Oil nationalism taught Fuentes he was Mexican at ten
Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012), Panama-born son of a Mexican diplomat, dated his Mexican self-awareness to the 1938 oil expropriation that angered the United States. Where the Air Is Clear (1958) made him a national celebrity; he later resigned as ambassador to France rather than serve under Díaz Ordaz’s Spanish posting.
Childhood capitals shifted with embassy life until Mexico City schooling. Cultural-relations work at Foreign Affairs in 1957 preceded the breakthrough novel; Aura and The Death of Artemio Cruz followed in 1962. He taught at Cambridge, Brown, Princeton, Harvard, and elsewhere while writing with pen and ink he called pre-modern tools.
Cervantes, Faulkner, and Balzac topped his personal canon—hence the “Balzac of Mexico” tag—alongside Latin American peers. Of three children, only daughter Cecilia outlived him; son Carlos died in 1999 of hemophilia complications.
Born in Panama City to a Mexican diplomat, he later said the itinerant childhood let him see Latin America as a critical outsider. His second novel, The Good Conscience, set among the comfortable middle class of a provincial town probably modelled on Guanajuato, was hailed by one reviewer as the classic Marxist novel. The Death of Artemio Cruz, with its rotating narrators and debt to Citizen Kane, is widely seen as a landmark of modern Spanish American fiction and placed him beside García Márquez, Vargas Llosa and Cortázar in the Latin American boom.
The ambition kept growing. Terra Nostra in 1975 ranged across Hispanic civilisation, cutting between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. The Old Gringo of 1985, which spins a story from the American writer Ambrose Bierce vanishing amid Mexico's revolution, was the first book by a Mexican author to become a US bestseller. From the mid-1980s he mapped his whole output into fourteen cycles called La Edad del Tiempo, and in 1992 he wrote The Buried Mirror to accompany a BBC and Discovery Channel series. His books reached 24 languages, and an essay of his ran in Reforma on the day he died.
Source: Carlos Fuentes
