The Spectacle of War at a Distance: Latin American Modernistas in World War I

Is World War I a Latin American event? To what extent can one consider World War I a Latin American war? In what sense could the worldly predicate of the Great War include Latin America? These are obviously counterintuitive questions about an unprecedented military conflict, fought by more than sixty-five million soldiers in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific Island and China where over ten million metropolitan and colonial soldiers lost their lives (not counting civilian deaths) and over twenty million men and women were wounded. Moreover, the proliferation of testimonial, historiographic, fictional and scholarly discourses and memorializations occasioned by the war over the past hundred years mostly focused on British, French, German and North American actions, traumas, effects and transformations, on national or individual levels (and to a significantly lesser extent, Russian, Italian, and Ottoman). In addition, most Latin American countries remained neutral throughout the war. Only when the United States Congress declared war on Germany in April 1917 did it force its Caribbean and Central American formal and informal colonies to do so as well, although even then they did not contribute troops. In October of that same year, and after heated debates, Brazil entered the war in an attempt to position the new republic within the anticipated geopolitical rearrangements that would follow the end of war. However, its actual participation was limited to sending one medical unit to France, which was comprised of one-hundred doctors, some nurses and a few dozen soldiers to protect the medical professionals (Cervo and Bueno, 209–10).¹

This merely symbolic participation of a few countries from the region is certainly not enough to place the eventfulness of the First World War within the cultural and discursive realm of Latin America during those years. Perhaps only economic historians, looking at the formation of a fully integrated world market of financial and industrial exchanges, would respond in the affirmative to my opening questions. Indeed, most countries in the region were “heavily dependent upon foreign capital, imports, shipping and insurance, access to export markets, and in some cases labor…[T]he collapse of the world economy and its subsequent restructuring during the war was an extremely testing experience which created both problems and opportunities for these peripheral countries” (Albert 2).² From an entirely different perspective, looking at the local echoes of war, and the ways in which they rearranged national political structures and institutions, historians like María Inés Tato, Patricia Vega Jiménez, Phillip Dehne and Olivier Compagnon (and very few others) have researched the presence of the conflict in the press, and among unions, economic elites and political and diplomatic actors. These historians have analyzed the Latin American investment in “la cuestión de la neutralidad o del compromiso, los efectos del conflicto en las relaciones comerciales entre Estados, en la vida cotidiana de las poblaciones y en el porvenir económico de América Latina,” with particular emphasis on determining “si el conflicto habría concurrido de manera crucial en la cristalización nacionalista y en las diversas inquietudes identitarias que se observan a lo largo de los años 1920 y 1930” (Compagnon 16, 21).³

These concrete rearrangements of local social and economic structures underscore the place of the war among a plurality of external determinations of Latin American processes of modernization. And yet, my initial questions interrogate the possibility of positing a constitutive relation between World War I and Latin American culture, and not merely the localized, particular echoes of the war’s universal impact; Latin America as an integral part of an event whose very globality encompasses Latin American culture within the uneven discursive field that constitutes it. Tackled from the disciplinary perspective of cultural and literary history, these questions frame the war as a problem that disturbs and reshuffles a segment of Latin American letters, rather than as the contingent name of some external conditions that render themselves visible through their local effects. Thus, the war disrupted the general order of signification, giving rise to a transatlantic discursive field...