Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares: Globilization in Recent Mexican and Chicano Narrative

Chapter One. The Brave New World of Carlos Fuentes’s Cristóbal Nonato

43 Chapter One The Brave New World of Carlos Fuentes’s Cristóbal Nonato A Critique of Mexican Modernity Every true poet is inevitably a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus, but only Columbus succeeded in discovering. The multiplication table existed for centuries before R-13, yet it was only R-13 who found a new Eldorado in the virginal forest of figures. Yevgeny Zamyatin We Since his monumental 1975 novel Terra nostra, the internationally known Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes has evidenced a particular concern with the implications of the 1492 Euro-American encounter for contemporary global culture and society.1 A dozen years later, and some half dozen years before the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, the United States, and Mexico, Fuentes’s Cristóbal Nonato (1987)2 constitutes an early critical assessment of some of the potential effects of globalization on the cultural and economic makeup of both Mexico and the US border region. Fuentes projects his dystopia five years into the future, setting his novel in a historically symbolic 1992, that is, precisely five centuries after the initial contact between America and Europe. Cristóbal Nonato—along with several other Mexican and Chicano novels published during the decade of the 1990s—searches in the periods of the conquest and the colony for the roots of social and economic problems that have impeded the modernization of Mexican society. This novel’s originality resides in its use of the literary dystopia to examine the historical conditions that have hindered Latin American development in light of European and US-inspired efforts to implement Western modernity 44 Chapter One in developing nations. The concurrence of the signing of the NAFTA treaty and the quincentenary of Columbus’s first voyage presents a fruitful juncture for questioning the conditions of Mexican development both because of the importance of the discovery for the emergence of Western modernity and because of the evolution of globalization at the dawn of the new millennium.3 In Cristóbal Nonato, Fuentes engages his reader in a serious reappraisal of the meaning of modernity and its application in postrevolutionary Mexico, posing crucial questions: What is Western modernity and why has it proven so difficult to implement in the two centuries since Mexico’s independence from Spain? And, significantly, what are the possible effects that modernity’s newest embodiment—globalization—might have on Mexico as a nation and on people living in the USMexican border region? In order to scrutinize Mexico’s project of modernity, Fuentes skillfully employs motifs, techniques, and themes associated with the literary dystopia—notably, the critique of the utopian image of the city as the ultimate representation of the national body and an examination of the deleterious effects of industrialization on the environment—and combines these with other concerns such as the role of indigenous communities in the modern nation. As do all the novels discussed in the present study, Cristóbal Nonato subscribes to the dystopian genre as it represents a reevaluation of the concepts of modernity, utopia, and nation as they have been applied to Latin America, depicting a futuristic society negatively affected by the pursuit of an industrial capitalism that ignores the unique historical and cultural composition of Mexico. The rather intricate plot of Cristóbal Nonato begins with the young couple Ángel and Ángeles Palomar conceiving their son Cristóbal—who is also the main narrator of the novel—on the contaminated sands of Acapulco in order to win the fictitious Discovery of America contest that would confer unlimited lifelong power of governance over the crumbling nation to the male child born at midnight on October 12, 1992, that is, five hundred years to the day after Columbus’s initial landing in the New World:4 SEPAN CUANTOS: El niño de sexo masculino que nazca precisamente a las 0:00 horas del día 12 de octubre de 1992 y cuyo nombre de familia, aparte del nombre de pila 45 The Brave New World (seguramente, lo estimamos bien, Cristóbal) más semejanzas guarde con el Ilustre Navegante será proclamado HIJO PRÓDIGO DE LA PATRIA, su educación será proveída por la República y dentro de dieciocho años le serán entregadas las LLAVES de la REPÚBLICA, proemio a su instalación, al cumplir los veintiún años, como REGENTE DE LA NACIÓN, con...