Utopias in Latin America : Past and Present / Edited by Juan Pro

pro index 4 - revised page i 30/04/2018 09:24 Page i UTOIN PIAIAS LAATTIN AMERICA Past and Present pro index 4 28/02/2018 08:34 Page ii Sussex Library of Study New Historical and Comparative Perspectives on Latin America SOCIETY, POLITICS, AND CULTURE Editorial Board Chair: Carlos H. Waisman Jaime Concha (Literature), Christine Hunefeldt (History), Ev Meade (History), Nancy Postero (Anthropology), Pamela Radcliff (Iberian History) This Sussex series, organized in cooperation with the Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies (CILAS) at the University of California, San Diego, is entitled “New Historical and Comparative Perspectives on Latin America: Society, Politics, and Culture.” The series will focus on the interdisciplinary study of Latin America, bringing together different viewpoints from the social sciences and the humanities. The Editorial Board is chaired by Carlos H. Waisman, Professor of Sociology, and made up by faculty members in the departments of History, Literature, Anthropology, and other social sciences at UC San Diego. The series publishes original monographs and contributed works from scholars in the United States, Latin America, and Europe, as well as papers drawn from CILAS projects and research conferences. pro index 4 28/02/2018 08:34 Page iii UTOIN PIAIAS LAATTIN AMERICA Past and Present EDITED BY JUAN PRO pro index 4 28/02/2018 08:34 Page iv All chapters copyright © Sussex Academic Press, 2018; Introduction and editorial organization of this volume copyright © Juan Pro, 2018. The right of Juan Pro to be identified as Editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. ISBN 9781845199227 (Cloth) ISBN 9781782845416 (PDF) First published in 2018 in Great Britain by SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS P.O. Box 139 Eastbourne BN24 9BP Distributed in the United States of America by ISBS Publisher Services 920 NE 58th Ave #300, Portland, OR 97213, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pro Ruiz, Juan, editor. Title: Utopias in Latin America : past and present / edited by Juan Pro. Description: Brighton ; Portland : Sussex Academic Press, [2018] | Series: Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies (CILAS)/Sussex Academic Latin American library Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017057086 | ISBN 9781845199227 (hb : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Utopias—Latin America—History. Classification: LCC HX806 .U775164 2018 | DDC 355/.02098—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017057086 Typeset and designed by Sussex Academic Press, Brighton & Eastbourne. Printed by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall. pro index 4 28/02/2018 08:34 Page v Contents Series Editor’s Preface vii Editor’s Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Juan Pro 1 Utopia in the Spanish Language: The Origin of a Word, the History 15 of an Idea Juan Pro 2 How to Do Things With Utopias: Stories, Memory and Resistance 36 in Paraguay Marisa González de Oleaga 3 Vasco de Quiroga rewrites Utopia 53 Geraldo Witeze Junior 4 Where Is Columbus’s Helmsman Taking Us?: The City of the Sun 76 of Tommaso Campanella as a Utopia Critical of the Iberian Empires Carlos E.O. Berriel 5 Utopian Imagination Across the Atlantic: Chile in the 1820s 92 Carlos Ferrera 6 Cabet’s Utopia, from Minorca to Argentina: Bartolomé Victory y Suárez 115 Horacio Tarcus 7 The Utopia of the “Latin Race”: Michel Chevalier, Victor Considerant 139 and Public Debate in Spain Concerning the Intervention in Mexico (1861–1867) Nere Basabe 8 Rhodakanaty in Mexico 159 Carlos Illades pro index 4 28/02/2018 08:34 Page vi vi | Contents 9 The Cecilia Colony: Echoes of an Amorous Utopia 180 in the Libertarian Press Laura Fernández Cordero 10 Technologies of the Afterlife: Spiritualism and Social Imagination 198 in Nineteenth-Century Mexico Ana Sabau 11 Universopolis: The Universal in a Place and Time 215 Andrew Ginger 12 The Commune in Venezuela: A Utopian Prefiguration 235 Dario Azzellini 13 Walking towards Utopia: Experiences from Argentina 262 Marina Sitrin The Editor and Contributors 280 Index 284 pro index 4 28/02/2018 08:34 Page vii Series Editor’s Preface This volume brings together papers that explore Latin America as a setting, for both Europeans and Latin Americans, of utopian thought and action. Utopian visions or practices have existed since the beginning of recorded history, but it is with modernity that the imagining and the attempts to establish alternative forms of social organization have become institutionalized. The essence of modernity was captured by Marx’s famous dictum, “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned . .” 1 In pre-capitalist and pre-Enlightenment societies, utopian thought or attempts to establish utopian communities were the product of either unusual intel- lectual foresight and audacity, such as Plato’s or Thomas More’s, or extreme circumstances, such as religious persecution of “heretic” medieval sects. These societies were not composed of social classes in the modern sense of the term, but of rigid status groups, practically akin to castes. Social mobility, both vertical and horizontal, was rare, except as a consequence of wars or other calamities. And the prevailing belief was that God had dictated both social organization and political institutions, which were therefore inalterable. Modernity destroyed these social structures and ideologies: The establishment of capitalism meant, in terms of social structure, the abolition of serfdom and the instau- ration of markets for goods and labor, with the ensuing potential for large-scale vertical and horizontal mobility; and the Enlightenment set the stage for the understanding that institutions and forms of social organization were contingent, and subject to the human will. These changes created the conditions for the massive mobilization of utopian thought and action that has characterized Western politics and culture since the “Great Transformation”: from the very idea of a market society which, as Karl Polanyi has pointed out,2 was itself utopian, to the liberal and democratic institutions understood as “government by the people”; anarchism (itself an extreme form of liberalism), and the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century. As this book makes clear, Latin America was strongly involved in this process of utopian theorizing and implementation. First, as several of these essays show, the region was conceived as a social “tabula rasa” in the imaginary of European utopians: an ideal environment for carrying out new social designs, at both the micro and macro levels. In the second place, Latin America has been a milieu in which both elites and anti-status quo revolutionaries have engaged in envisioning and bringing, or trying to bring into being, alternative institutional formulae for the organization of social or political life, sometimes at the level of local communities, others as the result of the thorough transformation of societies. nineteenth-century constitutions, as this book pro index 4 28/02/2018 08:34 Page viii viii | Series Editor’s Preface shows, contained strong utopian elements, and Latin America has been a fertile ground for the appearance and development of radical movements, political and religious, reformist and revolutionary, some democratic and others totalitarian. Why this propensity? A central trigger for utopianism, both North and South, has been an intense dissatisfaction with the status quo, coupled with the conviction that other institutional arrangements, more consistent with the utopist’s values, are possible. Sources of collective dissatisfaction have been plenty in Latin America since independence: economic backwardness with respect to other societies; the widespread belief that the region is dependent or directly controlled by foreign powers, responsible for this state of affairs; glaring inequality along economic and in many societies ethnic lines; prevalence, for much of the twentieth century, of authoritarian rule, sometimes very repressive; marginality and economic and political exclusion of large segments of the population; extensive governmental corruption; etc. At the same time, political ideologies, usually of European origin but locally re-interpreted, have served as a basis for generating alternative institutional frameworks: from conventional Marxist- Leninist formulae to original local products, such as theology of liberation or Hugo Chavez’s “Twentieth-Century Socialism” and other variants of contemporary populism. Many of these movements or actual experiments have failed and others are trailing badly, but as long as the two determinants of utopianism mentioned above — dissatisfaction with the current social organization and the hunger for alternative formulae — remain, utopian movements and organizations will be recycled and re-constituted, and they and the societal responses they generate will continue making up one of the central dimensions of the social and political dynamics of Latin American societies. 1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Ch. 1. 2

Load more