Disaster Writing

The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America

Mark D. Anderson

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780813932033
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the aftermath of disaster, literary and other cultural representations of the event can play a role in the renegotiation of political power. In Disaster Writing, Mark D. Anderson analyzes four natural disasters in Latin America that acquired national significance and symbolism through literary mediation: the 1930 cyclone in the Dominican Republic, volcanic eruptions in Central America, the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, and recurring drought in northeastern Brazil.

Taking a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the disaster narratives, Anderson explores concepts such as the social construction of risk, landscape as political and cultural geography, vulnerability as the convergence of natural hazard and social marginalization, and the cultural mediation of trauma and loss. He shows how the political and historical contexts suggest a systematic link between natural disaster and cultural politics.

1 Disaster and the “New Patria”

Cyclone San Zenón and Trujillo’s Rewriting of the Dominican Republic

In this home, Trujillo is boss.

—Trujillo-era slogan

THE HURRICANE THAT STRUCK the Dominican Republic on September 2 and 3, 1930, caused unprecedented damage to the nation’s capital, disrupting severely the nation’s infrastructure as well as its self-image. Santo Domingo’s iconic Río Ozama overflowed with the hurricane’s intense rains, washing out key bridges and port facilities and flooding the neighborhoods along its banks, while winds of up to 150 miles per hour wreaked havoc on tin-roofed, wooden buildings that had been constructed during the period of rapid urbanization from the end of the nineteenth century through the US occupation (1916–1924). Thousands were killed, and a much greater number were left without food or shelter. Despite the massive scale of the destruction and having consolidated his power mere weeks earlier, Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo responded in a highly efficient manner to the disaster, putting to use his military training in organizing the relief efforts. In the years that followed, Trujillo and his collaborators used his response to Cyclone San Zenón as a key trope in the narrative legitimizing his rule, which lasted from 1930 until his assassination in 1961.

Trujillo’s renaming of Santo Domingo following the hurricane’s leveling of the city in 1930 was not simply another of the megalomaniac acts that characterized his regime. Beyond his penchant for the unsubtle performance of power, Trujillo’s rewriting of Santo Domingo’s urban landscape as Ciudad Trujillo signified a radical rescription of Dominican history and, in the eyes of the regime, its future. Indeed, the incredible devastation wreaked by the hurricane scarcely two weeks after a military coup culminated in Trujillo’s likely fraudulent election as president allowed him not only to consolidate his power by declaring a state of emergency and martial law but also to remake the capital in his image. His rewriting impulse did not stop at the city limits, however, but radiated forth to encompass the entire nation: Trujillo became the most common toponym in the Dominican Republic, appearing from the capital to the Haitian border in private homes and public parks, on street signs, bridges, public works projects, hillsides, and mountaintops. Two provinces were even rechristened in the family name.¹ This rescription was not limited simply to changing the place names to reflect his regime; it also implied the physical reconstruction of Santo Domingo and much of the countryside to his specifications, as well as the ideological transformation of Dominican society.

The Dominican Genealogy of Disaster

The Trujillan penchant for what might be termed “branding,” given the marriage of national politics and personal economics for which the regime was famous, adds credence to exiled Dominican politician Juan Bosch’s claim that the dictator had turned the Dominican Republic into his private corporation.² Indeed, the dividing line between public and private property became quite blurred during his administration; he frequently “borrowed” from the national treasury, pawning his personal property to the nation for exorbitant prices in order to free up capital for the expansion of his economic empire, only to buy it back a few years later (Turits 242–43). In this context, the proliferation of the Trujillo surname throughout the country could be construed as simple political branding, an act of staking his claim completely in keeping with his possessive, patriarchal image. While this scenario cannot be dismissed, upon closer examination the effects of Trujillo’s substitution of the names of bridges, parks, streets, and even mountaintops with the family surname has much more profound implications, for the names they supplanted were not without prior history.

In the eyes of the regime, the old names begged replacement because they denoted an outmoded and ultimately failed past of colonial servitude and threatened sovereignty. The past had been a disaster, and it could only be rectified through the complete physical transformation of the landscape and the consequent modification of the defeatist psychology of its inhabitants. Trujillo’s rescription of these places was not necessarily intended to erase history completely, however; the Trujillan iconography was meant to serve a supplemental role to the past, acknowledging it but also marking a clear rupture with it. The past was past, and this was modernity.

A key move in Trujillo’s rewriting of the Dominican Republic was to replace the existing ciudad letrada, which was composed primarily of members of the postindependence oligarchy, with a new group of intellectuals and bureaucrats who swore absolute loyalty to his regime. Indeed, Trujillo’s strategy of rewriting history through transforming place was not an entirely novel idea: the old order had made use of place names and historical markers to maintain its social and political hegemony, tracing its legitimacy back to the colonial period and particularly to the Colón (Columbus) family.³ In order to carry out the remaking of places with historical meanings contrary to Trujillo’s political designs, it would be necessary to replace the custodians of the oligarchy’s national history with his own. This new intellectual class was charged with the task of creating the discursive underpinnings of his power by assembling a body of cultural texts that would simultaneously justify and obscure the repressive acts carried out by his government. Tellingly, not only do many of these texts refer to the 1930 Cyclone San Zenón, but they actually use it as a key argument in their vindication of the dictator’s tactics. The hurricane became the cornerstone of what might be termed Trujillo’s politics of disaster: that is, the discursive construction of a catastrophic national history characterized by perpetual vulnerability to attacks from outside sources, both human and natural.

This tragic view of Dominican history reappears in works written by Trujillo supporters throughout the “Era of Trujillo,” some of them even published under his name. The majority of these texts, almost in their entirety aimed at offsetting criticisms of human rights abuses from abroad while trumpeting the regime’s modernizing achievements, open by positing Dominican history as a series of failed development projects, whose truncation is due to vulnerability to nefarious external and, occasionally, internal forces. For this reason, Colombian author José Antonio Osorio Lizarazo, who found refuge in the Dominican Republic as a political exile and became one of Trujillo’s most prolific and ardent defenders, initiates his overview of Dominican History in his eloquent if biased La isla iluminada (The Illumined Island; 1947) with the declaration that “a series of misfortunes, wars, massacres, prosperities, assaults of Nature, determine its history, convulsed and agitated like that of no other nation in the Americas” (42).⁴ Likewise, Dominican writer Túlio Céstero Burgos reproduces this vision of the national past in his somewhat less polished Filosofía de un régimen . . . (A Regime’s Philosophy . . . ;1951), claiming that “the sinister past of our nationality, which flourishes today, lies there, in ruins, like a stigma” (22).⁵ Indeed, he refers variously to “a sordid past, littered with rubbish” (29) and “our shameful past” (45) characterized by “fratricidal storms” (58). Henry Gazón Bona propagates a similar view of the nation’s architectural history, alluding to the period since independence as an “abysm” of “artistic apathy,” whose primary characteristic was the profanation of venerable colonial art and architecture by “indifferent barbarians during a time of heretic rulers” (1). Trujillan ideology painted the Dominican Republic’s history preceding his rise to power as a failure in every sense: a failure to modernize, a failure to become truly independent or to create a viable national culture, a failure to thwart the “barbaric” influence of black Haiti, and a failure to throw off the yoke of Yankee imperialism.

According to the official line, this catastrophic history took its toll on the Dominican psychology as well, creating a pessimistic being with no sense of historical agency. Trujillo himself, or his ghostwriter at any rate, emphasizes this point in The Basic Policies of a Regime (1960): “Always the people were faced by uncertainty, discord, the ruin of their hopes, the crushing of their vital instincts. All this frustration was causing to be forged a special psychology, a typical but unique sensitivity, a way of being unlike that of any of the other peoples of America” (29). Trujillo argues that although this traumatized historical subject was adept at surviving the vicissitudes that it was forced to confront, its defeatist mentality was altogether unfit for the modern paradigm of progress. The Dominican subject’s wounded psyche was a reactive, not a proactive, force and, as such, could only weather life’s storms but not rebuild in the wake of their destruction.

Naturally, only Trujillo’s regime could put an end to the Dominican Republic’s tragic destiny by effectively neutralizing the threats that had created it and thus transforming the national psychology into a positive, proactive historical force. The Dominican Republic’s catastrophic history had to be rewritten, its failed culture of disaster replaced with a new outlook based on select modern Western values and the removal of what the regime perceived as the impediments to this transformation. Consequently, Osorio offers only four options for the future of the Caribbean nation: yet another invasion by Haiti and a subsequent regression to African barbarism, exploitive occupation by the United States, interminable civil wars, or Trujillo (23). Clearly, only one of them guarantees its survival as an autonomous state. The Dominican Republican being a democracy, the people were free to choose.

Tellingly, the “special psychology” created by the Dominican Republic’s unique geography and history was also used to justify Trujillo’s singular brand of democracy. Regarding this point, Osorio presents an interesting argument in favor of “historical, geographical, and ethnic relativity” based almost entirely on nineteenth-century racialist theories of environmental determinism (11). While his vocabulary may anticipate current theories of anthropological relativism, his thrust has little to do with cultural plurality: on the contrary, a few pages onward he makes clear that “the concept of democracy is contingent on multiple eventualities” (13). At root is an attack on the universal application of Western notions of democracy and human rights; he promotes “a local concept of democracy,” in which more important than the right to vote and individual guarantees are “prosperity and collective well-being, the fullness of spiritual freedom, the authentic happiness of the people” (13).⁶ He describes a utilitarian democracy that depends on individual material well-being rather than political representation. In any case, for Osorio representation has already been achieved: further on, he describes “a perfect copenetration of the people, who command, with their commander” (20–21).⁷ Trujillo is invested with the power of the people not by vote but through embodiment: he is the pueblo.

Chronicling the Future

Robert Kastenbaum asserts correctly that “no matter how a disaster may be explained, the catastrophe can serve as a powerful explanation of other events” (69). This was certainly the case with the Trujillo regime; beyond chance or the will of God, there could be no concrete explanation of why the 1930 hurricane struck Santo Domingo, but the catastrophe was propitious for the regime’s construction of this worldview in which the nation’s physical and moral integrity was perceived as perpetually vulnerable to multiple threats. This politics of fear led to the perception of everyday life as a perpetual state of emergency, providing the ideal justification for Trujillo’s authoritarianism and repressive tactics. Indeed, governments the world over have a history of responding to perceived emergency through totalitarianism, although relatively few have reached Trujillo’s extremes.

The regime saw its response to the hurricane as the first step in constructing a “magnificent new nation” that would leave behind its catastrophic past (Trujillo 16). This project required “eliminating the factors of political disorder, financial oppression, juridical imprecision, and economic serfdom, replacing the public’s pessimism and feelings of incapacity by self-confidence and creative willpower to carry out a fundamental transformation” (Trujillo 18). Alongside this chillingly nonchalant proposal for the elimination of political opponents, the oligarchy, and anyone else who stood in his way, the psychological transformation of the Dominican people became a key factor in his plan to remake the nation. Trujillo saw this refashioning of the national subject as the only possible route to modernity, and whoever refused to assume this transformational, ultimately antihistorical identity was labeled a traitor and forcibly (and sometimes permanently) removed from the nation. In this way, Trujillo hoped to fabricate a homogeneous, national “culture of disaster” capable of dealing with any internal or external threat in a preemptive and, from his point of view, constructive manner. And in his mind, there was no separation between the new national psychology and the physical modernization of the national landscape; the transformation of the directionless peasants, who still formed the majority of the population, into modern workers would be both a catalyst for and a product of development.

While the destruction wreaked by the hurricane did not give birth to this project of the construction of the “Nueva Patria,” or “New Homeland,” it both hastened and facilitated its execution. On this point, Trujillo states,

I had scarcely begun to undertake this staggering program when—sixteen days after my inauguration—a tremendous cataclysm destroyed the nation’s capital.

The San Zenón Hurricane, as it came to be known, left thousands of victims, a wrecked city, and a grisly panorama of death and desolation. The tragedy had the effect of precipitating my plans. It created sadly propitious circumstances for their implementation. I could exercise my capacity for organization and leadership, which had been developed during my military career. I was able with this demonstration to restore some degree of confidence, which was the foundation of the moral reconstruction I proposed. (31)

The natural disaster thus exercised a triple function in the regime’s politics: first, as a proving ground in which Trujillo could demonstrate the effectiveness of his leadership abilities; second, as an experimental laboratory for the totalitarian policies that he would later implement in response to future contingencies or perceived disasters; and third, as a platform for the construction of this new national psychology that would replace the defeatism that, according to his analysis of the nation’s history, had characterized the Dominican collective consciousness since colonial times. Indeed, enforced solidarity under his leadership became the cornerstone of this new national “can-do” psychology:

The efficiency with which I met the terrible consequences of the storm and the readiness with which I took charge of the situation—without having had time to organize the government that was to attempt to lead a country already struggling against growing and implacable menaces and which was so financially subjugated that it lacked even minimum autonomy—enabled me to restore confidence, stimulate effort, overcome pessimism (further exacerbated by the catastrophe) and rehabilitate our noble hopes and ambitions, prove the power of unity and cooperation, and awaken some of the qualities dormant in the national character. In other words, there was a demonstration of what a people is capable of doing by acting with faith, decision and method under competent, vigorous leadership. (Trujillo 31)

In this way, Trujillo’s response to the devastation caused by hurricane San Zenón gave rise to a consistent politics of disaster that would characterize his approach to future perceived threats. This would represent the concretization of what Valentina Peguero terms the “militarization” of Dominican culture, implementing a kind of obligatory collectivism and social solidarity under Trujillo’s command. This collectivism à la force was central not only to the social organization of his power but also to his discourse of democracy through embodiment.

A key step in Trujillo’s strategy to consolidate power using the hurricane was to transform the catastrophe from an experience of individual loss into a national disaster mediated by the state. His regime used a variety of mechanisms to collectivize the disaster, including involving the public directly in the relief effort, creating centers where people met to receive food and medicine, and coordinating the popular perception of the disaster through the use of media. Indeed, newspapers played a fundamental role in this process. As Ramón Lugo Lovatón points out, even in the midst of the general devastation and the interruption of most public services, Santo Domingo’s newspapers continued printing, falling silent for only two days immediately following the cataclysm (67). Benedict Anderson’s seminal study has made clear the fundamental role that newspapers have played historically in the creation of the national civic imaginary and collective feelings of sharing a historical moment.⁸ Trujillo, like so many politicians before and after him, took advantage of this cultural tradition in order to construct a public disaster culture capable of coping with the hurricane as well as future threats such as communism, Haitian immigration, US intervention, and any other challenge to his hegemony.

In fact, Lugo’s chronicles themselves pl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Approaching Disaster
• 1 Disaster and the “New Patria”: Cyclone San Zenón and Trujillo’s Rewriting of the Dominican Republic
• 2 Drought and the Literary Construction of Risk in Northeastern Brazil
• 3 Volcanic Identities: Explosive Nationalism and the Disastered Subject in Central American Literature
• 4 Fault Lines: Mexico’s 1985 Earthquake and the Politics of Narration
• Conclusion: On Writing and the Nationalization of Catastrophe
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index