Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

identity construct #5: latin america 155
the Odyssey and to the Bible, the two great historic transformers of the
oral and the experiential into the scriptural and the discursive, is an exact
enough encapsulation of a cultural tradition. These two narratives have indeed
been essential sources for the metanarratives of Western development
(as well as the usual Greek meaning, “meta” also signifi es goal or objective
in Spanish), currents fl owing into the watershed of modernity, one of whose
great expressions is Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), which draws on both of them.
When, after the illusions of the 1960s, the watershed was perceived to be a
dam—man-made?—the era of Post-modernism was declared.
The United States, in the north of the New World, was able to carve
out its own independent territory within the space of European—now
Western—development, and could thus cultivate a self-satisfying foundational
myth. Minorities fl eeing from oppression had sailed the dangerous
seas to freedom, set up small, democratic, God-fearing communities, and
followed the sun and their own manifest destiny across a receding frontier
from east to west, reluctantly defending themselves against wild animals
and savage Indians to whom they had fi rst offered the hand of friendship.
Immigrants and their cultures could be simply aggregated to this scheme.
One could say, then, changing our metaphors, that the capitalist prow cuts
through the surface of reality, simplifying as it goes, but leaving the wash
and spray of turmoil and confusion in its wake. Such an experience permits
the repeated unfurling of the great myth of progress, the endless frontier, the
one identity, the permanent march of capitalism, knowledge and freedom:
“man’s search to know his world and himself,” to quote Daniel J. Boorstin. 7
The fact that this “triumph of the west,” to cite another similarly enterprising
history, has involved racism, genocide, imperialism, the destruction of
nature and the menace of the nuclear shadow, is easy to ignore (except in
Faulkner’s South), especially since the space age allows the myth another
dimension through its literally endless frontier. These are just bad dreams,
to be exiled from the garden of a nation that likes to “feel good about itself.”
Latin American experience allows no such happy simplicities. In Latin
America at the time of the conquest there were not just nomadic Indians,
but a complex tapestry of great civilizations (defi ned, of course, by their
conquerors as great organized barbarisms) and smaller cultural groupings,
which could not all be moved on or ignored, nor even easily liquidated: besides,
the colonization was not a family or community activity but a great
state enterprise carried out on behalf of the Crown through the Army and
the Church, without ordinary laborers and very largely without women,
other than voluntary or involuntary Indian collaborators like Cortés’s mistress
and interpreter, Malinche. It was said to be a liberation from ignorance,