THE WIDE RANGE OF DOCUMENTS amassed in this comprehensive chapter reflect the shifts and continuities in thought as well as the various agendas that informed writings relating to the “discovery,” “invention,” and finally the construct of “Latin” America. Some of these sources help to dispel long-standing stereotypes; others point to the sheer “imperial interests” involved, from Spain to France and the United States. Representing the viewpoints of a variety of thinkers and historical figures from different centuries and parts of the world, these seminal documents have shaped the discourses on Latin America. Hence, these texts—especially when considered collectively—begin to illuminate the ways in which the complexity of the continent “resists categories.” This chapter sets the stage and introduces the main dilemmas and questions debated in this entire book. Three main ideas—organized into six parts—are encompassed by this introductory chapter and are echoed throughout the volume: the “Latin-ness” of the continent; the simplistic idea of ensemble implied by the vastness of the word “America”; and the straddling of both terms—“Latin” and “America”—that the overstated, impossible concept of Utopia brought to the fore as it began to be increasingly applied to the continent, beginning as early as the sixteenth century.
I.1 “America as a Utopian Refraction” includes accounts inspired by the earliest European expeditions to the New World which would set the tone and introduce some of the terms of the discourse that would have currency for centuries to come. In Christopher Columbus’s letter to King Ferdinand of Spain, we read his awe and his sense of a God-given right to conquer as he describes his voyage across the Atlantic, as well as the unprecedented people and lands “of which not only Spain, but Universal Christendom will be partaker” [SEE DOCUMENT I.1.1].—Columbus mistakenly believed he had arrived at the Indian Sea, confusing Cathay (China) with Juana (Cuba), an auspicious error that nevertheless set into motion a vast christening of the continent on European terms. From the Mexican intellectual Alfonso Reyes, we learn of the sixteenth-century cartographers of Saint-Dié who privileged Amerigo Vespucci’s travels in Cosmographiæ introductio (1507), which “met with success because it spread the news of a Terra Firma [Brazil] different from the one that Columbus had made known” [SEE DOCUMENT I.1.5]. These navigations inspired a European enthrallment with this still mostly unknown New World, which was embraced for its “possibilities” and seen by many as the site where a Utopia might flourish. In Thomas More’s Island of Utopia a fictional Portuguese sailor-philosopher Raphael Hythloday—who had apparently traveled with Vespucci—offers an account of the utopian society of wisely governed people he encountered during one of his journeys [SEE DOCUMENT I.1.2]. His depiction of the Islanders were echoed by European thinkers such as Francis Bacon, who writes of “the great Atlantis (that you call America)” [SEE DOCUMENT I.1.3]. Like More, Bacon joins fiction with recently discovered facts about the continent and lauds its social, political, and economic successes: that New Atlantis “as well as that of Peru, then called Coya, and that of Mexico, then named Tyrambel, were mighty and proud kingdoms in arms, shipping and riches.” Such narratives illustrate that what were relatively unexplored territories like Brazil, Peru, and Mexico offered prime, blank slates upon which European minds could picture utopian societies.
Beginning with Columbus, America became a spiritual “field of possibilities” where justice, liberty, and even Utopia could be within reach for the tired, worn-out societies of the Old World. The idea of America as a “promised land” recently discovered (by chance) led to opportunities for a sort of American Crusade resulting in: the annihilation of advanced civilizations such as the Aztecs, Mayas, Chibchas, and the Incas; obstacles of doctrine perpetuated by evangelization; and the imposition of a powerful foreign rule via colonization. What may seem paradoxical is that the ambitious drive toward conquest was inextricable from the (self-) criticism of the failures of European institutions implied by the fascination with Utopia. The idea that America was within arm’s reach of Utopia was one that persisted for centuries, despite the impossibility defined by the very term itself: the Greek word “Ou-tópos” (U-topia) was literally a “no-place.” Indeed, for Mexican scholar Edmundo O’Gorman, America was no more than an “invention” or a “potentiality” to be realized only by receiving and fulfilling ideas and values of European culture in a refractive way [SEE DOCUMENT I.1.7]. The continental notion of “being” was in some ways a vision wrought by the fantasies and contradictions projected by European concerns.
I.2 “The Invention of an Operative Construct”—the “Latin-ness” of America—by the French intelligentsia is the focus of the second section of this chapter comprising texts by French politicians, historians, geographers, and sociologists. The origins of this view stem from Napoleonic proposals supported by European scholars who posited the American ideal of “the great Latin Family,” which frankly supported France’s hegemonic ambitions. This conception first appeared during the period of Imperial French intervention in Republican Mexico with Carlos Calvo’s twenty-volume commercial and diplomatic history (1862) of Latin America that he dedicated to Napoleon III as an “expression of gratitude of all people of Latin race” [SEE DOCUMENT I.2.1]. It is Calvo who first introduces the term “Latin America” in print, and his understanding of the continent influenced generations of thinkers on the subject. In 1912, the future president of France Raymond Poincaré congratulated Francisco García Caldéron for his work in Les démocraties latines d’Amérique, which suggests that the French venture in Latin America will result in cultivating societies that are “more and more receptive to our literature, to our art, to our trade, and our capital. The great Latin family can only gain in material prosperity and moral authority” [SEE DOCUMENT I.2.3]. Mixing lofty, cultural ideals with profits, the justification for the extension of this “Latin family” was obvious: France was the holy seat of Latin culture and Christendom, and these factors positioned her to best unite these lands under Catholicism. Moreover, as Michel Chevalier notes, “the destiny of France and the power of her authority are inextricably linked to the future opportunities of Catholic countries in general, and the Latin race in particular” [SEE DOCUMENT I.2.2]. By stressing this, he naively pondered and justified France’s “order” through Mexico’s ordeal, thus encouraging a cultural venture of the continent. Such writings begin to touch on the important role religion could play as a pivotal and unifying factor transcending differences, discrepancies, and antagonisms.
The impulse to homogenize the region with one encompassing term— Latin America—can be traced specifically to France and to critics including André Siegfried: “My travels in the region led me to believe that these countries have enough in common to allow us to group them together within a shared Latin American milieu” [SEE DOCUMENT 1.2.4]. Increasingly, however, such an all-embracing view of the region triggered considerable debate regarding the unified, cultural existence of the geopolitical entity “Latin America.” The question of whether there is a Latin America and what constitutes its being were frequently posed by twentieth-century academics with varying viewpoints and agendas. One such writer, Luis Alberto Sánchez, specifically asks: “How could there not be a ‘Latin America’ when people talk so much about it—about its personality, its efforts, its race, its idiosyncrasies, its unitary religious beliefs, its sentimental literature, its future?” [SEE DOCUMENT I.2.6]. Although Sánchez is among those who assert a “unified environment,” a younger generation of French scholars rejected essentialist approaches to the question of whether there is a Latin America as such. Fernand Braudel and Marcel Niedergang, among others, think in terms of multiplicity rather than homogeneity [SEE DOCUMENT I.2.7 AND DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1052740 (http://icaadocs.mfah.org/icaadocs/THEARCHIVE/FullRecord/tabid/88/doc/1052740/language/en-US/Default.aspx), RESPECTIVELY]. The latter, in fact, proposes an alternative construct: the “Twenty Latin Americas.” In some respects, Guy Martinière finds a middle-ground term, offers a more nuanced modus operandi, and argues instead for the application of Latin-ness as an “operative concept” [SEE DOCUMENT I.2.10] that, in one way or another, makes possible an ample approach to a complex, intricate, and mixed ensemble. Indeed, multifarious traits characterize Latin America even within specific national contexts and borders. Why not, then, an overall appellation?
I.3 Cuban-born independence leader José Martí refers to Latin America in possessive terms—as “Nuestra América” (Our America)—longing for rights grounded in the precarious and blurred identity of a continent recently liberated from the grip of its colonizers. Addressing the struggles within his own country, he notes that America “still suffers, from the tiresome task of reconciling the hostile and discordant elements it inherited from the despotic and perverse colonizer and the imported methods and ideas which have been retarding logical government because they are lacking in local realities” [SEE DOCUMENT I.3.4]. The incongruity between an imposed colonial system and these opposing “local realities” lay at the core of the struggle for identity of the newborn American republics. Writing more than seventy years before Martí in his well-known letter (1815) from Jamaica, Simón Bolívar got to the roots of the Latin American dilemma of identity: “we scarcely retain a vestige of what once was; we are, moreover, neither Indian nor European, but a species midway between the legitimate proprietors of this country and the Spanish usurpers” [SEE DOCUMENT I.3.2]. A key trait of this hybrid struggle was the opposition between fragmentation and unity; or, in other words, between the coherence of the North American E pluribus unum (out of many, one) and the continental shattering of ex uno plures (out of one, many). The texts gathered in this section exemplify the contentiousness of the fragmentation–unity debate. Colombian statesman José María Torres Caicedo’s idea of the Latin American Multi-Homeland (1864–65) represents an attempt to chart a new model for the continent that simultaneously rejects both the notion of unity as well as the idea of federation that served as a model for the United States. He argues: “In Latin American States, all colonized in the same manner, ruled by identical laws, traditions, religion, what can be achieved by a federation that moves in the opposite direction. . . ? Unity becomes division, it becomes unhinged” [SEE DOCUMENT I.3.3]. Torres Caicedo proposes instead a confederation of sovereign states to establish what he dubs a “Multi-Homeland” (multipatria). A second alternative whose proponents include the Mexican educator José Vasconcelos takes the form of ethnic unification, overruling the complexities of culture. He calls for the union of Iberian people in the continent in opposition to Anglo Saxon America, stating: “The free mixing of races and cultures will reproduce in higher numbers and better elements, the universalistic experiment that failed in North America. There it failed because it became ‘North Americanism’; here it may be saved if the Iberian flexibility and strength establish the basis for a truly universal type. The conscience of this mission beats in the heart of all Latin American nations, and provides an impulse toward contemporary ‘Latin Americanism’” [SEE DOCUMENT I.3.8]. The ethnically grounded “contemporary Latin Americanism” conceived by Vasconcelos was racial and even “spiritual,” and also quite different from Bolívar’s dream of a politically unified continent.
Not everyone bought into dreams for a single, though plural and multicultural Latin America. Many South American intellectuals expressed their skepticism regarding Latin America’s struggle for unified identity. Writing of the continent’s inescapable Evils of Origin, Brazilian historian Manoel Bomfim assesses with great pessimism a persistent colonial status: “the new country never becomes a nation, remaining only the ex-colony, extended into the independent State, against all laws of evolution, extinguishing progress, captive to a thousand prejudices, bound to conservatism by ignorance. The result of this recalcitrant past is this society that we see now: poor, exhausted, ignorant, brutalized, apathetic, with no idea of its own value, hoping that the heavens will remedy its misery, beseeching fortune from chance” [SEE DOCUMENT I.3.5]. Alberto Zum Felde, an Argentinean-born literary historian, considers the spiritual forms of colonization that result in new, composite brands: “American French” or the “Spaniards of the New World.” In Zum Felde’s opinion, nations are tantamount to individuals conscious of their developing autonomy: moving from a more simple or primitive state of being, to a period of intermingling and invasions, and finally to something that could only be defined by complexity. Many of the arguments presented in this section are underscored by the implication that post-colonial political assertions of independence are undermined by continued European spiritual and cultural colonization.
I.4 The idea of fitting a plural reality within a single concept has parallels in the idealized and impossible notion of Utopia. The Spanish Baroque poet Francisco de Quevedo was indeed the first to translate the word Utopia as “no hay tal lugar” (“there is no such a place”).1 Given the continent’s early associations with Utopian hopes and doctrines, it is quite significant that even before being officially named, it was imbued with both negativity and the idea of nothingness. This deep-rooted association with Utopianism, then, naturally leads to the question posed in this section: Is “America a No-Place?” Fundamental to this question is the metonymical equation pars pro toto in which several countries (the parts) aspire to belong to the continental ensemble (the whole). The mere aspiration to become defined in terms of a “totality” and as something substantial rather than nothing or no-place (Utopia), is partially an attempt to counter the philosophical negativism of the alternative (lack of) definition. In this chimerical view, a monolithic America offers endless possibilities. According to Alfonso Reyes, the author of Última Tule (1942), America “appears as the stage for all attempts at human happiness,” and with Europe’s gaze fixed upon the New World, it begins “to conceive of a more felicitous humanity” [SEE DOCUMENT I.4.5]. However, in order for such abstract, propitious potential to be realized in Latin America, Brazilian historian Manoel Bomfim stresses that such concrete endeavors as “work, intellectual instruction, and the diffusion of primary education must be implemented” [SEE DOCUMENT I.4.1]. The idea of America as Utopia also informs the American writer Waldo Frank’s notion of “America [as] a potential organism: completely latent,” full of promise but still in an embryonic phase [SEE DOCUMENT I.4.3]. Furthermore, as the offspring of Old Worlds, America represents a “standard of universality” that José Vasconcelos philosophically casts as Indology; that is, the “future race” that will result from the intermingling of all known ethnicities into “the first instance of a positively universal race” [SEE DOCUMENT I.4.2].
I.5 The ongoing effort to define “Latin American” identity reflects the “Tensions at Stake”—the uneasiness involving the dialectics of opposition and complement—in the complicated nexus between the Americas and Utopia. Oswald de Andrade’s “Anthropophagous Manifesto” (1928) suggests that such tensions can be resolved in a cannibalistic fashion with the absorption and transformation of the “sacred [cultural] enemy” in order to “transform the enemy into a totem” [SEE DOCUMENT I.5.7] Questioning the “canned consciousness” that feeds us with Western civilization, he makes an anthropophagous call against Christian morals, arguing: “they were not crusaders who came; they were fugitives of a civilization we are devouring.” In South America, the prevailing thinking beginning in the early twentieth century was that the assimilation of the European “other” hinged upon first setting into motion a process of self-definition. And, in the words of the Uruguayan painter Pedro Figari: “This cannot happen until we have developed a number of organizing proposals, (as if [we were designing] an architectural structure) focused on defining the American soul,” our otherness [SEE DOCUMENT I.5.2]. Despite his deep-seated conviction and confidence that Latin America is “a powerhouse of strength and ideas,” Figari, among other artists, cautioned that the process of colonization, at least at the economic level (which is unavoidable) was not at all over. The French anarchist Charles Malato frankly identified the economic issues at stake as a tension with the “imperialists of the United States”: “Under the thumb of the Dollar Kings [Vanderbilt, Morgan, Rockefeller], things would not be quite the same” [SEE DOCUMENT I.5.1]. Such a situation irritated the struggling, new Spanish-American republics, who, according to the Argentinean writer and activist Pablo Rojas Paz, had been subjected to externally-imposed definition by their various colonizers: “Many have concocted long, terrible names for us—North America invented Pan American; France came up with Latin American; Spain created the term Hispanic American. Each of these names, though thinly disguised as an overture to harmonious relations, is actually an expression of its creator’s frustrated imperialist designs” [SEE DOCUMENT I.5.3]. Insofar as the tensions of imperial devouring are implied, these writers suggest that the continent as a whole has the potential for recourse in an inverted, cynical response. As stated in de Andrade’s 1928 manifesto: “Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.”
In this ongoing struggle to self identify as opposed to being identified, numerous cultural tensions emerge: rupture versus continuity, autochthonism versus Europeanism, and Americanism versus Nationalism. Such questions and struggles were vigorously debated by Latin American intellectuals, whose perspectives were often nuanced by and filtered through the specific historical and cultural concerns of the countries in question or of their own countries of origin. In the texts included in this section, we find that Mexico and Peru are posited as countries associated with the ancestral values of their indigenous civilizations; in contrast, among writings focusing on Argentina and Uruguay, we find evidence of the continuity of the European legacy in America. In the first case, in considering the so-called Open-Air Schools of Painting in post-revolutionary Mexico, Martí Casanovas notes that the key for asserting cultural independence may lie in the country’s indigenous past: “I admire the work of Mexican Indigenous visual artists. . . . the resurgence of the Mexican countryside, the work of Indians. I am passionate about and admire fervently, any event produced along these lines that is live, palpitating, because I see in it the seeds, the possibilities, the future of Indo-American culture” in order to truly resist Europeanism [SEE DOCUMENT I.5.5]. Other documents stress the primacy of the continental and suggest the “restrictive” qualities of what is national. Peruvian philosopher Antenor Orrego explains this continental perspective by arguing that “we must not forget that within the spirit of America, there is no room for what is national, restrictive, and negative in each country; instead, what is national is American, period” [SEE DOCUMENT I.5.4].
I.6 We conclude this chapter with texts by Brazilian authors who ponder a seminal question for understanding the hemisphere: “Does Brazil Belong to Latin America?” This controversy isolates Brazil—not only linguistically but also geographically and culturally. But the question has broader, continental significance as well, particularly with regard to South American identity and its historical and philosophical relationship to the so-called hypothesis of Utopia. This section asserts a range of views regarding Brazil, from emphasizing difference to calling for more integrative approaches aimed at establishing compelling connections with the rest of Latin America. Ideas of the country’s disconnectedness or “splendid isolation” were well embedded in the long-lasting rule of the Empire of Brazil (1822–89). Along with establishing the identity of Brazil’s enormous territory, this period of Empire also produced isolationist thinking with regard to the rest of the continent as exemplified by the work of monarchic authors including Joaquim Nabuco, Silvio Romero, and Eduardo Prado [SEE DOCUMENT III.1.2]. Prado’s rejection of linkage to or similarities with the rest of the continent and Afrânio Coutinho’s insistence on cultural autonomy (as if it were possible) [SEE DOCUMENT I.6.6] are countered by more forward-looking thinkers (Prudente de Moraes Neto, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Antonio Candido) who brought to light a consciousness of the limitations, restrictions, and taboos at play. Mainly, three ideas are pivotal here: isolation, nexus, and/or difference.
The grasp of a “continental island” expressed by several authors in this book (Candido, Darcy Ribeiro, Gilberto Freyre, and Aracy Amaral [SEE DOCUMENTS I.6.7; I.2.9; III.2.3; AND IV.4.2, RESPECTIVELY]) is a point of cultural consternation. For other Brazilian authors, the designation of “Latin America” is especially meaningless: As Coutinho states: “There is no reason whatsoever to designate the peoples of this continent as ‘Latin’—not Latin, or Hispanic, or Iberian. Latin America is a historic absurdity that stems from colonial bias” [SEE DOCUMENT I.6.6]. Instead, he explains, “in Brazil, every day we feel less and less Latin.” Candido explains this disconnection and isolation in terms of Brazil’s colonial roots: “Portugal was always a small, marginal state with no presence worthy of consideration within the centers of collective civilization.” Unlike the Spanish colonies, “It never had a Phillip II to astonish Europe, nor a [Miguel de] Cervantes to alter the course of literature” [SEE DOCUMENT I.6.7]. The key issue for many of these writers is reconciling this essential disconnection with a desire for coexistence with the broader reality that surrounds Brazil. Although Manoel Bomfim rejects “the general epithet Latin Americans,” he also acknowledges: “There is a relationship between Spaniards and Portuguese. There were needs common to both metropolises and analogous processes of colonization. The result of all this is a certain similarity of character between the neo-Iberian peoples. But that is all.” However, in order to characterize the formation of his country, Bomfim’s conception of Brazil in the Americas (1929) cautions that this should not be carried too far: “for the distribution of the Americas to be logical, it would be necessary to distinguish three of them, instead of two: the Castilian, the Portuguese, and the English” Americas [SEE DOCUMENT I.6.1].
1
Quoted in Steven Hutchinson, “Mapping Utopias,” Modern Philology 85, 2 (November 1987): 170.