One of the more substantial cultural offerings to celebrate the quincentennial of Columbus’s discovery of America will be broadcast on the Discovery Channel on April 1923. Entitled “The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World,” it is a series of five one-hour programs on the history of Spain and Spanish-America, written and narrated by the celebrated Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes. The series embraces an extraordinarily wide range of materials, from the pre-Columbian Indian civilizations to Mexican immigrants in today’s Los Angeles, from Spain’s Gothic age to its current “consumer socialism.” The underlying premises of the series are that the events of 1492 really did inaugurate a New World, and that the history of America (broadly construed as the entire Western hemisphere) has been a long search for Utopia, a quest which has been vastly enriching to humanity as a whole.

A generation ago such notions would have been wholly unexceptionable.

A generation ago such notions would have been wholly unexceptionable. But today, when the Columbus quincentennial celebrations are being forced to assume some heavy political burdens, it is a positive relief to see and hear the story of the discovery and conquest of the Americas told with a sense of balance, discrimination, and wit. If the scholarship here is somewhat conventional, at least it does not insist on judging the past purely in terms of the present. Although he is a man of passionate conviction, Fuentes the novelist is nonetheless capable of imagining perspectives other