SOURCE: "Carlos Fuentes' Agua Quemada: The Nation as Unimaginable Community," in Latin American Literary Review, Vol. XXI, No. 42, July-December, 1993, pp. 57-69.

In the following essay, Van Delden surveys Fuentes's handling of the identity of Mexico as a nation in his works, particularly in Agua Quemada.

George Orwell claimed that politics gave him the sense of purpose he needed to write good prose. What politics was for George Orwell, Mexico has been for Carlos Fuentes, with the difference that for Fuentes it is not so much good writing as writing tout court that appears to have been enabled by the possession of a literary polestar. Consider the fact that an autobiographical essay Fuentes first published in Granta as "The Discovery of Mexico" became "How I Started To Write" when it was later included in Myself with Others, a collection of Fuentes's essays. One can hardly imagine more vivid proof...