Comparative Civilizations Review Volume 12 Number 12 Spring 1985 Article 5 4-1-1985 Constructing the "New World" in the Works of Carlos Fuentes Ann McBride-Limaye University of Wisconsin-Madison Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr Recommended Citation McBride-Limaye, Ann (1985) "Constructing the "New World" in the Works of Carlos Fuentes," Comparative Civilizations Review: Vol. 12 : No. 12 , Article 5. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr/vol12/iss12/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Comparative Civilizations Review by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact
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[email protected]. McBride-Limaye: Constructing the "New World" in the Works of Carlos Fuentes 44 CONSTRUCTING THE "NEW WORLD" IN THE WORKS OF CARLOS FUENTES ANN McBRIDE-LiMAYE The development of Mexican culture was a cross-civilizational proc ess. Through her sixteenth-century conquests in the western hemisphere, Spain imposed history on the New World, and in effect she created the New World. Of course it is well to remember that there were two Old Worlds, indigenous and European, two different forms of hegemony, two displaced orders which would combine to produce a colonial mestizo culture, a mixed-blood culture born of the forcible cross between indi genous Aztec and Spanish civilizations . Mestizaje (miscegenation) is the central fact in the New World, a fact which calls up an inevitable chain: the Spanish conquest of the Americas recalls the Spanish reconquest of the Iberian peninsula and the resulting expUlsion of the Moors and the Jews.