McIntosh-Byrd is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. In the following essay she looks at Carlos Fuentes's The Old Gringo as a critique of the Western-European traditions of philosophy and narrative.

The Old Gringo is a novel about borders— about the boundaries that demarcate countries, separate minds and cultures, and mark the edges and turning points of linear history. It is also a novel about the falsity of those borders—presenting a structural and textual collapse of distinctive chronologies, viewpoints, identities, and narratives. Carlos Fuentes's book takes on form among the multitudes of discrete stories and histories. It generates itself at the points of impact between nineteenth-century U.S. novels and Mexican peasant oral history, between journalism and fiction, playing with the harmonies that are produced from the simultaneous speech of disparate voices.

Even on its most basic level, that of plot, The Old Gringo...