Capitalist Thresholds: La muerte de Artemio Cruz and the Mapmaking of Modern Mexico

Abstract In this essay, I argue that Carlos Fuentes’ La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962) delineates a theory of Mexico’s long transition to capitalism. I demonstrate that Fuentes’ novel makes sense of the world as it continually separates the external from the internal, the realm of the social from the realm of the individual, and popular from bourgeois interests. While literary scholarship has often interpreted Artemio Cruz as an emblem of the betrayal of the ideals of the Mexican Revolution, I propose to approach the novel’s main character as a personification of capital, a representative of a definite social class, whose life provides a narrative enclosure of Mexico’s peripheral modernization. Throughout the essay, I focus on separation as a spatial code that accounts for the emergence of a new class formation in Mexico in the 1940s and 50 s. I argue that in its spatial integrations, La muerte de Artemio Cruz formalizes the obstacles presented by economic dependency to the expansion of a national bourgeois order.