CLAH Lecture: Learning and Teaching

The following speech was written in acceptance of the Distinguished Service Award of the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) for 2020, would have been delivered at the January 2021 meeting of the American Historical Association/CLAH, were it not for the coronavirus pandemic. I share this award with the majority of the members of CLAH: the scholar-teachers of Latin American history who dedicate most of their professional time and energy to teaching undergraduates across North America. Harking back to Herbert Bolton's project for a hemispheric history, incidents and anecdotes from my own experience learning and teaching about Latin America serve to illustrate that reducing provincialism, chauvinism, and ethnocentrism among North American undergraduates are still valid objectives.

World War I in Latin America

The First World War was a global event that intensively involved Latin America. From the beginning, Latin Americans sensed that this war had worldwide scope. For many observers, the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 represented a profound turning point in the unfolding of history. Because of the breakdown of the European civilizational and development model, and in the unreserved belief in human progress in the years from 1914 to 1918, a world where Latin America had occupied a fixed position was effectively gone. Many contemporary witnesses agreed that an era had ended in the days of August 1914, and a new, still uncertain age had begun. The war stimulated the massive utilization of new forms of media like photography and cinema. Press photography proved to be an important instrument of propaganda, which contributed to the worldwide circulation of war pictures that seemed to depict objective reality. The understanding of reality expanded, for what was real no longer simply pertained to one’s own life, but also to events mediated through imagery. It was precisely in places like Latin America, where there was a geographical separation from the front lines that people experienced the war, both privately and publicly, through media-produced images. What is more, the World War I took place there especially as a propaganda war, which also caused a largely unprecedented form of radical hatemongering among rivals to spread in the subcontinent. Consequently, the traditional bias toward European models proved to be obsolete and the future had to be conceived anew. Due to this attitude, the call for a reorientation of identities on a national and regional level, which had already gained momentum before the war, became even louder. Scholarship on Latin American history has for decades largely ignored the First World War as a major event in which the continent played a part. This was mainly due to historiography’s focus on the nation and as well as initially on military and diplomatic, and later social and economic, topics. Only recently, with the rise of the new cultural history and global history, have the tides started to turn. Several important studies have now been published.

The Heroine’s Path. Teresa de la Parra: Charting the Path of Latin American Heroines

As a heroine in the novel of her own story, the Venezuelan author Teresa de la Parra (1889-1936), was an acknowledged noted novelist and gifted public speaker in her lifetime when she was invited to deliver three lectures in Bogotá and Barranquilla, Colombia, in 1930, and later in Cuba. The lectures were not published until 1961 in Caracas by the Venezuelan critic Arturo Uslar Pietri and I translated the lectures for the book, Teresa de la Parra: A Literary Life (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). The Tres Conferencias: Influencia de las mujeres en la formación del alma americana or Three Lectures: Women’s Influence in the Formation of the American Soul, described the important roles women played during the Conquest, Colonial, and Independence eras in Latin America. The Colombian Lectures represent her last work. In the 1970’s, when critics began to value women’s writing for its valuable contribution to literature, they began to read and value this author’s work that addressed female heroines. In these lectures de la Parra declared herself a “moderate feminist” as she highlighted the important roles the founding mothers played in Latin American history and in the formation of its ethos and culture. She wanted to uncover the hardships that had been imposed on women starting with the conquest of México. As Spain conquered more of the Latin American continent, women played important roles, but de la Parra pointed out that the stories of half the human race had been ignored by Latin American historians, who tended to write about battles and victories rather than the sacrifices and the heroic contributions of women. By recuperating the voices of the “founding mothers,” Queen Isabela, Ňusta Doña Isabela (el Inca Garcilaso’s mother) Doña Marina, Madre Castillo, Policarpa Salavarrieta, Manuela Sáenz and her contemporaries Delmira Augustini and Gabriela Mistral, de la Parra created a community of heroines.