Reinventing Identity
Mix, Miguel Rojas
THE HISTORY OF AMERICA BEGINS WITH A clash of two cultures that were not merely dissimilar, but incompatible: The values of one negated those of the other. Identity-who we are and what culture...
...Literature was destined to break those barriers-but onlyif it were free from prejudgments as to any particular revolutionary style.' 6 32The revolutionary ideal of America was broadened in the 1960s to include not only anti-imperialism but also the liquidation of capitalism, the creation of a "new man" and a new society...
...One was Spanish, European, civilized...
...Ibid., pp...
...The history of our definitions of our identity, whether as "Creoles" and "Indians," "Hispanic Americans," "Indo-" or "African Americans," "Pan-Americans," "Latin Americans" or "Continental People" is a record of our commitments to unity on particular bases...
...1895 photo of a gaucho: Sarmiento viewed Argentina's nineteenth-century civil wars as a conflict of identities: the swallow-tailed coat versus the poncho One of these was the feeling among the Spanishspeaking people of the Western Hemisphere that they had fundamental habits and interests in common which differentiated them from Europeans...
...2 (New York: Hafner...
...4. The Congress was attended by delegates from Colombia (then comprising what are today modemrnColombia, Panama, Venezuela and Ecuador), Peru, Mexico and Guatemala...
...Although the name "Pan Americanism" did not arise until the First International American Conference in 1889, the origins of the concept go back to the declaration by U.S...
...Or as Juan Jos6 Ar6valo, president of Guatemala (19451951), would put it many years later, "the fable of the shark and the sardines...
...The only thing left was to invent our own identity...
...The early Spanish chroniVOLUME XXIV, NUMBER 5 (FEBRUARY 1991) Miguel Rojas Mix , formerly director of the Latin American Art Institute in his native Chile, now teaches at the University of Paris VIII and in the Institute of Advanced Studies of Latin America at the Sorbonne...
...But despite this hostility, even after independence, important elements of the integration achieved by the colonial system remained...
...In the early independence period, the Andean countries--Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia-were the most interested in unity...
...Ray Mauro Marini, "Interdependencia e integraci6n continental...
...Caravelle: Cahiers du monde hispanique et luso-bresilien No...
...6. Other milestones toward integration were the several congresses in the tradition of the one convened by Bolivar in Panama in 1826: the First Congress of Lima, 1847-48, the Continental Congress of Santiago de Chile in 1856, and the Second Congress of Lima of 1864-65...
...In a speech read in Paris, June 22, 1865, he said that "union is the true patriotism of the Americans of the South....This union which takes the form of a confederation of the South, watered by the Amazon and the Plata and shaded by the Andes, is the picture of the American and Latin identity, which will perpetuate the race and permit the creation of the great American nation....Only this union...can hold back the imperialism of the United States of the North, which believes in its empire as Rome believed in its own...
...Latin America must be made into a Continental People...
...For Cuban writer and revolutionary Jos6 Marti (18531895), Pan-Americanism meant the "union of the condor and the lamb...
...2 The idea was that America should be united, but under the hegemony of the United States...
...3 ("L'Amerique latine et les Caraibes"), 1978...
...In 1921, the Congress of Hispano-American History and Geography in Seville agreed that the proper term to cover Spain, Portugal and Spanish and Portuguese America was "Hispanic...
...Toward the end of the nineteenth century another notion appeared, Pan-Americanism, which is a project for integration without identity...
...Conflicto y armonia de las razas en Amdrica...
...Widely reprinted, including a paperback edition with notes and commentary (Buenos Aires: Clisicos de Ayer y Hoy, 1969...
...This program precluded alliances with neighboring countries with large indigenous populations, who were assumed to be incapable of progress...
...7. "Iniciativa de la America...
...Thus it was the indigenous element that first gave meaning to nationality, while the Spaniards, through their culture, language, and above all administration, contributed the integrative principle-that is, it was the Spanish imperial system that held these territories together...
...During the First World War, the Spanish philologist Ram6n Men6ndez Pidal (18691968) launched a campaign to prohibit the term in the press...
...At the beginning of the European conquest, it was an ethnic term, applied exclusively to the aboriginal population...
...Che Guevara presented a heraldic image of revolutionary Latin America: a total confrontation within a worldwide confrontation...
...Besides civil wars, wars between the new countries undermined sentiments of continental solidarity...
...As Sim6n Bolivar put it in 1815, at the dawn of independence, "We are not Europeans, we are not Indians, but a hybrid species between the aborigines and the Spaniards...
...6 HERE WERE, HOWEVER, BOTH INDIGENOUS and African Americans who did not consider themselves "Ibero-," "Latin," or "Hispanic," but sought new labels based on Indianness or Negritude...
...Facsimile edition, Library of Classics Series, No...
...Especially damaging were the War of the Pacific (Chile versus Peru and Bolivia, 1879-1883) and the War of the Triple Alliance (Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil against Paraguay, 1865-1870...
...2. Immediately after independence, the Creoles would deny the sense of nationality to the aborigines...
...17...
...In woodcuts, the Mexican, Honduran, Chilean or Paraguayan was represented as an Indian...
...Unable to bear to think of ourselves as Indians-which, in fact, we are not-we are far from being the Europeans that many have "claimed" us to be...
...Yet another term, "Ibero-America," was launched in Spain with the publication of the review Unidn IberoNACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS americana in 1904, in the wake of the Spanish defeat in the Spanish-American-Cuban War of 1895-1898.'4 If Pan-Americanism was an attempt at integration without identity, Ibero-America represented identity without integration...
...Darcy Ribeiro, "La cultura latinoamericana...
...If we were called "Hispanic," the Italians and Eastern Europeans (tanos and rusos, in Rio de la Plata slang) who crowded the poor and middle-class neighorhoods of Buenos Aires and Montevideo smiled skeptically...
...Victor Ratil Haya de la Torre (1895-1979), founder of APRA and several times candidate for the presidency of Peru, was probably the originator of the concept of "Indo-America...
...As in all the previous discourses, the identity of this "Continental People" was defined by the struggle against the common adversary: imperialism...
...9. This notion of Latin spirituality was publicized in France by Ernest Renan (1823-1892...
...I Marti introduced instead the concept of "Our America" (Nuestra Amdrica), meaning the America of the Spanish-speaking peoples...
...The aim of the U.N.'s Economic Commission on Latin America (ECLA), as voiced by Ratil Prebisch and Celso Furtado, was to create national and continental bourgeoisies and promote economic integration...
...He saw the conflict of identities as reflected in the clothing: It was the civil war between the swallow-tailed coat and the poncho.' After Argentina was finally united, the national bourgeoisie, influenced by Sarmiento and Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810-1884), set out to "civilize," that is, Europeanize the country...
...The loss of Spain's last colonies in the New World, Cuba and Puerto Rico, in 1898 gave Spaniards their own identity crisis and inspired much new thinking...
...The others, the unschooled masses in the towns and, especially, the countryside were "barbarians...
...The first proponent of integration of the American republics was Bolivar, who wrote the Argentine general Juan Martin de Pueyrred6n: "One only should be the homeland of all Americans, since in everything we have had perfect unity...
...Am6rica Latina en sus ideas...
...Even before independence, people in the colonies had begun looking for a common label...
...But the issue of "identity" is more than a problem of individual psychology...
...127-140...
...Jos6 Vasconcelos, La raza c6smica, 1925...
...Juan Jos6 Arevalo, Fdbula del tiburrn y las sardinas (Amirica Latina estrangulada...
...interventions in Mexico (1845-1848) and Nicaragua (William Walker's expedition, 1855-1860), and the French in Mexico (1861-1867...
...Uruguayan essayist Jos6 Enrique Rod6 (1872-1917) picked up this idea for his famous book, Ariel, first published in 1900.10 Borrowing characters from William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," he made the spirit Ariel represent Hispanic American spiritualism, against the monster CalibAn as the materialism of North America...
...The fact is that no ready-made "assumed" or "claimed" description fit us...
...2 0 The quest for identity, as Bolivar, Bilbao, Mariitegui, Allende and others have understood, is not an archaeological enterprise, an attempt to find ourselves in the past...
...1. Chile f6rtil provincia sefialada/de la regi6n antartica famosa/ de remotas naciones respetada/por fuerte, principal y poderosa./La gente que produce es tan granada,/tan soberbia, gallarda y belicosa/ que no ha sido por rey jams regida/ni a dominio extranjero sometida...
...Oscar Collazos, Julio Cortizar and Mario Vargas Llosa, Literatura en la revolucidn y revolucion en la literatura (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1970) 20...
...On the other hand, interventions by the industrialized countries in search of raw materials or other commercial advantages tended to stimulate feelings of Hispanic American solidarity against the aggressors: the U.S...
...Miguel Rojas Mix, "Bilbao y el hallazgo de America Latina: Uni6n continental, socialista y libertaria...
...Nation" has been defined historically in two ways: by ethnicity and by territory...
...The most famous exponent of this idea was the Argentine writer and politician, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888, president of Argentina 1868-1874...
...But defining this nation was problematic...
...The aim, as he put it, was "to feel ourselves, really, men of the same people, without losing our nationality...
...The possibilities for the Indian to raise himself materially and intellectually," he wrote, "are not determined by race, but by economics and politics...
...Identity," Webster's tells us, is the "fact of being a specific person or thing" or "being the same as someone or something assumed, described or claimed...
...For this reason, political interests, from both within and outside our countries, have shaped the debate over identity in America from colonial times to the present...
...They were not empowered, nor were their home governments stable enough, to enact Bolivar's visionary proposals...
...In the 1950s, the idea of Latin America began to reappear in discussions of economic development, among both social scientists and revolutionaries...
...If we called ourselves "Latins," the Indians, blacks and mulattoes of the Caribbean and Brazil found this hard to acept...
...2 The struggles for independence (1810 to about 1825 in most of Spanish America) tore apart that imperial system and also gave the word "nation" a much stronger emotional charge...
...16...
...Teodoro Valciircel (1900-1942) mystically conceived of an Indian America led by the people of Cuzco, ancient capital of the Incas...
...It does not, he answered, unless we understand by culture "a complex and fluid entity that does not correspond to a given form, but to a tendency in quest of an authenticity that has never been achieved...
...For the Argentine politician and writer Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (see below), the Araucanians not only were not Chile, but its enemy...
...The issue of our identity as a people is inseparable from that of political, cultural or economic union among kindred people...
...Americans by birth and Europeans by right, we find ourselves in the conflict of disputing titles of possession with the natives and of supporting ourselves in the country where we were born, against the opposition of 'Spanish' invaders, thus making our case most extraordinary and complicated...
...Julio Cortdzar argued that the Latin American is a "historical person, alienated and subordinated by the underdevelopment in which capitalism and imperialism keep him...
...the other barbarian, American, almost indigenous...
...3. "Carta de Jamaica," in Sim6n Bolivar: Escritos polos (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1971), p. 69...
...On the basis of this supposed "Latin" solidarity, France justified its invasion of Mexico 8 It was the sort of solidarity expressed by Lewis Carroll's walrus, which wept as it swallowed the oysters...
...And Argentina was preoccupied by its civil wars from the late 1820s until 1852...
...8. Ostensibly, Emperor Napoleon III was responding to a request forassistance from conservative Mexicans opposedtoBenito Juirez...
...President James Monroe in 1823, which originally appeared as a principle of "nonintervention...
...After the Second World War, Pan-Americanism was transformed at the Bogota Conference in 1948 into Inter-Americanism, a form for the United States to dominate relations with its neighbors to the south...
...Referring to the Auraucanian chiefs who led the resistance to the Spaniards in the sixteenth century, he wrote, "For us, Colocolo, Lautaro and Caupolicin, regardless of the noble and civilized garb in which Ercilla cloaked them, were nothing but so many filthy Indians, whom we would have ordered hanged now, if they reappeared in a war of Araucanians against Chile, which has nothing to do with such scum...
...9, pp...
...Pan Americanism is a radically imperialist conception that is founded on the old idea of "Manifest Destiny," developed especially by Jefferson, which implied nothing but the right of the United States to construct a colonial empire...
...Quiroga was ten years dead (murdered in an ambush) by the time Sarmiento's book appeared, in 1845, but by attacking him Sarmiento was really attacking Rosas...
...To create an institutional framework NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICASfor this homeland, he convened a "Congress of Deputies" (Congreso Anficti6nico) in Panama on June 15, 1826...
...harmonious development was supposed to occur through a policy of import substitution...
...The nation became associated with the la patria, the homeland, and thus with the "patriots" who fought for independence...
...In his book Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, written in 1845 while Argentina was torn by civil war, he wrote that before independence, "there were two distinct societies in the Argentine Republic, rival and incompatible: two different civilizations...
...Before America could be united against imperialism, he argued, countries like Peru would have to establish their own nationality, which meant resolving the conflicts between Creole and Indian society...
...Without agreeing on who we are, we cannot agree on who are our allies and who our enemies...
...These viceroyalties, governorships and captaincygenerals now became the boundaries of the new nations...
...According to the geopolitical conceptions of the time, the main world struggles were between cultural blocs, including the "Latins" versus the "Saxons," and France sought hegemony over the Latins...
...He envisioned schools on the national borders that would "conjugate a Latin American language," a "statue of the American man," and a system of social security for all Latin Americans in any country of the continent...
...29RCoumbn Quinc Aentenary Columbian Quincentenary clers in Mexico spoke of Indian "nations," and in Chile, the Spanish soldier and poet of the conquest Alonso de Ercilla y Zdfiiga (1533-1594) was thinking of the Araucanian Indians when he wrote: Chile, fertile and distinguished province of the famous antarctic region of remote nations, respected for being strong, grand and powerful...
...Mexico: UNAM, 19786, no...
...Salvador Allende, Discursos (Havana, 1975...
...L OYALTY TO THEIR PATRIA HAD LED THE patriots to repudiate all that Spain stood for...
...The Revue du Monde Colonial gave early expression to the idea in 1867: "Latin America covers, besides Brazil, the most important and most populous of its states, the republics of Chile, Rio de la Plata [the Argentine Provinces plus Paraguay and Uruguay], Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, New Granada, Venezuela, Central America and Mexico...
...Latinoam6rica...
...Buenos Aires: Editorial Palestra, 1959...
...Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana, founded in 1924...
...9-89...
...He envisioned a multi-racial, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist society, which he also expressed as "workers' America," united from "the Rio Grande to the Straits of Magellan...
...The second legacy was the basic administrative division...
...Rather, it is a common project, defined by our common struggle...
...4 During the nineteenth century, the concept of "nation" became associated not only with patriotism, but with progress: The nation was conceived as being made up of the "civilized" people, those with an urban culture and at least rudimentary book learning...
...This would be the starting point for efforts to reunite them...
...For him the task before this people was its liberation from poverty, which could be achieved only in the "socialist homeland...
...Referring to the mother country, Bolivar said, "The hatred the Peninsula inspires in us is greater than the sea that separates us...
...In a war between Spain and Peru (1864-1866), the former Spanish Colonies of Chile, Ecuador and Bolivia joined on the side of Peru in the name of Hispanic American solidarity...
...Among the intellectuals associated with the so-called "Generation of '98" were Miguel de Unamuno, Azorin (pseudonym of Jos6 Martinez Rufz), Ram6nMariadel ValleInclin, Paroja, Antonio Machado, Ramiro de Maeztu, Jacinto Benavente...
...In Peru, three concepts of Indo-America arose in the early 1900s...
...A variant of the theme was the theory of Mexican author and educational reformer Jos6 Vasconcelos (1881-1959) that Latin Americans were the "cosmic race," a synthesis of all the world's peoples, whereas the "Saxons" sought the exclusive dominion of the white race...
...The Revue de Races Latines, published in Paris from 1857 to 1861, raised an argument that would have important consequences in Latin American thought: that Francisco Pellegrino's 1530 engraving of an enslaved Native American woman was originally the frontispiece in a book of lace patterns although the Anglo-Saxons might be better at constructing a technical civilization, the Latins had a superior culture...
...Salvador Allende carried the idea further in his phrase "Pueblo Continente" or "Continental People...
...UNESCO, in Cultures, vol...
...Bilbao's proposals for Latin American unity included the formation of a Latin American congress, standardization of weights and measures throughout the region, colonization of the wilderness, universal education and civilization of the "barbarians," abolition of customs duties, an international tribunal, a Latin American publishing house and university, a daily newspaper and common armed forces...
...7 The name "Latin America" was popularized in France in the 1860s, as part of the Pan-Latin euphoria during the reign of Napoleon III...
...Thirdly, despite these jurisdictional divisions, there still remained a feeling of cultural unity, of the "greater patria" embracing all the former colonies...
...The tenacity of these colonial divisions would impede efforts for a wider, continent-wide integration...
...The quest for identity is not about the past, but about the future we choose to construct...
...Idea de un congreso federal de las Reptiblicas ." In La America en peligro (Santiago de Chile: Ercilla, 1941), p. 138...
...French publications enthusiastically promoted the new label...
...An important shift in thinking in those years was the emphasis on socio-economic inter-dependency rather than language as a basis for unity among nations...
...Bolivar (1783-1830) would return to this subject again and again, most notably in his speech to proindependence forces at the Congress of Angostura (Venezuela), February 15, 1819...
...The colonial empire had been highly centralized with a vertical command structure, but divided into territorial administrations which, in 300 years, had generated loyalties to one's particular, administratively defined place...
...It was designed, first, to describe Spain's institutions for cooperation with its former colonies and, second, to counter the term "Latin America," which Spanish intellectuals of the "Generation of'98" rejected huffily...
...In America many intellectuals felt threatened by the expansion of "Saxon" power-represented by England and especially the United States-and looked to France to halt it...
...5. The target of Sarmiento's attack, the gaucho caudillo Juan Facundo Quiroga (1788-1835), known as the "Tiger of the Plains," was an ally of Juan Manuel de Rosas...
...5, no...
...Brazil was too busy constructing an empire, and in any case its colonial heritage made it look more toward Portuguese-speaking Africa than to its neighbors...
...People seek identity at different levels of experience-including race, class, nation and continent...
...National identity would become further complicated after independence, with the arrival of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe...
...46, 1986...
...In the same spirit, the Second Declaration of Havana of 1975 reaffirmed, like Augusto C6sar Sandino in his time, armed unity against imperialism and capitalism...
...The idea of Latin America is also associated with regional economic pacts like the 1960 "Treaty of Montevideo...
...This was especially evident in the work of the Brazilians Mauro Marini and Darcy Ribeiro.7 Ribeiro asked whether "Latin America" exists...
...Latin American sentiment was prominent in the 1950s in the works of those writers calling themselves "committed...
...Nowadays, the only thing "Pan American" is the Pan American highway...
...6 T HE NAME LATIN AMERICA WAS FIRST launched by the Chilean writer and sociologist Francisco Bilbao (1823-1865), as a formula for unity against "Saxon America," or the United States...
...Identity is history and, in America, ours is an alien, imposed history...
...The abbot Viscardo (1799) had spoken of "American Spaniards," the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda (1750-1816) of the "Columbine Continent, alias Hispano-America" (1801), and Bolivar of "southern Americans...
...He advocated strengthening regional pacts and was convinced that the Inter-American system had to be replaced by a system that defended the Latin American peoples...
...Anuario de estudios latinoamericanos...
...In contrast, the white person born in the New World was called a "Spaniard of the Indies" or simply an "Indiano...
...Victor Ratil Haya de la Torre, founder of APRA, proposed the creation of an Indo-American bourgeoisie, as the only force capable of resisting imperialism.1 6 And for the Marxist intellectual Jos6 Carlos Maridtegui, "The Indian is the foundation of our nationality in formation...
...Identity-who we are and what culture we belong to-has been at the heart of national debates in our hemisphere ever since...
...The book was first translated into English by Sarmiento's friend, the American educator Mary T. Mann, as Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants, or Civilization and Barbarism...
...Identity, in his view, is a process and unity a product...
...Allende proposed concrete measures of integration...
...The people that spring from it are so illustrious, haughty, bold and bellicose that never have they been ruled by king nor subject to a foreign rule.' Even at the end of the colonial period, the word "nation" still referred to the aboriginals...
...Ever since that initial encounter, we who are products of the clash of these two cultures have been trying to reconcile our reality with how others describe us...
...The Spanish diplomat and novelist Juan Valera y Alcali Galiano (1824-1905) said this term "Latin America" offended him as it would a father whose son denied his name...
...Originally published in 1956...
...There he proposed a treaty of perpetual union and confederation, courts of arbitration and the establishment of common armed forces...
Vol. 24 • February 1991 • No. 5
