"Carlos Fuentes: Neither Discovery Nor Encounter but the
Imagining of America"
 
Interview by Jose Tono Martinez
Translated by Sharon Kellum
 
in Encounter (Issue 10 pp. 4-7)
 
Carlos Fuentes, the acclaimed Mexican writer, was invited by the
Smithsonian Institution to Washington D.C., to present his latest
book, The Buried Mirror, which contains the author's reflections
on Spain and the New World.  Fuentes is also the author of La
Muerte de Artemio Cruz, La region mas transparente, and Cristobal
Nonato.
 
JTM:  Your new book, The Buried Mirror (El espejo entarrado), is
an interesting compendium of Spanish and American history,
perhaps its most novel; feature.  For example, your connecting
the ancient Aztec pantheon with the ancient Iberian pantheon must
have required an extraordinary effort at interrelating concepts
that appear disparate...
CF:  In the first place, I let myself be guided by the PBS
television series "The Buried Mirror" because throughout the
shooting, due to the requirements of filming, the rapid sequence
of images, and the lack of time, I saw that I was leaving out,
things that I was leaving for the book.  I accumulated lots of
notes and items I couldn't discuss on camera on a topic as broad
as the continuity of the Spanish-speaking world on both sides of
the Atlantic.
 
JTM:  [Mexican historian and philosopher Edmundo O'Gorman speaks
of the invention of America in response to the discovery,
encounter, or collision of worlds.  [Colombian educator] German
Arciniegas refers to America as a world of its own, estranged
from Europe, where Americans develop their own conception of the
world.  Octavio Paz emphasizes the fact of racial mixing and the
indigenous difficulty, due to isolation, of understanding the
other, the same thing that happened to the Europeans who imposed
themselves.  It seems at times that the problem with America is
one of interpretations and constant provisional rewritings of
history.
CF:  I've said, let's not talk about either discovery or
encounter, rather let's talk of the imagining of America, which
is what remains to be done.  All those elements you've cited stem
from the idea of a very potent imagination that has manifested
itself over the course of five hundred years and has not finished
yet.  The challenge of America has always been, since the
beginning, to imagine America, and today more than ever because
we're about to enter a new century and it is necessary to decide
what we're going to do with the legacy of the past.
 
JTM:  What would be the gaps and the difficulties in this
imagining of America.
CF:  The challenge is very clear.   The recent economic and
political crisis has shown that everything can collapse or get
off track except the cultural continuity of Latin America.  Our
failure has consisted of not knowing, not finding continuity
between the politico-economic life and the cultural life, where
we have had huge success.   Perhaps it was because we did not
make the economy and the politics ourselves....Our day will come
when we as citizens make politics, the economy, and culture all
harmonize.
 
JTM:  Some years ago, when the first debates over the
Quincentenary were taking shape, the stance that a country like
Mexico was going to take was looked at with suspicion.  Yet these
doubts have been dissipating little by little among all the
nations...
CF:  I think that much reflection has been occasioned because
we've all insisted on it, and that it's not a matter of
celebrating or deploring but of reflecting.  The meeting in
Guadalajara [of the Iberoamerican Presidents] had a lot to do
with what you're talking about it.  it was perceived there that
we make up a whole and that it was counterproductive to sacrifice
the missing unity that was impoverishing us.  If we begin to play
the role of prosecutors of our own past, lashing out against
ourselves and treating our history masochistically, we're going
to end up debilitated up in a world that, in my opinion, demands
unity as much from Iberia as from Iberia as from Latin America...
 
 
JTM:  From that perspective, how is the Spanish position
perceived?
CF:  Well, it is already known that there have been many Spains
for Latin America....[He laughs.]  During the first era of
independence, Spain was rejected as a defeated colonial power.
We then sought a North American model and a French model, but
both of them failed.  In the case of Mexico, the arrival of
expatriate Spanish Republicans in the twentieth century
[following their defeat in the Spanish Civil War] changed the
negative perception of Spain because this group of men and women
transformed the cultural, economic, and social life of Mexico for
the better.  These people stood out in contrast to Franco and
Francoism...But it is the Spanish transition to a European
democracy that has finally reconciled all points of view.  And in
fact, the most democratic country in the Hispanic world today is
Spain, something that didn't happen before.  So that in Mexico, a
change in cultural perception came first and then one in
political perception.
 
JTM:  The Spanish colonial period was guided to a great extent by
the interpretation of the Catholic Church, which itself was not
monolithic.  Coexisting alongside the Torquemadas of the
Inquisition were Catholics like Bartolome de Las Casas, Toribio
de Benavente, and others.  There is a battle of gods and a battle
of men.  Perhaps the one of the deficiencies of American
societies is rooted in the concept of universal Catholicism,
which by being so inclusive avoided a fusion of a type of social
direction that other European nations (from a modern perspective
centuries later) more clearly had.  Can we compare these
different forms of colonialism?
CF:  Your question involves many answers.  On the one hand is the
answer that Spain gives in Europe when faced with Protestantism.
Spain has been the bastion of the Counter-Reformation, as opposed
to France, England, Germany, and the Low Countries.
Nevertheless, in the realm of art, this response was more
heterodox than in Northern Europe.  Thanks to it Cervantes,
Velasquez, and the great Baroque poets appeared in Spain, and
their emergence implies opposing forces with room to differ,
alternative views, and independence in the face of the orthodox
vision of the Counter-Reformation.  In America, the presence of
[reformist writer Bernardino de] Sahagun, Motolinea [Fray Toribio
de Benavente], and Vasco de Quiroga represents a force opposing
that of the conquistadors.  And in the case of Bartolome de Las
Casas, that force ended up persuading the Spanish Crown, which
otherwise was not much interested in whether the conquistadors
had too much power.  What distinguishes the Spanish colonization
from the other European colonizations--the French, English,
Dutch, and Portuguese--is that Spain was the only colonizing
empire that debated with itself about the nature of its acts of
conquest and colonization.  The dispute between Gines de
Sepulveda and Francisco Suarez, the vision of Las Casas or
Quiroga are exceptional occurrences in the history of
colonization.  It is the debate of a power with itself.  On the
basis of this debate, I believe, was founded the modern concept
of international law based on human rights, and this spectacular
fact answers your question in my opinion.
 
JTM:  Yes, certainly.  But to what extent did the outcome of the
confrontation with other nations (which in turn the end turned
out badly) get translated into the Black Legend?  When this
result was transferred to the United States via English
historiography, it led to negative stereotypes about everything
Spanish in other countries and to a kind of self-paralysis, a
decadent self-justification for all the evils of Ibero-America.
CF:  Yes, this perspective condemned us in a certain way to
doomed imitation of foreign models that had little to do with our
tradition and that kept us from seeing that there was a
democratic tradition that was Iberian in origin and also
communitarian, alternative, and indigenous to the Americas
themselves.  Recognizing this tradition has taken a long time.
The current Spanish democracy did not come out of nowhere.  It
arises from a tradition that goes back to the communities and the
municipalities of the Middle Ages.  Thus this tradition itself
was obscured in favor of another tradition that, when
transplanted to Latin America, did not work.  The cultural and
political challenge of Spanish America has been precisely to find
and create a tradition of its own.
 
JTM:  Let's go back to the theme of racial mixing by recalling
the famous book by the Mexican Minister of Education during the
revolution, Jose de Vasconcelos, who spoke of a "cosmic race"
emerging in the Americas.  What does this mean today when we see
a country like Peru being actually torn apart by a struggle
between old ideas and races?
CF:  We must view this subject today in a universal way because
we are going to witness in the twenty-first century a series of
massive migrations from the East to the West and from the South
to the North.  Peoples of other races, other creeds, and other
cultures are going to arrive in the great western centers of
progress--in Europe, in the United States--and they are going to
raise the challenge of the other, which is also a challenge of
racial mixing and mixed race, of diversity within societies that
at times would rather consider themselves homogeneous or feel
that way.  This trend is also going to affect Spain.  I do not
exclude the possibility of a turning backward and a racist,
xenophobic reaction in the face of these migrations, which are
the price of global economic intervention and instant
communication and are therefore inevitable.  I think that no
other society in the world has more experience with racial mixing
and incorporating the other than Ibero-America.
 
JTM:  Hernan Cortes, the founder, the destroyer, was also the
first miscegenator...
CF:  Well, many people would disagree with you on this because
they say that the first was Gonzalo de Guerrero in the Yucatan.
 
JTM:  At least, Cortes was the first in a symbolic sense.  I
remember that when I was in Mexico, I was surprised at how people
argue and disagree over Cortes, with a passion and ardor that
I've rarely seen.
CF [laughing]:  Yes, it's unbelievable.  It's as if every evening
they showed a newscast on television and the first story that
appears is "Mexico was just conquered by the Spaniards."  I get a
little bored at times, and they get mad at me.  I say, "Enough
already, let's not talk about Cortes any more.  We'll build him a
statue on the Paseo de la Reforma and put an end to the subject."
But they don't answer me with humor.  Only one person did, and he
replied that if I admire cortes so much, I should put his statue
in my garden and worship him day and night.  [He laughs.] And
it's not that I admire Cortes--it's not a matter of that.  But
it's clear that he is a great figure who requires deep thinking
and a balance in analyzing him.  He was a Renaissance man and a
man of first-rate military, political, and tactical intelligence.
But Cortes is also a victim of the conquest, and thus they end up
denying him part of his just deserts.  He was a man who was both
interesting and vulnerable.  He is a figure one must ponder and
study not simply reject or avoid, as is often done in Mexico.
cortes is the founder of one of the Mexican nations, the post-
Aztec nation.  He was a dictatorial criminal who seized power
over Mexican institutions.  Cortes was a mercenary soldier and a
conqueror, a Renaissance prince who never got to be a prince.
 
JTM:  Speaking of contemporary issues, do you really believe that
Hispanics have the possibility of maintaining and developing
their own culture?  No precedents for this exist in the United
States.
CF:  No, but it's a new situation, and it's the second phase of
the immigration to the United States.  And some of it is not
immigration because one must realize that many of the so-called
hispanics, such as the Chicanos, have been here since before the
Anglos arrived.  One mustn't forget that the United States came
to California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado and that
the descendants of Spaniards and Indians were already living
there.  So that one must be careful about that.  But in any case,
it's now a matter of a new stage in which the United States is
ceasing to be a melting pot and is no longer creating something
new.  Not only Hispano-Americans but Orientals--Chinese, Koreans,
Vietnamese, and so on--are trying to retain important aspects of
their cultures, and this trend implies a disenchantment with the
concept of unity within diversity.  And the only way of
maintaining unity is by protecting diversity because if it is
rejected, it leads to separatism, as we have seen in Yugoslavia
and in the former Soviet Union.  In this sense, we will soon see
how the treaty between Mexico and the United States works because
there may be much agitation and opposition--it could lead to the
paradoxical situation that on one side of the border the treaty
creates commercial liberalization and on the other, trenches,
barbed wire fences, and roadblocks are created to keep Mexicans
form coming in.  This kind of agitation can also erupt in Spain
if they demand visas of Hispanic-Americans starting in 1993.
This is the great paradox of our time: the big economic blocs are
opening up internally at the same time that they are closing
their doors to those outside.
 
 
MARTINE3