The 1920S and 1930S: The Country and The City

Like the 1830s and 1840s, the decades following Europe's first world war were a period of intense nationalisms and debates on nationalism in many parts of Latin America, this time in the context not of independence but of modernization (see Francine Masiello, this volume). Many countries had experienced internal economic expansion through the challenge of meeting Europe's needs during the war. Internal markets and small industry developed, creating in some countries national business classes and middle sectors strong enough to challenge land-based oligarchic interests. Urbanization and industrialization created conditions for the emergence of the first modern mass political movements. Industrial working classes developed and became a political force in some places. Challenges to traditional oligarchic orders were often expressed as internationalism, urban cosmopolitanism, Latin American continentalism, and a critique of nationalism. At the same time, in response to changing demographic and political landscapes, nationalist visions were formulated both by those seeking change (in Peru, for instance, the indigenous majority leaped into the foreground of national concern) and by those opposing it (in Argentina, Rosas was revindicated, for example).

Print culture, as Benedict Anderson's argument predicts, was active in formulating dramas of modernization and competing national self-understandings. In every capital city, cosmopolitan avant-garde movements undertook to create modern, urban high cultures. At the same time, regionalist literatures emerged, seeking to consolidate urban-based discourses about the countryside, affirming, rejecting, or parodying visions of rural progress. It is a symptom of the time that both regionalist and avant-garde movements operated to the complete, and often aggressive, exclusion of women. The great women poets of these decades—Alfonsina Storni, Juana de Ibarbourou, Gabriela Mistral—were widely acclaimed but not accepted in avant-garde circles. Today they are benignly classified in literary typologies as posmodernistas distinct from the avant-garde. The experimentalism of their writing goes largely unrecognized by the literary establishment.

While the male avant-garde often combined a critical perspective with an eager radicalism and enthusiasm for modern urban life, equally cosmopolitan women writers tended to depict modern urban life as a source of confine-

ment, fear, or despair. While for some male poets the mobile figure of the urban flâneur became a vehicle for elaborating a vigorous aesthetic of the city, such an aesthetic seems to have lacked plausibility for many women writers. A critique of domesticity and suburban boredom emerged, consolidating itself in the 1940s in the work of such writers as Chilean María Luisa Bombal.

No women writers appear in the canons of regionalist literature either. This is not to say, however, that women did not write about rural life. No contrast could be more revealing than that between the two classic Venezueian texts that appeared in 1929: Rómulo Gallegos's Doña Bárbara and Teresa de la Parra's Las memorias de Mamá Blanca . Gallegos's novel became Venezuela's canonic epic of modernization, in which an enlightened, urban-educated man returns to the countryside, takes over a ranch owned by a crude and powerful woman rancher, and tames and marries her daughter, thus securing the future for reason, progress, and the patriarchal family. De la Parra, through the reminiscences of an elderly woman city-dweller, nostalgically depicts elite rural life as a feminocentric paradise of girls, women, and servants, still identified with the colonial era. Modernization is represented by a catastrophic move to the city, where the young female protagonists experience a drastic loss of liberty in the name of a highly repressive urban femininity.^[7]

The schematic contrast between Doña Bárbara and Mamá Blanca should not obscure their common ground. Symbolically, gender operates similarly in the two works, though with contrasting value signs: both Mamá Blanca and Doña Bárbara stand for preindustrial social structures inherited from the colonial period and now seen to be passing. Both represent forms of female power and entitlement destroyed by modernization. Both remind us that, from a purely socioeconomic standpoint, the development of urban centers of power and elaborate state apparatuses threatened to deprive women heirs and property owners of an economic base for which there was no urban or industrial equivalent. Elite men could leave family estates to become lawyers, bankers, or businessmen, but the city held few such new beginnings for their female counterparts. Transposed to the house in the suburbs, class privilege realized itself in new ways that perhaps seemed narrow and small in comparison with the hacienda or the fundo . As literary creations, Doña Bárbara and Las memorias de Mamá Blanca register in contrasting ways the impact of feminism on the lettered imagination. De la Parra seeks to revindicate a lost oligarchic mother, while Gallegos feminizes and "barbarizes" a traditional figure in order to dispel it from the national landscape. In Peru at this same time, a very similar fate was being dealt to another traditional icon, the figure of the indigenous woman, to which I now turn.