Strange Pilgrimages: Exile, Travel, and National Identity in Latin America, 1800-1990s (review)

Ingrid Fey and Karen Racine have put together an excellent collection of 15 essays about Latin Americans abroad that succeeds on many different levels. The subject itself is fascinating and relatively novel since most studies, and especially those written in Latin America, confine themselves to examining what foreign, usually European, visitors have had to say about a given Latin American country. The articles in this volume, in contrast, look at what Latin Americans gained from the faraway places they lived in or visited.

The editors have divided the collection into four thematic and chronological sections that also reflect the evolution of the interaction between Latin Americans and the United States and Europe. In a most valuable introduction, they start from the premise that foreign travel was generally a valuable experience that commonly helped Latin Americans gain the perspective and maturity that they brought back to the region upon their return. The essay also makes the case that travelers became more nationalistic abroad, in part as a survival strategy, particularly if they expected to go home one day.

The first grouping—"Constructing Nations after Independence and Beyond"—looks at foreign travel and residence from 1810 to the 1870s. The four essays included here indicate how time spent abroad could be wonderfully beneficial, as Racine describes the life of Venezuelan-born intellectual Andrés Bello in London. Or harmful, as Roderick Barman shows about Brazilians who went to France to be educated yet returned home unable to win positions of the first rank; such positions instead went to their peers who had remained at home and spent those years building useful contacts. As to those who went to the United States, while Cuban Ramón de la Sagra's visit to Baltimore, as related by Camilla Townsend, helped him gain a more profound understanding of the humanity of all people including slaves, Mexican Justo Sierra O'Reilly's stay in the United States only hardened his heart against the rebellious Maya at home in Yucatán.

The next section "Touring Modernity," does not hang together as well as its predecessor, but has much to offer as well. Two of the articles—Ingrid Fey on Latin American feminists in Paris and Sandra Boschetto-Sandoval on Chilean feminist Amanda Labarca in New York City—concern gendered responses to foreign places, a sub-theme of the entire book. As Fey recounts in "Frou-Frous or Feminists?," there were 2,354 Latin American women living in Paris in 1891, where some of the women flourished in the liberating environment and actually held salons of their own. According to Boschetto, Labarca became fascinated with the pragmatism of John Dewey and others during her stay in New York in the 1930's. Her experience helped her develop an understanding of the gendered nature of experience. Richard McGehee examines how U.S. institutions like the YMCA supported athletic activities particularly in Guatemala and Nicaragua. He notes that while there is little mention of sports to be found in newspapers of the day in Central America in 1900, just twenty years later such descriptions were commonplace and foreign sports figures were often used to sell products to Latin Americans.

The six essays in the third section, "Taking Sides," all concern politics as experienced by both Latin American individuals and organizations while living and working abroad. The first article, by Arturo Taracena, discusses the fate of the Asociación General de Estudiantes Latinoamericanos (AGELA), a group formed in Paris in 1925 to protest imperialist policies. Yet, only four years later, it was in decline as the Depression and diplomatic work took their toll. The next three pieces concern what happened when visitors went abroad specifically for what we might call today "fact finding" trips. Daniela Spenser writes about Mexicans who...