The NAFTA Novel

By Nicolás Medina Mora

Neoliberalism didn’t just transform the economic relationship between the United States and Mexico—it reconfigured their cultural relationship, too. In our latest issue, Nicolás Medina Mora gives name to the fiction of the era.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1988, while Margaret Thatcher destroyed a society she insisted didn’t exist, Deng Xiaoping synthesized Mencius with Hayek, and Mikhail Gorbachev unmade the Soviet Union, the Mexican bourgeoisie partook of its third-favorite pastime after binge drinking and short selling: literary blood sport. The historian Enrique Krauze—a sycophantic surrogate of Octavio Paz, the poet-dictator who traded antifascism for anticommunism as he angled for the Nobel—had taken a hatchet to the novelist-caudillo Carlos Fuentes, arguing in a long essay that the writer who had become “everyone’s favorite Mexican” in the United States was “a foreigner in his own country.”

The takedown was vicious even by the standards of the Mexican Republic of Letters, where feuds reach levels of animosity unthinkable in countries where criticism is understood to be about writing, not writers. To his credit, Krauze admitted that his “discomfort with Fuentes” was no longer “intellectual or literary, but moral.” The novelist, he explained, was “a gringo child of Mexican origin.” Having grown up in a diplomatic family in Washington, D.C., Fuentes saw Mexico “refracted through a North American perspective.” That last phrase sounds odd in English but is only mildly retro in Spanish: norteamericano as a demonym for the United States was still common in the 1980s. But why not say una perspectiva estadounidense, angloamericana, yanqui, even gringa? Wasn’t Mexico also part of North America?

The Pazian-Fuentista Conflict was so overblown that even the Los Angeles Times felt compelled to cover it, noting some of the writers involved had “ceased speaking to each other.” That’s because Krauze’s essay was an unwitting expression of the political anxieties of the moment. While the idea of a free-trade agreement with the United States had yet to seduce the Harvard PhD who was about to become president of Mexico, the political unconscious of the Mexican Republic of Letters already sensed that it would confront an unsettling question: Can one still conceive of Mexican literature independently of the United States?

Krauze’s hatchet job was published simultaneously in Paz’s Vuelta and Leon Wieseltier’s New Republic. The English rendition was the work of Edith Grossman, the translator of Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes. Krauze’s broadside, in other words, was processed by the same machinery that transformed his bête noir’s dense Spanish prose into a delicacy fit for palates reared on Iowa corniness. Consider two telling deletions from this line, which quotes Fuentes:

México “el país imaginado e imaginario”, no era una nación tangible, histórica. Era sólo una víctima de los Estados Unidos y una lengua por conquistar.

A literal-minded translator might render the passage as follows:

Mexico, “the imaginary, imagined country,” was not a tangible, historical nation. It was only a victim of the United States and a language waiting to be conquered.

Yet the translation published in The New Republic reads:

Mexico, the “imaginary, imagined country,” was not a tangible, historical nation. It was only a victim of imperialism, an instrumental reality, a language.

Even though Krauze is describing Fuentes’s view, The New Republic wouldn’t print a sentence in which the United States is identified as Mexico’s oppressor, perplexingly replacing the nation’s name with the vague “imperialism.” Likewise with the deletion of “conquered,” which in the original figures Fuentes the gringo as a colonial adventurer, pillaging Mexico’s linguistic wealth. The process of being translated into English had refracted Krauze’s views through a U.S.-centric perspective, turning him into what he despised: a North American writer.

Continue reading “The NAFTA Novel,” an essay by Nicolás Medina Mora, on our site.

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