Quote by Carlos Fuentes: “A nation is not something that exists. A nation is something that has to be built.”

National identity is not a fixed inheritance or a natural fact — it is an ongoing project that requires active effort, choice, and construction by its people. Nations that stop building themselves begin to decay into merely the past.

Fuentes was a prolific essayist throughout the 1970s at a time when Mexico's PRI government maintained decades-long authoritarian rule while claiming to embody the ideals of the Mexican Revolution. His essays challenged the idea that Mexico's national identity was a settled matter rather than a live and contested question.

Mexican novelist and diplomat, one of the central figures of the Latin American Boom, whose novels The Death of Artemio Cruz and Terra Nostra engage Mexico's colonial history, political corruption, and cultural complexity. He received the Cervantes Prize in 1987.