6.4: Hispanoamérica 1930-1969

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From the 1930s to the early 1970s, Latin America experienced an intense confrontation between aspirations for radical, communist-inspired social change and the maintenance of capitalist development within existing structures. The nationalist era, which until the 1950s even manifested itself in import restrictions to strengthen local industry, gave way to a "Latin Americanist" era, characterized by enthusiasm for social change and debate over which side to take during the Cold War.  The triumph of the Cuban Revolution (1959) became a touchstone for both left-wing and right-wing ideologies in the debate about the place of Latin American countries in the global power structure and what their sociopolitical model should be. Consequently, Latin American artistic and literary production received 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 rifle" (intellectuals, workers and guerrillas) with which one 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.

Nacionalismo y populismo

superar: to overcome lograr: to attain soberanía: sovereignty debilitarse: to weaken materias primas: raw materials terrateniente: large land owner a menudo: often ejército: army golpe (militar): coup desempleo: unemployment escasez: scarcity impuestos: taxes dueño: owner sindicato: labor union ventaja: advantage obrero: industry worker empresario: business owner receta: recipe hasta cierto punto: to a certain extent tarde o temprano: sooner or later peligrar: to be in danger amenazar: to threaten empresa: enterprise, company cada vez más: ever more

Following the economic expansion of the first three decades of the 20th century, the export-oriented bourgeoisie weakened with the depression experienced by global capitalism during the 1930s. International demand for agricultural products and raw materials was halved. The pendulum then swung back to the conservative right. The traditional landowning elite regained control of the government, repressing leftist activism, often with the support of the military. During the 1930s, there were military governments or attempted coups in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras. [1]  The military thus recovered its influential role in Latin American politics. Related to this militarism and the economic crisis, several nationalist wars reminiscent of those of the 19th century also reappeared: Bolivia-Paraguay (1933-38); Colombia-Peru (1932-34); Peru-Ecuador (1941-42).  To address unemployment and shortages of imported goods, the strategy of incentivizing domestic manufacturing became widespread through a protectionist policy known as "import substitution industrialization" (ISI). To this end, governments raised import taxes, established or financed new industries, kept wages low, and reduced taxes on domestic products. Nationalist propaganda was also promoted, along with efforts to regain domestic control of natural resources and a sense of pride in domestic products over foreign ones.  Industrial owners grew wealthier and could influence politics, but labor unions also grew larger, and political parties that won their support gained an electoral advantage. Control, then, had to be negotiated primarily among three power groups:     1) the interests of the traditional landowning elite, often associated with the Church;     2) the emerging commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, with increasing economic and social influence;     and 3) the working class and the unions, whose support (or control) was crucial for continued industrial expansion.  In many cases, the balance tipped in favor of the sector that secured military and/or Washington support. But in certain countries and periods, left-wing parties gained considerable influence, as in Chile during the 1950s and 60s.  The different forms of government in Latin America during these decades represent diverse strategies for combining these power groups. One such formula was a pro-industrial and pro-military alliance that attempted to incorporate the interests of business owners while simultaneously satisfying 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 some extent, Arbenz in Guatemala, Velasco Ibarra in Ecuador, and Cárdenas in Mexico. The problem was that they tried to represent two emerging groups with conflicting interests (workers and their employers), one of which sooner or later felt betrayed, and these systems were unsustainable in times of economic austerity. Their stability was also jeopardized if reforms threatened the interests of landowners or North American companies. In other cases, different political parties included both emerging groups (Chile), while others excluded them through dictatorships (Venezuela, Nicaragua, Paraguay), or coalitions 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 in the 1936 revolution in Paraguay, the 1944 revolution in Guatemala, and the 1952 revolution in Bolivia. However, this type of revolution would become increasingly difficult within the context of the aggressive US policy of securing the continent's loyalty during the Cold War.

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

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Cold War and left-wing activism

cuantioso: quite large inversión: investment a medida que: as (process) lograr: to achieve sede: headquarters doblaje: dubbing encubierto: under cover de parte de: in favor of derrocamiento: overthrow entre tanto: in the meantime gabinete: cabinet a partir de: starting in duradero: lasting así como: as well as ambiente: climate, environment ámbito: sphere, field Evangelio: Gospel a largo plazo: in the long run

The most significant impact of World War II on Latin America was its definitive inclusion within Washington's sphere of influence. By 1945, Western Europe had been forced to liquidate its investments in the Americas to finance the war, and its influence was considerably reduced. The United States, on the other hand, consolidated its position as a global political, economic, and military power, with substantial investments throughout the continent. As relations with the Russians cooled, the Truman administration persuaded almost all Latin American countries to sever ties with the Soviet Union and several governments to outlaw local communist parties—a move that also aligned with the interests of the economic elite. In 1948, the Organization of American States (OAS), headquartered in Washington, was established in Bogotá to promote common policies across the continent. During the following years, the Pentagon strengthened its influence over Latin American militaries, reinforcing and expanding its military bases in the region. The United States became the Hemisphere's leading trading partner. And in the cultural sphere, American television and film productions, with their efficient dubbing systems, flooded markets across the entire continent. Covert CIA interventions became commonplace, generally carried out by the elite and against popular movements. Two of these interventions—which fueled anti-American sentiment among the left—led to the overthrow of reformist President Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala in 1954 and of Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973, despite both having been democratically elected in their respective countries.  Meanwhile, popular support for communist parties grew in many Latin American countries, gaining a foothold in the Chilean cabinet and securing seats in Congress in more than nine governments during the 1940s. Armed resistance in the form of guerrilla warfare, already understandable given the high poverty rates, acquired a radical nationalist dimension from the 1950s onward: the “liberation” from U.S. imperialism and capitalist exploitation. And from the 1960s onward, the Soviet Union and China also played their part in drawing Latin America into their sphere of influence, helping to finance revolutionary guerrilla movements in the region. The enduring victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 served as a wake-up call for Washington and the elites, as well as a catalyst for the proliferation of “national liberation struggles” in rural and urban guerrilla movements throughout Latin America. For grassroots activists, it seemed for the first time possible that workers and peasants could seize control of the state and obtain the right to healthcare, education, and a decent standard of living.  As with the student movement in France or the civil rights struggles in the United States, many Latin American students and intelligentsia joined the activist fervor that characterized the 1960s worldwide. The most famous intellectuals of the time depicted in their works the history of marginalization and repression of the people, as well as their aspirations for more egalitarian and participatory societies. One of the most widely disseminated books was *Open Veins of Latin America*, by the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015), which examined the history of injustice and human exploitation on the continent. In Chile, a left-wing coalition (the “Popular Unity”) won the 1970 elections, and Salvador Allende, the new president, nationalized the copper mines that were in the hands of foreign companies, raised workers' wages, and froze the prices of basic necessities, among other socialist-style reforms. The Cuban government also launched a campaign to spread socialism throughout the Americas with substantial Soviet funding. But both failed to consolidate long-term economies that were prosperous for all.

 

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Latin Americanism of the 1960s 

As we have seen, the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 became a driving force behind the proliferation of “liberation struggles” in rural and urban guerrilla movements throughout Central and South America. The term “Latin America,” understood as a unity of peoples with shared aspirations and a history of oppression, then served to foster the struggle for social change and for political and cultural sovereignty, particularly along leftist lines. 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 dependency, and a common destiny of liberation (the “Latin American identity” or “Latin Americanism”) and therefore should unite in a common struggle against two enemies: the interests of Washington in the service of Wall Street, and the local ruling class associated with those interests. Thus, the 1960s marked a period of immense creativity, enthusiastic unification, and international dissemination in the arts and intellectual production for Latin America. A large number of young people across the continent sang along to musical movements like South American protest songs and Cuban Nueva Trova , sympathized with leftist groups in their countries, and participated in avant-garde poetry movements. They read with admiration novels that translated these ideals into a novel, vibrant, and critical narrative. All of this led many Latin Americans to feel they possessed an innovative and distinctive voice that captured European and North American attention because of its uniqueness. 

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

prevalecer: to predominate desdeñable: insignificant aislado: isolated padecer: sufrir albergar: to house abundar: exist in abundance

“There is no small enemy nor any force to be underestimated, because there are no longer any isolated peoples. As the second declaration of Havana states, no people of Latin America is weak, because it is part of a family of two hundred million brothers and sisters who suffer the same miseries, harbor the same feelings, have the same enemy, all dream of the same destiny, and count on the solidarity of all the honest men and women of the world. This epic that lies before us calls to the starving masses of Indians, of landless peasants, of exploited workers, to the progressive masses, to the honest and brilliant intellectuals who abound in our suffering lands of Latin America.” (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—like the triumphant Cuban revolution or Salvador Allende's democratic socialism in Chile—that would benefit the majority of the population and not just the elite. 

Liberation theology, developed by Christian philosophers from Central and South America such as the Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez and the Brazilian Leonardo Boff, proposed applying Gospel principles to the active pursuit of social justice. Liberation pedagogy, 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 oppression for generations. Thinkers like Leopoldo Zea (Mexico) and Enrique Dussel (Argentina) developed a rigorous and alternative philosophy for understanding Latin America 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 the imitation of European or American modernization, elaborating an alternative thesis called Dependency Theory, which emphasized the structural change in economic relations at both the global and national levels. 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 force and aspirations towards more egalitarian and participatory societies. 

 

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The "Boom" of narrative 

apenas: barely lanzar: to launch hasta entonces: until then convertirse en: to become cúspide: peak rayuela: hopscotch acaparar: to capture, to monopolize habían logrado: had accomplished inaudito: unheard of, extraordinary primermundista: form the first world trama: plot telenovela: soap opera

Latin America then captured the world's attention from 1961 onward, when the communist-leaning government, protected by the Soviet Union, stabilized in Cuba, challenging Washington's hegemony in the hemisphere. The region had become a battleground in the Cold War. In both Europe and the United States, Latin American studies programs proliferated, focused on producing knowledge about that part of the continent which, just a few years earlier, had been barely studied. The Kennedy administration launched the Alliance for Progress, an investment initiative for the (capitalist) development or modernization of Latin America, and began appointing Puerto Ricans as ambassadors to various Spanish-speaking countries to strengthen its ties with the region.  The year 1967 was pivotal for Latin American literature, which until then had been largely ignored on the world stage. That year, Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899-1974) became the first Latin American novelist to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (Chilean 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 Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) was published, becoming a worldwide bestseller within a few months . It was the pinnacle of the Latin American literary boom, which had begun a few years earlier with the immense popularity of  Hopscotch  (1963) by Argentine Julio Cortázar (1914-1984), and which also included the work of Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-) and Mexican Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012), among others. For the first time in history, Latin American literary production had a leading role on the international stage 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 formed the Latin American Boom, almost all of them left-leaning, captured global attention with a literature that brilliantly combined modern experimentation with distinctive elements of Latin American life and culture. The jungle, myth, oral tradition, the indigenous and African presence, turbulent politics, paradoxical history, and the insatiable search for identity were all integrated into monumental novels whose poetic language captured many of the contradictory experiences of Latin America that were exotic or innovative to the First World. It was, in a way, a replica of what Mexican painters like Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and José Clemento Orozco had achieved in the 1920s and 30s. What was "normal" for Europeans and North Americans appeared as something "magical" to the narrative gaze, and what was unheard of or magical to the First World gaze was described as 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 included Hollywood plots, tango stories, and soap operas. The new novel sought to represent the heterogeneous and diverse experience of its peoples and to propose alternative models of reality. In this effort, a common ideal emerged, which reinforced the idea of "Latin American" unity.

Years earlier, in the prologue to the novel The Kingdom of This World (1949)—which narrated the Haitian Revolution—the Cuban musicologist and novelist Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) had proposed the term "marvelous realism" to designate this new fiction that recreated American historical reality in its fertile combination of mythologies and cultural models, from indigenous and African to European and mestizo. Carpentier said:

por: because of paisaje: landscape fáustico: like Goethe’s Faust, tragic, debased agotar: to exhaust

"Because of the virginity of the landscape, because of the formation, because of the ontology, because of the Faustian presence of the Indian and the black, because of the Revelation that constituted its recent discovery, because of the fertile mestizaje that it fostered, America is far from having exhausted its wealth of mythologies. What is the history of all America but a chronicle of the marvelous real?" (12).

The Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899-1974) had published his novel *Men of Maize* (1949) that same year , 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 history of Mayan resistance against the advance of Western culture, interpreting it in their own terms. Meanwhile, Juan Rulfo (1918-1986) and Elena Garro (1916-1998) had explored the bittersweet legacy of the Mexican Revolution, which had not lifted the majority of the population out of poverty, in a narrative that questioned the divisions between the fantastical and the historical. Similar to Octavio Paz, the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) differed in his political views from left-wing writers, seeking universal themes in his fiction and poems. His work, however, had an undeniable influence on the Latin American Boom generation, both in its questioning of a unified reality and in its experimentation with labyrinthine narratives that combined cultural heritages as diverse as the Latin American population itself. 

By the beginning of the 1960s, a large reading public already existed in Latin America. The expansion of cities and educational opportunities ensured 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 reinforced by the apparent success of the Cuban Revolution, which helped spread a "Latin Americanist" spirit across the continent, transcending national borders and creating a consciousness of political change among the masses. Several Spanish and French publishing houses also launched a major promotional campaign that favored leftist writers and fostered plurinational forums. Thus, three factors combined in the 1960s: first, painting, poetry, and the novel had cultivated a Latin Americanist consciousness and an eager reading public; second, the political left gained considerable strength in many countries of the continent; Third, European publishers encouraged the publication of Latin American works due to public interest in following the processes of change in Latin America during the Cold War. 

It was this combination of factors that allowed brilliant novelists like Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Ernesto Sábato (Argentina 1911-2011), Juan Carlos Onetti (Uruguay 1909-1994), and 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 global stars. Like Borges, they criticized the "provincial" novels of social realism and embraced literary experimentation in dialogue with the most daring trends of the First World. 

Unlike Borges, a central theme of the Latin American Boom was Latin American history, a 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 story of the Buendía family, and Macondo has been interpreted as a metaphor for Latin America. 

By the mid-1970s, military repression had become more brutal throughout the region, Fidel Castro's government was less popular, and revolutionary fervor had waned. The writers of the Latin American Boom then delved deeper into historical themes and the figure of the dictator. Carlos Fuentes, in Terra Nostra (1975), criticized the use of history to legitimize present-day injustice. The Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos (1917-2005) ridiculed historical documentation and explored the figure of the caudillo José Gaspar de Francia—who had ruled his country for forty years in the 19th century—as a metaphor for the Stroessner dictatorship in his copious novel I, the Supreme (1974). Gabriel García Márquez also parodied the endless rhetoric of caudillismo in The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975). From the 1980s onward, the era of literary experimentalism and grand collective metaphors came to an end, and all these writers adopted a more realistic and accessible style, in keeping with the commercial demands of the global age. An example of this ideological and aesthetic diversity is the career of Vargas Llosa, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010. His narrative included social commentary in the 1960s and 70s, and later incorporated humor, historical research, and neoliberal ideas. 

The legacy of the Latin American Boom continues to be present in various manifestations today associated with the ambiguous "magical realism," a term that has been used to describe the combination of orality and writing in other parts of the world, such as in the novels of Toni Morrison in the United States. 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 literature and have taken over a literary scene that was traditionally dominated by male figures. 

According to many contemporary Latin American writers, it no longer makes sense to associate the continent with a specific style, as it comprises diverse, complex, and pluralistic cultures, in which the so-called "magical realism"—fascinated with the exotic—is just one possibility among many for literary expression of the heterogeneous experience of each region and each individual. Moreover, most of these cultures are now primarily urban and intimately connected to the processes of commercialization and openness of the 21st century. 

Nevertheless, Dependency Theory, the Philosophy, Theology, and Pedagogy of Liberation, and the aesthetics of “magical realism” or the Latin American Boom were important instances where intellectual production from Latin America influenced First World thought during the 1960s and 70s, promoting processes of cultural and political decolonization. All three were cases where a substantial group of Latin Americans saw themselves, understood themselves, and defined themselves as subjects (agents) of knowledge, instead of the traditional position of the colonized, who are seen, understood, and named by others as objects (patients) of knowledge. While this Latin Americanism did not produce the radical socioeconomic changes that many hoped for, it marked a fundamental milestone in the trajectory of collective self-definition in the region. Even today, hip hop groups like Calle 13 (Puerto Rico) celebrate "Latin American identity" by revisiting the themes of the "Nueva Canción" movement of the 1960s ( http://youtu.be/rqlmJdsfCJc ). Many continue working toward that Latin American unification and justice that the Chilean poet Violeta Parra summarized in 1964: 

My life, the American people, 
my life, feel distressed, 
my life, because the governors, 
my life, have them so separated. 

When will that moment come, Mr. Prosecutor, 
when America will be just one pillar? 
Just one pillar, oh yes, and one flag, 
when the border disputes will finally end. 

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

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Sources 

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• Carpentier, Alejo.  The Kingdom of This World . Montevideo: Arca Editions, 1949. 

• Chang-Rodríguez, Raquel and Malva Filer. Voices of Latin America . Boston: Thomson & Heinle, 2004. 

• Davies, Catherine, ed. The Companion to Hispanic Studies. Oxford University Press, 2002. 

• Franco, Jean. History of Spanish American Literature . Barcelona: Ariel, 1983. 

• Franco, 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, José Miguel. History of Spanish American Literature . Madrid: Alianza, 2001. 

• Winn, Peter. Americas: The Changing Face of Latin America and the Caribbean. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 

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For review and reflection 

1. What values and circumstances created the Latin Americanist enthusiasm of the 1960s? 

2. How could the concept of "Latin Americanism" be defined or explained? What ideological movements does it encompass in theology, philosophy, pedagogy, sociology, etc.? What values and 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 problems does it have as an aesthetic characterization of Latin America? 

5. What were some of the writers and musical movements that became famous during the novel "Boom" of the 1960s? How has this landscape changed in subsequent decades?