Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America's Export Age

Chapter 5: Exploitation: A Journey to the Export Real

Ericka Beckman Capital Fictions Final proofs for press December 6, 2012, Page 158 158 Eric Cap Fina Dec Chapter 5 EXPLOITATION A Journey to the Export Real Where to escape, where to seek protection? Women and little children, eyes wide with terror, ran into the gang’s gunfire before finding shelter. “Long live Colonel Funes! Down with taxes! Long live free trade!” —José Eustasio Rivera, La vorágine From Export Reverie to Export Real By the 1920s, Spanish American literary texts began to offer a new way of envisioning export economies by way of a current known as regionalism. In the aftermath of the urban-based and intensely Europhilic literary movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly modernismo, regionalism marked a turn inward, to the peripheries of the already peripheral nation-state. Jungles, plains, and mountains are the settings par excellence of regionalism, a geographical shift frequently encoded as marking a turn away from the preciousness and artifice of Frenchified letters toward a more virile, if less sophisticated, form of cultural expression . The new protagonism of nature, in turn, has traditionally been seen as a turn toward a more authentic, if less modern, vision of Latin American societies at the turn of the nineteenth century. But as I argue in this chapter, regionalism’s turn toward “nature,” and “the land” marked anything but an escape from commercial culture: instead, the settings examined by regionalism were precisely those at the center of export-led modernization. Under a system organized beckman.indd 158 12/6/2012 8:54:39 PM Ericka Beckman Capital Fictions Final proofs for press December 6, 2012, Page 159 Exploitation 159 around the extraction of natural resources, the rural hinterlands are always already marked as frontiers of accumulation and possible centers of production. Focusing on a key text of regionalism, the Colombian author José Eustasio Rivera’s La vorágine (The Vortex, 1935), a novel set in the early twentieth-century Amazonian rubber boom, this chapter explores an instance in which literature comes into direct contact with the social worlds created by export-led modernization.1 These are worlds that earlier authors and texts had either idealized or ignored. Export reverie, a key modality of early liberal optimism, had imagined egalitarian polities and nations enriched beyond their wildest fantasies; the actual people who were to perform the labor required by full-scale export economies were rarely seen. Modernismo , by contrast, even in moments of crisis, focused almost exclusively on European objects and locales. Not coincidentally, it was in the 1920s, when the export model had already fomented numerous crises and was itself on the brink of collapse, that Rivera’s regionalist text turned to examine the human consequences of liberal modernization . Like the novel examined in the previous chapter, José Asunci ón Silva’s De sobremesa, Rivera’s La vorágine focuses on an urbane poet from Bogotá; unlike Silva’s novel, however, Rivera’s takes the reader into the unmarked forests of rubber extraction to register the exploitation upon which this activity depended. In turning to the exploitative and often murderous practices of extraction, La vorágine serves as a point of contact with what I call the export real, defined as that which the lettered creole subject didn’t know he knew, but had been there all along. The ways in which this subject both sees and occludes what happens on the export frontier is the subject of what follows. The Rubber Boom: Export Age (Ir)rationality The Amazonian rubber boom, which reached its apex in the early 1900s, was long over by the time that the Colombian poet and lawyer JoséEustasioRiverawroteLavorágine.Buttheboomremained—and beckman.indd 159 12/6/2012 8:54:39 PM Ericka Beckman Capital Fictions Final proofs for press December 6, 2012, Page 160 Exploitation 160 Eric Cap Fina Dec remains—an unparalleled episode of the rationalized irrationality of commodity booms. The extraction of rubber was so brutal that it stretched the putative rationality of capitalist accumulation to its outermost limits. Before the 1890s, the Amazon rainforest had figured prominently in creole imaginaries as a place of indomitable wilderness that nonetheless hid vast stores of wealth.2 Much of the region remained unmapped, and as numerous tracts of the early twentieth century attest, was inhabited only by Indian “savages” and “cannibals.”3 But this changed once demand for wild rubber grew to unfathomed heights with the...