The Melding Americas : Views From the South

“The gringos, who later brought their languid women with muslin dresses and big gauze hats, built a separate town on the other side of the tracks, with palm lined streets, houses with metal grated windows, little white tables on the terraces and paddle fans hanging from the ceiling, and wide blue lawns with peacocks and quail. The sector was enclosed by a wire mesh fence, like a giant electrified chicken pen that in the cool months of summer woke up black with fried swallows. No one even knew yet what it was they wanted, or whether they really were nothing more than philanthropists, and they had already brought on a colossal disturbance, much more disquieting than the gypsies of old, but less transitory and comprehensible. Equipped with resources that in another era were reserved for Divine Providence, they modified the rainfall regime, hastened the harvest cycle, and took the river from where it always had been and put it with its white rocks and its cold currents on the other side of the town, behind the cemetery. It was on that occasion that they built a concrete fortress over the discolored tomb of Jose Arcadio, so that the odor of cadaver dust would not contaminate the waters.”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967)

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“Upon initiating my life in the United States, I resided for some time in Los Angeles, a city inhabitated by more than a million persons of Mexican descent. At first sight, the traveler is surprised by--besides the pureness of the sky and the ugliness of the dispersed and ostentatious constructions--the vaguely Mexican atmosphere of the city, impossible to capture in words or concepts. This Mexicanness--a taste for adornments, carelessness and splendor, negligence, passion and reserve--floats in the air. And I say floats because it does not mix nor is it joined with the other world, the North American world, made of precision and efficiency. Floats but does not oppose; is balanced, driven by the wind, at times torn like a cloud, at others straightened like a rocket shooting off. It is dragged along, it yields, it expands, it contracts, sleeps or dreams, ragged beauty. It floats: It does not cease to exist, does not disappear.”

Octavio Paz, “The Labyrinth of Solitude” (1963)

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“The North American has to understand that Latin America comes from things that you have never known at all. You have never known Indian empires based on theocracy and vertical structures of power. You were not colonized by a European autocracy constructed also in a vertical fashion. . . . Which means the common good is the purpose of politics, and it is best achieved by unity exercised through one will, through an autocracy. That is ingrained in the Latin American soul.”

Carlos Fuentes, Los Angeles Times interview (1992)