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

identity construct #5: latin america 157
Of course “Europe,” including North America, the vanguard of scientifi c,
technological and cultural progress, is still there, although any relation with
it has always thus far required the perpetuation of a dependent, neocolonial
status for a Latin America still considered new, young and underdeveloped
after almost fi ve hundred years. Native America is gone, though Bolívar’s
“La Patria Grande,” now Guevara’s socialist America, may still beckon. But
Mestizo America, oscillating, crucifi ed between the two poles, remains the
constitutive reality. This is not a complementarity but a confl ict, an opposition,
the variable sign for a real contradiction which determines many
others.
Some dualisms are universal and are manipulated—in different ways—by
all human societies, usually to range them in interlinking hierarchies which
justify the dominant epistemology and prevailing social status quo. The existence
of males and females and of day and night, for example, underpins
the way in which human beings think about reality and organize their culture.
These two oppositions alone account for much of the basic content of
mythical thought, as numerous contemporary anthropologists have shown.
The key dualism in Latin American culture, however, is unmistakable and
has a specifi c historic point of departure which happens to be a moment of
cultural confrontation: between an already existing, known world of “Europe,”
and a new, recently “discovered” world named “America.” Like the
Romans before them, the Spanish imperialists defi ned that which was other
as barbarous, and themselves as civilized, through a strategy which has certainly
not outlived its usefulness even at this “Post-modern” fi nale to the
twentieth century [. . .].
All these dualisms have journeyed inexorably throughout Latin American
history and culture, along the forking paths of race, nation, class and
gender, taking up ever new forms and combinations, slipping, superimposing,
eliding, metamorphosing, yet somehow—as long as certain kinds of
antagonism continue to exist—always reemerging over time in some new
and unexpected guise. The myth we are tracing can exist wherever a “civilization”
vanquishes a “barbarism” (it could have been written in England
soon after the triumph of the Romans, or of William the Conqueror, or in
Ireland at any time since the sixteenth century). But only in Latin America,
because of the emergence of the Mestizo culture and the enduring nature of
the historical contradictions involved in its creation, have these essentialist
human, Western and continental dualisms been given the force to create
such an enduring historical and literary myth, whose time is not yet past.
Since 1492 the Latin American Mestizo has been forced to abandon the
sedentary communities of his native forebears and, dialectically negating