The history of ideas in Latin America is typically confined to the description of regional adaptations of European ideas. However, in the field of economic ideas in the period from the Depression of the 1930s to the debt and growth crises of the 1980s, first ‘structuralism,’ associated with the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA, or in Spanish, CEPAL), and subsequently ‘dependency theory’ were notably autochthonous, distinctly Latin American contributions to development theory. Moreover, they were widely embraced by theorists and policy-makers in the Third World at large. Although Marxism is treated and corporatism is discussed in brief compass, it is to the development of structuralism and dependency - arguably the most influential ideas ever to appear in Latin America - that this essay is principally devoted. It deals with the diffusion of ideas, the formation of new ideas, and, necessarily, the independent rediscovery of ideas already developed elsewhere. Because they are sometimes inseparable in the Latin American context, it also occasionally treats policy as well as theory. The project is inherently a comparative one, since only by comparision can originality or distinctiveness be assessed. Genetic connections between ideas in Latin America and elsewhere will be indicated, as well as the independent rediscovery of identical or closely analogous propositions. Finally, in social thought, it seems obvious that theory, if its tenets are assumed to be true and are not subject to empirical verification, slips easily into ideology, a set of propositions which implicitly justifies social values or social configurations. Both theory and ideology are part of the story.

When I think Faulkner, I'm usually reading, writing, or teaching (and learning) about his work, or performing some combination of these three activities, and perhaps it is these activities that suggest the three things I think of Faulkner’s work as doing and enabling others to do, the things I think literature and other cultural work can do at its best. First, his work reflects or represents certain realities (as in much reading, especially of “readerly” texts). It never does so directly, but it often does urge readers' attentions on past a relatively transparent medium toward the apparently solid message, past questions of how we are seeing toward questions of what we are seeing, in ways that tend to reinforce or articulate (or rearticulate) what seems natural, what seems like common sense. However, Faulkner’s work, at other places and times in it, or in the reading, writing about, or teaching of it, also pointedly criticizes those same realities it represents, calling readers' attention back from what they see to how they see it, to the '"nature" of reality and to ''common sense" as constructions and questions for discussion (as in much writing, especially of "writerly" texts). And in still other ways, Faulkner’s work participates in the ongoing social construction of those realities insofar as readers, writers, teachers, and students more or less consciously respond to such questions of nature and common sense as important cultural works in progress, an ongoing process of social negotiation and change (as in much teaching and learning, for example).

In American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, his seminal 1941 study of classic American writing, F. O. Matthiessen located the “renaissance” of his title in the 1850s, when Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville were all publishing major works. One might locate an earlier American renaissance (or “naissance”) at the beginning of the 1820s, when three writers who would come to dominate American literature during the next two or three decades published their first important books. Washington Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, was issued in installments, by C. S. Van Winkle of New York City, beginning in June 1819 and running through September 1820. In September 1821, Hilliard and Metcalf, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, issued the first volume of Poems by William Cullen Bryant. Three months later, in New York City, Charles Wiley issued James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy. The earth did not, perhaps, shake at the time, but from the perspective of literary history the appearance of these three books within a little less than three years seems momentous. The careers of these writers would testify to a major change in the meaning of both literature and literary vocation in America — a change that affected almost all of their literary contemporaries.

There were in Latin America (in 1990) no less than five hundred churches, religious communities, missions and religious movements related to Protestantism. This chapter considers only those which historically and/or doctrinally trace their origins to the sixteenth-century Reformation. Following a widely accepted typology of Protestantism in Latin America we include three main streams: (a) immigrant groups, mostly European, that brought their religious affiliation and churches to Latin America; (b) missionary Protestantism: churches created by missionary work among the native populations; and (c) Pentecostalism. Omitted, therefore, are such dissident non-Protestant groups as the Jehovah Witnesses, Mormons or Christian Scientists and syncretic movements like the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church which, although born in areas of Protestant majority, do not claim either a Protestant origin or to belong to Protestantism.

BACKGROUND

Aside from the British colonies in the Caribbean all the attempts in the sixteenth century to found Protestant colonies in the continent (for example, the Welser German colony in Venezuela, the Huguenot colony in Rio de Janeiro and the Huguenot colony in Florida) were aborted. Twenty-seven persons were condemned during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the Inquisition for ‘Lutheran heresy’. Some of these were British privateers and tradesmen and some were Spaniards influenced by Erasmian ideas and the ‘Iluminado’ movement in Spain. In the eighteenth century, with the accession to the throne of Spain of the ‘enlightened’ Bourbon dynasty, there was a greater circulation of dissident ideas and books. In an effort to eradicate them, the Inquisition identified the religious doctrines of the Reformation and the liberal political and philosophical ideas of the French Enlightenment, whereby the designation ‘Lutheran’ embraced both ‘heresy’ and ‘subversion’.

ROMANCE, ROMANTICISM, AND THE LITERARY

In his extended works from The Scarlet Letter (1850) through The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860), Nathaniel Hawthorne was the writer of prose narrative most important in establishing the kind of writing now recognized as ‘literary.’ Spurred by the success of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne's publishers moved to consolidate his position by reissuing Twice-told Tales (1851), collecting several of his recent sketches and tales along with some dozen previously unrepublished pieces in The Snow-Image (1851), and commissioning from him a book of mythological narratives for children, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1851 – 2, followed by Tanglewood Tales in 1853). The first year in which Hawthorne's writing provided enough income for his family to live on was 1851. Nevertheless, the gap in his career as a writer of fiction – seven years to The Marble Faun after only three years of high activity – indicates that even Hawthorne was not fully or clearly established in the role of a professional writer. His Life of Franklin Pierce (1852), written for the successful presidential campaign of his college friend, gave him access to a lucrative patronage position as American consul in Liverpool (1853–7), and with the financial security he earned from this position Hawthorne spent further years in France and Italy. These biographical facts emphasize the fragility of the newly emergent literary narrative.

Along with his college acquaintance and friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hawthorne was the figure around whom the recognition of ‘literature’ was established in the United States. Hawthorne best combines recognition in his own time with recognition in later discussions of American national literature, but Edgar Allan Poe did more to put into place the theories and perspectives that have formed the twentieth-century notion of literature.

INTRODUCTION

The Catholic Church dominated the religious and cultural life and was a major influence in the political and economic life of Latin America during 300 years of colonial rule. In the nineteenth century, following independence from Spain and Portugal, freemasons, liberals and positivists in the new states challenged the Church’s exclusive ideological claims and forced it on to the defensive. The secularization of the State and its absorption of liberal and anti-clerical influences, together with the confiscation of Church properties and the introduction of lay education, civil marriage and burial weakened the power of the Catholic Church, economically and socially as well as politically. As the State shed much of its conservative and Catholic past, so the Church was compelled to diminish its hitherto heavy reliance on the State and to look to its own resources and institutions. New challenges were posed in the first decades of the twentieth century by explicitly atheistic versions of anarchism and socialism. Free-thinking was a powerful force among urban intelligentsias; and the process of urbanization was frequently accompanied by a growth of religious indifference among all social classes.

During the papacies of Pius XI (1922–39) and Pius XII (1939–58)–and it is important always to remember that the Catholic Church is an international institution organized from Rome—the Church began to establish connections with new socio-political forces—industrial, bureaucratic, nationalist and popular—which, for lack of power, themselves needed allies. The Church, for the most part antiliberal and also now fiercely anti-communist, abandoned the defensive posture acquired during the liberal ascendancy, and placed its relationships with the state and civil society on a new basis.

INTRODUCTION

The use of the term ‘working class’ or ‘proletariat’ in the history of Latin America since 1930 is fraught with difficulty. For some groups of workers, at certain times and places, these terms seem more or less adequate, while for other groups of the working population the phrase ‘working class’ suggests a greater homogeneity of social origin, location in the world of work, and of attitudes and organization than is warranted. The problem is a real, rather than a merely semantic one. In the changing world of work, certain categories or groups of workers came to define themselves, or to be defined by others, as in some sense a ‘working class’, and this cultural definition had consequences for the way they thought about the world and acted it it. Classic examples of this are the working classes of Argentina and Chile, where a strong sense of class identity was linked with clear political orientations. However, this was by no means the modal experience, and many Latin American workers saw themselves in much more diffuse terms either as distinctive elites, separate from the rest of the working population, or as subsumed within a larger social category variously labelled ‘the poor’ or ‘the people’. These diverse forms of social identity (and the struggles over the political and cultural definition of the urban work force) have been a central element in the dynamics of working class and popular organization, and comprise one of the links between the labour movement, narrowly defined, and broader social movements.