Elite Art Worlds

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduardo Herrera
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Rockefeller Foundation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Graduate Studies ◽  
Luigi Dallapiccola ◽  
Elite Status ◽  
Latin Americanism ◽  
The 1960S

Between 1962 and 1971, the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) of the Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires became the central hub of Latin American avant-garde music. With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation and the wealthy Di Tella family, CLAEM offered two-year fellowships to some of the most recognized young composers of the region to undertake graduate studies in a unique privileged setting under the direction of Alberto Ginastera and with permanent and visiting faculty that included Gerardo Gandini, Francisco Kröpfl, Mario Davidovsky, Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Nono, Aaron Copland, Luigi Dallapiccola, Bruno Maderna, Riccardo Malipiero, Olivier Messiaen, Roger Sessions, and Earle Brown. This book combines oral histories, ethnographic research, and archival sources to reveal CLAEM as a meeting point of US and Argentine philanthropy, local experiences in transnational currents of artistic experimentation and innovation, and regional discourses of musical Latin Americanism. The story of CLAEM shows how musical avant-gardes were articulated, embodied, resignified, and institutionalized in Latin America; how composers during the 1960s engaged with discourses of Latin Americanism as professional strategy, identification marker, and musical style; and sheds light into the role of art in the legitimation and construction of elite status and identity. By looking at CLAEM as both an artistic and a philanthropic project, the book illuminates the relationships among foreign policy, corporate interests, and funding for the arts concerning Latin America and the United States in the mid-twentieth century.

From the Cold War to the Cruelty of Violence: Jean Franco's Critical Trajectory from The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City to Cruel Modernity

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (3) ◽  
pp. 701-710
Author(s):  
Arturo Arias
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
Lettered City ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

The Cuban Revolution Generated a New Communist Paranoia in the United States. Interest in Latin America Grew Dramatically after Castro's rise to power in 1959 and was partly responsible for the explosive growth in the number of scholars specializing in hemispheric issues during the 1960s. Latin Americans, in turn, saw this phase of the Cold War as a furthering of imperial aggression by the United States. The Eisenhower administration's authoritarian diplomatic maneuvers to isolate Guatemala by accusing the country's democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz (1950-54), of being a communist and by pressuring members of the Organization of American States to do likewise had already alarmed intellectuals and artists in Latin America five years before. On 17 June 1954, Carlos Castillo Armas and a band of a few hundred mercenaries invaded the country from Honduras with logistical support from the Central Intelligence Agency in an operation code-named PBSUCCESS, authorized by President Eisenhower in August 1953. By 1 July 1954 the so-called Movement of National Liberation had taken over Guatemala. Angela Fillingim's research evidences how the United States officially viewed Guatemala as “Pre-Western,” according to “pre-established criteria,” because the Latin American country had failed to eliminate its indigenous population (5-6). Implicitly, the model was that of the nineteenth-century American West. As a solution, the State Department proposed “finishing the Conquest.”

Alliance for Progress

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen G. Rabe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Growth ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Marshall Plan ◽  
Assistance Program ◽  
Alliance For Progress ◽  
The 1960S

On March 13, 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced the Alliance for Progress, an economic assistance program to promote political democracy, economic growth, and social justice in Latin America. The United States and Latin American nations formally agreed to the alliance at a conference held in August 1961, at Punta del Este, Uruguay. U.S. delegates promised that Latin America would receive over twenty billion dollars in public and private capital from the United States and international lending authorities during the 1960s. The money would arrive in the form of grants, loans, and direct private investments. When combined with an expected eighty billion dollars in internal investment, this new money was projected to stimulate an economic growth rate of not less than 2.5 percent a year. This economic growth would facilitate significant improvements in employment, and in rates of infant mortality, life expectancy, and literacy rates. In agreeing to the alliance, Latin American leaders pledged to work for equality and social justice by promoting agrarian reform and progressive income taxes. The Kennedy administration developed this so-called Marshall Plan for Latin America because it judged the region susceptible to social revolution and communism. Fidel Castro had transformed the Cuban Revolution into a strident anti-American movement and had allied his nation with the Soviet Union. U.S. officials feared that the lower classes of Latin America, mired in poverty and injustice, might follow similarly radical leaders. Alliance programs delivered outside capital to the region, but the Alliance for Progress failed to transform Latin America. During the 1960s, Latin American economies performed poorly, usually falling below the 2.5 percent target. The region witnessed few improvements in health, education, or welfare. Latin American societies remained unfair and authoritarian. Sixteen extra-constitutional changes of government repeatedly unsettled the region. The Alliance for Progress fell short of its goals for several reasons. Latin America had formidable obstacles to change: elites resisted land reform, equitable tax systems, and social programs; new credits often brought greater indebtedness rather than growth; and the Marshall Plan experience served as a poor guide to solving the problems of a region that was far different from Western Europe. The United States also acted ambiguously, calling for democratic progress and social justice, but worried that Communists would take advantage of the instability caused by progressive change. Further, Washington provided wholehearted support only to those Latin American governments and organizations that pursued fervent anticommunist policies.

Music and Regionalism Since the 1950s

2020 ◽  
pp. 193-208
Author(s):  
Pablo Palomino
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Music ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Latin American Music ◽  
Musical Space ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Latin Americanism ◽  
Musical Understanding

This chapter traces the consolidation of Latin American music as a category and of Latin America as a musical space since the 1950s, as part of a larger web of commercial, political, diplomatic, and musicological practices and discourses that consolidated the region as such. It shows how the discourses and markets discussed in previous chapters ended up shaping the current musical understanding of the region. It describes the decades of inter-American and radical musical Latin Americanism in the region from the 1950s to the 1970s, the expansion of the “Latin music” market in the United States and Latin America since the turn of the twenty-first century, and the naturalized meanings of Latin American music in contemporary culture.

Jesús Martín Barbero and Communication Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Lagos Lira
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Graduate Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Entire Career ◽  
The 1960S

Jesús Martín Barbero is a philosopher specializing in communication and culture, particularly focusing on Latin America as his major geographical research environment and emphasizing the social meanings and practices of cultural consumption. Although he was born in Spain and his formal academic training was developed in Belgium and France, his entire career has been conducted in Latin America and, specifically, in Colombia, where he has lived since the 1960s, with a brief interruption due to his graduate studies in the 1970s. Along with others, Martín Barbero is considered to be one of the main theorists of the Latin American school of communication. He represents the cultural studies trend within it, and he is one of the few Latin American authors in communication and cultural studies who has been translated or published in English. Some of Martín Barbero’s main contributions have been to resituate communication studies within the broader field of culture, emphasizing a nonmedia-centered approach, proposing a radically historical perspective, arguing that the concepts of popular and mass culture are not actually opposite, but tightly embedded within each other, and recognizing that popular and mass culture practices are indeed worthy of study. This perspective has often been dismissed or neglected by previous research in communication and cultural studies in Latin America, and the recent focus on telenovelas research is one such example. De los medios a las mediaciones: Comunicación, Cultura y Hegemonía (1987), Martín Barbero’s most cited book, has several editions in Spanish and has been translated to Portuguese (Dos meios ‘as mediacoes, 1992) and French (Des médias aux mediations, 2002). The translation to English in 1993 includes a little twist on its title: Communication, Culture, and Hegemony: From Media to Mediations. Although Martín Barbero’s work has been included in edited volumes or special issues in English, it has been overwhelmingly published in Spanish. Drawing on his corpus of work—his books, articles, conferences, and interviews—this article offers an overview of Jesús Martín Barbero’s main concepts, his intellectual trajectory, his major intellectual influences, and how and why he became an influential thinker in the Latin American field of communication and cultural studies. It also highlights some limitations in Martín Barbero’s work.

Latin American Theater and Performance

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jill Lane
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
American Theater ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
Theater Studies ◽  
Latin American Theater ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Theatrical practice in Latin America predates the European conquest, and since the conquest has been a site for the expression of new cultural formations, often enacting or contesting prevailing systems of power. As in the field of theater studies generally, the term “theater” encompasses a range of performance practices, and overlaps in key periods with religious rites, political spectacle, festival, social and modern dance, performance art, and popular culture forms. Major concerns of the field include asking how European-based dramatic forms have been reinvented through their continuous interaction with indigenous and African cultural forms, and vice versa; what are the meanings of modernist and post-modernist dramatic forms in societies where modernity is an unstable context; how theater practitioners have transformed traditional forms of theater into an activist “Theatre of the Oppressed”; and what role theater plays in the contemporary neoliberal moment. While scholarship on theater in Latin America dates to the early 20th century, the field of Latin American theater studies—which defines its object of study as theater from the entire region—emerged alongside Popular Theater practice of the 1960s and 1970s, which similarly understood itself as a continental project. Both practice and scholarship, forged in the context of the Cold War, embraced a socially critical stance in favor of the working classes (the “popular” classes), understood theater as a vehicle for social change, and believed that shared Latin American aesthetics and methods were emerging. The field has retained this fundamental interest in the social and political dimensions of theater and has responded to the changing geopolitics of the region. A significant development in the field was the shift in the 1990s from a continental to a hemispheric frame. The hemispheric orientation sought, on one hand, to reshape disciplinary boundaries that rendered the formative, and often repressive, relation between the United States and its southern neighbors invisible; on the other, it affirms shared histories, culture, and aesthetics between US Latinx and Latin American communities and artists. This bibliography addresses the history, theories, and practices of Latin American theater studies and maps its changing disciplinary boundaries and thematic concerns over time. The periodization is intentionally loose. For example, works related to revolutionary aesthetics and the politics of the body are concentrated in the 1960s and 1990s respectively, but these represent threads in both practice and scholarship that continue well past those dates.

Argentina’s Centro de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM), the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Cold War

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduardo Herrera
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Rockefeller Foundation ◽  
Graduate Studies ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Luigi Dallapiccola ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Foreign Relations ◽  
The Cold War

Between 1962 and 1971, the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) of the Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires became the central hub of Latin American avant-garde music. With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation and the wealthy Di Tella family, CLAEM offered two-year fellowships to some of the most recognized young composers of the region to undertake graduate studies in a unique privileged setting under the direction of Alberto Ginastera and with permanent and visiting faculty that included Gerardo Gandini, Francisco Kröpfl, Mario Davidovsky, Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Nono, Aaron Copland, Luigi Dallapiccola, Bruno Maderna, Riccardo Malipiero, Olivier Messiaen, Roger Sessions, and Earle Brown. Engrained in the history of CLAEM were elite worldviews about the role of philanthropy in society and deep Cold War ideologies that shaped US–Latin American foreign relations in the early 1960s such as Kennedy’s “Alliance for Progress.”

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy C. Offner
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
New Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Associations ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
The Road ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The New Deal

In the years after 1945, a flood of U.S. advisors swept into Latin America with dreams of building a new economic order and lifting the Third World out of poverty. These businessmen, economists, community workers, and architects went south with the gospel of the New Deal on their lips, but Latin American realities soon revealed unexpected possibilities within the New Deal itself. In Colombia, Latin Americans and U.S. advisors ended up decentralizing the state, privatizing public functions, and launching austere social welfare programs. By the 1960s, they had remade the country's housing projects, river valleys, and universities. They had also generated new lessons for the United States itself. When the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty, U.S. social movements, business associations, and government agencies all promised to repatriate the lessons of development, and they did so by multiplying the uses of austerity and for-profit contracting within their own welfare state. A decade later, ascendant right-wing movements seeking to dismantle the midcentury state did not need to reach for entirely new ideas: they redeployed policies already at hand. This book brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, the book also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism.

Electoral Rules and Democracy in Latin America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia McClintock
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
Electoral Rules ◽  
New Parties ◽  
Political Exclusion ◽  
Number Of Parties ◽  
Freedom House

During Latin America’s third democratic wave, a majority of countries adopted a runoff rule for the election of the president. This book is the first rigorous assessment of the implications of runoff versus plurality for democracy in the region. Despite previous scholarly skepticism about runoff, it has been positive for Latin America, and could be for the United States also. Primarily through qualitative analysis for each Latin American country, I explore why runoff is superior to plurality. Runoff opens the political arena to new parties but at the same time ensures that the president does not suffer a legitimacy deficit and is not at an ideological extreme. By contrast, in a region in which undemocratic political parties are common, the continuation of these parties is abetted by plurality; political exclusion provoked disillusionment and facilitated the emergence of presidents at ideological extremes. In regression analysis, runoff was statistically significant to superior levels of democracy. Between 1990 and 2016, Freedom House and Varieties of Democracy scores plummeted in countries with plurality but improved in countries with runoff. Plurality advocates’ primary concern is the larger number of political parties under runoff. Although a larger number of parties was not significant to inferior levels of democracy, a plethora of parties is problematic, leading to a paucity of legislative majorities and inchoate parties. To ameliorate the problem, I recommend not reductions in the 50% threshold but the scheduling of the legislative election after the first round or thresholds for entry into the legislature.

Latin America and the League of Nations

1926 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-30
Author(s):  
Percy Alvin Martin
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Treaty Of Versailles ◽  
Post War ◽  
International Status

To students of international relations it has become almost a commonplace that among the most significant and permanent results of the World War has been the changed international status of the republics of Latin America. As a result of the war and post-war developments in these states, the traditional New World isolation in South America, as well as in North America, is a thing of the past. To our leading sister republics is no longer applicable the half-contemptuous phrase, current in the far-off days before 1914, that Latin America stands on the margin of international life. The new place in the comity of nations won by a number of these states is evidenced—to take one of the most obvious examples—by the raising of the legations of certain non-American powers to the rank of embassies, either during or immediately after the war. In the case of Brazil, for instance, where prior to 1914 only the United States maintained an ambassador, at the present time Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, and Japan maintain diplomatic representatives of this rank.Yet all things considered one of the most fruitful developments in the domain of international relations has been the share taken by our southern neighbors in the work of the League of Nations. All of the Latin American republics which severed relations with Germany or declared war against that country were entitled to participate in the Peace Conference. As a consequence, eleven of these states affixed their signatures to the Treaty of Versailles, an action subsequently ratified in all cases except Ecuador.

Licensing Journalists in Latin America: An Appraisal

1996 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 878-889 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry W. Knudson
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
The United States ◽  
Professional Standards ◽  
Court Decisions ◽  
Government Control ◽  
Military Regimes ◽  
The Press ◽  
University Degree

The issue of professionalization of journalism and therefore of how to achieve professional standards has been of concern to journalists and to the general public for many years.1 In Latin America, one attempt at professionalization - the development of the colegio - has garnered some praise and has raised concerns about government control. Probably no issue in recent years concerning the Latin American press has aroused greater opposition or misunderstanding in the United States than the system whereby anyone must have a university degree in journalism and/or be a member of a colegio - a professional association - in order to practice journalism. Despite recent Supreme Court decisions in the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica against obligatory licensing by their colegios of journalists, the institution is gaining headway in Latin America as a whole. Opponents maintain that the colegio system imperils freedom of the press. But others assert it raises professional standards and increases salaries. The author of this study notes that colegios frequently uphold freedom of expression under dictatorial or military regimes, and that opposition by publishers to colegios seems to be based on economic rather than “free press” grounds.

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