To talk about José Vasconcelos’s 1939 screenplay Simón Bolívar (Interpretación) (Simón Bolívar [An Interpretation]), we need to retrace a bit of history. As we touched upon in Chap. 1, Mexico was one of the hemispheric sites of the 1930 centenary celebration of Bolívar’s passing. The year marked a new beginning. For Pascual Ortiz Rubio, who was welcomed as the new president elect by the Pan American Union in Washington, DC, in late 1929, had won a landslide victory in an electoral process that had seen violence against José Vasconcelos’s campaigners and supporters, and balloting compromised by massive fraud, the first act of the political party Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR) (Revolutionary National Party) established by Plutarco Elías Calles that in 1946 would rename itself the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI) (Institutional Revolutionary Party). These were the early moments of Mexico’s post-twenties order. Vasconcelos was out, having lost brutally in his battle with Calles, while there was a new party that had been formed against him, able to use the apparatus of free elections to elevate the relatively unknown Ortiz Rubio to the office of the presidency, the second person to serve as a puppet to the caudillo Calles whose power was now located not in himself alone, but also in the PNR. For Ortiz Rubio, the centenary was a boon, permitting him to establish a new beginning while at the same time to synchronize Mexico with the Pan American Union, one more Latin American head of state eager to be part of Washington, DC’s America and perhaps with the fantasy that the authority invested in him could rise above that of Calles.
The addresses, dedications, essays, and papers produced in the course of the year, with some read at the amphitheater that was now part of the National University, spoke of a heroic figure with whom Mexico had been united in one and the same process of liberation and national progress. Of Venezuela, there was little mention, as the Venezuelan state and Mexico were locked in diplomatic battle.
Mexico had severed relations with Gómez’s government in 1923, making this break in the context of its own foreign policy aiding liberal opponents of dictatorship within its Latin American zone of influence, and would not resume relations until 1933.1 Among the Venezuelan exiles who came to Mexico in the 1920s was Cipriano Castro who resided in Puerto Rico and was still trying to find a way to take back the government from Gómez. Venezuelan exiles were not only liberals, but also communists such as Gustavo Machado, all in battle with Gómez and Vallenilla Lanz, the latter, who, as we have seen, argued that constitutions had no efficacy, justifying in this way the need for powerful personalistic leaders to preside over a society evolving according to the slow and careful path he imagined. Gómez’s economic machine that was supported by the United States had to be redirected. In 1929, Venezuelan exiles in Europe and the Americas undertook a military assault against Gómez that failed.
The 1930 Mexican Bolívar centenary consisted of a ceremony organized by the secretariat of foreign relations that featured addresses by the Peruvian ambassador and an ex-Mexican senator; of a speech sponsored by a civic action group that was delivered on the street named for Bólivar, right in front of the house where 16-year-old Simón stayed during his visit to Mexico to meet with the viceroy;2 of a student competition for best essay at the Universidad Nacional, won by Andrés Iduarte whose work was included in the proceedings of the centenary, as were all the tributes we are citing;3 and of professional societies such as the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics and the National Academy of Sciences where speakers celebrated Bolívar while addressing issues in their professions. One spoke of Gabino Barreda in 1862, the future founder of the Preparatory School, telling of how he urged the city council of Mexico City to declare an American Confederation, a vision similar to Bolívar’s if not inspired by it, in order to help push the French out of the country.4 Another, an engineer, told of the centenary events of that year in Peru, Guayaquil, Bogotá, New York City, the hall of the Pan American Union in Washington, DC, Panama, Venezuela, a town named Bolívar in Vizcaya (Spain), and La Paz.5
This was hardly, then, the heavily politicized Bolívar that Vasconcelos had constructed in the 1920s through muralism, as we saw in Chap. 1. A new set of individuals and groups were speaking Bolívar’s name within the context of civil society, not empire. With regard to Mexico’s and Bolívar’s connections, they could have spoken about much more.
There is Bolívar’s 1815 Jamaica Letter , where he details the bloodshed caused by Fernando VII’s counter-revolution in New Spain in an effort to portray Spain as barbaric and where he issues a recommendation to New Spain’s leaders of independence that they should draw upon the popular religious symbol of the Virgin of Guadalupe to direct the masses, not the figure of Quetzalcoatl, of interest only to scholars. Bolívar, in the letter, was addressing the priest turned military leader José María Morelos who had assumed leadership of the insurgent army, having been appointed to this position subsequent to the capture and execution of Father Miguel de Hidalgo in 1811. Morelos called a constituent congress in 1813, the Congreso de Anáhuac (Congress of Anáhuac), with the congress declaring independence on November 6 of that same year. He was captured on November 5, 1815 by Agustín de Iturbide, tried by the Inquisition, then executed on December 22, 1815. He was still alive when Bolívar finished the letter on September 6. Following Morelos as the leader of the insurgent army was Vicente Guerrero.
In relation to Guerrero and Iturbide, they could have also addressed Bolívar’s 1829 article intended for publication in which he attacks Vicente Guerrero who lost the presidential elections of 1828 but who took the office by force, alleging corruption, on April 1, 1829. Guerrero, who was approved by Mexico’s congress, abolished slavery on September 15; he also enacted progressive measures, such as public schools, free education, and agrarian reform. But Conservatives ousted him in December of that year, driving him to the south with the new government seizing and executing him in 1831. Accused of being responsible for the decision were secretary of war José Antonio Facio and cabinet member Lucas Alamán. Alamán was a conservative political figure who was founder of Mexico’s first bank, a mover and shaker of industry, and an historian. He, along with the military leader and politician Santa Anna, defined the era of the 1820s to the 1850s.
Bolívar, who had employed Iturbide’s son on his military staff for two years, in the unpublished article describes Guerrero as “barbaric” on account of his mestizo and African heritage. Bolívar lists Guerrero’s violent acts, including his involvement in the triumvirate that had decided to execute the senior Iturbide in 1824.6 His action in that moment in relation to Iturbide represented yet another dramatic reversal. In 1821, Iturbide and Guerrero established an alliance after Iturbide changed sides in order to take advantage of the desire by Spanish monarchists to bring about independence as quickly as possible so that there would be a state to serve as a stronghold for absolute monarchy during the time of the restoration of the Cortes (1820–1823). Los Tratados de Córdoba (The Treaty of Córdoba) in 1821 called for Fernando VII or a European monarch to rule the independent state, but Fernando VII refused the invitation after seeing that he could come back to power at home and members of the Holy Alliance also were unwilling to supply a prince to be monarch. In the case that both options failed, the treaty called for Iturbide to assume the role of emperor, which he did. His liberal opponents then chased him from power, with Iturbide returning from Europe in 1824, not realizing that he would be executed if identified.
Bolívar, for whom Guerrero was the beginning of the end, was siding with Mexican conservatives. Guerrero was Bolívar’s new Píar, his new Padilla. Would he have approved of his execution had he lived to see it? What would be have said about Alamán?
Finally, in connection to Bolívar’s support of the royalist turned independentist Iturbide, the individuals and groups in question could have also spoken of a long ode produced by Ramón Valle for the 1883 centenary celebrations of Bolívar and Agustín de Iturbide in Mexico, Bolívar e Iturbide en el centenario de ambos heroes (Bolívar and Iturbide in the Centenary of Both Heroes).7 To be sure, there is more cultural work about Bolívar that might have been referenced if we were to look, for example, at Gustavo Vargas Martínez’s book, Presencia de Bolívar en la cultura mexicana (The Presence of Bolívar in Mexican Culture).8
If the 1930 Centenary was produced to erase the memory of 1929, Vasconcelos in his exile did not let go of what had happened to him, in his writings speaking of the acts of which he and his supporters had been victim. In 1939 and 1940 he published the screenplay entitled Simón Bolívar (Interpretación) that will be at the center of our discussion as well as a prologue, brought out together at Ediciones Botas in Mexico City. Vasconcelos wrote the work at the tail end of his years-long exile from Mexico at the moment of yet another expulsion, this one from the United States, and the stint he did as vice-chancellor of the Universidad del Noroeste in Hermosillo, Mexico. He was embattled but that was nothing new.
In the prologue, which has the force of a manifesto, he explains to a public that knows him well why he writes in a new genre as well as why he focuses on the liberator of northern South America. Bolívar, after all, was not Mexican. Part of that explanation centers on Pan Americanism, which in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, as we saw in Chaps. 9 and 10, undertook to unite “north” and “south” in one vast administrative apparatus, receiving in Washington, DC, as recorded in its bulletin, new presidents of the member states and their ministers, and which Vasconcelos critiques directly in an essay published in Santiago, Chile, in 1934, “Bolivarismo y Monroísmo (Temas Iberoamericanos)” (“Bolivarianism and Monroism (Iberoamerican Themes)”).9
Another part of the explanation concerns the US film industry and its Mexican affiliates, which, with his signature vehemence, he accuses of indoctrinating Mexicans with the ideas of “our dominators.” To illustrate this, he draws his readers’ attention to one film in particular, Warner Bros.’ 1939 Juarez , with its US and Mexican versions.10 Vasconcelos dismisses the film as pro-Yankee, a reflection of an entire industry. Still, this intellectual, who was primarily an essayist and cultural critic, responds to Hollywood, Pan Americanism, and the Mexico that in his mind betrayed him in 1929 by trying his hand at something he attempts only sporadically in his long and turbulent career: the literary arts, and in this particular case screen writing.
When discussing Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century, we can hardly avoid speaking of Vasconcelos. He was secretary to Mexico’s first revolutionary president, Francisco Madero, in Washington, DC (1911); cofounder of Mexico’s most important cultural institution after muralism, the Ateneo (1909–1913); vice-chancellor of the Universidad Nacional (National University) (1921–1924); head of the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP ) (1921–1924); promoter of literacy and hygiene programs (1921–1924); patron of the muralists (1920–1924); candidate for the presidency, as we have seen (1929); director of the National Library (1940–1958); and founder of literary journals. Vasconcelos was also a distinguished if not controversial exile, residing now in the United States (1930, 1935–1938), now in Spain (1931–1933), now in Argentina (1933–1935). At the level of his intellectual production, with the exception of his famous memoirs, he is known primarily as an essayist whose visions of Mexican culture and history were defined by his understanding of his nation and the rest of Latin America as culturally different from the United States and as economically and racially subjugated to an “Anglo-defined U.S.” order and who stood against Bolshevism.11
One work of his obtained a wide readership throughout Latin America, and to this day continues to be read with great interest, particularly in Mexico and the United States. This is his 1925 “La raza cósmica” (“The Cosmic Race”) that, seizing upon the teleological impulses of nationalism and the race theory of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, speaks of a Latin America that will one day embody socialist principles and be home to a new hybrid race mixing over time so-called superior and inferior racial stocks. It is a top-down vision of uplift and racial integration, put forward from the imagined heights of Mexico’s white Hispanic tradition, that targeted as inferior Mexico’s indigenous peoples. In this stark and troubling way, it stands in opposition to the work of the muralists that he in fact spearheaded in his role as head of the SEP, particularly that of Diego Rivera and Clemente Orozco, who were thinking about the Americas in the context of empire and modernity just as Vasconcelos was but who elevated the indigenous. Our interest lies in the Vasconcelos of the 1930s who, with essays such as “Bolivarismo y Monroísmo” turns away from the concept of racial hybridity to embrace what would become a new race-centered platform for his battle with liberalism and Bolshevism. What he had imagined as the trunk of a eugenics-directed racially mixed whole now stood alone, mixing no longer a value. This was unadulterated Spanish whiteness and Catholicism.
But the screenplay and prologue are not simply a curiosity in the life of a figure who would sympathize with the Axis powers, renouncing Mussolini and Hitler only after the discovery of the Holocaust but then expressing his support for Spain’s Francisco Franco, a position opposite to that of Lázaro Cárdenas who, as president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940, and an enemy of Vasconcelos, embraced republican Spain by offering his country as a home to its exiles; they provide an interesting window onto Vasconcelos’s relationship to economic and cultural developments in the United States, his Catholic politics in relation to the Cristero War of 1926–1928 and reformist or liberal ideology in Mexico, as well as his understanding of the ideology of culture. In the vision he proposes, Vasconcelos will stand with the white conservative Catholic Lucas Alamán, not with the populist Afro-mestizo Vicente Guerrero in whose execution the former was implicated. Alamán’s vision of Mexican and Latin American economic development within the cultural context of Catholicism is a foundational model.
In the pages that follow we examine first the film Juarez , then the prologue—a text from which Vasconcelos’s screenplay, Simón Bolívar (Interpretación) cannot be separated—and finally the screenplay itself. It perhaps could be said that no one in Mexican letters in the twentieth century has attached more significance to the power of myth and historical figures than Vasconcelos. Previously, in his “La raza cósmica,” Plato’s lost Atlantis had furnished him with a distinguished mythical origin from which to reimagine Latin America. Now with his war against Pan Americanism that had seen him in the early 1920s oversee the organization of a canon of hemispheric emancipators to oppose to that of the Pan American Union—the latter soon to have its Gallery of Patriots filled with busts sent from the 21 member republics—a canon that as seen in the 1922 mural of Roberto Montenegro includes a George Washington who is anti-imperialist, that role can be filled by Bolívar.12 Vasconcelos’s Bolívar, however, would not only be that of the Bolívar of independence, but also that of the Gran Colombia and the Federation of the Andes. The state builder. But first, a word or two about the film Vasconcelos targets in the prologue and that motivated him to put the Liberator on the big screen before, as he seemed to fear, his pro-Pan Americanist rivals in the United States and Mexico did.
Juarez , according to historian Paul J. Vanderwood, was conceived in a pact of sorts between Warner Bros. and the US government.13 The year was 1938. Warner Bros. had just completed a script for a new antifascist film based on the heroic figure of Benito Juárez, the leader who liberated Mexico from Maximilian, the Habsburg prince imposed by the French and Mexican conservatives during the French occupation of 1862–1867, while the Roosevelt administration had just arrived at the decision that it would use Pan American doctrine to oppose the German presence in the Americas. Throughout the mid to late 1930s, as Michael E. Birdwell tells us in Celluloid Soldiers: The Warner Bros. Campaign against Nazism, Jack and Harry Warner, Polish Jews, had been making films to alert the public to the danger of fascism and to argue for US intervention. To do so, they had to contend with the State Department and the Pacific Coast Anti-Communist Federation, which, on account of US neutrality, “discouraged movie-makers from the production of films dealing with conflicts abroad.”14 Warner Bros. resorted, then, to plot lines that could not be seen as directly anti-German, although the topic of fascism at home was not off limits. The story of Benito Juárez fit their program, providing them with an allegory about national resistance, just as the figure of Robin Hood had for a film they brought out one year earlier.15
The United States, learning of the Warner Bros. project, asked the studio to present the struggle between Benito Juárez and the French from the point of view of US Pan Americanism, the policy in the name of which it had been seeking to dominate and create markets in Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s. The studio complied, desirous, as Vanderwood explains, of pleasing FDR, with whom it had intimate connections; of currying favor to stop an antimonopoly suit against the movie industry; and of protecting itself from accusations of communist sympathizing by congress and action groups.
The result was a new script that not only puts forth a heroic vision of resistance to an illegitimate imperial power, but also states clearly US Pan American claims over the “democratic” hemisphere in the face of Nazi attempts at strengthening trade relations and cultural ties with Latin American nations. As Vanderwood tells us, Juárez would now be portrayed not as he originally had been by the screenwriter Aeneas MacKenzie, that is, as an obtuse Zapotec Indian resisting an outside power, but rather as a hero of resistance less identifiable by his “ethnicity” than by his passionate admiration for Lincoln. Juárez, as a Mexican incarnation of Lincoln, would stand for a “democratic” Mexico and a democratic Latin America opposed to European expansionist desires.16
Benito Juárez held special significance for Vasconcelos. In “Bolivarismo y Monroísmo”, he attacks the leader, holding him responsible for creating the conditions that allowed the influx of foreign capital and Protestantism. Juárez had ousted the French and separated church and state. But for Vasconcelos—with his new Catholic politics born of the political instability in Mexico in the 1920s, a decade that saw the rise of caudillo figures like Calles and Obregón, and between 1926 and 1929 of armed conflict by regional Catholic politicians and priests against the secularizing state, the Catholic sector in part fueling Vasconcelos’s candidacy for presidency, and his certainty that Mexican politics was being driven by US capitalist interest—weakening the Catholic Church was tantamount to weakening the nation. In fact, for the Mexican intellectual in exile, who presented himself now as a defender of laborers not only in Mexico, but also throughout Latin America, Juárez was nothing but “an incarnation of Pan Americanism even before this movement made its objectives clear in congresses.”17
Proof of this for Vasconcelos is the fact that Juárez’s bust, together with those of other Latin American emancipators, stood in the Pan American Building in Washington, DC. Proof of this for him was also, more importantly, the Juárez-sponsored disentailment of church lands, which, Vasconcelos passionately argues, was what led to the arrival of new landlords, US and Anglo corporations, and new religious leaders: Protestants.
How he explains Juárez’s politics is significant. He links it to the fact of his having been located in the United States. In an interesting formulation in which the United States is presented not only as the place of refuge for embattled Mexican leaders, but also as a cultural space so seductive as to test their will to remain true to their “heritage.” Vasconcelos describes Juárez’s anti-Church politics as having been born not of his own lights or convictions as a lawyer or judge but of the supposed transformation he experienced during his residence in New Orleans. Juárez succumbed to temptation when others have not.
The list of Mexican intellectuals and politicians for whom the United States served as a place from which to organize is a long one, among them: Juárez and Melchor Ocampo in the 1850s, exiled by Santa Anna; the Flores Magón brothers in the first decade of the twentieth century, anarchist critics of the Porfirian regime; and Vasconcelos in the 1930s, exiled by Calles. In Vasconcelos’s revisionist conceptualization of Mexican history, if not Benito Juárez, the hero of the modern nation, then who is Vasconcelos asking Mexicans to celebrate? Whom were they supposed to idealize if the world depression now provided irrefutable evidence that this Mexican Pan Americanist avant la lettre, falsely hailed as a hero for five generations, was, in fact, a traitor, having delivered Mexico to the world economy? There were two figures: one Lucas Alamán who in the 1830s organized the Tacubaya Congress, to the disapproval of the United States, to establish a commercial pact between the Hispano-American nations; the other, President Francisco Madero who was to be praised as a statesman for his alleged plan to restore to the Church the lands taken from it first by Juárez and later by Porfirio Díaz.
Arguably, then, any creative piece, whether Mexican or US, praising Benito Juárez would have disturbed Vasconcelos. Still, a film that had the potential to reach a large audience, that was made in the United States (as most were at the time), that was produced by Warner Bros., which advocated US intervention in the European conflict, and that supported the United States’ Pan American agenda would have outraged this critic of Pan Americanism who, during the 1930s, in his attempt to find a model of modernization to oppose to the United States, recuperated the Spanish colonial enterprise, celebrating it for the “technology” it brought to the manual laborers of Latin America.
That Vasconcelos would write a screenplay in reaction to the film industry, and more particularly, Warner Bros.’ Juarez , was hardly the response one would have expected. This was not only because Vasconcelos was not a film artist, although in the prologue, to make his “debut” comprehensible to the Mexican public, he claims to be a playwright manqué, forced by historical circumstance throughout his life to write philosophical and historical essays. This was also because Vasconcelos was certain, as he also states in the prologue, that his foray into cinema would never go any further than the written word.
First, as we know, Vasconcelos at this time enjoyed little influence in Mexico, having just returned from a long exile in the United States that had resulted from his call for civil revolt to protest the 1929 presidential elections stolen from him by the political machine of Plutarco Elías Calles who was supported by the US ambassador to Mexico Dwight Morrow, an injustice of which he reminds readers until the end of his life. Second, even if he had enjoyed the influence, in the prologue he tells us that he could expect no cooperation from the “nascent” Mexican film industry, the puppet, in his mind, of a Hollywood dominated by US political and economic concerns, be they Liberal, or as charged by US congressman Martin Dies, Jr., creator of the House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities, and affirmed by Vasconcelos, Bolshevik. Whether this was paranoia or not, Vasconcelos was no doubt visible on the radar of the US government not only for the reason that he had refused to walk away quietly from the 1929 elections in which the United States had had such an interest, wanting to bring a definitive end to the Cristero War and to do business with Calles not with nationalists like Vasconcelos, but also because of the many public speeches he gave throughout Latin America in the aftermath in which he criticized US economic and political incursions. Vasconcelos had, then, good reason to understand the US Labor Department’s denial of his visa renewal request in 1938 as retaliation for his political positions.18
So why go to the trouble of composing a screenplay? One explanation is so that he could write a prologue, that is, so that he could have a stage on which to give expression explicitly to his view on Mexican-US relations and his belief in conspiracy as the engine behind seismic political change. It was a vision rooted in the fact that, with or without the knowledge of Washington, DC, the US ambassador Henry Lane Wilson had allowed the Mexican general, Victoriano Huerta, to use the US embassy for the purpose of planning the assassination of the democratically elected Francisco Madero and his vice president José María Pino Suárez, which took place on February 22, 1913; and with regard to the 1929 presidential elections, in Calles’s close relationship with US ambassador Dwight Morrow and the United States’ obvious approval of them but confirmed by the reception received by the winner in Washington, DC. Now, his perception that history was conspiracy took on a life of its own in his new attempt at building a Mexican and Latin American consciousness to resist the United States and its Mexican allies, that perception serving as the matrix for his famously Manichean, totalizing, culturally and racially based ideas pitting Catholicism against Protestantism and Judaism.
A second explanation is that with US cinema having become a mass-media industry and with the Mexican film industry in ascendancy, Vasconcelos, who more than any intellectual of his time envisioned for himself a large mass public, would have wanted to comment, again explicitly, on this industry that threatened to eclipse his logocentric world and that, in the case of Warner Bros., sought to demonize fascism.
A third explanation, related to the second, is that he wanted to propose a model or a form for a future Latin American cinema. What better way to go about proposing that model than to use as a foil the celluloid soldiering associated with Warner Bros.?
As he tells his readers in a formulation that naturalizes the function of film as essentially ideological, this new medium that he saw as combining entertainment, learning, and indoctrination had the potential to be extraordinary, provided that the aesthetic was given a proper place. This had not occurred, he maintains, in the films of the era, particularly in Warner Bros.’ Juarez , which he regards as vulgarly nationalistic, and as it in fact was, costly. Nor had this occurred, one could think, in the film of liberal nationalist Miguel Contreras Torres, director of the 1933 Juárez y Maximiliano (Juárez and Maximilian). The Latin American cinema he imagined would represent a new era.
A fourth explanation concerns the historic prerogative of the lettered city that we know as the title of Ángel Rama’s famous book. Vasconcelos wrote the screenplay and prologue to declare the priority of the written word—el Verbo (The Word), as he calls it, with his familiar embrace of Christian symbolism—over cinematic image. In a statement revealing his concern about the diminishing authority of the print intellectual, he tells his readers that the contribution of the script is more significant than that of the cameramen, the director, or the actors. A fifth explanation, which addresses the simultaneity of the writing of the prologue, is that Vasconcelos from the beginning planned on publishing the screenplay. To the Mexican public he needed to justify the idea that as a print form the screenplay had value independent of its function in a filmic production. Put differently, he needed to make the screenplay culturally intelligible as published text. Curiously, to this end, he uses the authority of the US literary market, reporting that publishing “filmodramas” such as his “for general dissemination” has become increasingly common in the United States, where movie scripts are valued as texts in their own right, as are theatrical plays.19
A final explanation is that Vasconcelos, positivist that he was, needed to announce his vision of the future, of future generations and glory. One day, as he promises his readers in the “La raza cósmica,” poverty, colonialism, physical ugliness, and injustice would be transcended by a new aesthetic order. Similarly, he now promises that one day the mediocrity of Hollywood would be superseded by a Latin American cinema which, while similarly mass produced, respected not only national interests, but also quality, as constituted by such high culture activities as ballet and orchestral music. Perhaps then, his Bolívar screenplay would find its way onto the screen to take the place of that of filmmakers like Contreras Torres, who was Vasconcelos’s nightmare. In 1941 Contreras Torres’s completed a documentary-like film that was pro-Ally and “Mexican-made” called Simón Bolívar, El Libertador, which was screened in New York City in 1943 with copious English subtitles.20 Perhaps, at this time, too, the Mexican leaders he praises so, Francisco Madero and Lucas Alamán, for their positions on Catholic institutions, Catholic control of land, and the economy would also be immortalized in film. For this admirer of Hegel, the positivists, and Christian theology, of all things structured around a trinity, Bolívar, Alamán, and Madero would assume their proper place in the Mexico and Latin America that Vasconcelos imagines, anchored in the Spanish Catholic tradition and forming part of a new world order free of US hegemony.
Faith in the redemptive power of the written word: No Latin American intellectual embodied this principle more than Vasconcelos. Yet the Bolívar whom Vasconcelos constructs in Simón Bolívar (Interpretación) is not the student of the famous educator Simón Rodríguez or the legendary writer and legislator for the ages. In fact, we never see Bolívar writing, as we do, for instance, in García Marquez’s The General in His Labyrinth. Nor do we ever see him, for that matter, on the battlefield. Rather, the Bolívar that we have before us is a ceremonial one wrapped in the monumentalism of Latin American Catholicism and in the medium of filmic representation.
To produce this iteration of the figure, Vasconcelos differentiates Bolívar culturally from the United States, portraying his social, ceremonial, and political life as transpiring gloriously in a Hispanic Catholic world. That world consists of monumental spaces in which the masses welcome the mythical hero as he enters the liberated city. In one scene, we see Bolívar depicted triumphantly entering the plaza of Caracas in 1813 (any plaza in the Spanish-American Colonial style will do, Vasconcelos indicates in his scene directions). In another we see Bolívar being blessed in a Quito cathedral by the archbishop following the Pichincha victory. We also view the leader in a seat of honor at a Caracas dance hall watching couples move to Sevillian, Spanish rhythms. We are told in the scene directions that this style of dance is to be understood by the audience as distinctly Hispanic or Latin American: The dancers are to use their legs and hips, not their arms and shoulders, as Anglos do.
Furthermore, it is not simply that Vasconcelos presents Bolívar as part of a ritualized public world different from that of the North. He creates a figure who will convert to the Hispanic Catholic tradition, rejecting the English and US liberal tradition Bolívar in fact admired. There is much that Vasconcelos does to prepare the way for Bolívar’s epiphany. Throughout the text we see figures close to Bolívar warning him about the Anglo world. For instance, the German Alexander Humboldt, whom Bolívar may have met in Paris in 1804, is portrayed telling the young future leader that he must beware of England’s commercial designs on Latin America. In this fictionalized scene Humboldt also tells Bolívar that the person who liberates Latin America will need to be like Julius Caesar, not Napoleon.
One can imagine several reasons Vasconcelos insists upon the Roman instead of the French imperial model. First, sympathizing as he did at the time with the Axis powers, he could not deploy the comparison of Bolívar to Napoleon since he did not want to be seen as supporting the French. Second, the Caesarian model of imperial power was being evoked by Benito Mussolini. The construction of Bolívar as Caesarian, then, was a clear way of making the Venezuelan leader resonate with the “powers” of the moment. Finally, Vasconcelos, with his long-standing Hispanic-based cultural politics, saw the Gallic as a model of empire and culture that had already failed in the Americas. In “La raza cósmica,” Napoleon is presented as a myopic, somewhat historically sinister figure to whom is attributed the rise of the United States in the Americas on account of his decision in 1803 to sell it the Louisiana Territory. As far as Vasconcelos was concerned, had Napoleon possessed the appropriate ethnic consciousness of solidarity with Latin-based cultures, he would never have made a deal that years later would pave the way for the United States to take or acquire the northern provinces of Mexico.
The issue of empire, then, was central to Vasconcelos’s reflection. In the screenplay, to make way for the Spanish Catholic Bolívar he imagined, he has the leader enter into a discussion with a fictional French abbot he is supposed to have met in Haiti in 1816 regarding the role of the Spanish as economic colonizers of the Americas. As we know, Bolívar railed against the Spanish empire in his famous 1815 Jamaica Letter . In order to “correct” this, Vasconcelos has the abbot, Gerard, address the matter of economic development. Characterizing the Spanish as capable economic administrators, the abbot cites Humboldt’s findings that they successfully placed European crops in the New World, a formulation that is supposed to directly refute Bolívar’s portrayal of the colonial administration in the Jamaica Letter as obstructing Latin America’s development. With this, we see Vasconcelos defending the notion he puts forth in “Bolivarismo y Monroísmo” that of Spain as a nation possessing technologies accessible to laborers at large and as an alternative, therefore, to corporate and industrial modernity.
At the same time, unapologetic promoter of the white race in his vision of the future of hemispheric culture that he now was in a new way, Vasconcelos could not allow Bolívar’s identity as emancipator of the Afro-Latin Americans to stand. To this end, he in fact dedicates an entire scene to Bolívar’s visit to Haiti and to his relationship with Alexandre Pétion, who came to the aid of the independence movement not once but twice.
In a clear departure from his earlier, futuristic celebration of the tropics in “La raza cósmica,” Vasconcelos portrays Haiti as the primitive bucolic location of a purported inferior race and Pétion not as an individual but as a representative of “his race,” as the so-called black president. Not that Vasconcelos was concerned with being historically accurate, but we should note that Pétion was bi-racial and that the politics in the Haiti of his time pitted “blacks” against “mulattos.” Still, why would Vasconcelos have insisted on constructing a scene in Haiti when he easily could have avoided mention of Bolívar’s extraordinary debt, just as so many others have? The reason is that Vasconcelos wants to explain how Bolívar could have come to take up the cause of liberating the enslaved blacks, and furthermore, how he could be regarded by later generations as an emancipator. Bolívar, as we are supposed to learn from the screenplay, was a realist who understood that in the moment he needed Pétion’s assistance he had no choice but to acquiesce to the Haitian president’s demand and proclaim that he would liberate the enslaved. Vasconcelos, let us say, is “contextualizing” Bolívar’s words. Haiti, we are told, at this time represented an historical axis, a strategic place to which Bolívar had to go for military assistance. With this in mind, we are to see Bolívar’s proclamations to end slavery, then, as a concession to the political project of the individual funding him and not a reflection of the true content of his thought. What has happened to Bolívar’s connection to Haiti? In Bolívar’s May 25, 1825 address to the Peruvian Congress where he presents for adoption his Bolivian Constitution, he uses the example of the successful transmission of power from Pétion to Jean-Pierre Boyer in order to defend the principle of the lifetime president, a central feature of the constitution. All Peruvians had to do was look to the example of state formation in Haiti to approve his constitution.
Vasconcelos is calling into question Bolívar’s interest in and commitment to Haiti. Reconstructed, Vasconcelos’s Bolívar who now does not truly care about manumission will stand not only for the union of church and state, opposing Juárez in this way, but also for the post-1824 dream of federation. Readers and viewers, particularly those among Latin America’s youth, will be able to find in independence the lessons that will guide them in the future.
But how could Vasconcelos portray the liberal Anglophile, Francophile, anticlerical, anti-Spanish Bolívar in such a way? How could Bolívar, who never uttered a single significant public word of criticism against the United States or England, who in fact admired the civic and political traditions of the United States and also admired the English parliamentary system, who contemplated in the mid to late 1820s inviting the English to act as guardian of the new republics, be seen as an enemy of the United States and the Anglo world?21 Furthermore, how could this figure, who in essence stood against the Catholic clergy, except in his final dictatorship when he sought out their political support, be reconciled not only to Catholicism, but also to its pomp?
Vasconcelos could do this because of his relativistic understanding of the relationship between power, tradition, and interpretation. Addressing this relationship in the prologue, he speaks of his right to fashion his own Bolívar, one who was not only castizo (pure) and culturally Latin American in the way he imagines this but also one whose story of development and final spiritual redemption hinged on the critical knowledge Latin Americans had gained since the emergence of the United States as hemispheric power. Indeed, the figure he was presenting, he avowed, is no less an interpretation, as he underlines with his inclusion of the word in the title, than the Bolívars of the French and of the United States. This is significant. For in justifying his right to produce a Bolívar for the times, in explaining the grounds that authorizes him to mine the Bolivarian archive for the religious statements that he would include in his drama, he says nothing of the multiple if not myriad appropriations of Bolívar in Latin America. Ricardo Palma, José Martí, José Enrique Rodó, to name just a few of the intellectuals and writers who positioned themselves through Bolívar (the cases of Palma and Rodó to be discussed in later chapters), are neatly elided so that the story of Vasconcelos’s relationship to the “Liberator” can be seen as that of a Latin American rescuing a foundational figure from foreign hands. Vasconcelos’s Bolívar is to be an eminently usable one for Latin Americans confronted by the specter of the new antifascist Pan Americanism, a figure in whose heroic story may be found all the evidence of Latin America’s spiritual unity as well as all the evidence of the cause of its continued political fragmentation: the United Kingdom and the United States.
Most narratives about Bolívar, whether friendly or hostile, take a stand in one way or another on the merits of his two state projects: on the one hand, the Gran Colombia of which he was president; on the other, the Bolivian Constitution together with the Andean Federation, the former that was to serve as the basis for the latter. In Vasconcelos’s narrative, although there is a scene that deals with his response to the so-called calumnies directed at him during his dictatorship in 1828 and 1829, the failure of Bolívar to realize his dream of a federation is not presented as the result, as it in fact was, of irreconcilable differences between himself and the Granadan Francisco de Paula Santander, the Venezuelan José Antonio Páez, and other representatives of so-called local interests. Furthermore, there is no mention of Bolivia’s ouster of Sucre in 1828 or the war between Peru and the Gran Colombia. Rather, the failure is seen as the result of British and US economic and political interests.
Bolívar is portrayed saying the following to one of his secretaries on the subject of the United Kingdom: “You are wrong, Martel. Behind Páez is England…. England does not want us to be strong. A collection of disorganized nations is easier to manage for its own interests than a great State like the one I had imagined.”22
The United Kingdom was, of course, interested in establishing trade relations with the new independent nations, and did. But its experience with the Gran Colombia, which defaulted on a loan extended to it in 1824, discouraged investment in the following decades, as did, as John Lynch states in his discussion of Bolivia, the market collapse of 1825, which left British companies unable to work the mines sold to them by the new government.23
Henry Clay did make a statement in 1825 expressing the United States’ opposition to the Mexican-Colombian alliance for Cuban liberation. Still, as Hugh Thomas, a British historian who was a figure not unlike Salvador de Madariaga and Waldo Frank—an intellectual who took advantage of Pan Americanism to produce countless mega narratives explaining to a British and US and international audience the Hispanic and Latin American world—writes in his history of Cuba: Had Bolívar truly desired to take the liberation process to Cuba under the command of Páez in collaboration with Cuban exiles in Mexico, supported by that country’s president (as he threatened to do after the battle of Ayacucho in order to compel a complete surrender by the Spanish) Clay’s statement would not have deterred him. At the same time, nor was it likely, Thomas adds, that the US public would have supported a military effort against Bolívar’s army.25Let us speak clearly, O’Leary; what is getting in my way is the ambition of foreigners…. In these moments the failure of Cuba hurts me most. The expedition that should have freed it was ready; Colombia offered the largest contingent; Mexico was also quick to assist. And who impeded us? The United States! Why is this country opposed to the liberation of Cuba?24
In Vasconcelos’s revised version of the Bolivarian epic, the internal differences between Bolívar, Santander, and Páez are presented as being merely contingent. The “Liberator” explains to O’Leary that those who believe themselves to be his rivals will bow their heads to him if he is able to establish a federation of “pueblos Americanos” (American peoples) including all of Latin America, not just Venezuela, New Granada (present-day Colombia), Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Yet if the importance of the conflict with Santander and Páez is downplayed in this way, the ethnic identities of Anglo/Irish and Hispanic are described as being transcendent.
In a scene in Quito in 1822, O’Leary, who collected and organized Bolívar’s correspondence and who in his biography defended him against his detractors and enemies as a liberal, Enlightenment figure, is portrayed exchanging disparaging remarks about the creole Bolívar with an agent of the British Secret Service. O’Leary, referred to in the stage directions of this scene alone as the Irishman, attributes the success of the independence movement to the participation of English and Irish recruits and mercenaries who like him joined the movement beginning in 1817. For his part, the agent tells him not to worry about defending British commercial interests, for Chile’s hero of independence, Bernardo O’Higgins, “another one of ours, has the command of the Chilean fleet. England will not relinquish the pursuit of its quarry. Ha, Ha, Ha.”26
It is true, of course, that O’Leary would serve as British consul general in Venezuela and Colombia after Bolívar’s death and the break-up of the Gran Colombia, just as another Bolívar aide-de-camp, the British Belford Hinton Wilson, would in Peru. Following this scene, indeed neatly juxtaposed to it, is that of the famous unrecorded meeting in Guayaquil in 1822 between Bolívar and the Argentine Liberator San Martín, after which San Martín ceded authority to Bolívar over the liberation of Peru and then left South America to retire in France. Here, in a portrayal of trust, agreement, and unity—rather than, possibly, as many conjecture, of power politics—San Martín is represented as willingly agreeing to withdraw from the campaign, and subsequently, as accompanying Bolívar together with their respective staffs for drinks and dancing. With this, Vasconcelos seems to resolve the enigma of San Martín’s surprising removal of himself from the independence movement, shunting aside the contention of Argentines that Bolívar threatened to withhold his forces from the conflict in Peru if San Martín did not cede his command to him. Vasconcelos may also be seen in this same gesture to erase from view the critical tension regarding the matter of the political future of Guayaquil, which Bolívar declared to be part of the Gran Colombia but which many in the local elites wanted either to be part of Peru or to be independent. As for Vasconcelos’s conception of history, the following, then, can be said: By supplying an “updated” version of O’Leary and O’Higgins, by “revealing” them to be part of a vast conspiracy of British capitalist interests, a providential, positivist Vasconcelos furnishes readers of his screenplay, if not perhaps one day viewers of his film, with a new mythical vision of cooperation among Latin America’s liberators based on the fictions of racial coherence and difference.
The screenplay Juarez was based on Franz Werfel’s 1924 play Juarez und Maximilian, translated into English in 1926 and performed that same year at the Theater Guild in New York City. In the play, Werfel, himself Austrian, portrays the Austrian Habsburg prince Maximilian as an enlightened aristocrat who, combating the demagogue of democracy that is Juárez, defends till the end of his life his vision of a radical constitutional monarchy. As Vanderwood points out, Aeneas MacKenzie, in the first Warner Bros. adaptation, brought about two important changes. He presents Juárez as a Zapotec Indian who is intellectually inferior on account of his “race”; also, to meet the interpretive needs of Warner Bros., he replaces the climax of the original play, in which Maximilian lashes out against the new tyranny represented by Juárez, with a different climactic moment, the evacuation of French troops under threat of US intervention, the significance of which the primitive Juárez does not entirely grasp. In the second adaptation, prompted by the agreement between Roosevelt and Warner Bros., MacKenzie, now in collaboration with John Huston, rewrites the role of Juárez in order to define him as a bearer of Pan American values. To this end, Juárez is presented as a Lincolnphile, and a personal relationship that never existed between the two is invented. Thus there is a portrait of Lincoln hanging behind Juárez’s desk in the moments of the film in which Juárez appears presiding over his government-in-exile; a scene in which Juárez is presented receiving a letter of support from Lincoln; and a scene where we witness the Mexican president-in-exile receiving with great sorrow news of the US president’s death. In the second script, Juárez is thus transformed from racialized Indian to a New Deal Lincolnesque figure representing liberalism and a democratic hemisphere. No doubt Vasconcelos, who vilified Juárez as being unable to assimilate to Hispanic culture on account of his “Indianness,” would have preferred the racialized portrayal of his historical nemesis. But the second and final script would have also appealed to him, for therein could be found the “truth” of which he sought to convince his compatriots—Juárez’s identification with the United States.
The Monroe Doctrine is also emphasized in the final screenplay. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon III) and his ministers are portrayed speaking of the need to show the United States that France is not in violation of it. At the beginning of the film we see them plotting to protect themselves from accusations by staging a referendum for the Mexican people on whether they want to have the Austrian Habsburg Maximilian as their king. Equally significant is the scene toward the end of the film that Warner Bros. deleted from the Mexican version after reaction from Latin American viewers at the opening in New York.27 Here we are shown a US envoy who is sent, subsequent to the Union’s defeat of the Confederates, to visit Louis-Napoleon to inform him that the United States takes the Monroe Doctrine very seriously and is poised to support Juárez. As the British historian Jasper Ridley tells us, with the end of the Civil War, the United States no longer needed to tolerate the occupation since it had done so principally to secure from France assurances that it would not sell naval vessels to the Confederacy. But, as Ridley also tells us, the United States, which was supplying Juárez’s army and was concerned about violence on the border, did not put pressure on Louis-Napoleon, who already wanted to evacuate his troops from Mexico and was desperate to save face before his own public, outraged by the expense of the occupation. A meeting did, indeed, take place between Louis-Napoleon and a US envoy, but this envoy was James Watson Webb, a friend whom Louis-Napoleon called upon to advise him. The meeting initially had nothing to do with the Monroe Doctrine. To the contrary, Louis-Napoleon asked Webb if the United States would help him politically by recognizing Maximilian. To which the envoy, now alluding to the doctrine, responded that public opinion prevented President Andrew Johnson from doing so and that such was the sentiment of the American people that in the event of a continued occupation there could be thousands going to Mexico to fight for Juárez. He “suggested that Louis-Napoleon might consider withdrawing his troops from Mexico in stages over eighteen months, for this would make it clear to the world that he was withdrawing in his own good time and not under duress.”28
Non-Hispanic US viewers of the film, it would be reasonable to think, would have lacked the critical knowledge to question a version of Mexican history in which the United States is presented as the linchpin of independence from the French. Furthermore, Pan Americanists—cultural hegemonists that they were—whether consciously or unconsciously, would have perceived US prerogative over Mexico and the rest of Latin America, as embodied by the Monroe Doctrine, as correct and natural. It was, of course, another matter for viewers in Mexico, who, as Vanderwood tells us, saw in the film the same old story of US paternalism and interventionism in Latin America.29 For Vasconcelos, who considered launching a military assault from US territory on the socialist president Lázaro Cárdenas in the years before his expulsion, that story of interference would have included the fraudulent elections of 1929 to which he saw the Left-leaning Cárdenas as heir.
Vasconcelos’s desire to celebrate the continental figure of Simón Bolívar along with national figures such as Francisco Madero, executed together with his vice president by General Victoriano Huerta, and Lucas Alamán, on the big screen to compete with Warner Bros. made sense for one such as himself who understood all forms of culture as a form of propaganda. In this, his last major attempt at redirecting Mexican politics, the race theory he embraced from the 1920s forward aligned him with other Latin American race thinkers like Vallenilla Lanz. But such are the vagaries of memory and the politics of culture that the Vasconcelos of the 1930s and 1940s would not be the one remembered. Instead, that one would be the Vasconcelos of “La raza cósmica,” celebrated by later generations for his clear statement of opposition to US racial political hegemony and at the same time domesticated on both sides of the border, whether by the likes of the Mexican writer and essayist Alfonso Reyes, the Chicano movement, or US and Mexican textbook writers, as a voice attesting to the successful and exemplary racial mixing of indigenous and Spanish white.
This exclusive focus on the figure of the 1920s is significant because it leaves out earlier and later moments in the story of this major figure’s engagement with ideology and culture, in particular the important transitional moment examined here ending a ten-year exile that saw Vasconcelos go from Mexico to the United States, then to Spain and Argentina, later back to the United States, and finally back to Mexico. Vasconcelos fought on many political and cultural fronts, including the celluloid front of the late 1930s, while using the very border that he and other Mexican intellectuals and politicians crossed so often to distinguish what was Mexican or Latin American from what was (US) American. The Latin American cinema he imagined has still not come into being, and ironically, at the time he was writing, Mexico was entering its cinematic Golden Age. But in the end, no text or texts of Vasconcelos speaks more eloquently than does Simón Bolívar (Interpretación) together with its prologue to what was of most importance to Vasconcelos throughout his long and embattled career: the creation of a political and cultural consciousness capable of resisting what he saw as the assaults of the “powerful,” which for him was first and foremost the United States. In his response to Juarez, a motion picture in the service of the US state, we see a vision that is self-consciously propagandistic, presented in the universalistic language of high culture, the same language in which he inscribes all his distinct projects rallying both the elites and the masses. We also see an intellectual who was both a realist and an idealist, waging his celluloid war in the print medium to which he had access but hopeful that his words and images would one day become something more despite his statements of skepticism in the prologue to the contrary.
Bolívar would remain alive in the Mexican tradition, particularly in the plastic arts, where, as Gustavo Vargas Martínez Fuente explains, he became an important icon thanks to Vasconcelos.30 In print, one appearance of his figure is noteworthy, an extension of Vasconcelos’s vision of Bolívar as Latin American caudillo and/or charismatic leader but presented now in a new binary in which Bolívar is made to stand as one of two definitions of the caudillo.
The individual who formulated the binary was writer and essayist Octavio Paz in his 1969 essay, “Crítica de la pirámide” (“Critique of the Pyramid”)31 Paz, who stood opposed to nationalists like Vasconcelos, had earlier brought out El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude), his famous series of essays of 1950 in which he seeks to sweep away the class-and race-based oppositional politics of rivals through his well-known sociology- and archetype-driven reflections on power. His goal was to create institutions to combat the logic of personal domination he saw everywhere.32 But in his 1969 essay Paz attacks not Mexican society per se but the party that dominated the country for 40 years and that would for another 30 years, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, for its role in the October 2, 1968 massacre of students and workers as ordered by Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, the PRI president at the time. In a sleight-of-hand that could be seen as a new version of blame the victim, Paz condemns not only the all-powerful party, the first public attack of its kind, as scholars have pointed out, but also Mexicans writ large, whom Paz asks to take responsibility for the violence of the state—heirs, as he argues through Freud, to a collective history of violence going back to the Aztecs and the colonization process. Using the same critical paradigm he develops in El laberinto de la soledad—that of Mexican modernity as having two subject positions, that of the powerful and that of the powerless—Paz writes of a Mexico descended morally from the country’s original communities’ centuries-long internalization of the power inequalities thrust upon them first by the Aztec state, then by the Spanish colonial state that replaced the Aztec.
Paz, it is clear, was Othering the Aztecs, who in recent decades had been elevated to represent national culture, as seen in the place they were made to occupy in the new National Museum of Anthropology, opened in 1964. As for the student leaders killed and imprisoned at the hands of the PRI in 1968, together with the student and worker movements in which Mexico’s 1968 had its origins, detailed by Elena Poniatowska in her book, La Noche de Tlatelolco, The Night of Tlatelolco, they are barely spoken of, the importance of their critique minimized by the purported conditions under which they made it. The students became subjects existing outside society by virtue of their location in the university—not being of society—a tremendous statement to make given that protest in 1968 was centered at the Autonomous University of Mexico.
Paz does critique the PRI, presenting the figure of its president in the 1960s as embodying what he posits as a Mexican iteration of the archetype of the caudillo, the figure whose authority exists in the law. To this archetype he opposes that of what he defines as the Latin American caudillo as represented not only by Vasconcelos, but also by Bolívar, the Argentines Manuel Rosas and Juan Perón as well as the Cuban Fidel Castro, leaders who define their authority through their individual acts. Benito Juárez and Venustiano Carranza fall under the rubric of the caudillo whose authority is based in the law; Santa Anna and Pancho Villa under that of the caudillo whose authority is not.33
Paz , who throughout his career used the concept of archetypes and dualities as a way of framing his critiques, deploys these two forms of leadership to narrate modern Mexican history. As if they were the only possibilities for Mexico in the years after the Revolution, Paz retells the political history of Mexico through their lenses, writing that the PRI, founded as the PNR in 1929 by Plutarco Elías Calles to legitimize his extralegal authority as jefe máximo—any mention of the 1929 elections that saw Vasconcelos, the embodiment for him of the other archetype, left out—had functioned well until the late 1950s. At that time, however, it began to become increasingly rigid, its possibility for moral action, Paz submits, undermined by its own suffocating concern with form, hierarchy, and power, the office of the president of the PRI congealing by 1968 into the embodiment of the severest form of the Mexican lawful caudillo, the Aztec Tlataoni. In another instance of Othering, Paz is barbarizing the Aztec leader, presenting him through the filter of the PRI as a mindless and heartless institutional figure. The other form of leadership with its cast of figures who include enemies of liberalism provides Paz with a counterpoint against which to bring into relief and celebrate certain Mexican leaders, particularly Carranza and Calles, all this at the same time as part of his effort to keep on course the political model put in place by the latter in 1929, a model he in the end defends but likens in its contemporary embodiment to fascism and the violence of the Aztec state and that he argues requires not a wholesale rejection but critique.