La región más transparente Reading Order

La región más transparente (Where the Air Is Clear, 1958) by Carlos Fuentes is the founding novel of the Mexican Boom — the book that established Fuentes as Mexico's premier novelist and that set the formal template for the great Boom novels that followed. Set in Mexico City in the early 1950s, the novel follows dozens of characters across the full spectrum of Mexican society — from the old revolutionary families who have become the new bourgeoisie, to the indigenous poor who arrived from the countryside, to the American expatriates and European immigrants who have washed up in the capital — through a year in the life of a city that is simultaneously the most cosmopolitan and the most traditional in the Americas. The novel's central consciousness is Ixca Cienfuegos, a man of indigenous descent who moves through all the novel's social worlds as a kind of witness and catalyst — provoking characters into revealing their truths and connecting the Mexico of the present to the Mexico of the Aztec past that still pulses beneath its surface. Fuentes brought to the novel the full arsenal of modernist technique — stream of consciousness, multiple perspectives, time shifts, mythological overlays — and the result was unlike anything previously written in Spanish. The novel's Mexico City is the true protagonist: Fuentes was doing for the Mexican capital what Dos Passos had done for New York in Manhattan Transfer and Joyce for Dublin in Ulysses.