The Years with Laura Díaz by Carlos Fuentes
"The Years with Laura Díaz" by Carlos Fuentes is a multi-layered novel that intricately weaves the life story of Laura Díaz against the backdrop of shifting Mexican history and culture. The narrative is framed by Santiago López-Alfaro’s documentary project, which begins with a mural in Detroit and concludes with another in Los Angeles, symbolizing the deep connections between art, identity, and memory. The story spans from 1905, chronicling the life of Laura’s grandmother, Cosima Kelsen, through a series of family legends and poignant events that shape Laura’s self-discovery.
As Laura navigates relationships with her family, including her revolutionary half-brother Santiago and her labor leader husband, Francisco, she grapples with her personal dissatisfaction and societal expectations. Her interactions with iconic figures such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo further enrich her journey, exposing her to the complexities of art, politics, and love. The novel also addresses themes of loss and resilience, particularly as Laura confronts cancer and reflects on her life choices.
Fuentes uses Laura’s experiences to explore broader socio-political issues, including Mexican-American relations, the impact of McCarthyism, and the role of women in society, ultimately presenting a narrative that is as much about personal identity as it is about collective history.
The Years with Laura Díaz by Carlos Fuentes
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published:Los años con Laura Díaz, 1999 (English translation, 2000)
Type of work: Novel
The Work
The Years with Laura Díaz begins and ends with Santiago López-Alfaro making a television documentary, first in Detroit in 1999 and then in Los Angeles in 2000. In Detroit, while looking at a mural painted by Diego Rivera, he sees the face of Laura Díaz, the woman whose story is covered in the ensuing pages; at the end of the novel, he is looking at another mural by a Mexican painter, whose work, like Rivera’s, was also censured and obliterated.
The framing device sets the plot in motion, taking readers back to 1905, when Laura’s grandmother, Cosima Kelsen, is traveling from Mexico City to the family home in Veracruz. On the trip home, a dashing bandit nicknamed the Hunk of Papantla cuts off her fingers in order to steal her rings, but, inexplicably, a legend develops that Cosima never got over her infatuation with the bandit. That legend is but one of many that persists in family history. At her home in Catemaco, Cosima has three daughters: the pianist Hilda, the writer Virginia, and Leticia, Laura’s mother. She also “adopts” Maria de la O, her husband Felipe’s mulatto daughter. At Cosima’s funeral, Laura follows a white crow (more legend) to what she believes is a giant female figure covered with jewels, a sight that recurs later in the novel.
When Laura and Leticia join Leticia’s husband, Fernando, in Veracruz, where he has become a bank president, Laura meets the first Santiago, her half brother, the son from Fernando’s first marriage, and the two become very close. Santiago, a revolutionary, is executed by a firing squad, and Fernando is transferred to Xalapa. Laura marries Juan Francisco López Greene, a labor leader, and has two sons, Santiago and Danton, but she is unhappy, believing that she has “shrunk” rather than grown. She realizes that she knows only Francisco’s public self, not his private self. After Francisco informs on Carmela Soriano, a rebel, Laura leaves her husband and is soon attending soirees with Orlando Ximenéz, a notorious womanizer. She also becomes friends with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, who take her to Detroit, where Diego includes her in his mural. When she returns to Mexico, she meets Jorge Maura, the only man she really loves, but he leaves her to help his Jewish lover escape from Nazi persecution.
Laura then returns to Francisco and renews her relationships with her children. Santiago, the painter, gives his mother a painting she believes depicts the Fall of Man. Santiago dies at twenty-six, before he can realize his artistic potential. His brother, Danton, marries a wealthy woman and has a son, another Santiago, who rebels against his father, becomes political, and is killed at a demonstration, but not before his wife becomes pregnant. Her baby becomes the fourth Santiago, Laura’s grandson, who begins and ends the story.
At the demonstration, Laura, who has been given a camera, photographs her son and begins her career as a photographer and her life as a complete human being. In 1972, after she learns that she has cancer, she returns to Catemaco, her childhood home, which has been restored by Danton, and finds the statue of the woman, as well as the ceiba tree, which her grandfather, in an effort to spare her from superstition, had told her was the statue she had seen. In embracing the ceiba tree, with its spines like “wounding daggers,” Laura finds the tree ironically “protecting” in the sense that it provides her the release from life she seeks.
In addition to an intricate plot and a large cast of characters, Fuentes offers his readers a tour of Mexican history, a course in American-Mexican relations, McCarthyism, mural painting, and mythology. Most of the political content comes from discussions between Francisco and labor leaders and between Jorge and his friends, and the novel suffers a bit from the protracted harangues about why the revolution failed. The nature of Mexican-American relations is vividly portrayed through Rivera’s mural and Santiago’s interpretation of it. While Rivera paints many black and brown faces, he does not paint any white ones—the white workers are facing away from spectators. The machines on which American capitalism relies are depicted as menacing and outsized, so that they seem to be a threat. Harry Jaffee, one of Laura’s lovers, is one of the many political refugees from the northeast United States and Hollywood whose careers have been destroyed by the anti-Communist paranoia fostered by right-wing politicians.
The legends and mythology in the book are, almost without exception, feminine. The giant female statue, the doll Li Po, and Leticia, “the central feminine image” for Laura, suggest that the real power in the novel is feminine.
Sources for Further Study
Booklist 97 (September 1, 2000): 6.
Library Journal 125 (October 1, 2000): 147.
Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2000, p. E1.
The New York Times Book Review 105 (November 12, 2000): 8.
Publishers Weekly 247 (September 18, 2000): 85.
The Washington Post Book World, October 15, 2000, p. 7.