5.4: Spanish America 1930-1969

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From the 1930s to the beginning of the 1970s, Latin America experienced an intense confrontation between aspirations for radical social change inspired by communist inspiration and the maintenance of capitalist development within existing structures. The nationalist era, which until the 1950s even manifested itself in a limitation of imports to strengthen local industry, gave rise to a “Latin American” era, of enthusiasm for social change and the debate about which side to be on during the Cold War. The triumph of the Cuban Revolution (1959) became a reference, both for left-wing and right-wing ideologies, in the debate about what place Latin American countries would occupy in the distribution of world power and what their sociopolitical model should be. For this reason, the artistic and literary production of Latin America received great international attention in those years.

Mural of the Communist Youth in Havana, Cuba (1960s). This mural illustrates the cultural framework of “study, work and gun” (intellectuals, workers and guerrillas) with which a part of the population aspired to generate radical changes and which another part of the population saw as a threat to stability, prosperity and security.

Nationalism and Populism

overcome : to overcome achieve: to attain sovereignty: sovereignty weaken: to weaken raw materials: raw materials landowner: large land owner often : often army: army coup (military): coup unemployment: unemployment scarcity scarcity taxes: taxes owner: owner union: labor union advantage: worker advantage: industry worker entrepreneur: business owner recipe: recipe to a certain extent: to a certain extent sooner or later: sooner or later jeopardize: to be in danger threaten: to threaten company: enterprise, company every Once more: ever more

After the economic expansion of the first three decades of the 20th century, the exporting bourgeoisie weakened with the depression experienced by world capitalism during the 1930s. International demand for agricultural products and raw materials fell by half. The pendulum then returns to the conservative right. The traditional landowning elite regains government control, suppressing left-wing activism, often with support from the military. During the 1930s, there were military governments or coup attempts in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras. ^[1] The army thus regains its influential role in Latin American politics. In connection with this militarism and the economic crisis, some nationalist wars that recall those of the 19th century also reappear: Bolivia-Paraguay (1933-38); Colombia-Peru (1932-34); Peru-Ecuador (1941-42). To respond to unemployment and the scarcity of imported products, the strategy of encouraging the development of domestic manufacturing is generalized in a protectionist policy that was called “industrialization by import substitution” (ISI). To this end, governments raised taxes on imports, founded or financed new industries, kept wages low, and reduced taxes on household products. Nationalist propaganda, efforts to regain domestic control of natural resources, and a sense of pride in one's own in the face of foreign affairs were also encouraged. Industrial owners grew richer and could influence politics, but unions also grew larger and political parties that won their support had an electoral advantage. Control, then, had to be fundamentally negotiated between three power groups: 1) the interests of the traditional landowning elite, often associated with the Church; 2) the emerging commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, with growing economic and social influence; 3) the working class and the unions, whose support (or control) was crucial to continuing industrial expansion. In many cases, the balance was tipped in favor of the sector that obtained military support and/or that of Washington. But in certain countries and times, left-wing parties achieved a lot of influence, such as in Chile in the 1950s and 1960s. The different forms of government in Latin America during these decades represent different strategies for combining these power groups. One of these formulas was a pro-industrial and pro-military alliance that tried to incorporate the interests of businessmen and at the same time satisfy some workers' demands under the magnetism of an authoritarian and charismatic leader. This was the recipe for populism, applied by Perón in Argentina, Vargas in Brazil, Rojas Pinilla in Colombia and, to a certain extent, Arbens in Guatemala, Velasco Ibarra in Ecuador and Cárdenas in Mexico. The problem was that they tried to represent two emerging groups with conflicting interests (the workers and their employers), one of whom sooner or later felt betrayed, and were unsustainable in times of economic austerity. Its stability was also endangered if the reforms threatened the interests of landowners or North American companies. In other cases, different political parties included the two emerging groups (Chile), they were excluded by force of dictatorships (Venezuela, Nicaragua, Paraguay), or coalitions were generated between sectors of the middle class, workers and peasants for armed resistance (Colombia, El Salvador). In some cases, these coalitions managed to seize power and carry out liberal reforms for a time, such as in the 1936 Revolution in Paraguay, the 1944 Revolution in Guatemala, and the 1952 Revolution in Bolivia. However, such revolutions would become increasingly difficult as part of aggressive US policy to ensure the loyalty of the continent in “The Cold War”.

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[1] The great exception has been Costa Rica, whose party government established a progressive system of social security and worker protection and, a decade later, eliminated the national army.

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Cold War and Left-Wing Activism

large: quite large investment: investment as: as (process) achieve: to achieve headquarters: headquarters dubbing: covert dubbing: under cover by: in favor of overthrow: overthrow meanwhile: in the meantime cabinet: cabinet starting from: starting in durable: lasting as well as: as well as environment: climate, environment scope: sphere, field Gospel: Long Term Gospel: In the Long Run

The most important impact of World War II for Latin America was its definitive inclusion within Washington's sphere of power. By 1945, Western Europe had had to liquidate its investments in America to pay for the war, and its influence was greatly reduced. The United States, on the other hand, consolidated itself as a global political, economic and military power, with large investments across the continent. As its relations with the Russians cooled, the Truman administration succeeded in getting almost all Latin American countries to break relations with the Soviet Union and for several governments to declare local communist parties illegal — which also coincided with the interests of the economic elite. In 1948, the Organization of American States (OAS), based in Washington, was created in Bogotá to promote common policies on the continent. During the following years, the Pentagon strengthened its influence over Latin American armies, strengthening and expanding its military bases in the region. The United States became the Hemisphere's main trading partner. And, in the cultural field, North American television and film production, with efficient dubbing systems, flooded markets across the continent. Covert CIA interventions became common, usually on the part of the elite and against popular movements. Two of these interventions—which fueled anti-American sentiments on the left—led to the overthrow of the reformist president Jacobo Árbens of Guatemala in 1954 and of the Chilean Salvador Allende in 1973, despite the fact that both had been democratically elected in their respective countries. Meanwhile, popular support for communist parties grew in many Latin American countries, gaining the presence of power in the Chilean cabinet and congressmen in more than nine governments during the 1940s. Armed resistance in the form of guerrillas, already understood by the high levels of poverty, acquired a radical nationalist dimension from the 1950s onwards: the “liberation” of US imperialism and capitalist exploitation. And starting in the sixties, the Soviet Union and China also did their part to tilt Latin America towards their sphere, helping to finance revolutionary guerrilla movements in the region. The lasting victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 was a wake-up call for Washington and for the elites, as well as a motivation for “national liberation struggles” to proliferate in rural and urban guerrillas across Latin America. For popular activists, for the first time it seemed possible for workers and peasants to take control of the State and obtain the right to health, education and a decent standard of living. As in the student movement in France or the struggles for civil rights in the United States, many students and the Latin American intelligentsia joined the activist enthusiasm that characterized the sixties in the world. The most famous intellectuals of the time represented in their works the history of marginalization and repression of the people as well as the aspirations for more egalitarian and participatory societies. One of the books that were widely disseminated was The Open Veins of Latin America, by the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015), which reviewed the history of injustice and human exploitation on the continent. In Chile, a left-wing coalition (the “Popular Unity”) won the elections in 1970, and Salvador Allende, the new president, nationalized the copper mines that were in the hands of foreign companies, raised workers' salaries and froze the prices of basic necessities, among other socialist-type reforms. The Cuban government also undertook, with extensive Soviet funds, a campaign to disseminate socialism throughout America. But both failed to consolidate prosperous economies for all over the long term.

 

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The Latin Americanism of the 1960s

As we saw, the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 became a motivation for the proliferation of “liberation struggles” in rural and urban guerrillas in Central and South America. The term “Latin America”, understood as unity between peoples with the same aspirations and a history of oppression, then served to promote the struggle for social change and for political and cultural sovereignty, particularly with a leftist line. This utopian spirit was also manifested in the conviction that, from Mexico to the Southern Cone, these peoples shared a colonial past, a present of dependence and the same destiny of liberation (the “Latin American identity” or “Latin Americanism”) and therefore must unite in a common struggle against two enemies: Washington's interests at the service of Wall Street, and the local ruling class associated with those interests. Thus, the 1960s marked a time of immense creativity, enthusiastic unification and international diffusion in the arts and intellectual production for Latin America. Large numbers of young people across the continent sang to the rhythm of musical movements such as the South American Protest Song and the Cuban Nueva Trova, sympathized with left-wing groups in their countries, and participated in avant-garde poetic movements. Novels that translated these ideals into a novel, vibrant and critical narrative were read with admiration. All this made many Latin Americans feel that they had their own innovative voice that captured European and North American attention because of their difference.

The type of discourse that prevailed in these years is summarized in one of Che Guevara's speeches at the beginning of the decade:

to predominate: to predominate negligible: insignificant isolated: isolated to suffer: to suffer to harbor: to house abound: to exist in abundance

“There is no small enemy or negligible force, because there are no longer isolated villages. As established in the second declaration of Havana, no people in Latin America are weak, because they are part of a family of two hundred million brothers who suffer the same miseries, harbor the same feelings, have the same enemy, all dream of the same destiny, and have the solidarity of all honest men and women in the world. This epic before us calls for the hungry masses of Indians, of landless peasants, of exploited workers, the progressive masses, the honest and brilliant intellectuals that abound in our long-suffering lands of Latin America” (https://youtu.be/EktbVnKPx6o).

Workers', peasant and guerrilla movements gained strength in many countries. In fact, there was a spirit of unification among the middle and lower classes around the ideal of building sociopolitical models—such as the triumphant Cuban revolution or the democratic socialism of Salvador Allende in Chile—that would benefit the majority of the population and not just the elite.

Liberation theology, created by Christian philosophers from Central and South America such as the Peruvian Gustavo Gutierrez and the Brazilian Leonardo Boff, proposed to apply the principles of the Gospel to the active search for social justice. The pedagogy of liberation, proposed by the Brazilian Paulo Freire, created an educational practice designed to promote political action and value the knowledge of people who have suffered socioeconomic suppression for several generations. Thinkers such as Leopoldo Zea (Mexico) and Enrique Dussel (Argentina) developed a rigorous and alternative philosophy for thinking about “the Latin American” in its specificity and dignity. Economists and sociologists such as Enrique Cardoso (Brazil) and Alonso Quijano (Peru) produced a systematic critique of development understood as an imitation of European or American modernization, developing an alternative thesis called the Dependency Theory, which emphasized the structural change of economic relations both globally and nationally. For their part, the most famous writers, composers, filmmakers and artists of the time represented in their works the history of marginalization and repression of the people as well as their creative strength and aspirations towards more egalitarian and participatory societies.

 

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The “Boom” of Narrative

barely: barely launch: to launch until then: until then become: to become cusp: peak Hopscotch : Hopscotch to Capture, to Monopolize They Had Achieved: Had Accomplished Unheard of: Unheard of, Extraordinary First World: Form the First World plot: plot soap opera: soap opera

Latin America has occupied the interest of the world since 1961, when the communist-led government protected by the Soviet Union in Cuba was stabilized, challenging Washington's hegemony in the hemisphere. The region had become a zone of contention for the Cold War. Both in Europe and in the United States, Latin American study programs multiplied, focusing on producing knowledge about that part of the continent that, a few years before, was barely studied. The Kennedy government launched the “Alliance for Progress”, an investment initiative for the (capitalist) development or modernization of Latin America, and began to appoint some Puerto Ricans as ambassadors to several Spanish-speaking countries, to strengthen their affinity with the region. The year 1967 was a decisive year for Latin American literature, until then generally ignored on the world stage. That year, the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899-1974) became the first Latin American novelist to receive the Nobel Prize for literature (the Chilean Gabriela Mistral had received it for her poetry in 1945). Also in June of that year, the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude appeared, by the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014), which in a few months became a worldwide bestseller. It was the pinnacle of the “Boom” in the Spanish-American novel, which had begun a few years earlier with the great popularity of Rayuela (1963) by Argentinian director Julio Cortázar (1914-1984), and which also included the work of Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-) and that of Mexican Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012), among others. For the first time in history, Latin American literary production played a leading role on the international scene and, by the year 2000, four other writers had received the Nobel Prize for literature: Pablo Neruda (Chile) in 1971, García Márquez in 1982, Octavio Paz (Mexico) in 1990 and Derek Walcott (St. Lucia) in 1992. The writers who made up the novel's “Boom”, almost all with left-wing ideology, garnered worldwide attention with a literature that brilliantly combined modern experimentation with distinctive elements of Latin American life and culture. The jungle, the myth, the oral tradition, the indigenous and African presence, the turbulent politics, the paradoxical history and the insatiable search for identity were integrated into monumental novels whose poetic language managed to capture many of the contradictory experiences of Latin America that were exotic or innovative for the First World. It was in a way a replication of what Mexican painters such as Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and José Clemente Orozco had achieved in the 1920s and '30s. The “normal” for Europeans and North Americans was described as something “magical” for the narrative gaze, and the unheard of or the magical for the first-world view was described as an ordinary everyday life: “García Márquez conjured up a world in his native Colombia where magic was as real as money and ice as magical as dragon's eggs” (Winn 400). And this generation had also assimilated the influence of international literature as well as modern mass culture, with novels that included Hollywood plots, tango stories or soap operas. The new novel sought to represent the heterogeneous and diverse experience of their peoples, and to propose alternative models of reality. In this effort, a common ideal was perceived, which reinforced the idea of “Latin American” unity.

Years before, in the prologue to the novel The Kingdom of This World (1949) —which narrated the Haitian revolution—Cuban musicologist and novelist Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) had proposed the term “the real marvelous” to designate this new fiction that re-created American historical reality in its fertile combination of mythologies and cultural models, from indigenous and African to European and mixed race. Carpentier said:

by: because of landscape: landscape Faustic: like Goethe's Faust, tragic, debased out of stock: to exhaust

“Because of the virginity of the landscape, because of the formation, because of the ontology, because of the Faustic presence of the Indian and the Negro, because of the Revelation that constituted their recent discovery, because of the fruitful interbreeding that it fostered, America is far from having exhausted its wealth of mythologies. What is the whole history of America if not a chronicle of the real-wonderful?” (12).

The Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899-1974) had published in that same year his novel Hombres de Maize (1949), which shared this effort to find a language appropriate to the “magical” or surreal experience and to express the need for social transformation. This novel combined surrealist techniques with traditional legends to create a magical reality, capable of representing the story of Mayan resistance to the advance of Western culture, interpreting it in its own terms. For their part, Juan Rulfo (1918-1986) and Elena Garro (1916-1998) had explored the bittersweet legacy of the Mexican revolution, which had not lifted most of the population out of misery, in a narrative that questioned the divisions between the ghostly and the historical. Similar to Octavio Paz, the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) differed in his political ideas from left-wing writers, and sought universal themes in his fictions and poems. His work, however, had an undeniable influence on the “Boom” generation, both in its questioning of a unanimous reality and in the experimentation of labyrinthine stories that combined cultural heritages as diverse as the Latin American population itself.

At the beginning of the 1960s, there was already a wide reading audience in Latin America. The expansion of cities and educational opportunities guaranteed that a growing middle class of professionals and university students avidly read the novels of their favorite authors, with whom they shared ideals of radical transformation of social structures. This enthusiasm was confirmed by the apparent success of the Cuban revolution, which helped to spread across the continent a “Latin American” spirit of transcending national borders and creating an awareness of political change among the masses. Several Spanish and French publishing houses also carried out a major dissemination campaign that gave preference to left-wing writers and encouraging multi-national forums. Thus, three factors were combined in the sixties: first, painting, poetry and novels had prepared a Latin American consciousness and an avid reading public; second, the political left gained great strength in many countries of the continent; third, European publishers stimulated the publication of Latin American works because of the public's interest in following the processes of change in Latin America during the Cold War.

And it was this combination of factors that allowed brilliant novelists such as Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Ernesto Sábato (Argentina 1911-2011), Juan Carlos Onetti (Uruguay 1909-1994) or José Donoso (Chile 1924-1996) to disseminate their works to hundreds of thousands of readers in Latin America, Europe, Asia and the United States, becoming world stars. Like Borges, they criticized the “provincial” novels of social realism, and embraced literary experimentation in dialogue with the boldest trends of the First World.

Unlike Borges, a central theme of the “Boom” was Latin American history, the critique of the continent's sociopolitical conditions and the promotion of a regional identity. One Hundred Years of Solitude can be read as an allegory of Colombian history in the plot of the Buendía family, and Macondo has been interpreted as a metaphor for Latin America.

By the mid-1970s, military repression grew more severe across the region, Fidel Castro's government was less popular, and revolutionary enthusiasm waned. The writers of the “Boom” then delved into historical issues and the figure of the dictator. Carlos Fuentes, in Terra Nostra (1975), criticized the use of history to legitimate the injustice of the present. The Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos (1917-2005) ridiculed historical documentation and explored the figure of the leader José Gaspar of France—who had ruled his country for forty years in the 19th century—as a metaphor for Stroessner's dictatorship in a copious novel entitled Yo, El Supremo (1974). García Márquez also parodied the endless talk of caudillism in The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975). Starting in the eighties, the era of literary experimentalism and great collective metaphors came to an end, and all these writers adopted a more realistic and easy-to-read style, in line with the commercial demands of the global era. An example of this ideological and aesthetic diversity is the career of Vargas Llosa, recognized with the Nobel Prize in 2010. His narrative included social condemnation in the sixties and seventies, and later incorporated humor, historical research and neo-liberal theses.

The legacy of the “Boom” continues to be present in various manifestations today associated with the ambiguous “magical realism”, a term that has served to describe the combination between orality and writing in other parts of the world, such as in Toni Morrison's novels in the United States. In addition, during the eighties and nineties, a significant number of women writers have also enjoyed international recognition. Luisa Valenzuela in Argentina, Isabel Allende and Marcela Serrano in Chile, Laura Restrepo in Colombia, Laura Esquivel in Mexico, Gioconda Belli in Nicaragua and Nélida Piñón in Brazil, are some of the narrators who maintain international attention on Latin American letters and have taken up a literary scene that was traditionally dominated by male figures.

According to many Latin American writers today, it no longer makes sense to associate the continent with a specific style, because they are diverse, complex and plural cultures, in which the supposed “magical realism” —fascinated with the exotic— is only one possibility among many of literarily elaborating the heterogeneous experience of each region and each individual. Today, moreover, most of them are primarily urban and are closely connected to the processes of commercialization and opening-up of the 21st century.

However, the Theory of Dependency, the Philosophy, Theology and Pedagogy of Liberation and the aesthetics of “the real marvelous” or the “Boom” of the novel were important cases in which intellectual production from Latin America influenced First World thought during the sixties and seventies, promoting processes of cultural and political decolonization. All three were cases in which a substantial group of Latin Americans looked at each other, knew each other, named themselves as subjects (agents) of knowledge, instead of the traditional situation of the colonized, which is to be looked at, to be known, to be named by others as an object (patient) of knowledge. Although this Latin Americanism did not produce the radical socioeconomic changes that many expected, it marked a fundamental milestone in the trajectory of collective self-definition in the region. Even today, hip hop groups such as Calle 13 (Puerto Rico) celebrate “the Latin American” by taking up the songs of the “New Song” of the sixties (http://youtu.be/rqlmJdsfCJc). Many are still working towards that Latin American unification and justice that the Chilean poet Violeta Parra summarized in 1964:

My life, the American peoples,
my life, feel heartbroken,
My life, because the governors,
my life, have them so separated.

When will that be when, Mr. Prosecutor,
for America to be just a pillar.
Only one pillar, oh yes, and one flag,
to end the messes at the borders.

For a handful of land I don't want war.

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Fuentes

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• Carpentier, Alejo. The kingdom of this world. Montevideo: Arca Editions, 1949.
• Chang-Rodriguez, Raquel and Malva Filer. Voices from Latin America. Boston: Thomson & Heinle, 2004.
• Davies, Catherine, ed. The Companion to Hispanic Studies. Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Frank, Jean. History of Spanish-American literature. Barcelona: Ariel, 1983.
• Frank, Jean. The Modern Culture of Latin America. New York: Praeger, 1967.
• Martin, Gerald. Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century. London, New York: Verso, 1989.
• Oviedo, Jose Miguel. History of Spanish-American literature. Madrid: Alliance, 2001.
• Winn, Peter. Americas: The Changing Face of Latin America and the Caribbean. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

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To review and think

1. What values and circumstances created the Latin American enthusiasm of the sixties?
2. How could the concept of “Latin Americanism” be defined or explained? What ideological movements does it include in theology, philosophy, pedagogy, sociology, etc.? What values and what drawbacks does it have as a political ideal?
3. What were some of the reasons why Latin American novels were so successful in Europe and the United States during the 1960s? In what sense (s) is this phenomenon paradoxical?
4. How could the concept of “Magical Realism” be defined or explained? What values and what problems do you have as an aesthetic characterization of Latin America?
5. Who were some of the writers and musical movements that became famous during the novel's “Boom” in the sixties? How has this landscape changed in subsequent decades?