Gilbert M. Joseph

Close Encounters

Toward a New Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations

It is a commonplace that Latin American history has been powerfully influenced by foreigners and foreign powers—not least by North Americans and the United States. Not for nothing do Mexicans refer to their neighbor as the "Northern Colossus" and visit the government's "National Museum of Interventions" (which showcases invasions of the patria by European powers as well as the United States). Nor is it surprising that throughout the hemisphere Latin Americans joke sardonically that "When the United States sneezes [undergoes a recession], we get pneumonia [experience full-blown depression]." Or, that the images Cubans, Chileans, and Central Americans nurture of North American wealth and corporate power or CIA plots are invariably dark and larger than life—images codified by some of the hemisphere's most influential writers: José Martí, José Enrique Rodó, Pablo Neruda, Miguel Angel Asturias, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel García Márquez, to name but a few.

Of course, there are also more benign legacies, heroes, and mythologies. Fidel Castro quoted Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson long before he invoked Lenin, and for a time played baseball as passionately as politics. Mexican journalists report the strong influence of the U.S. New Left on the Zapatista leader of Chiapas, Subcomandante Marcos. No world leader has enjoyed as enduring and popular a cult in Latin America as John F. Kennedy. The intimidating Northern Colossus is also "El Norte"—"el otro lado" (the other side)—a sanctuary for Latino immigrants and refugees; a source of insurgent support (e.g., Cuba in the 1890s, 1950s, and since 1959; and Mexico in the 1910s); and a mecca for tourists and consumers. In short, the U.S. (and broader foreign) presence is varied and complex, and it has cast a long shadow.

In seeking to understand the influence that North Americans and other foreigners have had on the region in the post- (or, as some prefer, neo-) colonial period, Latin Americanists first studied foreign investment and commercial affairs, diplomacy, and military interventions—and relied disproportionately on U.S. sources. Not surprisingly, their analyses reflected prevailing notions regarding the determining influence of climate, the struggle between "civilization and barbarism," the "challenge" posed by "modernization," the specter of "communist subversion," the deforming legacy of imperialism, and so forth. In the 1960s and 1970s, "Dependency theory" held center stage among progressive intelligentsias north and south of the Rio Grande: the structural subordination of Latin America as a periphery within the capitalist world system was held responsible for the "development of underdevelopment," understood primarily in economic terms. Like its neoclassical predecessor, "modernization/diffusionist theory," the predominantly neo-Marxian dependency school emphasized the power and influence of the "developed" world in shaping Latin America, but—as we shall see presently—the two paradigms were diametrically opposed in their interpretation of whether the results were positive or negative.

The Postmodern Challenge

Today, with theories of imperialism and dependency under attack and the once-discredited diffusionist model recycled (yet again) in "neoliberal" form by the managers of the "New World Order," Latin Americanists across a variety of disciplines and a new generation of historians of U.S. foreign relations (once known as "diplomatic historians") are challenged to study the region's engagement with the United States in innovative ways. New poststructural concerns with the intersection of culture and power, with historical agency, and with the social construction of political life are producing new questions about the nature and outcomes of foreign-local encounters. Turning away from dichotomous political-economic models that see only domination and resistance, exploiters and victims, Latin Americanists (like their counterparts in African, Asian, and European studies) are suggesting alternate ways of conceptualizing the role that U.S. and other foreign actors and agencies have played in the region during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the same time, they are integrating gendered, ethnic, and linguistic analysis in their research designs; challenging the conventional separation of "public" and "private" spheres (and thereby expanding notions of the political); unsettling such seemingly fixed categories as "the state," "the nation," "development," "modernity," and "nature"; and in the process rethinking the canon of such traditional genres as diplomatic, business, and military history, and international relations theory.

This volume represents the first systematic attempt to take stock of this exciting watershed and, in the process, to theorize a new interpretive framework for studying the United States' formidable presence in Latin America. Contributors explore a series of power-laden "encounters"—typically, close encounters—through which foreign people, ideas, commodities, and institutions have been received, contested, and appropriated in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America. We should be clear at the outset: our use of the term encounter in conceptualizing the range of networks, exchanges, borrowings, behaviors, discourses, and meanings whereby the external became internalized in Latin America should not be construed as a euphemizing device, to defang historical analysis of imperialism. Sadly, in much of the literature on the 1992 Columbian quincentenary, the term performed just this sanitizing function. Equally, it is not our intention to reify "Imperialism," validating Leninist identifications of it as the "highest stage of capitalism," or imposing other teleological conditions for its study.

Rather, we are concerned in this volume with the deployment and contestation of power, with scrutinizing what Mary Louise Pratt refers to as the "contact zones" of the American empire. As these essays vividly demonstrate, U.S. power has been brought to bear unevenly in the region by diverse agents, in a variety of sites and conjunctures, and through diverse transnational arrangements. Forms of power have thus been multiple and complex: simultaneously arranged through nation-states and more informal regional relationships; via business and communications networks and culture industries; through scientific foundations and philanthropic agencies; via imported technologies; and through constructions of nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Contact zones are not geographic places with stable significations; they may represent attempts at hegemony, but are simultaneously sites of multivocality; of negotiation, borrowing, and exchange; and of redeployment and reversal.

We feel no obligation to rehearse the attenuated debate over whether or not the United States has been an imperial power—a debate that continues to preoccupy U.S. diplomatic...