Quote by Carlos Fuentes: “Mexico has a pyramid at its center, and it is made of skulls.”

Fuentes is saying that Mexican national identity is built upon a foundation of death and sacrifice — both the Aztec ritual pyramid and the mass killings of the conquest. The nation's grandeur cannot be separated from the violence that created it.

Fuentes published The Death of Artemio Cruz in 1962, as Mexico celebrated fifty years since the Revolution while critics began to question whether the Revolution had fulfilled its promises of land reform and equality. The novel was a direct interrogation of how the ideals of the Revolution had been corrupted by power.

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.