The Literature of Latin America, Before and After ‘El Boom’

Opening “The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays” is like walking into a fast-flowing river. This collection of 77 essays spanning 150 years reflects Latin American literature and culture in all its brilliance and turbulence.

From the first piece by Venezuelan Andres Bello to the last by the editor, Ilan Stavans, who was born in Mexico and teaches at Amherst College, these essays touch on the challenging Latin American question: Who are we?

Perhaps nowhere in the world is identity as central to life as in Latin America. Spanish, Portuguese, indigenous, black, German, Italian, Japanese, Jewish; Catholic and capitalist; rapacious and spiritual--the intermingling of the Latin American peoples seems to demand that its writers and artists sort them all out.

The result has been more than a century of intellectual activity full of astonishing vigor and vivid imagery. These essays are an excellent guide for those who come to Latin American literature chiefly through the fiction of “El Boom,” an explosion of creativity after World War II by writers including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa.

But these pieces are also of intrinsic interest, not merely as signposts of literary movements. Stavans is not afraid to make unexpected choices. Argentina’s Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the nation’s president from 1868 to 1874, produced a powerful account of his visit to the awesome Niagara Falls. Cuban revolutionary hero Jose Marti is represented by a newspaper report of an earthquake in Charleston, S.C., an account that is noted for its sensitivity to the city’s black inhabitants.

Spoken or unspoken, the assumption in many of these essays is that writers matter, their visions matter and they have an obligation to set aright their disordered societies. Chile’s premier poet, Pablo Neruda, said that the poet is like, of all things, the local baker.

“He fulfills his majestic yet humble task of kneading,” Neruda said in his 1971 Nobel Prize address, included here, “placing in the oven, browning and delivering our daily bread, with a true sense of community. And if a poet could be moved in the same way by such a simple conscience, that simple conscience would allow him to become part of an enormous work of art--the simple, or complicated, construction that is the building of a society, the transformation of man’s condition, the simple delivery of his wares: bread, truth, wine, dreams.”

A great number of Latin Americans have written about their homelands from abroad, whether this exile was imposed or chosen. Chilean writer Jose Donoso meditates on this theme in “Ithaca: The Impossible Return.” He explores the element in their works of ausencia, which is not translated by the “emotionally inert” “absence” but in Spanish is “an emotionally charged word, rich with connotations of dreaminess, of guilt and punishment, of sleep, of recall, even of madness.”

Exile, for Latin American writers, has been perhaps more common than not. Garcia Marquez wrote “One Hundred Years of Solitude” in Mexico, Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz wrote in Paris and India, Argentina’s Julio Cortazar wrote in Paris, Brazil’s Jorge Amado fled his country’s dictatorship, Miguel Angel Asturias attacked Guatemala’s dictatorship from Paris, and the list goes on.

Most of the essays are short, with exceptions like Elena Poniatowska’s “And Here’s to You, Jesusa,” a marvelously revealing look at a poor Mexican woman fighting against her smothering circumstances. Stavans brings his selection up to the present with essays by the Mexican cultural critic Carlos Monsivais, the Guatemalan Indian Rigoberta Menchu (winner of the Nobel Peace Prize) and a sardonic and very literary letter by “Subcomandante Marcos,” leader of the Zapatista rebellion in the Mexican state of Chiapas.

Recalling Neruda’s Nobel Prize address, the Oxford collection is a powerful testimony to the Latin American people, “who have been marked by misfortune for centuries,” and to those writers who have struggled in the name of “light, justice and dignity.”