Book Review: Popular Struggle and Resistance in Latin America

Three recent works deal with literature as a means to understanding how common people attempt to improve their way of life. In his sweeping synthesis The Great Latin American Novel, the renowned novelist Carlos Fuentes offers insights not only into the great writers who have shaped our understanding but also into the cultural landscape and political realities that motivated them. For Latin Americanists whose research and writing are driven by disciplinary training, it is important to become familiar with the literature of the places we study, and Fuentes facilitates this task. He begins with Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Latin America’s “first novelist,” who wrote about a world that had disappeared decades after accompanying Hernán Cortés on his arrival in Mexico and who influenced Bartolomé de las Casas and his denunciation of the peaceful coexistence between “the devastated world of the indigenous peoples and the triumphalist attitude of the white man in the New World” (50) and the Leyenda Negra. He celebrates Machado de Assis and his The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1981), and he turns to the great Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, which has enchanted many of us. He reminds me how I discovered Cervantes in a Spanish-literature class: “There was one world before the publication of Don Quixote in 1605, afterwards, another one, forever different—the novel of La Mancha . . . is indispensable in order to speak about fiction, or the immediate past, of today, of tomorrow” (398).

The works of Juan Pablo Dabove, with its focus on “how men of letters articulate the bandit trope in order to reflect upon their own practice, their own place in society, or to carry out a particular literary or political project” (98) and Sarah Sarzynski, for whom themes of “cangaceiros, rural poor and Coroneis, slavery, and messianism formed the language of the political debates” (17) during the 1950s and 1960s in Northeast Brazil, are based on broad research but generally presented through case studies. Both are of particular interest to me because early in my career (see Chilcote, 1972) I organized a series of colloquia at UC Riverside and UCLA focused on movements and charismatic individuals that organized against the state and the ruling class in pursuit of a better life. Our research drew partly on case studies in the Brazilian Northeast that at the time had been romanticized in the literature. One of our cases, by Amaury de Sousa, focused on social banditry, and my early assessment attempted to advance an agenda for further, deeper research. Both Dabove and Sarzynski have contributed significantly to that objective.

Dabove organizes Bandit Narratives in Latin America around cases in Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. The first part focuses on banditry, portraying Pancho Villa and Hugo Chávez as part of an insurgent tradition aimed against established authority. Both are viewed not as outlaws but as influenced by social banditry aimed at societal improvement, examining Villa through an autobiographical work and Chávez through reference to an “anti-imperialist” lineage dating to the sixteenth century. The second part looks at the role of banditry in twentieth-century nationalism as seen in the novels of Rómulo Gallegos, Antonio Uslar Pietri, Rafael Muñoz, and Enrique López Albújar. A third part of the book, devoted to left thinking, movements, and policy, discusses Latin American Marxist writers including José Carlos Mariátegui, Jorge Amado, and José Revueltas. A final part draws out the emphasis on social banditry in the writing of Jorge Luis Borges, João Guimarães Rosa, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Ricardo Piglia. The final chapter, which seeks to explain the meaning of “bandit,” might well have been placed at the beginning, since the term has many meanings and implications. Dabove justifies its placement as follows: “This book is not about bandits per se. It is about how men of letters articulate the bandit trope in order to reflect upon their own place in society, or to carry out a particular literary or political project” (98). He suggests two ways of understanding banditry—the realist (implying robbery, perhaps for profit in the midst of wars and revolutions) and the nominalist (violent and perhaps revolutionary, criminal, or outlaw)—and explores this distinction in academic writings. Then he turns to Eric Hobsbawm, who said that social bandits were peasant outlaws considered criminals by the state but viewed in peasant society as “champions, avengers, fighters for justice” (269).

My own interest began long ago with Hobsbawm’s highlighting social banditry and through many years of field research in the Brazilian Northeast, including in two rural communities of the sertão of Bahia and Pernambuco, where I studied family domination in the face of cultural manifestations and popular movements struggling to survive since the late nineteenth century. I immersed myself in the vast literature of the region, including the poetic writings of the cantadores or troubadours who roamed the backlands singing about social banditry.

Several years of research and teaching in urban Recife led me to a study of the communist parties from early in the twentieth century to the Cold War period of the 1950s and the military coup of 1964, around which Sarah Sarzynski frames her Revolution in the Terra do Sol. My recent LAP book on the Cold War and its impact on Latin American studies (Chilcote, 2022) has no essay on Brazil, but she could surely fill that gap from her impressive research. Indeed, she briefly explores this theme in her introduction by reference to the Yale historian Gilbert Joseph’s “new history” of the Cold War in Latin America, which leads her to look closely at the grassroots level. She takes “a cultural approach . . . to uncover the significance of the political and cultural debates about Northeastern Brazil during the Cold War” (12). She also smartly contends with Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Júnior’s depiction of the Northeast as an “invention” and instead delves into “a myriad of political and cultural actors—rural social movement leaders and participants, foreign and local politicians, intellectuals, journalists, large landowners, military officials, filmmakers, and popular poets” (243).

The Cold War is the backdrop to her study of the revolutionary fervor spreading throughout Latin America in the wake of the Cuban Revolution and the protests, strikes, and land invasions in Northeast Brazil. She refers to Euclides da Cunha’s classic work on the Northeast, Os Sertões: Rebellion in the Backlands (1902), as a “national epic” descriptive of the desperation of the Northeasterner, which was profoundly influential on my own work. She turns to Glauber Rocha’s “cinematic masterpiece” Deus e o diabo, released in 1964 in midst of the Northeast political and social turmoil and impending military intervention but depicting “historical struggles involving messianic cults, violent bandits, hired thugs, greedy large landowners and miserable, ignorant rural people” (1). What ensues is an interesting synthesis of Brazil and its Northeast cultural traditions and politics. A lengthy introductory chapter looks at revolution in Brazil in an effort to depict the major institutions (in particular the peasant leagues, the communist party, and rural workers), the radicalization of the Catholic Church, and party politics regionally. The ensuing chapters turn to documentary films, songs, and poetry of the literatura de cordel; the cangaceiro or bandit as depicted in history and film; the coronel, the rural political boss who controlled large stretches of land; slavery and the quilombos; and religion as a political and revolutionary means of improving life in the Northeast.

The book’s theme of the Cold War and the Northeast is worthy of our consideration and deserving of more study. Through interviews, archival research, documentary film, and reviews of a massive literature, Sarzynski briefly looks at life of the lower class, the disadvantaged poor, the marginalized peasant farmer, the rural workers and small merchants, and the dominant landowning coroneis of the past. It is fascinating narrative, a foundation for future deep class analysis of traditional rural life in Northeast Brazil. Having lived in Brazil through most of the period under study, I found that this book refreshed my past experience and opened up new paths for understanding the complexity of culture and politics in Northeast Brazil.