5.4: Spanish America 1930-1969

---

From the 1930s to the beginning of the 1970s, a pivotal point for both left-wing and right-wing ideologies in the debate about the place of Latin American countries in the globalizing process, Latin America experienced an intense confrontation between aspirations for radical social change inspired by communist ideology and the maintenance of capitalist development within existing structures. The nationalist era, which until the 1950s even manifested itself in the limitation of imports to strengthen local industry, gave rise to a “Latin American” era of enthusiasm for social change and debate about which side to take 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 garnered significant international attention during 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

Following the economic expansion of the first three decades of the 20th century, the exporting bourgeoisie weakened as a result of 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, military governments or coup attempts occurred 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 address unemployment and the scarcity of imported products, a strategy of encouraging domestic manufacturing development was adopted in a protectionist policy known as “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. However, in certain countries and periods, left-wing parties exerted significant influence, as seen in Chile during 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 sought to incorporate the interests of businessmen while also satisfying some workers' demands under the influence 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 under dictatorships (Venezuela, Nicaragua, Paraguay), or coalitions were formed 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 implement liberal reforms for a time, as seen 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 an aggressive US policy to ensure the loyalty of the continent in “The Cold War”.

---

[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.

 

---

Cold War and Left-Wing Activism

The most important impact of World War II on 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, has consolidated itself as a global political, economic, and military power, with significant 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 presidents Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala in 1954 and Salvador Allende of Chile 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, resulting in the presence of communist power in the Chilean cabinet and the election of 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. Starting in the 1960s, the Soviet Union and China also contributed to tilting Latin America towards their sphere, helping to finance revolutionary guerrilla movements in the region. The lasting victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 served as a wake-up call for Washington and the elites, as well as a motivation for “national liberation struggles” to proliferate among rural and urban guerrillas across Latin America. For popular activists, it seemed possible for the first time that workers and peasants could 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 1960s worldwide. 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 was 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 in the long term.

 

---

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, which captured the attention of Europeans and North Americans due to its distinctiveness.

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

“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).

«No hay enemigo pequeño ni fuerza desdeñable, porque ya no hay pueblos aislados. Como establece la segunda declaración de La Haba­na, ningún pueblo de Amé­ri­ca Latina es débil, porque forma parte de una familia de dos­cientos millones de hermanos que pade­cen las mis­mas miserias, albergan los mismos senti­mientos, tienen el mismo enemigo, sueñan todos con un mismo destino, y cuentan con la solidaridad de todos los hombres y mujeres honrados del mundo. Esta epopeya que tene­mos delante, llama a las masas hambrientas de indios, de cam­pe­sinos sin tierras, de obreros explotados, a las masas progresistas, a los intelectuales ho­nes­tos y brillantes que abun­dan en nuestras sufridas tierras de América Latina» (https://youtu.be/EktbVnKPx6o).

Workers, peasants 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, not just the elite.

Liberation theology, developed by Christian philosophers from Central and South America, including the Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez and the Brazilian Leonardo Boff, proposed applying the principles of the Gospel to the pursuit of 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. This theory emphasized the structural changes in 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.

 

---

The “Boom” of Narrative

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 during the Cold War. Both in Europe and the United States, Latin American study programs proliferated, focusing on producing knowledge about that part of the continent that, a few years prior, had been 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 pivotal year for Latin American literature, which had been largely overlooked on the world stage until then. That year, the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899-1974) became the first Latin American writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral had received it for her poetry in 1945). Also in June of that year, the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014), was published, and within a few months, it 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 composed the novel's “Boom”, almost all with a 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 1930s.

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). This generation had also assimilated the influence of international literature, as well as modern mass culture, with novels that incorporated 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:

“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).

«Por la virginidad del paisaje, por la formación, por la ontología, por la presencia fáustica del indio y del negro, por la Revelación que constituyó su reciente descubrimiento, por los fecundos mestizajes que propició, América está muy lejos de haber agotado su caudal de mitologías. ¿Qué es la historia de América toda sino una crónica de lo real-maravilloso?» (12).

The Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899-1974) published his novel Hombres de Maíz (1949) in the same year, which shared his effort to find a language suitable for 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 Argentine Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) differed from left-wing writers in his political ideas and sought universal themes in his fiction and poetry. 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.

By the beginning of the 1960s, a wide reading audience had already developed 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 spread a “Latin American” spirit of transcending national borders and creating an awareness of political change among the masses across the continent. Several Spanish and French publishing houses also carried out a major dissemination campaign that gave preference to left-wing writers and encouraged multi-national forums. Thus, three factors were combined in the sixties: first, painting, poetry and novels had prepared a Latin American consciousness and an avi and embraced literary experimentation in dialogue with the boldest trends of the First World Warntinent; 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 Rodríguez de Francia—who had ruled his country for forty years in the 19th century—as a metaphor for Stroessner's dictatorship in his copious novel, Yo, El Supremo (1974). García Márquez also parodied the endless talk of caudillism in The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975). Starting in the 1980s, the era of literary experimentalism and grand collective metaphors came to an end, and these writers adopted a more realistic and accessible 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 of orality and writing in other parts of the world, such as in Toni Morrison's novels in the United States. In addition, during the 1980s and 1990s, a significant number of women writers 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 closely connected to the processes of commercialization and globalization 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 had expected, it marked a fundamental milestone in the region's trajectory of collective self-definition. Even today, hip-hop groups such as Calle 13 (from Puerto Rico) celebrate “the Latin American” culture by incorporating songs from the “New Song” movement of the 1960s. (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.

Mi vida, los pueblos americanos Mi vida, se sienten acongojados Mi vida, porque los gobernadores Mi vida, los tienen tan separados Cuando será ese cuando, Señor fiscal Que la América sea sólo un pilar Sólo un pilar, ay sí, y una bandera Que terminen los líos en las fronteras Por un puñao de tierra No quiero guerra

 

Fuentes

---

• 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.

---

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?