2061 - fiction - excerpt from 'The Hispanic Condition: Reflections on Culture and Identity in America - Latin America: Private Eyes & Time Travelers

Literary Review, Fall, 1994 by Ilan Stavans

I HAD A PLEASANT DREAM in which I saw the future in our Americas. According to my abstruse calculations, it took place in the year 2061, more than a couple of centuries after the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty. Made of disconnected halves, I found myself in bizarre, almostunrecognizable locations--one looking like Santa Barbara, California; the other, a tropical setting, probably Havana. For inexplicable reasons, during the whole dream I longed for the ugly metropolitan landscapes of my Mexican childhood, which I was able to invoke in brief conversations with a waitress I saw at a college cafeteria.

Ultramodern architecture, without the slightest hint of baroque style, was in the background in my first sight. A gigantic clock hanged on top of a brick tower. While I sat on a glorious beach next to a majestic academic institution, a polite old lady almost fluent in what sounded like my mother tongue, Spanish, and with what sounded like an Arabic accent, came to me offering a rotten yellowish pear. I politely rejected it. She asked me what had brought me to the place. I answered I had come to research the life and times of Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, a militant layer of the Hippie generation who befriended Hunter S. Thompson and wrote a couple of autobiographical narratives, including The Revolt of the Cockroach People. His papers were archived at the University of Santa Barbara. She smiled and began feeding sterile bread to hungry seagulls. She assured me no such place still existed. It had been relocated in the east coast, somewhere in New England. I laughed. She then reflected on historical events and discussed revolutions and gradual social changes.

Decades after the North American Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, also known as Tratado de Libre Comercio, was signed in late 1993, she assured me, the region north of the Rio Grande, by then known as the Tigurex River (a name first used around 1540) had changed fundamentally. A high-speed highway had been built between Los Angeles, the capital of the Hispanic world and also the metropolis with the most Mexicans, some 78 million, and Tenochtitlan, a name that substituted the standard appellation: Mexico City. Poverty was still ubiquitous in numerous rural areas and urban ghettos, even after repeated attempts to abolish it by politicians. In fact, at the end of the previous millennium Mexico had undergone a bloody civil war, led by unhappy Indian soldiers of Mayan descent, which began in the southern state of Chiapas in the hands of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional and spread throughout the Yucatan peninsula and Veracruz. Inequality, notwithstanding, wasn't anymore based on racial lines. White Anglos had slowly been alienated from society. They now lived in the fringes, alienated, unequivocally resented. I remember my interlocutor reciting from memory a fin de siecle text by Guillermo Gomez-Pena, a cult Chicano figure during my own lifetime:

Mexico is sinking

California is on Fire

& we are all getting burned

aren't we?

But what if suddenly the continent turned upside down?

what if the U.S. was Mexico?

what if 200,000 Anglo-Saxicans

were to cross the border each month

to work as gardeners, waiters,

3rd chair musicians, movie extras,

bouncers, babysitters, chauffeurs,

syndicated cartoons, feather-weight boxers, fruit-pickers, &

anonymous poets?

what if they were called waspanos,

waspitos, wasperos or waspbacks?

what if we were the top dogs?

what if literature was life, eh?

what if yo were you

& tu fueras I, Mister?

A new global culture indeed emerged, one with Latino, French, Portuguese, and Anglo elements intermingled. Other nations, including Chile, Argentina, and Colombia, had joined the trade pact originally set forth in North America and stranded diplomatic boundaries dividing North America quickly vanished. No more Monroe doctrines, no more Good Neighbor policies; the Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic worlds had finally become one. With the fall of Communism in China, a monumental influx of industrious Asian immigrants settled first in Los Angeles, then in Tenochtitlan, and finally in Piedras Negras. Children of mixed marriages, part Asian and part Hispanic, had increased in considerable numbers. Even for those constantly rejecting change, ethnic and cultural purity were totally irretrievable. Caliban's Utopia: or, Barbarism Reconsidered, an epochmaking book published in 2021 by Dr. Alejandro Morales 3rd, a theoretician at the University of Ciudad Juarez, claimed a new race was born: la arroza de bronce--the Bronze Race of the Rice People. My Arab interlocutor, referring to the volume as "prophetic," explained Morales's thesis. Based on Jose Vasconcelos's early-twentieth-century essay about La raza cosmica, a triumphant mix of European and Aztec roots, the volume argued that Asian-Hispanics, as true super-humans, were called to rule the entire globe. The author based his argument in the new function of the Rio Grande (which he called Rio de Buenaventura del Norte): once an artificial division, it ceased to be divided, becoming "just another Mississippi River," a natural sight, a commercial avenue, a tourist spot. And indeed, in 2021, after the War of Mannequins between Cuba and the United States, an agreement was signed dismantling all North American borders to establish a single hybrid nation of nations, simply called New World.