To Understand

As a child, it is very difficult to fully comprehend some of the things that we are meant to learn.  Fuentes was taught about Mexico from a very young age.  It was their heritage that his father wanted him to know.  But growing up in America, he did not realize that Mexico was a real place at first.  It was among the lands of storybooks and legends at first.  It wasn't until Mexico nationalized the holdings of foreign oil countries did he realize that it was a real place.  Not only that it was a real place, but that it could affect him with how his classmates were cruel to him for where he was from.

As a child, there are many things that fall under this category of being real but not real.  Sure we may know that something is real, but it is not really real until we can touch it for ourselves.  This can even carry into our adulthood with some things.  We may know that people are suffering in other countries, that people are starving.  But we cannot comprehend it having never suffered the way that they have ourselves.  Having never starved at all.  We are often told not to think of people in broad terms, but it is difficult to do that when we have no specific terms to apply to them.

As Fuentes got older, he realized more of his heritage and understood it better.  He spoke of how he did not find modernity as difficult to find as his own countries heritage and tradition.  But he realized that, just like his entrance into the world was a confusion of not being where either his mother or father didn't want him born and being baptized twice to fulfill both his mother's Catholicism and his father's Catholicism,  he would never quite fit anywhere specific.  He was a wanderer.  But no matter where he wandered, he would not let go of his past, of his heritage.  He had seen Mexico and he now understood his heritage and he wasn't willing to let go.