Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism by Pablo Calvi

Abstract

Reviewed by: Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism by Pablo Calvi Jeffrey Peer Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019 By Pablo Calvi Many celebrated writers in the history of Latin American letters found work as journalists and first published some of their best known writing in newspapers, yet the central role of literary journalism in Latin American literary history has at times escaped the notice of North American scholars. Pablo Calvi's Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism offers a broad look at that history, "noticing a few lines connecting authors and periods" (228) stretching from foundational texts like Domingo Sarmiento's Facundo (1845), [End Page 201] through the rise of the mass media at the turn of the twentieth century, up to the advent of the testimonio genre during the 1960s. By considering authors across two centuries, Calvi gives a big-picture view. He also takes some unexpected and entertaining turns and reveals the benefits of his hemispheric perspective and his background as a journalist and scholar of journalism studies. Calvi's first surprise is to begin with the little known story of a scandal in Chile in 1844. Francisco Bilbao (1823-1865) was just twenty-one when he published "Sociabilidad chilena," a "thirty-four-page Saint-Simonian-Rousseauian tirade against Spain's religious monarchy" (19) and the "monarchic mentality" (26) of post-colonial Chilean society. The article was attacked by ultra-Catholic conservatives and its author was charged with blasphemy, immorality, and sedition. But a growing liberal, intellectual middle class defended Bilbao, and his trial became a cause célèbre, with antagonistic crowds either supporting him or cheering for the prosecutor, who sought a long prison term and the destruction of all copies of the newspaper, to be burnt by "an executioner" (28). According to Bilbao's brother, the drama was comparable only to "a volcanic cataclysm," "the sudden collapse of a population [or] a lightning bolt striking at their feet" (25). Calvi's interpretation is instructive; "the trial signaled the emergence of an unprecedented audience—a nascent postcolonial readership" (20). In this distant episode of Chilean history, he finds the early signs of a liberal Latin American press, as well as a first example of "certain constants" (227) in the long history of the form he sets out to trace. According to Calvi, Latin American literary journalism would thereafter be political, committed to "democratic values, freedom of expression, the public good, justice, and truth" (227). The first line between authors that Calvi draws leads to a much more recognized figure. Domingo Sarmiento (1811-1888) published Facundo while in exile in Santiago, just a year after the Bilbao trial, from which, according to Calvi, he may have learned the lesson, "Do not write to the elites who oppose your views. Write to the masses who will support you" (55). Calvi emphasizes Facundo's allegorical referentiality (as an attack on Rosas in disguise), and how Sarmiento's claims of "irreproachable accuracy" (56) were subordinated to his political aims. "Sarmiento thus inaugurated Latin American literary journalism as a political-allegorical genre that obliquely refers to the present by narrating past events," he writes (59). But the next author Calvi turns to did not refer so obliquely. The crónicas of José Martí (1853-1895), especially his "Escenas norteamericanas, cartas desde Nueva York," openly advocated for Cuban independence and a pan-Hispanic 'Our America' opposed to the imperial ambitions of Washington. His crónicas set out to expose the ugly underbelly of North American economic and social progress. Calvi, a good storyteller, shows us Martí behind his desk at his office near Wall Street, with a fur rug on his feet in the winter, portraits on the wall of Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Simón Bolívar, eager to frustrate the machinations of US Secretary of State's James Gillespie Blaine during an ill-fated Pan-American conference in 1889. Calvi's next surprise is to turn toward Argentine journalist Juan José de Soiza Reilly (1880-1959), whose true-crime writing captivated the public imagination when Buenos Aires was undergoing dynamic urban and social expansion at the turn of the twentieth century...