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

164 reframing latin america
many ways to political power, a key question is who directs the creation of
culture and the production of cultural identity. Because the Latin American
man of letters is, from Independence to the present day, so often also a man
of state, the formulations of identity that have gained the greatest measure
of power are closely tied to the social reproduction of the elites. In Brazil
and Mexico especially, and in other countries as well, cultural identity now
often means identifi cation with an officialized national culture. Even such
an oppositional construction of culture as Roberto Fernández Retamar’s
“Calibán” (1971), written in part to contest the elitist implications of Rodó’s
Ariel, supposes a Latin American unanimity which, although it may be necessary
as a strategic position, also elides the question of intracontinental
difference.
Nevertheless, marginalized social groups affirm particular identities
which, in some cases, subvert the ideology of the modern nation-state. In
the twentieth century, fi gures such as the black Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén
and the Guatemalan Indian leader Rigoberta Menchú insist on particular
minority cultural identities as bases for political action and historical consciousness.
These struggles, internal to the nation and continent, although
often overshadowed by the search for a cohesive national and continental
identity, are increasingly visible today.
Three Theoretical Concepts
We have been discussing the relationship between culture and political
power, the production of culture and cultural identity, and the hybrid nature
of “Latin American culture.” The recurrence of these topics in debates
on cultural identity has given rise to the creation of three theoretical concepts,
which are now commonly used to ground discussion of modem Latin
American culture and society. These are the lettered city, imagined communities,
and transculturation.
In his book on the social role of the Latin American intellectual, La ciudad
letrada (1984), Angel Rama develops the concept of the “lettered city”
to elucidate the relationship between culture and power structures on the
continent from the colony to the twentieth century. Briefl y, the lettered city
is the urban group composed of educated elites who wield pens to execute
the will of viceroys and later, postcolonial rulers. According to Rama, it is
this group that determines and enforces society’s official order. Rama is careful
to emphasize the gap between the “lettered” and “real” city, thus underlining
the artifi ciality or the nonorganic nature of the order imposed by the
lettered city and revealing the letrados’ project as the actual production of