Notes

1. See Lewis Hanke and Gustavo Pérez Firmat. A comprehensive state-of-the art survey of the field has been recently offered by Earl E. Fitz.

1. The nomenclature of the region is politically charged. I use the terms historically, referring to the region as “Spanish America” before independence and “Latin America” after that, or (as in this case) when referring to its entire history.

2. It is useful to recognize the vast and significant body of work on pastoralism and on the epistemological distinction between city and the country, most notably along the Marxist lines of the theorist Raymond Williams in The Country and the City (1973).

3. Indian raids and the threat of Indian captivity are a fixture of frontier culture of the United States, and there are also notable Latin American examples—for instance, from the South American pampas is La cautiva (The captive, 1837) by the Argentinian Romantic writer Esteban Echevarría. On female Indian captivity, see two parallel studies, Christopher Castiglia’s Bound and Determined, for the North American phenomenon, and Susana Rotker’s Captive Women, for the South American one. When the US government began persecuting the Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache, many of these tribes retreated into northern Mexico, especially in the 1840s and 1850s, causing an escalation of raids within Mexico that even threatened Mexico City (Weber 95). In his memoirs recalling childhood on the northern deserts during the 1890s, the Mexican politician and philosopher José Vasconcelos, author of the influential The Cosmic Race (1926), recalls being warned by his mother what would happen to him if he were captured by marauding Indians (1:7–8).

4. My translation of “¿Buscaremos la higiene y patología del hombre chileno en los libros europeos, y no estudiaremos hasta qué punto es modificada la organización del cuerpo humano por los accidentes del clima de Chile y de las costumbres chilenas? . . . Lo dicho se aplica a la mineralogía, a la geología, a la teoría de los meteoros, a la teoría del calor, a la teoría del magnetismo; la base de todos estos estudios es la observación, la observación local, la observación de todos los días, la observación de los agentes naturales.”

5. As Casey Blanton puts it, “American fiction and the American travel narratives that influenced it share a response to the idea of travel as a symbolic act, heavy with promises of new life, progress, and the thrill of escape” (18).

6. The Baudrillard/Žižek notion of “desert of the real” turns outward this classical and inward-looking concept of the desert, by concentrating on the manipulability of perception: after having existed for a long time in a convincing virtual simulacrum, the emancipated subject finds itself in the dismal “real” world—the true desert (Žižek 15). Within travel studies, sociologists like Dean MacCannell have critiqued the “staged authenticity” of the tourist experience (95–107).

7. These mendicants played a key role as forward agents of the feudalistic encomienda system of indentured servitude that would last for centuries. These men of the cloth seeded the landscape with ranchos, missions, and reducciones, where converted Indians—in their view, spiritual children needing guardianship—were taken under religious and economic tutelage and taught Western values, technologies, and trades in exchange for involuntary labor. This infantilization of a vast majority of the native population of the Americas initiated the persistent racial caste system that plagues Latin America to this day. The legal structure for this originated in the 1551 debates between Bishop Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, author of A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552), and the philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. See Lewis Hanke’s All Mankind Is One (1974) and the more recent Darker Side of the Renaissance by Walter Mignolo (1995); on the encomienda system, see Encomenderos of New Spain by Robert Himmerich y Valencia (1996).

8. Much of what remains of the nonphysical Aztec culture—its rituals, beliefs, habits, proverbs, and customs—is contained in the massive protoethnographic work of the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590), the Historia natural (known as the Florentine Codex). Sahagún developed a system for collecting data that was astonishingly similar to modern ethnographic field methods. He interviewed, independently, two corroborating native sources before he accepted any information as definitive; he also employed Aztec scribes who were trained to understand and record information both in Aztec hieroglyphics and in Spanish. Other such examples stand out as well: the Dominican Francisco Ximénez (1666–1729), who learned Quiché language, was responsible for preserving the Popol Vuj, the Mayan sacred book.

9. In another such case from the colonial period, author William Byrd II gives two very different accounts of what can be found on the same trip: his very detailed narrative survey History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina (1729) and his lewd Secret History of the Dividing Line (1841).

10. Clifford quips that Malinowski has “no method at all,” alluding to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which Clifford compares to Malinowski’s Diary: “Both Heart of Darkness and the Diary appear to portray the crisis of an identity—a struggle at the limits of Western civilization against the threat of moral dissolution” (98). In Heart of Darkness, when narrator Marlowe reads Kurtz’s unsent report it becomes apparent to him that Kurtz has gone mad in the wilderness: into his otherwise balanced assessment of the natives, Kurtz has scrawled “exterminate all the brutes.” Clifford astutely notes how both Malinowski the ethnographer and Kurtz the ivory trader/missionary endured lonely sojourns so unsettling that they reached a schizophrenic split.

11. A speculative field devoted to proving that Lewis’s death was a murder has been quite productive; see John Guice, By His Own Hand?

12. This was studied by Angel Rama in his classic The Lettered City (77–78). It is hard to underestimate how many Latin American officials of all ranks—lawyers, presidents, ministers, and functionaries at all levels—have been published novelists or poets.

13. Bahktin elaborates: “Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation with any living dialogue. The orientation towards an answer is open, blatant and concrete” (Dialogic Imagination, 279–80).

14. Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word and Irving Leonard’s Books of the Brave make strikingly similar cases, looking at the books brought from home by the new arrivals, which shaped their image of what was before their eyes.

15. Oddly enough, the picaresque and the quixotic became inexorably intertwined, but literary criticism seems not to have made much of this genre trouble. When, and why, did the lonely rogue’s tale become confused with the tale of the mythic and bickering pair of travelers? More important, why is this modal blurring significant? I will refer to some of these questions in the pages ahead.

16. Especially in the second part of Don Quixote, these parallel fantasy worlds are invented and staged by others, reflecting the Don’s delusions as they were set out in part 1: Sancho is awarded the governorship of the “island” he had been dreaming about (and proves to be a surprisingly level-headed ruler) and the Don is challenged by “Knight of the White Moon,” the disguised bachelor Sansón Carrasco (2:45, 2:64).

17. “Homophilic loyalties are enlisted as a source of security (for the state, the community, the citizen or ethical subject). Conversely, and much to the puzzlement of contemporary commentators, philoxenic solidarities introduce the disruptive category of risk into the otherwise determined Epicurean espousal of the ethical benefits of cultivated ataraxia, or invulnerability, and autarkia, or self-sufficiency. Any sort of friendship (local or global) is emotionally risky, as it might bedevil the tranquil Epicurean sage with anxieties of affective dependence. But friendships toward strangers or foreigners, in particular, carry exceptional risks, as their fulfillment may at any time ‘constitute a felony contra patriam’” (Gandhi 29).

1. Instead of the standard English translation of the title (El Lazarillo: A Guide for Inexperienced Travelers between Buenos Aires and Lima, 1773), this is closer to the original El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes desde Buenos-Ayres hasta Lima, in which “ciegos caminantes” is literally “blind walkers” or “blind travelers.” (The complete Spanish title is, comically, a paragraph long.)

2. The “true” picaresque is on several levels itself a nonconforming, “delinquent” literary genre. For instance, it is simultaneously critical and proud of the larger social forces it documents—nationalist criticism in Spain has always seen it as an instrument of empire, whereas the political left has claimed it as realistic critique of the institutions of discipline such as the church, and the privileged warrior class. Offering (mostly) a reversal to the standard Anglo-American appreciation of the optimistic late picaresque, Lennard Davis offers a compelling treatment of its connection with the “criminal” origins of the modern novel. Davis claims that during the seventeenth century, narrative began to announce itself as “purely factual or actually recent,” and that this claim is tied to various “true” accounts of criminality, including journalistic ones (70): “There seems to have been something inherently novelistic about the criminal, or rather the form of the novel seems almost to demand a criminal content,” and the novel, like the criminal, “is both locus of fraud and the locus of truth” (125, 128).

3. Anything coming from the other side of the Pyrenees was orientalized, a fetish that led to the German Romantics’ sensualizing rediscovery of the Spanish Baroque, to exoticizing works like Prosper Merimée’s (and later George Bizet’s) Carmen, and to Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra. Spain was seen as a backward place of heat, bullfights, Catholic superstition, veiled women, honor killings, and delinquents. As argued above, the Lazarillo and Don Quixote do share a family resemblance. Both feature episodic structures and marginalized protagonists who wander through the underside of society; both offer a comic platform for social satire; and both avail themselves of unapologetic cruelty and “lower body humor,” as Bakhtin called Cervantes’s brand of Rabelaisian comedy (114). Neither the author of the Lazarillo de Tormes nor Cervantes inaugurated this sort of wandering episodic structure per se: it can be traced to classical sources such as Lucianic satire and Petronius’s Satyricon, as well as to medieval saints’ lives and confessions. Another shared element is purely practical: Don Quixote’s immediate models were popular chivalric adventure books meant to be read aloud to illiterate audiences, with chapters offering a good pause structure. See Matthew Garrett for a recent consideration of episodic structure in anglophone American literature.

4. This shared but radically contrasting relationship with truth claims has led some literary historians to place the two texts as ethical opposites: Lazarillo a protorealist text, a shining example of crudely effective mimetic chronicling, as Alexander Parker put it, “a boy who is a boy, not a miniature adult” (112), and on the other hand Don Quijote as the first modern and self-referential novel. Manuel Durán explores this at length in La ironía en el Quijote.

5. In North America, the relationship between the observation and description of nature and nation-building is long established. See Early American Cartographies, the useful volume edited by Martin Brückner on the cartography and spatialization of the entire American continent during this period.

6. On this topic, see Percy Adams’s “Perception and the Eighteenth-Century Traveler.”

7. See Vera Kutzinski and Ottmar Ettte on Humboldt and slavery (“Introduction,” Humboldt 2001). The importance of Humboldt as a patron of the Americas runs deep within official national cultures: countless streets, parks, schools, counties, and even ocean currents are named after him and/or his fellow traveler, botanist Aimé Bonpland.

8. See Ilona Katzew’s Casta Painting. Another example from the Spanish American seventeenth and eighteenth centuries where high art had a startling folk reinterpretation is the Baroque. The barroco de indias craftsmen produced numerous examples of architecture and decorative arts that were nativized and racialized. See Parkinson-Zamora (1997).

9. Cultural anthropologists like Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner who studied rites of passage define liminal space as a place outside of everyday norms where participants look back in. This upside-down, theatrical place is only temporary, since the liminal is built to be abandoned: initiates and revelers always return to society (Leach “Time”).

10. Enrique Florescano and Isabel Sanchez further this view (183–290), as does John Lynch (“Origins” 13–30).

11. Claudio Veliz makes the intriguing case that turmoil resulting from the liberalization of trade initiated the dominant cultural and political trope of nineteenth-century Latin America, the dispute between civilización and barbarie, often simplified as a confrontation between an outward-looking, liberal, Europeanizing, urban (and urbane) ethos and a conservative, inward-looking, agrarian, and provincial one often allied with the church (125–162). This rift runs deep within the gauchesque literary genre discussed in the following chapter.

12. One possible counterreading regards the homegrown and the homemade, which began to replace goods from the mother country. This is perhaps where the backcountry found itself at the vanguard: it is the autochthonous place, its distance from the compromised metropolis necessitating self-sufficiency and, difficult as it was, forcing the imagining of independence. Two complementary studies, one about North America (Rigal’s American Manufactory) and the other about Spanish America (Andrew K. Bush’s The Routes of Modernity), explore the parallel between the commerce of manufactured, physical products and the commerce of culture. Bush argues that during the late colonial period in Spanish America, the native-spun and “coarse”—both words and cloth—began to flow from the periphery to the metropolis, gradually replacing the better-crafted European goods flowing in the other direction: the beginning of a postcolonial modernity (26–27).

1. When I refer to the cultural construction, I use the term “cowboy”; when I refer to the historical figure I use terms such as “range driver.” There is no analogue for the term “gaucho,” although the “gauchesque” certainly refers to a cultural imaginary.

2. “The ruling class in the countryside had traditionally imposed a system of coercion upon people whom they regarded as mozos vagos y mal entretenidos—vagabonds without employer or occupation, idlers who sat in groups singing to a guitar, drinking maté, gambling, but apparently not working. This class was seen as a potential labor force and was therefore subject to all kinds of constraints and controls by the landed proprietors: punitive expeditions, imprisonment, conscription to the Indian frontier, corporal punishment, and other penalties” (Lynch, Argentine 104).

3. For generations, just about every leading Argentine intellectual, whether provincial or from the city, has found it necessary to argue for the Martín Fierro as the national foundational epic—for instance, Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938) with El payador (The gaucho singer) or Ezequiel Martínez Estrada (1895–1964) author of, among other works, the massive Muerte y transfiguración de Martín Fierro (Death and transfiguration of Martín Fierro).

4. The widely available translation of Martín Fierro (1974) only contains “The Departure.” An older (1936) out-of-print translation includes most of the “Return” (trans. Walter Owen). Much of this translation’s print run is marred by mispagintion and printing errors. All excerpts from the “Return” use either the Owen translation where adequate (as indicated) or are my translation.

5. See Jens Andermann, “Argentine Literature.”

6. Turner’s triumphalist image was of a West where “every individual was a new Adam. Each was the first man, each the new unfallen,” as Simonson writes (36). The frontier was the crucible where US national values of “frontierism. . . . free enterprise, laissez-faire, individual rights, natural rights, manifest destiny, popular nationalism, and social mobility” were born (37). The contrasting reading to this optimism argues that the “closing” marked a decline, according to more recent revisionists of Turnerism (see Richard Slotkin and Roderick Frazier Nash). Wherever American exceptionalism is concerned, the stakes are quite high.

7. As Ludmer, the most sophisticated analyst of the gauchesque, puts it: “That transparency (which is in part, a product of the theft of the past and of the convergence of multiple forces on one point) . . . can only be read from within the already constituted genre, from the perspective of the future and its convention” (4).

8. This recalls the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser’s notion of “interpellation,” which locates the constitution of the subject at the precise moment when he or she is called by the authorities, the “police” (“Hey, you there!”). When the ideological state apparatus orders him or her to conform, to stand down—that is the precise instant the subject, responding to the call from overwhelming and instantaneous authority, becomes him- or herself: a political mirror stage. “[What] I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else)” (174).

1. Summarizing this aspect of 1950s culture, Griffin and Susman write: “Fullfilling those utopian dreams made the United States a success. . . . Ironically, however, this moment of triumph was accompanied by something disturbing: a new self-consciousness of tragedy and sense of disappointment” (19). A more light-hearted overview of Cold War paranoia, Michael Barson and Steven Heller’s Red Scared!, deals with the fairly limited subset of anxious works that represented the object of anxiety directly: films such as The Manchurian Candidate (1962).

2. Several interrelated thought patterns emerged as a result of this conflation of scales. A sense of being watched pervaded: alien invasion fantasies, like the film The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951); tortured, voyeuristic works like Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1951) and Psycho (1960); paranoid political psychodramas such as The Manchurian Candidate (1959); and the opened secrets of the Kinsey Reports (1948, 53). Spy and noir genres flourished under the shadow of Sputnik.

3. Another interesting parallel between Biedermeier and the 1950s in North America is that, later, once their myths of a peaceful, simpler life had been punctured by social unrest, both produced intense nostalgia.

4. In Nadel’s analysis, the second half of the Cold War—the late 1960s and 1970s—connects to the rise of postmodernism: cultural and political dissatisfaction led to questioning the normativity and reliance on closed forms, and this laid bare some internal contradictions and hardened fictions (157–203).

5. After Francis Ford Coppola’s production company, which owned the rights to On The Road, made several fruitless attempts to bring the book to film, it finally succeeded, with Salles directing.

6. There were many known instances during the Cold War in which the United States helped Latin American intellectuals on the left, offering them fellowships and academic positions and funding their magazines and other publication venues. At times the purpose was to undercut Soviet influence, while at other times it was to purchase information about political activities. And sometimes it was for outright bribery, to soften or silence hard-line anti-US positions. This has been studied at length, notably by Jean Franco in her fine Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, in which she offers a close reading of the complicated relationship between the Latin American intelligentsia, US information and cultural agencies, and the CIA.

7. Argentina would not benefit from the global postwar boom that occurred in most of the capitalist West, led by the United States. Perón’s policy of protectionism, meant to promote self-sufficiency in industrial and manufactured goods, had an unintended consequence during this period: agriculture was neglected, eroding what historically had been the cornerstone of the country’s export economy. Thus began the “Argentine paradox” of economic decline in the second half of the twentieth century. The relevant statistics can be found at http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/GDP-per-capita-in-1950; see also Guido di Tella, Political Economy of Argentina.

8. Besides being considered a founder of Latin American “ethnomarxism,” Mariátegui is often cited as one of the first ecologically aware social critics. The emphasis in his Seven Essays on the Indians’ deep ties with the land, and their “correct” communitarian use of it, is seen as an expansion of dialectical materialism to include an awareness of the limits of natural resources—often overlooked in Marxism’s utilitarian view of the material world as primarily a source of raw materials for the human endeavor (see Jorge Coronado’s Andes Imagined, 25–52). During this same period, the postrevolutionary Mexican government was experimenting with small-plot land distribution to the recently emancipated peasant class, implementing a communal system, ejidos. This was something Mariátegui was likely observing, given his active exchanges with Mexican intellectual and political figures of the Mexican Revolution, such as José Vasconcelos (see Vásquez Castillo).

1. Kristine Vanden Berghe gives a fine overview of the main issues that arise when an educated, urban mestizo like Marcos assumes roles as spokesperson and leader in an indigenous rebellion (54–87). Jan de Vos, in Una tierra para sembrar sueños (2002), offers a good counterpoint, stating that the indigenous population had been reclaiming “the book” for quite a while before the appearance of the Zapatistas and Marcos. For a broader approach to the deployment of “Indianness” in the uprising at large and its various discourses (not just those of Marcos), a useful discussion is Nicholas Higgins’s Understanding the Chiapas Rebellion; Thomas Olesen also lays out the discursive networks created by the movement.

2. Michael Tangeman writes that the declaración is “devoid of much of the leftist rhetorical baggage usually accompanying leftist Latin American guerilla movement” (89). Vanden Berghe, perhaps the most thorough formal reader of Marcos’s narratives, notes that classical anti-US rhetoric is strangely muted in Marcos’s voice, replaced by a wider-ranging, nuanced, and ironic stance (143–53).

3. Mariana Mora, who outlines the progression of Zapatista discourse from this early stage to the later “Otra Campaña,” claims this “first moment” was where the indigenous-rights claims were predominant. Given its surprising success due to the novel use of media, it morphed into the terms of the larger struggle. “The decision to construct the autonomous municipalities generated” a “reinterpretation of the movement, originally conceived as primarily agrarian, as one that linked resource distribution to self-determination” (70). According to Mora, the two disparate aims—local resource distribution and indigenous rights on the one hand, and self-determination in the face of a large system on the other—did not come into clearer synergy until the later stages of the movement in 2006, after almost “a decade of local practice.” In any case, Marcos’s ironic and playful language appeared as early as 1994. Josefina Saldaña-Portillo argues for a different reading of the development of Zapatista discourse: she addresses the complex signification of mestizaje within the discourse in tandem with parallel resistance movements, such as US Chicanismo. Saldaña-Portillo contends that the Zapatista shift away from a local agenda toward a larger one that engaged with national and even international concerns (e.g., political transparency and referendum initiatives, recall votes)—and, we can assume, antineoliberalism in general—was what caused the hard government backlash. The Zapatistas “exceeded the terms of their own subalternization,” the “particularity of their ethnicity” (402–3).

4. Most of my references to the Spanish originals refer to the six-volume collected Documentos y comunicados (1994–2001), unless otherwise noted.

5. Spivak’s position is somewhat polemical within the debate over essentialism, because she argues for the occasional necessity of essentialism by the resistance to power: “It’s the idea of strategy that has been forgotten. . . . So long as the critique of essentialism is understood not as an exposure of error, our own or others’, but as an acknowledgment of the dangerousness of something one cannot not use” (5, my emphasis).

6. Approaches to this range from short, mostly impressionistic journalistic pieces by notables Margo Glantz (1998), Gabriel Zaid (1994), and Hugo Hiriart (1995) to more theoretically inclined (e.g., Eduardo Duhalde and Enrique Dratman, 231–34). Most significant, perhaps, is Marcos himself.

7. As Griffin and Susman note, “Comics dramatized . . . the same kind of collective representation appearing in so many realms of postwar culture: heroic figure who is a concerned, anxious sinner capable of the most dreadful acts and incapable of operating rationally in terms of a scientific society’s norms” (28).

8. According to Latin American literature specialist Hermann Herlinghaus, Marcos is not exactly an antihero, but rather an “anti-Platonic” half-hero who, through intentional inconsistency and discontinuity, seeks discursive emancipation from the mechanism of authorial voice, which is ultimately hegemonic. Like the unifying Foucauldian author function, the notion of the “hero” is suspect (225–28).

9. Border Arts performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, for one, sees in the high-irony Subcomandante a fellow performero (90); “hacktivists” such as Electronic Disturbance Theater founder Ricardo Dominguez have claimed a seamless connection to Marcos’s work (Fusco and Dominguez, 2010).

10. Herlinghaus couches Marcos’s duality in Brechtian terms: “What we have is the ‘Brechtian’ problem regarding the relationship between those who ‘make’ history and those who ‘write’ it, those who move history and those who dedicate themselves to its symbolic ordering—between the ‘who’ and the ‘what’” (221, my translation). He argues that “Marcos has invented” his ironic persona “as a satirical postscript to a bourgeois project whose cultural hegemony” nonetheless “continues to echo” throughout it (57).

1. Here I follow ideas laid out by Edward Said in his meditation On Late Style (2006).