Literary criticism from the Far West

The mother kingdom and its vice-regal daughter—part of a Catholic but multinational European empire whose ruler, Emperor Charles V, reigned with little knowledge of Castilian until 1556—organized themselves as such not in "the long run" but over a short period, during the XVI^th century. The differences are enormous, but the similarities, to say the least, disturbing: while Spain was born after seven centuries of Muslim domination—the conflictual or civilizing nature of which has been the subject of bitter debate for decades among historians of the peninsula—New Spain rose, thanks to the Caesarian gesture well documented by Christian Duverger, on the ruins of Moctezuma's Empire II and in the face of the conversion, willingly or by force, of the Mexican Indians to Catholicism.

No conversion is peaceful: neither was the Romanization, nor later the Catholization, of barbarian peoples in Europe. But the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, as early as 1531, is proof that there was indeed that "spiritual conquest" of which Robert Ricard speaks. At least in Mesoamerica, there were no large-scale rebellions during the viceroyalty, calling for the return of the old gods. They survived as penates, mixing with Catholicism, the branch of Christianity most open to crossbreeding. Anthropologists no longer take seriously the term "syncretism". All religion is, by definition, syncretic, and Mexican Catholicism is largely a Mariolatry that occurred in the midst of a historically unprecedented epidemiological catastrophe and, of course, neither foreseen nor desired by the Spaniards, eager to convert souls to compensate for the spiritual losses due to the Reformation in Europe.

The Mexican nation was born in 1821, only in the political and legal sense, as a result of the disintegration of the Spanish empire in America, but it was forged during the three viceregal centuries. Much of what we now know as "indigenous culture" was born in those years: a subject from Axayácatl in the XV^th century would have been just as surprised by the pseudo-Aztec dances performed on Mexico City's Zócalo as a Canadian tourist in the XXI^st century.

Mexico became a republic half a century before the national unities of Germany and Italy, around 1871; similarly, the Reformation laws that separated church and state in Mexico were imposed by President Benito Juárez half a century before they were in France. Let these historical facts serve to support a literature that has been written for half a millennium in a Neolatin or Romance language like Spanish, for contemporary indigenous literatures are the result of linguistic laboratory work, quite respectable, but dating from the XX^th century. As the first great Mexican literary critic, Jorge Cuesta (1903-1942), put it, Mexican literature is at best a heresy to the Castilian tradition, but not an apostasy.

Latin American literature in Spanish was, and is, literature of European origin, as much in dialogue with Spain as American English is with British English. Our major differences are more historical than linguistic; they are not even properly existential: a Jorge Cuesta in Paris in 1928 felt as helpless and anxious as a Bostonian "doing Europe" in a Henry James novel, or as Fedor Dostoyevsky, decades earlier, in Baden-Baden. That's why thinkers and poets like Arturo Uslar Pietri and Octavio Paz have spoken of Latin America as the Far West.