A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire
About this audiobook
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 ten” men remained inside the mineshafts, and that all ten were most certainly dead. Yet when the mine was opened six days later, the death toll was not ten, but eighty-seven. 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.
Ratings and reviews
About the author
Yuri Herrera, born in Actopan, Mexico, is an acclaimed and award-winning author. His Signs Preceding the End of the World won the Best Translated Book Award in 2016 and was included in many best books of the year lists, including the London Guardian’s Best Fiction and NBC News’s Ten Great Latino Books. His first novel, Kingdom Cons, won the 2004 Premio Binacional de Novela Joven and, when published in Spain won the Premio Otras Voces, Otros Ámbitos, being considered the best work of fiction published in Spain by a jury of 100 people, including editors, journalists and cultural critics. He studied politics in Mexico, creative writing in El Paso, and took his PhD in literature at Berkeley. He teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Lisa Dillman is a translator from Spanish and Catalan and a lecturer at Emory University.
Armando Durán has appeared in films, television, and regional theaters throughout the West Coast. For the last decade he has been a member of the resident acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In 2009 he was named by AudioFile as Best Voice in Biography and History for his narration of Che Guevara. A native Californian, he divides his time between Los Angeles and Ashland, Oregon.
