5.1: Early 20th Century in Latin America

 

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The 20th century in Latin America can be summarized as a pendulum between the effort to change and the tendency to prolong the conditions of extreme inequality and economic dependence inherited from the colony and not overcome during the 19th century. Improving the conditions of marginalization for the people and achieving more national sovereignty was the great explicit (although not necessarily practical) concern of most intellectuals and many politicians, but preserving the interests of minority elites was the practical (though rarely explicit) mission of almost all governments, in economies defined by foreign investment. The painting on the right is part of the aesthetics that emerged during the first decades of the century, which, after the exoticism associated with the modernist style, prefers to explore everyday, local and non-European history, with the aspiration to redefine more inclusive national identities. The “birdman” was a gold icon that, according to legend, buried people from what is now northwestern Colombia, to protect them from the greed of the conquistadores. It is a good symbol of the effort to “unearth” the history and culture of marginalized sectors of the population.

Bird Man (1936), by Pedro Nel Gómez (Colombia 1899-1984). GOJUKA, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Economic Expansion and Social Changes

raw materials: raw materials worker: industry worker support: support after dismantling: to dismantle strengthening: strengthening strike: strike as well as: as well as

In many Latin American countries, the 20th century began with an economic expansion in the export of raw materials, which produced considerable urban growth and an increase in the middle and working classes. Some sectors of the business elite favored political reforms to gain the support of a larger sector of the population. In Argentina, voting was opened for middle-class men in 1912; Uruguay convened a constituent assembly with the participation of all citizens; Chile adopted a parliamentary system; Brazil, after the dismantling of the monarchy in 1889, began a period of electoral politics; and in Mexico, a group of liberals rebelled against the state monopoly of the positivist dictatorship. On the other hand, worker and peasant activism, connected with the worldwide strengthening of left-wing movements, became very important, since strikes and protests had a crucial impact on the economy. Thus, labor mobilization—anarchist, syndicalist, communist—made itself felt during these years. This mobilization led to processes of redefining the national sphere, as in the case of the Mexican Revolution (1910-19), which had an immense cultural influence in the region. Debates and initiatives to redefine the place of traditional working classes such as indigenous or Afro-descendant, as well as the impression that the European model was not necessarily superior, increased interest in local demonstrations and in alternative visions of the destiny of nations. This redefinition of national identities and of the arts also responded to the changes that Western Europe experienced in the first decades of the century. Until the end of the 19th century, Western culture was considered a superior civilization force for progress and social harmony. At the same time, especially with Karl Marx (1818-1883), the principles of capitalism and bourgeois society began to be strongly questioned. Consciousness scholars such as Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) disputed the empire of reason (the Enlightenment idea that man was a rational animal) and emphasized the importance of other aspects of the psyche, such as the unconscious, dreams and emotions. In 1905 and 1915, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) published his theories of relativity, generating a total revision of how reality was conceived. On the other hand, The Decline of the West (1918-22), the work of the German philosopher Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), posited the aging of European civilization and its need to renew itself in contact with other cultures. The nightmare of the First World War (1914-18) seemed to confirm these theses and undermined confidence in European superiority, also questioning the value of colonialist or imperial projects. All of this contributed to a radical self-examination of Western culture and arts, as well as to a nationalist feeling and pride in the non-European in the Americas.

in line with: in keeping with breaking through: to make one's way

In line with these modernizing forces, there has also been a growing organization and political participation of women since the end of the 19th century, who have had to negotiate the traditional role of sacrificed and virtuous mothers (the model of the Virgin Mary, or “Marianism”) to break through in public life. At the beginning of the century, the protest against legal, political and economic inequality between the sexes was often articulated through teachers' organizations, since they were an educated middle class sector with a clear awareness of the discrimination they suffered. For example, the academics and educators who participated in the scientific congresses of the Southern Cone between 1898 and 1910, promoted discussions about sexual inequality in education, public health, nutrition and child rearing. The visibility of many intellectuals, writers and artists also increases thanks to these initiatives.

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Impact of the Mexican Revolution

give rise to: to give way to gremial: trade- or guild-related instead of: instead of often: often campo: field, realm Occidente: the West boil: to boil speech: popular speech: from ordinary people engraving: engraving source: source the truth: what is certain marked a milestone: became a milestone

The armed mobilization of the years 1910-25 did not radically transform the economy or the class structure in Mexico. But it did give rise to new forms of citizen participation between 1920 and 1940: peasant leagues, unions, union organizations. All this produced mass politics very different from the autocratic and personalist style inherited from the colony. The balance of power was fundamentally altered in a country that would soon have the largest Spanish-speaking population in the world. Instead of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” as in Russia and China, the State became an arbiter between three social classes — the peasants, the workers and the liberal bourgeoisie — with the limits imposed by strong American influence, often in alliance with the traditional elite. The Mexican model, although it was not repeated in any other country, had a great impact on the political and social thinking of Latin America, from Brazil to Guatemala. In the cultural field, Mexico became an epicenter of the process of redefining collective identities that took place in the West during the 1920s and 1930s. Social protest was also boiling in many countries on both continents and States had to discuss how to integrate working people into national identity. Europe itself, decentered, sought aesthetic values in other cultures. The Mexican experience of the 1920s and 1930s, with the enthusiasm to build a new society and with an emphasis on education and artistic production, then had a lot to tell the world. This is how the Dominican intellectual Pedro Henríquez Ureña summarized it in a speech to Argentine students in 1925: “Mexico is now in one of the active moments of its national life, a time of crisis and creation. He is criticizing his past life, affirming his own character, declaring himself fit to form his type of civilization” (11). It was an era of popular affirmation and creativity, in which symbolic warfare and the building of heroes were as important as armed confrontation. The flourishing and activism of the plastic arts was one of the most eloquent manifestations of this spirit. Dozens of artists of both sexes flooded the national imagination with murals, paintings and engravings with criticisms of Western civilization and, above all, trying to learn from the indigenous past and present in order to present a constructive, combative and often idealized vision of the people as the source of a new type of society. Several of these artists —such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros— received great international recognition: “For the first time, Latin American artists found in their own home something that fascinated Europe: the indigenous, the African, the land” (Franco 102). The Mexican experience thus also fostered a feeling not only of nationalism, but of affirmation of Latin America as a whole. As the Mexican poet and Nobel Prize winner for literature Octavio Paz stated in 1986, “The Mexican Revolution was the discovery of Mexico by Mexicans. A revelation” (229). The word “discovery” suggests the decolonizing scope of this rebellion, which transformed the way the country conceived of itself. The word “revelation” alludes to the difficulty of naming a phenomenon that many question as a “real” revolution. The truth is that this “response to the wound of the Conquest” (Fuentes 209), of global significance, marked a milestone in the long and incomplete process of building just and autonomous societies in Latin America.

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Indigenism, Negrismo, regional soap opera

As part of the redefinition of national identities at the beginning of the 20th century, intellectual production (art, literature, studies) related to non-Western cultural elements in America, which already had a history of centuries, achieved particular visibility and fruitful development. In countries with large populations of pre-Columbian origin, there was a proliferation of critical, literary and visual works on native peoples, known as indigenism. Its central and explicit objective was to highlight the relevance of native peoples to the sociopolitical and cultural identity of these countries. This objective distinguishes it from romantic and sentimental representations (known as “Indianism”) that did not seek to denounce the historical exploitation of this population or to delve into the causes of its frequent rebellions. In 1924, for example, the Peruvian Raúl Haya de la Torre founded the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance -APRA-, a grassroots trade unionist movement that proposed lifting the indigenous population out of poverty and making a more equitable distribution of wealth. At the same time, Peruvians César Vallejo, in poetry, Martín Chambi, in photography and, in the narrative, José María Arguedas and Ciro Alegría, among many others, incorporate in a fruitful and perceptive way part of the experience and aspirations of that indigenous presence. Similar works and initiatives emerged, through all aesthetic and social manifestations, in countries such as Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador and Bolivia.

In the Caribbean, Negrismo sought to recognize the presence of African origin in national culture with figures such as Nicolás Guillén (Cuba), Aimé Cesaire (Martinique) and Marcus Garvey (Jamaica). In the Caribbean, anthropologist Fernando Ortiz (Cuba 1881-1969) disseminated studies on African cultures transplanted to the Americas. Around that time, the taste for North American jazz also developed in Europe, and political-cultural initiatives gained ground to vindicate the African presence in the United States (Harlem Renaissance), Jamaica (Marcus Garvey) and the French West Indies (Aimé Césaire and the Négritude movement), among others. A Spanish-American expression of these interests was the literary movement of “Negrismo”, which sought to recognize the population of African origin and its meaning in national culture, and to reciprocally enrich aesthetic production with the cultural fruitfulness of that presence in many Hispanic countries. Negrism had a particular impact on poetry, since it incorporated Afro-Caribbean rhythms and sounds, one of the most notable aspects of the cultural production of slaves and their descendants. Thus, a poetic vein of great beauty and novelty was produced in those years of formal experimentation, although with different levels of exoticism. Some prominent figures in Negro poetry in the first half of the 20th century were Luis Palés Matos (Puerto Rico 1898-1969), Manuel del Cabral (Dominican Republic 1907-1999), Emilio Ballagas (Cuba 1908-1954), Adalberto Ortiz (Ecuador 1914-2003) and Jorge Artel (Colombia 1909-1994). Among them, the one with the greatest international resonance was the Cuban Nicolás Guillén (1902-1989). Afro-Hispanic literature has continued to deepen as a fundamental sector of cultural production throughout Latin America, and of specific relevance to the immense Afro-descendant population in the Caribbean (which includes the Caribbean islands and coasts of Mexico, Central America and North South America), Brazil, Uruguay and the Pacific coast of Peru, Ecuador and Colombia.

In areas where the peasant population was mostly mixed race, such as in Argentina, Venezuela and Colombia, the novel about the land (also called regional or telluric) sought to investigate the “autochthonous” and propose visions of national development that took into account the distinctive character of South American geography and ethnicity. Authors such as Romulo Gallegos (Venezuela 1884-1969), José Eustasio Rivera (Colombia 1888-1928), Ricardo Güiraldes (Argentina 1886-1927), Mariano Azuela (Mexico 1873-1952), Alcides Arguedas (Bolivia 1879-1946) and José de la Cuadra (Ecuador 1903-1941), investigated in their novels the regional life and views of various sectors of their peoples, becoming national references for their respective countries. Part of his aesthetics is based on the literary and pictorial realism that had flourished in Europe since the end of the 19th century, and which had had influential developments in the narrative of the Spanish-American social theme, with authors such as Clorinda Matto de Turner (Peru 1852-1909) and Manuel de Jesús Galván (Dominican Republic 1834-1910), to mention just two.

 

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Poetry after modernism

Already during the second decade of the 20th century, an important group of poets began to distance themselves from modernist aesthetics. The poem “Twist the Swan's Neck” (1911) by Mexican Enrique González Martínez (1871-1952), has served as an emblem of this detachment, since it criticizes the imitative use of the most visible symbols of that movement: swans, princesses, jewels. But the spirit of innovation and the freedom to combine different trends in dialogue with the modernizing processes of their time remained in force.

The poetics immediately following Modernism can be grouped in two directions based on this renewing character. The first, known as Spanish-American postmodernism [1], emphasizes formal simplification and accessible images as opposed to modernist opulence; the second, avant-garde, radicalizes exploration of the critical place of art in modern societies with intense formal experimentation. These and other trends coexisted and intersected in a wide range of regional and personal variants.

What would later be called “postmodernist poetry” in Latin America was not the result of a programmatic movement but of an almost always gradual change in style and in thematic interests. A group of young poets joins the renewed interest in affirming local cultures and environments (as in the regional or land novel). Although they continue the Americanist project of a part of Modernism, they are opposed to its solemn aesthetic. One case is the Venezuelan Andrés Eloy Blanco (1897-1955), who prefers popular legends and nearby landscapes in a literary project he calls “Colombism”, that is, discovering the American world anew, like Columbus. Emulating the popular song or “Trova” with a lexicon accessible to a reading public that continues to expand along with the middle class, the poet from Tierras Que Me Oureron (1921) conceives himself as a painter of landscapes and people:

If there remains a painter of saints, if there remains a painter of the heavens, let him make the sky of my land, with the tones of my people, with his fine-haired angel, with his medium-haired angel, with his carian angels, with his brown angels, with his little white angels, with his little Indian angels, with his little angels, with his little angels blacks, who eat mango in the slums of heaven. (“Paint me little black angels” v. 35-47).

If there is a painter left who paints saints, who paints skies, let that painter do my land's sky with the colors of my people, with its angel of fine pearl, with its small time angel, with its blond angels, with its colored angels, with its white little angels, with its Indian little angels, with its black little angels. Paint them while eating mangoes through the heavens shanty towns.

The language, tone and interests here are very different from those of the modernists. There is a desire to connect the poetic adventure with the visibility gained by the working classes in those years and with the search for alternative cultural models. The style imitates popular traditions and incorporates localisms such as “catires”, colloquialisms such as “medium-haired” and family references (mango, slums).

Postmodernist poetry therefore opts for a less ornate and more direct style. In contrast to modernist musicality or preciosity, “an emotion that meditates on itself” (Quiroga 339) is staged with a sober tone. One sector emphasizes the rural, where many of its authors come from. Another group develops urban experiences. But in both, there is a desire for formal purification and to lower the poetic voice from its grandiloquent pedestal to instead create an intimate atmosphere, shortening the distance between the poetic voice and the reading public.

There are many poets and styles that have come under the umbrella of Spanish-American postmodernism. [2] An interesting facet of this aesthetic period is the large number of authors who are classified under this label and who broaden the lyrical horizon of their time. This can be explained in part because few were part of a programmatic poetic movement and therefore fall under this somewhat vague denomination. But at the same time, it indicates and allows us to explore a greater visibility of women in the political and intellectual life of nations in the process of industrializing. Some prominent names are Alfonsina Storni (Argentina 1892-1938), Juana de Ibarbourou (Uruguay1895-1979), Dulce María Loynaz (Cuba 1902-97), Julia de Burgos (Puerto Rico 1914-53) and Yolanda Bedregal (Bolivia 1916-99). In all of them, one can trace, among a variety of topics, the desire to configure less restrictive identities and more egalitarian relations between the sexes. The most outstanding poet of Spanish-American postmodernism was Gabriela Mistral (Chile 1889-1957), the first Latin American person to receive the Nobel Prize for literature (1945) and one of the creative forces of UNESCO. The Chilean writer develops a poetics of powerful simplicity, both in its form and in its content, which creates “an ennobled modality of ordinary speech” (Franco 274). Part of her work elaborates themes and genres proverbially associated with the feminine and the rural (such as lullabies or ballads), subtly modifying the meaning of the traditional roles assigned to women and the working classes. For example, it represents mothers beyond the domestic sphere, underlining their power to influence all of humanity, and peasants as the source of an alternative future.

 

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[1] It is better to talk about “Spanish-American postmodernism” to avoid confusion with “Post-Modernism”, a term that applies to a type of global cultural production from the end of the 20th century (which some call postmodernity).

[2] Among them are the Puerto Rican Luis Llorens Torres (1874-1944), the Chilean Carlos Pezoa Véliz (1879-1908), the Colombian Porfirio Barba Jacob (1880-1942), the Argentinian Baldomero Fernández Moreno (1886-1950) and the Mexican Ramón López Velarde (1888-1921).

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Modernist vs. Postmodernist Aesthetics

 

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Fuentes

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• Chang-Rodriguez, Raquel and Malva Filer. Voices from Latin America. Boston: Thomson & Heinle, 2004.
• Craven, David. Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910-1990. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
• Davies, Catherine, ed. The Companion to Hispanic Studies. Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Frank, Jean. History of Spanish-American literature. Barcelona: Ariel, 1983.
• Fuentes, Carlos. “The Three Mexican Revolutions”. New Mexican time. Madrid: Santillana, 1995.
• Henríquez Ureña, Pedro. Plenitude of America: selected essays. Buenos Aires: Peña del Giudice, 1952.
• Jimenez, Jose Olivio. Critical anthology of Spanish-American modernist poetry. Madrid: Hyperion, 1989.
• Miller, Francesca. Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice. University Press of New England, 1991.
• Oviedo, Jose Miguel. History of Spanish-American literature. Madrid: Alliance, 2001.
• Peace, Octavio. The privileges of sight: Mexican art. Mexico: Fund for Economic Culture, 1987.
• Quiroga, Jose. “Spanish-American poetry between 1922 and 1975”. History of Spanish-American literature. Ed. Roberto Gonzalez Echeverria and Enrique Pupo-Walker. Trad. Ana Santonja Querol and Consuelo Triviño Anzola. Madrid: Gredos, 2006. 318-73.
• Skidmore, Thomas E. and Peter H. Smith. Modern Latin America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Winn, Peter. Americas: The Changing Face of Latin America and the Caribbean. 4th ^ed. Berkeley: U of California, 2005.