Enfermedades y males de América Latina. Intervenciones intelectuales entre 1898 y 1930

Abstract

Latin America has been usually portrayed as an ill geographical space, with no possibility of healing in order to change its current destiny. It is also frequent to think about the crises and setbacks that accompany its history. This essay studies interventions of Latin American intellectuals and publicists who, between the end of the 19th century and the 1920s, resorted to the image of disease —and other associated medical notions— to explain the tragic destinies of the region and thus defined a repertoire of ideas that seem to have endured. The paper focuses on two moments because of their importance in the emergence of repertoires of ideas, images and metaphors. On the one hand, the 1898 war between Spain and the United States, and European imperialism as a backdrop; on the other, the Great War and its effects, overlapping with the setting of the Latin-American centennials (1910-24), the Mexican Revolution (1910) and the Reforma Universitaria (University Reform, 1918), which began in Argentina but created a university movement in other Latin American countries. Therefore, as a general argument, this paper argues that it is feasible to organize a body of texts produced in different Latin American countries between the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th that has formed an interpretative repertoire, which operates as a matrix to characterize the Latin American region and associate its destiny to notions such as disease, condemnation, impossibility, and failure. Particularly, the paper highlights how references to illnesses in literal and metaphorical senses show the overlap between notions such as disease-conquest-colonization and disease-imperialism-European decadence.