Latin America in 1870–1930 initiated many modernization projects, and “First Wave” feminism resulted from expanded education, a modernizing strategy. Feminism engaged in emancipation strategies and legal and labor reforms. Suffrage was not its primary aim. Periodicals showed feminism’s impact in culture, commerce, civil rights, and public health, and films showed women in daring roles. Early leaders were professionals (Moreau de Justo) and labor activists (Capetillo, Muzzili). Feminism was first successful in cities (São Paulo, Buenos Aires), changing education, labor practices, and child protection. The Mexican Revolution produced new contexts for women in the arts (Campobello). The US presence in Cuba and Puerto Rico reordered Caribbean racial and social hierarchies. Women writers and activists of varied social classes, feminist or not, showed the costs and benefits of urbanization, family, and immigration. Teaching and writing allowed “middlebrow” access to the public sphere (Mistral, Storni). Literature brought women’s issues to the public sphere.

Three pivotal events took place in Iquique between 1870 and 1930: one of the key naval battles of the War of the Pacific (1879); the establishment of a parallel government that challenged president José Manuel Balmaceda’s desire for greater taxation of nitrate wealth (1891); and the massacre by the Chilean military of striking miners at the Escuela Santa María (1907). This chapter examines the rhetoric of mourning in the literature of Iquique during this period and its link to shifting alliances along national, political, and affective lines. Texts analyzed include articles by Nicolás Palacios; poems and prose by Rubén Darío, who lived in Chile between 1887 and 1889; the novel Juana Lucero (1902) by Augusto D’Halmar; and the writings of labor organizer Luis Emilio Recabarren. The chapter links mourning to questions about workers’ rights, extractivism, and “cosmopolitanism” in Latin America’s first export age – issues still under debate today in the region.

The period between 1870 and 1930 saw the beginning of the Latin American anarchist movement. Latin American anarchist literature emerged in the context of the tensions between the modernization process and the sudden reappearance of supposedly premodern intellectual traditions. Amid these tensions, the anarchist movement allowed for the professionalization of subaltern intellectuals, as well as for lettered intellectuals to move into popular spaces. This chapter examines this juncture through some documents from the German anarchist Max Nettlau’s personal archive, which provide clues to the construction of these intellectual and political networks (from Cuba to Mexico and the United States; from Europe to Argentina, and from there to the rest of the continent). Through the study of these networks, this essay reconstructs the history of some anarchist editorial projects and of some of the working-class intellectuals who developed their work within these spaces.

The chapter examines how diverse forms of rural insurgency (i.e. banditry, caudillismo, millenarianism, revolutionary uprisings) were depicted in literature from the tapering off of the civil wars to the Mexican Revolution. Rural insurgency was a paramount preoccupation for letrados of the period, not only because of the material challenges that it posed to the imposition of agrarian capitalism and the sovereignty of the nation-state, but also because rural insurgency tapped into the cultural capital of rural societies (e.g. kinship, networks of patronage), forms of leadership (e.g. caudillismo), heterodox versions of Catholicism to articulate dreams of social justice (e.g. millenarianism). Hence, rural insurgency was considered, by its mere existence, an existential challenge to the very notion of a modern capitalist nation-state. However, the chapter examines how, at the same time that literature served as a sort of “prose of counterinsurgency” (Ranajit Guha), it was also a site of reflection on the dilemmas attending the constitution of a modern polity and culture.

Exports of the agricultural fertilizers guano and nitrates spurred bursts of economic euphoria and decline on South America’s Pacific coast, first in Peru and then in Chile. This chapter analyzes fiction and economic essays from Peru’s guano era (1840s–1870s) and Chile’s nitrate era (1880s–1920s). In both contexts, intellectuals voiced concerns that the financial abundance brought by fertilizer exports would reveal itself to be “fictitious prosperity,” both ecologically and economically unsustainable. These anxieties, moreover, infuse novels that dramatize urban elite society in times of fertilizer-driven abundance: Benjamín Cisneros’s Julia (Peru, 1861) and Luis Orrego Luco’s Casa grande (Chile, 1908). By tracing shared tropes across literary genre as well as temporal and national context, the chapter illustrates how elites expressed concerns about economic booms marked by debt, financial speculation, and the export of a single, exhaustible natural resource.

With a focus on Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, this chapter examines the sense of belatedness in abolitionist and postabolitionist literature published between the 1860s and the 1930s. Belatedness implied an affective relationship to the global temporality of abolition – a way of feeling time as shame that shaped literature in long-lasting ways. Writers like José Martí and Machado de Assis reflected on the apparently anomalous status of their nations, where slavery was not abolished until 1886 and 1888 respectively. By analyzing canonical literature in light of the Black public spheres that emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century, this chapter explores questions such as the rejection of African cultures, Whitening ideologies, the fantasy of the submissive slave, the myths and realities of racial democracy, Maroonage, and other forms of slave resistance. Other writers analyzed include Maria Firmina dos Reis, Antônio de Castro Alves, Alfonso Henriques de Lima Barreto, Martín Morúa Delgado, and Francisco Calcagno.

This essay offers an overview of literature and culture in Manaus between 1870 and 1930. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, Manaus grew from a remote outpost in the Brazilian Amazon to one of the capitals of the rubber boom – a bustling port where British bankers mingled with Turkish traders and opera companies from Italy sang at the opulent Teatro Amazonas. By World War I, however, the rubber trade had shifted to southeast Asia and the city entered what is typically portrayed as a long decline. Most accounts of the boom depict Manaus as a place where “culture” was just another import and object of conspicuous consumption. In contrast, this essay shows how the social and economic relations, international influences, and cultural infrastructure established during the heyday of rubber were essential to the postboom emergence of a regionalist movement and efforts to articulate an explicitly Amazonian identity.

Much of the work that has been devoted to Latin American history of science, as well as the analysis of intersections between literature and science in the long nineteenth century, points toward the flawed relationship that this region has had with science and technology. Science encompassed a series of proposals of new ways of seeing; it was a new platform that allowed writers to assume and retain control of their environment. This chapter explores the emergence of popular science magazines in Latin America – publications in which, it is argued, we find literary accounts of science as well as creative accounts of scientific observation. An improved understanding of this vast body of work helps us, in turn, to think of fin-de-siècle Latin American science as representative of what Bruno Latour defines as the “exegesis,” or constant inscription, that represents the central quality and activity of modern scientific life.

As a consequence of the process of modernization and the new growing engagement of Latin American countries in cultural and material global exchanges, the period 1870–1930 marked some important transitions in the way travel was understood. It became increasingly a bodily and material practice, and even a form of consumption. This chapter follows some of these trends in order to show how different Latin American intellectuals of the period reflected upon their own writing about travel. Discussing works by Lucio V. Mansilla, Miguel Triana, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, and Mário de Andrade, it focuses on descriptions of the modes and rhythms of travel. Finally, it pays attention to the means of transportation: traveling by horse, on foot, by boat, by train, or by car turns out to connote a different experience as the relationships that the traveler establishes with the landscape vary significantly depending on the type of transportation used.

This volume explores how the circulation of goods, people, and ideas permeated every aspect of the continent’s cultural production at the turn of the century. We are interested not only in understanding how literature and the arts confronted the unprecedented penetration of global capital in Latin America, but also in exploring the ways in which rapidly transforming technological and labor conditions contributed to forging new intellectual networks, creating original discourses, exploring innovative forms of knowledge, and reimagining the material and immaterial worlds. This volume shows the new directions in turn-of-the-century scholarship that developed over the last two decades by investigating how the experience of capitalism produced an array of works that deal with primitive accumulation, transnational crossings, and an emerging technological and material reality in diverse geographies and a variety of cultural forms. The various contributions provide a novel understanding of the period as they discuss the ways in which particular commodities, intellectual networks, popular uprisings, materialities, and nonmetropolitan locations redefined cultural production at a time when the place of Latin America in global affairs was significantly transformed.

This chapter examines journalistic representations of the yerba mate industry created by the Hispano-Paraguayan author Rafael Barrett. It describes the long history of the yerba industry from its origins in the sixteenth century to the current vogue of nutraceutical herbal supplements before focusing on the conditions that led to massive exploitation of agricultural laborers in the debt-peonage system of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This establishes the context for a detailed examination of the politics and poetics of Barrett’s chronicles. Barrett, known today as a pioneering anarchist intellectual in the Río de la Plata region of South America, was primarily focused on exposing the human rights and labor abuses of the yerba industry, but his writings also suggest a mode of ethnobotanical inquiry at odds with the Western ontological distinction between nature and culture, a mode in which yerba itself demonstrates a startling and fascinating agency.

This chapter focuses on sugar as a commodity underlining and overdetermining social, political, and aesthetic changes in the Caribbean from the 1870s to the 1930s. These global and regional changes included the consolidation of the gold-standard regime and its sudden dismissal, the apparition of corporate-based capitalism, the rearticulation of economics as a discipline through the marginalist “revolution,” the incorporation of former slaves and indentured service into a wage-labor force, and the beginning of the conversion of former plantations into hospitality sites. The resurgence of sugar as a dominant raw commodity gave a particular character to the region's absorption into global corporate capitalism. By focusing on both the material and the social dimension of sugar, the argument is made that this commodity helped negotiate the differences between literary and artistic innovations coming from European-influenced lettered elites and those coming from popular groups with strong Afro-Caribbean roots.

In the prologue to his novel Serafim Ponte Grande (1933), Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade wrote: “The modernista movement, which gave way to the ‘anthropophagic’ virus, seemed to indicate an advanced phenomenon. São Paulo possessed a powerful industry. Who could say that the rise of coffee couldn’t bring that semi-colonial, nouveau riche literature to the level of those costly imperialist surrealisms?” How did Latin American artists and writers relate to the profound political and economic changes that took place at the end of the 1920s? This chapter looks at Latin America’s cosmopolitan avant-garde’s rejection, incorporation, or support of the emerging internationalism triggered by the global rise of communism. It does so by examining two events: Diego Rivera’s trips to the Soviet Union and the United States, and the experience of the Brazilian Anthropophagic movement seen from the perspective of Oswald de Andrade’s transformation from cosmopolitan poet to internationalist activist.