Handbook of Latin American Literature (Routledge Revivals) by William Foster David;

Author:William Foster, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

VII

The social progress of the nineteenth century might be summed up in the following comparative generalization. The struggle for independence was led by Creoles and mestizos, a strange alliance of upper and middle elements of the social hierarchy. The revolution of 1910, on the other hand, was protagonized by mestizos and Indians who sought "freedom" from "independence." In other regards, the two rebellions were disconcertingly similar. Both were more spontaneous and fragmentary than premeditated or unified, encompassing uncertain mixtures of social, economic, and political dissatisfactions. Porfirio Díaz was quickly deposed, but the chaotic armed revolt endured through 1917 and beyond. The years 1920 to 1934 were ebullient ones in which the revolution's political machine was consolidated and a single-party, pseudodemocracy implemented. It was legendary President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40), the last of the military presidents, who succeeded in implementing many of the nationalist social reforms which had always been part of the revolution's rhetoric. Since 1940 Mexico's civilian leaders have generally emphasized modernization, industrialization, and economic development.

If the nineteenth is for Mexican literature a century of apprenticeship and formation, the twentieth century is one of experimentation and consolidation. Thanks in part to the aesthetic sophistication of Modernism and the thematically liberating cataclysm that was the revolution, literary imitation and borrowing become "optional" in the twentieth century, and they occur on an individual rather than a collective basis. A new cultural independence evolves in the twentieth century, partly symbolic and partly real, which coincides with the gradual consolidation of the social and political revolution.

Literary production in the twentieth century does not fall into the broad and relatively neat historical periods into which earlier efforts have over the years been channeled. This is partly a reflection of cultural and historic realities (confusion and multiplicity of influences and schools of practice; accelerated change), partly the result of a lack of historical perspective and canonical consensus. The year 1940, nonetheless, is a useful general period line for twentieth-century literary production in Mexico. In literature the years 1910 to 1940 are ones of self-definition and factional polemic. By 1940, postrevolutionary Mexico has established its character and a period of relative stability and consolidation is opened which propitiates appreciable growth.

It is noteworthy that the Mexican revolution of 1910 does not mark an abrupt change or a decisive interruption of Mexican literary development. Of course cultural activity was inconvenienced by the turmoil, but literature continued to be written and published. Intellectuals were for the most part not protagonists of the sociopolitical revolution, and literary activity during the years of the armed struggle rarely bore directly on the conflict itself. The so-called literature of the revolution was slow to appear, and very much after the fact.

The famous intellectual group known as the Ateneo de la Juventud, founded in 1909 and short-lived as a collective enterprise, is a case in point. Revolutionary intellectuals they were, but just plain revolutionaries they generally were not, even though their decisive public activity as a group exactly coincided with the birth of the political revolution.

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