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

252 reframing latin america
of cultural studies deconstructionism, Guillermoprieto “looks into the margins”
of Che’s life to see behind the public persona. Even though she never
uses discourse to describe her interpretation of Che, she shows how Che was
constituted by social values of which he was not aware and which may not
have been in accordance with his socialist idealism and revolutionary legend.
Guillermoprieto shows that patriarchal manhood played a signifi cant role in
shaping Che’s sense of self and his interpretation of his surroundings.
Her rendering of Che’s life draws us back to Stuart Hall’s argument about
identity as an unsettled space that emerges “between a number of intersecting
discourses.” 11 Guillermoprieto shows us how Che’s sense of self was
constructed and how his life was a narrative, a series of narratives actually,
that he told himself and that other people told about him. In Hall’s words,
“We tell ourselves stories of the parts of our roots in order to come into contact,
creatively with it.” 12 And so Guillermoprieto reveals to us the place,
or space from which Che originated, the discursive localities that went into
making him the man he thought he was and the man he had no idea he was.
While her reading of Che might come across as critical, it is not a hatchet
job by a onetime member of the fl ock who has lost her faith. Guillermoprieto
fi nds Che to be, not surprisingly, a real person, a complex man with
merits and faults. But most important, she fi nds a man whose identity was
made and remade by himself, the people around him, and the storytellers
who came after him. In that regard, Che represents any other person. If he
had lived, he might have rejected cultural studies, but he also might have
found solace in the idea that his life, as a narrative construct, was discursively
linked to everyone else’s in the world. In this way, he could hardly
have been more a man of the people.
Alma Guillermoprieto, “The Harsh Angel” 13
Che was the century’s fi rst Latin American: an astonishing fact, given that
hundreds of millions of people in the hemisphere are joined by the same language,
the same Iberian culture, the same religion, the same monstrously
deformed class system, the same traditions of violence and rancor. Despite
those essential bonds, Latin America’s twenty-one nations lived in determined
isolation and a common mistrust until Che came along and, through
his acts, proclaimed himself a citizen of them all. He was an artist of scorn,
heaping it on the sanctimonious, the officiously bureaucratic, the unimaginatively
conformist, who whispered eagerly that the way things were was
the best way that could be arranged. He was a living banner, determined to
renounce all the temptations of power and to change the world by example.