In this 1948 article published in the Parisian journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, renowned French social and economic historian Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) responds to Luis Alberto Sánchez’s ¿Existe América Latina? [SEE DOCUMENT I.2.6] Braudel criticizes Sánchez’s poetically written perspectives on the continent as naive. He ridicules Sánchez’s ideas regarding Latin American unity and his notion of a single Latin America. The article was published three years after Braudel became the leader of the second generation of historians affiliated with Annales and one year prior to the publication of his first book and magnum opus La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1949). The author is best known for his work on the Mediterranean world and on the history of capitalism; however, he had wide interests and wrote frequently on Latin America. From 1934 to 1937, Braudel lived in Brazil while helping to establish the Universidade de São Paulo with the anthropologist Claude Lévi Strauss. This translation is from the original article [“Le livre de Luis Alberto Sánchez: y a-t-il une Amérique Latine?,” Annales, économies, societés, civilizations, vol. 3 (October–December 1948) (Paris: Kraus Reprint), 467–71]. It was later published in Cahiers des annales [(Paris), no. 4 (1949)].
LUIS ALBERTO SÁNCHEZ [SEE DOCUMENT I.2.6] is a famous writer. He was a driving force behind the university reform in Peru in 1919 and the author of classic books such as Literatura peruana [Peruvian Literature], América, novela sin novelistas [America, A Novel Without Novelists], Vida y pasión de la cultura en América [The Life and Passion of Culture in America], among many others. Sánchez also has the gift of seeing, understanding, and loving and, more importantly, of helping others to see, understand, and love. His latest book ¿Existe América Latina? [Does Latin America Exist?] is enthralling from the very beginning. Little by little, as one immerses oneself in its images—which are beautiful, and his reasoning, which is extremely clear—one is captivated by his train of thought. There is not the slightest sense of danger and one feels as though one is in the competent hands of a trusted guide who is an expert on the roads, enigmas, and problems of the twenty-odd segments of the Latin portion of the New World. And yet, there is some danger here; this fine book is an attempt to intercede on its subject’s behalf, but it is often a dream, filled with idealism and humanity, but a dream nonetheless which does not always reflect the cold and sometimes cruel reality. Luis Alberto Sánchez sees Latin America as a human family, one that is beyond discord, clashes, and differences. Internally homogeneous, it is a continent unto itself. But it must now organize itself in terms of that biological unity, in order to live of and for itself in a renewed expression of its original, constructive values.
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The book begins by asking the question that is posed in its title: ¿Existe una América Latina?1 But the response, unencumbered by doubts or misgivings, never seems to contemplate the possibility of questions or regrets. This is, in our view, the greatest flaw in this fascinating book; the reason for its aggressiveness and, at a deeper level, for its narrow focus. To intercede on someone’s behalf means to choose, to simplify, to rule out objections, and to distort the facts. It means to argue in the style of those earlier European observers and dreamers who, from 1910 to 1939, spoke about European unity. Europe is undoubtedly one, but it is not just one: Europe has ruled itself out, has opposed itself, and has been obsessed with both its own construction and destruction. Does this mean we can be more optimistic regarding Latin America in the present or the future?
To intercede means to choose. For Luis Alberto Sánchez, instead of the arbitrary, almost “surgical” cities intentionally created by mankind, it means the cities that spring up biologically, like children of nature. It means to prefer the perennial fields instead of the cities; the instinct of the masses instead of the idle intellectuality of the élites; the Mestizo—the new human being of the Americas—instead of the white man; an indigenous culture evolving from its own roots instead of an imported civilization with its windows open to the rest of the world. So much for preferences! The list of lacunae is enormous. To intercede means to consciously omit. Substantial problems still remain in the shadows because they are inconvenient. Therefore nothing addresses the vastness of the wide-open spaces where men, nations, and civilizations are scattered, remote from each other. “I hardly know what the Argentines are thinking,” wrote the Brazilian art critic Sérgio Milliet recently, “or what is being thought in the rest of South America, because we are so isolated from each other.”2 And Pablo Navarro, an Argentine journalist said that, as far as his fellow countrymen are concerned, any contact with Brazil leads to an unexpected encounter with a particular group of people and an unfamiliar terrain just a short distance from their own country, a journey “to a mystery land.”3 Nothing at all has been written about the economic realities of the situation that both separates and, to an even greater extent, unites them. Is this a calculated gamble?
In any case, how to ignore, or try to ignore, the various forms of nationalism still to be found throughout the Americas, or how to try to make them go away by closing one’s eyes? The day before yesterday, nationalism was political; yesterday it was literary (the only kind capable of soothing the heart); today, it tends more than ever to be economic—which is insatiable. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, but that is not the point), Latin America has its differences; it has national blocks, schisms, oppositions, and powerful centrifugal forces. In some cases, these are due to spaces that are not homogeneous or are a result of what happened in the past, the harsh ways in which people treated each other and the land to which they are extremely attached. Furthermore, civilization is not spread evenly across the continent, but varies according to local colors. Luis Alberto Sánchez has produced a monochromatic book that softens the contrasts of those hues. He is particularly remiss in not having given Brazil its due, since it is a separate, Portuguese Latin America in and of itself. Despite his fair reporting on Brazil, it is not included in this Spanish-American perspective except as part of his general picture. There is an arbitrary imposition of order, but it is an essentially Spanish order that spans the Andes, the Pacific, and the plateaus of Southern Mexico. The strong, eager roots of Sánchez’s book plunge deeply beneath the surface of Native civilizations.
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I would reproach the author for not differentiating the various issues and for stubbornly relating every problem to one single problem. Let us consider a few examples. The first chapter of his book presents an outline, depicting the geographical conditions of Latin America and its impact on the people and on the natural environment, especially when the environment is still partially wild. This is, admittedly, something that cannot be avoided, as was keenly observed by W. H. Hudson—the son of an Englishman who was born and raised on the Argentine pampas, then went to England when he was very young. He wrote extensively about the flora and fauna of the Americas, describing the country where he was born as well as Uruguay, the Guyanas, and Venezuela. He always portrayed the natural environment as awesome, exuberant, and tyrannical, and very hard to forget. Another observer, Lucien Febvre, reporting on his visit to Buenos Aires in 1937, spoke of his impressions of the works of Argentine landscape painters, [stating that] the land overwhelms the canvas, leaving barely enough room across the top for a narrow strip of sky. In a similar vein, Sánchez writes: “Latin American literature is strongly influenced by our landscape. . . . Without it, there would be no La Vorágine, Doña Bárbara, the foreword to Facundo, the poetry of Chocano, Don Segundo Sombra, the novels of José Rubén Romero, the intoxication with nature expressed by Uribe Arrais, the geographical anguish of [Pablo] Neruda, or La Suave Patria, the poem by López Velarde.”4 The list would be endless. In addition to Doña Bárbara, I am reminded of other novels by Rómulo Gallegos that express the human poetry and scenery of the Venezuelan Llanos. In the Americas, the land exerts a powerful influence on life, art, literature, thinking, and the soul of people.
We are in full agreement with the picture presented by Luis Alberto Sánchez at the beginning of his book and are ready to accept his ideas, observations, and suggestions. According to him, the geography of the continent is its unifying factor, whereas history (that is, people and events) conspires against it in senseless opposition. Geography demands that people should adapt to their environment, should put down roots and develop a “human plasma” that requires that human beings live in harmony with their natural environment. This is precisely what was created by the pre-Columbian civilizations that were destroyed by the European conquest, that random whirlwind of history that, in this case, interrupted a long chain of human adaptation and settlement.
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I will not disagree, nor attempt to refute that history does not often act in harmony with the environment. But, what environment are we referring to? In terms of the American continent, is it not stretching the truth to insist that there is but one geography—a natural and uniform boundary? There are certainly a variety of spaces, harmonies, adaptations, and “human plasmas.” Geography is, after all, versatile. The geography of the Andes is not the geography of the Argentine pampas, or of Northern Brazil, or of the South. If man must adapt to his environment, does that not prove that such environments, each one intrinsically different from the others, will not necessarily be equally accessible to different people, communities, and nations? Isn’t history itself a fallible force that destroys harmonies and unity?
We nonetheless follow the author with pleasure until later in the book, when we part ways with him in his excellent chapter 7: ¿Existe la tradición? [Does Tradition Exist?] Is there a historical tradition in Latin America? What is it? Does it favor unity, or not? This matter does not merit a lengthy discussion since it is obvious that, in most of the countries involved, it refers to the tradition of the white minority and is thus extremely limited in scope. Could we possibly imagine France ignoring her history prior to Francis I [1494–1547]? According to Luis Alberto Sánchez, however, it is these minority traditions that promote the various expressions of nationalism that are destroying American unity: Peruvian nationalism, Argentine nationalism, Chilean nationalism, and so on. In fact, a living tradition—derived from Iberian and American, and from mestizo and Native life—is Unitarian. At least, this is his assumption and, once again, he is both right and wrong. Iberian, Native, and mestizo are all bogus literary devices. To say Iberian is to risk mistaking Spaniards for Portuguese. Native is a dangerous singular word, and mestizo is nothing but an ambiguous formula. Could we say, in that case, that there is an Iberian, a Native, or a mestizo tradition, and could we say that there is only one? Would that not be substituting wishes for realities? Why can the masses—since they are at the heart of this formula—be more united than the elite? And those should both be plural: masses and elites. No, it is not enough to turn our backs on Europe or to deny the essential value of white people in order to create a melting pot of everyone who lives on this continent which is, after all, Portuguese and Spanish, Negro and Indian, not to mention all the other human contributions.
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All that said, I feel perfectly comfortable mentioning the salient feature of this book, which is a paean to a country that is both new and ancient, and that, in order to survive, must reconcile its origins. Whenever Sánchez stops trying to intercede on someone’s behalf, whenever he yields to his natural need to see and feel, he is truly matchless. His chapters devoted to races—the Native, the Black, and the Mestizo (chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6)—are astonishingly rich. I particularly recommend his thoughts concerning the color line, which he considers a social line as much as an ethnic one, which in general does not separate people on the basis of their skin color but according to how much money they have. In social terms, the yawning chasm between the poor and the rich is more dramatic than the Andes mountains; whether one is in the upper or the lower ranks depends on the color of one’s skin.
I would, incidentally, like to mention that stark social inequalities are a grim, relentlessness reality in South America, as mentioned above; they create an imbalance constantly in search for expression through newspapers and avant-garde novels by means of which great movements are instigated. The Americas have lately attained a new maturity in terms of social issues that, like the subject of race, is on everybody’s lips. It is yet another change, no less important than the frank and open debate on ethnicity that is taking place in South America, which is Latin in name and undoubtedly in spirit, if not in terms of its population. The admirable books by Gilberto Freyre, the sociologist from Recife, are being replaced by a wave of literature that has engulfed Latin America. Mestizos used to be looked down on. Now they are revered, as are the virtues of the melting pot in which the races were mixed and which laid the foundation for what the Americas would become.
I also enjoyed the author’s discussions on the law, public mores, the Army, and the Church—the last two, unfortunately, leave much to be desired. Law became terror, the scourge of these new countries that we gladly used to believe were free of excessive regulations! The fact is that laws have multiplied uncontrollably across this virgin land: Latin America is living under a regime of legislative inflation. What are we to think about a country—a huge and very rich country—where the president, during a ninety-day period in 1945, enacted some seven thousand government decrees? In South America one is hard-pressed to take a step forward without stumbling over the regulations or stipulations issued by lawmakers. It is no wonder that old and well-established law schools are flourishing everywhere. Duck your head to avoid this branch, or liana, or bunch of thorns; take another alley and circumvent the fence or the hedge because here, for sure, the policeman is usually kind. Laws create obstacle courses, but they are so complicated that people look for loopholes. This deluge of constantly changing and frequently ill-adapted laws rains down, neither wetting nor fertilizing the ground upon which it falls.
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Having re-read certain pages, the reader will seriously wonder whether he should quibble with the author, who has so much to teach us. Might we not sympathize with his efforts since—like a water-diviner—he scours this vast country looking for the little-known water of human brotherhood for which he thirsts? If Sánchez outlines ideas that are sometimes false and unquestionably fragile concerning Latin unity, it is not for spiritual reasons but for sentimental ones. The same can be said of André Siegfried [SEE DOCUMENT I.2.4], an author with whom Sánchez disagrees but on whose support he relies along the way. Sánchez does not see, he dreams; he longs for the unity of the American family, for that land that is almost a continent straddling the four cardinal points: the Pacific and the Atlantic, Europe and the United States and, to an even greater extent, [for that land that is] in thrall to thousands of influences, both internal and external, that have accustomed the region to sudden changes and miracles. As Sérgio Milliet recently wrote: “We live as though everything could change with the arrival of a telegram.”
In truth, Latin America can only be one, clearly and sharply defined, if seen from the outside. The fact is that when Luis Alberto Sánchez discovered his America—with the fragrance and violent colors he encountered in Panama—he was coming from the United States. Because it is one by contrast, by opposition, held captive within its continental mass. It is one on condition that it opposed the other continents, though that never prevented it from being deeply divided.
1
Braudel deliberately misinterprets the title used by Sánchez in Spanish, adding the definite article “una,” which is not in the Spanish original but which reinforces the argument he makes in his review.—Ed.
2
Sérgio Milliet, (no reference to article) O Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, June 8, 1947.
3
Pablo Navarro, (no reference to article) La Nación, Buenos Aires, July 20, 1947.
4
The author mentions Sánchez’s extensive references to Latin American literature. La Vorágine by Colombian José Eustacio Rivera (1889–1928); Doña Bárbara by Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos (1884–1969), who was also president of Venezuela and ousted by a coup d’état (1947–48); Facundo (civilización o barbarie) by the Argentinean Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–88), also a president of Argentina (1868–76); Peruvian José Santos Chocano (1875–1934), who was a key figure in the defense of Americanism; Don Segundo Sombra by Argentinean Ricardo Güiraldes (1886–1927) which portrays the gaucho way of life; the novels La vida inútil de Pito Pérez about native environments and the 1910 Mexican revolution by José Rubén Romero; little-known writers such as Uribe Arrais, or celebrities like the Chilean Pablo Neruda (1904–1973); and “La suave patria,” the poem by Ramón López Velarde that is widely quoted in Mexico.—Ed.