serna allows Santa Anna to speak in the first person and to defend his many questionable actions. Serna's choice of the first person mode is cleverly purposeful since the real Santa Anna wrote an autobiography, Mi historia militar y politica (1810-1874) (published posthumously in 1905), in which he mounts a self-defense of his questionable actions. As I will show in this study, El seductor de la patria dialogues directly and subversively with the real Santa Anna's autobiography. Julia Kristeva states that a dialogic relationship between two texts occurs when "any text is the absorption and transformation of another" (37). In this novel Serna absorbs, transforms and thereby undermines the real Santa Anna's autobiography on three levels: first, by using the epistolary mode in the novel to expose the artifice of writing a personalized vision of history and fill in silences in the real Santa Anna's autobiography; second, by inserting into the novel the voices of many other characters from both the public and private spheres of Santa Anna's life who offer contrary perspectives, thus making the reader skeptical of the veracity of the general's words; third, Serna further hones his critique of Santa Anna through a series of comic and often parodic love affairs where this Mexican general comes across as a risible don Juan.
