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Claudia Gilman In Djelal Kadir y Mario Valdés (eds.) A Comparative History of

Cultural Formations: Latin-American Literatures, Oxford University Press, pp. 418-429,

2004, ISBN 0-19-517540-9.

Claudia GilmanCONICET/[email protected] DO NO CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION

Bio-Policies Undergoing Transformation.Bodies and Ideas of American Identity. i

INDjelal Kadir y Mario Valdés (eds.) A Comparative History of

Cultural Formations: Latin-American Literatures, OxfordUniversity Press, pp. 418-429, 2004, ISBN 0-19-517540-9.

THIS TRANSLATION SHOULD BE REGARDED AS A NEW KIND OFCAPITAL SIN. HOPE SOME INSIGHTS REMAIN.

EMPEROR IS MORE THAN NAKED: “TRANSCULTURATION” ISJUST ASUFIX, NOT A DISCOVERY NEITHER A GOOD ONE. TAKE A LOOK

ON ETHNOLOGY DEBATES OVER CULTURE. YOU WILL FIND OUT THE VERY REASON TO FOUND ON CULTURE A SET OF TOOLS TO FIGHT AGAINST RACE SCIENTIFIC TOOLS TOUNDERSTAND, DEFINE AND PROVOKE CHANGES IN HISTORY.

What is the scheme of philosophical and religious discourses produces by

Latin America after the vertigo of modernization? This issue is primarily

framed as an inquiry into the limits of present-day discoursive reality. Wheredoes Latin American’s present actually begin? One should note that

―America‖ in fact means—the western hemisphere at various stages of its

history (yet not all of these stages, since this is not merely a cartographic issue

but one that involves grasping a conceptual entity), which means that

proposing some type of continuity as regards tradition. In other words, our

attitude towards unyielding distance or difference as regards they supposedly

transtemporal essence of what is Latin American.

The idea of ―America‖ is, as we know, a constellation that first

emerged during the colonies’ struggles for emancipation through specific



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enunciation strategies. It was taken up again, for the second time, and within

the cultural sphere, by the fin de-siècle modernist movement in literature,

spread throughout the continent by the itinerant Darío. It was subsequently

reflexively explores on the basis of the wave of revolutions that began in 1959

with the triumphal entry into Havana of the guerrilla commanders of Sierra Maestra.

Through its dissemination, the density of the Latin American reality

merely proves the constant, unoriginal presence of an ontological

differentiation. What is unusual about this peculiar construction of identity,

therefore, only acquires its paradoxical singularity in politics, knowledge, and

beliefs, inasmuch as they cease being unusual and interrelated, in various

ways, with the categories of time, tradition, and return. Each of these opening

of borders (colonial subjugation, the republican order, cosmopolitan

modernization, the civic revolution, and the purely political affirmation of a

Great Fatherland) constitutes a veritable break or fold in the main space of

the continent which left its traces on the development of Latin Americanistic

political discourse.

The slowness with which Latin American regarded themselves as a

part of the Americas even after 1810 was much in evidence; it was never the

allegory of a ―Sleeping Beauty‖ shrink its field of reference, defining itself in

terms of a derivative, proliferating heterogeneity. One of its clearest

components is that is relational and thus is linked to the derivative, imitative,

dependent and conceptually overdetermined list) of its relationships, first

with Europe and subsequently with the United States and with the rest of thenations that throughout the world, emerged as a result of struggles against

colonialist metropolises. The relational aspect of its composition also

involves the inversion and multiple phrasing of such newer terms as

authenticity, originality, independence, centrality, and historical prominence,

as well as the elaboration of more complex configurations for the symbolic

negotiation of the peripheral. They are undoubtedly ironic (in other words,

modern) elaborations, inasmuch as apparently opposing terms are subjected

to the historically dynamic and are forged together in dialectic relationships.

The cultivators of linear history have arguably failed in theirinterpretative discourses because they did not wish to see the superposition

of times, cultures, and strata that actually characterize Latin America and so

suggested the need to elaborate other instruments for organizing a

homogeneous critical discourse. In taking up these well-known ideas of

Angel Rama, I do not urge the cancellation of the categories and concepts

devised to provide an account of Latin American history, but rather

emphasize the danger of categorical fossilization, which prescribes

similarities and differences established by the same concepts and categories

that have served to explain them. It is a question, then, of either going



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beyond them or opting for silence. Following routes that are not always new

(but rather only suggested, left in historical latency) or else noticing that there

is nothing left to be said.

The prison house of language is the greatest obstacle to these

reinterpretations, and it is hardly surprising, then, that international artistssensitive to this problem, such Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille or Sergei

Eisenstein –all bewitched by Latin American reality —can serve as emblems

for expressing not only the gap between language and thought but also the

continuous need to find bridges to span them, however precarious these

bridges may prove.

Ezequiel Martínez Estrada (1895-1964), the Argentine ―radiographer‖

of the Pampas, or Octavio Paz (1914-1998), tracing the minute labyrinths of

solitude or the nameless narrator in Los pasos perdidos (1953; The Lost

Steps (1956)), Alejo Carpentier’s (1904-1980) novel, agree when they

perceive the Latin American world (and perhaps the world itself) as mindless

agglutination and historical stratification, with no center, with simultaneous

temporalities, about to emerge in any crack in time or space. Paz’s Mexican

descriptions can therefore be allegorically extended to the rest of the

continent, a land where no only different races and languages but also

various historical levels coexist. It is also a place where various eras confront,

ignore or devour each other in the same space or are separated by a few

kilometers. If the continent is therefore the site of derivative spatial-temporal

heterogeneity (in other words, a place where nothing coincides with itself),

not only does it therefore favor repetition, but responses themselves tend tobe recurrent. However, within the same resources, the course or route of a

definition of what is ―Latin American‖ is outlined. This is a non nostalgic

concept of the tradition itself in which the establishment of its existence is

constantly hurled into the vacuum of the future— which provides the

necessary energies for its very construction. As a pluralist conglomerate of

unrelated events, Latin America defies narrative descriptions in its specific

historical unspeakableness. To offer an analogy: We know that the Hubble

telescope reveals current images of now-extinct? We see their symptoms

with our own eyes: Yesterday they were merely stars; today they are light.The long, interminable dialogue or murmur of culture shows that absolutely

nothing has just died or been born. No novelty is absolutely novel. There is

no death that cannot survive in phantasmagoria.

The militant Latin Americanistic groups of the 1920s that emerged as

a result of the universitary reform movement were exact contemporaries of

the continental artistic vanguards. The two also coincided on their

nationalistic concerns and many of their accounts of identity. Their artistic

discourses of regionalism and avant gardism, in principle make them

opposite to each other. In his detailed anthology of Latin American



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vanguards, Jorge Schwartz explains why he excludes the regionalist manifesto

of Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987), which, for many years, was regarded as a

representative product of the 1920s –that is, until Freyre himself admitted

having written it in 1952. Yet, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) had already

alerted us to the epistemological value of falsifications: Should we refuse, inthe name of a confession that pays tribute to the ―historical truth‖, to

question the conditions that make the links between a document and an era

real? Freyre’s manifesto seemed to form part of a constellation of the 1920s;

the empirical fact that delayed it for three decades ought not to erase the

traces of its credible belonging to a climate of ideas.

We know that Latin American literary vanguards comprise a

multiplicity of paradoxes that are undoubtedly included within the

framework of the insistent reflection on Latin American identity that is

broader and more extended in time. We know that the literary form of the

essay played a leading role in this process, as borne out by such works as

Radiografía de la Pampa (1933), X-Ray of the pampa (1971), by Ezequiel

Martínez Estrada, Historia de una pasión argentina , 1937; History of an

Argentine Passion, 1983), by Eduardo Mallea (1903-1982), Retrato do Brasil (1928) Portrait of Brazil, by Paulo Prado (1869-1943), Raízes do Brasil (1936; Roots of Brazil), by Sergio Buarque de Holanda (1902-1982),

Interpretação do Brasil , 1947, Brazil: An Interpretation (1945), by Gilberto

Freyre, Guatemala, las líneas de su mano (1955; Guatemala, The Lines of Its

Hands), by Luis Cardoza y Aragón (1904-1992) or El laberinto de la soledad

1950, Labyrinth of Solitude, 1961, by Octavio Paz.In order to explain the power exerted by the essay from the definition of this

Latin American identity (situated moreover, within the general framework of

modernism) Richard Morse, for example, is obliged to frame the successive

as simultaneous, positing the existence of a landscape that, toward the end of

the 1920s, would lead modernism to orient itself initially from an aesthetic to

an ideological point of view.

Within this interpretation, for example, Mario de Andrade (1893-

1945), the author of Macunaima (1928), would navigate the transition

between both aesthetic and ideological moments and would also explain thesocial orientation of the Northeastern modernism of Gilberto Freyre and

Graciliano Ramos (1892-1953). The theme of identity, amply developed

through the essay form, would, thus, be explained not only by the diagnostic

possibilities of the genre but also by the fact that its authors tended to be

more critical of the status quo and more respectful of the aspirations of the

dispossessed. Jorge Schwartz also postulates this shift from the aesthetic to

the social, exemplifying in the trajectories of Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) and

César Vallejo (1892-1938); this itinerary leads from the avant garde to

socialism and includes the action by Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954) and



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the reformulation of the aesthetic ideological project of Martínez Estrada.

Critics would appear to have detected something like the structure of the

double helix in the modernist DNA in the fact that this movement

constitutes both an aesthetic and an ideological project (either simultaneously

or in successive chronological stages). It is true that modernism certainly constitutes a complex and contradictory phenomenon, implying both a

criticism and a celebration of modernity itself. But the greater degree of

attention given to the avant garde aesthetics of modernism may have been a

result of the brilliance of modernism itself, as well as of an affinity with

scholarly sensibilities. Here, perhaps, are the remains of a will to tradition

that literally exploded in the 1960s in literature, in the streets, in the

mountains and in the jungle. Since then, in the eyes of Latin American

criticism, modernism has constituted a central aesthetic category that

sometimes overshadows other expressions of experiences, political fables,

quests, and explorations that, while not always prized, were also important at

the time.

It is useful to note, however, that the heightened ideological tension of

the late 1920s and early 30s was not unique to Latin America. This period

can be regarded as the era of the international ideological civil war, when the

fate of the world seemed to depend on Spain, the symbol of this global

struggle. Undoubtedly, the period between the Week of Modern Art in São

Paulo in 1922 and the Red Communist Rebellion led by Luis Carlos Prestes

(1890-1990) in November 1935 saw a number of significant historical events

that modified the shape of the world, such as the Wall Street crash on 29October 1929 and the subsequent collapse of the world capitalist economy,

at least for a time. The fall in prices wrecked the economies of Argentina,

Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay

and Venezuela –in other words, all the countries whose foreign trade was

based on certain raw materials. Halperín Donghi noted that, although the

crisis created a brusque anticlimax following half a century of economic

expansion, it is also necessary to consider the particularity of local cycles,

which, on more than one occasion, had already been completed before the

end of the stage that would come to a close in the 1930s. (The historian’sobservation was intended to warn of the complexity and particularity of

periodization). One of the results of the Great Depression was that it

banished economic liberalism for half a century and thus modified state

models. During 1930 and 1931, twelve Latin American countries underwent

a change of government or regime, ten of which occurred as a result of

military coups. The collapse of world economies was followed by a period of

war, heralded by Lugones in Lima, in 1924, on the occasion of the centenary

of the battle of Ayacucho.



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The First World War put an end to the illusion of the inevitable rise

of modernity at the very center of the model; this failure was borne out by

the panorama of unfulfilled promise of the elites who controlled the Latin

American economy and political development. On the one hand, as we

know, historians have set the decline of the positivist paradigm between1910s and 1920 (Leopoldo Zea). Te incisiveness of the diagnosis of Western

decadence offered by Spengler is borne out by the readiness of Latin

America to agree with his conclusions. Be that as it may, it is not unlikely that

the disintegration of the center opened up the possibility of postulating new

centers or simply eliminating the center as the basis of the existence of

differences. If Latin America identity is made up of a plurality of unrelated

events, it is essential heterogeneity is to be found in its origins, if there is no

longer a modernization program, and civic representation collapses; then the

problem will lie in the adherence to a national tradition and the role of

personal loyalties and relationships played out on a national scale. In other

words, the redefinition of tradition opens up the very possibility of a

breakdown in meaningful interpersonal relationships in quotidian reality.

This factual or empirical nonrelationship can be seen as a resistance to

change and the denial of the irreversibility of historical time.

It is in this respect, and only this, that Latin America was able to travel

in a new opposite direction, as the Peruvian physiologist Carlos Monge

Medrano (1884-1970) wrote to his son, comparing his trip to Europe as a

student to his journeys abroad from 1929 onwards, as a way to explain the

results of his discovery. The journey in the opposite direction meant that,henceforth, it was he, the American, who would be listened to rather than

listen. Likewise, this new journey was linked, in various accounts, to a review

of the theories of the inferiority of the native population of Latin America

and the persistent reflection on the specific identity of the Latin American

social body. This journey in a new direction assumes the introduction of

various new modes of order. In the intellectual sphere, it involved the

abolition of the scientific view of the inferiority of the native. By way of

illustration of this view, one should recall that in 1921, an expedition of U.S.

and British scientists led by the physiologist Joseph Barcroft carried out observations on the effects of altitude on the human body, using the

expedition members, none of whom was accustomed to the altitude, as

reference. Their conclusion stated that human acclimatization to altitude was

virtually impossible and that the Indian’s physical a nd mental capacities

where therefore reduced by anoxia. Dennis Jourdanet, a French physiologist,

had conducted studies of this nature in Mexico during the second half of the

nineteenth century and had reached similar conclusions: Mexicans were an

anemic race due to the lack of oxygen in the blood experienced by the



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inhabitants of the plain they were in high places, which kept them in a

permanent state of weakness.

It was precisely to refute this thesis that, in 1927, Monge Medrano

organized an expedition to the Andes in order to prove that the concept of

normality might have other meanings; he thereby revealed the existence of physical and physiological mechanisms that Andean men had developed

over the centuries in order to acclimatize to the low oxygen pressure at high

altitudes. The description of the loss of acclimatization to altitude was

internationally recognized as an autonomous clinical entity and since 1928

has been known as Monge’s Disease, in honor of his scientific -cultural

crusade to vindicate Andean men.

It is clear that both Barcroft and Monge held certain beliefs before

they undertook their work. Traveling in the opposite direction required not

only knowledge but an idea of one’s destiny. Each state of society is capable

of conducting a certain type of science. Since the ancient religion of Babylon

demanded the exact prediction of celestial events, it is hardly surprising that

Babylonian science should have encouraged the study of astronomy.

Likewise, in order to break with the scientific view of the scientifically

inferiority of the Indians, which they did not believe, a group of Peruvian

scientists responded with the discovery of the hematological mechanisms that

functioned at high altitudes. Needless to say, this discovery coincided with

the moment when the question of the native in Latin America was being

reconsidered; it also established the basis for turning Peru into an immense,

first-rate laboratory where human physiology at high altitudes would bestudied. Thus, European and North American aviators would want to

discover the secrets of the highland Indians for their work in the dangerous

skies of the Second World War. Something powerful was being produced in

America, or so they suspected in Europe, when, after the Nobel Prize for

medicine and physiology awarded to Bernardo Houssay in 1947 for his

discovery of the complex interlocking of hormonal effects, many believed

that the strength of the German pilots was due to the Argentine exportation

of suprarenal glands to the Axis countries. This widespread pseudoscientific

fable appeared to be based in part on European notions of what was Latin American. The belief that the German’s superpowers were due to the effects

of a sort of a druidic potion originating in a place that combined the

unknown, exoticism, and distance reflects a European central perspective

(Bataille, Caillois, Artaud) on the regenerative powers of the primitive.

At the same time, from an aesthetic point of view, there was a parallel

and similar attempt to repeat and recover essential cultural elements through

the reappraisal of black and indigenous art in Latin America. This was

expressed by David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974) in his Manifesto de Barcelona (Barcelona Manifesto) in 1921; in the inclusion of pre-columbian



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art in the constructivista universalismo of Joaquín Torres García (1874-

1949); in the Afro-Americanism of Candido Portinari (1903-1962) and

Wilfredo Lam (1902-1982); in the Latin Americanist negrismo de Nicolás

Guillén (1902-1989) as well as Verde Amarelo (Green Yellow); in the

Argentine criollo avant-garde; and last but not least, in the poetry of César Vallejo (1892-1938).

There was also a manifesto of a new political order in the student

rebellion movement. In 1917, there was a general strike of junior and senior

high school students that extended throughout Uruguay, transferring its

epicenter (in 1918) to the Argentinian province of Córdoba. This movement

spread in expanding waves throughout the continent, creating a new Latin

American generation, which, according to José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-

1930), was the result of the proletarianization of the middle class. The social

and economic conditions of the future educated classes of the continent had

therefore been radically transformed. In 1924, the Uruguayan Carlos

Quijano (1900-1984), one of the major promoters of Latin Americanist

thought and ideologies, founded in Paris a general association of Latin

American students, together with José Ingenieros (1877-1925) and Victor

Raúl Haya de la Torre (1895-1979).

Yet there was also an affirmation of miscegenation as the demographic

evidence of a new social order, visible, for example, in José Vasconcelos

(1881-1959), whose journey through the continent, in 1922, as the leader of

the revolutionary Mexican delegation, enabled him to create bonds of

sympathy and establish the bases of his theory of ethnic unification on whichhe would expand in La raza cósmica (1925, The Cosmic Race 1979) and

Indología: una interpretación de la cultura iberoamericana (1926) Indology:

An interpretation of contemporary Iberoamerican Culture). According to his

theories, the Amerindians had belonged to the Atlantean race of red men,

which prospered and then irreversibly declined after fulfilling their particular

mission. For Vasconcelos, the Inca and Aztec empires, far from being the

high expression of that culture, were merely its decaying remains. In keeping

with José Enrique Rodó (1871-1917) or Eduardo Paulo da Silva Prado

(1860-1901), Mexicans saw the antagonism between Latin American and Anglo-Saxons as the true historical conflict. History’s secret plan indicated

that the red Atlanteans, from whom the Indians descended, would never

reawaken and that the days of the pure whites, the conquerors of today, were

also numbered. A new period was approaching, that of the fusion and

blending of peoples. America, the oldest and newest continent in the world,

was destined to be the cradle of the fifth race, the highest of all lineages,

which would reveal the fundamental feature of a Spanish American

idiosyncratic identity. Unlike its predecessors, this race would not have a

precarious historical mission but would become a definitive race, an integral



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race, the synthesis of all peoples. There would be no need to elaborate a

political program along racial lines, since peoples of different races would

develop their own natural policies, governed by enlightened passion:

Marriage, as a result of pleasure and attraction, would be a work of art,

capable of eliminating the ugliness of the earth. Vasconcelos’s aest hetic-amorous evolutionism reinterpreted the disturbing present in terms of a

Utopian future that would heal all wounds. He thereby affirmed that

miscegenation would not be denied as the regenerative destiny of the

Americas.

We can, therefore, see that this derivative heterogeneity of what was

―Latin American‖ has historically exerted two types of pressure. The force

exerted by tradition takes its direction from a relationship with the given and

the inherited. In culture, in society, in the regions, and on the map, the

existence of a serious conflict of racial and political order begins to emerge,

one that translates, in the first place, into bodies, as non transferable results

of policies and history. From this came a need to determine who the parents

where –if one wished, as indeed was the case, to acknowledge one’s brothers.

This search required the discontinuous verticality of alliances in order to

understand the continuous horizontality of the present, the mere result of a

historical process. In his ―Carta de Jamaica‖ (Letter from Jamaica) Simón

Bolívar (1783-1830) took it upon himself to record the time that had

elapsed, in terms of human mutation, between the arrival of the European

(and the conquest) and the emancipation of Latin America, stating that they

had barely preserved vestiges of what they were in earlier times, that they were neither Indians nor Europeans, but rather and intermediate species

between the legitimate owners of the country and the Spanish usurpers.

According to Octavio Paz, at the center of Mexican history lays

orphanhood: hence the obstinate, interminable search for origin and

filiation. The fact that orphandhood is not solely a Mexican notion is borne

out by the Argentine rancher, patron, and writer Ricardo Güiraldes (1886-

1927), who wrote Don Segundo Sombra (1926), a criollo modernist novel,

the subject and enigma of which is the ―guacho‖, or homeless person (in

popular language, a person who does not know his parents, or who has not been recognized by them). The development of the novel is driven by the

dilemma of affiliation, which, despite (HERE THERE IS A PROBLEM

BECAUSE I DISTINGUISHED BETWEEN ―GUACHO‖ AND

―GAUCHO‖ AND THE TRANSLATOR DID NOT. SOMEONE

CHANGED EVEN THE PLOT OF THE NOVEL) being formally

resolved in the end (the homeless gaucho turns out to be the illegitimate son

of the owner of the ranch), fails to resolve the real problem of paternity,

whose economic, ethical, cultural and physical functions multiply without

complementing each other. The dilemma also affects the author himself,



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Güiraldes, which is why he dedicated the novel to the gaucho –―to the

gaucho in me‖. The aesthetic depiction of rural life does not detract from the

dilemma of orphanhood through which the test raises the question of

paternity. It is no coincidence that, shortly before being deported to the gas

chamber, a war orphan, Benjamin Fondane (1898-1944), sought the originof his tragedy in a film version of this very text, to which, working with

Victoria Ocampo, he tried to give a Russian flavor by exploring the issue of

emptiness and existential crisis.

Naturally, by tracing one’s lineage, with all its political, cultural,

economic, social, ethnological, and historical nuances, Fondane reveals the

selective nature of what is understood as representative and typical of a

people. What differs from one group to another is undoubtedly the

genealogy. Whether or not one agrees, the denotative tension of the Other

as barbarous shows what shifting concept foreignness is. So much so, in fact,

that one can draw an arc between what is foreign and what is native. The

density of what is otherness lies precisely in the fact that, from the point of

view of power, one never knows the Other or exactly what the Other wants.

However, one is always suspicious of his actions and fears the consequences,

revealing a specific fantasy that attributes an all embracing power to the

desires of the Other seen as a homogeneous threat. By attributing a will, a

direction, and a common objective to the Other, the discriminating fantasy

enables the threatened to escape from an unbearable situation. This

unbearable situation is one in which the Other never ceases to make

demands on ―us‖ (the dominant, entitled elite), one in which ―we‖ are unableto translate the desires of the Other into an unequivocal language and a

specific demand; this is the allegory of the insatiable blackmailer who will

exploit his victim endlessly.

The crisis of identity is, therefore, transformer into the Other’s endless

demands and, finally, into the emergence of what is sinister. From the

Hispanicism of José Vasconcelos and Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1884-1946)

(correlative to Freyre’s views on the Portuguese colonizer), spanning the

indigenism of Mariátegui, the vindication of the Haitian Creole in Jean Price-

Mars (1876-1969), the double forswearing of Martínez Estrada predecessorand Paulo Prado’s scorn for the policies of the Brazilian colonizer, a wide

arc of dissent cuts through this idea of a focus on the origins of national

identity, the family, and the state. To understand Latin America implies an

intense review of the demographic order that nuances any appraisal and

perception of the human and physical component of social matters; the

gamble on the future, implicit in Juan Bautista Alberdi’s (1810-1884) motto ―to govern is to populate‖ and explicitly taken up by Mariátegui, thus

becomes n acceptance of the hybrid. The ideology that promoted mass

immigration from Southern Europe to South America had two faces: The



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desire of a new white hybrid and the operation that implied annihilating the

indigenous and now surplus population in the pursuit of modernizing

projects.

It is, therefore, clear how Latin American politics are linked to the

logic of breeding; this, however, does not belie the Platonic theory of politics.Nomos (the law) and nomeus (the shepherd) show the genealogy of a

pastoral power wielded over a flock with a salvational intention and a

categorical imperative. While the pastor divides and classifies, in other

words, selects, the law attributes, gives lessons, and interprets bodies and

spaces. The virtually infinite Latin American territorial expanse, during the

lengthy period when land was the principal source of wealth, created a

relationship with cruelty and with blood that undoubtedly went beyond the

moment of positivism. Conversely, in lands where there were barely any

industries, the new masses of immigrants would be directed by a populist

leader, the true pastor of consciences. It is impossible to attribute these

ideological developments to traditional thinkers alone. One should recall, by

way of an example, that while condemning demographic statements which

expressed the expectations that an Indian emancipation would result from an

active cross beteww4n the aboriginal race with white immigrants (a form of

sociological naiveté), Mariátegui shows how this naiveté was the order of the

day in expectations surrounding the new future of Latin America. The

majority view stated that the future of Latin America depended on the fate of

miscegenation. The racism of sociologists regarding the mestizo (as

established by Le Bon) was followed by a Messianic optimism that investedthis same mestizo , the Other, with the hope of liberating the continent.

A Marxist, such as Mariátegui rejects the promise, the prophecy, and

the future predicted for a people left to their fate and removed from truly

political will to action. Modernity, in his view, is hegemony, and, in the final

analysis, sovereignty. Yet this does not cause Mariátegui to diminish the

importance of bodies and their hybridity. His emphasis on the economic

decisions concerning the Peruvian situation and the means of resolving the

latter is based, perhaps involuntarily, on the unpolluted permanence of

Indian populations. If the Indian, as an organic member of society andculture, can find the key to modern civilization on his own, his capacity for

political, social, and economic struggle is also due to his survival: according

to Mariátegui, the biological material of the Tawantinsuyo has remained

unchanged after four centuries.

One could say that, in every case, following the era of the modernizing

social laboratory, there is a need to observe results and evaluate gains and

losses. The most obvious result of the latter is the existence of visible

remains, like the corporeal human mass that emerges from the demographic

policies of the learned elites. The most obvious proof of the failure of these



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policies created by the Liberal imagination is provided by Carlos Bunge

(1875-1918) when, in Nuestra América (Our America), he is compelled to

condone the effects of elements as disparate and difficult to manipulate as

smallpox, alcoholism, and tuberculosis because of their ability to decimate

the Indian and African populations. A population of mixed race, urban poor, and immigrants came

together in the cities and formed extended systems of mediation and

negotiation between the main demographic entities of Indians, blacks,

Spaniards, and some of the most recent European arrivals. These ubiquitous

presences forced the reflection, affirmation, or rejection of the impact of

history on bodies. Yet those who do so have looked at themselves in the

mirror; their own bodies have also been closely observed. Leopoldo

Lugones (1874-1938) had successfully exalted the gaucho as an emblem of

nationality in a social world comprising new othernsessses (in El Payador (1916), The Ballad Singer) and even managed to ignore Bolivar’s declaration

―we are neither Indian nor European‖ in order to postulate that the mestizos where the Others. The visibility of his hybrid nature escaped him: Lugones

sought to control the uncontrollable by defining a stable and therefore

abstract mestizo . He was constantly troubled by his negation of himself as a

mestizo; for a time, the mestizo served as the basis of class distinction for the

patrician learned and urban elites. The same thoughts are expressed by

Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959) in the first issue of Sur in his self-portrait: His

physical features are those of an Indian, but, he states, his mind is European.

This, then, was what constituted being a living contradiction in terms, theamphibian of miscegenation, neither fish nor reptile.

Human existence, it was stated over and over again, depended on

codes of behavior, rules of control in civilized society, but where there had

been order; there was now an uncontrolled mindless palpitation, the pulse of

which continued in a social body that was brain-dead. Even the traditional

life and death split was no more. The split was now between normal life and

a horrendous inert life, a kind of leaving death, a machine-like nonlife that

controlled the state apparatus as a mob. In his own way, and before Freud,

Martínez Estrada accurately pointed out the distance between idea andmatter, the hiatus between past and present, when he wrote, in his poem

―Argentina‖ (1927) that the meek, foundational efforts of the fathers of the

nation was an idea and not of flesh and blood. The lack or representation of

death in the unconscious became a postulation of the phantasmagoric nature

of history in psychologist’s discourse on the national character.

Failing to take these paradoxes into account, the thought about the

past, present, or future identity of Latin America made abundant use of a

rhetoric of biology, thus making a lexical link with the positivism against

which it ralied. As in Vasconcelos’s prophecy, in many cases, it



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metaphorically implied the creation of cell tissue that would be the new

biological man. The writers who offered their prophecies or criticisms spoke

at length of the attention to bodies and miscegenation as one of the most

important features of the present. Like the Cuban Virgilio Piñera (1912-

1979) in La carne de René (1952), the Ecuadorian Jorge Icaza (1906-1978)in Huasipungo (1934) subsequently framed his denunciation in the rhetoric

of nausea: Not merely flesh, but rotten, diseased, stinking flesh. His list of

what was foul was almost limitless.

Endless variations on this theme emerged, arising from the

examination of the hybrid social body, Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987), in his

preface to Casa grande & Senzala (1933) The masters and the slaves, 1946),

held that everything seemed to depend on him and his generation, and that,

of all the problems, none concerned him as deeply as miscegenation.

Perhaps Gilberto Freyre, even more than Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969), best

evaluated the mixture of bodies of heterogeneous origin in the American

continent: He regarded the difference between race and culture as

fundamental. This crucial differentiation had already been expressed in

―Raza y Cultura‖ (Race and Culture) a speech delivered by Pedro Henríquez

Ureña on Columbus Day in 1934, as the Dominican pointed out, could well

have been called the day of Hispanic culture. In Freyre’s terms, this

operation involved discriminating between the effects of purely genetic

relationships and those involving social influences. This radical expansion

and displacement of genetic and social causes is far from evident. In order to

acquire scientific status, as Freyre proposes, it is impossible to break completely with the models and blood laws imposed by racist versions of

positivism. Freyre himself used the regulating framework of Wissler’s

theories of biochemical content, the economic determinations of Marxism,

the psycho-physiological studies by Walter Cannon and Arthur Keith, and

even agreed with Francisco José de Oliveira Viana (1883-1951) who, in

Evolução do Povo Brasileiro ) had written an apology for the white groups in

his country based on the hypothesis that the tropical climate per se was

capable of making northern European degenerate.

Gilberto Freyre’s attempts at synthesis and erudition can be seen fromthe heterogeneity of his acknowledgments: Hacienda owners, former slaves,

colleagues, libraries, archives, museums, sugar mill owners, his own relatives,

and the relatives of barons and viscounts – a world shot through by

antagonisms whose harmonious coexistence was possible only in books. One

could say that, in order to avoid succumbing to the alienation of the subject,

paying attention to bodies required close observation of the (Freudian)

primary scene in Latin America. In a famous and fairly recent song, Silvio

Rodríguez, the singer song-writer of the group Nueva Trova Cubana, dreamt

about serpents. Paulo Prado, Octavio Paz, Martínez Estrada, Gilberto



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Freyre, Carlos Mariátegui, and Price-Mars dreamt of wolves, as in the

famous dream of the ―Wolf Man‖ analyzed by Freud, in which several of

these animals high up in the branches of a walnut tree and absolutely

immobile, stare fixedly, terrorizing the dreaming four year-old. Freud

interprets this image as the child’s view of the sexuality of his parents. Thisdisturbing fixed gaze can be made doubly perturbing in Spanish and

Portuguese, since these languages can supplement the visual aspects of the

dream, representing, as in a concrete poem, the eyes in the vowels that spell

out the word: L-O-B-O.

This is why it is not only a question of knowing who our parents are

but of seeing what they have done with their sexuality. As Octavio Paz said,

the question of origin was the secret center of anxiety and anguish. Paulo

Prado entitles the first chapter or Retrato do Brasil , ―Luxuria‖. This Edenic

paradise was the Brazilian territory where the Portuguese colonizers, as

violent adventurers, arrived to unleash the exuberance of youth, exercise

their desires, and satisfy their sexual appetite. Fired up by the nudity of

Indian women, they multiplied their purely animal unions; their immorality

seemed literally terrifying and absolutely limitless.

The essays of Gilberto Freyre (from a less traumatic although no less

explicit perspective), Martínez Estrada, Mariátegui and Octavio Paz focus on

the Conquest, describing as rape the first physical contact, provoked by the

shortage of white women, between the conquistadors and the Indian women.

Thus, the population of the Americas is the direct result of violence:

Mestizos were engendered in infamy, while the imputation of this carriesrepugnance of one who satisfies his fleshy appetites, as Martínez Estrada

dramatically suggests, the population bears the stigma of these irregular

unions, which, over time, would turn the past into a time of accumulated

shame. The time that has elapsed since this era of shame is described best

through the genre of the essay, undertaken as an essential task for

understanding the present. The shame of the past assumes the form of

trauma. The unusual persistence of Cortés and La Malinche in the Mexican

imagination and sensibility, as Paz suggests, shows that they are more than

historical figures; they are symbols of a secret, unresolved conflict, themeeting with Reality. In this respect, it would even be worth drawing up a

provisional typology. Mariátegui and Martínez Estrada are situated at

opposite ends of the political spectrum when dealing with the role of human

will. Whereas the former deploys all the forces of rationality to explain the

Peruvian situation, the latter places the degradation of history (or its

irremediable impossibility) within the natural and cosmic order. Indeed,

both regard the conquistador as an anachronism in Latin America by

defining him as a medieval man. Yet, although one sets the conquered land

in a more ancient prehistory rather than in the context of the cosmos, the



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other regrets the eradication of a social plenum (Incaic communism) by

invaders from an even more archaic society.

The Hybrids of Civilization and Barbarity, Nature and Culture

The cultural discourse on the difference and conjunction betweennatural procreation and systematic control over human production in the

name of anthropological selection techniques reflects an ideological victory

for ideologues of planned population control. There are some who believe

that Nietzsche exaggerated when he promulgated the idea of the breeding of

man (Verhaustierung ) on the basis of state control. However, there is no

doubt that a project such as this constitutes a peculiar example of hybridism,

firstly because it proposes, in the short term, the elimination of all

distinguishing signs of difference, and secondly, because (unlike an earlier

mindless exercise of the religious salvational, imperial power, in which

pastoral power was exercised by bio-cultural instincts with no empirical goal)

toward the end of the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century, the

idea of human procreation without a program of breeding is replaced by the

state agency that plans the hybrids. In Latin America, Domingo Faustino

Sarmiento (1811-1888) brutally inscribed the awareness of two irreconcilable

modes of order in t he divided Latin American body within the continent’s

cultural and political memory. The opposition between civilization and

barbarity, which has proved particularly mobile and rich in its various

connotations, continues to exert an extraordinary fascination in the political,

scientific, and demographic elaboration of the continent. In practical terms,the Comtean watchwords of order and progress describe the building of

bridges capable of ensuring the human and cultural flow between a civilized

Europe and a Latin America that was barbarous yet wished to stop being so.

By inventing a ghostly Godfather, Ricardo Güiraldes domesticates the

terrible shadow of Facundo, whom Sarmiento exorcises at the beginning of

his famous text. He takes him to his home, uses him pro domo sua ,introducing him into his own inner gaucho self, the gaucho within him. The

negotiation between the two radically different orders of civilization and

barbarity, culture and nature, spirituality and materiality, humanity andanimality is achieved here by reducing the different profiles of each of the

terms. The result is not strictly a synthesis, since a complete suture could not

exist between these poles that history has forced to move in both directions

at once, which are thus quite barbarous and quite civilized at the same time.

It is hardly surprising that this revision should coincide with the much-

quoted revelation of Walter Benjamin –avid reader, like Martínez Estrada,

of the writings of Geoge Simmel (the source, in fact, of the idea that there are

no documents of culture tat are not also documents of barbarity).



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Paradoxically, positivism, which emphasized social determinism and

the natural laws of evolution, also carried the illusion of the conquest as

dominating nature through technological and scientific progress in America,

the same way that positivists had sought to control demography in Latin

America. The antipositivist reaction would emphasize the illusory nature of this conquest, which, event today, is far from complete, notes Mariátegui

bluntly. Not that far removed from the convictions of Euclides da Cunha

(1866-1909) or Martínez Estrada, he suggests that land is the definitive truth,

the first and the last. If supremacy over nature is synonymous with

modernizing rationality, the revenge of the forces that resist all domination

must be expressed, or rather, is what must be expressed. The survival

strategy of a Hansel and Gretel spoiled by Liberalism assumes, beyond the

evident evil of the world, a stable, terrestrial area in which stones, roads and

maps indicate visible paths. Yet Latin America seems to emerge as an

unstable living space in which all traces of planned urbanization are erased

not only by the overwhelming, uncontrolled power of nature but also by the

Latin American man, who turns the confrontation into a personal wager,

which he will lose. Hence the convergence of nature as a force that swallows

up man’s meager efforts, or conversely, Brazilian antropophagy and the

explicit return to nature and all the forms of natural environment that

overwhelms man from earthquakes to the tropical rainforest and the

hurricanes of the Caribbean. These novels, La Vorágine (1924) by José

Eustasio Rivera (1888-1928), Los pasos perdidos , by Alejo Carpentier and

La casa verde by Mario Vargas Llosa, nearly always feature a place wheretracks are erased and roads can be walked along only once.

Nature constantly reveals its double valency: Its possibilities of

destruction and creation, its untamed power and its beneficent sustenance of

life. Like the jungle in La vorágine , it is the source of rubber that will

establish the country’s wealth, and of swallowing up the protagonist together

with his wife and son, but not his story, recovered thanks to Clemente Silva.

It may involve extremes, as shown by the voyage trough time embarked on

by the narrator of Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos as he goes deeper into

the Venezuelan jungle. When he tries to retrace his steps, he fails, for theroute back cannot be traversed. This double valency is both symbolic and

economic: Barbarous nature is the main provider of the resources that

incorporated Latin America into international trade. However, this poorly

managed natural wealth could be exhausted in the expansive cycle of the

economy, often destroying the fertility of the land, as in the case of the coffee

and sugar plantations, and forcing the Latin American economy to be

dependent on international prices for its export products. This primary

order or disorder, in many cases unforeseen (such as the wealth of guano in

Peru, excremental richness par excellence), reveals the living nature of



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merchandise and the identity derived from it. This, in turn, has led to an

entire system based on materiality and on the primary nature of subsistence.

Eating and excreting , performing all one’s bodily functions without shame,

and even transgressing the taboos that established civilization, as in the

Anthropophagous Movement. Just as anoxia produced by altitude develops compensatory

mechanisms in the blood, culture develops similar mechanisms for defining,

creating and inventing a figure to describe the hybrid. Beyond the projects of

social transformation suggested by the liberal program, this bet on barbarity

skillfully expressed by Alfonso Reyes’ redundancy (the amphibian of

miscegenation) also appears in the wager on the regenerating power of

nature, expressed by Oswald de Andrade and Martínez Estrada, for whom

barbarity and civilization are two centripetal and centrifugal forces of a

system in equilibrium. On the basis of these contradictory data, of

affirmation and resistance, remains of transplanted colonial illusions of

empire or authenticity, reconciled if not domesticated by modernization, one

of the hybrids of mythological imagination that have most forcefully

intervened in the history of the continent begins to emerge on the

contemporary scene. Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and compilations of beliefs

bear out the view expressed by Jorge Luis Borges in El libro de los seres imaginarios (1967): that the terrible image of the centaur lies at the origin of

the American conquest based on the belief that, for the Indians, who were

unfamiliar with horses, Pizarro’s or Hernán Cortés’s soldiers were physically

joined to their steeds. The Latin American centaur, on which the imaginative version of the hybrid would be based, was the centaur at the agonizing

moment of taming, at the painful and still unstable moment of

metamorphosis. Colt and rider resembled a wounded centaur, as martinez

Estrada tells us in his poem on horse training, in the brutal melee of the

rodeo where steer, horse, and man are indistinguishable.

Unlike what we find in Greek and Hellenistic iconography, the Latin

American hybrid does not ride Apollo’s horses or tolerate a third persona on

his mount. He finds identity in the very process of his always unstable alloy,

threatened by a horse’s plunge or his lack of experience. His concern is for what creates a hybrid being, rather than hybridization itself. It is Santos

Luzardo, the civilizer and barbarian in Doña Bárbara (1929) by Rómulo

Gallegos, (1884-1969) and it is also Doña Barbara and the raped mother

described by Octavio Paz. The conclusion is similar to the experience of

Macunaima : the final though: men were machines and machines men. We

are thereby distancing ourselves from humanism. Human selection obviously

creates unease, yet it is no less true that abandoning this possibility, as in the

times of the original impotency when this power was delegated to God or

others, far from resolving the issue, prevents the understanding that man is



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not necessarily man’s friend. On the contrary, recent cultural history shows

that, for his fellow men, man represents the highest power, which produces

not only purely modernist malaise in culture, but a postmodernist

abandonment of the notion of humanism

In Latin American cultural history, the images of cannibal and thecentaur indicate the process of the combination of bodies. Both figures

emerge as a process, never as a product. (Hence the obsession with the

horse-training scene, correlative to the obsession with the primary scene).

The Latin American barbarian, who is, at the same time, a remnant of a lost

civilization, is perceived in nature and also in the masses, in other words, as

what can be trained and harnessed, the thing whose voice can be

transformed into the howl of a bleeding animal, as in Jorge Icaza’s

Huasipungo . The ―animalization‖ and ―naturalization‖ of man and his body

no longer fulfills even the basic conditions of reproduction of the social

order. The Indian masses produce and die; they build a highway over the

marsh, which has been drained at a massive cost to human life. The type of

naturalism represented by Huasipungo is worth reviewing, particularly the

consideration of the reproductive or mimetic nature of the Indian language.

This is presented as an absolutely zero degree of language, in other words, a

purely affective language: The only language that can be transformed into the

howl of a bleeding animal, This line of development includes the animal

transformation of the narrator in Clarice Lispector’s work (1925-1977): She

takes animal transformation beyond modernism. Lispector’s narrative is

devoid of all mimetic experience-in the quasi cockroach, G. H. andMacabea, the quasi-rat. She pushes the human body beyond all mimetic

registers and into a primeval sense of life. In this hybrid of the masses and

nature, one can also see the type figures of political domination. In many

Latin American countries, the space devoted to the rider, in the fable of the

horse-trainer, will be simultaneously or successively occupied by popular

leaders and armies, men on horseback and their battles. The instability of

power in this constant struggle for dominance leads to the creation of the

cacique type, in which one strongman is indistinguishable from another.

The 1960s and 1970s: The Period of Revolution

For heuristic purposes of analysis, one can establish an outline of the

periods of the construction of Latin America identity. If the mode of order

of modernity declared that the future was now, and its successors were

concerned only with changing the present and abolishing the centrality of

political power in an emancipatory social revolution modeled on the Cuban

revolution as in the version of Ernesto (Che) Guevara (1928-1967): The

present is the struggle, and the future will be ours. ―El socialismo y el



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hombre nuevo en Cuba,‖ Guevara famous text, written during his trip to

Africa, is in fact a letter sent to Carlos Quijano for publication in the

Uruguayan weekly Marcha (directed by Carlos Quijano from 1939 to its

cloture in 1974). It is not a historical curiosity but rather an important

indicator of how this Latin Americanism served as mediation between JoséIngenieros’s (1877-1925) progressive ideas of the late nineteenth century and

Che Guevara’s vision of the twenty -first century, heralded by the creation of a

publishing house of that name, Siglo Veintiuno Editores in the 1960s.

From the 1960s onwards, Latin America formed new political blocs

with other regions, citing a new diagnosis and focusing on new relationships.

The illness/identity to be resolved was called ―dependency‖, and the

program to cure this was a new means of insertion in the world, one that

took on itself the task of ―liberation‖; the result of this w orldwide

involvement reaching from Africa and the Middle East to America would be

a future identity, this time a full one. By going in an already defined

direction, Latin America would no longer be a ―way of living‖ but would

have a ―position‖ in the world, and would claim its long-demanded rights.

The response to the challenge of this new, inevitable, and imminent

liberation was the figure of the new Latin America man. Its definitive version,

in both, theory and practices (the old debate between ―las armas o las letras‖,

knew here another avatar), incarnated in Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, el

―Che‖. He is still a symbol, maybe because he was real and at the same time

was a televised hero. In it, the idea of hybris underlying the Nietzschean

Übermensch re emerges.Except him, men would be the locus of a metamorphosis; he would

no longer be defined by his physical features but by his relationships. This is

the oppressed men described by Paulo Freire (1921-1997), exploited and

dominated, one of the ―outcasts of the world‖ to whom he devotes his

Pedagogía del oprimido (1970, Pedagogy of the Oppresed, 1970). Or this is

the bandit proclaimed by his compatriot, Hélio Oiticica, through the motto

―seja bandido, seja herói‖ (―Be he bandit, be he hero‖). Unlike

Vasconcelos’s new man, founded in the expectation of the biological force of

miscegenation, the current image shifts to the new and, as yet, undeterminedman: The human being who will arise in the future, based on the struggles of

liberation and sacrifice. This future man who responds to Latin American

hour of revolution implies a new type of family line. His code is not genetic

or even eugenic, but purely ideological. This new family of men possesses

the strength of will and does not develop in segments. Its prefigurement is to

be seen in warriors, individual men who have produced a mutation in

themselves: A physical mutation for resisting inclemency and obstacles, a

spiritual mutation that leads to the giving of the self to the cause of the



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liberation of human forces capable of fully developing a radically

transformed society.

Latin American political thought comes back to reality in the force and

persuasiveness of liberation theology, which also arouse during this period.

Camilo Torres (1929-1966), priest and guerrilla leader assassinated in 1966,caused a major shock when he said that whoever was not a revolutionary was

guilty of mortal sin. The hopes of transcendence were re secularized in the

new man. The violence of the Christian apocalypses shifted to an

understanding –until then hypocritically concealed behind the rhetoric of

submission that the church had promulgated--- of violence as a constituent

feature of politics, all politics.

The period of the 1960s and 1970s constitutes an era with his own

historical density and fairly precise limits, separating it from the

constellations immediately before and after it, surrounded, in turn, by

thresholds that enable it to be identified as a temporal and conceptual entity

in its own right. The Cuban revolution, the decolonization of Africa, the

Vietnam war, the civil rights movements in the United States, and the various

outbreaks of youth rebellion allow one to postulate a set of institutional,

political, technological, cultural, and socioeconomic relationships without

which is extremely difficult to imagine how the perception could have arisen

that the world was about to change and that intellectuals would have a role in

that transformation, either as its spokesmen or as an inseparable part of its

own revolutionary energy. The future of humanity seemed sued to the

destiny of the Third World.During the 1960s and 1970s according to the manifestos and

declarations that proliferated at the time, the logical unfolding of the dialectic

materialist view of history appeared to be inevitable, and it was expressed in

the emergence of an accelerated sense of time, whose best metaphor is that

of the furious chariot of history that trampled the hesitant underfoot. This

was a moment when politics gave meaning to various practices and

structured a generalized feeling of the inevitable and longed-for

transformation of the world of institutions, subjectivity, art, and culture. This

is the perception within which truly groundbreaking events, such as Cubanrevolution, were conceived.

The belief in the inevitability of socialism went hand in hand with the

idea that it (rather than capitalism) embodied the historical rationality of

modernity: The domination of the majority by the minority was, for many, a

reality that was not only ethically unacceptable but an affront to intelligence.

The world in general and Latin America in particular seemed convinced of

the imminence of a radical change in the world and in man. Even in the

United States, on 12 May 1966, Senator Robert Kennedy gave a televised

speech in which he publicly acknowledged what seemed to be obvious to a



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left in expansion: that the revolution in Latin America was unavoidable. Even

the Church, affected by the climate of the times transformed its pastoral

discourse. New laws, new pastors, New nomoi , new nomia . Indeed, from the

papacy of John XXIII onwards, when the encyclicals’ Mater et magistra (15

May 1961) and Pacem in terris (11 April 1963) were proclaimed the Churchintroduced what was known as ―aggiornamiento ‖ (sort of update). As a result,

official ecclesiastic discourse was permeated by reinterpretations of the

mandate of charity. As part of this modernization by the Vatican Council,

Paul VI defined the moment as a new era in history, one characterized by

the gradual worldwide spread of profound changes. The Catholic Church,

thereby, increased it contacts with the African and Latin American

continents. The climax of this strategy was the General Latin American

Episcopal Conference in Medellin (1968) where the Pope was received with

a speech confirming that an abnormal situation existed in Latin America,

where the dignity of the human beings was ignored and where vast masses

were still awaiting the sign of their redemption. The dialogue East/West and

the forecast of a pacific coexistence in a world reigned by two antagonist and

powerful bands failed to consider the geographical breadth of the world

map: a revolutionary scene was developing elsewhere. At the same time, a

new process of specialization in the sphere of the intelligentsia started a triage

in which Scientifics became increasingly less concerned with ideology and

politics than others creative minds of the generation. Many were destroyed,

not by madness.

Yet the new political and intellectual agenda proposed the rejection of all colonial powers, postulating anti-imperialism without rejecting the idea of

national sovereignty and liberation, coexisted with the expectation that the

world revolution had already begun. The conviction that the scenario of

history was changing and that it would thereafter unfold in the Third World

also gained currency. These expectations regarding peripheral revolutionary

possibilities were periodically renewed in discourses that were virtually

harangues. The historical gravity rotated from a Eurocentric, western or

North Atlantic perspective to one of polycentrism. Although the perception

of new antagonisms failed to eliminate the class struggle, in underlines otherelements in conflict. Terms such as oppressive and oppressed nations,

developing o developed nations, involved new perspectives on domination

and exploitation, suggesting that the rebellion of the proscribed and

outsiders, the exploited and the persecuted of other races and colors; the

unemployed and the unemployable was revolutionary, even if their

consciences were not. As Che Guevara puts it, the military avant-garde could

trigger the conditions for a revolution even though subjective conditions were

not ripe.



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The explanatory category of imperialism was invoked with renewed

force to explain why the revolution had not begun in the societies of

advanced capitalism as Marx had predicted. According to this explanation,

the lack of proletarian revolution in developed countries was due to the

material well being enjoyed by even the least privileged classes as a result of the exploitation of colonies, new and old. Intellectuals, too, stated that

capitalist countries had weakened the socialist revolution and the social

conflict at the heart of societies, because they had improved the living

standards of their proletariat through the exploitation on the impoverished

masses of Africa, Asia and Latin America. It was also believed, however, that

this situation was drawing to a close.

The dependent countries had also acquired an awareness of the

struggle, that they would have to wage to liberate them and, consequently, to

create the conditions that would make a revolution inevitable in the central

(industrialized) countries.

Latin American sociologist and economists proposed a new theory of social

change. The well-known ―teoría de la dependencia‖ proved persuasive. On

one hand, it was rooted in the interpretation of the Economic Commission

For Latin America (ECLA) –inspired by Raúl Prebisch—of the growing

deterioration of the terms of exchange and trade between underdeveloped,

typically producers of raw materials with ―low aggregate value‖ and

industrialized countries. In this respect, the creators of the dependence

theory believed that a fundamental starting point would be to refute the

hypothesis that development in peripheral countries would necessarily involve repeating the evolutionary stages of the economies of the First

World. To his end, they sought to elaborate an integrated development

model in which development and underdevelopment were considered as

two, mutually necessary sides of the same coin, rather than as successive

steps forward a universal development model. On the other hand,

dependency theory was also grounded in Marxism in general and, in

particular, in the review of Lenin concept of imperialism.

The crisis in political thinking also affected trust in the revolutionary

role of the Soviet Union, head of the socialist camp, which, at that time, was vying for leadership with an emerging and also socialist China. In fact, the

anti-Communists, who believed that the decline of the Cold War would put

an end to the lengthy fight for hegemony between the two major world

powers (since it had come to be known as ―peaceful coexistence‖), had failed

to perceive that there were new revolutionaries energies that were not

derived from the old Communist parties. Indeed, none of the existing

Socialist parties or states seemed to be the ideal sources for promoting a

Third World revolution. Despite the fact that over half the world had been

over by socialism, the party of professional revolutionaries created by Lenin



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was dedicated to the defense of the thesis of socialism in a single country, in

this cases, the USSR itself.

The nationalistic component of the new Latin American left, together

with the characteristics of Communist parties on the continent, which always

toed the Soviet Union Communist Party line, showed the need for a new road to progress. If the militants themselves started from the basis that it was

essential to fight against party dogma, those who had never followed party

guidelines would find this theoretical struggle even less traumatic. The

condemnation of the new left by Communist party leaders was emphatically

rejected by critical intellectuals who no longer accepted the criteria of

undisputed authority, or felt that their social importance had declined. For

militants of the new Latin American revolutionary causes and also for their

intellectual fellow travelers, the widespread discredit of both the democratic-

bourgeois political systems and the traditional Communist parties led to the

conviction that only a violent revolution could produce genuine socialism.

Violence thus acquired its central status in the political life of leftist militants

and intellectuals. The perception that the social order itself was based on

violence enabled revolutionary counterviolence to be set against the violence

of the oppressors. Moreover, even the central conflict of modernization –the

tension between universe and region— was legitimized by this code. The

unfair violence of the colonial order was followed, in a story such as A hora e a vez de Augusto Matraga (1946; The hour and Time of Augusto Matraga)

by Guimarães Rosa (1908-1967), in which the protagonist goes through a

religious conversion and commits himself to holy violence.Establishing the state of the 1960s period is far simpler than

determining when it ended. In 1997, in a review of his own political life and

its trajectory, Régis Debray dubbed the leftist militancy a ―spectral

community‖, meaning that it had evolved around a completely mistaken

ideological or blind view of the world. For this Frenchman, the 1960s and

1970s constituted the last transformation of Marxism, which, whether

reformulated or orthodox, has served as the main theoretical signpost for the

era. This era constituted the great frustration of expectation, the swan song of

educated culture in Latin America and the world. We know for a fact that the world revolution failed to take place. Was this leftist community, so

powerful in the production of discourse and so convincing regarding the

changes it heralded, and this period, when the masses mobilized to a

thitherto unprecedented degree, the result of a baseless illusion? If, in

Debray’s view, the left was mistaken, might not the succession of military

coups and brutal waves of repression have been a response based on the

very conviction that the revolution was imminent (and therefore had to be

combated)? Were the forecast mistaken, or was the use of force modified to

suppress existing revolutionary impulses?



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These questions cannot be answered, yet must be raised. Many

protagonist and witnesses of this period are currently reviewing the beliefs

and convictions they held then. This is borne out by the growing mass of

books and research on the period that reveal a considerable sympathy for

the revolution that never materialized and show that interpretation of thisperiod has not yet been concluded. Yet, although a period can be defined by

a conceptual framework that can be expressed at a given moment, the end of

a period is linked to a powerful redistribution of discourses and a

transformation of the paradigm itself that can or cannot be discussed. In

1971, in Bolivia, General Hugo Banzer overthrew his colleague Torres,

whose populist national government was supported by much of the left.

Between 1971 and 1974 Banzer consolidated a repressive regime that was

strikingly similar to those of other Latin American dictators. In 1973, the

overthrow of Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile marked the

end of one the experiences that had fed the expectations of regional

transformation. At the same time, in Uruguay, the president-elect

Bordaberry, who had come to power in 1971, defeating the leftist ―Frente

Amplio‖ in the elections, curtailed civil rights in a process that was further

expanded when Aparicio Méndez was deposed as a de facto president in

1976. In August 1975, the Peruvian general Morales Bermúdez, defeated

another general, Velasco Alvarado, who had been supported by important

leftist intellectuals and even militant former guerrillas and whose government

had undertaken an agrarian reform to the detriment of large landowners. In

March 1976, another military regime took over in Argentina, beginning a wave of repression that reached hitherto unknown levels in that country. The

military dictator’s brutal coercion imposed the nature and limits of discourse

by force, taking repression of all dissent to the extremes and silencing them

by censorship or murder.

To return to the Church, it is useful to note that the Church also

yielded to the imposed silence of the period. Many of the terms that held a

particularly important significance were re interpreted. The encyclical

Evangelii nuntiandi , promulgated by Paul VI, the Medellin Pope, redefined

in far less political terms the awkward connotations of the word ―liberation‖that had been emblematic of that Colombian conference. In many respects,

this period can be regarded as a crisis of hegemony in the Gramscian sense;

in other words, as a crisis in the habitual nature of the pact between the

dominators and the dominated, producing a tie between antagonistic forces.

An emblematic metaphor, the old dies without allowing the new to be born ,sums this up. It involves a crisis of trust that affects all parties, includes all

organs of public opinion –particularly the press—and is disseminated

throughout civil society. It implies, in the last analysis, that the ruling class no

longer performs its economic, political, and cultural function of propelling



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society as a whole forward. As a result, the ideological structure that lends the

ruling class cohesion and hegemony tends to collapse.

One should recall that the construction of hegemony is a necessary

condition for a dominant class to become a ruling class, which in turn tends

to undermine the very ideology that lent it cohesion and hegemony. Indeed,Gramsci had already pointed out that the collective awareness of the

subaltern classes should not necessarily become a revolutionary awareness

and warned that the politicization of the subaltern classes had less likelihood

of success, given that these classes did not have the same ability to reorient

and reorganize themselves as quickly as the ruling classes. In the modern

world, the most frequent examples of crisis resolution of this nature are

usually regressive; in other words, they end with the recomposition of the

previous political structure. In a situation of this nature, the dominant sectors

always have more alternatives; the recomposition of civil society; the use of

political society through the use of the state apparatus in order to quash the

reaction of the subaltern classes or to separate them from their intellectuals

by force, political attraction, or Caesar-like solutions in which providential or

charismatic men emerge. At times like these, both camps are equally strong,

yet neither has an absolute possibility of winning.

Beyond knowing whether a crisis of hegemony effectively took pace,

there is no doubt that, one way or another, the international left interpreted

the general process of politicization, together with other signs, as though it

was actually facing a crisis of this nature, particularly in Latin America.

Indeed through their media channels, critical intellectuals and militantsannounced the imminent end of capitalism, whose agony could be read in

the events of Vietnam and the replacement of the dollar standard in Europe,

the rejection of U. S. policies by significant groups of liberal intellectuals in

the United States, and the emergence of black power, heterogeneous

symptoms of discontent and other revolt movements was regarded as a

proof, in the word of the much-quoted Martí, of the poverty that corrupts

from the very entrails of the monster. For leftist militants and intellectuals, it

was significant that the American army, whit all its paraphernalia and

professional training, should have lost a war in which all its prestige as a superpower was at stake against a poorly armed groups of amateur

combatants.

For this reason, if the era can be regarded in Gramscian terms as a

crisis of hegemony, its closing coincided with the recomposition of the old

method of hegemonic domination, which foundered together with the

revolutionary expectations that had characterized its beginning. This

hypothesis allows one to posit a second point when the crisis ended: The

process of the death of the old without the birth of the new implies the end

of a future, that could have been possible, a future that had been



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meticulously outlined by successive generations of society. In this respect, the

era came to an end when this future was called a Utopia, when, in the words

of Dante, the doors of future were closed.

Translation: Suzanne D. Stephens.

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i I am hugely indebted to Raúl Antelo.

bio-policies undergoing transformation. bodies and ideas of american identity. claudia gilman. 2004

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