Pursuing a Thread: Latin America

I continue to approach Latin America from a variety of angles. For an overview of the culture up to the early 19th century, I have found Mariano Picon-Salas's A Cultural History of Spanish America very useful. I spotted this book on a shelf at the University of Wisconsin -- Green Bay's Cofrin Library, and eventually picked up a used copy of my own. (Bookfinder, a site that aggregates listings from Amazon, Abebooks, Alibris, Biblio, and other sources, is generally where I do my research to find reasonably priced copies of books I want.) Picon-Salas's last two chapters, on the Enlightenment era in Spanish America, intersect nicely with the studies I posted about yesterday. The Enlightenment was especially revolutionary in Hispanic cultures because their separation of politics and religion was quite incomplete, and their embrace of market capitalism very sketchy, compared to other European cultures at that date. Picon-Salas has a lot to say about this.

I've been concentrating just now on three geographic areas: Mexico; Cuba; Argentina and Chile.

Mexico: Joseph Wood Krutch's The Forgotten Peninsula (1961), about Baja California, was a delightful read. Krutch caught Baja on the cusp of major (primarily touristic) change, when it was still somewhat virginal (the Spaniards had always had a heck of an unsuccessful time there). You never know when a shapshot will catch something that is about to be gone.

I also read a fascinating essay by Ronald Ecker on "The Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico," an event that has spooked me for years. I remember first encountering a reference to it in J. Hoberman's and Jonathan Rosenbaum's Midnight Movies, in the chapter on Alejandro Jodorowsky, who was in the vicinity when the 1968 massacre took place. I have a library copy of Elena Poniatowska's Massacre in Mexico that I hope to get to soon.

Cuba: T. J. English's entertaining and informative Havana Nocturne, about the activities of the Mob in Cuba in the decades before the Revolution, overlaps with my other explorations on crime of the 1920-1960 era (which was partly brought on by my enthusiasm for the television series The Untouchables) and on the CIA. Lillian Llanes's book of photographs, Havana Then and Now, helps me visualize a city I've never visited (but would love to).

Argentina and Chile: I have always been taken with descriptions of Buenos Aires as one of the most labyrinthine of cities, and found some more writing in that vein in Jorge Luis Borges's peculiar "biography" of the early 20th century Buenos Aires poet Evaristo Carriego. It's really not so much a biography as a series of essays (on tango, and so on) that revolve around the city and Carriego. I also re-watched Martin Donovan's 1988 Buenos Aires-set thriller Apartment Zero, which I found somewhat less impressive on a second viewing -- the ending is facile -- but still flavorful, with a fine lead performance by Colin Firth. Apartment Zero's depiction of an older apartment building full of "characters" came to mind in the early chapters of British journalist Miranda France's Bad Times in Buenos Aires, since France seems to have taken up residence in just such a building -- maybe it is the norm. France is dyspepetic about the city, as her title indicates, but shrewd and insightful nonetheless, and frequently laugh-out-loud funny in that way British travel writers have (see: Peter Biddlecombe, Daniel Kalder). I especially enjoyed her descriptions of Argentina as a country obsessed with psychoanalysis, a tendency I had read about elsewhere (Woody Allen is one of the most popular film-makers there).

Argentina and Chile fit together geographically, and in some respects (not all) their experiences run parallel -- their political situations in the Seventies, with death squads and thousands of los desaparecidos (the disappeared), were thoroughly unsavory and still cast a shadow. Miranda France writes about this at length with respect to Argentina, and I watched Costa-Gavras's 1982 film Missing, about the disappearance of American journalist Charles Horman in Santiago, to get a feel for that era in Chile. It's not news to report that this is an exceptional film; Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek are sensational in it. The atmosphere is powerfully somber, and I don't think it's fair to say, as some have, that the film privileges the disappearance of one American over the deaths of thousands of Chileans. Every story has its hook, and what happened to Horman is the hook here, but the film brings you up right up against the reality of a country awash in death and political terror. It is sad that should so often be what you do find in investigating the recent history of Latin America.

Now I'm reading former British Ambassador to Chile John Hickman's News from the Ends of the Earth, to give myself more of a perspective on the history of this singular country.