Fuentes Fires Up Crowd to Strive for a New ‘New Deal’

Inga Kiderra | April 28, 2008

Carlos Fuentes spoke Thursday night at UCSD.

About 900 people packed Mandeville Auditorium April 24 to hear Mexican novelist, essayist, scholar and former diplomat Carlos Fuentes—one of Latin America’s best known and most respected literary and political voices.

Almost 80 years old, the unbowed and white-maned Fuentes presented “Globalization: A New Deal for a New Age” to an enthusiastic bilingual and binational audience.

Fuentes deplored international inequalities. Three trillion dollars circulate globally every day, he said, yet 20 percent of the world’s population has accumulated 80 percent of its wealth. We live in a world, he pointed out, where millions go hungry and without a roof over their heads. A burger's price tag equals about 10 minutes' worth of work in Chicago but four hours worth in Nairobi, Kenya, he also said.

Fuentes, the son of a diplomat who spent much of his childhood in Washington D.C., hearkened to the late President Franklin Delano Roosevelt,  calling for a “new New Deal of global governance that must begin like Roosevelt and the American people did from the bottom up.”

F.D.R. managed to lift the U.S. out of the Great Depression, Fuentes said, by channeling its youth into worthwhile community projects, while Germany and Japan, for example, channeled theirs into the military.

A “New Deal” in our age, Fuentes urged, must begin with expanding education, which must be at the top of the agenda here and worldwide. We must also, he said, “defend work, the dignity of work.”

He closed by re-invoking the wisdom of the legal minds of the Renaissance who, in response to globalization challenges of the 1500’s brought on by Columbus’ discovery of the Americas and Copernicus’ discovery of the universe, declared: “No might without right.”

Frontiers are going
to be erased and new communities are going
to rise up.

Fuentes’ prepared presentation was followed by an audience Q&A.

In response to a question about national and international responsibilities on immigration, Fuentes expressed a wish that Mexico would give work to all its citizens and create a dilemma in the U.S.: Who would take over the jobs currently held by immigrants?

Asked an open-ended question about his views on frontiers, Fuentes celebrated not just the San Diego/Tijuana border region but also those all around the world as far away as China and Russia, where people are meeting and their cultures mixing. “These meetings of people must be respected,” Fuentes said, cautioning against fear and xenophobia. “Frontiers are going to be erased and new communities are going to rise up.”

Fuentes was introduced by historian Eric Van Young, interim dean of Arts and Humanities at UC San Diego, and Max Parra, associate professor of Latin American literature—the pair who had first conceived of inviting Fuentes to campus over a coffee last year.

Van Young described UCSD as “an academic environment, in which there is an ardent interest in Mexico and its culture.”

Referring specifically to the long-term “Mexico initiative” announced by Chancellor Marye Anne Fox in 2005, Van Young said, “understandably, much of this initiative consists of research and joint projects in the sciences and interest in themes of common importance in economic, political and social life. We humanists, however, would insist on the obvious fact that our bilateral relationships have a tremendous cultural importance, and that the awareness of Mexican culture and history more broadly should be part of any such deepening of UCSD’s engagement with Mexico.”

The talk was sponsored by UCSD’s Division of Arts and Humanities, Center for the Humanities and Revelle College, in conjunction with the Mexican Consulate in San Diego.

On April 25, Fuentes continued his campus visit by meeting with selected undergraduate students.