You have an absolute freedom in Mexican writing today in which you don’t necessarily have to deal with the Mexican identity. You know why? Because we have an identity... We know who we are. We know what it means to be a Mexican.

Fuentes argues that once a national culture has achieved a confident sense of itself, its writers are no longer compelled to “prove” or constantly explain that identity. The quote pushes back against the expectation—common in international reception of Latin American literature—that Mexican authors must foreground “Mexicanness” as their primary subject. For Fuentes, a settled identity becomes a platform for artistic freedom: writers can range across themes, forms, and global concerns without being policed by cultural authenticity tests. The insistence “we know who we are” is also rhetorical—an assertion of cultural maturity and sovereignty in the literary sphere.