Biography and Latin American History

Bernardino De Sahagun: First Anthropologist. By Miguel León-Portilla. Translated by Mauricio J. Mixco. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. Pp. 324. $29.95 cloth.)

Sobral Pinto, "The Conscience of Brazil": Leading The Attack Against Vargas (1930-1945). By John W. F. Dulles. (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002. Pp. 413. $60.00 cloth.)

Porfirio Dà�az. By Paul Garner. (Edinburgh Gate, UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2001. Pp. 269. $13.95 paper.)

Andrés Bello: Scholarship And Nation-Building In Nineteenth-Century Latin America. By Iván Jaksić . (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. $55.00 cloth.)

Francisco De Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution. By Karen Racine. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003. Pp. 336. $65.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

Biography is one of the most popular historical genres, and it says something about the perversity of Latin American historians, including myself, that we do so little of it.¹ Aside from being academically unfashionable, it presents numerous difficulties in research and composition and does not lend itself to social science modeling. There have been various theories of development and underdevelopment, of cultural identity and nationalism, of religious belief and gender, but there is no body of theory aside from psychology that attempts to probe the development of a person. Twenty years ago there was still an academic interest in psychohistory (the application of psychoanalysis to biography), but it has been marginalized. Forty years ago, historians as distinguished as H. Stuart Hughes (1964) argued that psychoanalysis might reveal the layers of motive that mere facts could not convey, and in 1979, Miles F. Shore could cite an extensive body of work that had been shaped by psychological insights and ask

How can the biographer prepare for the task of sophisticated manipulation of psychological concepts and data? To what extent will formal training in psychodynamic psychology be necessary? How important is personal psychoanalysis? (Shore 1979, 165)²

Now, no historian talks this way. Although Freud remains of deep interest to literary biographers (see Bowie 2003, 191-92), the application of psychological insights to historical figures has almost disappeared. Yet it is almost impossible to escape the use of biography in most historical narratives and in the classroom. It is still the means to "make history personal"(Oates 1991, 7).

The five books under review do not advance any particular methodology but draw their methods and theories from Latin American history writ large. They seem removed from current concerns. They do not discuss gender at any length, although all of them are about men. They are not part of any "cultural turn"—any application of anthropological or literary methods to historical subjects. Although three of them are about men of ideas, they are not preoccupied with "discourse." They describe educated and relatively privileged people without mentioning any subalterns. Collectively, they cover Latin America's development from the conquest until the 1950s.

A central danger of biography is a tendency toward hagiography and a substitution of the great man's motives and behavior for historical explanation. Two of the books under review fall into this pattern. Miguel León-Portilla considers Bernardino de Sahagún "the first anthropologist of the New World" who attributed a "deep moral wisdom" to the Indians that he had studied for sixty years (266). John W. F. Dulles, calls Heráclito Fontoura Sobral Pinto "the conscience of Brazil." Karen Racine, Iván Jaksić., and Paul Garner are more measured in evaluating their subjects. The fact that these are nineteenth-century political figures—Francisco de Miranda, Andrés Bello, and Porfirio Díaz—allows them some reflections on issues of nationalism and development. I will discuss first the "heroic" biographies and then the others.

One of the attractions of biography is voyeuristic; we get to peep into another's life and learn something about the past at the same time. For this to happen there has to be a...