These collected works will be useful to anyone studying the intellectual atmosphere in Latin America of the 1940s and early 1950s and also to those Bolivian specialists interested in nineteenth-century history. The seven volumes under review contain mainly the works of Humberto Vázquez-Machicado (1904-57), who fills six and a half tomes. His brother José (1898-1944), who primarily worked as a bibliographer and lived a shorter life, makes a much less substantial contribution.
The works contained in these volumes, which originally appeared mostly in periodicals, run the whole gamut of Bolivian history, from the colonial period to the issues of the twentieth century. In addition, a number of articles range as far as a description of the Italian countryside and interviews with the German philosopher Oswald Spengler. Roughly organized by topic, the first two volumes cover the colonial era, volume 3 the wars for independence, volumes 4 and 5 the nineteenth century, and the last two miscellaneous topics.
A few contributions appear to be plainly silly, such as the one in which Humberto tries to show that Antonio José de Sucre was as manly as Simón Bolívar and like the great Liberator had many affairs with women (III, 405-413). However, Humberto makes a number of important contributions to Bolivian history, many of which have been inaccessible to modern scholars. While his unoriginal works on the colonial and independence periods have been superseded by more recent scholarship, his work on the nineteenth century is still useful. In particular, his lengthy biography of statesman Miguel María de Aguirre (IV, 1-436), based largely on nineteenth-century pamphlet literature, is a valuable contribution to the economic history of that period. Likewise, a description of the sources for Bolivian history in the United States (VII, 445-472) is still useful today. Other works of particular interest are the various careful and sympathetic studies of his native Santa Cruz de la Sierra interspersed throughout the seven volumes.
José Vázquez-Machicado’s most important work, his descriptive catalog of the material on Bolivia contained in the Archivo de Indias, is not contained in this publication. Most of José’s other studies are glosses on primary documents and consist in great part of transcribed documents. Although José had a better grasp of the primary documentation of Bolivia, his interpretive work is much less developed than that of his brother.
Another way of approaching this massive set of volumes is to see it as an example of the development of a Latin American intellectual. Humberto and his brother both were heavily influenced by German philosophers and, in fact, lived for a period in pre-World War II Germany. Humberto owes another important intellectual debt to Gabriel René-Moreno, his paisano from Santa Cruz and the preeminent nineteenth-century Bolivian historian. Only later in his life was Humberto able to disassociate himself somewhat from René-Moreno and overcome the positivism and racism inherent in the latter’s work. José’s work is not quite as revealing, but these volumes still constitute an important primary source for an intellectual history of the Bolivian intelligentsia during the first half of the twentieth century.
The editors were very thorough in their endeavors to uncover all of the Vázquez-Machicado brothers’ bibliography. The short biographies and the lengthy bibliographies of each author are useful for those interested in the works of both historians. Elsewhere their approach is at times rather creative; editors Guillermo Ovando-Sanz and Alberto Vázquez combine under a single title separate studies on the same topic, although the author gave little indication the studies should go together. This tends to aggravate the duplication that is probably inevitable in this type of endeavor. Also, Ovando-Sanz at times adds some bibliography that appeared after the brothers’ deaths, but that he feels is relevant. Unfortunately, these attempts at modernizing the footnotes are inconsistent and do not include most important works of the past twenty years. The many illustrations throughout the volumes are at times helpful, but the frequent duplication of book title pages of works mentioned in the text does not serve much purpose other than to make these books even more voluminous.
