Our Land is Made of Courage and Glory: Nationalist Performance of Nicaragua and Guatemala (review)

How is the nation performed in the drama of developing countries? Westlake examines two cases, Nicaragua and Guatemala. Although the book is organized by nation, Westlake is not primarily interested in the differences between the performances the two countries generate. (Indeed, it is confusing to discover discussions of Nicaraguan playwrights in the section of the book treating Guatemala, and vice versa.) Instead, she explores their similar function as performances of Central American nations with histories of imperialist domination. She wants to "reveal the ways national identity is performed, legitimated, and deployed" (3). Westlake analyzes how the five playwrights whose texts she analyzes perform a distinctively Central American nationalism through the articulation of a national race, character, and history.

Westlake begins with a sketch of the two nations' precolonial and colonial histories. Here, she makes one important distinction between Guatemala, where the indigenous Mayan population is 45 percent, and Nicaragua, where the native population was "practically wiped out by the Spanish" (14) in the sixteenth century. Still, she focuses on the shared history of the two nations. Westlake also sketches the history of a US policy in Central America that "tended to favor political stability at all costs." This policy, she notes, "has led the United States to support some of the bloodiest dictators in history" (21).

Westlake argues that Central American playwrights perform the national race by delineating who belongs to it and who does not. They articulate inclusion primarily through mestizaje, a deliberate blending of the black, white, and indigenous identities of these nations. "Where Europeans create nationalist sentiments out of constructions of racial purity, Latin Americans unite behind a mythos of racial solidarity" (44). They articulate exclusion through the expulsion of the imperialist desires and racist laws of "foreign capitalists, most notably from the United States, which sought to exploit or absorb them" (29). As an exemplar, Westlake persuasively demonstrates how Manuel Galich constructs the nation's borders in his nationalist drama, El tren amarillo (The Yellow Train), a play that features characters of five different races.

The performance of national character proves more elusive. Westlake argues that playwrights construct it through the use of metaphors, but the chapters devoted to locating and decoding these metaphors provide little evidence of this. The chapter on Galich yields at most two: the family as nation and mestizaje. Yet the two seem to function in nearly identical ways to perform the nation's inclusiveness. Racial inclusiveness, then, serves as the primary marker of both national race and national character. The other major chapter on nationalist metaphor treats Guatemalan playwright Miguel Angel Asturias. Here, Westlake describes the ways in which the European population in Guatemala represents the rational and the Mayan population the mythical. It is unclear, however, how this division operates as a cohesive national metaphor or how it serves nationalist aims.

The chapters on metaphor briefly mention several other "essentially Guatemalen" (and, one infers, Nicaraguan) characteristics, including generosity, fairness, durability, strength, and "realness." But Westlake neither connects these qualities to metaphors nor discusses them in any detail. Curiously, the characteristic of courage named in the book's title is not mentioned here.

The performance of national history is the subject of part 3, by far the most compelling part of the book. Here, Westlake identifies a drive for continuity with the past that motivates playwrights to reconstruct history, to diverse ends. She analyzes the plays of popular revolution supporter Alan Bolt and revolution opponents Pablo Antonia Cuadra and Rolando Steiner, demonstrating how each constructs a past that provides continuity with a particular desired present. In each case, she argues, "nationalist drama presents its audience with a stable and recognizable nation . . . [T]he character of the nation remains unchanged by both foreign pressure and the movement of time" (96). Westlake's argument here is strong, and useful for understanding nationalist drama in the Central American context and beyond.

In the...