José
Agustín

José Agustín Ramírez Gómez — known to readers across the Spanish‑speaking world simply as José Agustín — was one of the most original, irreverent and influential voices in twentieth‑century Mexican literature. Novelist, short story writer, essayist, screenwriter, dramatist and translator, he wrote with the rhythm of rock and roll and the slang of the street, and in doing so he gave a generation of young Mexicans their own reflection in the mirror of literature.

He was born on 19 August 1944, a child of Acapulco who carried Guerrero in his bones for the rest of his life. As a teenager he travelled to Cuba to teach reading and writing during the post‑revolution literacy campaign, and on his return to Mexico City he joined the legendary writing workshop of Juan José Arreola. There, at just nineteen, he wrote La tumba (1964), a brief and provocative novel told from the viewpoint of an upper‑class Mexican teenager. Two years later came De perfil (1966), a fast, dazzling, three‑day plunge into a young man's mind that drew comparisons to early James Joyce and confirmed him as a writer of extraordinary gift.

Together with Gustavo Sainz, Parménides García Saldaña and others, he became the central figure of La Onda — "The Wave" — the literary current that ushered in colloquial speech, rock culture, the experiences of youth, and a deeply iconoclastic spirit. "We were able to change the language," he once said of his generation, "with a totally new spirit and with a great sense of optimism, a sense of humour and irreverence, and a critical attitude toward society."

His life was as restless as his prose. He studied classical literature at UNAM, film direction at the CUEC, and dramaturgy at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. He directed the film Ya sé quién eres (te he estado observando) in 1970 and adapted novels by José Revueltas and Gabriel García Márquez for the screen. He spent seven months in Lecumberri prison in 1971, an experience that fed the autobiographical El rock de la cárcel. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright scholar, and taught at the universities of Denver, California–Irvine and New Mexico.

Across six decades he produced a remarkable body of work — novels including Se está haciendo tarde, Ciudades desiertas and Cerca del fuego; the monumental three‑volume essay Tragicomedia Mexicana, his biting chronicle of Mexican political and cultural life from 1940 to 1994; the cultural histories La nueva música clásica and La contracultura en México; plays, screenplays, and translations of Hemingway, Carlos Castaneda and James Purdy. He was awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura Juan Ruiz de Alarcón in 1993 and the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes in 2011, Mexico's highest cultural honour.

In 2009, after a serious fall from a stage at a film festival in Puebla, he spent twenty‑two days in intensive care. He returned home to Cuautla, in Morelos, where he lived quietly with his family for the rest of his life. He died there on 16 January 2024, aged seventy‑nine.

What José Agustín leaves behind is more than a shelf of books. He leaves behind a way of writing — fast, funny, tender, defiant, full of the music of how people actually speak — that opened a door for every Mexican writer who came after him. Que en paz descanse, maese de la onda.