Hispania Guest Editorial: Carlos Fuentes: Crossing Borders and into the Classroom

When Carlos Fuentes walked into a room, you could feel his energy. His vitality was palpable in a living room with friends, in a classroom packed with students, or even in an auditorium crowded with hundreds of people assembled to hear him speak. I was present at such a gathering last fall at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, along with several of my students from our class on Latin American novels. (Sadly, it was his final public appearance before his sudden death this past May.) We had just read Gringo viejo (1985), one of Fuentes's finest works and the first Mexican novel to appear on the New York Times best-seller list. That evening, the renowned Mexican author held everyone's rapt attention as he spoke with passion about "The Creative Spirit as a Force for Humanism," a topic aptly personified by Fuentes himself.

Speaking eloquently in both Spanish and English, Fuentes focused that evening on the importance of confronting today's global threats as a united international community, urging us to cross borders to recognize the multiplicity of civilizations and to accept the ideas and cultures of people from other countries. He referred to Gringo viejo (1985) as a compelling example of the possibilities for such acceptance. The longstanding conflicts between the people of Mexico and the United States appear insurmountable to the characters in the novel, but, by the end, they learn profound and lasting lessons as a result of their interactions across cultures. One character, an American journalist from San Francisco, comes to a poignant realization: "He had felt freed the moment he crossed the border at Juárez, as if he had walked into a different world. Now he was sure: each of us has a secret frontier within him, and that is the most difficult frontier to cross because each of us hopes to find himself alone there, but finds only that he is more than ever in the company of others" (161).

In his talk, Fuentes also underscored another constant theme in his works: the power of language, specifically Spanish, as an important purveyor of cultural diversity, other ways of viewing the world, and understanding reality. He touched on several key writers from Europe, Spain, England, and the United States, and then pointed to Latin American literature as uniquely able to represent the past as a living force, actively felt in the present. Because of its powerful fusion of history, myth, and fiction, Latin American literature provides important lessons and encourages Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries to forge their own model of development consistent with their own heritage—European, indigenous, black, and mestizo—instead of imitating foreign models.

As the son of a Mexican diplomat, Fuentes spent a good deal of his life crossing borders. He spent his childhood years in Washington, DC, Santiago, Buenos Aires, and Zurich. As an adult, he made frequent sojourns abroad, including a period in the seventies as Mexican ambassador to France. Throughout his long and active career, he expressed a deep affection for the United States. At the same time, he was openly critical of US foreign policy in Latin America, describing that policy in speeches and editorial essays as historically arrogant, inflexible, short-sighted, invasive, and fundamentally unjust. His no-holds-barred opinions on US policy made him a controversial figure in the view of the US State Department, which denied him entry into the United States on several occasions.

An outspoken critic and prize-winning author of more than thirty literary texts encompassing four genres (novels, short stories, plays, and essays), Fuentes is recognized as one of the major writers of fiction in Latin America, and certainly in his own country. Literary historian Fernando Alegría describes him as "uno de los escritores mexicanos que más intensamente ha contribuido a renovar el arte de la novela en su patria" (321). The philosophical underpinnings of his prodigious body of work largely pertain to the exploration and revelation of Mexican identity, the concepts of "la mexicanidad y lo mexicano," and by extension, identity issues...