The image of an attractive young woman (Fig. 1.1) appears on the cover of a recently published book about El Salvador. The book provides a nonfictional survey of the people, culture, and history of El Salvador for English-speaking readers. Its intended readership is university students or the general public looking for an overview. We think the book is quite good. The author expresses strong regard for the people of El Salvador, and the content of the book demonstrates his extensive knowledge of the country and its customs. We can only assume that the image chosen for the cover is meant...

With that broad description of cultural theory behind us, we will now turn to a more detailed and diagrammatic comparison of essentialism and semiotics. We take as our starting point the turn of the twentieth century, when empiricism achieved its greatest influence on the humanities. This is the era when architecture and art took an industrial turn, as seen in French art nouveau and art deco; when ethnographic studies merged science with humanistic anthropology; and, perhaps most notably, when the naturalistic movement in literature asserted that novels are akin to laboratories in which authors, like scientists, conduct experiments on their...

We are now ready to close this introductory section with a discussion ofnarrative, a critical aspect of semiotic readings.

A narrative is a story, the sort of tale we tell one another about our world and ourselves. Most narratologists, those who study narrative, would agree with this short and simple definition. That consensus, however, evaporates as soon as the discussion moves to more substantive issues, such as origin, structure, and meaning. Some define narrative strictly as novels, short stories, or other specific literary forms. Others take a broader approach and accept most forms of communication, from the most sophisticated...

To open our theory section, imagine taking a trip to Latin America. Our guide is Harry Foster, a North American, and our destination is El Salvador in the early 1920s. Our guidebook is FosterʹsA Gringo in Mañana-land, a description of his travels that he published in 1924. It may seem strange to begin this theory section with a primary text, but we have chosen to do so for two reasons. First, we aim to encourage readers to recognize all texts as discourses. Second, we seek to provide a case study of identity essentialism that will prepare them for the...

Before launching into our five identity categories of race, class, gender, nation, and Latin America, we shall turn our attention to a brief excerpt from Stuart Hall, one of the worldsʹ foremost theorists on identity.

Destabilizing identity structures, a primary objective of cultural theory, can be an alienating experience. What once seemed unwavering and true suddenly becomes tenuous and shifting. Hermeneuticians and modernists, who reject postmodernism, are quick to accuse cultural theorists of eradicating identities so much that we are left adrift on a sea of constructs. In short, they accuse postmodernism of being entirely impractical. One of Stuart Hallʹs...

In the early 1990s, Cornell West, a U.S. academician, wroteRace Matters, the title of which is a play on the wordmatteras both noun and verb.¹ West rejects racism and even the existence of race, so to him race does not matter. But he recognizes that ideas about race have affected and continue to affect, if not to dominate, life in the United States, so he believes in the need to study racial matters. He challenges those people who believe the United States has rectified its long history of racial injustice; West informs them that, unfortunately, race does...

As a concept,classis at once easy and difficult to comprehend, especially for Americans who tend to be ignorant of economic differentiation. For example, polls show that in 1940 fully 80 percent of Americans identified themselves as middle class, even though data revealed Americaʹs economic stratum to have been much more complex. While class would appear to be an objective condition based on oneʹs wealth, semioticians view it as a construct no different from race, gender, nationality. It is an identity, the meaning of which varies in accordance with the particular discourses that went into its making at any...

ʺI getrace, I can doclass,nationis fine, but please donʹt takegenderaway from me!ʺ This exclamation rang out as we entered our classroom one March afternoon. Indeed, gender may be one of the most challenging of all identity categories. We have found that while most students are willing to accept that race, class, and nation are discursively constructed, they resist the idea that gender, too, is a construct. Students are attached to their gender, more than to any other category, as crucial in defining their identity. Why does gender create such strong reactions and why is...

Whereas race, gender, and class offer essentialists something tangible when defining essence (skin color, sex organs, and economic standing), national identities are not quite so accommodating. The nation seems at once to be all around us, yet something we can not quite touch or see. Is it the government, the army, a legal code, patrimonial documents, art, language, or something else entirely? Where exactly does the nation reside? Despite the apparent challenge of answering these questions, the belief in national essence by nationalists and their celebration of it have defined human existence over the last two hundred years. With alarming...

This chapter is one of the most important parts of this introductory section on theory. It broadly describes the debates over what it means to be Latin American and offers a specific example of the difference between essentialistic and semiotic interpretations of identity. It includes excerpts from Gerald Martin, Leslie Bary, and Walter Mignolo, who describe themselves as scholars of cultural studies, though one is obviously a modernist and the other two are cultural theorists. Martin interprets Latin America from a more essentialist foundation and appeals to literary genres that he believes reveal its true identity. Bary adopts a more...

The excerpt in this chapter is by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, who exemplifies the lettered citizen in Latin America. Sarmiento served as president of Argentina in the mid-nineteenth century and was one of Latin Americaʹs most important writers. His renowned work,Facundo: civilización y barbarie(Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism), motivated generations of politicians and remains influential today. In fact, so canonical isFacundothat Sarmiento has achieved that rare status of transcending nationality and becoming a de facto citizen of all Latin America.

Born in 1811 in San Juan, Argentina, Sarmiento grew up on the frontier between Argentina and Chile. Largely...

Rómulo Gallegos has much in common with Domingo Sarmiento. Both were men of letters who became presidents of their respective countries, and both left an intellectual legacy of continental proportions. The literary works for which they are most famous,Facundoby Sarmiento andDoña Bárbaraby Gallegos, had similar objectives of defining and celebrating their nationʹs essence. But the vision of the nation which Gallegos promoted shifted notably from that of Sarmientoʹs generation of nineteenth-century liberals. Whereas Sarmiento called for the destruction of barbarism, leaving only a nostalgic reminder, Gallegos sought a fusion between societyʹs so-called barbarian and civilized elements....

When World War II was looming in Europe and Asia, the United States, under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, introduced a plan it called its Good Neighbor policy. It was an attempt to secure Latin American allegiances and hemispheric unity as a protection against foreign invasion, as well as to boost export revenue in the economically depressed years following the stock market crash of 1929. In this climate, film was thought to play an important role in shaping popular belief. Between 1941 and 1943, Walt Disney and his staff were contracted by Nelson Rockefeller, director of the Office of Inter-American Affairs,...

Whether through the publication of Karl Marxʹs writings in the nineteenth century, the victory of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the formation of Communist parties throughout the Western Hemisphere in the 1920s and 1930s, or the onset of the cold war in the late 1940s, Communism has deeply impacted the history of Latin America and the rest of the world. But arguably it was not until the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 that Communism began to define day-to-day life in Latin America. When Fidel Castro and his ragtag guerrilla army descended from the mountains of eastern Cuba and...

ʺLa culpa es de los Tlaxcaltecasʺ (ʺItʹs the Fault of the Tlaxcaltecasʺ), by the Mexican author Elena Garro, is a short story written in the magical realist style. Garro wrote the story in the early 1960s, just as magical realism was beginning to be consolidated into a genre of international proportions. Even though Garroʹs work was not accepted as a leading voice in this movement, her style was on the cutting edge of it. ʺItʹs the Fault of the Tlaxcaltecasʺ is no exception.

Born in Mexico in 1920, Elena Garro traveled far beyond her nationʹs borders. She lived in many...

Como agua para chocolate, a novel by Laura Esquivel, is a story of forbidden love. In 1991 it was made into a movie by Alfonso Arau, her husband at the time, a year after its publication. Esquivel also wrote the screenplay. The story revolves around a romance involving Tita and Pedro, the main characters. Their love affair simmers constantly throughout the story, but especially in the magical way in which Tita infuses her emotions into the food she prepares for Pedro. In consuming her meals, Pedro ingests Titaʹs passion for him as they bide their time waiting for the day...

Gregory Nava, a politically and socially committed Mexican- American filmmaker, made a name for himself in 1985 withEl Norte, a film about an indigenous Mayan brother and sister who fear political persecution and economic hardship in Guatemala and flee that country to seek safety and opportunity in the United States. They find neither. Nava cowrote the film with his wife, Anna Thomas, and it was nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay. Nava would go on to direct and write several other prominent and popular productions centered on Mexican-American themes, includingMi familia(1995), the focus of...

The final reading in this collection is an example of testimonial literature, a genre that flourished internationally in the late twentieth century and originated largely in Latin America. Testimonials reflect the growing attempt throughout the twentieth century to seek out the voices and perspectives of people who have historically been disenfranchised. The testimonial genre emerged from the civil conflicts in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s and represented the political act of denouncing injustices against members of marginalized groups. These personal stories are told in plain language by people who are indigenous, poor, and/or female to an ethnographer, reporter,...

Education is often, and paradoxically, alienating. In learning more, we often encounter ideas that challenge our assumed truths. Questioning those truths can be difficult because we are often forced to examine their sources, which might be very personal—our parents, other family members, friends, respected teachers, or religious leaders. We donʹt want to believe they led us astray. Even if we donʹt credit someone else for guiding us to a worldview, we still donʹt like learning that ours might be flawed. After all, nothing is more precious to our sense of self than the way we view the world. While...