Latin America’s Agrarian Novels Chronicled the Birth of a New World

We begin in medias res, along a path traveled by a landowner. In the opening pages of Rómulo Gallegos’s landmark 1929 novel Doña Bárbara, the novel’s protagonist, Santos Luzardo, travels toward his ancestral estate deep in the plains region of Venezuela. Two “bronzed” oarsmen alternately plunge poles into the muddy water to propel a canoe forward under a blazing midday sun. Santos, meanwhile, a white man dressed in the manner of “the city dweller who is careful of his appearance,” contemplates the wilderness.

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His objective, we soon learn, is to sell the family estate, Altamira, and, in keeping with the predilections of the region’s landed elite, move to Europe. But upon arriving in the plains, the landowner encounters a new reality that changes his mind: A mestiza (mixed-race) woman, the eponymous Doña Bárbara, has used her feminine wiles to usurp vast tracts of land, including a portion of the Luzardo estate. For the rest of the novel, Santos will remain in the plains region to fight the backward forces personified by Doña Bárbara and attempt to instate “progress.

What I do wish to propose is that regionalism, no matter how fixated on local color, responded to concerns that were far from provincial.

Santos Luzardo’s voyage to the plains is emblematic of the homecoming staged by Spanish American fiction beginning in the 1910s, one known in broad terms as regionalism. As an umbrella term for various subcurrents, such as criollismo, la novela telúrica, and la novela de la tierra, Spanish American regionalism marked a decisive phase in the continent’s literary production.

In broad terms, whereas a previous generation of poets and novelists had faced outward to embrace European aesthetic forms, objects, and civilizational ideals, early twentieth-century regionalisms turned inward, to identify and incorporate local or homegrown materials for literary expression. As an example of this shift, one of the dominant literary currents of the late nineteenth century, Spanish American modernismo, had famously showcased references to French authors (Paul Valéry or the Goncourt brothers), interminable catalogues of bibelots, and sumptuously decorated interiors. Early twentieth-century regionalism, however, inverted this Europhilic aesthetic.

On a spatial level, foreign or urban spaces gave way to rural ones. As an extension of this logic, the satyrs, nymphs, and marble statues that populated previous modernista texts such as the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío’s Azul (1888) were exchanged for “bronzed” oarsmen, bongos, and ranch hands. On a larger level, Spanish American modernismo’s dedication to art for art’s sake, particularly via poetry, gave way to an attempt to evoke local reality—and, more specifically, rural reality—by way of the novel.

When tasked with explaining why this homecoming took place when it did, critics have often relied on a narrative of cultural identity. As a well-known story goes, regionalists looked to the rural to find “traditional” materials with which to craft a more authentic national or regionwide literary aesthetic. Carlos Alonso has shown, in a deconstructionist vein, how this claim to authenticity was always something of a ruse, as texts themselves constantly undermined their own authority.

But such interpretations, while in some ways quite helpful, are incomplete insofar as they do not attempt to account for the larger structural dynamics at play in the regionalist turn inward and, as a result, the precise ways that novels might have encoded the transition occurring in societies across Latin America in the early twentieth century.

At the very least, regionalism marked a spatial recalibration in the literary imaginary, away from European metropoles and national capitals and toward rural hinterlands. Going a step further, this spatial recalibration itself anticipated a larger economic transition: a move away from a liberal, export model that principally served foreign markets and toward the foundation of a long-delayed and stunted domestic market. In proposing that we look at the material lineaments of regionalism, I do not mean to propose, of course, that literary texts evoked economic transitions in a transparent or straightforward manner: The mediations between texts and social contexts remain to be uncovered and examined.

Nor do I mean to suggest that the previous emphasis on foreign themes and settings automatically occluded social realities, while the turn toward autochthonous ones automatically elucidated them. To the contrary, the foreign-inspired modernista salon might alert us to the real conditions governing Latin American artistic production (and societies) in a moment of export-oriented capitalist modernization. Conversely, the regionalist emphasis on local settings might just as easily occlude those conditions. What I do wish to propose is that regionalism, no matter how fixated on local color, responded to concerns that were far from provincial.

The colonial latifundium, instead of being abolished by independence, was strengthened, leading to any number of national ills.

But if the hypothesis that the regionalist search for the national bases of culture broadly anticipated a new, national phase of capitalist accumulation in Latin America, it remains to be stated why, on the level of manifest content, this search took place in the rural hinterlands of the nationstate, and not, say, in expanding cities. As I explore throughout this chapter, early twentieth-century regionalist novels were drawn to the rural world not because it was a site of stable tradition (though this is often the ideological effect they produce), but because this world had become a problem in need of a solution. This problem was none other than the agrarian problem in its earliest instantiation, especially with respect to what was perhaps the key unifying feature of an otherwise intensely variegated Latin American countryside: the persistence of the large estate or latifundium (latifundio).

So long as export economies dominated, the large estate had not been a pressing problem for elites or the state. In some cases, preexisting latifundia were modernized and adapted to the needs of export commodity production, frequently on the basis of outright slavery or any number of coercive arrangements like debt peonage and sharecropping. In others, the weak state of the internal market allowed them to persist, seemingly unperturbed by either economic exigency or the legal norms of the state.

But with the decadence of the export model in the early twentieth century, the large estate did indeed become a problem; in some quarters, it became the pressing problem facing Latin American societies. As an indication of its scope, scores of tracts began to be published in the early decades of the twentieth century bearing names such as Mexico’s Rural Problem (1917), The Problem of Agricultural Production (Chile, 1919), Agrarian Questions (Argentina, 1921), and El latifundio (Venezuela, 1937). Tellingly, despite the national differences such texts reflect, all begin with the exact same premise: The colonial latifundium, instead of being abolished by independence, was strengthened, leading to any number of national ills.

These included, depending on the country, the nonproductive monopolization of land by an absentee landed class, the stunting of national markets, and, in many cases, the brutal oppression of peasants tethered to estates. And while authors would propose different solutions to this problem depending on their political leanings, they all agreed on the intractable nature of the large estate as the veritable cornerstone of the Latin American agrarian question.

The question of the large estate was also the cornerstone of the regionalist novel. Much like the Latin American countryside itself, the particularity mobilized by the Spanish American regionalist novel unfolded against a backdrop of a single institution: the large estate. Two of the three best-known examples of 1920s Spanish American regionalism, both studied in this chapter, have landowners as their protagonists: Gallegos’s Doña Bárbara and Ricardo Güiraldes’s Don Segundo Sombra. The protagonist of a third paradigmatic example of the genre, José Eustacio Rivera’s La vorágine (The Vortex, Colombia, 1924), is not a landowner, but an urban poet swept into the violent world of the Amazonian rubber trade.

As Northrop Frye has remarked, romance tends to be the favored genre of ruling classes, an observation that rings particularly true in Latin America.

The general tendency toward landed characters returns, however, in lesser-known regionalist novels such as Mariano Latorre’s Zurzulita (Chile, 1920) and Enrique Larreta’s Zogoibi (Argentina, 1926). Further, the plots of many regionalist novels hinge on the fate of the estate itself, along the lines of inheritance and marriage, modernization schemes, or the appearance of upstart peasants in the landowner’s midst. In this way, the so-called novel of the land is, fundamentally, a novel of and about the latifundio in a moment of transition. The reason is obvious enough: the Latin American novel, when traveling to the countryside in the early decades of the twentieth century, could not avoid the large estate or the landowner.

This focus on the large estate, in turn, helps explain why regionalism was dominant in Chile, Argentina, and Venezuela but not in Mexico, where mass peasant insurrection in 1910 gave way to a radically different kind of novel, the so-called “novel of the Mexican Revolution.” Nor was it dominant in the Andes, where indigenous rebellions ramped up throughout the 1920s and 1930s to produce twentieth-century indigenismo. Regionalism, and more specifically criollismo, tended to crop up in contexts where landowner rule had not been fundamentally challenged by the possibility of revolution. Even so, at the very least, the regionalist novel’s gravitation toward the large estate alerts us to a crisis of some sort, one that authors attempted to solve by narrative means.

But if the early twentieth-century regionalist novel was a novel of and about landowners and the latifundio, this is only a first step of analysis. Placing texts in an economic context allows us to see them in a new light, but it is not an end in itself. Rather, my aim in the following pages is to show how a set of novels by Gallegos and Güiraldes posed and answered agrarian questions in a manner that only the novel could, on the level of aesthetic form. As critics such as Antonio Candido have remarked, regionalism was at bottom an attempt to render Latin American reality in its dominant rural guise.

And indeed, the novels chosen for study in this chapter all take a concrete rural reality as a point of departure: concretely, the latifundio as a problem in need of a solution. What is most intriguing about the novels examined here, however, is that they can’t take the path of either naturalism (a literary mode in vogue at the time) or realism; instead, they can only solve their problems through flight into an older, fantasy-laden region of romance. As Northrop Frye has remarked, romance tends to be the favored genre of ruling classes, an observation that rings particularly true in Latin America. At the same time, though, because these twentieth-century novels take reality as a point of departure, they can’t function purely as romances either.

Taking a cue from Roberto Schwarz’s analyses of nineteenth-century Brazilian literature, I propose that the aesthetic disunity that characterizes these novels sheds light on a wider social dynamic, one that, as I explore below, stretches from the rural estate to the most abstract realms of the global market. For while novels by Güiraldes and Gallegos present us with rather naked class apologetics that confirm the goodness of landowners, their wildly contradictory textual dynamics attest to something far less obvious and self-assured: on the one hand, social contradictions that refuse to be banished and, on the other, the reactionary energies regularly called forth to contain any attempt at change.

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