My undergraduate students don’t like to read history, and who can blame them? Ninety-nine out of one hundred historical monographs are written with a brutal disregard for readerly sensibilities; if it weren’t for professional obligation and our need for knowledge, not even historians would read them. That’s why, particularly for use in the surveys, I’m always on the lookout for good novels and good journalism, both of which seek to attract readers rather than repel them.
For the latter—good journalism—the New Yorker has always been my best source. (See, for example, Lawrence Weschler, A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers [1990], and Mark Danner, The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War [1994], both originally published in the New Yorker and ideal for classroom use.) So in 1989, when that magazine hired a former professional dancer from Mexico, Alma Guillermoprieto, to write on Latin America, I took notice. I liked very much what I read, and immediately assigned her piece on the Mexico City garbage dumps as a brilliant illustration of the systems of patronage and corruption that have kept the PRI in power for 65 years. Now, here are all her 13 essays of the last four years. Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, and Peru receive principal attention, along with individual essays on Argentina, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Panama.
The writing is vivid, the observations acute. Like any good journalist, Guillermoprieto has an eye for the telling detail. But unlike many of her colleagues, she also has an eye for the larger, sometimes much larger, structures in which those details are embedded. Several major themes run through this volume, but its core, its “bleeding heart” (p. 249), is the contradictory, wrenching, pulverizing impact of modernization and modernity on the region. Most of the essays focus on cities that have grown at headlong pace during the last 30 years and are now swollen, congested urban nightmares. Surrounding and infiltrating those cities are slums and favelas populated by poverty-stricken migrants recently arrived from the countryside, or those migrants’ children, These are the “superfluous,” “excess” populations for whom there is no place in the streamlined, ruthlessly competitive, hyperefficient model of neoliberalism. They are the “perpetual outsiders,” surviving by their “remarkable wits” and “extraordinary initiative” in inventing new livelihoods (the informal sector, garbage picking, drug trafficking), community institutions (from the comedores populares in Lima to the autodefensa death squads of Medellin), and cultural forms (see the remarkable essay on NAFTA and the ranchera, or on Brazilian popular religion, or on telenovelas).
It is those people who hold the key to Latin America’s political future: dictatorship, fascism, democracy, socialism, or something else entirely. Guillermoprieto’s quote from a Peruvian political analyst can readily be extended to the region as a whole: “They are pragmatic, oriented to television, somewhat committed to democracy but critical of its formalisms, urgently concerned with their immediate problems, and in need of day-to-day solutions. They are the cholos de mierda, and they are the new Peru. With them, all bets are off” (p. 88).
This is superb reportage, which students will actually read and learn from (and recognized as such by a LASA Media Award in 1992). Read it and use it now, before it goes cold. And take out your subscription (educator’s rate, of course) to the New Yorker.
