The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism during the Cold War

1. "Catch 28": The McCarran-Walter Immigration Blacklist and Spanish American Writers

37 1 “Catch 28” The McCarran-Walter Immigration Blacklist and Spanish AmericanWriters In 1952, the immigration and naturalization law known as the McCarranWalter Act was passed by Congress. President Truman vetoed the act, declaring that “seldom has a bill exhibited the distrust evidenced here for citizens and aliens alike—at a time when we need unity at home and the confidence of our friends abroad,” but Congress voted overwhelmingly to override his veto (Cong. Rec. 1952, 8084). The act was a product of the McCarthy era and the Cold War, and for almost forty years, it had a major and negative impact on the attitudes of Latin American authors—as well as many others—toward the United States. One of the principal changes that it introduced to existing immigration law was the addition, in Section 212(a)(28), of provisions for denying visas to foreigners who believed in, wrote about, or were affiliated with organizations or individuals that promoted Communism; who advocated or were in any way affiliated with organizations that advocated “the economic, international, and governmental doctrines of world communism or the establishment in the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship”; and so on.1 Section 212(a)(28) did allow an individual’s ineligibility to be waived: a visa could be granted following an interview with a U.S. consular officer, who had to approve the application , after which both the State Department and the attorney general had to agree that “the admission of such alien into the United States would be in the public interest” (Immigration and Nationality Act). Securing a waiver was, however, a complex, time-consuming, and often Kafkaesque process. Many visa applications were turned down by local embassies, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the State Department, and even the attorney general’s office. This generated great hostility toward the United States, as did the waiver application process: many foreigners refused to ap- 38 The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism during the Cold War ply for visa waivers because they resented being asked whether they were members of the Communist Party, convicted felons, drug addicts, or prostitutes (among other classes of aliens ineligible under Section 212); because visas were frequently denied at the last minute; and because when visas were approved, they only allowed an individual into the country for as long as his or her commitments lasted. Moreover, the smoothest implementation of the McCarran-Walter Act depended on the collaboration of two separate government bureaucracies with different databases and different chains of command—the Department of Justice, headed by the U.S. attorney general, and the State Department, to which U.S. consular offices report—a collaboration that was often far from seamless. The ideological exclusion clause was applied broadly. Time and again, it was used to justify denying visas to individuals who had expressed leftist or anti-American views or were simply suspected of holding them. Over the years, political figures, intellectuals, and writers were placed on a secret government list of “undesirable” aliens whose presence in the United States was deemed “contrary” or “prejudicial to the public interest.” These individuals included Hortensia Allende (Salvador Allende’s widow), Michel Foucault, Graham Greene, Farley Mowat, Jan Myrdal, Daniel Ortega (a former president of Nicaragua), Pierre Trudeau, and Nino Pasti (an anti-nuclear activist who had formerly served as a deputy supreme commander of NATO for nuclear affairs). The list also included several winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature : Dario Fo (as well as his wife, Franca Rame), Doris Lessing, ­ Czeslaw Milosz, and, from Spanish America, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Even U.S.-born writer Margaret Randall fell afoul of the act.2 The reach of the act extended well beyond public figures: in 1964, hundreds of Eastern European athletes had to petition the State Department for visas so that they could change planes in Alaska while en route to the Tokyo Olympics (“U.S. Eases Visas”), and in 1982, three hundred antinuclear activists from Japan who wanted to attend the U.N. Disarmament Conference were denied visas (“McCarran Redux”). There was public outrage at such incidents, and concern that they violated the guarantee of freedom of expression and the free circulation of ideas in the First Amendment—and, later, concern about whether such exclusions contravened the Helsinki Accords of 1975. These issues prompted numerous efforts to modify and repeal the clause in Section 212. The McGovern Amendment of 1977...