Ecological Imaginations in Latin American Fiction

Introduction

Introduction “The message I want to send in a time capsule is a living message.” Here Homero Aridjis pauses. “I would like to send a living monarch butterfly.” The Mexican poet speaks these words in the 2007 documentary The 11th Hour, and he names three creatures he would send into the future: the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus), gray whale (Eschrictus robustus), and sea turtle (several species from two families, Cheloniidae and Dermochelyidae ). All are migratory animals that spend part of their lives in Mexico, but whose survival is as much linked to global forces as is Aridjis’ own family story. Aridjis’ poetic imagination sends them to flutter, splash, and nest in the imaginations of his global audience, motivating viewers to build a future that includes these creatures. Homero Aridjis’ participation in this documentary, narrated by Hollywood celebrity Leonardo DiCaprio, is part of an artistic movement to raise global consciousness about human and nonhuman nature. Aridjis is one of many committed public intellectuals in Latin America who have spoken to environmental realities. Harvard ecocritic Lawrence Buell states that “one sees a trend-line of mounting resolve during the late twentieth century to fathom and raise public consciousness about the history, present state, and possible future of the environmental interdependencies between human and nonhuman within human society, made increasingly unstable and dangerous by drastic alterations in planetary environment” (Future 97). Aridjis certainly forms part of this global movement, but his art and ac- 2 • Introduction tivism also stem from a strong sense of place. The son of a Greek immigrant and a local woman, Aridjis grew up just miles from the wintering grounds of monarch butterflies in Michoacán, Mexico. An ecocritical approach to Latin American literature can take many forms, but it must take into consideration the way literature registers both the intimate knowledge of place and global forces of change. Here, I am interested in the way contemporary Latin American fiction depicts the historical , economic, and cultural roots of ecological transformation and crisis in the Americas. It is my contention that texts of ecological imagination use a rhetoric of nature to expose and critique human power structures during a moment of growing unease about the global economy. The authors of the primary texts I consider all recuperate a sense of place, and some posit an ecocentric agenda that valorizes nonhuman nature. Others have an explicitly anthropocentric agenda, and their fictionalization of history and the natural world offers warnings about modernization and highlights paths of resistance to it. I have selected texts with a dual purpose in mind: to offer a literary analysis of expressions of ecological imagination in contemporary Latin America and to produce an innovative text about the broad sweep of environmental history as apprehended through fiction. Specifically, I am interested in late twentieth-century novels of national or international significance that have an ecologically oriented imagination and that fictionalize moments in history the authors identify as determinant of ecological and social problems in Latin America. These works depict turning points in nineteenth- and twentieth-century environmental history, and they warn of an apocalyptic future for Latin America in the years to come. All also share a common preoccupation : the mobilization of a discourse of nature to indict the neoliberal order of late twentieth-century Latin America.1 The selected texts depict distinct time periods and cover four areas: Argentina at the turn of the nineteenth century, the Amazon in mid-twentieth century, Costa Rica in the late twentieth century, and Mesoamerica in a futuristic twenty-first century. As I have arranged them here, this broad selection of books becomes a vehicle to explore the environmental history of Latin America from south to north, past to present and future. From Argentina, where nineteenth-century battles between civilization and barbarism played out famously in literature and the landscape, there are Introduction • 3 three novels: Tierra del fuego (1998) by Sylvia Iparraguirre, Un piano en Bahía Desolación (1994) by Libertad Demitrópulos, and Fuegia (1991) by Eduardo Belgrano Rawson. I examine three texts about the Amazon, by writers from three different countries: Mad Maria (1980) by Brazilian Márcio Souza, Fordlandia (1997) by Argentine Eduardo Sguiglia, and Un viejo que leía novelas de amor (1989) by Chilean-born Luis Sepúlveda. In Central America, I focus on literature from Costa Rica, the epicenter of the ecotourism industry. These primary texts are Murámonos, Federico (1973) by...