Public Pages: Reading Along the Latin American Streetscape by Marcy Schwartz (review)

Toward the end of Public Pages, Marcy Schwartz describes a painting by Antonio Berni in which a girl teaches several boys to read. More than a painting, Juanito Laguna aprende a leer incorporates bits of garbage into a layered canvas. The complexity of its assemblage, made visible on the surface of the work, mirrors the nature of the scene represented: learning to read is never a simple act, particularly in contexts riven by social divisions, and the precariousness of the boys’ and the girl’s economic situation is made clear in both figurative depiction and material support. Painting scenes set in the Buenos Aires slums, Berni “uses the very materials that residents rely on to build their makeshift homes” (228), and thus here he connects reading to this same material reality. Schwartz presents this work as a reflection of an ethics of reading as an everyday act, coextensive with the materiality of daily life.

A reflection on Berni stands as a fitting conclusion to Schwartz’s detailed, multifaceted analyses of recent projects that seek to cultivate public spaces of reading in Latin American cities. Two main strands run through this study. The first involves a number of close readings of the literary print production, most often comprising very brief texts, that one can encounter in the public spaces of large Latin American cities today. The second traces in detail the institutional mechanisms that foment, organize, and distribute this literature. The result is a layered illustration of the places of literature in Latin America—indeed, of the ways in which literature, both its aesthetic interior and its institutional exterior, contributes to a sense of place in cities like Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Lima, Santiago de Chile, and São Paulo. As such, the reader gains an understanding of a selective but important swath of literature in contemporary Latin American urban life, framed within the political and economic forces shaping these writings.

Many of the projects that Schwartz analyzes are undertaken at the municipal level, underwritten by the local administrations of large cities, usually national capitals. Some receive funding from corporations or national ministries of culture. Two of them seek recognition within the framework of cultural governance at the international level (UNESCO). But others operate at a less official level: at the scale of neighborhood associations or even smaller. These very diverse projects share a common notion of literature: “Literature as conceived, produced, and distributed by these programs has intrinsic poetic and humanistic value” (3). That is, literature is not seen here as a means to acquire skills or prepare for a specific aim. It is neither a means to functional literacy, as it was, for example, in the Cuban and Nicaraguan literacy campaigns that followed political revolution in those countries, nor a tool for promoting a specific political consciousness: “These programs invest in reading for enjoyment that prompts social interaction to construct new collective urban imaginaries” (3).

One might object, rightly, that there is nothing apolitical about this description. Indeed, the conviction shared by the projects Schwartz analyzes is that reading in public is an activity that should be promoted because it generates a healthy citizenry—and, of course, the way in which one defines the health of the citizen is itself a political matter. That said, these projects, as Schwartz outlines in her introduction, are not built on the suppositions that guide the classic understanding of the public sphere. That is, they do not conceive of a clean separation between public and private wherein literature comprises a sort of preparation for entering public debate. Some of them do grapple with the legacy of hierarchy, colonial in its origins, inherent in the Latin American ciudad letrada. But the political and economic actors supporting these public reading projects are so diverse and dedicated to such different visions of society that we are left to wonder how to conceive of commonalities among them, beyond their support for reading in public space.

One of the virtues of Public Pages is...