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

identity construct #5: latin america 161
the twentieth century would suggest that within each Latin American two
mythical beings are always at war, an original Spaniard (or Portuguese, or
Frenchman) and an original Indian (or Negro, especially in Brazil, Cuba and
Haiti); and beyond this inner confl ict, he and she are permanently crucifi ed
between their own, already dual America and the external world of Europe
(and later North America). A Latin American must face the fact that s/he
is both part of and the product of many cultures, but at least two: hence
the proliferation of concepts like bi-culturalism, transculturation, the neobaroque,
or Magical Realism, as codes for the social reality and cultural
expression of the colonized Mestizo continent—whose project, nonetheless,
in the modem era, must surely be that of the truly multicultural and
polylingual space.
This only very recently desired outcome—fi rst visible in Asturias’s Men
of Maize (1949)—means choosing a future which is different from the past,
maybe even a negation of the past. It means not seeking to impose oneself
by violence, not conquering as a means of establishing identity, not repressing
the other, weaker part of oneself; possibly even encouraging all the traditions
of resistance and rebellion, seeking out the suppressed democratic,
cooperative and ecological currents of the culture, seeking to fuse rather
than split, to unite rather than separate, because America took the wrong
road at the start and must take a different road in the future if the way is to
be found. If this is done, the Latin American republics may be better placed
to confront the world that is to come than other nations with a willed—
rather than inherited—lust for progress through violence.
As we have seen, Latin American reality itself, by the 1920s, was already
extraordinarily complicated—twenty separate nation states unifi ed and divided
by history and geography and by inextricably interwoven concepts of
race, nation, class, gender, and culture. But the problems of decipherment
were getting more formidable as they went along. As the Western world itself,
in the age of modernity, entered its own twentieth-century maze, Latin
Americans were obliged, more than ever before, to understand what we
now call the “First” and “Second” Worlds of Europe and North America in
order to understand themselves, which implied travelling simultaneously
through two superimposed labyrinths without any guide to tell them how
to read the signs. For the irresponsible this created an endless playground, a
gigantic hall of mirrors in which all paths led to the truth—or none. For the
committed avant-garde writer, however, who sought to combine political
and aesthetic revolution in the age of cultural Modernism—Joyce and/or
Kafka—the challenge was momentous.
As a matter of fact, things were even more complicated than this suggests.
What critics complacently call “the labyrinth” (dissolving differences)