Carlos Fuentes and the Cultural Syncretism of Latin America

Abstract

In the paper we investigate, on the one hand, the cultural continuity of Latin America from the point of view of the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes and, on the other, the interweaving and fusion of pre-Hispanic and modern culture on the continent(s). We do this from the perspective of the writers and thinkers who have recognized transculturation as one of the key processes of the territory where different races live, gathered under the term mestizaje, and share a common language, Spanish.
Encompassing the attitudes of the founders, defenders and interpreters of the emblematic Spanish-American syncretism (the Argentine theorist Walter Mignolo, Uruguayan literary critic Ángel Rama and essayist Enrique Rodó, excellent representatives of Mexican culture and literature José Vasconcelos, Alfonso Reyes and Octavio Paz, the Cuban writer and musicologist Alejo Carpentier, Portuguese scientist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, and others), we point to mutual cultural assimilations of the Spanish-speaking territories of South America, Mesoamerica and North America. The central part of the article is dedicated to Carlos Fuentes’s thinking on cultural identity, the paradigm of racial mixing, and the heritage of various origins as a gift of the Indo-Afro-Ibero-American individual and society. Finally, through this research, we show that, according to Carlos Fuentes, the source of Mexican transculturality is related to the Baroque and its Atlantic exchange, which overcame the temporal and spatial abyss, under whose arch a new Spanish American cultural genealogy was created, and thanks to which the Latin American novel emerged as a genre of genres, liberated from colonial prohibition after three centuries and was afterward compelled to compensate for it.