This collection of essays came out of a conference organized and hosted by the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the Center for Latin America in the spring of 1991. Marina Pérez de Mendiola has selected 12 “historical, philosophical, sociopolitical, and literary” essays for this collection to help “alter broader debates” about the changing cultural dynamic between Spain and Latin America in the postcolonial world.
Historians of Latin America naturally have a stake in such a debate. Far beyond the current fashions of postcolonial studies, the questions attendant to cultural identity in a changing and increasingly global world culture are fundamental to our understanding of modern Latin America. What impact, for example, have the recent series of Ibero-American conferences had on regional solidarity and supernational structures? Why has the rather imperial world of Spanish letters now offered its belated official recognition of the enormous contributions of Latin Americans to Spanish literature? What is the significance of Subcomandante Marcos’ evoking the spirit of Republican Spain in the Zapatistas’ struggle? What are the cultural implications of Mario Vargas Llosa’s renouncing his Peruvian citizenship and becoming a Spanish citizen? In other words, to what degree has the creative tension between Rubén Darío’s Spanish Lion and her “thousand cubs . . . roaming free” in the Americas benefited cultural coherence, historical memory, and unity of action? for Spain? for Spanish-speaking America?
Unfortunately, in the main, this collection does not address such questions consistently or cogently. Many of these essays are poorly edited, mired in academic jargon, and concerned only with answering specialists’ narrowly framed questions. This general rule has exceptions, however. John Tolan tells the story of how the Battle of Roncesvalles, immortalized in the Song of Roland, has been recast on both sides of the Atlantic to serve different imperial and national mythologies. James D. Fernandez, through a textual analysis of Clarín’s “Boroña,” argues that America and the tragic returning indiano was an element inextricable from the construction of Spain’s national identity. Santiago Daydí-Tolson, using the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda as exemplar, explores peninsular writers’ curious indifference toward the former colonies in the New World. María A. Escudero examines the cultural strategies of Franco and post-Franco Spain toward Spanish-speaking America. Pérez de Mendiola analyzes Seville’s Expo ’92 in light of past “expositions” to gain a greater understanding of the continuing force of the Spanish neocolonial dream. Finally, Ofelia Schutte, using Domingo Sarmiento and José Martí as the poles, examines the emergence of an authentic cultural identity in Latin America.
Despite these thought-provoking contributions, however, the collection (as currently composed) has neither sufficient balance, historical contextualization, nor accessibility to justify recommending it as a text for undergraduate courses. And that is lamentable, because the subject is worthy of our attention and thought.