The two essays in this work call for a greater emphasis on nonelite studies and challenge the liberal developmental approach to Latin America born in the 1960s with its conceptual reliance on modernization and development theory.
In “Cultures in Conflict: The Implication of Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Latin America,” E. Bradford Burns juxtaposes the supposedly modernizing actions of the elite with the conservative traditions of the “folk.” The elite aped European ways and North Atlantic capitalism without changing fundamentally such vital factors as land tenure. Forced modernization bred widespread folk dissent, and worsened the economic condition of the traditional population. Nineteenth-century political violence was, thus, a comprehensible reflection of this culture conflict.
With the claim that “modernization” is a dated and unsatisfactory concept, Thomas W. Skidmore draws a direct line from the labor violence of the early 1920s in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, through the cooptive corporatist approaches of subsequent populists, to the contemporary stalemate between the military and labor in those three nations. His “Workers and Soldiers: Urban Labor Movements and Elite Responses in Twentieth-Century Latin America,” claims in part that overreliance on foreign economic ideas and a certain telescoping of events prevented the emergence of an autonomous labor movement adapted to pluralistic politics. The conflict inherent in this failure remains unresolved.
Both authors raise questions that deserve serious attention. Burns’s use of culture and the authors’ joint challenge to the utility of such concepts as progress, modernization, and development are especially welcome. As Richard Graham speculates in his critical introduction to the essays, however, the conservative traditions that Burns edifies may have supported the corporatist labor controls that Skidmore criticizes. Burns comes precariously close to romanticizing tradition in the way that the elite “romanticized” modernization.
Liberal developmentalists might well argue that Burns’s own analysis shows that the elite’s failure to make economic and social changes necessary for modernization, and not the model itself, caused the conflict he describes. The argument could be answered easily if Burns extended his culture conflict tool one step. The cultural baggage the elite carried conflicted with the models in question and rendered them inapplicable and ineffective. Culture conflict characterized the elite versus North Atlantic models, not just forced modernization versus tradition. Skidmore suffers from a similar need to go one step farther. If the military-elite attack on labor originated in part in an overreliance on foreign economic models (economic dependency), did not labor’s failure to organize effectively stem in part from its reliance on foreign labor models (labor dependency)? The failure to take local cultural exigencies into account may well illuminate more problems than either author here addresses.
The arenas in which Burns and Skidmore operate are too little researched, as both scholars recognize, to permit definitive analyses. Their explorations, however, are invaluable signposts for future investigations and should provoke healthy discussion among both scholars and students perplexed by Latin America’s complexities.
