20th Century Latin Research Articles

Lo real maravilloso americano: justeza de un concepto en el septuagésimo aniversario de una poética 1949-2019

Este trabajo propone una relectura de la teoría de lo real maravilloso americano de Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) en su septuagésimo aniversario. Además del interés de revisión de su texto teórico en relación con las prácticas de las artes y la literatura, se planeta un análisis de sus lógicas y naturales disimilitudes con el realismo mágico, en tanto poética autónoma de excepción de la primera, en esa compleja construcción de la modernidad en América Latina en el siglo XX.

Civilization in 19th Century Latin America: The “Modernization” of Cities and the Use of Prisons as a Form of Racial Control

In the mid to late 19th century, Latin American states adopted European ideals of “civilization.” These ideals were foundational for several state projects that looked to “improve” the aesthetics of Latin American major cities, which were modelled after Paris, the epitome and embodiment of modernization. This “civilizing” reform of the cities caused the ghettoization of non-white communities, given that modern cities were conceptualized as white cities. Thus, to “Europeanize” Latin American cities, Indigenous, Black and Asian peoples needed to be contained and displaced. This was achieved through the creation of the prison system, which came to represent a new form of slavery and a state mechanism for the continuous control of racialized communities. This presentation will examine how criminality was socially constructed to justify the imprisonment of a specific “type” (or race) of person, which is evident given the prison demographics of the time. It will also analyze the theories of eugenics which provided justification for the project of civilization, which only served to worsen the social ills

Towards Global Xiqu Studies: Situating Latin America on the Trans-Pacific Circuit

Xiqu (Chinese opera) studies have been increasingly considering transnational history and practice. New scholarship has improved the understanding of trans-Pacific connections in Cantonese opera between Asia and North America. This article recovers Cuba and Peru (especially Havana and Lima) as major nodes of Cantonese opera in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, showing how it was practiced and sketching out its reception and legacy. This contributes to the elaboration of a global perspective in xiqu studies, while laying the groundwork for future critical approaches surrounding Chinese and transnational performance in later 19th and earlier 20th-century Latin America.

Jurisdictional Autonomy and the Autonomy of Law: End of Empire and the Functional Differentiation of Law in 19th-century Latin America

This contribution discusses the collapse of the Iberian Empire and the transformation of legal regimes in 19th-century Latin America. While most of the literature on this period centers on the process of state-building and the reform of legal institutions, my discussion will focus on the important changes produced in the form of law according to Luhmann’s theory of functional differentiation. The main argument is that systems theory can provide a re-evaluation of the history of law in the 19th and 20th centuries if one focuses on the idea of the autonomy of law. I argue that this way of reading the functioning of law is analogous to the legal historical re-evaluation of early-modern Iberian legal regimes through the idea of jurisdictional autonomy. Taken together both ways of understanding autonomy in legal observation direct our attention to shifts in law that go beyond the question of empire and nation-state building.

Infancia e historia: Actos de la memoria en Dios tenía miedo de Vanessa Núñez Handal y Mañana nunca lo hablamos de Eduardo Halfon

This essay studies the traumatic encounter between childhood and History in Vanessa Núñez Handal's Dios tenía miedo (El Salvador, 2011) and Eduardo Halfon's Mañana nunca lo hablamos (Guatemala, 2011), by exploring the relationship between memory and history as a bi-directional corrective exchange. Both texts represent narratives produced by authors who were born between the 1960s and 1980s and grew up during some of the most radical decades of 20th-century Latin American history. As opposed to the children of parents disappeared by the terror of the State—who narrate from a point of irretrievable loss—, authors like Núñez Handal and Halfon turn to writing in order to exorcise what Gabriele Schwab calls "unprocessed toxic knowledge" and/or "unwitting complicity" (28, 34). As adults, they are driven back to the past by inquisitiveness, anxiety, guilt, shame, or the pain produced by their latent affective memories and the silence surrounding them. Fusing together autobiographical elements, memory, history, and invention, they create a fictional fabric, which allows them to take a different look at the past in order to understand it and themselves. This questioning of the past that returns and haunts is also a questioning of a subject and a subjectivity in the present. Memory work in these texts is a vehicle for reflection on History, a way of taking a position regarding the authors' social class, and a mode of approaching the past as class experience.

Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age by Ericka Beckman

Reviewed by: Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age by Ericka Beckman Alejandro Mejías-López KEY WORDS Ericka Beckman, Alejandro Mejias-Lopez, Capital Fictions, Latin American Literature, Political Economy, Global Capitalism, Export Age, Export Reverie, Modernity, Modernization, Neocolonialism, Modernismo, José Martí, Rubén Darío, Julián Del Casal, José Asunción Silva, Julián Martel, José Enrique Rodó, José Eustasio Rivera, Gabriel García Márquez beckman, ericka. Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013. xxix + 254 pp. Traditional categories of literary periodization have been largely displaced as the main organizing principle of our thinking about 19th-century Latin American literature. Increasingly, we have come to read literary texts through conceptual lenses and frameworks from other disciplines, from anthropology and sociology to philosophy and political science. In this book, Ericka Beckman brings another discipline, political economy, to the table in an attempt to offer a new periodization for the turn of the 20th century (xxi). Building on Eric Hobsbawm (The Age of Capital) and Doris Sommer (Foundational Fictions), Beckman’s Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age encourages us to think Latin America’s cultural history and modernity on its own terms. Rather than passive (and premodern) objects of capitalism and empire, her focus on the “Export Age” presents Latin American liberals as subjects of the region’s modernization process, however flawed it ended up being, and Latin American writers as fully engaged in making sense of global economic dynamics through their writings. Beckman’s study aims to provide us with a model for understanding literature and economics as deeply interconnected. On the one hand, the avatars of capitalist global development in the late 19th century were not a mere context for literary texts, but central to even the most disinterested literature. On the other hand, [End Page 345] Beckman reminds us, following Karl Polanyi, that political economy’s “capacity to imagine worlds that do not yet exist” (xx) generate an abundance of fictions essential to the functioning of the capitalist machine. For Beckman, then, “capital fictions” are not only those produced about, but also by capitalism so that “when we turn to the study of specific texts and genres of the Export Age, the term acquires additional meaning in reference to works of the imagination whose value resides not so much in their truth or falsity, but rather in their capacity to seize on the fictitious dimension of capitalist economy itself” (xx). In this light, Latin American fictions are not external to, but rather function within the capitalist system. In her book, then, Beckman sets out to explore how modern capitalism and its fictions developed in the peripheries of the system according to their own concrete conditions. As she rightly puts it, “the idea that Latin America lies somehow outside of or anterior to modern capitalist formations is itself a ‘capital fiction,’ or fiction of the first order … the time has come, I think, to reposition this region’s cultural production at the vanguard, and not the rear guard, of the history of global capital” (xviii). The book begins with an introduction in which Beckman lays out the main argument and theoretical framework of the book, a new historicist and Marxist approach to cultural analysis. The subsequent two parts of the book, “Boom” and “Bust,” are meant to evoke “Latin American engagements with global capital as permanently volatile and uneven” (xxiii). According to Beckman, a focus on the Export Age is particularly helpful for illuminating these broader cycles, as this period was marked by both moments of hopeful utopian liberalism and dystopic moments of realization that the liberal modernizing dream would never come to pass, moments often provoked by actual economic crises. Part one, “Boom,” consists of two chapters organized around the directionality of commerce: production/export and consumption/import. In the first, and perhaps the best chapter of the book, Beckman does a remarkable job of analyzing, through a variety of literary and nonliterary texts, how capitalist fictions of modernization worked in Latin America. Placing them in the context of dominant economic theories such as David Ricardo’s influential model...

José Mariátegui's East-South Decolonial Experiment

Common notions of comparative philosophy tend to be strongly configured by the East-West axis. This essay suggests ways of seeing Latin American liberation philosophy as a form of comparative philosophy and an important Latin American thinker as being relevant for East-West political philosophy. The essay focuses on the Peruvian activist and intellectual, José Mariátegui, who is widely regarded to have been a leading Marxist, liberatory, and decolonial figure in 20th century Latin America. Like many “Third World” intellectuals of the interwar years, Mariátegui had an interest in decolonization struggles in Asia and wrote with some consistency on this subject and in ways that bear significantly upon key themes in his political theory. Since very little of this has received commentary, this essay begins a discussion of Mariátegui's decolonial experimentation with ideas about Asia, decolonization, and indigenous cultural forms, like those of the Incas and Confucians. After some preliminary discussion of Eurocentrism, postcolonial thought, and decolonial thought, attention is focused on Mariátegui's East-South geography of liberation, heuristic use of Chinese revolutionary politics, and Sinified hermeneutic for conceptualizing the consciousness of the Peruvian indigenous, a central element of his political theory.

Three Waves of Populism in Latin America

Contemporary political regimes in Venezuela and Bolivia led by late Hugo Châvez (now by his successor Nicolas Maduro) and Evo Morales are considered by foreign and Russian scholars as part of the third wave of populism. In the 20th century Latin America already witnessed two waves of populism which coincided with significant political transitions, namely a transition from oligarchy to mass politics accompanied by implementation of import substitution industrialization policies, and a transition from authoritarian rule to democracy during the third wave of democratization which triggered neoliberal reforms inspired by Washington Consensus. This article presents common characteristics of Latin American populist regimes that emerged in different historical periods which help identify the origins as well as distinctive features of Venezuelan and Bolivian political regimes. It is stated that the Châvez and Morales left populist regimes resemble classic populist regimes in that they rely on incendiary anti-establishment discourse. Therefore, left populist regimes are characterized by high levels of polarization as well as weak institutionalization and class or indigenous orientation. Election of left populist leaders may lead to institutional deadlock, uneven playing field and transition to competitive authoritarianism.

Truth, History and Myth in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

Latin American writers learnt from Borges' fiction how to assimilate innovations of European modernism, thus becoming fully aware that were part of that movement, spite of their geographical or cultural marginality. And, as Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria demonstrates subtle essay dedicated to problems of contemporary Latin American novel, Borges was also one who taught those writers, especially Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, how they were and at same time were not part of Spanish literary tradition, with test being Cervantes' Don Quixote.2 A few years later, Carpentier offered perfect lesson transformation of Latin American history into fiction. This was new demonstration of how early American historiography and novel were linked from their very beginning, with linchpin being Cervantes' novel. (Garcia Marquez himself, addressing these issues his interview with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, El olor de la guayaba [The Scent of GuavaJ, talked about the supernatural elements that form part of our daily life and that the Caribbean is different world whose first work of magical literature is The Diary of Christopher Columbus, book which tells of fabulous plants and mythological worlds.3) Thus it became clear that modern Latin American fiction mainly represents search for non-essential kind of essentialism, search for origins that are non-determining and stand precariously on break with past. And this was very first lesson to be learned from Borges' complicated and insidious rewriting of Quijote (Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote being, of course, perfect example). Other versions of Cervantes' narrator appeared field of 20th century Latin American novels: Melquiades and his manuscript One Hundred Years of Solitude or various textual plays with status of writing Yo el Supremo or character of Platino. They represent, collectively and individually, turns to second most important character created by Cervantes Don Quixote: not Sancho Panza, but author/authors fiction. By insisting on these elements, Latin American reading of Cervantes' masterpiece uncouples creation from any essence that gives text an ontologically determined or revealing order. Because Echevarria is right: the second lesson to be learnt from Latin American rewritings of Quijote is that Cervantes as figure of author is more important than Don Quijote character, whereas Spanish readings Don Quijote is more important.4Garcia Marquez' s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude was published 1967 and was considered multi-layered book, new version oi Don Quixote, written Latin American key, as Carlos Fuentes demonstrated well-known essay that analyzed mechanisms of a second reading. The book is, on first examination, long, episodic and sometimes violent story of Buendia family who establish town called Macondo, somewhere (South American) jungle - or perhaps even out of known world. After century of incredible stories (and histories) of characters and of their fictional world, Macondo is destroyed by wind, thus existence of this family and of their town is ended. Of all contemporary Latin American novels, none has captured public imagination more than One Hundred Years of Solitude, book selling tens of millions of copies all over world. And, as D. P. Gallagher points out, in Latin America it appears, remarkably, to appeal to most people who can read.5 Nevertheless academics also praised novel highly. One possible explanation for such phenomenon may be that One Hundred Years of Solitude can be read on many levels and interpreted from various points of view, following example of Cervantes' Don Quixote. First there is superficial level on which Garcia Marquez' s novel sustains an obvious appeal: town of Macondo that author had been inventing for many years (traces of it being identifiable his short fiction, rightly called by Mario Vargas Llosa veritable prehistory of Macondo6) is an extraordinary place, populated by extraordinary people whose antics appeal on first reading, sometimes lending impression that novel is full of caricatures. …

Documents of 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art

Documents of 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art

19th Century Latin America Imperialism from a Global Perspective

Abstract19th century Latin America was subjected to imperialist aggression from both the European nations and the United States. The form of imperialism, however, changed over the course of the century, with the ‘traditional’ imperialism of the colonial period giving way to the ‘gentlemanly’ imperialism of the early to mid‐19th century. By the century’s end, a ‘new’ imperialism emerged noted for its association with the growing world capitalist economy, especially the need for the capitalist nations of Europe and the United States to acquire new markets for their goods, cheaper sources of labor, and greater access to raw materials.

How Women and Illiterates Shaped Education Outcomes in 20th Century Latin America

Is there a direct relationship between the characteristics of the electoral franchise and outcomes in education? This paper examines how voting institutions affect school enrollment in 20th century Latin America. We find that higher levels of political competition and electoral participation engender a positive effect on total education enrollment, albeit with quiet varied results for different levels of enrollment. But not all participation is created equal. While women's suffrage increases tertiary and secondary enrollment, the enfranchisement of illiterate populations increases primary enrollment.

Que tipo de nações percebemos na América Latina do século XIX?

The article aims to analyze the way one can consider, within discourse, the idea of nation and State in 19th century Latin America. Indigenous peoples play a central role from the perspective of the groups of power, be it as a glorious past or as a “present” that reflects the “backwardness” of the countries.

Political competition, electoral participation and public finance in 20th century Latin America

Rational choice models predict that political competition and political participation have opposite effects on the size of government. We investigate these theories using data from a panel of 18 Latin American countries during the 20th century. Our research builds evidence for the prediction that reforms enhancing political competition tend to limit the size of government, while reforms increasing political participation tend to increase the size of government. Furthermore, we find that reforms which remove literacy requirements from franchise laws are associated with governmental expansion, while changes in women's suffrage laws have no impact on the size of government. Our findings demonstrate the empirical relevance of the distinction between political competition and participation.

Religion, Politics and Law in 19th Century Latin America

Religion, Politics and Law in 19th Century Latin America

Linaje y fortuna en una zona de frontera. Felipe Barragán y su familia, 1713-1801

<p>Felipe Fernández Barragán fue un rico comerciante de provincia en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII. Gracias a él, su padre y su hijo, la familia Fernández Barragán destacó como integrante de la elite de la zona oriental de la provincia de San Luis Potosí. Su padre, Gabriel Rufino, puso los cimientos de la fortuna familiar y José Florencio, heredero varón de Felipe, disfrutó de una posición social destacada en el ámbito virreinal. Su estudio ejemplifica el esquema de tres generaciones propuesto para familias notables en América Latina en el siglo XIX, aunque como una elite familiar de transición.</p>

Child delinquency and the prophylaxis of crime in early 20th-century Latin America

A fin de ahondar en la vision que predominaba a principios del siglo XX sobre el maltrato infantil, sus efectos sobre el comportamiento de los jovenes y las estrategias para prevenir la delincuencia juvenil se ofrece una sintesis en ingles de la conferencia La delincuencia infantil y la profilaxis del crimen , presentada en 1929 por el pediatra e higienista social colombiano Jorge Bejarano Martinez y se resaltan sus teorias sobre el abuso y la desatencion infantil, y la prevencion del crimen. Mediante citas del texto original de 88 paginas, esta sintesis presenta los puntos de vista de Bejarano sobre las condiciones sociales que el consideraba cruciales en la etiologia de la delincuencia infantil en Colombia (la falta de mecanismos sociales de proteccion y de oportunidades educacionales para los ninos, la pobreza en el hogar, el trabajo infantil, el abandono, y el abuso y la desatencion de los ninos). Aunque en Colombia aun subsisten problemas de fondo similares, se han logrado avances en la proteccion de los ninos contra el abuso y la desatencion para prevenir la delincuencia en etapas posteriores de su vida. Esta conferencia demuestra que Bejarano fue un precursor de estos esfuerzos en America Latina y ofrece elementos sobre los origenes de las estrategias actuales para reducir la violencia juvenil.

Making the Bilingual Connection: Students from North Carolina Receive Multicultural Training in Veracruz

Making the Bilingual Connection: Students from North Carolina Receive Multicultural Training in Veracruz

Political Competition, Electoral Participation and Public Finance in 20th Century Latin America

Rational choice models predict that political competition and political participation have opposite effects on the size of government. We investigate these theories using data from a panel of 18 Latin American countries during the 20th century. Our research builds evidence for the prediction that reforms enhancing political competition tend to limit the size of government, while reforms increasing political participation tend to increase the size of government. Furthermore, we find that reforms which remove literacy requirements from franchise laws are associated with governmental expansion, while changes in women's suffrage laws have no impact on the size of government. Our findings demonstrate the empirical relevance of the distinction between political competition and participation.

Latin American Theatre Today 2005 in Connecticut

FALL2005 135 LatinAmerican Theatre Today 2005 in Connecticut TimothyG.Compton The sixth edition of Latin American Theatre Today was the first held away from the University of Kansas. The University of Connecticut hosted the event and provided its setting, Laurietz Seda organized it, gathered the resources and staff, and made sure that things ran smoothly. George Woodyard, who obviously relished his role as non-organizer, gave the Festival’s only keynote address the first evening, delivering the University of Connecticut “Luis Eyzaguirre Lecture” which he entitled “One Hundred Years of Plenitude: Key Moments in 20th Century Latin American theatre.” He identified and commented on what he considers to be ten key moments or forces in twentieth-century Latin American theatre, some of which were events (such as the 1968 Festival de Manizales), some were movements (such as the Teatro del Pueblo phenomenon in Buenos Aires) and others were people with huge impacts on theatre (such as Florencio Sánchez, Rodolfo Usigli, Seki Sano and Eugenio Barba). Mornings featured presentations of ponencias in concurrent sessions running five-deep, so some 100 scholars presented with representation from numerous countries. Many presentations dealt with the major theme of the conference, “Traducción, transgénero y transnacionalismo.” Early afternoons featured playwright roundtables with multiple playwrights each afternoon . These included Eduardo Rovner, Cristina Escofet, Nora Glickman, Héctor Levy-Daniel from Argentina; Frank and Reynaldo Disla from the Dominican Republic; Roberto Ramos-Perea,AravindAdyanthaya and Carlos Canales from Puerto Rico; Guillermo Schmidhuber,Antonio Zúñiga and Estela Leñero from Mexico; Migdalia Cruz, a Puerto Rican from New York; and Guillermo Gómez Peña, a Mexican now based in San Francisco. They spoke about their relationship with theatre and society, their work and fielded questions . Many of them personified the conference theme of transnationalism. 136 LATINAMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW Late afternoons featured workshops on translation or performance, “lecturas dramatizadas” of plays recently written by Estela Leñero, Carlos Canales and Nora Glickman, a live interview with Roberto Ramos-Perea, and screening of a film documentary. Two performances occurred nightly, with a bonus afternoon puppet show on April 6. The schedule of organized events ran from 8 AM to 10 PM, entirely on the University of Connecticut campus, which had beautiful facilities for all events. Plays at theatre festivals tend to be performed by small casts with minimal sets and technical requirements, and seek to break new ground in their content or technique. These traits largely describe the whole of the nine performances of this festival. Four of the plays were monologues. Four others had casts of two. The play with the largest cast had four actors. About half of the performances did not have a traditional story line and about the same number featured non-traditional visual imagery.Almost all lasted about an hour, with the longest lasting about 80 minutes. Four performances took place entirely in Spanish, one entirely in Portuguese, three almost entirely in English, and one had portions in English and others in Spanish. The highlight of the performances for me wasAravindAdyanthaya´s Prometeo encadenado, which he wrote, directed and performed himself. This was an “escritura dramatizada,” in which the set consisted almost entirely of a laptop computer on a desk with a chair and a large screen onto which was projected what Adyanthaya input to the computer. The major action of the play was just that, the inputting of data into a computer, which sounds rather dull, but in fact the audience seemed entertained and riveted to the monologue throughout. At first, when the only action was watching the performer type, the audience seemed to chuckle at even simple typographical errors. Perhaps the amusement stemmed from our surprise at seeing something so mundane as processing words transformed into theatre. Later the play become interactive with the audience, as Adyanthaya told the story of Prometheus, then interacted brilliantly with an audience volunteer, then went into the audience himself and finally led the audience in chants and word plays. Although some of this sounds silly, in fact this play examined several subjects in rather profound ways. One of the most striking was a profound look into the nature of symbols, and particularly letters...