LATIN, LATINO, AMERICAN: SPLIT STATES AND GLOBAL IMAGINARIES
AMERICA’S
HOLD ON THE UNIVERSAL imaginary has withstood the test of time. As a distant
moment of discovery, a hemispheric marker, or the naming of a powerful modern
nation, America’s claims to unique transcendental dimensions continue to seem
natural—if not necessary—to peoples, nations, and academic traditions. These
outlines are only disturbed when the concept is asked to suit a plurality that
rests beyond these ritualized references, when America’s fate as a field of
differences comes into full view, for then there is hardly any consensus as to
what it might or could mean. To think simultaneously of Guatemala, Argentina,
Haiti and the United States as part of the same territory, for example,
immediately brings an arresting challenge to bear on the idea of America, almost
to a point of silence, even among those otherwise engaged in studying it. At
that dramatic moment it becomes crucial to remember that the invention of
America has always been an arbitrary exercise in location, a site not far from
the lines of utopia and nostalgia.
Attempts to configure or define American landscapes have varied considerably
through the centuries. Colonial powers, republican schemes, and individual
pursuits have all left their mark. Yet, despite their number and disparity, they
all seem to share a proclivity for cartographical errors and mythological
tales—New World, El Dorado, The Mayflower, and Caliban perhaps being the most
dramatic. Systematic efforts to validate essential differences among the
Americas occurred throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but they
only managed to demarcate a game of inflexible oppositions that still animates
fables of identity and republican fictions. Civilization/barbarism, Anglo/Latin,
North/South, capitalism/one-man-rule—thus went the familiar cartography that
followed these civilizing impulses. Further migratory and cultural shifts across
the Americas in the past few decades appear to have yielded new iterations of
the same tendency: coordinates such as postmodernity/subalternity, civil
society/chaos, global order/ungovernable cultures. Deeply established academic
disciplines, among them U.S. American and Latin American studies, owe their
constitution to such divisions. It remains an open question whether new
metaphors and unexpected narratives can still claim these territories, or
whether new constructs and unexpected subjects will aid in the blurring of
these imaginary lines.
American myths are abundant and prone to constant revision. The history of the
North/South divide undoubtedly provides a key set of examples. One would be that
of a continental mission inspired by providence—a myth that has long sustained
national identity in the United States. To this America, thoroughly steeped in
other narratives pertaining to language, race and work ethic, correspond various
Latin American retorts that have mainly survived in the realm of cultural and
artistic imagination, though they still sometimes imbue political rhetoric.
Simón Bolivar’s ambition to unite the South as one republic in the nineteenth
century immediately comes to mind, even though it ultimately encountered
insurmountable obstacles. Ariel, an essay published in 1900 by José Enrique
Rodó, called for a less utilitarian, more aesthetically balanced rendition of
the North American model, thereby striking a chord among Latin American
intellectuals whose sense of regional identity no longer came primarily from
Bolivarian unification projects, or from opposition to the lingering Spanish
colonial rule in the Caribbean, but rather from the modernist verve of a
cultural critique aimed at the United States, particularly after the
Spanish-American War of 1898. A few years earlier, José Martí, a great
modernist as well, had taken a more direct route to his lifelong critique of the
United States. His essay “Our America” sought to contest the cultural and
linguistic destiny of America as a signifier. It could be said that his utopia
contained much more poetic symbolism than political specificity, and that his
high-brow modern aesthetic obstructed a much needed emphasis on modernization
programs, but it introduced nonetheless a radically new American compass in
which indigenous and African-American cultures claimed a seat alongside those of
European ancestry.
Such blueprints have sustained the Latin American imaginary for nearly a
century, particularly through philosophical and literary debates that take for
granted the North/South divide. Cultural modernity and modern state formation
lay at the heart of these contentions, with the United States serving as marker
for the finished product and Latin America as the failed or unfinished version,
notwithstanding the internal diversity of both constructs. Much lies in the
balance of how one approaches this complex cluster of issues and their implicit
models. Within literature, these contradictory motifs have often assumed an
organic whole, as evidenced in artful essays like Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth
Of Solitude (1953), which sought to depict the history of the Mexican national
character and its indigenous history as a tragic enigma behind which stood the
failure of the state, a web of contradictory historical discourses without any
possible resolution except as an artistic form which the Latin American modern
aesthetic translated into a universal value.
The links between literariness and subjectivity took a more disjunctive turn
with the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges around the mid-century mark, but the same
constellation of motifs can still be traced through the magic realist constructs
that fueled the area’s novelistic boom at least until the 1970s, and perhaps
beyond. This literary tradition, an object of veneration for most of the
twentieth century, now claims the attention of deconstruction, often anxiously
so, as if the latter’s conditions of possibilities could only be found in the
former’s web of influence. One should note in this regard that the
poststructuralist cycle, much of it elaborated through research universities in
the United States, has no doubt contributed various critiques of the modern
aesthetic in Latin America and opened new lines of inquiry, among which feminism
has made pivotal contributions. But this paradigm must also sort out the
perplexing effects of unexpected events on our understanding of the Americas as
a whole, such as the end of the cold war, the termination of alternative paths
to modernity inspired by revolutionary socialism, the end of ideology claims by
global capital, and, perhaps most critical of all, the advent of techno-mediatic
culture. In the case of Latin Americanism, or for that matter U.S.
Americanism, one must also consider another unanticipated element of crucial
importance: the expansion of the Latino population in the United States, its
political and cultural dimensions, as well as its potential for critical
thinking about the Americas.