THE LAST DECADE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY was no less critical for the ongoing effort to (re)define Latin American and Latino art than earlier, especially active and pivotal periods like the 1920s and 1960s. Given the debates featured in Chapters I through V, it would be logical to assume that by the end of the century the dialectical opposition between identity and modernity would have dissolved, opening up the possibility for some kind of synthesis; in reality, this did not happen.1 As the documents gathered in this chapter will demonstrate, rather than disappearing or being resolved, many of the debates concerning the existence or not of Latin America or a Latin American art became especially heightened during this period. A series of political, economic, and ideological factors extending well into the initial decade of the twenty-first century contributed to the ongoing persistence of the identity/modernity debate. During the 1980s, the most important economies in the region (Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Chile) embraced neoliberalism—an economic philosophy based on the power of free markets and of deregulation to stimulate both short- and long-term economic growth. The success of these policies not only led to their widespread adoption throughout the area, but also paved the way for Latin American countries to become players in the newly emerging global order. By 1990, globalization was in full swing, threatening to tear down national boundaries in favor of porous borders and the unfettered traffic of individuals from one end of the globe to the other. This dynamic also paralleled the ascent of Postmodernism as the leading cultural ideology of late twentieth-century global capitalism. As its name suggests, Postmodernism represented an epistemological break with the ideological and philosophical absolutes stemming from the Enlightenment, which served as the foundation for Modernism. In this way, Postmodernism signaled the end of the so-called grands récits, or broad, teleological accounts and explanations (such as Nationalism), as well as of the structures and institutions (such as the national State) that supported all these metanarratives. Instead, Postmodernism promoted the values of pluralism, relativism, and notions of borderless-ness, recycling, hybridism, and margins versus centers.
To the extent that these transformations questioned fundamental values that historically shaped Western hegemony, they served to empower peripheral societies and ethnic communities to take control of their own political and social agendas. This was a turning point in the history of these groups, shifting them from the margins to the center. In the United States (and later in Europe), the combined claims of ethnic and gender minorities gave rise to a new social movement known as Multiculturalism. This movement sought to usher in the utopian dream of a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-lingual society. In contrast to the melting pot model, the type of multifaceted society urged by Multiculturalism hinged on the peaceful and productive coexistence of its various ethnic groups, including the Latino, Asian, African, and Native American communities. The key to the success of this model lay in achieving a delicate balance between the specific cultural identities of the (sub-)groups and their impelling drive to participate in the broader mainstream culture. The impetus for Multi-culturalism can be traced to the “Culture Wars” of the late 1980s and early 1990s waged by minority and new left-oriented groups against conservative forces that sought to undo the social and political gains of the Civil Rights era. Informed by both Post-structuralism and post-colonial theory, these groups set out to question entrenched inequalities, to tear down established canons, and, in the process, to redress the imposed silences, gaps, and outright biases of either hegemonic or official histories. Given its rooted idealism and overarching goals, Multiculturalism can be considered the last utopian movement of the twentieth century. From this point of view, the crucial role that it plays in the documents throughout Chapter VI provides a fitting closure to the present volume which began with the utopian ideologies related to the period of “Discovery.”
The selected documents in this chapter explore the multicultural shift of the 1990s from the perspective of its impact on both U.S. Latino and Latin American art. Unlike previous decades, the dynamic associated with globalization brought these two fields into closer contact with one another. On one hand, the trend toward worldwide integration of financial markets set in motion by globalization stimulated the interaction between U.S. and Latin American markets, creating the conditions for the increased flow of both real (economic) and symbolic (cultural) capital across the Americas. On the other hand, an ascendant demographic trend in national statistics placed U.S. Latinos at the center of the multicultural movement serving as spokespersons for its radical claims. Hence, as early as 1989, Guillermo Gómez-Peña—one of the most emblematic personalities of the period—observed: “A major paradigm shift is taking place in front of our very eyes. The East Coast/West Coast cultural axis is being replaced by a North/South one. The need of United States culture to come to terms with the Latino American ‘cultural other’ has become a national debate. . . . The First and Third Worlds have mutually penetrated one another. The two Americas are totally intertwined” [SEE DOCUMENT VI.1.1]. At stake was the actual realization of the old dream of uniting divided Americas through active exchange between U.S. and Latino American culture.
The Latin American and Latino U.S. writers featured in this chapter—artists, critics, curators, art historians, and cultural studies specialists—represent a new breed of critical intellectuals trained in or exposed to postmodern theory (a combination of Marxism, Post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, post-colonial studies, and the emerging disciplines of cultural and gender studies).2 This explains why their discourse is far more abstract than the more literary or journalistic approach of the early twentieth-century pensadores. Prominent among this group is the newly empowered figure of the curator who—as a key agent of the increasingly fluid and globalized art world—took over the emblematic roles of artistic arbiter and spokesperson, previously assigned to the art critic. Because curators are essentially mediators between artists, institutions (museums, auction houses, galleries), and private interests (collectors, patrons), they were especially well positioned to respond to the demands of the new global system characterized by transnational flows, border exchanges, and the brokering of both symbolic and material goods. In tandem with the rise of the curator’s role, the art exhibition emerged during this decade as a de facto battleground for debating issues of identity or cultural representation [SEE CHAPTER V], thereby consolidating a trend already in place since the 1980s.
VI.1 The section provocatively titled “Ideology Between Two Waters” captures the radical utopian zeitgeist of the early 1990s in the United States through two interrelated tropes: the notion of America as living border and the active mixing or blending of races—i.e., mestizaje—that results from ceaseless border interactions. In “Border Culture: The Multicultural Paradigm”—a masterful, manifesto-like text that, much like David Alfaro Siqueiros’s “Three Appeals” [SEE DOCUMENT II.1.2], served as a passionate call-to-arms for the new Latino generation of artists and intellectuals—Mexican writer, activist, and artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña summed up the spirit of the decade when he proclaimed: “Today, if there is a dominant culture, it is border culture” [SEE DOCUMENT VI.1.1]. The “border” alluded to by Gómez-Peña, as well as the other authors represented in this section, is both real and symbolic. As the Chicano curator Patricio Chavez points out, at 1,952 miles the Mexico/United States border is “where perceptions of the so-called First and Third Worlds thrive: the conquerors and the conquered, the rich and the poor.” Its significance ultimately derives from the fact that it put both worlds “in collision, conflict, and competition” [SEE DOCUMENT VI.1.5]. The fluidity of the border and its function as a place of confluence for all the cultures of the Americas, in turn, led Latino cultural critics George Yudice and Juan Flores to propose the notion of a “living border.” In their view, “the trope of a border culture is not thus simply another expression of postmodern aesthetic indeterminacy. . . . It corresponds to an ethos under formation; it is practice rather than representation of Latino identity. And it is on this terrain that Latinos wage their cultural politics as a ‘social movement’” [SEE DOCUMENT VI.1.3].
Supported by an unprecedented demographic shift that positioned Latinos as the most rapidly rising minority in the United States, notions of mixing, racial blending, or mestizaje also emerged as key tropes of this decade. Now, however, the construct involved was not promoted exclusively by Latin American or Latino intellectuals, but it also found powerful advocates in the white liberal intelligentsia. In her landmark 1990 book Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America, the American art historian, critic, and political activist Lucy R. Lippard argues that the multicultural model that had been so successful in Latin America since the colonial period now held the key to the long-term survival of the United States as a global society. In Lippard’s view, to mix “means both to mate and to battle. Mixing is the central metaphor, the active social component of the intercultural process.” Observing how this metaphor was being embraced by artists from all ethnicities and nationalities, she envisions—somewhat optimistically— a rainbow future “when everyone is of ‘mixed race’ and the barriers of race-as-class are destroyed. . .” [SEE DOCUMENT VI.1.2]. On this issue, Lippard’s argument is informed by the projection that by the year 2000 the U.S. white population would be surpassed by Latinos and other peoples of color and by the fact that the United States was also on track to be the second or third largest Spanish-speaking population in the world. Indeed, according to the 2010 census, the U.S. Latino population had exceeded 50 million citizens. Partly responding to these trends and realities, Lippard, like Luis Valdez, Shifra M. Goldman, and many other authors before her [SEE DOCUMENTS IV.1.1. AND IV.1.4], condemns the failure of the melting pot model in favor of “the prospect of a society that is cooperative rather than co-optive, syncretic rather than synthetic, multicultural rather than melted-down.” She thus advocates for “a gradual meeting of cultures, in which they are neither subsumed nor forgotten but are instead respectfully and equally recognized in their various degrees of autonomy” In Lippard’s view, Latin America offers more liberal attitudes toward racial purity as well as historically proven models of a mixed society that would be of use to U.S. multicultural groups in their struggle for legitimization.
Compounding the multicultural shift was the complexity and fluidity of the social formations at stake and the challenges that they posed for historians, sociologists, and anyone trying to make sense of them. Hence, not surprisingly, all the authors represented in this section call attention to the fact that the heterogeneity that characterizes Latinos is so broad and multifaceted that it is impossible to adequately define or categorize the many diverse peoples who are placed under this umbrella term. Unlike other ethnic groups, Latinos, as Yudice and Flores observe, are not a homogeneous racial or ethnic minority but rather a “very heterogeneous medley of races, classes and nationalities.” This medley includes “native-born U.S. citizens (predominantly Chicanos—Mexican-Americans—and Nuyoricans—‘mainland’ Puerto Ricans) and Latin American immigrants of all racial and national combinations. . .” For this reason, the authors grouped together here agree that the existing terminology to describe or classify these groups (“Hispanic,” “ethnic,” “minority,” “marginal,” or “Third World”) was either biased or insufficient. This limitation also applied to the theoretical language associated with Postmodernism. Thus, as in earlier decades of the century, there arose the need to—once again—find a new terminology, a new iconography, and a new set of categories and definitions with which to engage the Latino experience. To satisfy this need, Gómez-Peña calls upon Latino artists to “re-baptize the world in our own terms.” This naturally led to a new coinage aimed at describing the frequently schizophrenic experience of juggling two cultures while resisting assimilation into the dominant one. Terms such as “borderness” [GÓMEZ-PEÑA, DOCUMENT VI.1.1], “not-neither” [SEE SANDRA MARÍA ESTEVES, QUOTED IN DOCUMENT VI.1.3], and “between two waters” [MARI CARMEN RAMÍREZ, DOCUMENT VI.1.4] were concocted to describe productive positions from which artists and intellectuals could speak.
The emphasis on the border paradigm and on mestizaje as models for cultural production displaced the stress on cultural and aesthetic purity that characterized mainstream approaches toward art making in favor of biculturalism and hybridism as legitimate experiences. In this context, movements such as Chicano art emerged as exemplary cases of syncretic artistic manifestations. Tomás Ybarra-Frausto’s classic 1990 essay “The Chicano Movement/The Movement of Chicano Art” and Chon A. Noriega’s provocative “Barricades of Ideas: Latino Culture, Site Specific Installation and the U.S. Art Museum,” engage two specific cases of art movements or genres guided by hybridism and a border ethos. Ybarra-Frausto locates one of the key differences at the core of the Chicano art movement in its unabashedly syncretic, rasquache (underdog) sensibility. According to him, rasquachismo is “neither an idea nor a style, but more of a pervasive attitude or taste” that expresses the experience of the working class “rooted in resourcefulness and adaptability.” In contrast to the mainstream artist’s generally restrained, disciplined, and comparably more staid practice, the rasquache artist manipulates materials “mindful of aesthetics” in an unrestrained, flamboyant way that privileges strident, shimmering colors, with a baroque tendency to cover every single inch of space with intricate forms or patterns [SEE DOCUMENT VI.1.6]. Noriega, in turn, makes the case for Latino installation art—in particular, the altar—as a form of art that owes as much to “the baroque and its synthesis with the indigenous practices and rituals of Our America than it does to the avant-garde and postmodern.” In this way, he is able to locate the origins of Latino installation practice in vernacular traditions that lie outside the parameters of Eurocentric Modernism [SEE DOCUMENT VI.1.7].
In Ybarra-Frausto’s and Noriega’s claims for Latino art we can detect echoes of ideas espoused by writers from the early part of the century featured in the first chapters of this anthology, underscoring the cyclical nature of these central debates. Both authors, for instance, share a belief in Latino art as a specific manifestation of a much broader pan-American or pan-Latino identity, the roots of which extend as far back as the writings of the Cuban José Martí, some of which are featured in Chapters I and IV. In such a view, the fluid border loses its relevance as it opens up to an undeniable continental community. Ybarra-Frausto asserts that “new cultural undercurrents among Chicanos call for an awareness of America as a continent and not a country. In the new typology, an emergent axis of influence might lead from Los Angeles to Mexico City, then from there, to Bogotá, Lima, Buenos Aires, Managua, Barcelona, and back to the barrio. For artists, such new political and aesthetic filiations expand the field with hallucinatory possibilities” [SEE DOCUMENT VI.1.6]. Martí’s concept of “Our America” [SEE DOCUMENT I.3.4] lies at the core of Noriega’s interpretation of site-specific art as an artistic modality particularly suited for the Latino cultural project. Noriega invokes Martí’s idea that anti-imperialism in the Americas requires a “pan-national American identity.” Like Martí, he imagines a co-lateral, democratic, hemispheric community capable of dislodging the hegemonic claims of either Europe or the United States. Also reminiscent of José María Torres Caicedo’s notion of the Multi-Homeland [SEE DOCUMENT I.3.3], Noriega’s community involves not one nation but “a class of nations” in an ethical relationship with one another that elevates them above issues of race or class. He thus envisions Latino art as a continuation of Martí’s project to “remap” America [SEE DOCUMENT VI.1.7].
Nevertheless, the racial and ethnic utopia envisioned by U.S. multicultural theorists was not exempt from contradictions and biases grounded in the harsh historical and political realities of both Latin America and the U.S. Latino groups. The intrinsic optimism of those who espoused a pan-national view of “our America” was quickly challenged by the distance separating the experience of U.S. Latinos from that of South and Central American citizens. As noted by Gómez-Peña, this continental zone of conflict represents “one of the most painful border wounds imaginable.” For that reason, those of us who enjoy a bicultural status—straddling “two waters”—found ourselves occupying an ideal vantage point from which to elaborate a critique of Multiculturalism in the early 1990s. During this period, I, like others who dwell in this “in-between” place, drew on my perspective as an “Islander” Puerto Rican curator working in the United States to examine critically the impact of the multicultural shift on the representation of Latin American and Latino art in U.S. museum and exhibition circuits. The most problematic issue facing Multiculturalism, I argued at the time, was the paradoxical blurring of the distinctions that constitute the groups gathered under the broad Latin American/Latino construct [SEE DOCUMENT VI.1.4]. In the multicultural strategy, these groups were lumped together “for the sake of an overarching identity based on the common experience of racism and oppression.” Such a model was clearly inadequate to explain—and least of all represent—the disparate identities of marginal groups of Latin American artists. These ranged from U.S.-based Chicanos and Nuyoricans to Mexicans, South Americans, Central Americans, and Caribbean artists who, despite living in the United States, enjoyed strong ties to their countries of origin. Moreover, by placing the emphasis on difference, Multiculturalism was perpetrating the unequal division between “us” and “them,” since the “Other” is required to authorize this operation within an unequal axis that guarantees that “our” difference will never be recognized on its own terms.
VI.2 The multicultural shift was not exclusive to the U.S. Latino community and had significant repercussions in the Latin American artistic and cultural milieus as well. In each case, the challenge was to attempt to (re)define—one more time—the elusive concepts of Latin America(n) or Latino art. This time, however, the process of definition and redefinition occurred within the parameters of an increasingly global world and a postmodern discourse that claimed to privilege difference. The texts included in “The Transnational Mise-en-Scène” engage this debate while underscoring the problematic issues raised by the representation of Latin American and Latino art(ists) in contemporary art exhibitions organized in the United States and abroad in the 1990s, all within a more international, multicultural, and presumably borderless art world. Unlike previous displays focused on national or regional representations, a new slate of shows—rehearsing global flows and border metaphors—sought to tear down geographic and chronological categories in favor of more flexible, thematic groupings. Within this framework, the exhibition Ante América (1992) represented a brave initiative on the part of curators Gerardo Mosquera, Carolina Ponce de León, and Rachel Weiss to organize what was perhaps the first exhibition of Latin American art that embraced a multicultural, pan-Latin American model. As explained by Mosquera in the catalogue’s introduction: “Ante América [Facing the Americas] is a discourse of integration. South American, Caribbean, Central American, Native ones, Chicano, Afro-North American, Latin American and exiled artists in Europe take part in [this exhibition]. In a nutshell, this bundle of diversities that we classify—but cannot adequately represent—under the general designation of Latin America, or, better still, of Nuestra América, to use José Martí’s term, represents the Southern Hemisphere, even if some of these artists live in the big cities of the North.” From the curators’ perspective, these artists constituted “a cultural, historical, economic, and social community, beyond obvious differences” or geographic classifications [SEE DOCUMENT VI.2.1]. In the increasingly globalized context of the early 1990s, Ante América was a critique of both the endogamy and seclusion promoted by exhausted nationalisms across the region as well as of the exacerbated concern with both the Other and Otherness as espoused by Postmodernism. While nationalism tended to erase the multi-ethnic and multi-racial complexity of the individual countries, the concern with alterity only masked a renewed hegemonic thirst for the same old story: exoticism. Hence, as Mosquera emphasizes, “The strategy of the dominated is geared towards integration, starting from what unites them, and [following Nelly Richard] by activating their difference ‘in face of the predominant international post-modern factor’” [SEE DOCUMENT VI.2.1].
At the opposite pole of Ante América’s integrationist model lies the premise of Cartographies, an international show organized by Brazilian curator Ivo Mesquita for Canada’s Winnipeg Art Gallery (1993) that directly questioned the multicultural model in favor of an updated version of the cosmopolitan position—now globalized—at play in these debates since the 1920s. Taking advantage of the expeditioner’s terminology popularized by globalization, Mesquita’s exhibition set out to examine whether “what we have come to call ‘Latin American’ in the visual arts is capable of describing and interpreting (in a holistic and productive manner) the art produced in the corresponding continent” [SEE DOCUMENT VI.2.2]. Like Traba and other writers from previous generations, Mesquita is convinced that the term belies an integration of the continent that, for the most part, does not exist. His position is based on a critique of both nationalism and Multiculturalism as ideological frameworks supported by an elaborate institutional network that promoted the “ghetto-ization” of Latin American art into artificial categories. His aspiration is thus to propose “another cartography” for contemporary art produced in Latin America, one that “broke with the limits imposed by geopolitics and institutionalized relationships.” The ultimate goal is: “to promote the possibility that the art which is produced there [in Latin America] ceases to be the other which is spoken of in order to guarantee it the full exercise of languages, preserving the specificity and autonomy of the poetics” [SEE DOCUMENT VI.2.2]. Complementing and expanding Mesquita’s argument is Paulo Herkenhoff’s “Incomplete Glossary of Sources of Latin American Art” [SEE DOCUMENT VI.2.3]. This brilliantly conceived and ironical text consists of para-definitions of words and terms associated with Latin American art that deconstruct each other in an ongoing, circular loop. Through this cross-reference exercise, Herkenhoff manifests a postmodern skepticism toward all attempts to categorize or define Latin American art, thereby underscoring the futility of such efforts. Herkenhoff, together with Aracy A. Amaral and Frederico de Moraes, was—at that time—among the small number of critics championing Latin American art in Brazil. Despite a broader-based approach, there are traces in Cartographies of the Brazilian exceptionalist position vis-à-vis Latin America that we have seen articulated by others throughout this volume [SEE DOCUMENTS IN SECTION I.6].
The majority of authors who explored the impact of globalization on Latin American art and culture did so from the “big picture” perspective. That is, they focused on the macro-effects of capital flows, speculative investment, and other related factors on the dynamics of representation at play in exhibitions and museum or private collections generated inside or outside the region. In this context, literary and cultural theorist Nelly Richard’s “Latin American Art’s International Mise-en-Scène: Installation and Representation,” provides a rare example of a text that, while not completely eschewing the big-picture approach, seeks to delve deeply into the micro level [SEE DOCUMENT VI.2.5]. Specifically, Richard considers the impact of global staging operations on the reception of the art objects themselves. Richard proceeds from the fundamental question: Is it possible for artworks to convey issues of context that informed their creation to audiences unfamiliar with the culture in which they are inscribed? Moving beyond traditional issues of “quality,” Richard combines insights from anthropology and literary theory to develop a novel approach for assessing the critical performance and cultural translation operations at work in an audience’s reception and understanding of Latin American art works displayed in international exhibitions. And she concludes that “when applied to the postmodernist scenario of difference, the power of cultural representation is still an issue in terms of who controls the means of staging the discourse that will address the meaning of difference.”
At the core of the transnational mise-en-scène also lay the social and economic disparities and distortions reproduced with new intensity by globalization. The flattening and blurring of identities promoted by this economic phenomenon triggered reactions at the local level, as communities staged a defense of vernacular values and traditions. For Australian art critic and curator Charles Merewether, the emphasis on accumulation promoted by both economic and mass media circuits had a detrimental effect on the representation of Latin American culture in the global centers. In his view, such attempts tended to subsume the historical specificity, heterogeneity, non-synchronous development, and struggle for self-representation of local groups into “the vertiginous circuits of exchange and consumption, and spectacle of a transnational and mass visual culture.” In this way, “the cultural condition of Latin America is globalized while the very real crisis of underdevelopment is left intact” [SEE DOCUMENT VI.2.4]. Undoubtedly, in a new world order that clearly benefits transnational interests as well as alliances between the private sector and the State, popular cultures— which constitute the vast majority of the populations of these countries—are the outright losers.
As we reach the end of this volume, the tone of some of our featured authors becomes more contentious. Confronted by the failure of global and multicultural agendas to deliver on their promises of a more porous, egalitarian, and multifaceted society, curators and critics have grown extremely wary of the ideological constructs with which the complexity of the region continues to be—if not pigeonholed—at least homogenized and standardized. For Mosquera, writing a decade after Ante América, the persistence of this issue reveals that art and culture in Latin America have suffered from “a neurosis of identity that is not completely cured” [SEE DOCUMENT VI.2.7]. For many others, the advantage of hindsight led to an entire century of ceaseless efforts focused on resisting categorizations that have resulted in an absolute dismissal of the very terms of this debate. As summarized by the Peruvian art historian and curator Gustavo Buntinx: “‘Latin America’ ended up being a French joke; ‘Iberoamérica,’ a [Francisco] Franco-period hyperbole; [and] Panamerica, a crass, gringo term. And the intermittent efforts to establish North-South axes or momentum have often responded to U.S. interests more than to a legitimate need for symbolic exchanges” [SEE DOCUMENT VI.2.6]. In a similar vein, after examining the decline of the concept of “Latin America” through three key moments of Latin American art—the international-leaning and utopian 1960s, the repressive 1970s, and the return to democracy in the 1980s— Mexico-based Argentinean cultural anthropologist Néstor García Canclini speculates about whether or not it “would be better to let go of Latin Americanisms or ‘the Latin American’” [SEE DOCUMENT VI.1.8] once and for all. However, as he argues, this would go against the ever-increasing institutionalization of this category in political, cultural, and academic circles so that, although “one can doubt the existence of Latin America, it is evident that there are plenty of Latin Americanisms.”
While the options are limited, there is a general feeling that advances have been made and not everything is lost. As noted by Mosquera in 2003, since the 1990s the field of Latin American art has undergone significant transformations impacting the spheres of artistic production, art and cultural circulation and reception as well as institutions. Despite its limitations, globalization succeeded in opening up the international circuits for artists from Latin America and in stimulating a greater visibility and acceptance in international exhibitions, biennials, and museum collections. As a result, “Latin American art is beginning to be valued as an art without surnames. Instead of demanding that it declare its identity . . . [it] is now being recognized more and more as a participant in a general practice that does not by necessity show its context and that on occasion refers to art itself.” This leads Mosquera to outline the possibilities for transforming art historical perspectives and approaches, shifting from “Latin American art” to “art in Latin America” to “art from Latin America.” In his view, to stop using the category “Latin American art” means “to distance oneself from a simplified notion of art in Latin America and to highlight the extraordinary variety of symbolic production on the continent” [SEE DOCUMENT VI.2.7]. However, the Cuban critic is savvy enough to recognize that a mere semantic shift is not going to erase the axis of inequality and subordination that has characterized—until now and despite the gains of the last few decades—the Third World-like relationship between the region and the First World. Indeed, it is because of the persistence of this inequality that the debate over the so-called “identity” of Latin America has endured until today. Hence, the need, according to Mosquera, “to invert the direction of the current, not by reversing a binary scheme of transference but rather by contributing to pluralization in order to enrich and transform the existing situation.” For Buntinx, the solution needs to be more radical: the only “lasting, legitimate activation of something we could call the Americas” has to take place outside the logic and interests of the metropolitan centers. From this point of view, the decisive issue is empowering the local. That is, building structures—museums, collections, discourses, publications, archives, markets, circuits, and relationships (personal and institutional) that “respond to our own symbolic needs, while facilitating an exchange with the cosmopolitan circuits, an exchange not characterized by subordination” [SEE DOCUMENT VI.2.6].
To conclude this anthology with the writings of Mosquera and Buntinx is appropriate, as both authors stress the key issue that has guided this entire volume: namely, that the terms “Latin America” and “Latino” are, among other things, inventions. In other words, they are constructs that served the ideological and political needs of artists and intellectuals throughout the twentieth century in their authentic struggle to identify the region in the face of the hegemonic assaults of Europe or the United States. To paraphrase these authors, in proposing a potential agenda for the immediate future, we can move forward, guided by the understanding that if Latin America does not exist, we can always reinvent it.
1
Eduardo Devés Valdés makes this point in El pensamiento latinoamericano en el siglo XX. Tomo II: Desde la CEPAL al neoliberalismo (1950–1990), second edition, (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2008), 310–11.
2
The majority of the authors included in this chapter formed part—at some point or another—of the U.S./Latin America Cultural Studies Network, an intellectual platform sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation to foster debate on issues affecting culture and society in the Americas.