Mapuche intellectuals and political activists in early- to mid-20th-century Chile both worked within and subverted dominant modernizing and “civilizing” educational discourses. Mapuche women played an important role in the movement to democratize schooling in early-20th-century Chile by publishing articles in little-known Mapuche-run newspapers and advocating for Mapuche education broadly as well as specifically for women. There was also an important transnational dimension of Mapuche political organizing around education rights during this period. These two underexplored but important aspects of indigenous activism in Chile open interesting questions about the intersections between race, gender, and nation in the sphere of education.
12
Article
Indigenous Politics and Education in Early to Mid-20th Century Chile: Foregrounding Mapuche Women and Transnational Conversations
Joanna Crow and Allison Ramay
Article
The Institutional Construction of Intangible Heritage Concept and Policy in Brazil, 1937–2016
Morena Levy Salama
This article describes how the concept of intangible cultural heritage was developed in Brazilian public institutions and policies aimed at protecting and maintaining alive the country’s cultural traditions and heritage. This term was first imprinted in Brazilian public records dating back to the 1930s, when it was mentioned in a bill for the creation of a federal institution known as the National Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN). This concept was only reintroduced in the late 1980s, with the adoption of the new Brazilian Federal Constitution. After providing an overview of the process of replacing the term folklore with intangible cultural heritage, this article focuses on the execution of the federal government’s safeguarding policy for intangible cultural heritage beginning in the year 2000. From the promulgation of Decree 3,551, which created the National Program of Intangible Heritage (PNPI) and established the guidelines for the official recognition of Brazilian cultural traditions as national cultural heritage. By looking closer at the measures taken by the government after a cultural tradition becomes part of their heritage, this article further explores the participatory call developed by such public policy.
Article
Intellectuals and the Nation in Early 20th-Century Brazil
Sergio Miceli
In Brazil between 1920 and 1945, the potential for professional advancement increased significantly among literate individuals in three main areas: the intellectual and academic field in São Paulo and the emergence of a university-based intelligentsia; the boom in the publishing industry and the rise of professional novelists; and the Vargas regime’s widespread and deliberate co-optation of intellectuals. The interpretation presented in this article links class dynamics to changes within the activities of intellectuals, some of whom are analyzed here in the context of political and institutional tensions produced by the collapse of the oligarchic Old Republic (1889–1930).
Article
José Ingenieros, El Hombre Mediocre, and Social Integration in Turn-of-the-20th-Century Argentina
Mariano Ben Plotkin
The life of Italian-Argentine scientist and intellectual José Ingenieros (1877–1925) has been considered a clear example of the potential for upward social mobility based on talent that existed in Buenos Aires at the turn of the 20th century. Born Giuseppe Ingegnieros in Palermo, Sicily, from a working-class family, Ingenieros was able to become both one of the most internationally renowned Latin American intellectuals and scientists—his scientific and philosophical works were translated into several languages—and also a socialite of high visibility befriending some of the most prominent members of the Argentine social elite. His trajectory seems to be an example of unparalleled success. Nevertheless, a close look at recently unearthed sources, particularly his private correspondence, not only shows a different picture of Ingenieros’s life and works, but also forces us to reconsider accepted knowledge about the possibilities offered to immigrants by turn-of-the-century Argentine society. His trajectory constitutes an excellent case study for the analysis of both the potentials and the limits of social mobility in Argentina at the time, as well as the relationship between intellectuals and power during the transition from the oligarchic republic established in 1862, after the unification of the country, to the really democratic republic based on universal (male) suffrage introduced in 1912. An analysis of the context of production of his most popular work, El hombre mediocre, provides an opportunity to contrast his public image with the social insecurities he expressed to his relatives and friends.
Article
Latin American Marxism and the Atlantic
Andrés Estefane and Luis Thielemann
Marxist thought in Latin America was impacted by various transatlantic intellectual, and social influences. The changes in Latin American Marxism can be placed in a five-stage chronological framework. The first stage, from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, encompasses the arrival of European immigrants, who introduced the first references to Marxist socialism, and the local development of that repertoire among workers, journalists, and intellectuals in the urban centers of Latin America. The initial influence of the Second International and Karl Marx’s texts started to change during the second decade of the 20th century, following the debates sparked by the Russian Revolution and the emergence of communism. This context framed the beginning of the second stage, characterized by the emergence of a group of thinkers who questioned the Eurocentric tone and the mechanical assimilation of European Marxism. Taking as a point of departure the particularity of Latin American social formations, and inspired by a strong anti-imperialist discourse, these intellectuals and revolutionary leaders aimed at developing an original reading of Marxist thinking, more pertinent to the rural and indigenous character of the continental societies and the structural legacies of the colonial past. A third stage began in the 1930s, after the fall of the Spanish Republic, the ascent of fascism and Nazism in Europe, and the ideological purges that followed the Stalinization of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The increasing influence of the Comintern (the Communist International) deactivated the creative impetus of the early 20th century, though it did not prevent the emergence of intellectuals and local organizations—led by Trotskyism and Left Opposition groups—who strongly criticized Stalinism and the bureaucratization of Soviet Communism. The triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 marked the beginning of a fourth stage in the history of Latin American Marxism. That event inverted the traditional direction of the transatlantic influence, since Latin America became a landmark case for Western Marxism. In the midst of a complex and productive intercontinental dialogue with Europe, Latin American Marxism developed crucial debates on such topics as the colonial legacy of the continental capitalist development, the relationship between racial hierarchies and class struggle, and over the political “routes” to building socialist orders. These dialogues and debates came to an abrupt end after the wave of coup d’états that shook the continent between the 1960s and the 1980s. The political defeats of the attempts to construct socialist systems provoked a Marxist diaspora that brought many European intellectuals back to their own continent and sent many militants and thinkers into exile in Latin America and elsewhere. Interestingly, the evaluation of the defeat was the basis for an ample renovation of the Marxist thought, which marked the beginning of the fifth and current stage, characterized by the emergence of the Latin America’s progressive governments of the 21st century and the gradual withdrawal from the old bases of historical materialism. Although this periodization recognizes the diverse transatlantic contexts that influenced Latin American Marxism, it also seeks to highlight that the production of Marxist thinking on the continent has mainly been connected with the experience of active militants and intellectuals proscribed or marginalized in academia. By extension, the development of Latin American Marxism appears to be intimately linked to the political struggle of the continental Left, which does not negate that Latin American thinkers have also produced theoretical works on Marx.
Article
Literary and Cultural Magazines in Brazil in the First Half of the 20th Century
Tania Regina de Luca
Printed periodicals constitute sources increasingly used by researchers in the human sciences, as the catalogues of publishers, dossiers of academic journals, and research carried out in graduate programs show. The enormous variety of titles, many of which are easily available thanks to the digitalization programs of the institutions that hold them, seems capable of meeting a wide variety of interests. While heterogeneity is one of the attractions of this type of documentation, it also raises significant challenges for those who use this material as a source, since methodological procedures are subordinated to the specific nature of the selected printed material. Not by chance, wide-ranging works, which propose to cover the history of the press as a whole, have ceded space to monographic works dedicated to in-depth analysis of a single periodical or a restricted number of titles. Cultural and literary periodicals have attracted particular attention from specialists, since they included in their editorial teams combative intellectuals committed to disseminating aesthetic, social, and political postures, which makes these publications privileged vehicles to investigate sensibilities, tastes, themes, and ideas, in short shared readings that help us to understand the dynamics of cultural life at a given moment.
Article
Marxist Thought in Brazil
Bernardo Ricupero
The history of Marxism in Brazil has been marked by discord. This tension makes sense considering that historical materialism developed in a European social environment, contrasted, to some extent, with the Asian context. The problem is, therefore, twofold. First, the theory proved incapable of reflecting the specificity of a particular social formation. The latter, differing significantly from the reality in which Marxism emerged, comes to be seen as “eccentric.” Moreover, Marxist theory seeks to transform reality, which contributes to a confusion between thought and politics. In the same sense, Marxism cannot be self-sufficient, because it must respond to the challenges of the environment in which it is inserted, contributing, in turn, to its contact with other intellectual and political traditions.
Marxist thought in Brazil can be divided into three main historical moments: the first was marked by the preponderant influence of communism, from the 1920s to the 1964 coup; the second was characterized by the emergence in the mid-1950s of a New Left; and the third was the debate regarding democracy, which has gained momentum since the end of the country’s most recent authoritarian period in 1985. Throughout this extended historical period, Brazilian Marxists have been preoccupied with a recurring concern: How will the Bourgeois Revolution happen in Brazil? The periodization is not exact, with trends often overlapping and fostering an evolving political culture. In this way, through opportunities seized and missed, the Left—whose main theoretical reference today is still Marxism—penetrated Brazilian society and became an important part of national life.
Article
Liberation Psychology and the Salvadoran Civil War
Alexandra Puerto
Liberation psychology emerged in Cold War Central America with roots in the intellectual foundations of post-1960s Latin American social sciences. Jesuit priest, theologian, and social psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró pioneered the field of liberation psychology. He critiqued the epistemological limitations of mainstream Western psychology for Central Americans and encouraged the development of new ways to approach mental health as a collective community need with specific historical and social conditions. Spanish-born, but based in El Salvador at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) José Simeón Cañas, and influenced by the social ideas of critical pedagogy and dependency theory, the process of participatory action research, and, above all, the religious ideas of liberation theology, Martín-Baró proposed a new psychology that did not abstract individuals from their social context and incorporated a “preferential option for the poor” into its conceptual model. In Catholic social teaching, the fundamental principle of the “preferential option for the poor,” to prioritize care for the poor and vulnerable, originates in the Bible, but the phrase was coined in 1968 by Spanish Jesuit priest, Pedro Arrupe, and fully articulated as a central tenet within Latin American liberation theology by Peruvian theologian and Dominican priest, Gustavo Gutiérrez, in 1972.Rethinking psychology from the perspective of the poor and marginalized became a priority for Martín-Baró who called upon Latin American psychologists to reject intellectual neocolonialism and build a new epistemology from below, as well as a new praxis to transform reality for the oppressed. He also set the recovery of historical memory, deideologizing everyday experience and uncompromising solidarity with war survivors as essential practices for Central American psychologists. The realities of El Salvador’s civil war (1980–1992) served as the inspiration for Martín-Baró’s conceptualization of liberation psychology, his understanding of the psychosocial impact of political violence and the creation of the Instituto Universitario de Opinión Pública. Unfortunately, Martín-Baró’s work is unfinished, as he was assassinated by the elite Atlacatl Batallion of the Salvadoran army on November 16, 1989, in his UCA campus residence alongside five Jesuit colleagues, as well as a UCA employee and her daughter. Nonetheless, Martín-Baró’s psychological research and practice not only exposed the profound economic structures that limited Salvadoran liberation but also contributed to the emancipatory ideologies of anticolonial movements.
Article
Oliveira Lima and the Oliveira Lima Library at the Catholic University of America
Nathalia Henrich
Manoel de Oliveira Lima (b. Recife, December 25, 1867–d. Washington DC, March 24, 1928) was one of the most prestigious men of letters of his generation. As a historian, diplomat, literary critic, journalist, writer, and professor, he maintained an intense intellectual activity. His strong and often controversial views galvanized public opinion and gathered as many admirers as detractors. The “Fat Don Quixote” and the “Intellectual Ambassador of Brazil” were at the same time deemed a “Diplomatic Torpedo” with an “incontinent pen.” Lima became a renowned scholar and public speaker thanks to his expertise on Latin American history, especially on the history of Brazil. He was the author of numerous books and articles published in Europe and the Americas, and a lecturer at Harvard, Stanford, and the Sorbonne. He was a founding member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. His career as a diplomat began in 1891, the same year he married Flora de Oliveira Lima (neé Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, b. Cachoeirinha, October 26, 1863, d. August 12, 1940, Washington, DC), his lifelong companion and collaborator. Together they lived in Portugal, Germany, the United States, Great Britain, Japan, Venezuela, and Belgium until his retirement. A devoted bibliophile, Oliveira Lima donated his rich collection of rare books, artwork, manuscripts, prints, photographs, and documents from his personal archive to the Catholic University of America in 1916. In 1920, he established residence in Washington, DC to oversee the organization of the university’s library, which was inaugurated in 1924. He taught international law and acted as librarian at CUA until his death in 1928. The Oliveira Lima Library (OLL) is currently considered one of the finest collections of Luso-Brazilian materials and one of the most important Brasilianas in the world.
Article
Paraguayan Politics, Economics, and Cultural Identity, 1870–1936
Bridget María Chesterton
In the period 1870–1936, Paraguay began to redevelop economically after its devastating loss in the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870). Turning to a liberal economic model popular in the region at the time, government officials began selling off large tracts of land to foreign investors, in particular Argentine investors. The liberal era in Paraguay was notoriously turbulent as political rivals often relied on Civil War to gain power. Nonetheless, this period was pivotal in helping to shape ideas about the nation. The era ends at the Febrerista Revolution (1936) when returning Chaco War (1932–1935) veterans made their mark on Paraguayan politics and identity.
Article
Paraguayan Science and the Environment: A Historical Survey
Robert W. Wilcox
Much of environmental knowledge understood by an evolving scientific world from the early explorations of Europeans to the 21st century has originated in colonial possessions or developing nations. Observations by explorers, colonial officials, and visiting scientists to Latin America stimulated considerable interest in North Atlantic scientific circles, yet the contributions of Indigenous peoples, clergymen, and local scientists in furthering natural science/environmental knowledge often have received little attention from the historical community. This has begun to change in the 21st century, and roles of small nations are beginning to be recognized, including Paraguay. From the early colonial period, Paraguay was considered something of a promised land with abundant natural life and resources and, as such, a focus of interest for many aspiring practitioners of natural science, including members of the Catholic Church. By the late 18th century, traditional observational approaches conflicted with evolving European scientific rationalism, while political independence in the early 19th century generated attempts across the Americas to understand nature and environmental conditions through the imperative of economic growth. In Paraguay, this was delayed by national politics and war, but later in the century, the country embarked on a tentative path of economic development. While many observers criticized the impact of development practices, environmental science gradually transformed into a “scientific nationalism,” defined through the concept of a national nature. This evolved into developmentalist imperatives by the mid-20th century, leading to rapid degradation of the natural world. In the 21st century, the country is facing an environmental crisis, suffering some of the most extensive deforestation and related ecological destruction in the world. The convoluted path Paraguayan environmental science followed from early awed impressions to today’s critical concerns provides some insight into how scientists in poor and remote regions engaged with their natural worlds and attempted to understand nature in the face of multiple pressures: economic, political, and scientific.
Article
Political Parties and Intellectual Debates in Brazil from the Empire to the Republic
Angela Alonso
The Second Reign (1840–1889), the monarchic times under the rule of D. Pedro II, had two political parties. The Conservative Party was the cornerstone of the regime, defending political and social institutions, including slavery. The Liberal Party, the weaker player, adopted a reformist agenda, placing slavery in debate in 1864.
Although the Liberal Party had the majority in the House, the Conservative Party achieved the government, in 1868, and dropped the slavery discussion apart from the parliamentary agenda. The Liberals protested in the public space against the coup d’état, and one of its factions joined political outsiders, which gave birth to a Republic Party in 1870. In 1871, the Conservative Party also split, when its moderate faction passed a Free Womb bill. In the 1880s, the Liberal and Conservative Parties attacked each other and fought their inner battles, mostly around the abolition of slavery.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party grew, gathering the new generation of modernizing social groups without voices in the political institutions. This politically marginalized young men joined the public debate in the 1870s organizing a reformist movement. They fought the core of Empire tradition (a set of legitimizing ideas and political institutions) by appropriating two main foreign intellectual schemes. One was the French “scientific politics,” which helped them to built a diagnosis of Brazil as a “backward country in the March of Civilization,” a sentence repeated in many books and articles. The other was the Portuguese thesis of colonial decadence that helped the reformist movement to announce a coming crisis of the Brazilian colonial legacy—slavery, monarchy, latifundia. Reformism contested the status quo institutions, values, and practices, while conceiving a civilized future for the nation as based on secularization, free labor, and inclusive political institutions. However, it avoided theories of revolution. It was a modernizing, albeit not a democrat, movement.
Reformism was an umbrella movement, under which two other movements, the Abolitionist and the Republican ones, lived mostly together. The unity split just after the shared issue of the abolition of slavery became law in 1888, following two decades of public mobilization. Then, most of the reformists joined the Republican Party.
In 1888 and 1889, street mobilization was intense and the political system failed to respond. Monarchy neither solved the political representation claims, nor attended to the claims for modernization. Unsatisfied with abolition format, most of the abolitionists (the law excluded rights for former slaves) and pro-slavery politicians (there was no compensation) joined the Republican Party. Even politicians loyal to the monarchy divided around the dynastic succession. Hence, the civil–military coup that put an end to the Empire on November 15, 1889, did not come as a surprise. The Republican Party and most of the reformist movement members joined the army, and many of the Empire politician leaders endorsed the Republic without resistance.
A new political–intellectual alignment then emerged. While the republicans preserved the frame “Empire = decadence/Republic = progress,” monarchists inverted it, presenting the Empire as an era of civilization and the Republic as the rule of barbarians. Monarchists lost the political battle; nevertheless, they won the symbolic war, their narrative dominated the historiography for decades, and it is still the most common view shared among Brazilians.
Article
Race and Social Inequality in 20th and 21st-Century Brazil
Marcelo Paixão
Several voices inside and outside Brazil define it as a racial democracy—that is, a nation without segregation or rigid boundaries separating the different groups of race and color. This understanding interacts with issues like nationality and a positive image that this nation conveys for itself worldwide as a land of cordiality, happiness, and racial integration. More than origin, personal appearance is the basis of social interactions. Society can identify a continuum of hues of skin color among its individuals who are racially classified according to their social class and the social spaces in which they interact. However, it does not mean that the social prestige assigned to an individual’s skin color is neutral. The literature shows that the pattern of race relations in Brazil is characteristically ambiguous, based on constant racial prejudice and discrimination against the Afro-Brazilian population while systematically denying its existence. As such, Brazil’s individuals have an asymmetrical standard of social acceptance and access to economic, political, and symbolic power, based on their physical features, including their skin color, their hair type, and the shape or size of their lips and nose. Despite methodological complexities, several research pieces from 1990–2020 confirm that a racial hierarchy system exists in Brazil and that racial injustice, violence, and inequality are prevalent. Since the beginning of the 21st century, Brazil has implemented comprehensive social policies to combat poverty and affirmative action policies that target Afro-Brazilian individuals in an effort to improve the quality of the lives of Brazil’s poorest citizens. Nevertheless, these endeavors were not enough to overcome the consequences of a long historical period of slavery, discrimination, and racial injustice.
Article
Rediscovering the Aztecs and Mayas: Field Exploration, Archaeological Exhibits, and National Museums
Kevin M. Gosner
In the last decades of the 18th century, with the visit in 1784 of José Antonio Calderón to the Maya ruins at Palenque and the discovery in 1790 of the statue of Coatlicue and the Stone of the Sun in the central plaza of Mexico City, the study of ancient Mexico entered a new era. In the century that followed, teams of field surveyors, mapmakers, graphic artists, and artifact collectors worked across central and southern Mexico as well as in Guatemala. Some were commissioned by the Spanish Crown or later by national governments; many arrived from England, France, Germany, and eventually the United States. Early on they worked side by side with geologists, geographers, and field biologists as part of natural history expeditions, accumulating collections of artifacts that would be displayed in curiosity cabinets and early museums alongside trays of colorful butterflies and stuffed tropical birds. And then, as foreign travel books won popular audiences in Europe and the United States, and as international investors arrived in Mexico and Central America, archaeology also was taken up by enthusiastic amateurs looking to sell books, build private collections, or organize international trade fairs.
For serious students of ancient history, field exploration and advances in archaeological record-keeping transformed a body of research and scientific speculation that since the 16th century had been dominated by theologians, historians, and philologists, who studied Spanish chronicles and native language annals but paid scant attention to the remnants of material culture. In the process, Aztecs and Maya were rediscovered as historical subjects, their histories disconnected from that of contemporary Indian peasants and recast as rivals to the great civilizations of the Old World. Ruins of monumental architecture, recovered artifacts in sculptured stone or finely crafted metals, and ancient texts inscribed on wooden lintels and bark cloth were reclaimed as part of national patrimonies to be protected by new state agencies and displayed in modern museums. On January 20, 1911, the International School for American Archaeology and Ethnology formally opened in Mexico City, and this formative period in the archaeological study of ancient peoples ended. Manuel Gamio introduced the study of stratigraphy to fieldwork practices in Mexico and the discipline was transformed once again.
Article
Scribal Culture, Indigenous Modes, and Nahuatl-Language Sources from the 16th to 18th Centuries
Celso Mendoza
While several indigenous languages from the Americas have been alphabetized and written, no Native American language has such an extensive corpus of historical texts as Nahuatl, the language of the Nahuas or Aztecs of central Mexico. Writing in Nahuatl but using Latin letters, colonial Nahua scribes or tlahcuilohqueh produced an unparalleled outpouring of texts throughout the colonial period. Prior to the Conquest, the Nahuas recorded information in codices, which consisted of pictographic glyphs painted on sheets of bark paper, analogous to European books. They thus readily perceived the parallels between their pictographic codices and European alphabetic texts and quickly saw the utility and potential of the new technology. All that was needed was an introduction to European writing techniques. For the most part, this came in the form of friars, some of whom established schools for elite Nahuas, such as the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco in the latter part of the 1530s. Some Nahuas likely also learned writing from professional Spanish scribes as well. These students of the friars and lay Spaniards would soon teach other Nahuas to write, such that only a few years after the opening of the Colegio, Nahua scribes, working entirely on their own, were producing written texts. These scribes then taught others, and by the 1550s Nahuatl alphabetic writing became a self-sustaining, independent tradition that touched nearly every corner of the Nahua world. Alphabetic writing overtook indigenous glyphs, and by the 17th century most Nahuatl texts were entirely alphabetic. Last wills and testaments made up the bulk of scribal output, along with other “mundane” Nahuatl documents of financial, legal, or governmental matters, which have proven highly illuminating to historians. There were also annals; local histories stretching back to preconquest times; and plays, songs, and speeches (huehuehtlahtolli). Nahua scribal culture thrived until the 19th century, when opposition to it from both the Spanish Crown and, later, the independent Mexican nation made Nahuatl texts obsolete and superfluous.
Article
Sertão and Its Representations
Nísia Trindade Lima and Tamara Rangel Vieira
In Brazilian social thought, the sertão is understood more in a symbolic than a geographic manner and thus does not have a precise spatial characterization. As a result, many places have been identified as such in the history of Brazil. Analyzing the vast repertoire of meanings given to the idea of sertão, the absence of the state can be seen as a characteristic that distinguishes it, irrespective of the period considered. In this sense, the relations between space and social thought or between space and interpretations of Brazil are emphasized, highlighting the sertão–coast dualism which emerged following the publication of Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões as one of the possible ways of understanding the historical formation of the country. This dualism can be observed in distinct periods ranging from the literature about the scientific missions in the early 1900s to the debates about the construction of Brasília in the middle of the same century. Representations of the sertão in medical writings, sociological thought, literature, and film evince the resilience of this category as an ongoing metaphor for understanding Brazil.
Article
Severo Martínez Peláez and Latin American Historiography
Coralia Gutiérrez Álvarez
Severo Martínez Peláez is the most important figure in the founding of contemporary Guatemalan historiography. His work, in particular La patria del criollo (The Homeland of the Criollo), has been viewed by historians as a starting point for advancing the reconstruction of Central American history. Additionally, his work continues to have a broad readership, who consider it a factor in understanding the present. His contributions are essential to the understanding of the colonial period in Latin America, including debates that inspired his theses concerning the character of society in that period and his historical views on indigenous peoples. Like other thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s, his focus was primarily on economic and social history, in particular class struggles. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the intellectual, political, social, and even personal conditions relevant at the time he was writing in order to thoroughly understand and appreciate his work.
Article
The Spanish Language in Latin America since Independence
Ilan Stavans
The Spanish language arrived in Latin America as a tool of Iberian colonization. Indigenous languages struggled to survive under the implacable presence of an imperial tongue serving not only to make all subjects part of the Spanish Empire but also, and primarily, as a mechanism to evangelize a population considered by the conquistadors, soldiers, missionaries, and entrepreneurs as barbaric. During the age of independence (1810–1910), defined by bloody armed movements, the emerging republics in Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean Basin declared their autonomy by seceding politically, economically, and legally from Spain while pushing for a vigorous nationalist agenda that shaped them as nations. Spanish was an agglutinating force toward a new collective identity, regionally and locally. Important figures like Venezuelan philologist, lexicographer, and diplomat Andrés Bello established an agenda that helped define the cultural parameters of the young republics in terms of grammar, syntax, and morphology. Followers include Rufino José Cuervo.
Various aesthetic movements, such as modernismo, led by figures like Rubén Darío and José Martí, helped consolidate a transnational sense of linguistic unity. During the 20th century, the nationalist fever spread throughout Latin America, encouraging educators to establish pedagogical patterns that emphasized the uniqueness of the language within the country’s context. The effort was supported by ethnographers, anthropologists, and sociolinguists like the Cuban Fernando Ortiz and Venezuelan Ángel Rosenblat intent on finding what was local in the language. Simultaneously, each nation developed its own idiosyncratic media, which, again, allowed for verbal peculiarities to be included while also driving toward a standardized form. In this atmosphere, the Spanish language has been used as an organ of control by the state. It is also an invaluable tool through which to understand regional, national, and cultural differences.
By the end of the millennium, a new phenomenon emerged, not in Latin America per se yet intimately linked to it: Spanglish. It is a hybrid tongue used by millions of immigrants in the United States, whose power is increasing as time goes by. Spanglish has the potential of reconfiguring the way the Spanish language is understood in the future.
Article
Translating José María Heredia
Frederick Luciani
The Cuban poet José María Heredia (1803–1839) spent twenty months exiled to the United States because of his involvement in pro-independence conspiracies. In that time, Heredia wrote a prodigious number of poems and letters, which are the subject of an ongoing scholarly project undertaken by Frederick Luciani of Colgate University. Luciani’s work involves more than translating these poems and letters into English—it examines Heredia’s stay in North America against the background of political and historical events, and traces the matrices of his connections with key figures, literary and otherwise, in Cuba and the United States. Questions that have surfaced through the translation process and scrutiny of this period of Heredia’s life include the relationship between Heredia’s poetry and his letters; the value of his letters as a form of travel literature; the contradictions inherent in his exilic condition; the ambiguity of his political sentiments; the nature of the networks that joined 19th-century Anglo-American and Hispanic writers, translators, and scholars; and the challenges and opportunities that Heredia’s life and work pose for readers, translators, and scholars today.
Article
Underdevelopment in Brazil and Its Interpretations
Carlos Brandão and Hipólita Siqueira
Brazil is a vast and highly complex country that is subordinated to its central hegemonic poles and that combines both backwardness, modernity, progress interrupted by unfinished cycles of growth, and extreme inequality. Paradoxically, it is on the one hand ranked among the nine most advanced capitalist countries in the world and, on the other, listed as one of the nine countries with the worst income distribution. Attempts to interpret these dilemmas, historical disjunctives, and impasses have produced a plethora of original intellectual work that deals with the specificities of this most dynamic and yet highly contradictory national space.
A select few authors have produced extensive work on the subject and have legitimized themselves as the pinnacle of classical interpreters of Brazilian social and political thought. The originality, broad scope of analysis, and ingenuity of these great national thinkers have made them the authors of choice for those seeking to better understand Brazil as a nation. Their classics have formulated key and critical questions relating to the often-interrupted construction of this nation and the truncated, material, and spiritual or immaterial development of the Brazilian civilization as a whole, which began as a former Portuguese colony founded on slave labor. These are very comprehensive formulations, with a long-term historical perspective produced by those who have taken a very profound and highly structural look at Brazil, shedding light on aspects of its hitherto-obscure or unquestioned reality, enlightening and inviting to think more coherently, boldly, and consequently about its present and, indeed, future.
Among the main contributors are the likes of Caio Prado Júnior, Celso Furtado, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Florestan Fernandes, who have developed approaches to help unveil the nature and characteristics of the processes of dependence and underdevelopment that are so specific to Brazil’s peripheral capitalism.
12
