2nd Research Posts 2009                         LITR 5731 Colonial-Postcolonial Literature

Charles Colson

18 November 2009

Indigenismo as Latin American Postcolonial Literature

                Writing about the indigenous population of the New World began shortly after the Spanish conquest and has continued, by fits and starts, until the present.  For centuries, such writing was almost entirely by whites or mestizos in the language of the colonizers for the purposes of the colonizers.[1]  Though almost all of the Spanish-speaking colonies had achieved independence by 1826, “postcolonial” literature (as voices of the formerly colonized peoples) was slow in coming.[2]  Not until comparatively recently have indigenous voices themselves been heard.  In the course of doing background research for my thesis in Latin American history, I learned about indigenismo (literally, “indigenism”) as a literary movement among Spanish-speaking intellectuals who sought to bring attention to the plight of the Indian at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century.  Indigenista authors—particularly in Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru—turned away from the dominant romanticism of the late nineteenth century to realistically and sympathetically treat the plight of the Indian.  A second generation, writing in the early twentieth century, went beyond merely writing about injustices to work directly for reform.  The movement acquired respectability and, by the second decade of the twentieth century, a few committed indigenistas had reached positions of influence within the government.  Pragmatic politicians began to embrace the creed in their speeches, if not always in their actions.  The integration of the Indian population into “civilization” by means of public education became a nationalist project in a number of Latin American nation states.

                In postcolonial Latin America the dominant elites and the mestizo middle and working classes most often identified with local adaptations of the culture introduced by Spanish colonizers, looking to the United States as their hegemonic model for industrial development.  Indian culture (traditional, rural, and agrarian) was seen as a hindrance to modernity.  When indigenous farmers resisted the encroachments of capitalist landlords, the businessmen called upon the coercive powers of the state.  Indians who organized or fought back were often identified as Communist sympathizers and subject to eviction, arrest, torture, and extrajudicial execution.  In the last quarter of the twentieth century, indigenous voices in a form known as testimonio have become internationally known.[3]  In the context of postcolonial literature, the representation of the indigenous “other” by the literate descendants of the colonizers raised a multitude of questions for me  The fact that the authors had editorial help in presenting their stories piqued my interest.  Was there a historical connection between the two forms?  How would postcolonial issues of language as related to power and identity be addressed in such works?

                My research led me to several useful works on Spanish-American literature as well as journal articles on a number of branching, related issues.  Jean Franco’s An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature (1969) features a chapter entitled “Realism and the Novel: Its Application to Social Protest and Indianist Writing.”  She explains that, in contrast to the realism of the nineteenth century, which attempted to portray the relationship between the individual and his society, the realism of the 1930s focused on the workings of society and, in particular, economic exploitation and class struggle.  Franco gives examples of Ecuadorian realist novelists whose characters included montuvios (those with Negro and Indian blood in their veins who lived in the tropical coastal towns) and cholos (Indian “half-breeds” of the mountainous sierra) in contexts of social upheaval, but she classifies the Indianist novel as a “special branch of regional and social-protest novels . . . [that] has been written entirely by non-Indians and has inevitably suffered because of this.”  She identifies four stages between the 1920s and the late 1950s: “simple documentary exposure of conditions,” “Indians seen as the equivalent of the proletariat and the source of future revolutionary militancy,” “sociological study,” and “the attempt to comprehend the Indian mind through his mythology, poetry and legend” (242).  The Cambridge History of Latin-American Literature (1996) contains a more focused article on “The Literature of Indigenismo” by René Prieto, who notes that more recent scholarship has raised questions concerning the lineage, idiosyncrasies and generic boundaries between Indianismo and indigenismo.  He outlines three phases—“Indianismo, orthodox Indigenismo, and Neoindigenismo”—that have their beginnings in the 1840s and evolve into the late 1970s, where he finds the influence of magic realism and identifies dualities reminiscent of postcolonial literature.  Supplied with specific authors and novels in the movement, I was able to make some associations.

A second set of sources gave me insight into the connections between indigenismo, testimonio, and the larger field of postcolonial literature.  Through Philip Swanson’s Latin American Fiction: A Short Introduction I was able to trace Indian characters from their beginnings as “projected emblems of national identity” (9) to their appearance in a Regionalism concerned with social cohesion as it tried to envision a just and viable state incorporating indigenous peoples.  Swanson notes that “[a]n integral feature of what is now called Magical Realism is the indigenous population’s view of life, based upon myth and legend” (51).  It appears in the neoindigenist effort to recreate the indigenous experience from the inside.  After the experimentalism of the Latin American Boom period (roughly the 1960s and 1970s), Swanson describes a “return to an engagement with human reality” and it is in this social referentiality that he locates testimonio (84).  However, the intervention of academic or other intellectual discourse in the production of a genre that purports to give a voice to marginalized people is fundamentally problematic.  The chapter entitled “Testimonial Narrative: Whose Text?” in Naomi Lindstrom’s monograph The Social Conscience of Latin American Writing notes the long history of testimonial narratives in Latin American writing, but locates the mid-twentieth forerunner of testimonio in “an extreme case of the anthropological current in indigenista narrative (73).  Lindstrom traces the development of narratives that focused less on fictional or composite figures and more on individual experience and attitudes.  Developing a written narrative from tape-recorded interviews, especially one that is accessible to international readers, suggests that “the relationship between the more literate editors of these works and the autobiographical speakers is more complex that the texts readily indicate” (87).  The question of verisimilitude versus veracity is at the center of The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, edited by Arturo Arias.  This casebook provides a brief background, a collection of primary documents—newspaper articles, interviews, and official statements—and an assortment of essays in which scholars assess the “political, historical, and cultural contexts of the debate and [consider] its implications for such issues as the ‘culture wars,’ historical truth, and the politics of memory” (cover).  I returned once more to the portions of Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures that may be found at http://www.postcolonialweb.org to help me make connections among the topics of my research.  Themes such as language as power and identity, the production of literature, subversive themes, and the “complexities and varied cultural provenance of post-colonial writing” suggested correspondences with what I had read in other sources (n. pag.).

The various informants facilitated my search for answers, but the results were not as clear as I might have wished.  The historical connection between indigenismo and testimonio exists more as a set of evolving images than as a continuous genre.  Colonial authors tended to describe the Indian as other, in opposition to the imported culture.  Power relations between ethnic groups led to genetic mixture in the urban centers but failed to incorporate rural traditional groups.  Newly-independent states tried to imagine national communities and found the integration of the Indian into the dominant society an ongoing matter of concern.  Indigenist works reflect changing attitudes about the representation of the other, attempting to be ever more realistic.  Authors worked for more genuine characterization, incorporated details from personal interviews and anthropological studies, and experimented with esoteric language and “a type of syntax that aims to portray native speech patterns and non-Western structures of thought” (Prieto, 154).  Magical realism offered a way of coupling the Western normal or natural with the non-Western fantastic or supernatural in the common world setting.  Underneath it all ran a current of social protest, as if in an effort to answer the question Edward Said posed in writing Orientalism: who represents those who cannot represent themselves?  When indigenous peoples are not literate in the post-colonial “power language,” others have tried.

The most authentic voice, of course, is the one that comes from the autochthonous character himself, but even here the answers I sought were complicated by issues of power and identity.  “Documentary literature” includes works with a strong claim to factuality and “testimonial” writing, as a subset, would indicate “the first-person accounts of participants in or witnesses to significant events or little-known subcultures” (Lindstrom, 71)  Lindstrom cites the work of anthropologist Oscar Lewis for his use of tape-recorded native informants and novelistic presentation of material.  This was a new angle on the problem of representing real-world peasants and the urban poor in their own words.  While he acknowledges the families that contributed, Lewis had the ability to edit the transcripts and the books belonged to him.  Miguel Barnet (Biografía de un cimarrón, 1966) and Elena Poniatowska (Gaby Brimmer, 1979) are examples of authors who have worked in great depth with an individual to produce narratives that purport to be factual, yet skeptics warn that several steps intervene between history and the testimonial text:

The witness’s speech cannot be a reflection of his or her experience, but rather its refraction, owing to the vicissitudes of memory, intention, ideology.  The intentionality and the ideology of the author-editor is superposed on the original text, creating more ambiguities, silences and lacunae in the process of selecting, putting together, and arranging the raw material according to the norms of literary form. (quoted in Lindstrom, 80)

The work that definitively focused international attention on the phenomenon of testimonio, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú (I, Rigoberta Menchú), was developed into a written narrative on the basis of tape-recorded sessions.  While the young Quiché-Maya was visiting Europe as a spokesperson for the armed resistance in Guatemala, she was interviewed over the course of a week by journalist Elizabeth Burgos Debray after a third party sought out the editor and arranged the collaboration.  Burgos characterizes the narrative as lightly edited, Lindstrom tells us, but “[u]nder the scrutiny of literary critics, or any other readers attentive to details of the text, the narrative reveals itself to be the work of more than a single voice” (88).  North American anthropologist David Stoll conducted systematic interviews of his own, then published a book questioning the biographical details of Menchú’s account.  He posited that she had made herself a spectator of tragedies at which she was not present and attributed to herself vital dramas that she did not live (Asturias, 78).  People around the world flew to the Noble Prize winner’s defense with accusations of overenthusiastic empiricism, imperialist bias, and racism.  Stoll’s criticism was more nuanced than some gave him credit for: “One cannot say that Rigoberta lies.  She’s a person that belongs to a different cultural tradition, a preliterary tradition, an oral tradition, in which history has a collective nature, facts are stored in a common memory and belong to the entire community.  Everything she told has happened, even if it didn’t happen to her personally (Asturias, 80).  Burgos, who had parted ways with her subject over the matter of some unshared proceeds from the publication, offered a more pragmatic justification: “. . . we should not forget that when you fight a war of resistance, you employ methods that in a different context would not be acceptable” (Asturias, 81).  Apropos of language as power, the Brown University web page on “Political Discourse—Theories of Colonialism and Postcolonialism” reminds us that “language is the medium through which conceptions of ‘truth,’ ‘order,’ and ‘reality’ become established” (n. pag.).  Finally, Arturo Arias points out that the whole affair was part of “culture wars” over the effort to include other representatives besides the Western tradition in the required readings at U.S. academic institutions.  Testimonio, then, reflects a wide range of issues that typify postcolonial literature.

My investigations have been satisfying because they validated my impression that there were valuable connections to be made between Latin America and the other regions I have studied in LITR 5731.  Discovering the complexities of postcolonial literature in the region has piqued my interest in understanding more.  If I were to continue my research, I would look into the Spanish-language sources cited by the authors I have read.  Rather than reading more criticism and commentary however, I believe I will begin to read the indigenist novels and testimonial narratives I have learned about.  I want to experience the texts themselves.

Works Cited

Arturo Arias, ed. The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Franco, Jean. An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969.

Landow, George P., ed. “Political Discourse—Theories of Colonialism and Postcolonialism.” Contemporary Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature in English. Brown University, n.d. Web. 15 September 2009.

Lindstrom, Naomi. The Social Conscience of Latin American Writing. Texas Pan American Series. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.

Prieto, René. “The Literature of Indigenismo” (138-163). In Cambridge History of Latin-American Literature, Vol. 2: The Twentieth Century. Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Swanson, Philip. Latin American Fiction: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.