In His Latest Work, Novelist Carlos Fuentes Uses the U.S.-Mexico Border to Explore the Love-Hate Relationship Between Americans and Immigrants

Carlos Fuentes has called the U.S.-Mexico border “a scar.” He has fictionalized it as an apocalyptic no-man’s land called Mexamerica.

And now, in “The Crystal Frontier,” the acclaimed Mexican novelist revisits the border and finds a powerful new prism for the relationship between two countries--and the front lines of a potentially decisive encounter between two worlds.

“The border is an exciting opportunity to create a culture of understanding between two nations. It is the meeting ground, not just between the United States and Mexico, but between the United States and all of Latin America,” Fuentes says. “We have a great opportunity to either foster understanding, interchange and culture --or to condemn each other to suspicion, violence, even murder, xenophobia and genocide.”

During a recent stop at his idyllic home in a suburban neighborhood here, Fuentes (who lives much of the year in London) characterized anti-immigrant backlash, both in the United States and Europe, as a dangerous resurgence of racism deeply embedded in Western society.

“After the history of the 20th century--which is one of the most brutal, violent centuries on human record--to resurrect the ghost of xenophobia, racism, hatred of the other, is exposing oneself once more to the worst crimes of our age,” he says. “One would have thought these lessons had been learned.”

He finds the backlash reflective of a general amnesia over the birth of a vast stretch of the border region, during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) when the States seized a huge chunk of Mexican territory.

“Let us not forget that the U.S. Southwest was once part of Mexico, and the Hispanic roots are very deep. The Anglos are the newcomers, and no one asked them for green cards when they arrived in the Southwest.”

Nine interwoven short stories, “The Crystal Frontier” is a crossroads for a grass-roots globalism that Fuentes sees as reaching into the hearts of both countries.

The author follows immigrants who push the border--and the love-hate relationship between the United States and its illegal servants--as far north as Chicago, where an elderly woman repays the kindness of her Mexican caretaker with ethnic slurs. And south to a Guanajuato village where everyone lives on dollars sent back by emigrant relatives.

Fuentes introduces nouveau riche Leonardo Barroso, a decadent, ruthless border business baron who marries his son to a luscious young woman so he can take her as his lover. And Fuentes unveils the working girls of Barroso’s factories, who trade suffocatingly poor villages for border jobs and cope gamely with low wages and sexual harassment.

Fuentes’ border is as transparent as the plate glass that, in one chapter of his novel, separates a handsome undocumented Mexican janitor and a lonely businesswoman. And porous enough for anything--drugs, language, people, culture--to cross.

It is not the first time Fuentes has used the border as a metaphor for the divisions between people. Previously, it has symbolized the frontiers between the races, between men and women and life and death, or the battles his characters fight with themselves.

Nor is it the first time Fuentes has found an alchemy of economic disparity, sexual politics and cultural identity conflicts in the dregs of Manifest Destiny, or used his characters to explain Mexico to the United States and vice versa.

Fuentes--who will be 69 on Nov. 11--said his lifelong impulse to translate between the two cultures began when he was 4 and his diplomat father moved the family to Washington, D.C. Fuentes attended attended grade school there for seven years, with summers in Mexico.

“I had to start explaining myself to gringos and trying to understand them myself,” he recalls.

He has offered his insights on Latin America to President Clinton, whom he finds “very intelligent, not one of those boorish U.S. politicians” like Jesse Helms or “that loudmouth” Pat Buchanan. Fuentes recommended that Clinton normalize relations with communist Cuba.

“Fidel Castro has survived because the United States has kept him in power,” Fuentes says. “The biggest card in his hand is, ‘Look, I am defending you against the U.S. imperialists.’ ”

Unlike his friend Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia’s Nobel laureate, Fuentes is not a friend of Castro’s. He believes Che Guevara would be surprised to find himself the official patron saint of a revolution “that has failed in so many aspects he held close to his heart. He would not like to see a country that lives on tourism by day and prostitution by night.”

Fuentes says he still has not forgiven a “Cuban skunk apparatchik” for denouncing him as a traitor in the 1960s after he accepted an invitation (from Arthur Miller) to attend a PEN conference in the States. In an ironic testimony to the vagaries of the Cold War, Fuentes was banned from the States during the same era, under the McCarran-Walter Act, a McCarthy-era relic whose list of suspicious foreigners once included such distinguished writers as Garcia Marquez, Pablo Neruda and Graham Greene.

“I was in happy company,” Fuentes says, smiling.

Even if he criticizes U.S. policy toward Latin America, Fuentes professes “enormous” identification with U.S. culture.

Like Garcia Marquez and others behind the Latin literature boom, Fuentes acknowledges a great debt to Faulkner and other writers from the U.S. Without them, he said, “there would be no modern Latin American novel or poetry.

“And jazz!” he added. “You can’t think of the work of Julio Cortazar without invoking Charlie Parker and Louie Armstrong.”

This Janus-faced view is a schism that Fuentes says is common among Latin intellectuals. “We view the United States as a kindly cultural Dr. Jekyll that gives you jazz and films and poetry by day, and a horrible Mr. Hyde that appears by night and ravages our countries.”

“In Latin America traditionally, especially under dictatorships, if the writer did not speak, no one would,” Fuentes says. “So writers have been called upon to speak for the voiceless. That gave the writer a special weight, a star quality.”

Even in the United States, Latin American novelists have a headline-grabbing clout these days that home-grown intellectuals last enjoyed in the days of Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer.

That clout also lends their literary feuds--like the one between Fuentes and Mexican poet Octavio Paz--the same sort of aura that once attended the rivalry between Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

The affair erupted when both Fuentes and the more conservative Paz were on the short list for the Nobel Prize in literature (Paz has since won) and Fuentes was acting as a defender of the Sandinistas and leftist causes. Some saw the feud peak with an attack on Fuentes by a Paz protege, Enrique Krauze, that eventually was published in the New Republic as “The Guerrilla Dandy.” It portrayed Fuentes as a trendy nationalist who owed more to Hollywood than to Mexico and questioned his credentials as an interpreter of Mexico.

(Fuentes, a former diplomat--he once was Mexico’s ambassador to France--declines to wade in: “He decided to break our friendship. I did not.”)

Still, in the United States, novelists--like scientists and intellectuals--are increasingly overshadowed by Hollywood celebrities. In Fuentes’ eyes, a host of pressing U.S. social problems--like the widening gap between the rich and poor--are given similarly short shrift.

“It is more important to know whether Sharon Stone wears underwear or not than how much a black family makes in Jesse Helms’ state” of North Carolina,” Fuentes says. “Most of the news is about show business and the comings and goings of movie stars. This cult of celebrity sweeps social problems under the rug, and that means the problems will explode someday.”

Fuentes has had his own encounters with Hollywood.

There was his brief affair with ill-starred actress Jean Seberg, which inspired his erotic novel “Diana, The Goddess Who Hunts Alone.” There was the cinematic version of “The Old Gringo,” Fuentes’ myth-like tale of the mysterious disappearance of Ambrose Bierce during the Mexican revolution. The film emerged as an almost absurd caricature. Fuentes says he declined to see it.

He is returning to one of “The Old Gringo’s” most compelling themes--the relationship between men and women--in his next novel.

“I think it’s a big theme in life,” Fuentes says. “Mexican society is founded on very chauvinistic principles inherited from the Aztecs, the Spaniards and the Arabs. We have a triple misogynistic inheritance that is very hard to overcome.”

He said it intrigues him that women writers--he named Sandra Cisneros, Amy Tan, Toni Morrison, Cristina Garcia--have emerged at the forefront of a new wave of multicultural fiction.

“I am fascinated by the evolution of the changing status of women in [Mexico],” he says. “I’m trying to reflect all the changes that have taken place which have given women more independence, more political clout, more personality in Mexican society. Today you see a presence of women--in politics, business, teaching, the arts, literature--that was inconceivable 50 years ago.”