ESSAY text by SIMON LIBERATI artwork by ROBERT NAVA In 1938, in a brilliant, inspired, hallucinatory, and voluptuous article, André Breton set down his “Memory of Mexico,” following a visit to Leon Trotsky that same year. His prose is flowing and lyrical, less tightly corseted than usual. I believe the article was published in the magazine Minotaure, illustrated with photographs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Breton’s trip to Mexico — in the company of Jacqueline Lamba, mother of his daughter Aube and the inspiration for his novel Mad Love — was the result of a short-lived reconciliation with Antonin Artaud. I have just reread A Voyage to Land of the Tarahumara, and the contrast between Artaud’s madly precise dryness and the decadent velvet of Breton’s recollections casts this imaginary, twice-dreamt Mexico into stark relief. On one side is the sun and sacrifice; on the other, the Surrealist church and half-darkness. In…