The Crystal Frontier

"He is one of the few authors from Mexico who places his writing in dialogue with Mexican American and Chicano or Chicana writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa. His novel echoes that metaphor. It’s not that he’s actually borrowing it from her because he has used it in his earlier work. Gloria Anzaldúa focuses mainly on the way the border has been a scar in the lives of Mexican Americans by keeping them separated from Mexico. But Carlos Fuentes shows how the border, as a symbol of the relationship between Mexico and the United States, affects people in Mexico. He’s very interested in what the border relationship has done to people in Mexico and how that then impacts on the relationship between Mexican citizens and Americans. He develops a variety of characters. There are some immigrants from Mexico. There are also some characters visiting the United States – on lecture tours, or as students – or they live along the border. He focuses on the immense economic differences among Mexicans and the ways in which NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] and the changing US-Mexican relationship manifested at the border have deepened those differences. We think about Mexico as a poor country from which immigrants come. But we don’t actually see how people, like the main character in this novel, Don Barroso – who lives in the border area – actually profit from the way the relationship between Mexico and the United States is playing out right now. Barroso profits from the way in which the majority of the Mexican population is becoming increasingly impoverished by sending cheap Mexican contract labour to the United States and by building maquiladoras [factories] in Mexico that produce cheap products for the United States. The last story in the novel brings everything that happened before together in interesting ways. Fuentes blends in poetry and he brings in history . He’s trying to develop a different version of history, one that highlights how the migration of people from Mexico to the United States has been cyclical. Mexican people have always immigrated, just under different legal conditions, and the conditions have been laid out by the United States government. For example, in the 1940s to 1960s there was a guest-worker programme, the Bracero Program. Before, people came from Mexico for seasonal work and then returned across a relatively open border. So immigration has always occurred. It’s just that now we are defining it in different ways, and the ways we legally define it shapes the way that the movement occurs. As there are now fewer options to migrate legally, the movement mainly occurs undocumented. Fuentes grew up in the United States and Mexico, and now lives part-time in Mexico City. He’s seen as someone who writes from the centre. The centre has had a very problematic relationship with the northern border. That problematic relationship comes out a little bit in this novel. Fuentes realises that a new version of mexicanidad has developed along the US-Mexico border among writers and intellectuals there. For a very long time people in the centre of Mexico thought about the north as sort of barren and devoid of culture. That has changed with NAFTA – starting in the 1960s and intensifying in the 1980s with the growth of border towns – the fact that so much foreign industry located to these towns and then attracted people to work there. What people in Mexico City were thinking was that folks living along the border were becoming too Americanised because of the increasing integration with the United States. They’ve had this problem with that part of Mexico not being Mexican enough. Fuentes takes into account new ideas of nationhood that have developed along the border by focusing on characters that live in the border area and by tracing the diversity of these characters – the ones who profit from NAFTA and integration with the United States, and the ones who don’t."