Fuentes Fronterizo

Fuentes Fronterizo DebraA. Castiüo is a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and Professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where she aho serves as Director of the Latin American Studies Program. She specializes in contemporary Hispanic literature, women's studies, and post-coknial literary theory. She is author of The Translated World: A Postmodern Tour of Libraries in Literature (Fkrida State UP, 1984), Talking Back Strategies for a Latin American Feminist literary Criticism (Cornell UP, 1992), and translator of Ferderico Campbell's Tijuana: Stories on die Border (U of California Press, 1994). Her most recent book is Easy Women: Sex and Gender in Modern Mexican Fiction (U of Minnesota Press, 1998). While Carlos Fuentes has always been an at tentive and prolific commentator on U.S.Mexico relations, until the mid-nineties his published works reflected little direct engagement with border issues. It is not surprising, given the dramatic events impacting bodi Mexico's northern border (especially the tensions and recent legislation concerning migrant flow to the U.S.) and its southern one (the 1994 Zapatista uprising in the southern border state of Chiapas timed to coincide widi die implementation ofthe Nordi American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA]), that Fuentes would in recent years focus his creative eye on national identity at the site of its greatest pressure. It is past time, he hints, for central Mexico to turn its attention to die previously ignored fringes of national culture so as to interrogate both the nations recent past and its future prospects. In a series of articles written in 1994, some of the more important of which have been reprinted in Nuevo tiempo mexicano, Fuentes repeatedly expresses his concern about U.S. economic, cultural, and political inroads into Mexico while reiterating his support for NAFTA and die need for Mexico to integrate itself into a global economy. Fuentes negotiates this difficult balancing act by assuring his readers that Mexico is well positioned to deploy native creativity in die service of change, while maintaining pride in national sovereignty. Written at approximately the same time, die conclusion to his sweeping overview of Latin American culture since Columbus, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 4, 2000 160 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies El espejo enterrrado, phrases his call to action in more measured, elder-statesman-like tones: En medio de la ctisis, la América Latina se transforma y se mueve [...] mediante elecciones y movimientos de masas, porque sus hombres y mujeres están cambiando y moviéndose. [...] Tal es la polÃ-tica de la movilización social peimanente, como la llama el escritor mexicano Carlos Monsiváis. (Espejo 387) It is this question of constant movement and change as it impacts on a strong national identity that most exercises Fuentes' inquiries in Frontera de cristal as well. In both his fictional and non-fictional works, Fuentes has focused intensely on the question of how to define an authentic national culture within the parameters of a politically-circumscribed entity: what he calls "la nación legal." In his fictions, these debates typically ciystallize around a strong male figure. Thus, his Artemio Cruz served famously to describe the mid-century corruption of the Revolutionary spirit into a quasi-global industrial enterprise. Similarly, Fuentes himself notes that Cristóbal Nonato presciendy foresaw the central government's implication in the corruption and narcotraffic scandals of 1994 ("la literatuta fant ástica latinoamericana tiene un problema y es que se vuelve literatura realista en unos cuantos años" Tiempo 76-77). By a natutal extension of his double role as fiction writer and political commentator, Fuentes' immediate response to the uprising in Chiapas was to argue its import in both national political and literary terms. His early articles on the topic discuss the Zapatista revolurion in the context of other revolutionary actions in 1712, 1868, and 1910 as well as in parallel to fictions by Juan Rulfo and Gabriel GarcÃ-a Márquez. Likewise, in his early articles on Chiapas he refers patronizingly to charismatic spokesman Marcos as a revolutionary-cum-culture critic "[quien] ha leÃ-do más a Carlos Monsiváis que a Carlos Marx" {Tiempo 116,126). If it is...