A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties (review)

Diana Sorensen’s A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties relates the greatest artistic phenomenon of 1960s Latin America, the literary Boom, to historical events of the same decade. Commencing with an analysis of the Cuban Revolution, the study culminates with readings of Cortázar, García Márquez, Fuentes, Donoso, and Vargas Llosa, which demonstrate how the utopian spirit that underlies the Revolution both infuses and expires in the works of these now classical authors. The interpretations are more cultural than textual: they deploy the narratives as means to examine the connection between the Latin American state and pan-Latin Americanism, nationalism and globalization, patriarchy and power. Ultimately, Sorensen less discloses how the Boom reflects the political events of the ’60s than how the movement forms its own history within a larger, transcontinental one.

The reading of the Cuban Revolution centers on the image of “Che” Guevara, particularly as generated by Guevara’s own writings. Sorensen highlights the ways in which Che’s compelling figure produced identification across Latin America, spawning or representing the utopian, leftist, los de abajo pan-Latinamericanism that was fundamental to the Boom’s emergence. The sheer courage of Guevara, whether true or exaggerated through its various presentations, in part accounts for his iconic status. To explain the Che phenomenon further, Sorensen focuses on Che’s projection of masculinity, source of the brotherhood that he generated. Situated between his status as physician and soldier, charitable Christian and rebel, sacrificial body and aggressive warrior, Che stands not as the “macho” authority but as a combination of fraternity (as doctor, helper, collaborator) and supremacy (as revolutionary) that engenders a plurality of masculine identifications (which by no means excludes identification on the part of women), an hombre-sexualidad, and continues to do so today. Nonetheless, Sorensen emphasizes, Che as seductive brother does not by himself create either the initial global sympathy for the Cuban Revolution or the enduring admiration for the icon “Che.” Such a framework of support and love also requires the father (the brother/father terminology is mine), the patriarch: Fidel. Utopia turns (again, the terms are mine) on the impossible accord between the brother-brother and father-son relationships, which Che’s writings call for: Che transcends history as the embodiment of an ideal, utopian spirit, in which brothers are also sons, and sons are fathers. He is “masculine” precisely as Christ, the son-god, is masculine. Sorensen then interprets Cortázar’s short story “Reunión,” in which the Argentine author turns from textual experimentation to political commitment through an engagement with the Cuban Revolution, staging and adopting the identification process just described.

The theme of patriarchy, noted but not criticized in the study of Cuba, flows throughout the book; chapter 2, dedicated to the Mexico City 1968 student massacres, is no exception. Here, in addition to presenting the historical context, Sorensen contrasts two texts: Octavio Paz’s Postdata, appended after 1968 to the new editions of El laberinto de la soledad, and Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco, among the most innovative of the Latin American testimonios. Paz inserts the Tlatelolco events into the grand narrative of the Mexican nation. He argues, according to Sorensen, that the violence of the Mexica tradition remains imbedded in the foundation of Mexico. The slaughter of the indigenous peoples by the Spaniards, similar to the way in which patriarchy acts in Freud (through the murder of the father), does not eliminate, but rather produces the violent forefather, the reign of authority and carnage which the Mexicas symbolize (via the imaginary), and that “returns” in 1968. The events of 1968 thereby add to and/or reiterate the relatively homogeneous narrative of Mexico that Paz had developed in the first version El laberinto some twenty years earlier. Poniatowska, conversely, gives voice to...