Latin American Literature at the Rise of Environmentalism: Urban Ecological Thinking in José María Arguedas's The Foxes
2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.50.1.0064
ISSN1528-4212
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American and Latino Studies
ResumoEcocritical approaches in Latin Americanist literary and cultural studies (carried out in Latin America, the United States, or Europe) owe considerably to the dissemination of environmental literatures in English and to the ecocritical approaches developed in academia for studying these literatures. The drift of ecocritical approaches from English departments to foreign literature and comparative literature departments is driven by the relevance of environmental concerns, the will to address them across the curriculum, and the fact that comparison helps us recognize differences and commonalities. This development in academia parallels the dissemination of environmental discourses across borders occurring in the environmental movements themselves. Let's take, for instance, a discourse that has been evolving in Latin America since the early 2000s and has been actively used by social movements: buen vivir.1 “Buen vivir” or “vivir bien,” is a Spanish phrase that refers to indigenous-based alternatives to the negative impacts of economic development. The discourses of buen vivir focus on the good life in a broad sense, that is to say, the classical ideas of quality of life, but with the specific idea that well-being is only possible within a community. In most approaches, the concept of “community” is understood in an expanded sense that includes nature. Buen vivir, therefore, embraces the broad notion of well-being and cohabitation with others and nature. Buen vivir relies on values associated with indigenous traditions, and in this sense the concept explores possibilities beyond the modern Eurocentric tradition. On the other hand, it includes critical reactions to classical Western development theory that echo certain indigenous perspectives, for instance, radical environmental postures, particularly deep ecology and other biocentric approaches that reject the anthropocentric perspective of modernity and recognize intrinsic values in the environment. Another example would be the coincidence with feminist perspectives that link gender roles with societal hierarchies and the domination over nature. In spite of its historical emphasis on the local, environmentalism is a transnational phenomenon, politically and culturally, following and responding to processes of globalization and increasingly focusing on planetary issues.2Today, in the global North, ecocriticism is demanding from its practitioners an understanding of developments beyond their borders, as well as a cross-cultural sensitivity, ethics, and politics. In the global South, and certainly in Latin America, I argue, it is precisely the responsibility of literary and cultural studies to be at the frontline of this kind of research. Among the pending tasks in Hispanic studies are the study of canonical authors and texts from ecological perspectives and the expansion of that canon. On the other hand, environmental or ecological readings of Latin American literatures and cultures will benefit from a comparison with other literatures from the global South, and vice versa, since they have similar environmental problems, struggles, and histories. The current pattern in Hispanic studies of not engaging enough with the reflection on the relationship between society and nature and the human and the nonhuman in the history of Latin American literature and the arts projects the false image to our students, South and North, that these topics have been totally secondary in this tradition and that literature and the arts have nothing to say regarding current environmental issues and conflicts in the region.This article contributes to the achievement of these goals with a reading of El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (1971) (The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below [2000]) by Peruvian writer José María Arguedas (1911–1969). Los zorros (The Foxes), Arguedas's last, posthumous, and allegedly unfinished novel, explores major transformations in Peruvian Andean culture under the stress of migration in the 1960s. The novel also records Arguedas's own existential crisis that led him to commit suicide. Arguedas was one of the most influential Latin American writers of the twentieth century. Since his death, he has become an emblematic figure in theories of Latin American cultural identity based on the idea of transculturation, mestizaje, or hybridity. Arguedas's appeal owes to his forceful understanding of Peruvian cultural identity as the product of the conflicting but creative encounter of Andean, oral, traditional, and rural cultures, on the one hand, with Western, Christian, written, modern, urban and cosmopolitan cultures, on the other. For more than thirty years, Arguedas constantly rethought his profound critique of economic and cultural modernization and practiced through his literature a convinced self-conscious alternative adaptation to modernization rooted in Andean traditions. His importance can be measured too by the attention he receives from his rivals, for instance, from Nobel Laureate novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, also a Peruvian. In La utopía arcaica: José María Arguedas y las ficciones del indigenismo (2004), Vargas Llosa, despite his admiration for Arguedas, elaborates again on an argument he has made in several occasions throughout his own career: Arguedas and the history of Peruvian indigenismo fell into the trap of yearning for a nostalgic “return” to idealized premodern conditions.In this article, I argue that there is in Los zorros an emerging ecological thinking that surges ironically from the limitations of ecologies that are portrayed in the book as “Andean” or “provincial” (in the sense of “small town” and “unsophisticated”) ecologies that are overwhelmed by a major environmental crisis in the city of Chimbote, on the Peruvian coast. A massive number of people from the Andean highlands had poured into Chimbote, a former fishing town, lured by the expectation of job opportunities in the largest steel mill in the country but especially in the fish meal industry that had made of Chimbote the largest fishing port of the world. What has been omitted so far in interpretations of Arguedas's last novel is his attention to the ecological crisis brought about in Chimbote by resource-destructive economic and technological processes and to how this ecological disruption is coextensive with damage to the social fabric and psychological life of the immigrants. Intercalated in between the chapters, in sections entitled “Diarios” (“Diaries”), Los zorros also tells the story of the psychological breakdown of the subject that introduces himself as the author of the novel and that identifies himself as José María Arguedas, although the accuracy of these autobiographical sections has been much debated.3 “Arguedas's” reflections in the diary sections are mostly devoted to his own struggle to understand and accept the transformations in Chimbote (which may presage what lies ahead for Peruvian society) and to find the strength to write down this town's story in an appropriate fashion. As the story manages to be told, “Arguedas” becomes aware of the challenges Chimbote poses to his overall vision of the role of Andean culture in an alternative version of a modern and more democratic Peruvian society. Furthermore, Chimbote likewise challenges his past poetics of literary creation based on a sense of belonging to the universe. In order to narrate Chimbote, “Arguedas” will have to find a way of reworking his lost connection with all things.Los zorros is set in Chimbote, a boomtown on the Peruvian coast that within a decade had gone from being a sleepy fishing village to an industrializing yet poor city. Chimbote is overcrowded with Andean immigrants working in steel mills, in the numerous fleets of commercial fishing boats extracting anchoveta (a fish of the anchovy family), or in the busy factories where this catch is processed into fish meal for exportation (fish meal is ground dried fish used as a fertilizer and as feed for domestic livestock; from the late 1940s on, it was in great demand worldwide). The narrative focuses on the evidence of a devastating environmental crisis whose effects are part of the already traumatic experience of the Andean immigrants in Chimbote: La fetidez del mar desplazaba el olor denso del humo de las calderas en que millones de anchovetas se desarticulaban, se fundían, exhalaban ese olor como alimenticio, mientras hervían y sudaban aceite. El olor de los desperdicios, de la sangre, de las pequeñas entrañas pisoteadas en las bolicheras y lanzadas sobre el mar a manguerazos, y el olor del agua que borbotaba de las fábricas a las playas hacía brotar de la arena gusanos gelatinosos; esa fetidez avanzaba a ras del suelo y elevándose. (40)(The stench of the sea displaced the reek of the smoke from the boiler in which millions of anchovies were coming apart, melting, exhaling that rather foodlike odor as they were boiling and sweating oil. The dense odor of the waste matter, of blood, of the tiny entrails trampled in the trawlers and hosed out over the sea, and the smell of the water that gushed out of the factories on to the beach made jellylike worms rise up out of the sand; that stench kept drifting along at a ground level and rising. [43])4One can gather from similar descriptions throughout the novel a story of environmental degradation that is never addressed as such either by the narrative voice or by any of its characters. For starters, the novel makes reference to the fact that the number of anchoveta on the Peruvian coastline had been declining due to years of overfishing; in the novel, the anchoveta are disappearing from Chimbote's bay, and the fishing boats need to search for them in the open sea. Furthermore, this violent industrial extraction and processing of natural resources is leading to other species' extinction. Closer to the immigrants' daily life, the Chimbote bay, the surrounding desert, and the city's air and streets are being virulently polluted by the fish meal industry's waste. To make things worse, potable water, sewage, and trash collection is not provided by the town. And, finally, the apparently disorganized urbanization of the land surrounding the city by the immigrants is destroying the few wetlands in the area. One thing is clear though in the narrative: the violence against nonhuman actors partakes of the exploitation perpetrated against poor, gendered, and racialized human subjects. In every aspect, the fish meal industry is an unregulated activity, defiant of national and local authorities, encouraged by its weight in the gross national product. In the novel, the entry point for a social exploration of the industry's political economy is its labor practices. Attracted by the news of good jobs and free land for building their own houses that was spread north and south by a “mafia” working for the industrialists, indigenous peoples, mestizos, blacks, mulattos, descendants of Chinese immigrants, poor Spaniards, and Italians all arrived into Chimbote from every Andean town, from other coastal cities, and even from the Amazon in eastern Peru. And they keep on coming even after the labor market in Chimbote has substantially shrunk. The excessive supply of workers guarantees low wages for everybody, undermines job stability, and keeps the unions under the control of the industry. Moreover, this unstoppable migration exacerbates conflicts between the newly arrived and previous waves of immigrants and between members of different races and ethnicities.We can approach retrospectively the ecological crisis depicted in Los zorros by drawing on current thinking about urban sustainability. Chimbote's ecosystems (sea and desert) and ecotones (coastline and marshes) were made party to, one way or another, the consumption and investment choices of industries in distant, richer cities in the first world. Chimbote itself had all the common environmental problems affecting poor and industrializing cities: poor air quality, industrial pollution of water, no system for managing solid and hazardous wastes, no sewage treatment, lack of efficient public health and sanitation policies, deficient urban transport, insufficient housing for recent migrants, no protection from criminals, and so forth.5 In spite of the fact that Chimbote was the site of a significant source of wealth, there was no planning or capital to develop a very much needed and expected urban infrastructure. Despite the fact that income had grown in this export-oriented economy, the financing of public works depended on resources controlled mostly by an indifferent national government.In addition to providing an exposé of the environmental degradation taking place in Chimbote, the novels also pays attention to the actions and attitudes through which the immigrant characters experience and interpret in Chimbote their sense of embeddedness in nature. In the midst of a most violent depletion of natural resources, a maze of corruption and mistrust, and an apparent resignation to air and land pollution, a few Andean migrants often resort to performing traditional songs and narratives. Through these performances, the immigrants are not only reaffirming their identity on the streets of Chimbote and its shantytowns but are also trying to cope with the indefatigable boats, the polluting factories, and the much frequented brothels spreading on the dunes surrounding Chimbote. Most of the time, these performances evoke the wildlife and pristine environments of the high-altitude cordilleras: Antolín pulsaba cada alambre y cada entorchada, las hacía llorar una por una. Después tocó la introducción al huayno, acordes y melodías improvisadas que describían para Florinda y el cholo cabrón, las montañas y las cascadas chicas de agua, y las arañas que se cuelgan desde las matas de espino a los remansos de los ríos grandes. (74)(Antolín plucked each plain and each wire-wound string; one by one he made them sob. Then he played the introduction to the huayno, improvising melodies and chords that described for Florinda and the cholo pimp the warm Andean foothills and the little waterfalls, the spiders that hang down from thorny bushes toward the pools on the big rivers. [78]) In addition to the idealization of wilderness, pastoral nostalgia also plays an important role among the immigrants. Of course, in this novel the pastoral is not an idealization of rural life by an urban, middle-class, white, or Western subject but a crucial site of trauma and memory for the rural Andean immigrant. Far from naïve idealizing rural life by hiding the hardships of it, the immigrants recall too the unfair political ecology in the Andes that has driven them out of the mountains into the coastal cities, away from the oppressive medieval conditions on the haciendas in the countryside. This lack of economic and political opportunities has landed the Andean immigrants on deserts of which they have very little environmental knowledge.In Los zorros, the immigrant subjects have become aware of the need to understand their individual and collective identity in relation to a diversity of places and place experiences, not merely in relation to the place of origin or of current dwelling. Any form of place attachment known to the immigrants is challenged in Chimbote because of the uniqueness of its environmental crisis and social tensions, as well as because behind every immigrant there is often a story of successive migrations throughout Peru. The story of Don Esteban de la Cruz, one of the main characters, is a micronarrative of these displacements. After his father was killed in a family dispute, Esteban's stepmother left the countryside town of Parobamba for the city, taking with her Esteban's half brother. She put Esteban on the road and sent him to a relative's farm. Esteban was just eight or ten years old at that time. A couple of years later, Esteban and one of his cousins escaped from the farm and migrated to the foothills of the Andes, where the tropical forest starts. There, they worked in a coca plantation under such extreme conditions that they end up running away once more. After working on a highway for a year, they both migrated to Lima, Peru's capital, where Esteban survived working in all sorts of odd jobs but was unable to secure a place to live. One way or another, after living in other cities, Esteban found himself back near Parobamba working long days in the coal mine of Cocalón, from which he was eventually fired for fighting with another miner. From there, he moved to Chimbote, where he and his wife at last built a house, in a reed bed in a water-logged depression infested with mosquitos. Now a middle-aged man, battling the lung disease that he contracted in the mine, Esteban is angry about all the exploitation he suffered and witnessed throughout his life and about the effects that migration has on the immigrants' identity and sense of dignity. The Andean peasants cannot make a living working their small farms, nor can they accept the working conditions in the haciendas. Rootless in the cities, they longed for their hometowns and their youth: En so tripa de serrano, en su vena sangre del serrano que ha probao ya Trojillo, Lima, Chimbote, en su pecho adentro, más toavía, silencio, cementerio no más hay cuando le hacen quedar en so tierra pueblos. Cuando baja a la costa ya también, recuerda so crianza, cerros, fiestas con borracherita, pito y caja, violín; llora silencio, ratito namás en el trabajo homilde, dispreciao ¡caracho! (150)(In their highlander gut, in the blood vein of the highlander who has already tried Trojillo, Lima, Chimbote—inside his bosom there's even more silence; graveyard's all there is when they make him stay in towns up in his home country. When he goes down to the coast, now, too, he remembers his upbringin'—his mountains, festivals with little drunken spree, whistle and drums, violin; he cries quiet, goddamnit, just for a while in lowly job, treated with contempt. [157–58]) There is no room in Chimbote for the kind of sense of place that, according to Ursula Heise in her Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, has developed in American environmentalism. The immigrant in Chimbote is not compelled by an ethic of proximity, allegedly the basic prerequisite for an environmental awareness and activism. In Chimbote, the immigrants have no history of merging their bodies with the natural environment other than through their part in the exploitation of anchoveta, the polluted air they breathe daily, and their dead relatives populating the halfway built cemeteries.Undoubtedly, the knowledge and values supporting the narrative's eye for recognizing pollution, degradation, and environmental injustice in Chimbote derives from Arguedas's understanding of Andean cultures. The ecological values portrayed as “Andean” in the novel indeed feed some resistance among a few characters, but overall fall they short of developing alternatives to effectively manage the environmental impact of the fish meal industry and the uneven development that it produces. They fall short too of even inspiring better environmental practices among the immigrants themselves. In fact, the majority of the immigrants working for the fish meal industry, despite their cultural background, actively and willingly participate in the environmental degradation that they themselves call a “rape” of nature. “Ese, qu'está a tu lado, va'olvidar aquí el ojete, porque la mar es la más grande concha chupadora de mundo. La concha exige pincho, ¿no es cierto, Mudo?” (26) (“Out here that guy next to ya is gonna forget all about assholes, because the ocean is the greatest suckin' cunt in the world. The cunt demands a cock, right Mudo?” [27]). Male immigrants above all commit to the challenges that the Western and modern industry dare them to take on. They have become accomplices to a sexist “conquest of nature” that is driven not only by the immigrants' need to survive but by their desire to “conquer” a taunting Western industrial modernization. Industrial labor makes men, brag the former peasants now transformed into fishermen or factory workers. Even resisting capitalist exploitation is a manly affair. Both of these, meeting the challenges of development or resisting transnational capitalism, foster nationalism.6 And so, the immigrant men succumb to the lure of the city and its excesses. The brothels at the border between the city and the desert, where the story often takes place, are a microcosmos of Chimbote and of Peru.The immigrants are not interested in or else are unable to reproduce or adapt traditional social relations for community building in Chimbote or to develop a non-modern, non-Western, or more than modern or more than Western, relationship with the landscape. Owing to ethnic and class conflicts among immigrants, widespread corruption among politicians and unions; the high expectation that economic modernization would offer the immigrants social mobility, and ideological uncertainty within the Marxist Left, “Andean” ecologies retreat to the background, almost as an environmental unconscious. As defined by literary critic Lawrence Buell, the concept of an environmental unconscious refers “to the necessarily partial realization of one's embeddedness in environment as a condition of personal and social being” and “implies both the potentiality for a fuller coming-to-consciousness and a limit to that potentiality.”7 This predicament of Arguedas's “Andean” ecologies extends to the scholarship on Arguedas. The limitations of an “Andean” ecology in Los zorros should compel those readers who celebrate a non-Western ecological thinking for its resistance to colonialism in Arguedas's Los ríos profundos (1958) (Deep Rivers [1978]), his most popular novel, to question it. Indeed, in that novel Arguedas on the one hand links the exploitation of indigenous peoples by a class of Catholic landowners to the cruelty against nature perpetrated by those landowners.8 On the other hand, Arguedas links indigenous political strength and harmony with nature to the independent communities of the Andean highlands, the same landscapes evoked by the immigrants in Chimbote. The predicament of Arguedas's “Andean” ecologies is such that although the best critics of his work at the time were discovering and embracing environmentalism, they did not acknowledge Arguedas as the source of their interest in ecology. One of the most important scholars on Arguedas and on Latin American cultural studies in the second half of the twentieth century, the Uruguayan critic Angel Rama, missed the opportunity to introduce Arguedas's work as an incursion into the same ecological terrain that was catching his own attention, as recorded in his personal diary, while he was writing his two influential books Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (1982), devoted to Arguedas, and La ciudad letrada (1984) (The Lettered City [1996]). On 10 September 1980, Rama wrote in his diary that este amor por la naturaleza (por los árboles sobre todo) que he conquistado despaciosamente en USA, me ha llevado a la ecología. Estoy haciendo mías las demandas de tanta gente común que quiere un ámbito afín, que procura preservar nuestra “naturaleza” en un universo cada vez más contrario y cruel a las apetencias de la vida. En el seminario de integración, alguien se burló de esta búsqueda de “jardincitos amenos” para ricos. Es cierto que fueron los relativamente ricos de los países desarrollados quienes hicieron la protesta, pero aquello no disminuye nada de su legitimidad. Vivir en el jardín donde nacimos, retornar a nuestro paraíso terrenal. ¿Por qué no?9(This love for nature (above all for trees) that I have slowly conquered in the USA has led me to ecology. I am making my own the demands of common people who want an environment they can relate to, who try to preserve our “nature” in a universe increasingly harmful and cruel to life's yearnings. In the conference on [economic] integration, somebody made fun of this search for “pleasant little gardens” for the rich. It is true that it was the relatively rich in the developed countries who protested, but that doesn't diminish at all its legitimacy. To live in the garden where we were born, to return to our earthly paradise. Why not?) Behind this missed opportunity is, without a doubt, the difficulty that Marxism in Latin America had in articulating, until recently, an environmentalist or ecological thinking. And this difficulty is portrayed within the novel itself.The emerging ecological thinking in Los zorros, consistent with the way Arguedas represents Chimbote's unpredictable complexity, posits a set of questions and problems that cannot be addressed satisfactorily just by resorting to the accepted discourses at that time. What are the progressive forces in Chimbote preoccupied with? There is a political polarization among the unions that doesn't immunize them from the corruption financed by the fish meal factories. And the characters that play the role of intellectual figures are absorbed in ideological polarizations that keep them cut off from each other. For instance, the radical American Catholic priests that embrace liberation theology are promoting the anticolonialism of dependency theory while they themselves are suspected of being agents of foreign imperialism (as are the evangelical churches in town). In one occasion, a young Peruvian teacher, firmed believer in development economics as a mean of social progress is invited to dinner by the liberation theology priests. Along the meal, he gets lectured by the prominent Padre Michael Cardozo on the importance of dependency theory for breaking up the cycle of underdevelopment. For Cardozo and the other priests, the city of Cuzco, the former capital of the Inca Empire and supposedly the soul of Andean culture, is the source of wisdom for breaking that dependency and for understanding humanity in general. As they are saying their goodbyes, the young man and an older priest watch from the front door of the house a column of smoke towering above the steel mill and casting a shadow over the eucalyptus forest planted by the corporation running the mill. The Peruvian teacher, trying to impress the priest, tells him: —Vea, padre Federico, dijo con esa misma seriedad algo menos equívoca y obligada que le había atormentado durante la comida con los religiosos norteamericanos. —Padre Federico: la Fundición es la esperanza, ¿no? Ese humo de color rosado que no le hace caso a la oscuridad. (200)(“Look, Father Federico,” he said, with the same earnestness (although now less equivocal and forced) that had tormented him during the meal with the American clergymen. “Father Federico, the Steel Mill is hopeful, isn't it? That pink smoke that takes no notice of the darkness.” [212]) Father Federico responds with a caustic remark: “Vaya al Cuzco, así; en ese ánimo” (201) (“Go to Cuzco like that, in that state of mind” [212]).Los zorros calls for an urban environmentalism bound to but not bounded by Andean ideas on the interdependence of humans and nature. It is not a lack of environmental awareness that is undermining the response to the unsustainability of human and nonhuman life in Chimbote but rather a lack of social innovation necessary to developing alternatives to the indifference of capital, organized labor, and the national government. Would the immigrant residents, divided by ethnicities, class, and ideologies, be able to substitute community-organized labor for capital and supply some social and public services? In spite of their displacement, could these immigrant communities develop a bioregional approach that would take into account the fact the ecosystem services needed by Chimbote would be supported by a larger geographic region? Would an effective governance of the environmental challenges emerge from these specific historical circumstances? Despite these divisions and displacements, could the immigrants dig deeper into Andean traditions looking for such alternatives and for models on how to negotiate among themselves?The narrative depicts new forms of political organization that are emerging in the shantytowns surrounding Chimbote, where the poorest indigenous immigrants live, asociaciones de barriadas (shantytown associations), whose purpose is to improve the infrastructure of the shantytowns independently from unions, political parties, and factories. The novel follows one president of the barriada in particular, Bazalar the pork farmer, otherwise known as the “pig man.” On one occasion, the city hall, the police, and the parish priests order the shantytown dwellers to move their cemetery to some low-lying flatland north of the city center and the shantytowns, which is near the port of Chimbote's garbage dump. In the new location, however, the poor would be buried free of charge, at no cost to the parish, or the municipality. Nobody told the shantytown dwellers to transport their dead, who were already buried in the “old” cemetery, to the new cemetery. Nevertheless, they do so in an organized and disciplined fashion. Bazalar reaches out to the unions for support, but his contact expresses indifference toward and even contempt for the indigenous immigrants living in the dunes: Yo le'hablado y le'comunicado que Sendicato debería ser más atento asunto barriadas y le he contado me eneciativa traslado cruces e sus consecuencias. —Bien, compañero-me ha contestado. —Hay que revolver descontento pueblo barriadas que parece aplastado resignación miseria. Hay que revolver, compañero, hasta el concho, con cualquier circunstancia, el resignación negativo. Las barriadas hasta mi dan asco. (206)(I talked to him and communicated that Union, ought to pay more attention to shantytowns' business, and I told him about my initiative in movin' crosses and its consequences. “Well done, compañero,” he answer
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