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Nightmares of the Lettered City: Banditry and Literature in Latin America, 1816 – 1929

2008; Duke University Press; Volume: 88; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2007-122

1527-1900

Nicolas Shumway,

Gender, Health, and Social Inequality

In this sprawling and highly informative book, Juan Pablo Dabove contends that both historical and fictional narratives in Latin America often rest on a tension between builders and bandits, lawmen and outlaws, state violence and rebel violence — with a parallel debate about which is which. In his excellent introduction, Dabove describes how the bandit figure emerges in literature from the point of view of the “Lettered City,” a term he borrows from Angel Rama’s famous essay of the same name. Dabove makes clear that he wishes “to focus on the elite perspective of banditry,” meaning that his primary materials are literary texts, usually by recognized canonical writers (p. 38). Hence this study does not consider folktales or ballads (the Mexican corridos, for example), where, as Dabove points out, vivid bandit portraits also appear.Dabove’s introduction also provides an informed overview of the debate on the social meaning of banditry. At one pole is Eric Hobsbawm’s famous formulation that bandits were often pre-or proto-revolutionary figures who represented popular interests against the encroachments of the bourgeoisie and the liberal state. On the other extreme are arguments that theft of property, as defined by the rule of law, is always theft of property, and that violence outside the limits of the law is impermissible violence, no matter the context in which such crimes might occur. While Dabove skillfully describes these differing views of banditry, he clearly favors Hobsbawm and judges much of his material accordingly.Most impressive in this book is Dabove’s extensive reading of both primary and secondary sources. Indeed, we owe him a particular debt for calling attention to little-studied works like Manuel Payno’s Los bandidos del Río Frío, Eduardo Blanco’s Zárate, or Eduardo Gutiérrez’s Juan Moreira. Also interesting are his attempts to embed better-known works (Martín Fierro, El Zarco, and Los de abajo, for example) into a larger tradition of bandit narratives.Never far from his analyses, however, is his contention that people often labeled as bandits actually represented legitimate rural lower-class interests. For example, Dabove gives lengthy attention to El Chacho, Sarmiento’s biography of the provincial caudillo Angel Peñaloza, who was assassinated, perhaps with Sarmiento’s involvement, as he tried to continue Urquiza’s failed struggle against Porteño dominance. Not surprisingly, Dabove uncovers a powerful political and personal agenda in Sarmiento’s depiction of El Chacho as a bandit rather than a political force. An important question that Dabove never asks, however, is this: To what extent does Sarmiento (or for that matter many of the other writers Dabove discusses) actually speak for the Lettered City? Or more important still, to what extent does the Lettered City exist as a unified entity, a “hegemonic” force (to use a word for which Dabove shows particular fondness)? In the case of El Chacho, for example, “lettered” writers like José Hernández, Carlos Guido y Spano, and Olegario Andrade — all of them very much alive when El Chacho was assassinated — vehemently disagreed with Sarmiento’s depiction of Peñaloza’s life and the meaning of his assassination. Why are their views not also part of the Lettered City?More serious still, Dabove sometimes frames his discussion in an anachronistic rhetoric that faults nineteenth-century writers for not viewing their world in twentieth-century terms. For example, in his analysis of Ignacio Manuel Altamirano’s El Zarco, Dabove mentions that Altamirano’s Yautepec, a city besieged by banditry, has not become “a capitalist utopia” due to the “socioeconomic contradictions in Yautepec itself.” He further reproaches Altamirano because “There is no mention of an exploited rural proletariat, of the problematic effects of economic integration into the national system or the way large landowners were dispossessing the peasantry (which was indeed happening in the real Yautepec)” (p. 104). Without doubt, a novel devoted to the “exploited rural proletariat” might be a fine novel indeed. But it is not the novel Altamirano wrote, nor is it a novel that a Mexican writer in the 1880s might have written using either these concepts or this terminology. In addition, Dabove often frames his analyses within an increasingly tiresome set of oppositions that pits the “suppressed subaltern” against the “hegemonic, oligarchic, capitalist, masculinist, heterosexual” Lettered City. Admittedly, such dichotomies possess some abstract value, but as used here they often distort rather than enhance.In conclusion, Dabove has done admirable work in identifying a large number of bandit narratives and seeking the common threads that unite them in a literary sub-genre. Moreover, his material and analyses open the door to a fascinating debate on the significance of such narratives as they relate to larger social and historical contexts. While one might wish for a more nuanced theoretical discussion, we nonetheless owe Dabove a considerable debt for bringing to our attention a vast corpus of often neglected material.