I.6.1 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1054341
The following excerpt is from the introduction to O Brasil na América: Caracterização da formação brasileira, which Manoel Bomfim wrote in 1925 and published in 1929 [(Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves Editôr)]. Written approximately twenty years after A América Latina: Males de origem [SEE DOCUMENTS I.3.5 AND I.4.1], Bomfim begins by identifying himself as a Latin American, a continental posture that remains unusual among Brazilians. Simultaneously, the author also questions what he perceives to be a superficial unity in the region. This translation is derived from the book’s second edition [Manoel Bomfim, O Brasil na América: Caracterização da formação brasileira, Preface by Maria Thétis Nunes (São Paulo: Topbooks, 1997), 31–36].
WE OTHERS—ARGENTINES, PERUVIANS, BRAZILIANS, CHILEANS—who are among those called Latin Americans, never think [in terms] of Latin America. In our perceptions of reality, in the actual course of normal relations or as common ground for any immediate action, such a unity does not exist. Rather, we regard [as separate] each of these peoples whom some scholars abroad would [argue] constitute the Latin-ness of America. The same happens to any foreigner who has come to live with us: he will speak of Venezuela, Paraguay, Mexico, Nicaragua, but will never feel the need to fix his mind on this concept: Latin America. On the other hand, all those who do not know us, the constructors of theories, who speak of social, historical, or political things, will not fail to repeat pompous and puerile prejudices regarding this unreal unity: Latin America.
Finally, to what does this term apply?
In fact, [the term applies to] several American nations, some of English origin with their own quite particular development in the tradition of the political customs of their origins, as well as other nations derived from Spanish colonization. Besides those, there is Brazil, established by Portugal. 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, because after all the defining developments, there are more differences between the Brazilian nation and those created by the Castilian vice-royalties than between the colonizing nations themselves, Spain and Portugal. We should also note that, if you compare Chileans with Guatemalans, Mexicans with Argentines, Cubans with Paraguayans, you will find specific national characters separating them into very different peoples. [Francisco] García Calderón [SEE DOCUMENT I.2.3], when he studies The Latin Democracies of America, has a very clear aim: to stress and value whatever these democracies have in common. His work is directed toward the unity of Latin America. However, in considering especially this same unity, he has to acknowledge that “in one century of isolated political development, under the influences of climate and territory, divergent characters were formed in the nations of Latin America…” And he goes so far as to draft the lines that define such divergences: “. . . Mexico. . . Colombia. . . the rudeness of Chileans, in contrast with the rich imagination of the Brazilians. . . Argentina, a commercial people. . . astute Bolivia, slow and practical people. . . Some practical, governed by active plutocracies; others, dreamers. . .”1 Another neo-Castilian, the Argentine Ramos Mejía, dedicates a long chapter of his excellent work, El Federalismo Argentino [Argentinean Federalism], to demonstrate that Spanish colonization, “from a particularistic people, by temperament,” gave origin to disaggregated colonies, without the capacity to assimilate, divergent, [engaged] in constant internal conflicts: “. . . Peru alien to Chile; Argentina alien to both: to all the rest of America. . .”2
This much-used expression, this Latin America, ought to reasonably serve to designate geographically a group of nations formed by Iberians in a colonial regime of subordination and direct dependence, which soon degraded into a despotic and anti-progressive parasitism. Nothing more than an empty designation, it is appropriate only for the useless technology of those who accept the easy division of the West into Latin, Germanic, Slavic. . . ; following this argument, they conclude that there must be a Latin America to be in opposition to English America. Thus was born the notion, facilitated by ignorance, that took hold nevertheless because the expression has a resonantly grandiloquent sound; it is clear, distinguishes itself with pretentious erudition, [and is] easily manipulatable by obtuse sociologies in which the creoles of our lands are ill-treated and dishonored. The North American is still more explicit and cartographic: they talk peremptorily of South America, making the implicit contrast with their North. . . . We can console ourselves with the certainty that no people, among those who interfere in the affairs of others to delve for riches, know us less than those of the great Republic.
There is no contradiction between these current statements and the spirit in which the book, Latin America—of which this [book] is a necessary development—was understood. The main goal in the previous book was to respond to those who, applying to us the general epithet Latin Americans, assumed that we are inferior peoples, condemned to the factious agitations of a sterile barbarianism of no interest to the rest of the world. Accused and vilified under that label, it became indispensable to take possession of it and inscribe it in the frontispiece of a work dedicated especially to the matter in order to demonstrate that the facts cited to indicate our general degradation—the same [characteristics] by which the so-called Latin Americans were identified—are nothing more than the inevitable consequences of our colonial formation. Regrettable, yes, but perfectly eliminable, already eliminated, in large part, in the course of the independent life of some nations. The title of a book devoted to this purpose could be no other, but to apply it is not to admit that the neo-Castilian peoples remained undifferentiated. Nor does it suppose that Brazil, for being included in Latin America, lacks a national character and its own destiny. Just the opposite: it was necessary in that book to accentuate essential differences between the Brazilian nation and the other neo-Iberian peoples. It is to point out explicitly these distinctions and that the present work was undertaken as a development of the earlier book. It became really necessary to address this near slanderous treatment only to show that it is applied, and then repeated, because superficial “scholars” judge us without knowing us. Through ignorance and ill will, they created and maintain this concept that confuses us with others, as if we were peoples scarcely differentiated by these bad or negative qualities attributed as characteristic of Latin Americans.
In all of this, the most regrettable would be if we, ourselves—Chileans, Mexicans, or Brazilians—after such frequent encounter with the concept, in the neatness and simplicity of its terms, [if we] ended accepting that such a thing as Latin America must exist in the same sense used by those who condemn us with this term. That is to say, we would begin to think that we suffer from some basic inferiority, a kind of ethnic original sin that makes us unforgivably degraded, all with the same destiny. Well, we must resist such an outcome; resist, above all, within ourselves. [At the same time, we must understand] the full range of defects from which we truly suffer, analyzing them objectively, carefully searching out their origins, which are, along with the colonial traditions of the metropolis, the very same conditions of [our] national formation. In this way, we will confirm that all these evils can be summed up as essentially curable and transitory, consequences that will soon disappear, if we denounce them consciously, if we sincerely try to correct them. Therefore, since we are a people who distinguished ourselves as a nation early on, all these evils that we complain of must be defined in their specificity, as to what is inherent, particular, and proper to the formation of our national character.
In truth, we came from these origins: Iberian Portugal, where, from early times, the Portuguese affirmed themselves as a distinct nationality, diverging from what came to be Castile. Therefore, contrary to what those who pretend to know us as part of this Latin-American homogeneity, one must acknowledge that within the branches transplanted as the respective colonies, there are large differences and more accentuated divergences than between the two metropolises. We came from Portugal, a nation already detached from the rest of the Spain. So many things happened during the four centuries of our history, so many transmutations of stimuli and energies in the formation of our nationality that, in truth, there are more differences today between other neo-Iberians and Brazilians than between Belgians and French or even between Dutch and Prussians. 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. When they talk about Europe, these scholars never mention Iberia, not even as a simple geographical expression. Yet, in the vastness of our America, in spite of its evolution into nations, they take for granted the uniformity of this diluted [term]: American Latin-ness.
Without intending to abandon its Iberian origins, Brazil had, in the shaping of its character, a totally different colonial history, where the predominant motives were exclusively Brazilian. Often, these motives were even opposed to those that directed the formation of the neo-Castilian colonies. Three centuries of a markedly different life produced a national character of perfect unity, distinctly different. And with this [there exists] a particular ethnic situation, a pronounced mixture that could not exist in those colonies hampered by racial prejudices. We must remember that Brazil is a nation born of that colony which resisted the French and, above all, the Dutch, in order to preserve its unity of origin and conscience. [Brazil was] the colony that, in the intrepid adventures of its “bandeirantes,”3 expanded the nation through the heart of the continent. For all these reasons, the history of colonial Brazil is unique. [The nation was] built with such an affirmation of patriotic energy on the part of the Brazilians that it could justly be considered as the very spirit of our nation. Given the reality of the facts of the first century of Brazil, it would be absurd to think that history would not influence the ultimate destiny of a nation thus formed. Brazil was the only colony to resist foreign invaders with its own means; the only one to develop through its own resources. It was the first to present a new society, originating with the colonists but different from them. All this should have had, as indeed it did, a strong impact on the new national character and its modes of reaction against the wretched methods of the metropolis.
Thus, it is legitimate and indispensable to those interested in the destiny of this country to seek conscientiously its historical antecedents, clarifying and appreciating them in the acknowledgment of the qualities that ultimately remain with us and of the facts that are already ours. All this [has] the explicit goal of acknowledging, the historical influences, the evil constants; and remedying, diverting, [and] avoiding all that has proved or will prove harmful to us. After that, each matter denominated will have to be appraised and ranked in the ordering of our national aims. Brazil, as an assembly of people, cannot be considered as a simple sum of ethnic elements, considered separately—the Portuguese A, the Negro B, the Indian C—to arrive at a type merely composed as A-B-C. In the Brazilian people we find these three different, even very different races. The confirmation of these ancestries, in qualities and nuances of civilization, as diffuse origins, would be a commonplace, repeated with no meaning beyond technology. Because what is interesting is not the trivial, anthropological description or the stereotyped enumeration of ethnographic characteristics, but a deep understanding of the way in which the formative elements of the nation came together, so that the historical consequences of this formation can be logically determined. This is how we can acknowledge the value of each of the elementary qualities of these mixed races, arriving at the general formula of our national combination resulting from this mixture. No one today would tolerate this prattle that elevates itself as sociology and, in order to explain and characterize Brazilian literature, hunts for isolated motives in anonymous production or individual works to label them: this is from the Negro, this is from the Indian, or this is from the Portuguese, without managing to recognize what is new and properly Brazilian in our genius. The scholars as such go on as if it were possible that traditions could meet and at the same time remain impermeable to each other, without any reciprocity in influences, without consequences in the social and intellectual life that brought about this encounter. Well, rather than this, everybody knows that: more than blood, traditions blend when different races come together. The qualities of the spirit are combined, and their respective manifestations complete each other in a new and vividly original expression. The result of Judaic monotheism on the Western civilizations was not a simple mixture where one could distinguish parts of Aryanism juxtaposed against Semitism, but the exciting, regenerated, vivifying, and creative innovation of Christianity. This was the synthesis of earlier moral inspirations, an original and powerful synthesis because it improved on the combined traditions.
Thus, without wasting our attention in reproducing backward descriptions of races, we must consider the aspects of Brazilian development that are truly constants and that give it its character.
1
Francisco García Calderón, Les démocraties de l´Amérique (Paris: Ernest Flammarion éditeur, 1912), 311.
2
Les démocraties latines de l´Amérique (1912), 101.
3
Armed expeditions, usually departing from the Captaincy of São Vicente [Santos] and later from the city of São Paulo, conquered the backlands of the country, with the capture of Indians or the discovery of mines as their goals. These events took place toward the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. —Ed.