The Companion to Latin American Studies

Philip Swanson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134643097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Langues

What is 'Latin American Studies'? This companion gives a concise and accessible overview of the discipline. Covering a wide range of topics, from colonial cultures and identity to US Latino culture and issues of race, gender and sexuality, this book goes beyond conventional literary companions and situates Latin America in its historical, social, political, literary and cultural context. This essential book provides the key introductory information on the subject and will be especially useful for students taking or considering taking courses in Hispanic or Latin American Studies. Written by an international team of experts, each chapter supplies the necessary basic information and a sound introduction to central ideas, issues and debates. In addition to 12 chapters on the main topics in Latin American Studies, the companion includes an introduction, time chart, glossary and suggestions for further reading.

1

Latin American geographies

Gareth A. Jones

The principal question posed in this chapter is ‘where is Latin America?’. At one level this is a simple geographical question that should not vex anybody who has ever opened an atlas. Indeed, compared to the frenzy of cartographic updates necessary for Africa in the wake of decolonization or for Eastern Europe after the Cold War, the maps of Latin America appear to be fairly stable. A closer inspection would reveal some contested borders, between Ecuador and Peru for example, and some contested sovereignty, such as Las Malvinas/the Falklands. At a different level, however, the cartographic stability of Latin America is misleading. As Harley has observed:

all maps, like all other historically constructed images, do not provide a transparent window on the world. Rather they are signs that present ‘a deceptive appearance of naturalness and transparence concealing an opaque, distorting, arbitrary mechanism of representation, a process of ideological mystification’. (Harley 1992: 523, citing Mitchell 1986)

Maps, then, are imagined representations of space just as subjective as other ‘texts’ such as travel accounts, films, paintings, surveys and exhibitions (Driver 1992). So, while in the process of becoming objects these texts appear to convert imagined geographies of Latin America into ‘real’ geographies, in this chapter I want to consider how all such texts must still be understood as subjective. In order to do so I want to suggest that Latin America needs to be understood as geographically displaced through complex connections of commodities, people and images (Tomlinson 1996). Latin America is not contained in a collection of nation-states ‘over there’ but is, increasingly, also ‘over here’. Latin America might be a distinct place on a map, but its geography is everywhere. Latin America has become de-territorialized.

IMAGINATIVE GEOGRAPHIES

Appadurai (1990) has usefully categorized these connections of global cultural flows as ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes and ideoscapes. Ethnoscapes describe the persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, refugees, guestworkers and students (1990: 297). In my classes at the London School of Economics I have students from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Puerto Rico. I am implicated in an intellectual globalization in which I am either ‘adding value’, for an elite that can afford it, or encouraging a vicious ‘brain drain’ of young talent from the region. On my journey home across London, however, I encounter a different ethnoscape. On the bus, generally on the upper floor, is a transnational community of mostly Ecuadorians and Colombians. This is also a brain drain, quite well educated and entrepreneurial people now working as cleaners, porters and shop assistants in central London. And at the weekend, the ethnoscape is represented by a Latin American football league in a nearby park and by salsa classes in a community hall.

A displaced Latin America is also encountered through a technoscape of technology and information moving around the world. This is baffling to my father, who emails to tell me that his new up-and-over garage door is made in Hermosillo, Mexico, although he seems unaware that his car was probably made in Toluca and his computer in Tijuana. The technoscape, however, is also delivering news about Latin America’s engagement with the ideoscapes of world-views such as democracy and rights. My email account in mid-2002 has recently been full of messages about the economic collapse of Argentina, the attempted coup in Venezuela, and environmental activist concerns about the Mexican government’s decision to allow multinationals to grow genetically modified grain.

Latin America is part of the finanscape in which a small part of my mortgage depends upon the performance of ‘emerging’ stock markets. In this respect the technoscape of how those branch plants on the US–Mexico border produce circuit boards for my father’s computer and whether Venezuela’s ambiguity towards democracy is affecting the price of oil takes on a direct importance. To get away from it all, I encounter Latin America in the mediascape, the image-based narratives of what Appadurai calls ‘strips of reality’. For a moment, I indulge myself with the Sunday newspapers offering insights into snow boarding in the Andes and coral reef diving off Belize, an interview with a ‘black’ Peruvian singer about to tour Britain, a review of Argentine wines and the latest Mario Vargas Llosa novel. Meanwhile, my newsagent conveys to me his fears about the Latin Americanization of crime as a local ‘drugs war’ to distribute cocaine is fought by Jamaican Yardies and ‘Colombians’.

These are some of my connections to Latin America and they instil in me a ‘map’ of what Latin America ‘must be’ like which is not objectively arrived at but reflects my cultural and political situatedness (Appadurai 1990: 296). My set of imaginative geographies, my multiple ways of building a relationship to Latin America, are different from those of a multinational corporation or an environmental non-governmental organization (NGO), and differ according to whether I am a cinema-goer, a drug-taker, a football fan or a coffee-drinker. All imaginative geographies, however, are constructed upon the reception, interpretation and retention of discourses and images that represent Latin America as real.

To illustrate, I take two media that construct imaginative geographies of Latin America. The first is the flow of images and ideas about Latin America contained in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century travel accounts, and which have become established forms of knowledge through reproduction in books, exhibitions, contemporary travel writing, as well as a part of the ‘British’ cultural landscape, for example at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in London. A great deal about what we think we know about Latin America today derives from travel writers who nevertheless gave preference to certain places and overlaid meanings onto landscapes according to the ideological and philosophical conventions of the day.

The second medium is the process of consumption, specifically of bananas and coffee, the two principal commodities from ‘tropical’ Latin America (Llambi 1994). The inscription of imaginative geographies onto commodities is by no means new. Sugar, spices, chocolate, even Fray Bentos tinned beef have all been associated with representations of Latin America and the Caribbean, and have become domestic cultural icons at home (Naylor 2000; Roseberry 1996). The construction of contemporary imaginative geographies of Latin America through consumption builds an image of Britain as cosmopolitan and multicultural. But, while globalization is bringing Latin America in one sense ever nearer, the imaginative geographies represent Latin America in a series of stereotypical ways so as to create distance and mark the difference between the places of origin and the place of consumption (Cook and Crang 1996; Smart 1994). Good taste and chic may depend, briefly, on the consumption of an image of Latin America as exotic, although to somebody else the ‘gourmet’ coffee will be agribusiness.

TRAVEL WRITING AND IMAGINATIVE GEOGRAPHIES

The shelves of any large bookshop reveal the importance of the travel writing genre to the geographical imagination. Today’s collection, however, pales compared to the outpouring of travel accounts and works of natural history during the nineteenth century that constituted perhaps as much as 10 per cent of titles in libraries in England, Germany and the USA (Cicerchia 1998). This enormous output was written by ‘imperial citizens’ who were often directly implicated in the scientific and political projects of empire. The clearest examples are the accounts emanating from official expeditions, such as Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, Robert Schomburgk’s survey of the Orinoco river and Guyana borders, and La Condamine’s attempt to map the Amazon (Burnett 2000; Dunbar 1988; Stepan 2001).¹ Travel accounts also emerged from involvement in surveying the routes for rail companies, land colonization schemes and diplomatic missions (Dickenson 1997; Naylor and Jones 1997; Pratt 1992; Walker 1992).

Many of these travel accounts are the precursors and occasionally the more conscious guides to contemporary travel writers.² A good example is Toby Green’s Saddled with Darwin, which recounts his attempt to follow the routes taken by Darwin across South America to reveal how the landscapes that were important to the study of evolution had changed by the late 1990s. In places, Green’s attempts to mimic Darwin’s journey on horseback prove impossible, cut across by freeways or industrial zones, provoking Green to wonder whether, had Darwin been travelling today, he would have been able to make the kind of observations to generate a theory of evolution. Darwin’s ghost serves as an accomplice for Green’s critique of modern science, relating contemporary landscapes to ideas of global warming and genetic theory.

Contemporary travel writing borrows from earlier accounts in more subtle ways. Here I am interested in the appropriation of representations established in the nineteenth-century writers’ narrative as a system of ‘truths’ (Cicerchia 1998).³ These representations derive their (lasting) power from the construction of objectivity by writers, who mostly lacked a formal academic position, but whose class, race and gender gave them the mandate to imagine themselves as ethnographers, to pursue knowledge as a right and a symbol of their status (Salvatore 1996).⁴ This kind of privilege provided travellers with a detachment from the landscape that allowed them to represent their subjective observations as objective accounts.⁵ The opening to Reginald Koettlitz s paper in the Scottish Geographical Magazine is fairly typical:

Having a wish to see this famous stream [the Amazon!] … I took an opportunity offered me last April … Though the opportunities for studying the people, especially the Indians, as well as the natural history of northeastern Brazil and the lower Amazon were very few, I propose to give a short account of facts observed, together with information gathered during the South American portion of this voyage, in the hope that some of the matter may be of interest to the members of the Scottish Geographical Society, and some possibly even new. (Koettlitz 1901: 12)

Koettlitz does not mention the purpose of his trip to Brazil or his legitimacy for disseminating his geographical understanding, but he is sure that the ‘facts’ will be useful.

Koettlitz and others add to their credibility by giving the impression of being ‘alone’. This device positions the travel writer in a wilderness or against a frontier of the unknown, and is particularly vital in Latin America where there was little terra incognita and many preferred to follow established routes linking a European presence (Dickenson 1997). Seeming ‘alone’, however, enhances the power of the traveller to ‘see’ Latin America from a particular vantage point. Koettlitz, for example, gazes upon the shore from a boat, but for more drama travellers would look ‘down’ upon the landscape, dominating the scene as the ‘master’ or ‘monarch’ of all they survey (Burnett 2000; Pratt 1992).⁶ Today, Latin America is viewed from trains or light aircraft, or even from space using satellite imagery to ‘show’ global warming.

Representations of Latin America

Detachment from and dominance over the landscape set up the most important representation of Latin America, namely the enormity of nature. According to Cicerchia, ever since Humboldt’s thirty-volume travel accounts appeared in the early nineteenth century, ‘part of the European imagery of the “new continent” has been framed by nature’ (1998: 4). In his Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the Americas (1814–25), von Humboldt fused aesthetic appreciation with his tentative scientific understanding of nature, raving about the ‘abundant fertility’ and ‘organic richness’ (Arnold 2000). Writing to his brother, von Humboldt commented in 1799:

What a fabulous and extravagant country we’re in! Fantastic plants, electric eels, armadillos, monkeys, parrots, and many, many, real half-savage Indians.

And Henry Bates wrote:

To the westward we could see a long line of forest rising apparently out of the water; a densely packed mass of tall trees, broken into groups, and finally into single trees, as it dwindles away in the distance. This was the frontier, in this direction, of the great primeval forest characteristic of this region, which contains so many wonders in its recesses, and clothes the whole surface of the country for two thousand miles from this point to the foot of the Andes. (Dickenson 1997: 112)

Unlike the pastoral or increasingly industrialized landscapes of Europe, Latin American nature was physically over-powering and abundantly fertile, a possible paradise or Eden, adding a sexualized desire to the representation (Stepan 2001).

To the nineteenth-century traveller size did matter. It added to the sublime, the awe that served to make the visualization of the scene important, and captured an audience back home (Martins 2000).⁷ Latin America was a region of giants – usefully so in the case of Robert Schomburgk, whose expedition to Guyana was saved by the discovery of a huge water lily that he named after Queen Victoria, and which became a centrepiece of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Burnett 2000). More or less everyone makes some reference to the apparently endless sky-lines or the open landscape (Naylor 2001). Lady Florence Dixie was able to gallop and:

penetrate into vast wilds, virgin as yet to the foot of man. Scenes of infinite beauty and grandeur might be lying hidden in the silent solitude of the mountains which bound the barren plains of the Pampas, into whose mysterious recesses no one as yet had ever ventured. And I was to be the first to behold them! (Across Patagonia, 1880, cited in Robinson 1995)

Alone against the power of nature is a geographical imagination that resonates with a contemporary distress at environmental destruction (note Toby Green) and the discourse of ‘eco-warriors’.

The representation of Latin America as a landscape dominated by nature is frequently contrasted with observations of poverty and disease to legitimate calls to order nature. Dr David Christison, for example, writing of his journey to the River Plate in 1866, describes how the immense open grasslands gave Uruguay the potential to be ‘a second Australia’. The point is illustrated by a drawing...