Twentieth-century Latin America Research Articles

Introduction: Melmoth's Global Afterlives

In this introduction to the special issue, the editors read Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and its circuitous afterlives through the lens of recent, revised critical understandings of globalgothic. Driven by its striking depiction of evil, its eccentric narrative structure, and its atmospheric intensity, Melmoth the Wanderer's cultural impact reverberated across nineteenth- and twentieth-century literatures and visual media, an influence which continues to evolve to this day. Significantly, for a text preoccupied with the problematics of translation, transcription, and transliteration, Melmoth's network of global influence is fraught with anomalies and complications. From its first appearance in nineteenth-century Russia in French translation to its rediscovery in twentieth-century Latin America, the global afterlives of Melmoth expose the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of transnational textuality, both in Maturin's era and our own. The introduction ends with an overview of the essays collected in this volume – the first scholarly study dedicated to tracing the many afterlives of Maturin's Melmoth.

Beyond Bananas

Abstract From 1926 to 1974, the United Fruit Company operated the Lancetilla Experiment Station near Tela, Honduras. As a laboratory and botanical garden where one of the world's largest living collections of tropical fruits could be found, it stood in apparent contrast to the vast banana monocultures of the surrounding area. While United Fruit's infamous plantations depended on the application of pesticides and chemical knowledge to produce a single commodity crop, its Lancetilla Experiment Station pursued a broad research program oriented toward agricultural diversification. This essay examines the history of Lancetilla to explore the company's sponsorship of science and the multiple, shifting meanings of “diversification” within this prototypical transnational agribusiness. The history of experimentation at Lancetilla reveals a range of contested visions of economic development in twentieth-century Latin America, and it is a history that has left surprising traces in both local Honduran landscapes and the face of global agribusiness today. Ultimately, by introducing oil palm to Central America, United Fruit's crop diversification project served to replace one monoculture with another.

The Ball of La Laguna

The Ball of La Laguna was an infamous cross-dressing ball that ended in a police raid, media scandal, and public uproar on the night of January 31, 1959, in Lima, Peru. Hundreds of maricón (queer) couples attended the ball sporting masculine and feminine attire — unaware of the moral panic that would soon unfold across the city. How did class, race, and gender inequalities shape La Laguna? How did they shape heteronormative reactions to the ball? How can we understand the meanings of (homo)sexuality and cross-dressing at the ball? This essay answers these questions by conducting a content analysis of five newspapers, two magazines, a cartoon, an invitation to the ball, a video advertisement, and three oral history interviews. The Ball of La Laguna reveals that the class, race, and gender inequalities that have structured Peruvian society since colonial times also structured maricón social worlds and the policing of their communities. All attendees experienced homophobic treatment in the aftermath of the ball, but Indigeneity, femininity, and a lower-class status compounded these inequalities. La Laguna enables us to describe maricón social worlds in mid-twentieth-century Lima from an intersectional class, race, and gender perspective, which contributes to the growing literature on cross-dressing practices in twentieth-century Latin America and, more broadly, to the hemispheric turn in queer studies.

Shifting Patterns of Antisemitism in Latin America: Xenophobia, Exclusion, and Inclusion

AbstractThis article analyzes several patterns of antisemitism in twentieth-century Latin America. It identifies historical moments when carriers of social and political ideas projected negative images of Jews, sometimes pushing anti-Jewish policies and at times leading violent actions against Jews. Thus, antisemitism served to mobilize in defense of national identity; as a reaction to Jewish peddlers perceived as a threat to national economies; as a basis for the generalized rejection of “undesirable refugees” during World War II and the Holocaust; and as a Cold War phenomenon, along with anticommunism and neo-Nazism. Like other forms of xenophobia, antisemitism was grounded in prejudice and the demonization of a supposed enemy rather than being based on verified evidence. Analysis suggests that antisemitism has been deeply rooted in Latin America and has manifested over time with changing historical and social constellations. At the same time, while Judeophobic prejudices and actions have been intimidating and have at times precluded the legal immigration of Jews, antisemitism has rarely become dominant or led to systemic social discrimination, massive expulsion, or mass genocide, unlike in Europe.

Foucauldian Biopolitics and Nation Making in General Juan Velasco’s Peru, 1968-1975

This brief academic article examines the military government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru from 1968 through 1975 via the lens of Michel Foucauld’s foundational concepts of biopolitics and biopower. It analyzes a variety of primary and secondary sources, including legal documents from Velasco’s government, state propaganda posters, economic appendixes, historiographical analyses from the time, and other important documents. By examining this varied set of documents, we are able to get a better understanding of how biopower was utilized by Velasco’s government, as best seen through the discourse they maintained, to legitimize their undemocratic hold on power. This comprehensive research study also allows us to apply basic concepts of state power, authority, discourse, and biopolitics to other pivotal moments in twentieth-century Latin America.

Necropolítica del himen naturalista: virginidad, excedentes de vida y poder soberano en Santa (1903), El hijo del Estado (1884) y El himen en México (1885)

Sexual practices disassociated from the intimate family milieu and its reproductive futures were considered a betrayal against collective national wealth in fin-de-siècle Mexican Naturalism. One of the best-known scenes of the punishment for delitos de incontinencia (sexual incontinency) appears in Santa (1903), a representative urban novel by Federico Gamboa. Santa was perhaps the most widely read fiction about prostitution in early twentieth-century Latin America. At the same time, it had a moralistic agenda that combined medico-legal and religious discourse to stigmatize premarital sex. The novel was not only a literary rendition of sex trafficking in modern Mexico City, it was also a portrayal of the defamation endured by plebeian pregnant women, whose loss of virginity outside marriage left them exposed to sexual exploitation. With an emphasis on the scene of Santa’s miscarriage, this article analyzes the interruption of gestation as a punishment of a sovereign male narrator against the young woman’s premarital sex with her lover, the soldier Marcelino Beltrán. Likewise, I contextualize the novelist’s fixation with virginity and the hymen through a dialogue with a series of texts on obstetrics and legal medicine, which includes the medical treatise El hímen en México (1885) [The Hymen in Mexico] by the pharmacist Francisco A. Flores and the novel El hijo del Estado (1884) [The Son of the State] by Hilarión Frías y Soto.

Precios y valores: nuevas miradas sobre el problema del costo de vida en América Latina durante el siglo xx

Objective/Context: This work considers how historians have investigated the problem of the cost of living in twentieth-century Latin America. Their investigations have collectively expanded our sense of how social groups in different historical moments have imagined, calculated, and coped with the cost of living. Methodology: The article draws on a wide corpus of research from fields such as economic and labor history, as well as the study of the welfare state, nationalist movements, gender relations, consumption, and poverty. It incorporates findings from various case studies, including the author’s research on the First Peronism (1943-1955) in Argentina. Originality: The text identifies and explores three major tendencies in recent work on the cost of living in Latin America: the creation of new forms of social scientific expertise and knowledge about quotidian economic life; the political contests among a wide range of actors over living standards, inflation, and related concerns; and the impact of mass consumption on cost-of-living struggles and conceptions of social wellbeing. Conclusions: The article situates the studies in this dossier within a wider historiographical context while also pointing to future avenues of inquiry and cost of living issues that merit closer attention.

Monitor, Produce, Distribute: Chile’s Battle Against Inflation and Scarcity, 1932-1973

Objective/Context: This article reconstructs the struggle that consumers and the state waged to contain inflation and consumer scarcity in mid-twentieth-century Chile. Methodology: Drawing on records from Chile’s Ministry of Economy and print media, it first assesses how in the 1930s, mobilized consumers and Chile’s national price control office worked together to create an expectation that a strong interventionist state could prevent inflation and shortages by monitoring and regulating the speculative behavior of private merchants. Then, by examining the writings of leading economic thinkers of the postwar era, it details how the state’s understanding of rising prices and scarcity increasingly turned to structural matters of economic production and distribution, particularly in Chile’s rural economy. Originality: While most scholarship on inflation and scarcity in twentieth-century Latin America tends to either focus on the intellectual debate surrounding shortages and price volatility or on the grassroots political experience with these problems, I show how interactions between consumers and the state created a paradox. On the one hand, consumers came to expect that the state had an immediate duty and capacity to minimize short-term economic hardship. But on the other hand, by continuing to identify inflation and scarcity as problems driven by individual acts, many consumers, including some of the political left, lost faith in the state’s long-term planning capacity. Conclusions: The article concludes by showing how in the early 1970s, during a period of heightened class conflict, the state’s embrace of a longer-term, structural approach to inflation and scarcity drove a wedge between Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular (up) government and its political base.

Review: Selling Black Brazil: Race, Nation, and Visual Culture in Salvador, Bahia, by Anadelia A. Romo, and Modernity in Black and White: Art and Image, Race and Identity in Brazil, 1890–1945, by Rafael Cardoso

Review: <i>Selling Black Brazil: Race, Nation, and Visual Culture in Salvador, Bahia</i>, by Anadelia A. Romo, and <i>Modernity in Black and White: Art and Image, Race and Identity in Brazil, 1890–1945</i>, by Rafael Cardoso

Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America by Carolina Sá Carvalho (review)

Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America by Carolina Sá Carvalho (review)

Making the “Citizen Constitution”: Popular Participation in the Brazilian Transition to Democracy, 1985–1988

AbstractThis article examines popular participation in the making of Brazil's 1988 post-authoritarian “Citizen Constitution.” In 1987, Brazilians submitted 122 popular amendments (emendas populares) supported by over 12 million signatures to the National Constituent Assembly (1987–88). As this article contends, this extraordinary experiment in popular constitution-making problematizes notions of Brazil's transition from authoritarian to democratic rule as the most conservative of those that swept Latin America at the end of the Cold War. The popular amendments emerged amid a nationwide campaign for popular participation that saw millions of Brazilians participate in letter-writing campaigns, protests, and debates over the constitution that carried over into the halls of the Constituent Assembly itself. I argue that the popular amendments countered the arbitrary authoritarianism of the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship (1964–85) with a constitutionalism in which everyday Brazilians would safeguard democracy through popular participation in government. While only partially consolidated, this vision offered diverse marginalized groups an opportunity to claim full citizenship in Brazil's nascent democracy, especially in ways that more overtly addressed issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and disability. This article thus shows that far from being the exclusive province of political elites, everyday people meaningfully shaped the constitutional restorations in late twentieth-century Latin America.

Rómulo Betancourt: His Historical Personality and the Genesis of Modern Democracy in Venezuela

Rómulo Betancourt: His Historical Personality and the Genesis of Modern Democracy in Venezuela

Why Chuño Matters: Rethinking the History of Technology in Latin America.

This article examines the over-attention historians pay to innovation and high technology compared to local production through a brief review of the historiography of technology in twentieth-century Latin America. Following Svante Lindqvist's approach to "technological landscapes," it argues that the current history of technology in the region favors change over continuity, thus perpetuating a modernist and industrial perspective of technological dynamics. Based on a case study of chuño (frozendehydrated potatoes) production and consumption on the Altiplano of Peru and Bolivia, this article shows how historians could incorporate local and long-standing knowledge and use into the history-of-technology canon.

Land without Masters: Agrarian Reform and Political Change under Peru's Military Government

In 1969, a group of self-claimed radical military officers led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado, aided by able technocrats and a favorable hemispheric context, unleashed the last comprehensive agrarian reform of twentieth-century Latin America. After a coup and through a combination of an allegedly emancipatory discourse and authoritarian means, the purportedly radical generals aimed to transform the material foundations of the country by dismantling the hacienda system and empowering the campesinado, the disenfranchised mass of rural Indigenous peasants in the countryside. Until the publication of Land without Masters, the entangled history of this agrarian reform remained largely unaddressed by historians. Deploying a combination of methodologies—including regional archive research, oral histories, and visual analysis, among others—Anna Cant offers us a comprehensive analysis of the precedents, making, unmaking, and legacies of General Velasco's foremost experiment. Grounding her analysis on three distinctive regions of Peru, Cant convincingly shows how the reach and scope of the military revolution (an oxymoron) presented both redemptive promises and demands of subordination that produced clashing understandings of what the reform meant for the state, the campesinado, and the many in between. Land without Masters vividly reconstructs the tensions, conflicts, and enduring memories around the agrarian reform as an unfulfilled and yet truly transformative historical episode in the history of Peru and Latin America.The book's structure benefits the clarity of Cant's manifold arguments. After a compelling introduction that outlines the place of the Peruvian agrarian reform within the history of Latin America's political transformations and the importance of a regional or subnational perspective for understanding, testing, and deconstructing national narratives, the first chapter, “The History of the Land Question in Peru,” offers one of the best genealogies of this country's rural struggles—from the deep origins of colonial dispossession and displacement to the number of twentieth-century proposals for reinventing and recasting the “land question.” Chapter 2, “SINAMOS: Promoting the Revolution in the Regions,” introduces one of the book's central actors: the National System of Support of Social Mobilization, Velasco's propaganda engine for his peculiar revolution. An acronym that conveyed the central message of the agrarian reform (sin amos, without masters), SINAMOS and its regional networks allowed Velasco's reform to have an everyday presence in nearly every corner of the country—although this presence was remarkably contested. “Education for Social Change: The Making of the Campesino Citizen,” the third chapter, highlights the importance of educational and political literacies to agrarian reform. In promoting unprecedented forms of education, however, the military regime also nourished regional forms of dissent. The following chapter, “The Agrarian Reform in Public Discourse,” discusses one of the most intriguing features of this process: a mass media discourse, deeply rhetorical and highly visual, on reform's envisioned impact. Despite this discourse's hegemony, the public presentation of the regime's agrarian visions also engendered regional opposition. Finally, “The Agrarian Reform in Historical Memory,” the last substantial chapter, joins an emerging transdisciplinary literature focused on explaining how the agrarian reform is remembered as both a truly transformative experience and a massive example of failed state sociopolitical, cultural, and economic intervention.Cant's achievements are vast and profound. Unveiling the cultural dimensions of the agrarian reform, not only as a source of renewed national historical narratives but also as an educational endeavor that promoted genuinely radical forms of literacy, provides a new understanding of this process. The regional sensibility of the text is very vivid, and nearly every chapter effortlessly moves from the national to the subnational, giving readers a remarkably compelling ethnographic texture. The use of usually overlooked military sources—such as Actualidad Militar, the Peruvian army's institutional journal—is formidable. The interviews with historical actors pivotal in the making of the reform also provide depth and context to many of the ideas discussed throughout the book. Without major shortcomings, the book does leave two intriguing points for further research. Cant pays little attention to the twentieth-century origins of rural communities constituted as comunidades indígenas in 1920 or the attempt to establish granjas comunales in the 1940s, seemingly important departure points for discussing the narratives that led to the 1969 agrarian reform. The author also seems to confer a certain decompressing capacity to national agrarian reform, mechanically linking the presence or absence of these processes to subsequent political violence (p. 184).Land without Masters is more than a welcome contribution to the field. Cant offers an in-depth analysis, compellingly theoretical and captivatingly narrative, of Peru's most important sociopolitical, economic, and cultural turning point. A new agrarian history of Peru and Latin America begins here.

Growing Up Indio during the Mexican Miracle: Childhood, Race and the Politics of Memory

AbstractThis article explores the childhood of a Mexican Indigenous activist, Raúl Javier Gatica Bautista, who was born in 1963 in the Oaxacan market town of Tlaxiaco. Growing up in poor circumstances, Gatica would become a leader in the social movements that between the 1980s and early 2000s pushed Mexico toward gradual democratic reform. The article seeks to describe what it was like to grow up poor and Indigenous at a time (later dubbed the Mexican Miracle) of impressive social and economic advances. Paying special attention to the experience of racial abuse, the article also asks how Gatica's childhood came to inform his political militancy. While other historians have linked the phenomenon of political radicalism in twentieth-century Latin America to particular social conditions, or to the influence and adaptation of global ideologies, this article seeks the origins of Gatica's radicalism in the experience of a racialised childhood.

Struggles for Recognition: Melodrama and Visibility in Latin American Silent Film

Hollywood's growing influence in Latin America in the early twentieth century coincided and intermingled with an expanding US economic and military presence in the region. Yet at the same time, a nascent silent film industry challenged US hegemony and made visible the diverse political, cultural, and social characteristics of the region. Juan Sebastián Ospina León's Struggles for Recognition: Melodrama and Visibility in Latin American Silent Film is an ambitious, South-to-North hemispheric look at the intersections of silent cinema, melodrama, and modernity in the 1910s and 1920s. In addition to representing a significant contribution to the still-understudied topic of early cinema in Latin America, Struggles for Recognition enriches our understanding of modernity, gender, and political culture in places as distinct as Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico during this era.Researching silent film presents significant challenges in terms of sources and compels scholars to grapple with the techniques and politics of film preservation and restoration. Many of these early films have been fully or partially lost, while others have been reconstructed in ways that may not have been fully faithful to the originals. Contemporary film magazines provide insight into how films were promoted and received and on the way that local film production, distribution, and promotion were structured. We learn, for example, that the early Argentine film business favored films of US origin, while their Colombian counterparts' orientation and connections meant that European (especially Italian) films were the dominant fare in early cinema there. Finally, surviving print materials related to a film's production may speak to what the film looked like or how it was made.Following an introduction discussing the main themes and elaborating the links between melodrama and Latin America's “multiple modernities,” the first chapter sets the stage for silent cinema during the Great War era, with an emphasis on Argentina and Colombia. The pair of chapters that follow, which focus on these two countries respectively, are the strongest of the book. We are first introduced to “cinedrama porteño,” with roots in the melodrama of Argentine tango and sainete and typically set in popular locales like the conventillo, the cabaret, and the department store. In keeping with melodramatic templates, a good deal of attention is given to the strivings, debasement, and exploitation of workingwomen (including prostitutes). In contrast and reflecting the “Conservative Hegemony” that marked Colombian politics during this era as well as a very different relationship with the United States, the chapter on Colombian silents provides a fascinating discussion of breakout films in which Catholicism and local elites were visible in abundance and of a film industry that was more anti–United States than Argentina's.The next pair of chapters look at examples of silent cinema in Orizaba, Mexico, and two films made in or focused on the United States. The Mexican films, centered on subjects such as a train robbery and drug abuse, reflected the disruptions of the Mexican Revolution and a shared border with the United States, presenting a very different kind of melodramatic subject matter. The Mexico chapter also devotes some attention to the important topic of film restoration and reconstruction and the challenges of the silent film archive. This is an important and relevant discussion, but the link with wider themes of melodrama and modernity is not so clearly delineated. In the final chapter we are introduced to Charge of the Gauchos (Una nueva y gloriosa nación), a 1928 film written and produced in the United States by a Spanish Argentine filmmaker, a less-than-successful effort to rework a gaucho-centered tale of Argentina's history for US tastes. The chapter also discusses Garras de oro (1926), a Colombian film so highly critical of the US role in wresting the Panamanian isthmus from Colombia that the US government sought to squelch its circulation in the region.For all its notable strengths in research and analysis, it is noteworthy that a book with a thematic focus on visibilities and invisibilities in Latin American silent cinema has very little to say about representations of race and ethnicity in the films discussed. There is a brief analysis of Orientalism as it is deployed in the Mexican film El puño de hierro (1927) and some mention of the ways that Latin American silent cinema partly developed in reaction against racist depictions of Mexicans in Hollywood cinema. But one wonders, for example, to what degree whiteness was one of the visible dimensions of civilized respectability that many of these films sought to portray. All in all, however, this is a solid and enlightening piece of scholarship that makes an important contribution to film studies and the history of twentieth-century Latin America more broadly.

CRISE NA PERIFERIA: A CONCEPÇÃO DE “CRISE” NO DESENVOLVIMENTISMO LATINO-AMERICANO E EM RAÚL PREBISCH, ANOS 1929-1980

Abstract This article offers a study of the uses of the concept of crisis in Latin America in the context of Dependency Theory and Developmentalism. This conceptual history of “crisis” in twentieth-century Latin America identifies the intellectual trajectory of Argentine economist Raul Prebisch as a starting point and narrative thread, followed by the iconic sociological products of, or influenced by, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC/CEPAL). The trajectory of the concept of crisis in the region begins with a concrete temporal application referring to specific historical critical moments or junctures. Based on Prebisch’s work, it shows how a fundamental conceptual shift may be observed during the crisis of the 1930s, when crisis is conceptualized as an opportunity that leaves “the lesson” of an urgent need to revise neoclassical economic theory, promote industrialization, and to deeply restructure the role of the State in the region. Later, in the late 1950s and in the context of CEPAL and Development Sociology, the concept changed from a conjunctural to a structural meaning. The article tackles other temporal applications, such as cyclical crisis, structural crisis, and permanent crisis.

Contributors

Contributors

Transnational sports soundscapes: Soccer announcers and radio in Argentina and Chile, 1920s–60s

The article contributes to the field of cultural studies and radio history by focusing on soccer (or fútbol), arguably the most significant mass spectacle in twentieth-century Latin America. By exploring the trajectories, iconic voices and styles of sportscasters, the article reconstructs the masculine soundscape of soccer in Argentina and Chile between the 1920s and 1960s. Play-by-play announcers, who ranged from second-rate actors and singers to professional journalists, crafted their own versions of masculinity and nationalism that were central to representing sports culture in an increasingly transnational context. The article pays special attention to the sporting press, audio records and sports films, since many commentators borrowed heavily from other forms of mass culture. Their oral representations of the game, loaded with moral evaluations and political statements, can be seen as cultural texts because they enabled new ways of imagining sports for much larger audiences than those sitting in the stadium.

History of technology in nineteenth and twentieth century Latin America

AbstractThis essay focuses on recent trends in the history of technology in nineteenth and twentieth century Latin America. It emphasizes the English‐language historiography, especially economic, social, cultural, and political approaches. The essay argues that historians, using sociocultural and political discourses that often stress local and national innovations, inequities, and political wrangling, need to work in greater dialog with economic historians and science and technology scholars in order to create much needed synthesis works for the field.