An Interview with Juan E. Pivel Devoto*

Abstract

[Editorial Note. The following interview features a scholar whom probably many of our readers will have difficulty identifying. Though essentially self-taught, Juan E. Pivel Devoto is nevertheless a key figurethe key figure-in the development of a modern historical discipline in Uruguay. He first set out to establish the case for a separate Uruguayan national identity on the basis of documentary evidence, as distinct from patriotic rhetoric. In his subsequent history of Uruguayan political parties (to which he points in the interview as the work that has given him the most satisfaction), he demonstrated that the history of the national period could be written on a serious, objective level rather than in partisan polemics. Later still, in his Ratices coloniales de la Revolucion Oriental de 1811 (though he does not emphasize the work), he pointed the way to economic and social analysis of his country's past. Apart from writing history and playing a role in publishing historical documents and the works of others, Pivel Devoto compiled a remarkable record in museum management, a field in which he was, again, largely self-taught. And, as in the case of so many other Latin American intellectuals, these accomplishments were joined to an active political career. Pivel Devoto's identification with the Nacional or Blanco party, and with that party's long-time leader, Luis Alberto de Herrera, complicated matters for him in some respects, as Herrera's concept of Uruguayan nationalism made him a neutralist in World War II, and there were those who sought to tar him with allegations of nazi-fascism; this, in turn, hurt the image of Pivel Devoto, and was one reason why the national university did not open its doors to him. Nevertheless, toward the end of his career, and especially from the 1970s, he came to play a prominent and widely respected political role, first as an outspoken critic of Uruguay's lapse into military dictatorship and then as an educational administrator in the restored democratic regime of Julio Maria Sanguinetti, a political foe but personal friend.