I.3.9 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1053750
Born in Argentina, literary historian Alberto Zum Felde (1888–1951) was based in Uruguay, from where he put forward his Eurocentric ideas on Latin American culture. Like many other thinkers of his generation, Zum Felde sought to liberate Latin America from its intellectual and artistic dependence on Spain. Achieving this liberation required looking toward France, which he recognized as the spiritual mother of Latin America. This translation is from the original publication in Boletín de Teseo, Montevideo’s principal avant-garde journal of the 1920s [(July 17, 1924), 4–7].
OVER TIME, LATIN COUNTRIES IN EUROPE became increasingly interested in our America. The reason for their fascination was that a fresh blend of new nationalities on this side of the Atlantic—descended from the illustrious old progenitors of Latin culture—gave them cause for concern about their future on the new continent. The new blend included secular populations who, inspired by the immutable law of heroic cycles and the fatal reincarnation of the genius of civilizations, believed that it was time for the tired eagles of the ancestors’ command to cede the kingdom of space to the Condors of the Andes.
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We watched as France and Spain became increasingly interested in our people. Long-established official institutions and committees of representatives worked to establish or consolidate spiritual links between the two worlds. European books and newspapers were more widely distributed; American writers were warmly welcomed in important centers across the Atlantic; intellectuals from those same centers came to lecture in our cities. Their interest in “our things,” which inflated their overtures, together with their demonstrations of affection toward their “Latin daughters,” that went far beyond conventional diplomatic courtesies, suggested sincerity driven by a motive.
As we witnessed the interest and affection expressed by those two European countries toward our people, we noticed that they each had different motives. What France praised and encouraged in us was not what Spain praised and supported. Far from being similar, the qualities in question were usually diametrically opposed. The truth is that France wanted to cultivate our “Frenchness” and Spain wanted us to maintain our “Spanishness.” Both wanted to shore up their legacy among their American descendants as a way of ensuring their own long-term survival.
Latin America’s two main influences were Spain and France. We carry Spain’s influence in our blood; it has been there since the saga of the conquest, nurtured by the ancestral conditioning of our colonial phase and maintained beyond our political emancipation from the motherland through the living, permanent link of our language. Each and every one of our biological elements is Spanish; our Spanishness is one of our defining features. We are Spanish by origin, by our inheritance of certain traits and tendencies, by education, and by the language that we learned—in short, we are Spaniards in America. We would be indistinguishable from Spaniards in Spain if it weren’t for France’s intellectual influence—which we’d known since before our independence—that challenged the ideas we had inherited. What we learned from France helped us cease to be Spaniards and made us very different from our colonizers. Our wars of independence were sparked, to a considerable degree, by French influence in the Americas. The revolutionary ideology of [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau and the Encyclopedia was a major factor in the unraveling of colonial society. The fiery rhetoric of the Convention1 was on every statesman’s lips, from [Simón] Bolívar in the tropics, to [Marcelo T. de] Alvear and [Bernardo] Monteagudo in the [Río de la] Plata region.
The essays, proclamations, and allegations of generals and pamphleteers were riddled with Gallicisms. As French ideas “corrupted” the Spanish spirit of Latin American Criollos, the Spanish language was also corrupted by French literary influences; Bolívar’s writings were translated into French, and [Mariano] Moreno adopted a distinctly French tone. Not long afterward, while we were still conducting politics in our barbarous, indigenous way, Romanticism arrived on our shores—imported from France by [Viscount] Chateaubriand and [Alphonse de] Lamartine in their armored galleons—and liberated American literature from the dry Spanish classicism that we had learned in the cloisters of colonial universities.
Absent that extremely powerful French influence, colonial countries in the Americas would have endured as independent extensions of Spain. It was that influence, however, that “differentiated” Latin America from Spain and prompted our desire to be released from the colonial grip of the mother country.
France, therefore, is Latin America’s spiritual mother, just as Spain is its mother in the physical sense. Our flesh is Spanish but our intellect is French. Spain gave us our essential character while France filled our heads with new ideas, and our two parents were always at odds with each other. We inherited all our organic, atavistic, subconscious attributes from Spain; but our acquired, cultivated, rational qualities are French. Just as people struggle to find a balance between their organic impulses and their rational tendencies, Latin America became a battleground between French culture and the traits we inherited from Spain.
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Ever since we gained our Independence, Latin America has been influenced—as we have seen—by two powerful forces: an internal, hereditary one from Spain and an external, cultural one from France. Either one, on its own or in a dominant role, would transform these countries into spiritual colonies where life would be a reflection of life in France or Spain, so that their populations might quite logically be called the “American French” or the “Spaniards of the New World.”
Both our illustrious mothers aspired to cultivate their own way of life in Latin America and both fought against other influences. The Spanish praised the Hispanist intellectuals in the colonies, saying, “He is very Spanish, he is one of ours.” The French, on the other hand, lauded those who were clearly influenced by France and confided that, “he is a natural child of our culture, he has our spirit; he is very French.”
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It is obvious that this blend of nationalities that we call Hispanic America—or Latin America as the francophiles would have it—cannot be a reproduction or an extension of those nationalities. There must be a gestation leading to a new life that may inherit certain traits and qualities from its progenitors, but will gradually distinguish itself from them in the natural order of things, and will eventually develop its own individual, generic personality.
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Greece, Rome, and Germania were ethnically pure races; they were branches of the common trunk of Indo-European peoples, each with their own well-established, perfectly defined character and individual lifestyle that distinguished them from all others and set them on their particular evolutionary and historical paths. But other nations, formed over the years by emigration or conquest, are peopled by ethnic mixtures that take time to merge and develop a specific character of their own. This latter category includes our two progenitors, France and Spain, from whom we inherited our Latin qualities.
Though France and Spain both enjoy a powerful, clearly defined sense of individuality, they were once, as Latin America is now, “colonies” of various different races and cultures that gradually merged in a confusing ethnic and spiritual melting pot. Rome conquered ancient Gaul and imposed Roman rules and language. It was a Roman colony when it was overrun by Germanic tribes— the Franks, Burgundians, and Normans—during the invasion that led to the Merovingian barbarism of pre-Gothic centuries. France was a blend of Gallic and Germanic tribes with a Roman feudal culture that did not find its national identity until the time of the Crusades. And was it not Spain, which has such a distinctive flavor of its own, repeatedly colonized by Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Goths, and Muslims…? Surely early Iberians intermarried with rustic Germanics, and Moorish sensuality was fused with the dogma of the Jews…? Isn’t Spanish blood seasoned with the fatalism of Asia and the passion of Africa…? Wasn’t Spain in turmoil for several centuries after the Gothic invasions, searching for itself until it found its own voice and defined its own spirit…? Spain is a complicated blend of Roman stone, the iron of the Visigoths, and the gold of the Caliphate. And under all that, brooding and filled with ancestral echoes, is its Celtic-Iberian skull.
The same laws apply when people are merging together as when countries are being formed. The process begins with a simple, primitive stage that evolves into the confusion of conquests and racial blending, which gradually leads to a state of complexity and definition.
Neither our current lack of a distinct, individual character nor the spiritual colonialism under which we find ourselves should in any way imply that we shall never have our own character, nor that we are conditioned to submit passively to the influences that seek to dominate us at present.
Latin Americans must all be committed to the ideal of autonomy—a concept that we are just beginning to grasp—and, from the vantage point of that ideal, we must evaluate the various influences that attempt to shape us so that, rather than accepting these influences passively we might react against them, just as sensible men use reason and strength of will to react against the internal and external forces in their lives.
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1
Zum Felde refers to the assembly gathered in 1828 in the northeastern Argentinean city of Santa Fé. The convention took place during Manuel Dorrego’s tenure; shortly thereafter, Juan Manuel de Rosas installed his long-term dictatorship.—Ed.