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

identity construct #5: latin america 165
society, as opposed to the interpretation and codifi cation of an already existing
one. One example of the power of this lettered vision is nineteenth-
and twentieth-century indigenista narrative, which attempts to depict the
reality of indigenous peoples to an urban reading public. Written by non-
Indians, this type of narrative often corresponds closely to contemporary
government policy and anthropological discourse on the Indian. As such, it
is very different from, for instance, the real-life testimony of Menchú.
The concept of the lettered city is important as a reminder of the close
ties between notions of culture and relations of power and between intellectuals
and the state, and of the central role that intellectuals played in shaping
post-Independence society and educating the public to identify with
their vision. An 1868 essay on national literature by the Mexican novelist
and poet Ignacio Altamirano is brilliantly illustrative of this. Altamirano
writes that “novels are undoubtedly the genre the public likes best. . . . They
are the artifi ce through which today’s best thinkers are reaching the masses
with doctrines and ideas that would otherwise be difficult to impart.”
Benedict Anderson’s study of nationalism, Imagined Communities (1983),
can help us to see in a more general way how, in fact, the public was brought
to identify with the nation. Anderson argues that the modern nation-state
(in Latin America and elsewhere) is precisely not an organic but an “imagined”
community. By this he means that the consciousness of shared identity
and common discourse grounded in that identity which are the bases of
nationalist feeling are specifi cally created, both by historical forces such as
the development of print culture, and by ideological interventions such as
José de San Martín’s 1821 decree that, when Peru’s independence had been
won from Spain, Native Americans should no longer be called Indians or natives
but Peruvians. Anderson emphasizes that identifi cation with a nation
cannot be opposed to identifi cation with a “truer” community. Rather, all
communities are “imagined,” and “communities are to be distinguished,
not by their supposed falsity or genuineness, but by the style in which they
are imagined.”
The choice of a style in which to imagine the post-Independence communities
was far from obvious, given the heterogeneity of the continent’s
population and the variety of its cultural roots. The desire for difference
from Europe led some nineteenth-century thinkers to see the question of
identity in terms of originality. “Aspire to independence of thought,” warns
the writer and educator Andrés Bello in an 1848 article against the imitation
of European philosophies. “Our civilization too will be judged by its
works, and if it is seen to copy Europe in a servile manner, what opinion of
us will European thinkers have?”