Geocriticism and the exploration of Mexico City-Tenochtitlán in Carlos Fuentes’ Where the Air is Clear
Where the Air is Clear, or La región más transparente (1958) in its original version, is an urban fiction of Mexico City structured from a postcolonial perspective by Carlos Fuentes, one of Latin American Boom authors. This literary biography of 1950s Mexico’s capital is portrayed with a double c...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2022
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/18576/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/18576/1/51109-178353-1-PB.pdf |
| Summary: | Where the Air is Clear, or La región más transparente (1958) in its original version, is an urban
fiction of Mexico City structured from a postcolonial perspective by Carlos Fuentes, one of
Latin American Boom authors. This literary biography of 1950s Mexico’s capital is portrayed
with a double complexity. On one hand, the modern but chaotic space is presented through a
narrative fragmentation composed of a “chorus” of inhabitants from different social classes
and neighbourhoods. On the other, the author depicts a total image of the megacity by
highlighting its historical particularity: Mexico City was constructed by Spaniards precisely
above the ruins of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztecs. This article proposes a study of the
Boom’s classic text with a novel approach from a geographical focus. The methodology
utilized is Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism (2007) that aims to explore a space’s
fictionalization from a multidisciplinary approach, in this case, literature, history and
geography, and with the use of cartographic representations. This analysis is, thus, “mapped”
from the perspective of Ixca Cienfuegos, an indigenous character with supernatural powers
who explores the space of Mexico City-Tenochtitlán through two key years: 1951—the
Dystopia of Mexico City where modernity cohabitates with antiquity, and prosperity with
poverty— and 1519 —the Utopian past of Tenochtitlán before the landscape’s transformation
under Spanish colonization. |
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