One of Mexico's premier novelists and its foremost 'ambassador without a portfolio' (someone who utilizes his celebrity status to political ends), Fuentes has been a champion of goodwill for relations between the West and Latin America; good relations between the United States and Mexico has been a particular interest. This agenda shows in his fiction and intellectual enterprises.

Like other prominent members of the intellectual elite in Latin America and key figures of "El Boom," Fuentes comes from the ruling class. His father, Rafael Fuentes Boettiger, was a career diplomat stationed in Panama City in 1928 where his wife, Berta Macias Rivas, gave birth to Fuentes on November 11. Boettiger's career moved the family to Brazil in the early 1930s and then to Washington, DC from 1934 to 1940. While in Brazil, Boettiger served as secretary to Alfonso Reyes—a famous writer himself. Reyes later mentored Fuentes. At elementary school...