TV REVIEW : Holding a Mirror to Hispanic Heritage

“In ancient tombs of the Americas, mirrors have been found. The mirror has power, can harness the sun and can show us ourselves.”

With those poetic words, Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes begins each of five hourlong episodes of “The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World,” a miniseries that will be seen Sunday through Thursday at 7 p.m. on cable’s Discovery Channel. An early entry in this year’s muted commemoration of Christopher Columbus’ voyage, the series explores the quincentenary from the perspective of Spanish culture.

Taking the image of an ancient buried mirror unearthed to reflect the past even as it guides us toward a contemporary sense of ourselves is a clever conceit. Fuentes, who wrote and narrates the series, asks at the outset if there is anything to celebrate five centuries after Europeans and America’s native peoples first made contact.

In his view, this particular anniversary finds what he calls “Spanish Americans” in “a deep, deep crisis.” Yet, despite all that, despite the fact that every child in Latin America is born owing a foreign debt of $1,000, Fuentes argues that there is reason to mark the occasion. What’s to be celebrated is a cultural heritage “that we have been able to create during the past 500 years as descendants of the Indian, European and blacks.”

The first episode, “The Virgin and the Bull,” is a brilliant synthesis of Spanish culture. With the ever-urbane and ever-present Fuentes (he has more close-ups than Richard Chamberlain in “Shogun”) building his case like a cultural magistrate, the viewer is taken from one impressive location to another. Whether standing in the awesome prehistoric caves of Altamira, the Islamic splendor of the Alhambra, or watching a bullfighter’s cruel dance of death, Fuentes lovingly, sometimes smugly, establishes Spain’s right to be seen as one of the world’s great mother cultures. With eloquent musings and a historical sweep that would daunt most, he presents his vision of Spanish-driven achievement.

The heart of the matter, though, is not reached until Part Two, “The Conflict of the Gods,” in which Fuentes explores the genesis of what we now know as Hispanic America. Having shown that Spain is a syncretism of the Christian, Jew and Moor, he briskly moves through the facts of the Spanish Conquest. Using the murals of Diego Rivera as well as the statues and monuments of ancient America as visual aids, our host attempts to illuminate the pre-Columbian New World. He discusses how two epic world views clashed and then melded together in a bizarre melange of sex and language.

While each of the five episodes has its own failings, each has its share of penetrating insights and visually stunning images. For example, at one point in the third episode, “The Age of Gold,” Fuentes relates baroque art of the New World to the unique and even macabre identity inherent to those born of the Conquest.

Counterpointed with images of poor and exploited Latin Americans, Fuentes effectively underlines his point with poignant visual evidence. It is in these moments that the series commands the viewer’s attention.

Yet, for all his references to polyculturalism and the mixing of race, creed and art, it is Spanish history and culture that definitively frames “The Buried Mirror.” Perhaps Fuentes, who has often criticized the United States for its arrogant and imperialistic meddlings in Latin America, has mellowed, because his view here, even with its catholic pretension, seems weighted toward Spain.

His passion and erudition shine more when he is speaking of Velasquez, Goya, Cervantes and Garcia Lorca than of the people encountered by Columbus and his heirs. Of course, in all fairness, Fuentes walks a fine line here. After all, the series was paid for by a Spanish corporation, Sogetel, in association with the Quinto Centenario Espana and the Smithsonian Institution. It’s no wonder, then, that the series leaves the impression that all of Latin America, even U.S. Latinos, are just part of some grand Spanish cultural project--a Hispanic version of Manifest Destiny and Western progress.

Fuentes loses a perfect opportunity to comment on Spain’s legacy of cultural disfigurement when he takes viewers into the self-imprisonment of Phillip II, the 16th-Century monarch who oversaw one of history’s worst periods of human exploitation. Holed up in his monastic castle, the Escorial, the psychologically paralyzed emperor hides away in his bed chamber gazing up at the works of his favorite Dutch painter, Hieronymous Bosch.

Setting the scene as he moves around the king’s stately bed, Fuentes tells us that “thoughts of death” were always close to Phillip. It seems obvious that the irrational colonial atrocities inflicted upon the Indian and African slaves by Phillip’s minions were almost perfectly mirrored in the mental state of an emperor mesmerized by Bosch’s images of evil and debauchery. Had Fuentes shown this particular reflection and taken it to its ultimate conclusion, he might well have illuminated the long monstrous night of Spanish repression in the New World and the twisted logic of racism and European superiority that still haunts both the English- and Spanish-speaking realms of the Americas.

These concerns aside, however, Fuentes offers viewers a true insight into the Spanish. Rather than dredge up old horrors, he concentrates on the actual results of the co-mingling, the cultural realities of the Americas. He and his producers have created a glossy and somewhat Eurocentric production. In plumbing the Hispanic heritage, there is still much to be said, to be seen. What “The Buried Mirror” presents is one man’s passionate glimpse into that world.