Biography, Bibliography, History

Mónica Nepote was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, in 1970.



She studied Spanish-American literature at the University of Guadalajara.



For a number of years she worked as head news editor for Channel 22 television, where she later wrote the visual arts portion of the telemagazine “Luz verde” on the same channel.

She has published a number of books and chapbooks including Islario (Cuadernos de filodecaballos; Guadalajara, 2001) and Trazos de noche herida (Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro, CONACULTA: México, D.F., 1993). Her poetry, essays, chronicles and literary criticism have appeared in El Ángel, Biblioteca de México, Crónica Dominical, La Jornada Semanal, Nexos, Nostromo, Ovaciones en la Cultura, and Sábado.

She has twice won the National Fund Award for Culture and Art in the area of poetry. In 2002 she received the Efraín Huerta National Poetry Prize offered by the state of Tamaulipas. She lives in Mexico City, where she teaches poetry workshops and works as a freelance writer and art critic.

Translations of her poems into English have been published in the online version of Exquisite Corpse, and in the journals Bitter Oleander and Rhizome, as well as in the anthology Sin puertas visibles: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women (ed. and trans. Jen Hofer, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003).

Events in Mexican history around the time of the publication of Trazos de noche herida (1993), Nepote's first book:

NAFTA & The Zapatista movement (January 1, 1994)

NAFTA's Impact on Mexican farmers

Several studies have concluded that NAFTA has destroyed hundreds of thousands of agricultural jobs in Mexico. An influx of imports has lowered the prices for Mexican corn by more than 70% since 1994. As a result, of the the 15 million Mexicans who depend on the crop, many can no longer afford basic health care and the labor demanded of them has been increased. NAFTA has been criticized for allowing US agricultural subsidies to artificially depress corn prices. In 2000 alone, U.S. government subsidies to the corn sector totaled $10.1 billion, a figure ten times greater than the total Mexican agricultural budget that year.

Other studies reject NAFTA as the force responsible for depressing the incomes of poor corn farmers, citing the trend's existence more than a decade before NAFTA's existence, an increase in maize production after NAFTA went into effect in 1994, and the lack of a measurable impact on the price of Mexican corn due to subsidized corn coming into Mexico from the U.S., though they agree that the destruction of U.S. agricultural subsidies would aid Mexican farmers.