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Our pilgrim cultures have become universal. They move in vast currents from South to North
and from East to West, carrying with them workers and their families, and their prayers, their
cookeries, their memories, their greetings and songs and laughter and dreams and a desire to defy
prejudices, to reclaim equity alongside identity, to keep their own cultural profile in an unfixed
world that is determined by immediate communication, a growing technology and the flux of
both the capital and labour markets. These pilgrims are trying to enrichen the national identities
of those countries into which they are integrating.
Can we deny these secular legacies their right to exist? In a universe of such rapid change,
they can turn into essential, if not lifesaving, contributions to a future that is as complex as it is
unpredictable.
The French romantic poet Alfred de Musset wrote the following words at the end of the
Napoleonic era: “we live with one foot on ashes and the other on seeds”. The same can be said for
us today. We do not know how to separate the past from the future, nor should we have to, for they
both accompany us in the present.
Our century has been a brief one, full of contradictions. It began in Sarajevo in 1914 and ended
in Sarajevo in 1994. It has been a century of unmatched progress and incomparable inequality:
the biggest scientific step forward and the greatest political step backward. The voyage to the
Moon and the voyage to Siberia. The glory of Einstein and the horror of Auschwitz. The relentless
persecution of entire races, wars not directed against armies but against civilians, six million Jews
murdered by Nazism, two million Vietnamese killed in colonial wars and forty million children
that die unnecessary deaths every day in the Third World, needless deaths that are becoming less
and less and which one day will no longer occur thanks to men like Manuel Patarroyo.
Self-determination for some peoples, but not for others, be the latter sometimes neighbours
of the former. This is an irony worthy of Orwell: all nations are sovereign, bus some are more
sovereign than others.
We are in need of renewed international organizations that reflect a new world composition. In
1994, there are 200 independent states; in 1945, the year that the uno was founded, there were 44.
Today’s world is one of battles over transnational, national, regional and tribal jurisdictions, one of
opposition between the global and local villages, between the technological village of Ted Turner
and the memory village of Emiliano Zapata, between the happy robot that lives in the penthouse
and the tribal idols that survive in the basement. At present, we are undergoing a painful passage
from a volume economy to a value economy, with the consequent sacrifice of millions of workers.
And these workers are the victims of the following paradox: greater productivity is coupled
with greater unemployment. We are influenced by a worldwide info-net, but we are informed of
very little, because we have lost the organic relationship between experience, information and
knowledge. This is an age of information explosion and significance implosion.
However, all these conflicts can be considered opportunities; after all, they have the possibility
to bring about contact, interchange, dialogue and concord. Imagination and humanity needed to
create that one world which the Inca Garcilaso foresaw and which forces us today to acknowledge
ourselves in a common dilemma.
Carlos Fuentes
—
Prince of Asturias
Award for Literature
1994
Excerpt from the speech given on
the occasion of receiving the Prince
of Asturias Award for Literature
on 24/11/1994.
24
th
N
ovember
1994
