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159 Chapter 9 Carlos Fuentes Pan-Hispanism in the Age of Multiculturalism I n his search for the sources of Mexican culture and identity, Carlos Fuentes has repeatedly looked toward Spain. This fascination with the madre patria appears in works such as La muerte de Artemio Cruz, a novel about the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath that includes a key chapter set during the Spanish Civil War; Terra nostra, a massively ambitious exploration of the roots of Spanish American culture in sixteenth-century Spain; and Los años con Laura Díaz, a chronicle of twentieth-century Mexican history that focuses attention on the numerous links between Spain and Mexico. Indeed, even though Fuentes has gained fame and provoked controversy as a chronicler of Mexican history and an analyst of the Mexican character, much of his work has been marked by a preoccupation with an identity that is not just Mexican but panHispanic as well. Frederick Pike describes “panhispanismo” (also known as “hispanoamericanismo ” or “hispanismo”) as an intellectual movement founded on the conviction that there exists “a transatlantic family, community, or raza” of Hispanic people that shares “a set of characteristics, of traditions, and value judgments that render [them] distinct from all other people.”1 Pan-Hispanism, which José de Onís argues is an acceptable English equivalent for the Spanish terms “hispanismo ” and “hispanidad,”2 maintains that the central values binding this transatlantic family together originated in Spain and were subsequently transplanted to the New World. Most commentators agree that the ideology of panHispanism emerged in Spain and Spanish America in the wake of the SpanishCuban -American war of 1898. Once Spain had lost its last remaining colonial possessions in the Americas, it ceased to be perceived as an oppressive imperial power. With the political relationship between the two parties no longer a contentious issue, Spain and Spanish America began to pay more attention to their cultural ties.3 At the same time, anxiety about the threat of U.S. imperialism was running high in Latin America; pan-Hispanists responded by raising a cultural bulwark against the United States through the systematic differentiation of Hispanic culture from Anglo-American. Pike explains that pan-Hispanists criticized the United States for its materialism and advocated a specifically Hispanic value system, which “dictated a hierarchically structured society that would preserve social stratification and accord priority status to spiritual and cultural 160 Gunshots at the Fiesta pursuits.”4 The values in question are decidedly conservative and antimodern. This orientation is confirmed by Ricardo Pérez Montfort, who shows that in the Mexico of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, pan-Hispanist ideology was overwhelmingly traditionalist, nationalist, and Catholic in character.5 Given this background, how does one explain the fact that a progressive writer and intellectual such as Fuentes has emerged as one of the most vocal contemporary proponents of the idea of a transnational Hispanic identity? In this chapter, I will examine how Fuentes has taken a discourse with roots in a conservative, pro-Spanish, and Catholic ideology, and adapted it to the needs of the current multiculturalist moment. He does so by developing two different strands within the pan-Hispanist tradition: on the one hand, the view of Hispanic identity as a kind of spiritual antidote to the materialism and soullessness of modernity (of which the United States is the prime example); on the other, the emphasis on Hispanic culture as a culture of mixture or mestizaje. But, in weaving together these two strands, Fuentes ends up producing an ambiguous picture of Hispanic identity. While he promotes the Hispanic tradition as a hospitable, open-ended, and pluralistic phenomenon that provides a model for identity formation in the age of multiculturalism, he also emphasizes the distance separating Hispanics from Anglo Americans. He celebrates the long-standing Hispanic embrace of cultural and racial mixing, yet at the same time argues that Hispanics can only remain themselves if they adhere to what he identifies as a set of antimodern traditions that mark them off as a separate ethnic group. To grasp the oddity of such a position, one need only observe that the rise of what Fuentes calls “la hispanidad norteamericana” [Hispanic USA] constitutes the most striking demographic and cultural transformation of the last couple of decades on the American continent.6 And while he does not ignore the cultural mixing that flows from this encounter, Fuentes ends up seeing it more as an occasion for Hispanic cultural self-affirmation than as an opportunity for...

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