National regeneration and the education of the Latin American elites

Given the essentially cultural connotations of the notion of ‘Latin race’, education was widely perceived as a key tool for bringing about a process of national and regional regeneration. ‘The problem of the race’ was closely linked to ‘the problem of education’. What characterised the debate on education in all three countries was a deep concern with the need for a regeneration of the national character. This chapter explores the debates around Latin and Anglo-Saxon education models and the ways in which major contemporary theories of education were incorporated. Intellectual exchanges with the Spanish ‘regeneracionistas’ were key in the case of the pedagogical strand of Krausismo in the River Plate and especially in Uruguay. What approach to education best suited the Spanish American nations? Was ‘Latin’ education the best model to adopt? The ‘spatial’ direction of these exchanges is in itself revealing of the different national tendencies: while the Chileans ostensibly and increasingly looked towards the United States, the River Plate was largely part of a revival of Krausismo through direct contact with a new generation of Spanish krausistas.

Raza latina: immigration and decadence at the fin de siècle

This chapter explores the ways in which the incorporation of the notion of ‘Latinity’ was affected by changing representations of European civilisation. Through an analysis of the discourses that were created in the popular press, the key argument here is that shifting perceptions of the European immigrant deeply affected the debate on the Latin race: rather than being taken at face value, the possible implications of belonging to the cultural and political sphere of the Latin countries of Europe were long debated. More specifically, the chapter explores the idea of national degeneration in relation to responses to and perceptions of ‘Latin’ immigration at the turn of the century. The significant waves of immigration from Southern Europe fuelled discussions over the impact of a notion such as that of Latinity, which was becoming identified with ideas of progressive degeneration in the contemporary sociological literature. The civilising power of the immigrant was increasingly ambivalent as he was identified with a decadent civilisation whose values seemed to clash with nineteenth-century liberal ideals. So, contrary to the widely shared assumption that ‘Latin America’ was a uniform notion, this discussion shows the complex debates about Latinity and Anglo-Saxonness in each of the three national contexts.

Introduction

The introduction starts by defining the theoretical framework in the context of recent and current debates on ‘multiple modernities’, which often fail to include Latin America. This section then moves on to discuss the relevance of and relation between key categories, primarily those of ‘civilisation’ and ‘decadence’ − which were increasingly used in association with each other − with respect to the more recent notion of degeneration which provided them with a scientific analytical foundation. In the late nineteenth-century, many started to feel that ‘modern civilisation’ carried within itself the danger of deviance, especially as the medical model of social analysis became established. I discuss here how these debates culminated in the years between the mid-1890s and the early 1900s, when the process of nation-building and economic prosperity reached its peak in the Southern Cone as the rapid changes that had taken place during the previous two decades became consolidated. Among the main consequences were the growth of the urban population and the consequent rise of the so-called ‘social question’. It was during this time that the need to rethink how the idea of civilisation should be approached acquired for the first time such huge prominence in Latin America.

Conclusion

The book leads to two main conclusive points. Firstly, representations of cultural modernity in Latin America were not simply based on the idea of progress but were also linked with notions of degeneration. These ideas were subsequently challenged in order to engender a process of regeneration through which a different and more humane modern society could emerge, arising phoenix-like from the ashes of europeísta decline. The concluding chapter stresses the long-term significance of these turn-of-the-century debates by briefly considering the enthusiastic reception in South America of Oswald Spengler’s book on The Decline of the West (1918). Secondly, the book shows the ways in which and the extent to which the cultural notion of Latinity was debated, adapted and often challenged from within and the extent to which it facilitated internal discourses of modernity as well as of regional identity. The regeneration of Latin America needed to be primarily cultural. Or, to put it differently, culture was the essential instrument for political change. This political ideal would have a long-standing resonance in Spanish American criticism, reaching its ideological climax in 1920s Mexico with José Vasconcelos’ aesthetic vision of the cosmic race.

Against the poetics of decadence: Latin America and the aesthetics of regeneration

In the late nineteenth century, sociological studies often functioned as a channel between the psychological and criminological sciences and the traditional field of literature. I argue that Nordau’s work, which drew as much upon Italian criminology as it did upon Jean-Marie Guyau’s sociological theory of aesthetics, constituted a major path by which ideas of degeneration taken from the medical and criminological sciences came to be a fundamental tool of interpretation of modern Latin American culture. One of the main lines of argument in this chapter is that social theories on the degeneration of modern art were useful to vast sectors of the late-nineteenth-century intellectual elites to identify with the values of modern civilisation. By linking the development of literary modernismo to the wider engagement with questions about the features of modern civilisation, this discussion offers a new reading of modernismo as a movement that in its boom phase helped foster ideas of modernity as an essentially urban − and therefore transnational − phenomenon through notions of refinement, disease and degeneration. The second part of the chapter shows how Rodó’s seminal essay Ariel marked a turning point from decadent civilisation to the idea of Latin American culture by building on a moral conception of aesthetics.

Mythologizing the internal Other: rural tradition as antidote to modern civilization

The emergence of literary and cultural criollismo has usually been looked at in the context of early-twentieth-century nationalism. While these analyses have contributed to a better understanding of the extent to which early-twentieth-century responses to immigration shaped the political debate over the following decades, they seem to underestimate the pervasiveness of civilisational constructs at the turn of the century, thus failing to fully appreciate the specific contexts in which the first coherent attempts to come to terms with ideas of the modern were made. Breaking away from previous interpretations that look at the early-twentieth-century discourse about the nation almost exclusively in terms of a reaction to the phenomenon of mass immigration, this chapter focuses on the turn-of-the-century period and shows that, both in the River Plate and in Chile, discourses of the autochthonous primarily originated in response to the hegemonic outward-looking idea of modern civilisation. The chapter analyses the shift from the idea of a barbaric past to that of rural tradition. The countryside was used to counterbalance the refined and decadent urban civilisation based on European cultural models.