The key to the city, and the key to life

Earlier this month, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa invited Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes to his home in Hancock Park. Fuentes, the author of many novels, including “The Death of Artemio Cruz” (1962), “A Change of Skin” (1967), “The Old Gringo” (1985) and “The Eagle’s Throne” (2006), was given the keys to the city. What follows is an excerpt from the speech Fuentes gave.

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SOME PEOPLE might think you have taken a major risk in offering the keys to the city of Los Angeles to a Mexican citizen.

Not to worry. I will use these marvelous keys judiciously. But I will use them, fear not. I will open the gates to this magnificent metropolis -- Nuestra Senora de los Angeles de la Porciuncula -- with confidence and generosity.

With generosity because Los Angeles means so many things. This is a city of global significance. A city sustained by Native and Afro and Anglo Americans. The meeting point of the Orient and the Americas, North and South. A city that is re-created daily by the energy of its multicultural environment.

With confidence because Los Angeles proves that California is not the slide area but the solid area of solidarity among all its cultural and racial constituencies. The city by the sea where all the peoples of the world arrive in order to recognize and share each other’s values.

The City of the Angels is also the city of its citizens: confident, generous, fraternal in its conviction that we can and must all live together. Latinos and Asians, Anglo and Afro Americans, linked by the values of work and mutual respect.

For labor and respect go together. The workers from Mexico in California deserve respect. They are workers, not felons. They contribute, they do not rob.

They are needed -- in the fields, in restaurants, hospitals, communications, homes, gardens, factories. They are needed: The economy would not function without them. They are needed: They are not criminals, and a way must be found for them to enter this country in peace, with rights that are recognized as well as duties that are observed.

Migration is a reality. It deserves a legality serving all, migrants and hosts. We must all contribute to the legality of the reality.

But there are two parties in this question. One is the country that receives. The other, the country that sends. The sending country -- Mexico, in my case -- has obligations bigger perhaps than those of the receiving nation, the United States.

We in Mexico must create a far greater demand for our own workers in our own land. Mexico has a young, hardworking, intelligent workforce. Mexico needs workers, in communications, infrastructure, health, education, agriculture, industry; building schools, roads, houses, dams, hospitals, cities renewed.

We Mexicans cannot be satisfied with an economy that serves only half the population and leaves the other half out. We cannot be satisfied with unnecessary unemployment at very low wages. We cannot be satisfied with such uneven distribution of wealth.

We must move. We cannot go on being the very junior partner of NAFTA. We must make a national effort toward greater parity with Canada and the U.S.A. We have the resources. We have the people. We are sustained by a culture that goes back 3,000 years.

What we need now is a new deal that sets itself the task of building Mexico from the bottom up. Investment from above is both necessary and desired. The workings of our growing civil society must be expanded and respected.

But it is the action from below, the rise of work and better living conditions from the ground up, that will really re-found the Mexican Republic.

You and I know, your honor, that the key that opens up all the opportunities is education. I commend your truly extraordinary efforts to make education the centerpiece of your administration. You are setting an example that goes beyond the city of Los Angeles, even beyond the great state of California, and becomes a message to the world.

The right to education, [writer] Nadine Gordimer has said, is as basic as the right to have air. The exclusion from education is the primal reason for poverty and inequality. Education is the most practical avenue toward prosperity.