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F or nations to be united internally, they have to know who they are; they need a clear and positive sense of national identity. Four centuries of Latin American transculturation— the cre-

ative pro cess of cultural give and take— had given rise to a multitude of differences in speech, in customs, in attitudes. Intertwined with the pro cess of transculturation, the pro cess of race mixing had created national populations that were also distinctive.

During the colonial period, Eu ro pe an rulers had assigned American difference a negative meaning— an essentially “po liti cal” act. Then independence- minded Creoles reversed that attitude in their nativist rhetoric of 1810– 25 (“Americanos, you are the true sons of the soil!”), again as a power move, a matter of politics. But nativism faded after the Spanish and Portuguese were expelled, except when occasional foreign intervention revived it. The new nationalism that

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swept the region in the 1900s was another wave of the earlier nativist spirit, now with a strong economic agenda.

Who were the new nationalists, and what were they after? The nationalists very often were urban, middle- class people, recent immigrants or of racially mixed heritage. They had benefited less than landowners from the export boom. They rarely could travel to Eu rope or the United States, rarely could afford to import all the Progress they wanted. Neo co lo nial elites had created glass bubbles of Eu ro pe an culture in Latin American countries, but middle- class nationalists, too numerous to fit inside those bubbles, committed themselves to a larger, more ambitious, and above all, more inclusive vision of change. The nationalists would shatter the neo co lo nial bubbles, breathe Latin American air, and feel pride when young factories made it smoky, because industrialization was the practical goal they most desired.

Unlike the neo co lo nial elites, they would also feel comfortable in Latin American skins. Nationalism fostered collective self- respect by positively reinterpreting the meaning of Latin American racial and cultural difference. The nationalists declared psychological in de- pen dence from Eu rope. No longer slaves to Eu ro pe an fashion, Latin Americans would create styles of their own, especially in painting, music, dance, and literature. True, they would still watch Hollywood movies and listen to US jazz, but they also would teach Paris to tango and New York to rumba.

Nationalism’s wide appeal— reaching far beyond its “core con- stituency” of middle- class urban people— gave it a special power. Four centuries of colonial and then neo co lo nial exploitation had left a bitter, divisive legacy in Latin America. In de pen dence in the 1820s had created the outlines of countries, but not cohesive national soci- eties. Neo co lo nial ism, with its official racism and its railroads con- necting exportable resources to seaports, but not connecting major cities to each other, had done little to advance national integration. The nationalists’ simple truths— that everybody belonged, that the benefits of Progress should be shared, and that industrial devel- opment should be the priority— offered an important principle of cohesion. Nationalist critiques of imperialism also provided a clear, external focus for resentment— foreign intervention, both military

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and monetary. And a shared enemy is po liti cally useful. Like all rhetoric, nationalist rhetoric sometimes rang hollow, and nationalism had its dark side, too, as we shall see. Yet, nationalists who rejected the premise of white superiority and directed practical attention to long- neglected matters of public welfare clearly had a new and ex- citing po liti cal message. Nationalism attracted the ardent support of people across the social spectrum— something that liberalism had never really done. No wonder the advent of nationalism marks a clear watershed in the history of the region.

Latin American nationalism celebrates the unique— a par tic u- lar historical experience, a par tic u lar culture. This ethnic nationalism is more like the German or French variety than like US national- ism, which tends to focus on a set of shared po liti cal ground rules and ideals. The US version is sometimes called civic nationalism. Conse- quently, signs of ethnic identity— folk costume, for example, or tradi- tional foods— take on a nationalist importance in Latin America that they lack in the United States. In addition, ethnic nationalism tends to emphasize the idea of race— often, the idea of racial purity. German Nazism of the 1930s offers an extremely unpleasant example.

Latin American nationalism, on the other hand, emphasizes mixed- race, mestizo identities. The racial optimists of the neo co lo nial 1890s, persuaded by doctrines of “scientific racism” emanating from Eu rope and the United States, believed that national populations could— and should— be whitened over time, through immigration and intermarriage. And these were the optimists! The racial pessimists claimed that race mixing inevitably caused degeneration. Thus people of color who made up the Latin American majority were to be excluded or, at best, phased out from the neo co lo nial vision of the future.

In contrast, Latin American nationalists celebrated the mixing of indigenous, Eu ro pe an, and African genes. Each country’s unique physical type, argued some nationalists, was an adaptation to its en- vironment. Back in neo co lo nial 1902, Euclides da Cunha had called Brazil’s mixed- race backlanders “the bedrock” of Brazilian nationality and had begun to question their supposed inferiority. A generation later, in the 1930s, the idea of inferior races was dying a well- deserved death in Latin America— officially, if not in racist hearts— and mestizo

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nationalism had made the difference. For example, the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén celebrated two metaphorical grandfathers, the slave and the conquistador, in his poem “Ballad of the Two Grandfathers” (1935). The poet imagined these two contrasting ancestors as shadows that only he could see, always at his side:

With his bone-tipped lance, his wooden drum with rawhide head —my black grandfather. With his ruffled collar, his grey and warlike armor —my white grandfather.

The poet claimed both ancestors and did not identify with one more than the other. He imagined his black grandfather’s bare feet and “stony-muscled torso.” He imagined his white ancestor’s “pupils of Antarctic glass.” The white one was certainly colder, more remote. But the shadows of both ancestors were the poet’s allies. Neither could be his enemy, because both were a part of him. Therefore, race mixing had resolved the historical antagonism between white and black, at least partially and subjectively, in the person of the poet. As a metaphor for his mixed descent, the two grandfathers of Guillén’s poem defined his racial identity in a positive way.

In a larger sense, metaphors of race mixing provided a positive myth of descent for Cuba as a mestizo (or mulatto) nation. Guillén’s poetry had a musicality that was intended to echo percus- sive African rhythms, and some poems phonetically imitated black Cuban speech. These choices signaled a profound rejection of the Eurocentric aesthetic typical of earlier periods of Latin American history. And Guillén, while he became the most acclaimed exponent of Afro- Cuban poetry, was hardly unique. Instead, he was part of a much broader literary and artistic current that also included the Négritude movement of the French Ca rib be an. Furthermore, a string of fine contemporary novelists— Cuba’s Alejo Carpentier, Peru’s Ciro Alegría, and Guatemala’s Miguel Ángel Asturias— used African and indigenous themes to put their countries on the literary

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map. Not only did these nationalist authors deny the premise of Eu ro pe an racial superiority but they raised the idea of race mixing to a special position of patriotic honor. And they did so even as Hitler’s Nazis were successfully promoting the doctrine of white supremacy in Eu rope.

W H I T E N I N G I N T H R E E G E N E R AT I O N S . Redemption of Ham, by Modesto Brocos y Gomez. This 1895 Brazilian canvas illustrates the outmoded neo co lo nial idea that Eu ro pe an immigrant blood would “whiten” Latin American populations. Three generations— a black grandmother, a mulatta mother, and her white child— are intended to show the whitening that resulted from the women’s finding lighter- skinned partners. The father of the child, a Portuguese immigrant, is seated to one side. Nationalist thinking on race did away with the official goal of whitening and made African and indigenous roots a point of pride. Courtesy of Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro/Wikimedia Commons.

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B R O W N P R I D E . The Coffee Grower (1934) by the internationally recognized Brazilian paint er Cândido Portinari is a confident and powerful figure in no need of whitening. Like many nationalists, Portinari artistically celebrated the dignity of the working class. São Paulo Museum of Art.

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NAT IONA L IS T S TA K E P OW ER

You might guess where the nationalist eruption started— a country where neo co lo nial ism had done its worst, where nationalism drew energy from repeated foreign invasions, where people of mixed race were now the majority, a country that had already elected a president with no Eu ro pe an blood— Mexico. The centennial of Hidalgo’s 1810 rebellion saw the outbreak of the twentieth century’s first great social revolution, the Mexican Revolution (with a capital R).

By 1910, Porfirio Díaz had dominated Mexico for thirty- four years, and he was getting old. Reformers backed the presidential can- didacy of Francisco Madero, a slim gentleman from northern Mexico. Madero wanted only for Díaz to share more power among the Mexican elite, but the dictator refused. Madero’s appeal broadened when Díaz jailed and then exiled him. Now Madero got radical. He talked of returning lands unfairly taken from indigenous communities. Among many others, people of an indigenous community called Anenecuilco had lost land to encroaching sugar plantations during the years of neo co lo nial Progress. A leader of Anenecuilco, one Emiliano Zapata, allied his own uprising with Madero’s national movement. Zapata’s image— broad sombrero and black mustache, cartridge belts across his chest, riding a white stallion— became an icon of the Mexican Revolution. But Emiliano Zapata represents only one of many local leaders of rebellions that broke out all over Mexico. Unable or unwill- ing to fight them, Díaz left for Pa ri sian exile in 1911.

Suddenly, Mexico was full of “revolutionaries” with vastly differ- ing backgrounds and goals. They had agreed only on the need to oust Díaz. Who would rule now? Madero tried first but failed. He was re- moved by a general— with an approving nod from the US ambassador to Mexico— and assassinated in 1913. Years of upheaval followed in 1914– 20, as various forces fought it out, their armies crisscrossing the Mexican countryside with women and children in tow. New weapons of the World War I era, especially machine guns, added their staccato music to the dance of death. In the northern state of Chihuahua, and then nationally, Pancho Villa built an army of former cowboys, min- ers, railroad workers, and oil field roustabouts very different from the

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peasant guerrillas of southern movements like Zapata’s. A third move- ment, better- connected, more urban and middle- class, finally gained the upper hand and drafted a new, revolutionary constitution in 1917. These so- called Constitutionalists, fairly typical of the nationalist core constituency throughout Latin America, may be called the winners of the Mexican Revolution. Their po liti cal heirs controlled the destiny of Mexico for the rest of the 1900s.

The Constitution of 1917, still Mexico’s constitution, showed strong nationalist inspiration. Article 27 reclaimed for the nation all mineral rights, for instance, to oil, then in the hands of foreign com- panies. It also paved the way for villages to recover common lands (called ejidos) and for great estates to be subdivided and distributed to landless peasants. In principle, Article 123 instituted farsighted pro- tections (although practice would vary) such as wage and hour laws, pensions and social benefits, the right to unionize and strike. The new constitution also sharply limited the privileges of foreigners and, as a legacy of earlier Mexican radicals, curbed the rights of the Catholic Church. The Mexican church now lost the rest of its once- vast wealth. It could no longer own real estate at all. Its clergy, their numbers now limited by law, could not wear ecclesiastical clothing on the street nor teach primary school. Anticlerical attitudes exemplify the revolution- aries’ commitment to destroy traditions associated with old patterns of cultural hegemony. Leaders who emerged from the Constitutional- ist movement strengthened their rule in the 1920s. They did away with both Zapata and Villa, crushed Mexico’s last renegade caudillos, and fought off a challenge from armed Catholic traditionalists in the countryside. (These devout counterrevolutionary peasants were called Cristeros from their habit of shouting “Long live Christ the King!”) Finally, the Constitutionalists created a one- party system that would last, in various permutations, until the late twentieth century.

This party was first called National, then Mexican, and finally Institutional. But for seven de cades it remained a Revolutionary Party. Its official heroes were Madero, Zapata, and Villa, its official rhetoric full of revolutionary and nationalist images. Despite incal- culable destruction and horrendous loss of life (a million people died), the Revolution had been a profoundly formative national experience.

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T H E H I S T O RY O F M E X I C O . Two partial views of the great Diego Rivera mural in Mexico's National Palace. © 2016 Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artist Rights Society. Photo: Bridgeman Images.

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It had created powerful new loyalties and would loom on the imagina- tive landscape of Mexican politics for generations. Two US interven- tions during the years of fighting— a punitive invasion against Villa, who had raided a town in New Mexico, and a US occupation of the port of Veracruz— only added nationalist luster to the Revolution. The new government also brought some material benefits to the impoverished rural majority. A road- building program lessened their isolation, and some land was distributed— though not nearly enough for everyone. Major initiatives in public education began to reduce the country’s 80 percent illiteracy rate. The Mexican minister of education in the 1920s was José Vasconcelos, one of the hemi sphere’s leading cultural nationalists, who celebrated the triumph of what he called (colorfully, but confusingly) the Cosmic Race, meaning mestizos.

The great Mexican paint ers Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, who married in 1929, illustrate Mexico’s revolutionary nationalism. Diego Rivera was huge, ugly, magnetic, and brilliant. He was a muralist, a public paint er whose works covered walls and ceilings. He painted like a tornado for days straight, eating, even sleeping on the scaf- fold. Rivera’s crowded murals depict, above all, Mexico’s indigenous heritage. He worked from 1923 to 1928 painting Vasconcelos’s Min- istry of Public Education with scenes of open- air schools and indig- enous peasants dividing land won by the Revolution. In 1929– 30, he painted Mexico’s National Palace (built by heirs of the conquerors!) with images of Aztec Tenochtitlan’s colorful bustle, images that show the Spanish conquest as a greedy, hypocritical bloodbath. In Rivera’s mural, Cortés, resembling a troll, looks on as the conquerors slaugh- ter, enslave, and count gold. Rivera’s nationalist message is vivid— and likely to remain so: he painted al fresco, on wet plaster, so that his murals became part of the walls themselves.

Frida Kahlo, by contrast, painted small self- portraits, one after another. She painted especially while bedridden. Surviving polio as a girl, she had a horrible traffic accident that led to dozens of surger- ies. Her body, like Aleijadinho’s in colonial Brazil, was literally dis- integrating while she created. Her paintings explore a private world of pain, but also humor and fantasy. “I paint my own reality,” she said. Eu ro pe an surrealists began to admire her in the late 1930s, but

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recognition elsewhere, including Mexico, came later. Frida expressed her nationalism in personal ways— fancy traditional hairstyles, pre- Columbian jewelry, and the folk Tehuana dress of southern Mexico (floor- length, to conceal her leg withered by polio). She especially en- joyed wearing these clothes in the United States, where Diego painted in the 1930s. Frida loved Mexican folk art, like the papier- mâché skeletons that decorate Day of the Dead celebrations.

The nationalism of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo was widely shared in Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s. Everything national had become fashionable— folk music (corridos) and dance ( jarabes), tradi- tional dishes (tamales and moles), old- style street theater (carpas), and artisan objects (like Frida’s papier- mâché skeletons). Mexican movies featuring musically macho charros like Jorge Negrete, a Mexican version of the US singing cowboy, now competed with Holly- wood. The nationalism of many Mexican revolutionaries had Marxist overtones. Diego and Frida, for example, joined the Communist Party and offered their home to the exiled Rus sian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, who lived with them for several months.

Far away, in Argentina and Uruguay, nationalism showed a different face. In this most urbanized, literate, and middle- class part of Latin America, the core constituency of nationalism was stronger than in Mexico. So the nationalists of Argentina and Uruguay were able to take over without a revolution. Uruguay, in par tic u lar, soon had one of the most progressive governments in the world.

During the 1800s, Uruguay had been just another war- torn minirepublic battered by more powerful neighbors. Its po liti cal struggles were entangled with those of neighboring Argentina. Then Uruguay’s economic growth during the post-1880 export boom paral- leled Argentina’s phenomenal per for mance. As in Argentina, Uruguay’s delirious prosperity was controlled through managed elections. The country’s great nationalist reformer José Batlle y Ordóñez began as a tough, traditional politician. Batlle used his first presidency (1903– 7) mostly to vanquish po liti cal rivals. But having established broad support in the heavily immigrant middle and working classes of Montevideo, he used his second term (1911– 15) to launch the reform movement known simply by his name: Batllismo.

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Batllismo was not about race or cultural uniqueness. It was more a civic and economic nationalism. Batllismo meant concerted state action against “foreign economic imperialism.” It brought an unpre ce dented level of government involvement to the Uruguayan economy: tariffs to protect local businesses; government monopoly over public utilities, including the formerly British- owned railways and the port of Montevideo; government own ership of tourist hotels and meat- packing plants; and lots of state- owned banks to spread credit around. In accord with Batlle’s determination that “modern industry must not be allowed to destroy human beings,” Uruguay became the hemi sphere’s first welfare state, complete with a mini- mum wage, regulated working conditions, accident insurance, paid holidays, and retirement benefits. Public education, a matter of spe- cial pride in Uruguay since the 1870s, received further support, and the university was opened to women.

Batllismo transformed Uruguay forever, but the reforms depended, at least in part, on prosperous times to fund its ambitious social programs. In addition, this was an urban movement that left rural Uruguay virtually untouched. Batllismo was also aggressively anticlerical, making Uruguayan society among the most secular in the hemi sphere. Traditional Catholic Holy Week, formerly a somber time of religious pro cessions, became Tourism Week in modern Uruguay. To eliminate caudillo rule once and for all, Batlle even tried to abolish the one- man presidency in favor of an executive council. Ironically, many saw Batlle himself as a caudillo— but a “civil caudillo,” unlike the military caudillos of the 1800s.

Across the Río de la Plata, in Argentina, another “civil caudi- llo” representing urban interests overthrew the country’s landowning oligarchy by means of (believe it or not) an election in 1916. “The revo- lution of the ballot box,” they called it. Hipólito Yrigoyen, the winner of that election, led an essentially middle- class reform party with con- siderable working- class support, the Radical Civic Union. When the Radicals won the election of 1916, jubilant crowds pulled Yrigoyen’s carriage through the streets of Buenos Aires while flowers rained from balconies.

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The Radicals quickly entrenched themselves, creating the first truly mass- based po liti cal party in the history of Latin America. Not by any means above engaging in patronage politics, the Radical Civic Union distributed plenty of pensions and public employment to its supporters. Meanwhile, the reforms it enacted were less impressive than Uruguay’s. The Radicals talked economic nationalism, but the role of foreign capital in Argentina did not diminish. Yrigoyen’s one significant act of economic nationalism was the creation of a govern- ment agency to supervise oil production.

Still, Yrigoyen’s presidency marked an important change, not so much because of what he did, but because of what he represented. Poorly dressed and lacking in social graces, Yrigoyen was a man of the people. He hated the elegant elite of Buenos Aires, and they hated him back. Yrigoyen framed politics in moral terms, as a kind of civic reli- gion. He never married and lived a reclusive life of legendary frugality in a simple dwelling that his enemies called the presidential “burrow.” A famous anecdote exemplifies his disdain for the trappings of power. A friend, it is said, asked for a personal souvenir. Yrigoyen gestured vaguely toward a cardboard box overflowing with medals and honors. “Help yourself,” he replied.

Ordinary Argentines could visit the president to ask for some humble bit of patronage. Yrigoyen cared little about Eu rope and also maintained an Argentine diplomatic tradition of resisting US hemi- spheric initiatives. During World War I, despite US pressure, he insisted on Argentine neutrality. The greatest stain on his record is his violent repression of or ga nized labor during the “Tragic Week” of 1919 and the strike of Patagonian sheep herders in 1921. Yrigoyen was succeeded by another member of the Radical Civic Union, but he returned to the presidency himself in 1928, now senile, hardly fit to steer Argentina through the turbulent 1930s. Although he soon lost popularity and had to leave office, all Buenos Aires turned out for Yrigoyen’s funeral a few years later.

Batlle and Yrigoyen were individual leaders of towering impor- tance, not generals on horse back, but caudillos nevertheless. Nationalist politics was mass politics that often focused on such leaders. Another

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was Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, who led Peruvian nationalists mostly from exile.

Haya de la Torre was first exiled from Peru in 1920 for lead- ing student protests against Peru’s pro- US dictator. In Mexico, whose revolution strongly impressed him, the young radical intellectual founded an international party, the Pop u lar American Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), as a kind of collective self- defense against economic imperialism in Latin America. Haya de la Torre preferred the term Indo- America, to highlight the region’s indigenous roots, exactly the way Mexican muralists such as Rivera did. This nationalist empha- sis on indigenous roots is called indigenismo. Another young Peru- vian intellectual of the 1920s, José Carlos Mariátegui, imagined an indigenous socialism combining Inca models with Marxist theory. But Peru, when compared to Mexico, remained more ethnically split: the highlands heavily indigenous, the coast more black and white. Conse- quently, indigenismo was less successful as a unifying force in Peru.

APRA did not go far as an international party. Still, by threat- ening to make indigenismo more than theory or fiction, the move- ment had a powerful impact on Peru. APRA terrified conservatives. The party’s mass rallies filled the streets with poor and middle- class people who roared their contempt of the oligarchy, their fury at impe- rialism, and their loyalty to the “Maximum Leader,” Haya de la Torre. In 1932, APRA revolted after “losing” a managed election. The army crushed the uprising with mass executions, and APRA was banned from Peruvian politics. But the popularity of the outlawed party and its perpetually exiled leader only increased as years passed.

Ciro Alegría, a fervent, high- ranking APRA militant, was one of the many nationalists who had to flee Peru. While living in Chile, he began to write fiction inspired by indigenismo. Peruvian novel- ists had explored indigenismo for de cades, since the time of Clorinda Matto de Turner. Still, it is appropriate that the greatest indigenista novel, Alegría’s Wide and Alien Is the World (1941), emerged from the ranks of APRA. Writers like Alegría defended indigenous people, but the main practical goal of indigenismo was changing its subjects to fit the wider world. Perhaps it is not so odd that Alegría wrote his book for a New York publishing contest. He won and became one of the

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INDIGENISMO. The Indian Mayor of Chincheros (1925) by José Sabogal, Peru’s principal indigenista paint er, shows a community leader holding his staff of office in an idealization of traditional indigenous life. José Sabogal, The Indian Mayor of Chincheros: Varayoc, 1925, Museo de Arte de Lima.

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best- known of the many Latin American writers cultivating non- European roots in the 1930s and 1940s.

Nationalists did not take power everywhere in Latin America, but nationalism showed its po liti cal potency even where it did not rule. In many countries conservatives managed to co- opt national- ist influences or hold them in check. That was the case in Colombia, where nationalists tried to outflank traditional rural patron- client networks by unionizing urban workers and appealing directly to their self- interest. The conservatives’ hold on Colombia was too strong, however, to allow nationalist reformers to gain much headway. Ru- ral oligarchies held their ground, region by region, while pop u lar discontent accumulated in the enormous following of a fiery pop u lar leader, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Gaitán rose to national fame denouncing a massacre of banana workers who worked for a U.S. multinational corporation, and his angry condemnations of power and privilege put the word oligarchy into Colombia’s everyday vocabulary. Two de cades later, discontent would finally explode in violence.

Meanwhile, effective nationalist reform had to wait in other countries as well. One was Venezuela, despite (or perhaps because of) the country’s oil wealth— all of it flowing through concessions to for- eign companies. As a result of the freely bubbling black gold and easy money, Venezeula’s rulers were able to avoid the pop u lar outreach that essentially defined nationalist movements. Such outreach was often carried out by communist and socialist grassroots organizers, new players on the po liti cal stage of Latin America. Chile saw plenty of that kind of outreach, however, especially during the thirteen- day “Socialist Republic” associated with a flamboyant leader known as Marmaduke Grove, but Chilean nationalists of the Right vied quite successfully against those of the Left, and no single government con- solidated power. In Cuba, the overthrow of an unpop u lar neocolonial- style dictator in 1933 was carried out by a wide nationalist co ali tion that included inspirational university professors and left- wing stu- dents, as well as noncommissioned army officers and enlisted men led by one Sergeant Fulgencio Batista. Batista was a poor man who had been a cane cutter and whose mulatto coloring represented, to some extent, the same nationalist aspirations symbolized by Nicolás

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Guillén’s “Ballad of the Two Grandfathers.” But Batista wanted power, above all, and he bowed so compliantly to US instructions that he was allowed to run Cuba as a client state of the United States for de cades, his nationalist gestures reduced to mere window dressing.

Nationalism made the most striking changes when stable governments were able to combine mass mobilization with economic transformation. That transformation involved a rejection of the basic neo co lo nial model of export- oriented economic growth, which brings us to the Great Depression.

ISI A N D AC T I V IS T G OV ER NM EN T S

OF T HE 1930 S

The Great Depression of the 1930s finished the de mo li tion of neo- co lo nial ism and energized nationalist movements throughout Latin America. In the years following the 1929 crash of the New York stock market, the volume of Latin America’s international trade contracted by half in a violent spasm. Governments that depended on the export boom collapsed everywhere.

As the 1930s progressed, however, an important phenomenon occurred, a positive side effect of the collapse of international trade. The name of this phenomenon—import- substitution industrializ- ation— is a mouthful, and historians usually prefer ISI for short. But the name says a lot. Earnings from exports had gone down, down, down, and with them, the ability to import manufactured products. The ISI pro cess occurred as Latin American manufacturers filled the market niches left vacant by vanishing imports. Those who believe that trade is always mutually beneficial should ponder a startling fact: The 1930s interruption of trade— the interruption that idled so many factories in the United States and Europe—had the opposite effect in parts of Latin America, where industrialization took off in these same years. ISI gave the nationalist critics of economic imperi- alism a persuasive case against the old import–export trade.

ISI had really begun before the 1930s, most notably when World War I interrupted the import–export system in 1914– 18. Buenos

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Aires, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City were already be- coming major industrial centers. Overall, though, Latin American industries remained minor- league players. Until the 1930s, they could not compete with export sectors like agriculture or mining. Now that changed, and Latin American industrial production increased sub- stantially. Nationalists made industrialization a point of pride. For them, industrialization meant moving out of the neo co lo nial shadow and controlling their own national destiny. The nationalist govern- ments of the 1930s and 1940s therefore engaged in Batllista- style economic activism: setting wages and prices, regulating production levels, manipulating exchange rates, and passing protective labor laws. They also promoted direct government own ership of banks, pub- lic utilities, and key industries.

Unfortunately, not all Latin Americans got the benefits of ISI. As a rule, the larger the national market, the more likely import- substituting industries will thrive. Therefore, the most populous countries of the region— Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina— were the main beneficiaries. Chile and Uruguay, despite their small popula- tions, also underwent considerable ISI. Their comparatively high liv- ing standards provided more prospective consumers per capita. But small countries with predominantly poor rural populations could not absorb the products of many factories. So ISI meant little in Ec ua- dor or Bolivia, Nicaragua or Honduras, Paraguay or the Dominican Republic.

Nor did ISI bring all varieties of industrial growth, even to the big countries. Light industry (producing mass- consumption items like soap, matches, beer, biscuits, shoes, aspirin, and cheap cloth) responded most to the market opportunities of ISI. Heavy indus- try (producing “durable goods” like cars, radios, and refrigerators) responded less. Heavy industry required equipment that simply had to be imported. And it required steel. A national steel industry meant joining the big leagues. Only Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile did so during the 1940s.

Brazil—with over twice as many inhabitants as any other Latin American country in 1930, but still heavily rural and dependent on agricultural exports— offers an excellent example of ISI in action.

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Within two de cades, industry would surpass agriculture as a percent- age of Brazilian GDP. Although market forces explain most of this gain, economic nationalism played its part as well. The story of na- tionalist politics in Brazil centers once again on an individual leader, by far the best known and most beloved of all Brazilian presidents— Getúlio Vargas.

Those in search of US analogies might well call Getúlio Vargas the Franklin D. Roo se velt of Brazil. Note that, from a Latin American perspective, FDR and his relative, Theodore Roo se velt, stand worlds apart, never to be confused. The first Roo se velt seemed an enemy to Latin Americans, the second a friend. Vargas’s first period in office (1930– 1945) parallels FDR’s multiterm presidency, except that Var- gas later returned, for a total of nineteen years as Brazilian president. Vargas, like FDR, made famous use of the radio and vastly expanded the national government. Both men were masterful politicians, but physically unimposing: FDR paralyzed by polio, Vargas short and jolly. Both exuded a contagious optimism. Both died in office— Vargas, memorably, by his own hand.

The Brazilian “coffee kingdom,” Latin America’s largest oligar- chic republic, had begun to crumble during the 1920s. Considering Brazil’s oligarchic politics hopelessly corrupt, rebellious young army officers, collectively known to history as the Tenentes (lieutenants), staged desperate symbolic uprisings. One was a bloody gesture of defi- ance on Rio’s glamorous Copacabana beach in 1922. A bit later, other Tenentes formed a thousand- man armed column and marched for two years and countless miles through the Brazilian backlands trying to drum up support for their revolutionary nationalist vision. Mean- while, the coffee economy lurched from crisis to crisis in a permanent state of overproduction. By 1927, the government’s coffee valorization program was fighting a losing battle. Its vast stockpiles of unsold cof- fee only continued to accumulate. Then came the Depression, and the price of coffee dropped to less than a third of its already low price on the world market.

The rise of Vargas magnificently illustrates the po liti cal con- sequences of 1929. The following was an election year, and Vargas, governor of Rio Grande do Sul, a rising state but not a coffee producer,

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ran against the official candidate of São Paulo, a representative of the pro- coffee interests that had dominated Brazil for two generations. Although the electoral managers produced an official victory for King Coffee’s candidate, the old king had lost his grip. This time, opposition forces forcibly disputed the election results. With the support of the army, Vargas seized the presidency. This “Revolution of 1930” became a clear turning point in Brazilian history.

For seven years, Vargas ruled as a more or less constitutional president over a country suddenly filled with new po liti cal energies. No more would conservative liberalism alternate with liberal conser- vatism. All sorts of new ideologies were afoot. The “revolutionaries” of 1930 had included both frustrated liberals opposed to King Coffee and the idealistic young Tenentes, strong nationalists who despised liberals. The Tenentes absorbed the new radical ideologies of the day. Some of the most famous Tenentes joined the Communist Party, mak- ing it the heart of the Alliance for National Liberation (ALN). With the ALN, the radical left became a real power contender in Brazil for the first time. Meanwhile, on the far right, a group calling them- selves Integralists drew inspiration from Eu ro pe an fascism. The Inte- gralists saluted each other with out- thrust arms, used a symbol (the Greek letter sigma) slightly reminiscent of the Nazi swastika, and wore colored shirts, like Hitler’s brownshirts or Mussolini’s black- shirts, when they acted tough in the streets. Their shirts were patri- otic Brazilian green.

Vargas deftly negotiated the po liti cal tangles of the early 1930s, playing liberals, conservatives, communists, Tenentes, and Integral- ists against each other. Then, in 1937 he assumed dictatorial power with the support of the army and went on the radio to announce a nationalist institutional make over for Brazil: the Estado Novo, or New State. The Estado Novo was a highly authoritarian government, in which all legislative bodies were dissolved, po liti cal parties were banned, and mass media were censored. Vargas scrapped liberal- inspired federalism and sent centrally appointed “interventors” to di- rect state governments. The police of the Estado Novo operated with brutal impunity. Yet, despite all this, Vargas remained pop u lar. Why?

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Vargas was pragmatic, flexible about his means, more inter- ested in results than basic principles— another trait he shared with FDR. Always, too, he was a nationalist. Nationalism was the common ground of his multiclass alliance and the animating spirit of the Estado Novo. From far left to far right, everyone, it seemed, was a national- ist now. These were the 1930s, after all, when nationalist movements were on a roll around the world.

Everything was “national this” and “national that” in the Estado Novo. Vargas even ceremoniously burned Brazil’s state flags to symbolize the unchallenged primacy of the national government. The Estado Novo spawned dozens of government boards, ministries, and agencies, a bit like the “alphabet soup” agencies of FDR’s New Deal, to further the nation’s common goals and welfare. National councils and commissions were created to supervise railroads, min- ing, immigration, school textbooks, sports and recreation, hydraulic and electrical energy, and so on. The Estado Novo founded a National Steel Company and built a massive steel mill between the two most industrialized cities, Rio and São Paulo. Its National Motor Factory turned out engines for trucks and airplanes. It prohibited foreign own- ership of newspapers. And in the far south of Brazil, where German, Italian, and other Eu ro pe an immigrants had established agricultural colonies and maintained a separate culture and language, the Estado Novo exerted new assimilationist pressures. Immigrants were told to speak Portuguese and integrate themselves into the national society.

Like Mexico’s Revolutionary Party, the Estado Novo celebrated race mixing, and it encouraged Brazilians to embrace their African heritage. In 1933, the positive qualities of racial and cultural “fusion” had been promoted in a landmark study, The Masters and the Slaves, by a young anthropologist named Gilberto Freyre. Freyre argued that Brazil’s African heritage, far from constituting a national liability, as in racist theories, had created Brazil’s distinctive national identity and imbued all Brazilians, whether or not they knew it, with aspects of African culture. Brazilians seemed eager for Freyre’s unifying message, and a whole field of Afro- Brazilian studies suddenly arose with official encouragement. During these years, too, the spirited

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G E T U L I O VA R G A S . Between 1930 and 1945, Vargas ruled Brazil as a revolutionary, then as constitutional president, and finally, as dictator. In 1951, he was elected for a final, truncated term. Leonard Mccombe/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images.

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Afro- Brazilian samba became accepted as the country’s cultural sig- nature, vigorously promoted by the mass media of the Estado Novo.

Carmen Miranda— a singer, dancer, and actress whose trade- mark was headgear apparently made of fruit— rode the nationalist samba wave to movie stardom first in Brazil, which now had its own movie industry, and later in the United States. Carmen Miranda em- bodied paradox. In Brazil, her movie roles filled the niche—national musicals featuring national music— that the charro singing cowboys did in Mexico. But her later US movie- star image was a generic, gesticulating, “hot Latin” caricature that today seems far from nationalistic. She created this persona to suit US rather than Brazil- ian taste. Still, her outrageous costume, often blamed on Hollywood, was pure Rio de Janeiro; a carnival- kitsch version of traditional Afro- Brazilian Bahiana dress. Her samba moves were carefully studied from Bahian teachers. But Miranda was not Afro- Brazilian herself. In fact, she was Portuguese, although she grew up in Brazil. Still, her dancing made her Brazilian— both according to her (“Tell me,” she said, “if I don’t have Brazil in every curve of my body!”) and accord- ing to the Brazilian public that applauded her in the 1930s. Miranda made nine sold- out South American tours. In 1940, after performing for FDR at the White House, she returned to a hero’s welcome in Rio de Janeiro. But her popularity in Brazil plummeted when Brazilians heard her sing in En glish.

Across Brazil, a pro cess of cultural self- discovery was under- way. A landmark festival, São Paulo’s Modern Art Week of 1922, in- augurated an innovative nationalist current in the Brazilian arts. Among those associated with the São Paulo modernist movement was Heitor Villa- Lobos, who integrated Brazilian folk melodies into his classical compositions, just as Chopin and Liszt had done with Polish and Hungarian folk melodies for similar nationalist reasons a century earlier. Under Vargas, Villa- Lobos worked on a national program of musical enrichment, arranging huge concerts for tens of thousands. Today Villa- Lobos is by far Latin America’s best- known classical composer. Another leading light of São Paulo’s Modern Art Week was writer Oswald de Andrade. “Tupi or not tupi, that is the question,” declared Andrade, with typically Brazilian tongue- in- cheek

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lightheartedness, in his influential Cannibalist Manifesto of 1928. Re- calling certain Tupi dietary customs, Andrade suggested that Brazil- ian artists meta phor ical ly “cannibalize” Eu ro pe an art— consume it, digest it, then combine it with native and African influences to invent a new art unique to Brazil. Meanwhile, storytellers of northeastern Brazil were creating a great narrative tradition with strong nation- alist roots. Among them was Jorge Amado, long Brazil’s best- known novelist. Amado’s books are almost always set in Bahia, where Brazil’s African roots are especially deep. Like Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and many other nationalist artists and writers, Amado became strongly committed to a revolutionary Marxist vision during the 1930s.

The government of Vargas, too, eventually moved leftward, as we will see. In the 1930s and 1940s, though, Vargas’s policies were hard to place on the left- right spectrum of po liti cal ideologies. Nationalism, not socialism, was the vision he used to reconcile the demands of industrialists and industrial workers. The Estado Novo made industrialization a priority, and its extensive labor legislation disciplined the labor force, which the factory own ers wanted, but also protected it, which the workers needed. The Estado Novo created government- affiliated labor unions by the hundreds, but it did not allow them to strike. Instead, worker grievances were to be adjudi- cated by the government. It was a paternalistic system, not controlled by the workers themselves. Still, it constituted an improvement over earlier years, when worker protests had been simply “a matter for the police.” An impressive array of social legislation— from health and safety standards to a minimum wage, a forty- eight- hour work week, retirement and pension plans, and maternity benefits— was put in place for industrial working- class and urban middle- class people.

Like Argentina’s and Uruguay’s, Brazil’s nationalist movement was urban- based and urban- oriented. Only in Mexico, where peasants in arms had helped make a revolution, did nationalism transform ru- ral society too. The period of greatest transformation was unquestion- ably 1934– 40, during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas.

Whereas Vargas, like FDR, came from a rich landowning family, Cárdenas had humble village beginnings. He had fought ably in the Revolution and then become governor of his home state,

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Michoacán, in rugged and conservative western Mexico. Thirty- nine years old when be became the Revolutionary Party’s presidential can- didate, Lázaro Cárdenas was known for his loyalty to the cause, but not for his initiative. He surprised everyone by seizing the reins of power and galloping out to infuse the whole country with his vision of a better, fairer Mexico. He started this pro cess during his campaign for election. As the Revolutionary Party’s official candidate, he ran un- opposed, yet he campaigned like an underdog, ranging across sixteen thousand miles of Mexican countryside, visiting remote villages— on horse back, if necessary— as no presidential candidate had ever done before. Cárdenas did not forget about the villages of Mexico after be- coming president, either.

During his six years in office, he distributed almost forty- five million acres of land, twice as much as in the previous twenty- four years put together. He gave his support to labor organizations and, unlike Vargas, defended their right to strike. Government support of striking workers even led to a major international confrontation in 1938. These workers were employed by British and US oil companies that operated along the northeastern gulf coast of Mexico. When the companies and the strikers submitted their dispute to government arbitration, the arbitrators awarded the workers an increase in pay and social ser vices. The foreign own ers refused to pay, however. The Mexican Supreme Court reviewed and upheld the decision, but still the foreign companies stonewalled. The foreign own ers were shocked when Cárdenas then decreed the expropriation of the oil companies in accord with Article 27 of the Mexican constitution. Few mea sures have ever been more pop u lar with the Mexican people, who volun- tarily contributed part of their meager earnings to help the govern- ment compensate the foreign own ers. Even the Catholic Church, de- spite its long and bitter conflicts with the revolutionary government, rang its bells in jubilation when the oil expropriation was announced. Mexico’s “declaration of economic in de pen dence,” as it became known inside the country, gave rise to a national oil company, PEMEX. The railroads had already been nationalized, less noisily, in 1937.

Great Britain severed diplomatic relations as a result of the oil expropriation, and the US oil companies clamored for intervention,

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but FDR had other ideas. The world seemed a dangerous place in the 1930s, and FDR thought the United States badly needed allies in Latin America. As world war loomed on the horizon, he did everything possible to cultivate Latin American goodwill. In his inaugural ad- dress, he announced a “Good Neighbor Policy” toward Latin America. The idea was not totally new in 1933. Republican US presidents of the 1920s had already begun to abandon the aggressive interventionism of earlier years, finding that it created more problems than it solved. In 1933, however, at the seventh congress of the Pan- American move- ment, FDR’s representatives publicly swore off military intervention. In addition, Cuba and Panama were no longer to be “protectorates” where US Marines could come and go at will. The result was a re- markable change in the mood of US– Latin American relations. FDR then took advantage of improved relations to advance hemispheric se- curity arrangements in successive Pan- American conferences during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Carmen Miranda, now living in the United States, made Good Neighbor movies, and so did Walt Disney; an example is the 1945 animated feature The Three Caballeros, in which Donald Duck joins forces with a Brazilian parrot and a Mexican rooster.

If the nationalization of Mexico’s oil industry in 1938 was the acid test of the Good Neighbor Policy, it passed. Relations between Latin America and the United States became friendlier than ever before or since. After the United States entered the war, all the coun- tries of Latin America eventually joined as allies. The small states of Central America and the Ca rib be an, closest to the United States in all senses, signed on immediately. Sadly, however, some of the quickest to join the war effort were former “beneficiaries” of US military interven- tion, now in the hands of pro- US dictators. Some of these were outra- geous petty tyrants, like Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, about whom FDR supposedly admitted: “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard.” Ours rather than the enemy’s was the point. Chile and Argentina— much farther away from the United States and dip- lomatically more aloof, with many immigrants from “the other side,” Germany and Italy— were the last to join the US war effort. Brazil, in contrast, became the most helpful ally of all. The “bulge of Brazil,”

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reaching far east into the Atlantic, had major strategic importance in the Atlantic war, and Vargas allowed the construction of US military bases and airstrips there. In addition, a Brazilian infantry division went to fight in Italy alongside US troops. Mexican fighter pi lots, for their part, flew missions in the Pacific, doing much to mend relations between Mexico and the United States.

World War II also gave further stimulus to ISI— more, even, than had the Depression— not only in Brazil, but everywhere. Government spending for war production brought US industry hum- ming back to life— although now building tanks and bombers instead of cars and buses. US demand for Latin American agricultural exports also recovered. Foreign earnings in hand, the Latin American middle classes were ready for a shopping spree, but consumer goods could not be bought in the United States or Eu rope because of the war. So, with demand up and foreign competition still out of the picture, Latin American industries continued to flourish. In 1943, for exam- ple, Brazil’s exports totaled about $445 million, a $135 million trade surplus. For the first time ever, many Latin American countries had favorable balances of trade with Eu rope and the United States.

In 1945, at the end of World War II, the nationalists could take credit for leading the major countries of Latin America successfully through stormy times. Great things seemed just over the horizon. If their industrialization continued at the rate of the prior de cade, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and possibly others would soon get the heavy industries characteristic of the world’s most developed countries.

At the same time, a sweeping transformation of public culture suggested that Latin America’s bitter legacy of racial hierarchy and po liti cal exclusion was fast disintegrating. The hallways of Mexico’s palace of government— truly “corridors of power”— now proudly dis- played Diego Rivera’s huge murals depicting the achievements of indigenous Mexico and the evils of Spanish colonization. The black samba dancers of Rio de Janeiro were now acclaimed as exponents of Brazilian national culture, and their carnival parades received state subsidies. Across the board, Latin Americans were taking pride in themselves and each other. The advent of the phonograph, radio, and cinema had made Argentina’s great tango singer, Carlos Gardel,

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an idol throughout Latin America. Audiences loved the handsome Gardel’s tangos so much that they sometimes interrupted his movies to make the projectionist rewind and repeat a song. Gardel was on a triumphant international tour in 1935 when his plane crashed on a Colombian mountainside, tragically ending his still- ascendant career. Then, in 1945, Gabriela Mistral, a Chilean poet, became the first Latin American to receive a Nobel Prize. In literature, as in painting and music, Latin America was finally world- class.

Yet great problems remained. For one thing, nationalism, ISI, and the growth of an urban middle class had left some parts of Latin America virtually untouched. Central America provides a good example. The internal markets of Central American countries were too small to support much industrialization. So old- style land- owning oligarchies had not, for the most part, ceded control to more progressive nationalist co ali tions on the isthmus between Panama and Guatemala. In the years when nationalists like Cárdenas were breaking the back of Mexico’s landowning class, old- fashioned coffee- growing oligarchies still ruled much of Central America.

In Guatemala, many coffee growers were Germans who had little interest in the country’s national development. Guatemala’s ruler throughout the years of the Great Depression and World War II was a liberal authoritarian of a classic neo co lo nial cut, Jorge Ubico, who came to power promising “a march toward civilization” and whose main concern was promoting the cultivation and exportation of coffee. Ubico wanted Guatemala to be the closest ally of the United States in Central America, and during his presidency the United Fruit Com- pany became the country’s single dominant economic enterprise. El Salvador, a miniature version of the old Brazilian Coffee Kingdom, represented the worst- case scenario. There, a grim dictator, Maximil- iano Hernández Martínez, a dabbler in the occult, defended El Salva- dor’s King Coffee so brutally that 1932 became known in Salvadoran history as the year of “The Slaughter.” Most of the victims— more than ten thousand— were indigenous people. To be an “Indian” became so dangerous in the 1930s that indigenous Salvadorans gradually said good- bye to their ethnic identity. They hid their distinctive clothing, spoke only Spanish, and tried to blend in. Ironically, in the same years

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when indigenismo became an official creed in nationalist Mexico and elsewhere, the native heritage of stubbornly neo co lo nial El Salvador practically ceased to exist.

The United States generally put a lid on nationalism in Cen- tral America and the Ca rib be an. US co- optation of Fulgencio Batista’s nationalist impulse in Cuba has already been mentioned. In a num- ber of countries, the rulers of this period actually owed their jobs to US intervention. Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza and the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo had been placed in power, indirectly, by US marines. Both deployed a bit of nationalist imagery, but both distin- guished themselves above all, for their greed, corruption, obedience to the United States, and determination to retain power at all cost. Tru- jillo renamed the capital city after himself and erected a large electric sign that proclaimed the motto “God and Trujillo.” His most national- ist undertaking was the massacre of Haitian immigrants.

Even in Latin American countries where nationalism was a more serious force, rhetoric often outran reality. Despite the popular- ity of indigenismo and mestizo nationalism, racist attitudes lingered everywhere in Latin America. The poet Gabriela Mistral never forgave the Chilean elite that made her feel inferior early on because of her mestizo coloring. Also, urbanization had outrun existing housing and city ser vices. Shantytowns, constructed by rural migrants in search of industrial jobs, sprawled on the outskirts of major Latin American cities. It was hoped that these would be temporary; in the meantime, blackouts and water shortages became routine. Outside of Mexico, the Latin American countryside had felt few of the improvements brought by nationalism. More industrial jobs were needed for the migrants who arrived day by day in the shantytowns. Meanwhile, Latin Ameri- can industries remained technologically far behind those of Eu rope and the United States. They had prospered under the special condi- tions of ISI during the Depression and World War II, but they would have to improve rapidly to be competitive in the postwar period.

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S T U D Y Q U E S T I O N S

1. How did nationalist politics engage broad enthusiasm throughout Latin America after 1929? Particularly, what was the new nationalist ideology of race, and how was it embodied in the arts?

2. Why did Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) play such a central role in nationalist economic thinking?

3. Why did nationalists often appear as revolutionaries? Was nationalism left or right on the political spectrum?

4. What characterized the political style of leaders like Cárdenas, Vargas, and later, Perón?

5. How did the 1930s depression and World War II affect the relationship between Latin America and the United States?

K E Y T E R M S A N D V O C A B U L A R Y

ISI, p.249

Getúlio Vargas, p.251

Carmen Miranda, p.255

Lázaro Cárdenas, p.256

Good Neighbor Policy, p.258

Rafael Trujillo, p.258

mestizo nationalism, p.235

Emiliano Zapata, p.239

Pancho Villa, p.239

Diego Rivera, p.242

Frida Kahlo p.242

APRA, p.246

indigenismo, p.246

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P O P U L I S T L E A D E R S O F T H E T W E N T I E T H C E N T U R Y

T he mid- twentieth century was a time of charismatic leaders in Latin America. Generally they were electrifying speakers with a nationalist message. They became populists by directing

their message to poor and lower- middle- class voters. Populist versions of nationalism dominated Latin America’s po liti cal scene after World War II. Populists invariably cultivated a folksy style, often a paternal- istic one; “Father- knows- best” paternalism is generally a conservative trait. On the other hand, populists often used radical rhetoric, blasting oligarchies and economic imperialism. Their behavior in office is very hard to categorize on a left– right po liti cal spectrum. But in the cold war days of 1948– 89, any leader who talked a lot about workers was likely to be viewed as a leftist, or even as a communist, by US diplomats. The result was a lot of confusion. Recognizing this confusion is essential to interpreting the turbulent politics of the cold war in Latin America, our next stop.

JUAN AND E VA PERÓN. Courtesy  of UPI, Bettmann/Corbis.

FPO

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