La estela de la pluma: Cultura impresa e intelectuales en Centroamérica durante los siglos XIX y XX

Abstract

This is an important book by one of Central America’s most innovative historians. Molina Jiménez has published 8 books and coedited 16 others. Starting in the mid-1990s, he emerged as one of Central America’s most creative practitioners of the “new cultural history.” His work is greatly influenced by the latter generations of the French Annales school of history. Here Molina addresses the broad theme of the relationship between modern print culture and intellectuals in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicara-gua. He argues that intellectuals and their printed products — from essays in newspapers to books — must be contextualized in the broader cultural history of the region and its distinct national and regional cultural microhistories.The latter contexts are particularly evident in the evolution of a number of problems in the region’s historiography: print culture, schooling, literacy, the breadth and depth of intellectual circles, the construction of public life, and the commodification of artistic production. In analyzing the articulation between print culture and intellectuals within these microhistorical contexts, argues Molina Jiménez, we must also pay attention to urban and rural sociabilities, themselves complicated by gender and ethnicity. Molina Jiménez’s book is a landmark contribution to modern Central American historical scholarship, especially for specialists, despite the fact that the structure of the book and its own history in some ways detract from its effectiveness promoted by excellent and evocative writing. Readers unfamiliar with the economic, social, and political history of the region will find this a difficult book, as it assumes knowledge of those contexts. Its historiographical objective is to challenge the hegemony of socioeconomic narratives, and here Molina Jiménez generally succeeds.However, a different organizational structure might have presented a more robust challenge to the existing historiography. This may have proved difficult, since all the essays originated in other publishing contexts and with different scholarly objectives, in Central America and elsewhere. This in itself does not always make for the kinds of problems I will discuss in a moment, but here they creep into the latter part of this otherwise magnificent monograph.The book is divided into two parts. The book finds its high mark in part 1, with five chapters dedicated to print culture in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua between 1821 and the end of the nineteenth century. References to Guatemala and Honduras are few. This print culture is distinguished by what above I called “microhistories of culture.” This is the best part of the book. Not only do we acquire a substantial breadth of comparative data and insight for the countries scrutinized; it offers ample methodological ideas for approaching comparable documentation for Guatemala and Honduras in the future. Others who might consider the cultural history of these countries will have to ground their own work in Molina Jiménez’s pioneering labor.The second part of the book is dedicated to a consideration of a number of key “intellectuals,” from Maximo Soto Hall and Salomon de la Selva to Severo Martínez Pelaez and his contemporaries. It consists of five chapters. The most general issue addressed via the individual chapters in part 2 is the extent to which certain books and periodicals by particular novelists, poets, journalists, and historians have been misread and misinterpreted. This has occurred because critics, commentators, and propagandists have disregarded the region’s printed cultural and social history.Molina Jiménez’s main target is the intellectual historiography or literary criticism of the 1980s and 1990s, a period when intellectual production from the early decades of the twentieth century (critical to the national narratives often also referenced in the monograph) was often reprinted by university presses and debated through the lens of social science discourses of recent decades. Molina Jiménez’s objective in the nuanced discussions of these five chapters is to show the extent to which the interpretive vacuum generated by the more established socioeconomic historiography has hampered fuller understanding of intellectual life in general and in the particular cases studied.While the book’s prologue projects its general themes, a specific introduction to the second part would have made its particular arguments about the intellectuals and issues more effective. Since we lack that kind of introduction to the second part, the individual essays — while interesting and often fascinating — often lack consistent connections to the arguments about printed culture and cultural history of part 1. The chapter epilogues of the second part (which are excellent fixtures in part 1) do help present readers with the connections to the book’s most general argument about printed culture and intellectuals. However, they do so after the fact, and this detracts from an otherwise excellent book.