A Cultural History of Underdevelopment: Latin America in the U.S. Imagination by John Patrick Leary (review)

John Patrick Leary opens his "cultural history of underdevelopment" with a suiting epigraph from Aimé Césaire's Un Tempête: "And you lied to me so much, lied about the world, lied about yourself that you have ended by imposing on me an image of myself[,] underdeveloped in your words" (v). This quote perfectly situates Leary's cogent, well-referenced, and insightful paradigm shift. Rather than a typical analysis of the economic plight, dictatorial past, or boundless potential of the countries that comprise Latin America, the author leads the reader to take one step back, proclaiming that ". . . Latin America in the U.S. imagination has been a kind of vanity mirror" (3). From this vantage point, Leary posits, what has been termed Latin American underdevelopment reveals itself as a projection of the domestic, uneven development of the United States onto the screen of Latin America; it is a "reflection of the United States' spatial and political inequalities," and thus relieves the American fears of falling behind (2). Leary effectively flips the script: the American narrative of Latin American underdevelopment reveals the United States' cultural history as one that imagines itself as fixed and perfected rather than confront the reality of its own uneven development.

The author divides the work into six conventions or imaginings of Latin America: (1) Latin America as anachronism, (2) Latin America as nature, (3) Latin America as warzone, (4) Latin America as a source of cultural vitality and revitalization, (5) Latin America as a space of revolution, and (6) Latin America as an object of solidarity. He pairs each of these imaginings with at least one particular point of interaction between the United States and Latin America, for example, the role of the yellow press in the push for the annexation of Cuba.

In "Latin America as Anachronism: The Cuban Campaign for Annexation and the Future Safe for Slavery," Leary shows how Breitbart-style "journalism" took an active role in politics long before our current national struggling with identity and fear of the other. (Note: He does not invoke the name of Breitbart nor comment on the current political scene.) Although not the only primary source in this chapter, much of the analysis refers to La verdad, a newspaper published in New York and New Orleans that sought to "agitate in the United States and through illegal circulation in Cuba, for the United States' annexation of the Spanish colony" (28). Leary exposes how "white racial preservation" and a continuation of the pre-Civil War South form the core motivations for such publications. Lest the reader suspect this as interpretation based on a contemporary perspective's imposition on the past, he provides plenty of evidence from primary sources, including the words of La verdad on July 1, 1848: "We consider a Cuban every person born in Cuba; and what we wish is, that white people be born by the thousands, every hour" (37).

The next chapter shifts attention to how U.S. travel writing constructed a story of tropical underdevelopment. As a foundation, Leary distinguishes between two types of journey: the pilgrimage, or return to a source of history, identity, and inspiration, and the mission, the journey to a place "with no significant history at all" (49). American travel writings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took on the mentality of superiority associated with the missional journey and in its judgment formed "[t]he association of the tropical climate with these related scourges of filth, evil, indolence, and vegetal decline" (60). Rather than distinct peoples, these narratives represent Latin America as one region, or simply the other (61).

In "Latin America at War," Leary once more shows the underpinnings of domestic inequality in the projections of the United States onto Latin America by comparing the newspaper image of of a New York tenement girl to Cuba: "Like Mamie the Water...