A Silent Fury

The El Bordo Mine Fire

De: Yuri Herrera

Narrado por: Armando Durán

On March 10, 1920, in Pachuca, Mexico, the Compañía de Santa Gertrudis - the largest employer in the region, and a subsidiary of the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company - may have committed murder.

The alert was first raised at six in the morning: A fire was tearing through the El Bordo mine. After a brief evacuation, the mouths of the shafts were sealed. Company representatives hastened to assert that “no more than 10” men remained inside the mineshafts, and that all 10 were most certainly dead. Yet when the mine was opened six days later, the death toll was not 10 but 87. And there were seven survivors.

A century later, acclaimed novelist Yuri Herrera has reconstructed a workers’ tragedy at once globally resonant and deeply personal: Pachuca is his hometown. His work is an act of restitution for the victims and their families, bringing his full force of evocation to bear on the injustices that suffocated this horrific event into silence.

©2018 Yuri Herrera. English-language translation © 2020 by Lisa Dillman (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing

I have no prior info

I feel like the read was in 1 ear and out of the other.

It's a non-fiction read about the El Bordo Mine Fire that happened in 1920 and the coverup that happened after.

I feel like if you have no idea about that history or have any prior knowledge about it, you won't understand a lot of things. I like true crime and history and all but again since I have no info about it or never have heard it maybe that's why it was "meh" for me. And may if I have actually read it instead of listened to it I might have enjoyed it more.

That's all I can say about.