Fuentes and Cultural Identity

Carlos Fuentes covers a lot of ground in this essay. Admittedly, I wasn’t sure what he was talking about most of the time because he refers to so many events and people of which I’ve never heard. “How I Started to Write” was difficult to follow; I kept getting lost in Fuentes’ wordiness, and yet when I did understand what he was saying, I pulled out my pencil and made a little “this is important” mark in the margins. For example, I loved Fuentes’ point about culture existing in contact with other cultures. “My upbringing,” he writes, “taught me that cultures are not isolated, and perish when deprived of contact with what is different and challenging. Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other. No culture, I believed unconsciously ever since then, and quite consciously today, retains its identity in isolation; identity is attained in contact, in contrast, in breakthrough” (439).

As far as I’ve perceived, this belief goes against what most other “cultural purists” think. I think of Hitler’s eugenics agenda during WWII. He wanted to preserve a culture he thought was superior by destroying members of another culture, the Jewish culture (at least this is what I’m remembering from history class). Perhaps he didn’t believe that German culture could survive if it was in a relationship with Jewish culture (who really knows what he was thinking). Fuentes debunks the notion that cultural identity exists in its most pure state when isolated. In fact, culture can’t even exist in isolation. Instead, cultures maintain integrity when they interact with each other, grow with and apart from each other, come in conflict with each other. As individual humans depend on each other for the creation of self, cultural identity depends on relationship with other cultures, not on isolation.