Award-winning Mexican novelist and Hofstra University professor Dr. Álvaro Enrigue spent Friday, May 1, 2026, visiting English and Spanish Upper School classes, holding court over lunch with members of the Modern Languages and English departments, and delivering an assembly to the Upper School community.

Throughout his visit, Enrigue discussed his novel, “You Dreamed of Empires,” whose translation by Natasha Wimmer was named one of the New York Times 10 best books of 2024. This novel reimagines the 1519 arrival of Hernán Cortés in Tenochtitlan (modern-day Mexico City) through a hallucinatory, “colonial revenge” lens.

In Devina Bhalla’s Literary Voices class, Enrigue spoke at length about the beauty and complexity of the fractious indigenous society that the Spaniards encountered upon their arrival in Tenochtitlán. In the tertulia he held with Matt Zealand’s AP Spanish Literature class, he discussed his desire to demystify the indigenous politics of Mexico and how, when he writes fiction, he is “...like a child, breaking everything.” In his introduction of Enrigue to the Upper School students and faculty, Zealand noted that Enrigue embraces the idea that fiction is “a game” — a serious game, to be sure, “with its own system of rules that allows us to imagine different worlds” and that, above all, he seems to be having a “a hell of a good time writing his novels.”

In his assembly address, Enrigue described his “love story” with the ancient Mexica city of Tenochtitlán while reading a passage in which a Spanish character from the novel wanders through the city for the first time. In both his assembly and classroom visits, Enrigue underlined that he felt passionate about the idea of writing a novel in which readers could “see this city.”

The English translation of Enrigue’s 2018 novel, “Now I Surrender,” came out in March of this year, and has been referred to as a “baroque, postmodern anti-Western.”

Zealand noted in his introduction that as we read Enrigue’s work, we ponder moments in which everything might have been different. In so doing, we laugh, we think, we empathize, and we also dream, perhaps, about how things might be different in the future.