Chromosomatic imperialism

Chromosomatic imperialism is a phrase attributed to the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes in a passage reflecting on migration, racial power, and rivalry. Its force in the novel lies partly in the contrast between the scale of the idea—people understood as demographic power—and the exposed, tightly limited circumstances of an individual migrant such as Driss.

Attribution and Meaning

The phrase appears in a reflection on Hispanic illegal immigration into the United States. The speaker recalls Fuentes’s description of it as “chromosomatic imperialism,” then argues that power in a racial sense can be reduced to how many people belong to a group. In this line of thought, other people are framed less as objects of hatred than as rivals. The phrase therefore gives a compressed, provocative name to migration imagined as collective demographic force; the surrounding reflection presents that interpretation as the speaker’s view, not as a neutral definition or an established fact about migrants.

Driss’s Migration in Practice

Driss’s story supplies a sharply different scale of experience. He tells Ismael that he jumped ship and swam ashore south of the marina at Sotogrande, then walked through the marina and onward toward San Martín without being seen. His arrival is an individual act of evasion, undertaken while wet and alone, rather than a display of collective power.

Angela Bloodworth tells her husband, Roger, that Driss is on the run from the Spanish police because he is an immigrant. Roger offers him work as a gardener, with board and lodging and three hundred euros a month. The offer gives Driss shelter, but not freedom of movement: the Bloodworths tell him to remain on their property because local police look for undocumented workers. For weeks he prunes fruit trees and hedges under a straw hat, living from their table and refusing the wine they offer. The contrast makes the phrase’s abstract language of numbers and power sit uneasily beside a migrant whose safety depends on staying out of sight and accepting narrowly bounded work.

Mobility, Work, and Rivalry

The limits on Driss’s movement shape what comes next. When the tourist season ends and the Bloodworths settle into winter, he grows impatient and thinks increasingly about Paris. The roads there, Roger explains, are expensive, though Driss imagines that he might hitch a ride with Moroccans travelling from Algeciras. His plan is not a claim to power over a destination: it is an attempt to find a route onward without the police knowing. The phrase’s grand scale and Driss’s practical calculations of money, transport, and concealment remain in tension.

The novel also places migration within a wider landscape of unequal exchange. On the road to Merzouga, Anouar describes competition between the men of Tafal’aalt and the Aït Atta over different kinds of fossils, while traders from Germany, France, and the United States pay substantial sums for prized trilobites. This is not an explicit application of Fuentes’s phrase, but it broadens the surrounding picture of power: movement, livelihood, and value are shaped by relations that extend beyond any one person’s will.

Narrative Function

The phrase is memorable because it condenses a sweeping theory into a compact, unsettling expression, while the surrounding narrative keeps returning to particular conditions: a clandestine crossing, the threat of police attention, restricted movement, low-paid work, and the hope of reaching Paris. Read alongside Driss’s account, it exposes the distance between describing migration as the force of a population and attending to what an undocumented person can actually do. The novel leaves that discrepancy visible rather than resolving it into a single verdict.