Network Aztlan Latino Chicano Comunidades Transnacionales

The Latin American-ization of the United States

by Dr. Shifra M. Goldman

This paper is dedicated to Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State during the Richard Nixon administration.

In 1969, during a meeting of American states in Viña del Mar, Chile, Kissinger is quoted as saying "Nothing of importance can come from the South; history is not made in the South." I read this quote in the invitation to the Mercosur Biennial, and therefore dedicated my paper to Kissinger's arrogance.

It provides an ironic frame for everything I intended to say.

"The Latin-Americanization of the United States," may seem somewhat removed from the theme of the 1997 Mercosur Symposium held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, focused on American utopias and toward the subtheme of art and politics. However, I think the issues and topics are more complex than they appear, and I hope to present a point of view that reverses, or at least diverts, a century-old notion of Latin American culture as derivative - from Europe, initially, and from the United States after World War II. This verdict left Latin America without a claim to vanguard originality, with a charge that theirs was an art that was primitive, exotic, or exclusively folkloric, and without influence in other parts of the world. These are false and biased claims fostered by Eurocentrism, about which Edward Said commented "European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against [the Third World] as a sort of surrogate and even underground self."

Such sentiments promoted the idea that the movement of culture occurred as a one-way street, so to speak, without any reciprocity, and that it ignored the appropriations inherent in the parallelism between modernism and so-called "primitivism," which permitted the continuation of an unacknowledged debt that European modernism owed to many areas of the Third World - from Africa, Asia, the Near East, the South Pacific, and Latin America. Thus the debts of Cubism and German Expressionism to Africa, of Matisse to Islamic art, of the Impressionists to Japan, of Henry Moore to pre-Columbian art, of the Abstract Expressionists to Native American art, and of others to the South Pacific, were canonized as vanguard on one hand, and "primitive" (without merit except as sources) on the other. An artist like Wifredo Lam was considered second class for many decades, although he influenced artists in New York, as did Siqueiros and Roberto Matta. Such a premise was revived and widely criticized in the 1984 exhibition "Primitivism in 20th Century Art" at New York's Museum of Modern Art. In fact, this type of myopia prompted the famous anthropophagic manifesto of Oswald de Andrade, written in May 1928 for the São Paulo vanguard, led by the example of Tarsila do Amaral.

If European and Latin American modernism both drew on "primitivism" - a misnomer for pre-Columbian and folk arts - why should only the European model be considered "vanguard" while the Latin American was relegated to a second-class status, intellectually and aesthetically? Why should Joaquín Torres García and the members of his Taller, or the kineticists of Venezuela, or the concrete and neo-concrete artists of Brazil and Argentina at later dates be considered less important or innovative than the Europeans? How is it that the Mexican muralists, the works of Cândido Portinari and Antonio Berni, should be considered on a lower level of formal and aesthetic achievement in the arena of political and social criticism than those of the German Expressionists? How is it, finally, that the work of David Alfaro Siqueiros should be linked on equal terms, in a recent exhibition in Düsseldorf, Germany, with that of Jackson Pollock who was his student in 1936 in New York, and learned his famous "drip" technique from the Mexican master? Without Siqueiros' discovery of synthetic paints for the fine arts and the accidental effects that could be achieved, Pollock's most famous style could not have occurred. This brings us full-circle to the Latin-Americanization of the United States. My argument is divided into two classifications, both of which are historically and politically situated: the first classification deals with Latin American influences within the popular (vernacular) and mass media aspects of the United States; the second with that of the fine arts.

Popular/Vernacular, Protest Arts, and the Mass Media

Among the countries of Latin America, the one, possibly, that the United States most resembles is Brazil - in size, wealth of natural resources, in civilizations built on the land of indigenous peoples and with the labor of African slaves. Both encouraged immense European immigrant populations, and, by the 19th century, that of Asian peoples from Japan and China for agricultural labor. A further characteristic of these two former colonies, is that settlement by their European colonizers began on the Eastern seaboards and slowly spread west and north, thus concentrating high culture, industry and finance along the Atlantic Ocean. Even the penetration of the interiors had similar characteristics: the bandeirantes of Brazil, and the pioneers and frontiersmen of the United States, were the forces that carried out penetrations and land appropriations which led to an entire mythology about the process, reflected in civic monuments and cinematic legends. Finally, due to the enormous territories involved, a persistent regionalism marked even the 20th century, at least until the 1960s when recognizable symptoms of postmodernism and its accompanying globalization began to make themselves evident in North America.

However the Latin-Americanization process had taken place long before. By 1848, U.S. imperial projects of expansion had managed to absorb, by war and a pittance in dollars, almost one-half of Mexico's total territories acquired by the new nation some twenty-five years earlier from Spain. Mexico's northern territories became the U.S. Southwest, containing Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and parts of Utah and Nevada. The land was appropriated through legal and illegal means. Spanish was spoken (bilingualism was guaranteed by treaty, but made difficult by ethnocentrism), and states, cities, villages and streets were named in Spanish throughout the area; foods, music, festivals, and customs were adopted - though denigrated; and racism toward brown-skinned peoples (Mexicans and Indians) was pronounced for over 100 years, and still exists today, but more subtlely. Cowboys learned the skills and anglicized the words of their trade from the Mexican vaqueros (the gauchos/gaúchos of the North). With the 1970s, a generation of rebellious young Mexican Americans from throughout the Southwest and Mid-west changed into Chicanos and Chicanas, demanded and received higher education, and created an original culture as a fusion of Mexican fine arts (murals and posters) and U.S. popular and high art sources. The early Pachucos and the present Chicanos recreated a language called caló (Mexican slang) and today speak "Spanglish" along with university-derived English.

By 1898, the United States took over from Spain the Caribbean nations of Cuba and Puerto Rico - and added the Philippines for good measure. Cuba achieved its fragile sovereigntysome twelve years later; the Philippines in 1945; and Puerto Rico is still a colony. The eastern seaboard of the U.S. was populated by Cubans (Florida), and Puerto Ricans (New York) from the 19th century to the present. Cuban and Puerto Rican food, salsa music, hand-rolled cigars (in Tampa, Fla), and botánicas for religious and ritual products became part of the U.S. scene, while younger Puerto Rican artists in the 1960s called themselves Nuyoricans, after New York. Correspondingly, a constantly increasing number of politicians, professional persons, and business people throughout the country are of Latin American descent, most Spanish-speaking.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the search for exoticism in Hollywood produced the extravagant figure of Carmen Miranda - whose criticized life (now documented in a wonderful 1994 film by Helen Solberg) was revived and reconsidered by Brazilian "tropicalism" in the 1960s (Caetano Veloso, Hélio Oiticica, and others; today by Regina Vater of Texas). The samba and bossa nova penetrated the United States along with Mexican boleros and rancheras, Cuban sones, and Latin jazz played by both African Americans like Dizzy Gillespie, and by Caribbean musicians. Latin American stars also penetrated Hollywood, some no longer in degrading or stereotypical roles, but in serious drama, while Brazil's Hour of the Star and Bye Bye Brazil, Argentina's The Official Story, the multinational cast of Babenco's The Kiss of the Spider Woman, and other Latin American cinema (even Cuba's, despite many difficulties) reached the United States on a more or less popular level, shown in art houses and on cable television. By the 1980s, Chilean musical groups like the Quilipayun and the Inti Illimani toured the United States; as did Brazilian Laurindo Almeida and Argentine's Mercedes Sosa; while records by Chileans Violeta Parra and Victor Jara, and Daniel Viglietti of Uruguay, circulated in the United States. Music from Central America, particularly El Salvador, came north, patronized by the huge numbers of refugees from that besieged nation who crossed the border in the 1980s, aided and abetted by U.S. religious, political and artistic groups across the country, to enter North America, and to become permanent residents or citizens.

Also under the rubric of popular (as well as elite) culture has been the canonization as well as commercialization of three Latin American figures: Frida Kahlo, Che Guevara, and Eva Perón. While Kahlo was adopted in the 1970s by the U.S. feminist movement and as a role model for Chicanos and Chicanas, and images of Guevara as a utopian hero circulated in the 1960s, Evita is a recent arrival. The packaging of Frida, and the 1990's attention to Che, particularly on the 30th anniversary of his death in Bolivia, have become so intense that the terms fridamanía and chemanía have been coined to express some of the advertising fervor and exploitation accompanying their images. Evita, of course, has been subsumed to the presence of rock-star Madonna who played the film role in 1997, and all three have successfully competed in the U.S. and Europe with standard cult personalities like the Beatles and Elvis Presley. There is no question that Frida and Che represent utopic figures internationally, while Evita was certainly considered as such by the Argentine descamisadas. However the Che and the Frida of the 1960s and 1970s have been totally distorted in the anti-utopianism of postmodernism where they have been rendered as "spectacles" through mass-media-ization, and the source of profitable sales, from earrings to watches, to beer.

New York, the art market, and the transnationalization of Latin American art.

The early influence in the 1930s and 1940s of the Mexican School in the United States needs no further documentation here. Suffice to say that Mexican art was well-known and admired from New York to California where major murals were painted with teams of North Americans. When muralism was revived across the United States in the 1970s, the Mexican model was once more explored. Modern Latin American art, however remained unknown.

Paris was the city of predilection for an international potpourri of literary, musical and visual arts representatives, including many Latin Americans. However new factors entered the formulation after World War II when New York became a center for the fine arts. Described sardonically by French art historian Serge Guilbaut as How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, Guilbaut connects the importance of New York as a cultural capital replacing Paris, to Abstract Expression, freedom (presumably from communism), and the Cold War. He tracks this process back to 1935 and the de-marxification of the intelligentsia; however the capture of modernist supremacy by New York is dated to 1948 - the period during which the United States undertook to educate the world about the originality and importance of a home-grown Abstract Expressionism, using it as a banner of cultural freedom in comparison to that offered by the Soviet Bloc. I have written extensively about this phenomenon, including the crucial role of the Rockefeller-managed Museum of Modern Art of New York, in propagating this ideology, as well as its attempted micro-management, over several decades, of art programs and museum practices in Latin America in collaboration with the related organization known as the Center for Inter-American Relations (now called the Americas Society) of New York, and, at times. the Visual Arts Department of the Organization of American States.

More crucial to an understanding of the Latin-Americanization process, is an analysis of the 1970s and 1980s, following on the heels of a 1965 revision of U.S. immigration regulations which had the unexpected effect of opening the doors to formerly restricted immigration from the Third World - including many Latin American artists, but also Asians from the territories of U.S.wars in Korea and Indochina. The 1970s were signaled by a new market consciousness of the excellence of modern Latin American art and its exceedingly cheap prices compared to the overheated world market. I can quote one case from 1977 when a major Frida Kahlo painting was sold below auction estimates at Sotheby's auction house in New York for $19,000. (The peak price in recent years for a Kahlo painting has surpassed the three million mark in dollars.)

The 1980s provided an even greater surprise as major mainstream institutions in the U.S. (followed by European and Japanese museums) began to mount blockbuster exhibitions of modern Latin American art. In 1988, I gave this phenomenon the title - for better or for worse - of the "art boom", comparing it, in a prestigious art magazine, with the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s. The term "art boom" caught on, and is still widely used; however the curatorial quality and interpretive function within these exhibitions revealed the ignorance and Eurocentrism of U.S. curators and museum directors alike.

The "boom" also spawned a great number of catalogues, which now constitute a large part of the historical and critical literature in English, purportedly filling a lacuna of scholarship. A review of serious books on modern Latin American art available in the United States today, not only makes their scarcity obvious, but underlines the low level of scholarship in some of the catalogues, for example, those like Hispanic Artists in the United States and , Art of the Fantastic:Latin America, 1920-1987. The one exception was The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States: 1920-1970, an exhibit organized by a Puerto Rican, with a catalogue written by North American, Latin American and Latino critics and historians. Catalogues outlive their exhibitions, and readers have their opinions formed accordingly.

Those of us functioning as knowledgeable critics and art historians in the U.S. felt ourselves called upon to criticize many of the offerings and point out their failings, and we are still playing that role. Nevertheless, the U.S. public came to these exhibitions, and others like them, in the thousands, and were often astonished at the quality of the work. Private galleries, alive to the art market and to the great interest in Latin American art, began to proliferate; their presence spurring a new class of collectors. Thus we can say that the United States was beginning to be re-Latin-Americanized in this arena, thirty years after the Mexicans had been written out of North American art history books.

Slowly, new articles and books in English written by Latin Americans and by Latin Americanists like myself, are beginning to appear, and they emphasize the critical voice necessary in a period of postmodernism. As Cuban critic Gerardo Mosquera has pointed out in his introduction to a recent British publication, Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism From Latin America :

The 1960s and 1970s [were] decades strongly marked by the "Sixties Spirit" in its most political sense, influenced to a great degree by the Cuban Revolution and the activity that generated across the continent. In fact, much of this spirit was actively created within Latin America, to the extent that one could speak of a Latinamericanization of US culture. This had been a time of great hopes....The 1980s saw the end of one cycle and the start of another based on failure...[the new] anti-utopia is not only the result of a critique of modernity and its totalisms...it is part of new post-utopian thought and...contrary to appearances...is very positive. The "grand policy" of vertical transformation has been replaced by specific horizontal micropolicies.

My presentation embraces a much longer chronology than the 1960s through the 1980s, but contains some of the spirit of both - the celebratory and the critical. Coming from North America, I hold, moreover, to a notion of subterranean subversion. Facing postmodernism, neoliberalism, and brutal globalizations that are proceeding relentlessly, I would argue that the Latin-Americanization and the "other-ization" of the United States - now forced to see itself as one constituency among others; forced to consider the plurality not only of its changing populations, but also their multiple cultures which are homogenizing to some degree, just as global culture is bringing about not only a sense of difference, but a sense of fusion (most noticeable in music). There can be no real return to the older, ethnocentric, xenophobic, racist and patriarchal United States - though our most reactionary and violent politicians and right-wing organizations are trying their best to reimpose that status. U.S. cultural currents today, just as those of the dominant European powers who colonized the world on the strength of their supremacy, are now latinized, africanized, asianized, and feminized, from within. In closing, it is worth repeating a maxim by Vietnamese-American filmmaker, Trinh T. Min-ha, that is now well-known in the English-speaking world: "There is a Third World in every First World, and vice-versa".

Published by Art Nexus (bilingual), No. 29 (July-Sept; Aug-Oct, 1998):80-84