Book Review: Popular Struggle and Resistance in Latin America

• Author: Ronald H. Chilcote
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221140417
• Published date: 01 January 2023
• Date: 01 January 2023
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221140417

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 248, Vol. 50 No. 1, January 2023, 296–298

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X221140417

© 2022 Latin American Perspectives

296

Book Review

Popular Struggle and Resistance in Latin America

by

Ronald H. Chilcote

Carlos Fuentes The Great Latin American Novel. Victoria: Dailkjey Archive Press, 2016.

Juan Pablo Dabove Bandit Narratives in Latin America: From Villa to Chávez. Pitts-

burgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017.

Sarah Sarzynski Revolution in the Terra do Sol: The Cold War in Brazil. Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 2018.

Three recent works deal with literature as a means to understanding how common

people attempt to improve their way of life. In his sweeping synthesis The Great Latin

American Novel, the renowned novelist Carlos Fuentes offers insights not only into the

great writers who have shaped our understanding but also into the cultural landscape

and political realities that motivated them. For Latin Americanists whose research and

writing are driven by disciplinary training, it is important to become familiar with the

literature of the places we study, and Fuentes facilitates this task. He begins with Bernal

Díaz del Castillo, Latin America’s “first novelist,” who wrote about a world that had

disappeared decades after accompanying Hernán Cortés on his arrival in Mexico and

who influenced Bartolomé de las Casas and his denunciation of the peaceful coexistence

between “the devastated world of the indigenous peoples and the triumphalist attitude

of the white man in the New World” (50) and the Leyenda Negra. He celebrates Machado

de Assis and his The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1981), and he turns to the great

Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, which

has enchanted many of us. He reminds me how I discovered Cervantes in a Spanish-

literature class: “There was one world before the publication of Don Quixote in 1605, after-

wards, another one, forever different—the novel of La Mancha . . . is indispensable in

order to speak about fiction, or the immediate past, of today, of tomorrow” (398).

The works of Juan Pablo Dabove, with its focus on “how men of letters articulate the

bandit trope in order to reflect upon their own practice, their own place in society, or to

carry out a particular literary or political project” (98) and Sarah Sarzynski, for whom

themes of “cangaceiros, rural poor and Coroneis, slavery, and messianism formed the

language of the political debates” (17) during the 1950s and 1960s in Northeast Brazil,

are based on broad research but generally presented through case studies. Both are of

particular interest to me because early in my career (see Chilcote, 1972) I organized a

series of colloquia at UC Riverside and UCLA focused on movements and charismatic

individuals that organized against the state and the ruling class in pursuit of a better

life. Our research drew partly on case studies in the Brazilian Northeast that at the time

had been romanticized in the literature. One of our cases, by Amaury de Sousa, focused

on social banditry, and my early assessment attempted to advance an agenda for fur-

ther, deeper research. Both Dabove and Sarzynski have contributed significantly to that

objective.

1140417LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X221140417Latin American PerspectivesChilcote/BOOK REVIEW

research-article2022

Ronald H. Chilcote is managing editor of Latin American Perspectives.