The Conquest of Mexico through the margins of fiction and history in Carlos Fuentes

Abstract

In “Las dos orillas,” Carlos Fuentes reconfigures the discourse of the conquest of Mexico through a dialogue between literature and history. By bringing together different areas of knowledge, he redefines them, creating interpretations that are established through both interdisciplinarity and intertextuality. Therefore, it is within the framework of comparative literature that we analyze his narrative, acknowledging that it is constructed by intertwining concepts from Mexican mythology (such as the conception of circular time), translation (in the clash between betrayal and fidelity), and the counter-conquest (which points to transculturality) to elaborate other possibilities for recounting the past. The narrative of the short story, told through the voice of Jerónimo de Aguilar – a posthumously revived character who uses words to counter the chronicle of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, author of Historia verdadera de la conquista de Nueva España, and featuring Malinche, the indigenous woman who revealed the weaknesses of the Aztec Empire to Hernán Cortés – establishes struggles for the power of words, where the interplay of betrayals, fabrications, and lies between the Mayan, Nahuatl and Spanish languages ​​determines historical events. However, unlike the chronicles of the Conquest, which highlight an European hegemony and value a false cultural homogeneity, this account narrates a Counter-Conquest, evidencing that, in the contact between Europeans and indigenous peoples, a miscegenation of races was born, a hybrid culture that allows Carlos Fuentes’ literature to disseminate a different history, proposing to establish, at the same time, relationships of convergence and divergence between America and Europe.