Medicine and Nation Building in the Americas, 1890-1940 by Jose Amador

Author:Jose Amador [Amador, Jose]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: 2015-02-27T22:00:00+00:00

PART III

Legacies

CHAPTER 5

A Turn to Culture

Public Health Legacies and Transnational Academic Circuits

If, during the first decades of the twentieth century, public health campaigns traveled circuits linking Cuba, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and the United States, by the 1920s public health knowledge had become central to assessments of national identity. With varying degrees of engagement, established and promising intellectuals drew on this knowledge to alter conceptions of race and nation across the American tropics. Indeed, the assurance that preventive measures and proper hygiene could transform diseased, tropical peoples into productive citizens opened novel opportunities for reformulating ideas about race and for revising the legacies of former metropolitan centers. The turn from race to culture, however, did not develop in isolation, but rather in dialogue with other intellectual currents that moved across the hemisphere.1 It was the culmination of a long process forged in multiple languages and contexts. Prestigious research universities in the United States facilitated this epistemological shift, but it would be an error to present these institutions as the sole catalysts. Latin American and Caribbean intellectuals were deeply enmeshed in the process. Seeing this transformation through the networks these intellectuals forged sheds new light on how narratives of racial and environmental danger gave way to new studies of culture and nationality.2

Among the prestigious academic centers in the United States, Columbia University played a leading role in attracting talented scholars from Latin America and the Caribbean.3 During the 1920s, Fernando Ortiz—who, as we have seen, was already a leading intellectual figure in his country—established ties with Columbia faculty and alumni, giving lectures and sending promising students to its anthropology department.4 In 1931, he traveled to Columbia to deliver a keynote address on the African influences in the Antilles at the Instituto de las Españas (Institute of the Spains, now the Hispanic Institute), a center whose aim was to disseminate research on Iberian and Latin American cultural production.5 Columbia University similarly influenced the thinking of Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre and Puerto Rican literary critic Antonio S. Pedreira. In the 1920s, both moved to New York as promising young students to complete postgraduate degrees at the university.6 The parallels among the three writers extend beyond their connections to Columbia. After returning to his homeland, each intellectual continued to draw on his experiences abroad to write his greatest work: Ortiz produced Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1940), Freyre The Masters and the Slaves (1933), and Pedreira Insularismo (1934).

Their encounters across the Atlantic catalyzed an acute cosmopolitanism that shaped their understanding of national culture. Despite partaking in intellectual networks at the metropolitan center, Ortiz, Freyre, and Pedreira worked within restrictive national and comparative frameworks. Aware of the public health zeal of the previous decades, they challenged, albeit not always successfully, cautionary discourses of tropicality as they became acquainted with new and more relativistic theories on the formation of national culture. In the process, they adopted and modified notions of culture to highlight the positive contribution of marginalized populations to the nation, while at the same time denouncing colonial and neocolonial structures of inequality.

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