The Cacique in Chapultepec: Toward a Museology of Carlos Fuentes

Abstract

The 1960s were a crucial decade for museum building in Mexico. The key year was 1964, the end of Adolfo López Mateos's presidential term, since it saw the inauguration of the Museo de Arte Moderno, the Anahuacalli, the Museo de la Ciudad de México, and the most spectacular of all: the Museo Nacional de Antropología, the architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez's masterpiece and one of the country's primary tourist attractions. The 1960s also witnessed how Carlos Fuentes, a young writer who had published his first novel in 1958, continued to produce his canonical works at a staggering pace. In what follows, the dialogue between Fuentes's early fiction and the Museo Nacional de Antropología, two of the jewels of Mexican high modernism (always a dialogue with nationalism), not only invites a rereading of their most obvious features—namely, the luminous tension between their structures and their meticulous attention to detail—but also, from the distance of half a century (especially from the vantage point of the PRI's return to power), reveals a series of hitherto unexamined gaps and silences that merit critical attention.