My doctoral dissertation focuses on Octavio Paz and his circle of friends who published in his magazines: Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Luis Borges, Milán Kundera, Czweslaw Milosz, Enrique Krauze, Gabriel Zaid, among others. This international perspective of Paz is relatively new. Although there are numerous studies about Paz and his work, to date there is very little published about his two magazines Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta (1976-1998) and his work as their editor. There has also been little published about the collective participation of the aforementioned group of writers and intellectuals and their substantial benefits to the cultural debate in Latin America. My research has led me to unpublished papers by Paz and interviews with different collaborators of the magazine, including Octavio Paz.

Paz's perspective on politics is original. He always underscored that the debate in his magazine came not from social scientist, but from writers and artists. For Paz, art and literature were tools to criticize politics. From this perspective, Paz, like the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, believed that writers and intellectuals are not better or worse than the rest of the human kind, only different. Following this distinction, literature does not provide better or worse perspectives on democracy; instead, literature provides a different perspective.

The subject of intellectuals and politics during the last 12 years has had substantial importance, especially in the publication of Russell Jacoby's "The last intellectuals". According to Jacoby there are no longer heroes in the world, such as in the past decades. There are no more independent writers such as Octavio Pazs, Jean Paul Sartres, Daniel Bells or Phillip Rahvs due to the complexity of the world. Recently, intellectuals as topic and its relation to the debate on the world democracy has been the subject of the independent public intellectual Noam Chomsky. The French thinker Bernard-Henry Levy has also discussed the need for independent intellectuals and writers in the United States undomesticated by academia or the media.

In this perspective on literature and politics which has influenced and guided much of my own research. My dissertation illustrates one of the few circles of contemporary independent Latin American writers in Mexico—Paz and his circle—who criticized the political power from a non-state and non-partisan perspective, thus exemplifying art as an instrument of criticism.