Contemporary Latin American Social and Political Thought: An Anthology

Abstract

Iván Márquez has gathered in this book a wide range of excerpts from diverse Latin American contributions to social and political thought. He offers to the English-speaking audience of teachers and students a valuable sourcebook of key works by Latin American intellectuals, politicians, and activists translated into English. In his words, “this one is not only on Latin America but also from and of Latin America” (p. xii).The editor has selected a variety of records (narratives, essays, theoretical and analytical texts) concerning the different processes of social and economic transformations that have occurred in Latin America during the last four decades. The excerpts are brought together in several thematic collections: resistance and liberation, including student, indigenous, and feminist movements; liberation theology and pedagogy, under the influence of the Council of Vatican II’s proposals; dependency theory; guerrilla movements; and nationalism, democracy, and neoliberalism in the post – Cold War era and in the current era of globalization. The book collects contributions by Rigoberta Menchú, Paulo Freire, Eduardo Galeano, Raúl Prebisch, Enzo Faletto, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Ernesto Che Guevara, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, Alvaro Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Salinas de Gortari, among others. Each contribution is preceded by a brief profile of its author.Some considerations need to be made to assess this work properly. In the first place, the book lacks contextualization of the different processes mentioned. The anthology compiles sources from varied national cases, so it would have been pertinent to outline their common factors, the result of processes of continental scope, as well as their peculiarities, the product of singular, local developments. Furthermore, the term “contemporary” remains undefined in the book. If it covers the last 40 years of Latin American life, as the author states (p. xi), there are many remarkable and inexplicable absences. The Chavista experience, with its undeniable influence on certain countries of the region, should not be ignored. Evo Morales’s indigenista government, with its consequence of an exacerbated nationalism, or the successful transformation of travalhismo in Lula’s Brazil, should also not be neglected, nor, for the Argentinean case, should the permanent mark of Peronism, in all its variants, in the local political praxis. Even while the editor does not intend to offer an exhaustive catalogue of political and social expression, these particular cases (to mention only a few) deserve some space in this compilation. In sum, the book is useful as an initial approximation to a more complex and extensive universe of Latin American thought.