Un continente, una nacion?: Intelectuales latinoamericanos, comunidad politica y las revistas culturales en Costa Rica y en el Peru (1919-1930) (review)

Timothy Hawkins

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Hispanic American Historical Review 80.1 (2000) 222-223

¿Un continente, una nación? Intelectuales latinoamericanos, comunidad política y las revistas culturales en Costa Rica y en el Perú (1919-1930)

International and Comparative

¿Un continente, una nación? Intelectuales latinoamericanos, comunidad política y las revistas culturales en Costa Rica y en el Perú (1919-1930). By Jussi Pakkasvirta. Huaniora, vol. 290. Tuusula, Finland: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1997. Photographs. Maps. Bibliography. 236 pp. Paper.

The study of nationalism, national identity, and nation-building in Latin America has become one of the most popular areas of historical investigation during the past two decades. Although Latin Americanists have benefited from a long and rich tradition of broad theoretical inquiries about the development of the modern nation-state, recent research, such as this work, has been fueled in large part by some highly influential revisionist scholarship, in particular Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. In general, historians have approached these issues by analyzing the national development of a specific country. Jussi Pakkasvirta's study, however, eschews this tendency and examines the conceptualization, creation, and consolidation of the nation-state in Latin America by emphasizing the unique role of continentalism.

Drawing on the complicated relationship in the Hispanic world between patria chica and patria grande, Pakkasvirta argues that continentalism, the vision of a unified Spanish America which has existed in the region in various forms since the colonial period, is a variant of nationalism that attempts to construct an "imagined community" on a grand scale. Although primarily a utopian dream, continentalism has at times achieved limited and temporary success, finding its best expression in the Bolivarian framework for a federation of republics. In this particular case, the author focuses on a later version, anti-imperial continentalism, which developed across Latin America in the 1920s in response to the crisis of the liberal nation-state and the threat of U.S. imperialism. By analyzing two of the most influential cultural journals of the time, Joaquín García Monge's Repertorio Americano of Costa Rica and José Carlos Mariátegui's Amauta of Peru, Pakkasvirta shows how this new continentalist sentiment coalesced in the minds of Latin America's leading intellectuals and emerged in the form of cultural and social movements such as arielismo, indigenismo, and aprismo, which eventually collided with the liberal concept of the nation that had been imported from Europe during the previous century. In the end, he argues that the anti-imperial continentalist movement collapsed due to divisions within the Latin American Left in the 1930s and was simply absorbed into more traditional, nationalist discourse.

This work is at once an overview and a case study, an approach which leads to some valuable but uneven results. More than half of the book appears as a broad introduction in which the author reviews the historiography of nationalism, defines fundamental terms, and sets up the framework of his continentalist perspective. The book's primary contribution is Pakkasvirta's account of the pervasive yet continually changing influence of continentalism in the region. He makes a persuasive case that modern Latin America has been shaped by many competing, but not mutually exclusive, nationalisms; the European version, though the most overtly successful, represents only one [End Page 222] way in which Latin Americans have constructed their identity. Unfortunately, the chapters investigating the role of the two journals and their editors in shaping early-twentieth-century continentalism, which should have been the foundation of this argument, are less well developed and merit further analysis. In certain cases, some of this supporting evidence, such as Mariátegui's socialist-oriented philosophy, does not always advance his position.

Overall, this work is thought-provoking and clearly reasoned, a tribute to Pakkasvirta's thorough grasp of the vast historiography of nationalism. A general reader should find his summary of the tradition of continentalism in Latin America particularly appealing; specialists in intellectual history will want to...

Hispanic American Historical Review