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

156 reframing latin america
but this was difficult to believe even at the time: there were too many enslaved
survivors of the defeated for ideology to turn completely into myth.
Moreover, since Independence in Latin America there has been a plurality
of countries which have failed to become a United States of Middle and
South America. Progress has been made, but usually for brief periods, erratically,
sporadically, spasmodically: and hardly ever as a successful collective
enterprise but through the efforts of individuals, often tyrants. There was
not just one frontier; there were many different ones, sometimes within the
fragmented nation states, sometimes across them. Nothing has ever been
simple, unifi ed and consistent, except through the ruthless will of some
charismatic or authoritarian fi gure. Otherwise: improvization, intuition,
inspiration, spontaneity; or lethargy, original sin, bad blood, sad tropics,
sick people, a failure to assimilate and advance, sudden outbursts of violence,
devastating continental, national and individual solitude. They had
been marooned, isolated, banished, exiled, forgotten, negated, cursed; they
were in hell, purgatory, limbo, nowhere: in a state of inferiority, second -
class, comic-opera fi gures, caricatures, mimic men. Could they not escape
and progress? No, because they were in chaos, darkness, obscurity,
unpredictability—unknown and unpredictable even to themselves. When
the great liberator Simón Bolívar saw the collapse of his continental vision,
he declared: “Those who serve a revolution plough the sea.” 8 [. . .]
The complete myth rarely if ever appears—Miguel Angel Asturias’s Men
of Maize (Hombres de maíz, 1949) would be one exception—but usually
partially, sometimes fragmentarily, and even momentarily, like a forest or a
mountain glimpsed through the mist. The basic story is as follows:
Mother America, aboriginal, virgin, fertile, creative and productive—
nature’s muse—was violated by the Spaniard, the European outsider, cold,
rationalistic and covetous, motivated by theories, not experience, by lust
and power, not love and understanding. The product of this assault was the
illegitimate Mestizo (of mixed blood), the Latin American culture hero. Its
effect is felt to this day whenever Latin Americans gaze at the spectacle of
their history and ponder their identity: for theirs is not an identity but a duality:
Indian/Spaniard, female/male, America/Europe, country/city, matter/
spirit, barbarism/civilization, nature/culture, and, perhaps most ironic in
the context of Latin American fi ction, speech/writing. What is the Latin
American’s origin? Native America in its multiple forms? Renaissance
Spain (itself heir to Greece, Rome and Jesus)? Or the moment of violation
in 1492? What is her/his future? A “return” to Native America? A “return”
to European civilization? Or an acceptance of being for ever a member of a
hybrid culture in a non-European continent?