V.1.4 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1065195
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We live within concentric, successive, widening circles: family, neighborhood, church, school, work, club, party, city, and nation. The sense of belonging to this or that collective reality is older than names or ideas: first we are part of a family, later we know the name of that family, and still later we form an idea, however vague, of what a family is and means. The same occurs with the sense of separation and solitude. Growing up, we discover new names and realities; each name stands for communities, groups, and associations that become wider, increasingly evanescent: we can see our family, talk with it, but only in a figurative way can we see or talk with our nation or the congregations of the faithful of our church. All of the names of these various communities refer obscurely to the original sensation; all of them are extensions, prolongations, or reflections of the moment of beginning. Family, clan, tribe, and nation are metaphors for the name of that first day. What is its name? No one knows. Perhaps it is a reality that has no name. Silence cloaks the original reality, the moment when we opened our eyes in a strange world. At birth we lose the name of our true homeland. The names we say in the anxieties of possession and participation—my family, my country—attempt to fill the nameless empty space that is somehow involved with our birth.
That double sense of participation and separation appears in all societies and in all times. The love we profess for house and home, the loyalty to friends and those of the same religious beliefs, to party and to country, are affections that come from our beginnings, reiterations and variations of the primal situation. They are a code for our original condition, which was not simple, but rather composed of two antagonistic and inseparable terms: fusion and dismemberment. This is the essential principle of every human life and the nucleus of all of our passions, feelings, and actions. It is a principle older than consciousness or reason, and yet, at the same time, the origin of both. From feeling to knowing is a small step; we all take that step to reach the consciousness of ourselves. The name of the origin—unknown, hidden, perhaps nonexistent—becomes an individual name: I am Peter, Teresa, Juan, Elvira. Our names are the metaphor for the name lost at birth.
This process has been repeated in the lives of all societies, from the Paleolithic to our own times. First there is the collective feeling of belonging to this or that community, a feeling shared with greater or lesser fervor by all its members; then the sense of the difference between our group and the other human groups. Later, the sense of feeling different creates the consciousness of what we are; and that consciousness, finally, is expressed in the act of naming. The name of the group recapitulates the dual principle on which we are founded: it is the name of a collective identity composed of internal likenesses and the differences between us, and the others. The enormous diversity of societies, their various histories, and the richness and plurality of cultures have not altered the universality of the process. Everywhere the phenomenon has been basically the same, whether in the Neolithic village, the Greek polis, the Renaissance republic, or among a tribe of headhunters in the jungle. The name reinforces the ties that bind us to the group and, at the same time, justifies the group’s existence, asserts its worth. The name is a code for the fate of the group, simultaneously designating a reality, an idea, and a set of values. . . .
The declaration of a constitution is simultaneously a fiction and the consecration of a pact. It is a pact because the constitution pretends to be the birth or baptismal certificate of a society—a fiction, for obviously the society existed before the announcement of its birth. At the same time, the fiction becomes a pact and thus ceases to be a fiction; the constitutional pact changes custom into norm. Through a constitution the traditional and unconscious ties—customs, rites, rules, taboos, exemptions, hierarchies—become voluntary and freely accepted laws. The original dual principle—the sensation of separation and participation—reappears in the constitutional pact, but it is transformed: it is no longer a fate but a freedom. The fatality of birth becomes an act of free will.
The history of modern societies, first in the West and later in the rest of the world, is to a great extent the history of the intimate association between the various constitutions and the idea of a nation. I say the idea of a nation because, as I have noted, it is evident that the reality we call a nation is older than its idea. It is nearly impossible to determine what a nation is, or how and when nations are born. It is still endlessly debated exactly when political philosophy appeared in Greece. But the reality named by the word nation needs no proof to be perceived. Before it is a political idea, the nation has been, and still is, a profound and elemental feeling: that of participation. Nature, said [Johann Gottfried von] Herder, has created nations but not states. By that he no doubt meant that nations are the more or less involuntary creations of the complex processes that he called natural and that we call historical. The English, the French, and the other European peoples were nations before they knew what they were; when they learned it, and fused the idea of the nation with the idea of the state, the modern world began. In general, despite the natural differences of every case, the process has been similar in all the nations of Europe and, later on, the other continents.
The idea of the nation, transformed into one of the ideologies of the modern era, has frequently replaced historical reality. Through a curious confusion, the Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix has been seen as a patriotic symbol for France, the cave paintings of Altamira as the beginning of the history of Spanish art, and the independence of Mexico in 1821 not as the birth but as the restoration of the nation. According to our official history, Mexico recovered in 1821 the independence it had lost in 1521 when [Hernán] Cortés conquered the Aztec city-state of México-Tenochtitlán. The examples I have almost randomly cited—there are many to choose from—illustrate the modern and dangerous confusion between reality and ideology. I should add that this confusion, though widespread and dangerous, is understandable. It was natural, for example, that the Mexican feeling of participation, exaggerated after the war for independence (separation) from Spain, should have been expressed in a distorted chronology tinged with ideological passion: the nation existed for many centuries, was kidnapped, and then the constitutional pact restored the original reality. For this romantic version of our history, shared by many, the independence of Mexico was not a beginning but a return to the beginning. In almost all the modern revolutions, one finds the same idea: revolutionary movements restore the ancient freedoms and the lost rights. Thus the ancient idea of the return to the original time fuses with the modern idea of an absolute beginning, an unholy marriage of myth and political philosophy.
The process has been universal: the nation is the child of history, not of the idea. And yet there are exceptions. The most notable among them has been the United States. The English or the French discovered one day that they were English or French, but the Americans decided to invent themselves. Their nation was not born from the play of impersonal historical forces but from a deliberate political act. They did not, one happy day, discover that they were American; they decided to become it. The past did not establish them; they established themselves. I exaggerate, of course, but not a great deal. It is obvious that the birth of the United States, as in all that happens in history, was a coincidence of circumstances. It ultimately produced American society. What seems to me astonishing, however, and worth thinking about is the central and prominent role played, amid all these circumstances, by the political will to create a new nation. One often hears the United States referred to as an enormous historical novelty. Yet nearly everything that is the United States began in Europe. Not only is it a country made of immigrants and their descendants, its ideas and institutions, its religion and democracy, language and science, capitalism and individualism also came from Europe. But in no other part of the world has a nation been born by a deliberate act of self-establishment. It was also a new country in a polemical sense; it wanted to be different from the others, different from the nations created by history. Its newness was radical, anti-historical. The independence of the United States was not a restoration of a more or less mythic past, but an authentic birth. Not a return to the origins, but a true beginning.
The appearance of the United States was an inversion of the normal historical process: before it was a nation it was a proposal for a nation. Not a reality but an idea: the Constitution. The Americans were not children of a history: they were the beginning of another history. They did not define themselves by their origins, as others did, but rather by what they were going to be. The “genius of the people,” that expression so loved by Romantic historians, was always conceived as the sum of inherited traits; in contrast, the primary characteristic of the United States was its lack of characteristics, and its uniqueness consisted in an absence of national traits. It was an act of violence against history, an attempt to create a nation outside of history. Its cornerstone was the future, a territory more unexplored and unknown than the land in which the Americans rooted themselves.
It was a total beginning in the face of and against a history personified by the European past with its particularities, hierarchies, and old, stagnant institutions. [Alexis Clerel de] Tocqueville’s fascination for it is understandable; he was the first to realize that the appearance of the United States on the world scene represented a unique attempt to conquer historical destiny, thus its negation of the past and its wager on the future. Of course, no one escapes history, and today the United States is not, as the “founding fathers” proposed, a nation outside of history, but one bound to it with iron chains, the chains of a world superpower. But what was decisive was the act of origin, the self-establishment. That act inaugurated another way of making history. All that the Americans have made, within and beyond their own borders, good and bad, has been a consequence, an effect, of that initial act.
I mentioned earlier the absence of national traits in the United States. I did not mean, of course, that such traits do not exist. Rather, I wanted to emphasize that the project of the founders of the United States did not consist, as in other countries, of the recognition of the genius of the people, the collective idiosyncrasy or the unique character of the national tradition, but in the proclamation of a set of universal rights and obligations. The United States was founded not on particularities but on two universal ideas: the first, from Christianity, declared the sanctity of each individual, who was considered unique and irreplaceable; the second, from the Enlightenment, affirmed the primacy of reason. The subject of rights and duties is the individual person, in whose interior conscience debates itself and God: a Protestant legacy. In turn, those rights and obligations possess the universality and legitimacy of reason: a legacy of the eighteenth century. The emphasis on the future has the same root as the rational optimism of the Enlightenment. The past is the dominion of the individual, while the future is the kingdom of reason. Why? Because it is the unknown territory, a no man’s land that progress will ultimately explore and colonize. And progress is nothing but the form by which reason manifests itself in history. Progress, for the nineteenth century, was reason in motion. American pragmatism and activism are inseparable from progressive optimism, and the basis of that attitude is the belief in reason. In sum, one can see the birth of the United States as a unique phenomenon and yet, at the same time—and without contradiction—as a consequence of the two great movements that began the modem era: the Reformation and the Enlightenment.
The new universality was expressed by three emblems: a language, a book, and a set of laws. The language was English, the book the Bible, and the laws the Constitution. A strange universality: not false, but rather paradoxical and contradictory. It was a universality undermined by the three emblems that expressed it. English has become a universal language, but only because it embodies a particular version of Western culture. In the United States it was forced to respond to a double exigency, to remain faithful to the English tradition while still expressing the new American realities. The result has been a continual and stimulating tension; because of it, there is an American literature, one with its own unique character. The Bible, for its part, symbolizes the Protestant scission and represents a particular version of Christianity. None of the churches into which the reformist movement split has been able to reconstruct the original universality. The same can be said of the Constitution: the principles that inspired it are not timeless, like an axiom or a theorem, but rather are expressions of a certain moment in Western political philosophy. A triple contradiction: it was a universality that, in order to realize itself, had to face up to particularities and, in the end, identify with them; it was a set of beliefs that could be seen as versions or interpretations of the central doctrines of the most widespread traditions of the West; and finally they were political and moral norms that expressed the beliefs and ideals of a single linguistically and culturally determined ethnic group, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
In its clash with particularities, the United States discovered history. These particularities assumed many forms, but, in my opinion, two of them were especially significant: relations with the outside world, and the immigrants: two manifestations of otherness. In other writings I have dealt with some of the ramifications of the former, the inability of the United States to find a foreign policy that can meet the contradictory demands of an imperial democracy. As for the latter, it is hardly necessary to recall that it is, and has been for two hundred years, one of the central themes of American history. Some of the immigrations were forced (such as those of the blacks taken from Africa); others were voluntary (the Europeans, Asians, and Latin Americans). For a long time an extraordinary plurality of ethnic and cultural groups has predominated in the United States. Other empires have known such heterogeneity—Rome, the Caliphate [of Cordoba], Spain, Portugal, England—but it was one nearly always outside of the metropolitan areas, in the distant provinces or in the conquered territories. I know of no similar examples in history of such heterogeneity within a country. The situation can be reduced, in a succinct but not inexact way, to this alternative: if the United States had not built a multiracial democracy, its life and its integrity would have been subject to grave threats and terrible conflicts. Luckily—although not without errors and setbacks—the American people have met this goal. If they can hold on to it, they will have created a work without parallel in history.
In order to resolve the problem, the Americans have considered, at one time or another, nearly all of the other solutions attempted by other countries and empires. The repertoire is extensive and depressing. The oldest remedy—outside of plain extermination—is exclusion. It was Sparta’s solution. It is inapplicable to the modern world. Not only is it in contradiction to our institutions and ethical and political convictions, but it also implies an impossible demographic immobility. The example of England and the other modern empires is equally inapplicable. The foreign populations are not outside but rather within the national territory. It is equally impossible to imitate the policy of imperial China—homogenization. Another notable solution has been the caste system of India, which has lasted more than two thousand years; it, of course, is based on ideas foreign to our civilization. Spain and Portugal offered a model halfway between exclusion and absorption. The two empires were founded on the universality of the Catholic faith (participation) and on the hierarchies of blood and origin (separation). The Roman model is a worthy ancestor. Rome granted citizenship to the subjects of the empire. It was a great deal for its time, but today it is not enough. In fact, the only lasting and viable solution is the choice made by the United States: integration within a plurality, a universalism that neither denies nor ignores the singularities that comprise it, a society that reconciles the two contrary currents of that original sentiment: separation and participation.
In size, the Hispanic minority is the second largest in the United States. In its ethnic and cultural composition, it is a world apart. What is most surprising is its ethnic diversity—Spanish, Indian, Black, Mestizo, Mulatto—a marked and violent contrast to cultural homogeneity. This fact distinguishes it from the other large minority, the blacks. While the original culture is still very much alive among the Hispanics, the African roots of the black communities in the United States have almost entirely disappeared. Those cultures, of course, were never homogeneous, and one must speak of them in the plural. The differences between the Hispanic and Asian minorities are equally notable—language, religion, customs, histories. The Asian minority is composed of a great diversity of languages, cultures, religions, nations; the Hispanics are largely Catholic, Spanish is their original language, and their culture is not essentially different from that of other Spanish Americans. Culturally and historically, Catholic Hispanics are a continuation in America of that version of the West embodied by Spain and Portugal, as, at the other extreme, Anglo-Americans are an English version. This fact has never been easily accepted, for the Europeans and the Americans have, since the eighteenth century, looked down on the Spanish and Portuguese and their descendents. Nevertheless, to accept the fact is not to ignore the differences. They are substantial and great.
For the United States, the Hispanic minority represents a variant of Western civilization, a variant that is no less eccentric than that of the Anglo-Americans. Both are eccentric because the founding nations—Spain, Portugal, and England—were frontier entities, almost peripheral, not only geographically albeit historically and perhaps culturally. They are singularities in the history of Europe, an island and a peninsula, lands at the end of the world. Latin Americans and Anglo-Americans are the heirs of a pair of extreme and antagonistic movements that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, fought for supremacy not only of the sea and the continents but also of the human conscience. Both communities were born in the Americas as European transplants; transplants composed of separate cultures with conflicting ideas and divergent interests. Two versions of Western civilization were established in this hemisphere. The English and Dutch version was full of the spirit of the Reformation, which began the modern age; the Spanish and Portuguese version identified with the Counter-Reformation. Historians still debate the meaning of that movement. For some it was an attempt to halt the rise of modernity; for others it was an attempt to create a model different from modernity. Whether it was one or the other, the Counter-Reformation was a failed enterprise. We, the Latin Americans, are the descendants of a petrified dream. The Hispanics of the United States are a piece of that dream that has fallen into the Anglo-American world. I don’t know if they are the seeds of a resurrection scattered by storm winds, or the survivors of a great shipwreck of history. Whatever they are, they are alive. Their culture is ancient, but they are new. They are a beginning.
The eccentricity of Hispanic culture cannot be reduced to the Counter-Reformation and its negation of modernity. Spain is incomprehensible if one neglects two essential elements of its formation: the Arabs and the Jews. Without them we cannot understand many aspects of its history and culture, from its conquest of America to its mystical poetry. A culture is defined not only by its acts, albeit by its omissions, lacunae, and repressions; among the last, in the case of Spain, is the expulsion of the Moors and the Jews. It was an act of self-mutilation that, like all such acts, engendered countless demons and obsessions. Our other heritage—black and Indian—is equally complex. It, too, contains terrible demons: the conquest, slavery, servitude, the myths, languages, and lost gods.
Besides this ethnic and cultural complex, the Hispanics in the United States also belong to various nations. At one extreme, the Mexicans: immigrants from a country in which the most immediate reality is the mountains and the great plateaus, a population that traditionally has lived with its back to the sea. At the other extreme, the Cubans and Puerto Ricans: islanders who have never known any other plain but the sea. Among the Mexicans—ceremonious, taciturn, introverted, religious, and violent—the Indian legacy is the determining factor; among the Cubans and Puerto Ricans—extroverted, boisterous, effusive, vivacious, and equally violent—the black influence is visible. That is, a pair of temperaments, a couple of visions, two societies within the same culture.
This ethnic, geographic, and psychological diversity extends to other domains. The majority of the Mexicans are of peasant stock. The oldest populations are descendants of the early settlers of the American Southwest, from the time when those lands were Mexican; the others, more numerous, have arrived in successive waves throughout the twentieth century. Mexico is an ancient country, and the most ancient part of Mexico is its peasants. They are contemporaries of the birth of the first American cultures, three thousand years ago; since then they have survived enormous upheavals, various gods, and political regimes. They are also the authors of a strange and fascinating creation, Mexican Catholicism, that imaginative synthesis of sixteenth-century Christianity and the pre-Columbian ritualistic religions. Deeply religious, traditional, stubborn, patient, suffering, communal, immersed in a slow-moving time made of rhythmic repetitions—one can imagine their distress and their difficulties in adapting to the ways of life in the United States, with its frenetic individualism. What will be the final result of this encounter—a clash of two sensibilities, two visions of time?
The case of the Cubans is quite opposite. It is a new wave of immigrants expelled by the Castro regime, and one that is largely middle class: lawyers, doctors, businessmen, technicians, professors, or engineers. They did not have to leap into modernity; they were already modern. That—and their immense vitality—alerts intelligence, enterprise, and capacity for hard work help to explain their rapid and successful integration into American life. It is unfair to compare the Cubans to the Puerto Ricans; the Cuban immigrants had, from the start, an advantage that many of the Puerto Ricans lacked—a modern culture. Nevertheless, the achievements of the Puerto Ricans are hardly insignificant. One of them, in fact, is extraordinary and worthy of all our admiration: not only have they preserved their national character, also they have revitalized their culture.
The differences imposed by geography, blood, and class, are also the differences of historical times. The peasant from Oaxaca who has immigrated to the United States does not come from the same century as the journalist from Havana or the worker from San Juan. But one thing unites them: they are outcasts of history. The Mexicans belong to a country in which various civilizations have raised pyramids, temples, palaces, and other magnificent constructions, yet it has not been able, in this century, to house all of its own children; the Cubans and the Puerto Ricans—fragments of a great dismembered empire, Spain—have been the object of American imperial expansion, and now, for the Cubans, of Russian [maneuvers] . . . The other groups of Hispanics who come from Central and South America are also fugitives from history. We Latin Americans are still unable to create stable, prosperous, and democratic societies.
No matter how terrible and powerful the reasons for leaving their countries, the Hispanics have not broken their ties with their places of origin. No sooner had [Fidel] Castro allowed the exiles to visit their parents and relatives in Cuba than the island was full of visitors from Miami and other places. The same has occurred with the Puerto Rican and Chicano communities. In the north of Mexico and in the south of the United States there is now a subculture that is a mixture of Mexican and American traits. This geographical proximity has fostered exchange and, at the same time, strengthened the bonds of the Hispanic communities with their native places. It is a fact that is full of future; communication between the Hispanic minority and the Latin American countries has existed and will continue to exist. It is inconceivable that it will ever be broken. It is a true community, neither ethnic nor political nor economic, but cultural.
In sum, what seems to me particularly notable is not the diversity of the Hispanic groups and the differences among them, but rather their extraordinary cohesion. A cohesion not expressed politically, but in collective acts and attitudes. North American society is founded on the individual. The origin of the preeminence of the individual as a central value is twofold, as I have noted; it comes from the Reformation and from the Enlightenment. Hispanic-Catholic society is communal, and its nucleus is the family, that small solar system that revolves around a fixed star: the mother. The predominance of the maternal image in Latin American society is no accident; it is a confluence of ancient Mediterranean female divinities, Christian virgins, pre-Columbian and African goddesses: Isis and Mary, Coatlicue and Yemanyá (who is venerated in Cuba as the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre and in Brazil as Santa Bárbara). Axis of the world, wheel of time, center of motion, force of reconciliation, and the mother is the fountain of life and the storehouse of religious beliefs and traditional values.
Hispanic-Catholic values express a vision of life quite different from what prevails in North American society where religion is above all a private matter. The separation between public and private, family and individual is less clear and emphatic among the Hispanics than among the North Americans. The ethical foundations are the same; both are part of the Christian heritage. Nevertheless, the differences are marked; in the two versions of the North American ethic, the Puritan and the neo-hedonist, the prohibitive and the permissive, the center is the individual; in Hispanic morals the true protagonist is the family. This primacy of the family is not entirely beneficial. The family is a priori hostile to the common good and general interest. Family morals have been and continue to be opposed to generous and disinterested actions (one need only recall various evangelical condemnations). The root of our apathy and passivity in political matters, as well as the patrimonial-ism of our leaders—with their nepotism and corruption—is the family egotism and narrow vision. Moreover, precisely because the individual is confined to a more constricted space, individual action often becomes manifest in two equally pernicious ways: strict order and violent rupture. Cohesion and dispersion: the patriarch and the prodigal son, Abraham and Don Juan, the political boss and the lone sniper.
The continuity of these traditional models of living together is not, of course, entirely explained by loyalty to one’s own culture and the influence of the family. Persecutions, inequalities, humiliations, and daily injustices have also been decisive factors in the strengthening of the cohesion of the Hispanic communities. This is especially apparent in the cases of the Puerto Rican and Mexican minorities, constant victims of discrimination and other indignities. To these circumstances one must add another, equally powerful one, with its economic ramifications: the difficulty in obtaining higher education. All of this— culture, tradition, and communal cohesion, as well as discrimination—has influenced the state of the intellectual and artistic achievements of these groups. The Hispanics have excelled in painting, music, and dance; on the other hand, they have not produced notable writers. It is not difficult to understand why. Language is the soul of a people; in order to write works of the imagination—poetry, fiction, plays—one must transform the language in which one wants to write. This is what [Herman] Melville, [Walt] Whitman, and the other great writers did with English: they planted themselves in America, and they transformed the language. The Spaniard George Santayana wrote in a prose that is admirable for its transparency and elegance—a prose that, at heart, had little to do with English— but he had to sacrifice his life as a poet. On the other hand, in the visual arts— painting and sculpture above all—the Hispanics have expressed themselves with energy and delight. Not because the genius of the community is visual rather than verbal, but for the reasons I have outlined above. The visual image speaks, but what it says does not need to be translated into words. Painting is a language sufficient unto itself.
This book and the exhibition of contemporary Hispanic art that it documents provide an excellent opportunity to hear what the Hispanic artists are saying; to hear them with our eyes and with our imagination. Gathered together here is the work of thirty artists. Some of them have already achieved renown, but most are little known, both to the critics and to the general public. In this sense, the book and exhibition constitute a true act of discovery. I do not propose to talk about the artists themselves: it is not the intention of these comments, nor have I the authority to do so. Moreover, I think it is impossible in an essay such as this to evaluate thirty artists effectively. One need only read the chronicles of [Charles] Baudelaire and [Guillaume] Apollinaire on the “salons” of their time to realize that no one—not even the greatest—escapes the vices of that genre of writing: polite vagueness, flip generalization, smatterings of insipid praise, and peremptory dismissal. On the other hand, these two great poet-critics were nearly always on target when they were talking about the specific artists who corresponded to their own tastes. A good critic is born from sympathy and a wide exposure to the work.
Although I cannot and do not want to speak of the artists presented, I can venture an opinion on the selection of works represented here. That selection has been exacting but wise, resulting in a collection both rich and diverse, one that frequently startles. Here is a living, restless, changing reality. Most of these artists—contrary to the general tendency in contemporary art—do not paint as a “career” but rather out of an inner necessity. More precisely, they paint out of an inner necessity to affirm and express themselves to an external reality that often ignores them. It is impossible to forget that many of these works were made far from the artistic centers of the country, in isolation, poverty and distress. This is not an exhibition of people satisfied with what they have found, but rather of artists who are searching.
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For the ancients, the phantasma was the bridge between the soul, prisoner of the body, and the exterior world (worlds). For the surrealist poet and painter, the oneiric image is the messenger of the inner man. Poetry and art allow that prisoner, transfigured, to escape: to escape to desire, and to the imagination buried from the first day by prohibitions and institutions. The apparition of these images in the works of the Hispanic artists is disturbing. They are hieroglyphs of vengeance, but also of illumination, poundings on a closed door. Their paintings are neither metaphysics nor the knowledge of inner man nor poetic subversion, but rather something more ancient and more instinctual: icons, talismans, altars, amulets, effigies, travesties, fetishes—objects of adoration and abomination. The phantasma is, once again the mediator between the world of here and the world of there. How can one not see in these works another face of North American art…? A face still undrawn, but whose traces are now discernible. An art of the image not as a form in space but as an irradiation.