the andes imagined: indigenismo, society and modernity by jorge coronado

BOOK REVIEWS

INTERSECTING TANGO: CULTURAL GEOGRAPHIES OF BUENOS AIRES, 1900-1930.By Adriana Bergero. Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh P, 2008, pp. 376, $27.95.

Latin American and Caribbean popular cultures encapsulate the plea-sure of everyday life and have a raw edge bordering on, or crossinginto, vulgarity, with sexual innuendo, rich profanity, and ethnic slurs.The tango, the national dance of Argentina, represents many of these im-ages and stereotypes and yet it is the heart of Argentinean visual andcultural expression. In addition, the tango is multi-dimensional because itshows the changes in Argentina’s social landscape, diverse identities, andcommunities who in return help shape the development of the dance intothis “new modern identity.”

In Intersecting Tango: Cultural Geographies of Buenos Aires, 1900-1930Adriana Bergero illustrates Buenos Aires in all of these complexities. Shedraws on literature, journalism, photography, music, and other forms ofpopular culture in the theater that surrounds the “tango.” Through theuses of private letters, fashion ads, and the values attached to perfumes,Bergero traces the change in social makeup of Argentinean society throughwhich these diverse communities evolved a new modern national identity.

The period 1900-1930 is specifically significant to her study because ofthe city’s constant changes in landscape, composition, and character. Herstudy is framed around five presidencies in Argentina that brought indus-trialization, foreign trade, and global markets to the country. After 1870,leaders and intellectuals in most Latin American and Spanish-speakingCaribbean countries struggled with the desire to define their elite, mid-dle, and lower sectors of society. Bergero’s study reminds readers of theimportance popular culture has in one’s understanding of how a societydefines its national identity. The elite responded to these cultural chal-lenges by endorsing the image that Argentina is a nation committed tomodernity based on the supporters of liberalism such as immigration,industrial growth, economic progress, and public education. (3) For exam-ple, one sees this when Bergero discusses how popular culture in the 1920saffected the fundamental shift in the “imaginaries” dealing with militantresponses to the political and economic abuse of immigrants, workers, andwomen.

Interestingly enough, the “tango” and how it developed is not thecentral part of the text’s study. Instead, the symbolism and the complexitiesthat develop during the rise of the tango along with the modernity ofArgentinean society, history, and culture is the focal point of the book.To the author, the tango symbolizes and interconnects these hardships,romanticisms, and sexual lures that have come to shape today’s Argentina.The tango, as Bergero asserts, provided the best venue into daily life duringArgentina’s first entry into the country’s industrialization period.

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Her approach to these different forms of cultural expression and urbanmilieus is useful to the readers’ understanding of the various poets, play-wrights, and authors of the time cited throughout the text. She effectivelyillustrates the uses of these materials with the several publications of thetime such as Caras y Caretas, La Nacion, and La Prensa. For Bergero, publi-cations such as these served as bridges between the private and the pub-lic sectors of Argentinean society. In other words, everything consumed,worn, and/or preferred within the elite social sector was transferred to thepublic domains by the society columns that the general public read andstrived to become a part of. But more importantly, these types of printedmedia incited the tango and allowed for it to become the main vehiclefor the expression of personal, political, and social drama in Argentineanculture.

As an archivist, I find Bergero’s use of various primary sources tobe quite creative. Not only does she rely on various publications such asmagazines and newspapers, but also her use of material cultural as primarysources is a great way to incorporate how they re-tell the history andsocial aspects of Argentinean society during the early part of the twentiethcentury. Fashions, songs, and dances are unique and challenging conceptswith which scholars illustrate how societies creatively express themselves.Bergero incorporates this beautifully into her work.

In conclusion, Intersecting Tango discusses several challenging subjectsthat illustrate the role people play in a cultural revolution. Moreover, thestudy is multidisciplinary in that it incorporates topics that one who is inthe humanities and social sciences would find useful in research and/orthe classroom. Though the text is too advanced for undergraduates, itwould be very useful for scholars and advanced graduate students whoare studying social change, literature, fashion history, popular culture,and nationalism in Latin American and Caribbean studies. The book trulyrepresents the richness and complexities behind the “tango” in relationto gender, class, identity, and nation, and how each are implicated ineach other. But more importantly, Bergero’s study reminds readers of thesignificance the general public plays in the development of popular cultureand one’s understanding of history.

Christina Violeta JonesNational Archives and Records Administration

College Park, Maryland

THE ANDES IMAGINED: INDIGENISMO, SOCIETY AND MODERNITY. By Jorge Coro-nado. Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh P, 2009, p. 224, $26.95.

Andes Imagined is a scholarly examination of the paradoxical relation-ship of literary indigenismo to its indigenous referents during the early

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twentieth century. Coronado argues that while the stated objective of in-digenismo was to highlight the plight of the indigenous communities andadvocate for their rights under the aegis of the modern nation state, thereal “indio” of the period with his/her quotidian engagements with themodern state is conspicuously absent in the lettered texts of the indigenistawriters. The presence of the contemporary indigenous community is, incontrast, registered by other forms of indigenismo like print media andphotography, wherein communication with a socially variegated audienceis the main objective.

Coronado begins by distinguishing modernization from modernity.Modernization includes the social and political democratization, capital-ism, and new technologies introduced into Latin America during the post-Independence period. Modernity is the outcome of the interaction of thesemodernization processes with the local cultural realities of a given region.Modernity also refers to the intellectual discourses that addressed these in-teractions between modernization and the local realities with the objectiveof projecting an ideal nation state.

Coronado formulates indigenismo as a movement primarily concernedwith elaborating and defining the parameters of Andean modernities.His formulation extends its scope to include poetry, photography, and,journalism, all of which varyingly illuminate aspects of Andean modernity.The book focuses on the years between 1920-1940, a period of vigorousdebate on nation-building projects and an explosion of literary and artisticworks centered on the representation of the indio.

Coronado divides the book into two sections. In the first, he examinesthe writings of Jose Carlos Mariategui, Jose Angel Escalante, and CarlosOquendo de Amat, who mobilized the figure of the indio, his culture,and the Incan history to correct the inequalities of the colonial society.Devoid of any solid empirical observation of the indigenous people, thesewritings reduced the indio to an empty symbol of their authors’ idea ofa racially distinctive national subject who was made to signify a utopianIncan past in order to allude to a utopian Peruvian future, but in whomthe contingencies of the present were conspicuously absent. Furthermore,these intellectuals, steeped in the political and aesthetic ideas emanat-ing from the West, turned the figure of the indio into the repository ofeverything that was different from the modern West. These stylized rep-resentations, though well-intentioned, denied the indio agency to inter-vene in the shared present of Peru’s diverse society. Coronado arguesthat the indio of Mariategui’s essays, for instance, does not refer to thereal living indio of early twentieth-century Peru but, instead, to the al-ready mediated representations of the indio undertaken by other letrados,thus highlighting the overreaching pervasiveness of the lettered texts inPeruvian society. In keeping with this tradition, intellectuals assumed adidactic role in relation to the popular society, rather than observing the lat-ter’s lived realities and their intersections and negotiations with unfoldingmodernization.

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The second part of the book contrasts the aesthetized and/or politicizedpresentation of the indio with the communication strategies and engagedrepresentations undertaken in extra-literary media like the newspaper La-bor and the photography of Martın Chambı. Labor linked the indigenouspeasants with the urban poor through the shared identity of workingclass. Coronado offers a fascinating study of how Labor evolved from anideological mouthpiece of Marxist indigenistas into a journal that inter-polated a wide cross-section of the Peruvian working class, both urbanand rural. Labor catered primarily to an urban working-class populace,and Coronado contends that the newspaper’s editors discovered that thecategory of race served to distance the urban poor from the rural poor.Labor, therefore, soon switched to highlighting the indigenous more interms of class solidarity than in terms of racial difference. When the ur-ban poor perceived the rural Indian peasants as fellow victims of thesame feudal system that oppressed them, they were more willing to es-pouse their common cause. Thus, an emphasis on communication witha working-class audience molded Labor’s representation of the indige-nous, which gradually extended to cover empirically-based reports on theplight of indigenous peasants and their perceptions of social and economicconditions.

Coronado concludes by observing that the politics and aesthetics ofdifference distanced the indigenous communities from the rest of the na-tional society and also obviated their status as engaged citizens of a fastmodernizing Peru. In its turn, this oversight hampers a comprehensive un-derstanding of the Andean modernity. In contrast, the writings in Labor aswell as Martın Chambi’s photographs present the early twentieth-centuryindigenous subjects’ deft and dynamic negotiation with the forces of mod-ernization. Coronado’s critique also stresses how an audience determinesthe nature of the representation. The indigenista narratives and essayshad a rarified readership, limited to fellow intellectuals and ideologues,whereas both the newspaper and the photographs, in opening themselvesup to a wider audience, had to engage with their realities.

Though focused on early twentieth-century representations of the in-digenous subjects, Andes Imagined is also a timely intervention in contem-porary debates on subaltern issues. While such debates do emphasize theagency of the indio, the tendency to underscore his difference from theWest, in order to turn him into a figure of resistance to the hegemonicforces, is still prevalent. Coronado provides a relevant critique of this ten-dency. However, while the book claims to be a scholarly examination ofAndean indigenismos, ultimately it is a masterful examination of Peru-vian modernity. Coronado’s insights could have been further enriched bya chapter comparing indigenista approaches to the indigenous people inall Andean countries. Such comparison could have illuminated the role ofspecific political contexts, for example, the Chaco War in Bolivia (1931-35),in determining the representations of, and engagements with, indigenouscommunities in the Andean countries.

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This study offers valuable and refreshing insights into the politics ofrepresentation involved in indigenismo, and will be of interest to all schol-ars of Latin American studies, and subaltern studies in general.

Zoya KhanDepartment of Foreign Languages and Literatures

University of South Alabama

THE AGRARIAN DISPUTE: THE EXPROPRIATION OF AMERICAN-OWNED RURAL LAND

IN POSTREVOLUTIONARY MEXICO. By John J. Dwyer. Durham: Duke UP, 2008,p. 387, $24.95.

Most scholars who study U.S. foreign policy argue that the UnitedStates responded with accommodation rather than outright confrontationto Mexico’s expropriation of U.S. oil interests in 1938 because the U.S.needed Mexico to remain an ally in World War II. In The Agrarian DisputeJohn J. Dwyer argues that our focus on the 1938 oil expropriation is mis-placed. Dwyer uses case studies of land expropriation in Sonora’s YaquiValley and Baja California’s Mexicali Valley to demonstrate that FranklinDelano Roosevelt and the United States’ Good Neighbor Policy had al-ready adopted a policy of accommodation by 1935. While making his casefor a reappraisal of U.S. foreign policy, Dwyer also insists that it is time forhistorians to move beyond balkanized history, the much too narrow focuson a single set of actors—be they women, diplomats, political elites, peas-ants, etc.—and adopt a much messier, more complex narrative that takesinto account a range of actors and historical approaches, including social,cultural, economic and diplomatic history. By linking domestic politicalpressures on both sides of the border to the diplomatic strategies adoptedby political leaders, Dwyer is able to demonstrate that everyday peoplewere not just the pawns of elite powerbrokers, but rather influential actorsin their own right.

The two case studies that Dwyer uses demonstrate the historical contin-gency of land expropriation in postrevolutionary Mexico. In Baja Califor-nia, Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas worked closely with the ColoradoRiver Land Company (CRLC), a U.S.- based land development business,instead of siding with local Mexicans for a number of reasons. First, theMexicali Valley was a major cotton-growing area and thus attracted mostlyseasonably mobile jornaleros (day laborers), many of whom stayed only ashort while before crossing the border to look for work in the United States.Second, the CRLC had already invested a lot of capital into the MexicaliValley, making the cost of turning the area over to ejidatarios highly ex-pensive. Third, the area was relatively underpopulated, and Cardenasappointed Baja California’s governors, so expropriating the CRLC’s landswould probably have brought little political gain. Instead of working withthe jornaleros, Cardenas promoted the CRLC’s colonization scheme as an

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economic opportunity for Mexicans, in the process setting the stage for a1937 land invasion. Many jornaleros who migrated to the region could notfind enough work to escape poverty. In addition, many were also forcedto work for Asian immigrants (who were already renting land from theCRLC). This led not only to increased class consciousness, but also raceconsciousness. When neither federal nor local authorities responded totheir demands, they invaded the CRLC’s lands, thus forcing Cardenas’hand.

The dynamics in Sonora were quite different. A conservative politicalfaction backed largely by large land owners and the Catholic Church tookpower under the leadership of Roman Yocupicio in 1936. Campesinosin the Yaqui Valley would not have to invade and squat on American-owned lands settled by the Richardson Construction Company beginningin 1904. Instead, Cardenas would use the expropriation and redistribu-tion of these lands to undermine his political opponents even as he ex-panded his political base. Yocupicio, a Mayo Indian and former generalunder Obregon who had led a military campaign against the Yaqui in1926 and 1927, promoted the repatriation of those very same Yaqui totheir ancestral homeland as a means of broadening his political support.Nonetheless, Yocupicio was against land reform for both ideological andpolitical reasons. He believed that Mexican peasants lacked both the cap-ital and the know-how to engage in modern agriculture. In addition, hewas concerned that expropriating American-owned small estates wouldundermine Sonora’s economy by destroying the exact types of farmers andfarms that it needed to attract. Even as Yocupicio moved to consolidate hispolitical base by removing opposition politicians, Cardenas took advan-tage of an invitation by the local Federation of Workers and Campesinos toplace himself in the thick of the Sonoran struggle over land and resources.In the end, Cardenas returned to the Yaqui Indians over one million acresof their ancestral lands, advancing both his standing among ejidatarios andIndians.

These domestic issues had relevancy at the international level. Unlikeprevious Mexican presidents, Cardenas harnessed internal domestic pres-sure from below to advance his bilateral agenda with the United States.In spite of the fact that the United States held most of the cards in theensuing negotiations over land expropriation, Cardenas still managed tocome out ahead by employing James Scott’s “weapons of the weak,” whichinclude “foot dragging, obfuscation, [and] noncompliance.” In advancinghis novel approach, Dwyer argues that “subalternity can extend beyondthe disenfranchised lower classes; a nation’s elite can also be understood assubalterns when seeking to advance their interests against more-powerfulinternational actors” (269). Perhaps most importantly, Dwyer recognizesthe limited applicability of the “weapons of the week” in internationalaffairs. A number of other Latin American governments, including bothCuba and Chile, failed in their attempts to overcome a U.S. hard-line ap-proach between the 1950s and 1980s. This suggests that a shared political

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vision between the FDR and Cardenas administrations played just as im-portant a role in Mexican success as did the deployment of the “weaponsof the week.”

In sum, Dwyer’s book offers foreign policy experts new tools to un-derstand U.S.-Latin American relations and should become a standard inupper-division and graduate courses. My hope is that other scholars willuse his methods to test their limits in other foreign policy settings.

Andrae M MarakDepartment of History and Political Science

California University of Pennsylvania

CONQUISTADORS OF THE SKY: A HISTORY OF AVIATION IN LATIN AMERICA.By Dan Hagedorn. Gainesville: UP Florida, 2009, p. 387, $39.95.

In 1997, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museumin Washington, D.C. hired Dan Hagedorn to fill the recently created posi-tion of adjunct curator for Latin American aviation. Prior to Hagedorn’s ap-pointment, Latin America’s contribution to aviation was virtually nonexis-tent in the museum. That situation was rectified in 1998 when the museumopened an exhibit titled “¡ARRIBA!: The History of Flight in Mexico, Cen-tral America, South America, and the Caribbean.” The exhibit, albeit smalland lacking any major artifacts, prompted Hagedorn, currently the seniorcurator at the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field in Seattle, to expand hisresearch and write Conquistadors of the Sky: A History of Aviation in LatinAmerica. The result is a competent study, augmented by dozens of periodphotographs, that chronicles the influence of aviation on the transforma-tion of Latin America during the twentieth century.

Hagedorn begins his study with a discussion of the pioneers of aero-nautics in Latin America who used lighter-than-air designs. The authorexplains that the first documented aeronautical pioneer was BartholomeuLourenco, a Brazilian priest who, in 1709, conducted the “first scientificallyand officially documented experiments” using lighter-than-air designs (8).Using a toy balloon, Lourenco was able to describe accurately the theoryof lift. The first Latin American to make a successful balloon journey,however, was a Cuban, Jose Domingo Blino, on 3 May 1831. Hagedornexplains that the Mexicans and Brazilians, however, were in the vanguardof balloon technology in Latin America during the nineteenth century. By1900, the Argentines had also developed a keen interest in balloon tech-nology. Argentine Jorge Newbery conducted “the first international flightof any kind in Latin America” when he sailed the balloon Pampero fromArgentina to Uruguay in 1908 (15).

By the twentieth century, however, Hagedorn posits that aeronau-tic enthusiasts were becoming increasingly interested in heavier-than-air designs. Acknowledging that the Wright Brothers conducted the first

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successful heavier-than-air flight in North Carolina in 1903, the authorexplains that for over a decade aeronautic enthusiasts credited Brazil-ian Alberto Santos-Dumont’s 1906 flight in France as the first successfulheavier-than-air flight. Hagedorn contends that this was the result of thesecretiveness of the Wright Brothers, which led to an “informal” under-standing of their accomplishments (26). Regardless, Santos-Dumont is stillheralded as the “Father of Aviation” in Brazil and much of Latin America(30). In the decade prior to World War I, Argentina and Brazil, often usingEuropean designs, were in the vanguard of aviation technology. Nev-ertheless, it was Mexican Alberto Braniff who made the first successfulheavier-than-air flight in Latin America in 1910. In 1911, Mexican Presi-dent Francisco I. Madero was the first “sitting head of state of any countryto go aloft in an aircraft” (71).

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, “the initial surge in thegrowth of aviation throughout much of Latin America came to a verysudden and unexpected halt” (94). Realizing their dependency on Eu-rope, many Latin American nations began to push for the creation of theirown aviation industry, because they saw the value of aviation to militarypreparedness. By 1919, Brazil, which contributed an aviation unit to theAllied war effort, had the largest military aviation force in Latin America.Between World War I and World War II, many Latin American nationsbegan to expand the use of aircraft for military purposes. At the same time,Latin Americans began to investigate the possibility of using commercialaviation to traverse the high mountains and vast jungles of Latin Amer-ica. For example, in 1919 a joint Colombian-German airline venture, theSociedad Colombo-Alemana de Transportes Aereos (Scadta), was estab-lished in Barranquilla, Colombia. Scadta, which eventually evolved intoAvianca, successfully transported cargo and passengers. In civil aviation,“Colombia was without peer in Latin America” (221). By the 1930s, “everysingle military air arm in mainland South America owned equipment ofeither German or Italian manufacture” (306). In addition, German inter-ests were also dominant in Latin America’s commercial airlines. Once itbecame apparent to the U.S. government that war with Germany was aninevitability, the U.S. government used American-owned Pan AmericanAirlines to “eradicate Axis air-transport influence in Latin America in anamazingly short time” (306). Of special concern to the United States wasScadta because of its proximity to the Panama Canal.

During World War II, virtually every nation in Latin America benefit-ted from some form of “U.S. military air mission or Lend-Lease aircraft”(319). In the process, the United States became the dominant influenceon aviation in Latin America. Although commercial and civilian aviationin Latin America was severely affected during World War II, the UnitedStates continued to export commercial and civilian aircraft to Latin Amer-ica during the war. After the war, Latin America experienced a boom incommercial aviation encouraged by government ownership or subsidiza-tion of airlines. According to Hagedorn, “the growth in aviation in Latin

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America witnessed between 1946 and the 1970s has not been equaled”(417). In 1959, Argentina became the first Latin American nation to intro-duce commercial jet liners. Meanwhile, Latin American nations continuedto fortify their military capabilities with American, French, and Israeliaircraft.

Hagedorn concludes his study with an examination of the use of avi-ation technology in the illegal trafficking of drugs. He contends that thisillicit use of aircraft has “left an indelible blemish on one of the greatestachievements in history” (540). On a positive note, the author hopes thataviation will play a “dominant part” in eradicating drug smuggling (540).An insightful, well-researched work, Conquistadors of the Sky is an engross-ing case study of the impact of aviation on Latin America that should beof interest to scholars as well as casual readers.

Michael R. HallDepartment of History

Armstrong Atlantic State University

FROM MANY, ONE: INDIANS, PEASANTS, BORDERS, AND EDUCATION IN CALLISTA

MEXICO, 1924-1935. By Andrae M. Marak. Calgary: U Calgary P, 2009,p. 226, $34.95.

Andrae Marak has written a nuanced account of Mexican educationfrom the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s. His sweeping study incorporates allthe key actors in Mexico’s education reform process, including the Callesadministration, policymakers at the Secretarıa de Educacion Publica (SEP),state and local officials, federal and state teachers, parents and students,local elites, Indians, and peasants. This multi-vocal book is thoroughlyresearched and based on sources found in a dozen different archives, li-braries, and museums located throughout Mexico. It falls within the post-revisionist literature and adds greatly to a number of recent works onMexican education, indigenous groups, and the Calles regime. What dis-tinguishes this work from earlier studies is its focus on Mexico’s northernborder region. By concentrating on the states of Chihuahua, Sonora, andCoahuila, and detailing the impact of education reform on the Tarahu-mara, Seri, and Tohono O’odham Indians, Marak demonstrates that al-though many of Calles’s reforms failed, they nevertheless were part of anegotiated process between federal policymakers and local actors that wassubject to U.S. influence.

Throughout the book Marak details the numerous structural problemsfaced by the country’s public education system. For instance, around sixty-two percent of the population was illiterate and even more lived in poverty.Federal and state budget constraints resulted in a dearth of school build-ings, furniture, supplies, and qualified teachers. Also, language barriersthwarted instruction. Many parents, meanwhile, rejected the anticlerical,

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coeducational approach of socialist education and sent their children toprivate schools or American ones that were beyond the reach of federalreforms. Furthermore, local elites frequently blocked needed changes be-cause they wanted to keep rural workers uneducated in order to exploitthem more easily. In addition, many local school inspectors and teacherswere impatient, ethnocentric, and racist, making them prejudicial againstthe very people they were supposed to serve. Likewise, elitism, paternal-ism, and ignorance among federal officials led them to design impracticalpolicies for indigenous groups. Finally, state and municipal officials whoran their own school systems often refused to cooperate with federal pol-icymakers because they were “more concerned with consolidating theirpolitical power” than reforming education (12).

Because of these and other deep-seated problems, the “nearly im-possible task” of reforming the country’s education system required a“herculean effort” on the part of government officials. The goals behindCalles’s educational nation-building project were multiple and extendedfar beyond teaching people simply how to read and write. As Marakconvincingly shows, his administration used education as a tool to cen-tralize federal control over the country, increase economic output, civilizecampesinos and indigenous peoples, and create patriotic citizens. Gov-ernment officials believed rural isolation would end by building thou-sands of federally-run schools in the countryside, and Mexico’s ruralpoor could be converted into modern workers—who fostered economicdevelopment and cultural cohesion—through instruction that developedtheir practical skills and moral values. Under Calles, federal schools alsowere used to attack opponents like the Catholic Church. As the au-thor proves, the effectiveness of Calles’s education policies was depen-dent on Mexico City having state level allies who would enact federalreforms.

To reach his goals Calles implemented a number of new policies de-signed to weaken the already existing state and municipal schools sys-tems and strengthen his administration’s educational hand. For example,he halted federal subsidies of state primary schools and annulled all theeducational contracts that Mexico City had with individual states. Callesalso appointed a single director of federal education for each state who re-ported directly to the head of the newly created Rural Schools Department.The federal government also took over some state primary school systems,including Chihuahua’s. Most importantly, the Callistas established a newfederal school system to compete with municipal and state schools. Marakdeftly shows that this allowed federal officials to bypass several layersof local resistance and work directly with Mexico’s campesinos when im-plementing federal education reforms. Some of the schools establishedby Calles’s regime included the Casa del Estudiante Indıgena in MexicoCity and state-based Indian boarding schools. While the latter institutionwas in some ways more successful than the former, both sought to fosterindigenous economic and social rehabilitation. Calles’s government also

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established circuit schools to expand the federal government’s reach acrossthe countryside, and Central Agricultural Schools to make campesinos intoindustrious farmers. In addition, he set up frontier primary schools to stemthe flow of Mexican children to U.S. schools, combat the spread of Ameri-can culture in northern Mexico, and inculcate Mexican nationalism amongborder residents.

Marak clearly shows the federal government was unable to fully im-pose its education program on the northern states due to its regionalweakness. State governors, including fellow Callistas, often pushed backagainst federal policymakers in order to extract concessions from Mex-ico City. Peasants and indigenous groups did the same and negotiatedwith federal authorities to shape education policy to meet local needs. Forexample, parents in the border region regularly threatened to pull theirchildren out of the frontier schools and send them to U.S. schools unlessthe SEP dismissed radical teachers and offered courses, such as Englishinstruction, that better suited their needs. Similarly, the Tohono O’odhamIndians leveraged the superior options of settlement and education insouthern Arizona offered by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs in order togain better schooling from SEP in northern Sonora.

The author concludes that Calles’s “developmentalist educationmodel” was an advancement over the religious-dominated elite-basedsystem that preceded it. He rightly adds, however, that while many ofCalles’s reforms failed in the short term, in the long run they enabledLazaro Cardenas’s administration to advance the official party’s corpo-ratist agenda and bring “previously unassimilated indigenous groups intothe nation” (x). Andrae Marak has written a very rich, balanced, and infor-mative book that any scholar of modern Mexico, the border region, edu-cation policy, and indigenous history should read and consider for courseadoption.

John J. DwyerDepartment of History

Duquesne University

AFTER-DINNER DECLARATIONS. By Nicanor Parra. Trans. Dave Oliphant.Austin, TX: Host Publications, 2009, p. 513, $60.00.

Dave Oliphant’s translation of Nicanor Parra’s After-Dinner Declarationsskillfully conveys the Chilean poet’s ironic voice in a series of five discursos,or verse speeches/declarations/statements. In keeping with Parra’s ethicthat “poetry should be written in the language of the street” (i), Oliphant’schoice of “declarations” captures the underlying character of the fivelong poetic texts included in this volume, which commemorate eventssuch as Parra’s receipt of the Juan Rulfo Prize (awarded by the Mexican

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government), William Shakespeare’s birthday (at the Congress of the The-ater of Nations), fellow Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro’s centenary (athis precursor’s home in Cartagena, Chile), the conferral of an honorarydegree upon Parra by the Universidad de Concepcion, and a celebrationof renowned writer and educator (and childhood friend of the poet) LuisOyarzun at the Universidad Austral in Valdivia. This bilingual edition ofParra’s Discursos de sobremesa (2006) represents the most recent additionto the sizable body of work of the internationally-acclaimed 95-year-oldpoet.

As Oliphant suggests in his brief, yet extremely well-crafted introduc-tion, the new genre of the “antispeech”—evoking Parra’s 1954 publicationof Poems and Antipoems and subsequent self-proclaimed role as Chile’s pa-tron saint of antipoetry—finds its origins in these five occasional pieces,which deeply engage varied intellectual and personal currents runningthrough Parra’s multifarious intra- and intertextualities. Ever the osten-sibly reluctant, (falsely) modest, self-effacing puppet-master, the Chileanwriter parades a national and international pantheon of philosophers, his-torical and political figures through carefully measured movements, fits,and starts, all in the service of playfully and humbly accepting or render-ing (anti-)homage while at the same time ironizing the very possibility ofsuch discourse.

Oliphant’s translation succeeds on a number of different but inextrica-bly related levels: first, in its treatment of Parra’s idiosyncratic inventive-ness and localisms (textually and as explained by occasional footnotes);second, in capturing the unique voice of this irreverent poet that claims to“love to make people sneeze” (93); and third, in convincing the reader ofParra’s constant relevance as the poet nears his own centenary. Oliphant’scareful rendering of After-Dinner Declarations’ puns, paronomasia, andportmanteaux reveals just how practiced the translator’s hand is in thecontext of Parra’s writing.

To give some specific examples from the text, in the Rulfo address,titled “MAI MAI PENI,” we find a clear expression of the kind of reluctantacceptance of a purportedly undeserved honor. In the thirteenth poem,“I WOULD BE LYING IF I SAID I’M TOUCHED,” Parra declares: “Theprecise word is traumatized / News of the prize / left me with my mouthwide open / I doubt that I can ever close it again” (33). Parra’s modestremarks are rife with his trademark twists, often operating on the levelof the signifier to poke fun at the insider nature of said prizes, literaryhistory, genre, and other purportedly sacred topics, as he suggests in thetitle of the fourth speech—”THOUGH I HAVEN’T COME PREPARRAED[AUNQUE NO VENGO PREPARRADO]”—thereby inscribing autobio-graphical modesty into the genre of the (anti)discourse about to be read.In his “W.C. PrOblEM” in the “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” declaration, Parraasks, in an explicitly Shakespearean vein, “To P or not to P / That isthe question / Association of Prostate Patients” (the first two lines are in

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Book Reviews

English in the original), thus gently poking fun at the Bard’s age via a jabat his urinary health.

Quite strikingly, Parra’s deft wordplay in the After-Dinner Declarationsoften turns to ecological issues. While in the Rulfo section, he asks, “Whatview do you take / Of the planet’s ecological collapse? / I don’t see whatall the fuss is about / We know the world ended long ago” (95), Parra isn’tone to offer a concrete course of action; rather, he suggests that since “[t]heplanet can’t take it any more” (97), we must eschew political ideologies:“Neither socialist nor capitalist / Totally the opposite: / Ecologist” (99).Nevertheless, his assertion that “[w]e know the world ended long ago”does not mask nostalgia for an Edenic or even an idealized existence—hecalls for “harmony / Between the human species and its environment”(99), in which we might recognize that

The error consistedIn believing the earth was oursWhen the truth of the matter isThat we

belongto

theearth

Perhaps Parra’s most poignant and significant discurso—in terms of hisrelationship with the larger Latin American poetic and critical traditions—can be found in his “ALSO SPRACH ALTAZOR,” whose original English(sub)title already inscribes the project in the essentially antipoetic vein ofthe antispeech: “WE HAVE TO CRAP ON HUIDOBRO.” This amusingtitle, certainly “appropriate” for a roast marking Huidobro’s centenary,recalls Parra’s reference in “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” to “la Sociedad de Ex-critores de Chile” (150), whose scatological pun Oliphant skillfully rendersas “the Society of Writurds of Chile” (151). It serves as the jumping-off pointfor Parra’s roast of the “French” poet’s noisy irruption into the Chilean po-etic canon, thereby saving the future of Chilean writing from weepy andmournful sonnets and odes (Pablo Neruda) and guttural moans (Pablo deRokha; 171). Parra here blames his “master” for some bad habits (175), re-plays and satirizes the famous guerilla literaria (literary war; 215) between“TOO MANY STARS” in Chilean poetry (“The Creator overdid it / Halfas many would have been more than enough;” 213), and riffs on some ofHuidobro’s most famous works in light of the poetic tradition in Span-ish (“Antipoetry are you,” for example, evoking Spanish Romantic poetGustavo Adolfo Becquer’s love poetry; 243).

In sum, Dave Oliphant’s excellent translation of this major work byone of the Americas’ greatest living poets represents a valuable contri-bution to American studies and the growing canon of Spanish-languagepoetry in translation. After-Dinner Declarations shows just how fresh and

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contemporary Parra’s voice is as we approach the second decade of the21st-century, and it’s a constant pleasure to explore and laugh with (and oc-casionally at) the accessible yet highly nuanced poetic speeches presentedin this volume.

Scott WeintraubDepartment of Romance Languages

The University of Georgia

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the andes imagined: indigenismo, society and modernity by jorge coronado

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