Subalternity within the "Mestizaje Ideal": Negotiating the "Lettered Project" with the Visual Arts

In order to distinguish right from wrong, it is more useful and more prolific to close the books and open the eyes.

—Franz Tamayo, Creación de la pedagogía nacional

In her essay “The Challenge and Dilemma of Latin American Subaltern Studies” (1994), Florencia Mallon criticizes the project of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group as being too centered on literary theory and textual deconstruction. This criticism is basically misleading because, in our attempts to rethink coloniality, the literary critics who participate in research on subalternity have always negotiated their own field of work with issues raised by the social sciences. As I argue in this paper, a program of empirical historical research into the role of subaltern groups in Latin America, along the lines suggested by Mallon, also needs to include the strategies that are appropriate to discursive analysis.

Attempting, as I said, to negotiate different fields of research, I was struck by Angel Rama’s book The Lettered City (Rama 1986), which came out just after his death in 1982. In this book, the well-known Uruguayan literary critic poses the question whether literature, even the progressive literature of the 1960s and 1970s, was genealogically part of a tradition that went back to the colony, where the writer—“the lettered man”—and fine writing, literature, and the culture of the book were all implicated in the formation of national states where popular voices were erased. In my own research, I have tried to grapple with Rama’s insightful observations. In so doing, and as I began to negotiate different fields of study, I became increasingly interested in visual representations of the human body.

Consequently, the purpose of this paper is to discuss subalternity from the different “scopic regimes” that introduced and later questioned miscegenation, mestizaje, as the founding perception of Bolivian society. Following Martin Jay, I understand scopic regimes to be visual models of the modern era. They may be best understood as “a contested terrain, rather than a harmoniously integrated complex of visual theories and practices” (Jay 1988, 4). In fact, scopic regimes are characterized by some visual subcultures—Cartesian perspectivalism, Baconian empiricism, the baroque—whose separation has allowed us to understand the multiple implications of sight “in ways that are now only beginning to be appreciated” (4). That new understanding, I want to suggest, introduces new ways of seeing that may well be the product of a radical reversal in the hierarchy of visual subcultures. I propose viscerality to be one of such new ways of seeing, connected to subaltern sensibilities. Scopic regimes, then, should not be confused with histories of art. They are about vision and its historical construction.

Following a brief presentation on the development of mestizaje in Bolivia, this essay focuses on Franz Tamayo, one of the leading “lettered men” of modern Bolivian society. Through my discussion of Tamayo, I present a relatively unfamiliar configuration of nineteenth and twentieth-century ideas and events, that is, connections between domains of study and bodies of knowledge that rarely appear in histories of Bolivian art or of modernismo, the literary trend that Tamayo helped to introduce into Bolivian society at the beginning of this century. I thus incorporate visuality by associating Tamayo’s early-twentieth-century nation-building project with the paintings of Cecilio Guzmán de Rojas and Arturo Borda. I think that both painters are the best examples of the clash during the 1920s and 1930s between the symbolic (classic) and the allegoric (baroque) representations of society. It is through the opposing ways of seeing of these two major painters that subaltern sensibilities may have begun to decentralize the ocularcentric representations of reality, particularly those of Cecilio Guzmán de Rojas, the arbiter of “good taste.” With today’s growing social awareness about ethnic and gender issues, this decentralization indicates with unequivocal regularity that the visceral—the last...