During the 1960s, Mexico became caught up in what is known as the Latin American literary boom. Essayist Carlos Monsivais commented on it:
As never before, Spanish-language readers were confronted by the intense and complementary correspondence between literature and reality. In the midst of every sort of transition (towards fascism, towards revolutionary nationalism, towards the incongruous practices of Third Worlders), readers clung to these books as a means of escaping, not a cultural tradition, but the oppression of underdevelopment.265
The boom transcended the boundaries of Latin America, and reading Latin American fiction soon became fashionable among the cultural elite of the United States and Europe.266
Carlos Fuentes’s 1958 novel La region mas transparente (Where the Air is Clear, 1960) is one of the novels that launched the boom. It brought instant recognition to Fuentes, the son of a Mexican diplomat, who attended school in Argentina, Chile, and Washington DC. His novel evoked the Mexico City of the 1940s and 1950s, where the aggressive capitalism of Avila Camacho and Aleman clashed with the idealist revolutionary rhetoric of an earlier period. Fuentes set his story in urban surroundings, as was characteristic of boom writers, whose primary reality was the city and its inhabitants.267
Fuentes’s next novel, La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962; The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1964), was not only one of the most celebrated indictments of the Revolution and the society it created but also one of the most popular boom novels. In it, Fuentes depicted a revolutionary veteran on his deathbed recalling his rise to power and wealth through betrayal and opportunism. One flashback recounted how the veteran gained control of a hacienda and then betrayed the peasants living there by providing them with near worthless land as part of the “land reform” while keeping the best land for himself.
In 1971, Fuentes published Tiempo Mexicano, a collection of his best essays and reporting from the previous decade. He described the Revolution not as a historical event but as a myth. He stated,
“We are a dependent nation, semicolonial, we have no more room to maneuver than Poland.” Fuentes also noted that Mexico was saddled with what for the times was an enormous foreign debt of $3 billion. In Tiempo Mexicano, Fuentes criticized “development for the sake of development.” As with many intellectuals of his generation, he felt the solution to Mexico’s problems was “an energetic intervention by the state in Mexico’s economic life.”268
The 1950s were one of the most productive periods for Mexico’s great man of letters, Octavio Paz. Paz, the son and grandson of revolutionary intellectuals, is best known in the United States for his El laberinto de la soledad (1950; The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1961), the definitive study of what it meant to be a Mexican. In it, he delved into what he felt were Mexicans’ feelings of inferiority and resignation. Paz also published poetry and essays, lectured on and presented new poets and painters, and founded journals and a theater group. Later, he joined the diplomatic corps, and in 1962 he was appointed ambassador to India.269
When Paz learned of the 1968 student massacre, he resigned his ambassadorship in protest. The next month, he commented on the massacre in a Le Monde interview: “If there were any hopes the PRI could be reformed, they have become absurd after the events of October 2. The only solution is to criticize it from the outside and remove it from power.” In 1970, Paz published Posdata (The Other Mexico, 1972), a revaluation of Mexican reality in light of the 1968 student movement. In this book, Paz described two Mexicos, one modern and one underdeveloped. He felt this duality was “the result of the Revolution and the development that followed it: thus, it is the source of many hopes and, at the same time, of future threats.”270
Paz was one of the few lucky intellectuals who could, due to his stature, exist without drawing a government salary. The vast majority of Mexican intellectuals, one way or another, had to work for the government. Most universities were public, and the private ones tended to be conservative Catholic institutions that were inhospitable to the left-leaning intelligentsia. Intellectuals often held positions in the PRI, a government ministry, or a government-funded research center. As political scientist Judith Hellman noted, “Sooner or later all intellectuals who are not independently wealthy must deal with the dilemma of how to earn a living in Mexico and still retain political independence.”271
World History
