Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story
By Marie Arana
SILVER, SWORD, AND STONE
Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story
By Marie Arana
477 pp. Simon & Schuster. $30.
Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story
By Marie Arana
477 pp. Simon & Schuster. $30.
Review by: Álvaro Enrigue, a Mexican novelist, author of “Sudden Death.”
Toward the end of “Silver, Sword,
and Stone,” Marie Arana remarks on the difficulties of arriving at general
conclusions about the history of the vast and diverse Latin American continent.
It’s a complicated task, and not only because of the size of the land, the age
of many of the cultures and the magnitude of the human migrations it has
received. The oldest grievances of Latin America — economic inequality, lack of
access to justice, pervasive violence — feel as urgent now as they were in the
19th or the 16th centuries, and it’s hard to conclude anything about a story
that keeps repeating itself. The problem with never-ending narratives, of
course, is that they don’t have a conclusion.
As Arana, a Peruvian-born journalist
and the author of a prizewinning biography of Simón Bolívar, meditates on the fragility
of recent, still insufficient, progress in improving living conditions in the
region, she includes a melancholy line that resounded deeply with my own sense
of what it means to be Latin American: “We have learned to witness history with
a certain helplessness.” It’s a small confession but an important one — a
yielding to personal observation in a book that is otherwise carefully factual,
a window onto a soul contemplating the continent’s troubled experience of the
world.
Aren’t all histories brutal? Don’t
others feel the divergence between what their countries should be and what they
are the way we Latin Americans do? Why are we so prone to point out what we do
wrong? Hasn’t our peculiar creative genius been resilient enough? Are our gifts
to the world irrelevant? What about chocolate, corn, potatoes and tomatoes? The
coronary bypass, oral contraceptives,
a leprosy vaccine? Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Jorge
Luis Borges and Frida Kahlo? Arana is proud of her Latin American
heritage, but she has a point when she writes that until there is a full reckoning
with the legacy of racism and other forms of injustice the region’s citizens
must remain self-critical.
In her book,
she treats Latin America as a “commonality” with a “concrete character” rooted
in the unusual circumstances of the encounter between its indigenous cultures
on the one hand and European and African populations on the other. The region,
she argues, is defined by a common set of stories and interconnected system of
beliefs as well as the use of a lingua franca — Spanish — that is not the
mother tongue of all but which the majority understands and can speak.
To encompass these
particularities, Arana has divided her book into three parts, each named after
a trait that has played an essential role in history: “silver,” evoking the
dependence on extractive economies focused on precious metals; “sword,”
referring to the tendency to embrace political power predicated on military
might and the threat of violence — la
mano dura, or
the iron fist; and “stone,” a multifaceted religious fervor that is only
superficially similar to Catholic orthodoxy. In each section Arana reprises the
same stories from the time of the Aztecs and the Incas up through our day but
in ways that complement and don’t repeat. She has a noteworthy sense of
narrative form, and her intuition about the importance of repetition in Latin
American history is reflected in the book’s structure; problems recur like a
difficult dream that instead of finishing merely begins again and again. It’s
this frustration with repetition that explains her — our — melancholic
helplessness before history.
“Silver,
Sword, and Stone,” as Arana points out, is not a straightforward history of
Latin America. Neither is it journalism. Rather, it’s a hybrid, combining
learned historical analysis with in-depth reporting and political commentary.
Each section considers the region’s historical burdens through the prism of
actual citizens: Leonor González, the widow of a Peruvian miner who ekes out a
living pounding bags of stone into gravel in search of flecks of gold; Carlos
Buergos, a Cuban migrant to the United States who, beaten down by the Castro
regime, is imprisoned for theft in Havana and serves as a “hardened killer” for
the Cuban Army in Angola before escaping to Miami; and, finally, Xavier Albó, a
Spanish Jesuit who, preaching in Bolivia during the liberation theology
movement of the 1970s and ’80s, is awakened to the region’s misery and
corruption. These individuals and their stories are effective embodiments of
Arana’s themes and, by extension, their impact on the region’s more than 600
million inhabitants.
“The colonies were dead,” Arana
writes, but “the spirit of colonialism remained very much alive.” Her
indictment of the conquistadors is brutal, and she is unapologetic in
condemning the operations of the United States government in support of Latin
America’s right-wing authoritarian regimes during the Cold War. But she makes
clear that the Inca and Aztec empires were ruthless too, and that if the United
States offered weapons and training to the conservative owners of land and
capital, the use of extreme violence to crush the opposition was well
established by the time the Americans arrived to finance it.
“Silver, Sword, and Stone” is
just as illuminating about the current political moment, in which the cultural
and linguistic line dividing the United States from its hemispheric neighbors
for more than 200 years could become a fortress wall. She reads recent episodes
in Latin American history in the contentious but essential key of race
relations, which are at the core of the ideological confrontations in this era
of national populism.
Access
to education, justice and a reasonable income has always been linked to skin
tone in the continent, as Arana notes, but race has mostly been ignored as a
category of analysis by Latin American intellectuals. The issue is particularly
excruciating because the overwhelming majority of the population is nonwhite.
Yet no matter how many revolutions have been fought and won, that majority
remains the object of discrimination and economic corruption.
The reluctance of Latin American
elites to share their wealth — often but not always in association with foreign
powers — has produced a sophisticated discourse to justify the status quo. One
influential theory that Arana cites in passing, developed by the 20th-century
Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos, is that of the Cosmic Race — according to
which everybody in the region is of mixed origin and, because of this,
colorblind. New generations of Latin American writers and thinkers, frequently
from middle-class families that migrated from Europe in the past century, have
sustained the Cosmic Race theory, pointing out, with Marxist flair, that the
problem is capital distribution, not skin shade, and that class struggle will
eventually take us to a better place.
“Silver, Sword, and Stone” denies
these ideas with an informed and authoritative voice, one that deserves a wide
audience. Like Arana, I believe that the main problem in Latin America for the
past 500 years has been racism, in its varied, nefarious guises and names. As
long as the region continues to fail to address this head-on, the enormous
promise of its diversity and creativity will never be fully realized, and the
stories, and melancholy, Arana invokes will keep repeating instead.
