What can a story tell us about Latin American history?

What about a poem?

An essay?

Or a whole novel?

All the stuff we think of as "literature" isn't just art or entertainment.

It's got a lot more to say - and I don't know about you but I'm ready to hear the chisme.

Hi!

I'm Curly Velasquez, and this is Crash Course Latin American Literature.

[THEME MUSIC] We've learned earlier in this series that the term "Latin America" wasn't in use until the 19th century, around the time when the region's nations gained independence from Spain and Portugal.

So, when did Latin American literature start?

I mean, a lot of life and culture happened during the pre-colonial era, before Christopher Columbus showed up - completely uninvited, by the way.

For starters, indigenous communities, like the K<iche<, or Mayan, people of Guatemala, had a rich tradition of oral literature.

Stories were a super important part of understanding their own culture and history - including their origins.

Through oral storytelling, they passed down stories of K'iche' creation, many involving two characters known as the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque.

Like, in one story, the Hero Twins go to the Underworld to avenge their father by playing a ball game awfully similar to soccer - oh, I mean fútbol.

Anyway, together these stories are known as the Popol Vuh.

And if you're thinking, "Curly, that 'oral literature' looks a lot like a book," you're not wrong.

Sometime in the 1550s, while under Spanish colonial rule, a K'iche' author (or maybe a group of authors - not all writers work in tortured solitude) used the Latin alphabet to record the Popol Vuh as a book.

Which transformed it from oral literature to, you know, literary literature.

Then, in the 18th century, a Dominican friar - no, not that kind of Dominican, the one with the hair thing, yes, yes!

- named Francisco Ximénez translated the Popol Vuh from K'iche' into Spanish, which is the version we have now.

It's one of only fourteen surviving Indigenous manuscripts from all of Latin America.

Which underscores the immense cultural loss that came with colonialism in this region.

Just imagine what we're missing.

But the Popol Vuh lives on, providing crucial insight about Latin American literature - both historically, and now.

So many of its themes appear in stories written centuries later: like the relationship between humans and nature, the importance of familial ancestors, and animals acting as semi-magical spirit guides.

We'll see these come up again and again in our series, too.

Colonization in Latin America dragged on for over 300 years.

But by the early 19th century, we start to see a major shift.

Independence movements were springing up all across the continent.

And as Latin Americans strived for political autonomy, literature reflected that.

It gave voice to desires for independence and cultural self-definition.

Take the 1823 poem "Alocución a la poesía," "Allocution to Poetry," written by the Venezuelan-born poet Andrés Bello while he was in exile in London.

Bello addresses the poem like a letter, written to "divine poetry."

That lets us know he's talking about culture.

And not sending a secret admirer note to yours truly.

In the second stanza, Bello invites poetry to return to Latin America: "It is time for you to leave effete Europe No lover of your native rustic charms, And fly to where Columbus's world Opens its great scene before your eyes."

Now if you're like, excuse me, Columbus's world?

That's what I thought, too.

But what he's signaling with that phrase is not a return to the original, indigenous Latin America.

That world has been forever changed, so it has to become something new.

But he's also not accepting a European view of the, quote, "new world."

He wants Latin Americans to shift their eyes to the "great scene" that is Latin America today - one independent from that stage 5 clinger, European influence.

As the poem goes on, Bello situates poetry as the soul of his people, using the genre as a stand-in for the whole region seeking freedom and its own cultural identity.

Bello was also a grammarian and a politician - because even in the 1800s, poets needed side gigs.

It's a tough life out here.

He created a Spanish grammar that helped new nations make the language their own, and he held political positions in Venezuela, Colombia, and Chile as they established their own independent nation-states.

And, I mean, when your poets are politicians and your politicians are poets, there's no separating literature from political history.

But poetry wasn't the only kind of literature that popped off during this period of revolution.

Essays, academic works, and letters played a huge role, too.

Take Bello's good friend Simón Bolívar.

He was a politician, statesman, and revolutionary leader.

He's best known for helping the colonial territory Viceroy of New Granada win independence and establish the countries of Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela.

One of Bolívar's most famous literary works is "Carta de Jamaica," "Jamaica Letter."

Written in 1815, while Bolívar was in exile in Jamaica, it expresses his hope and determination for a free Latin America.

But Bolívar also expresses the unique challenges of forming new national identities after centuries of colonization, writing, "We are neither Indians nor Europeans, yet we are a part of each."

To be clear, he means Indigenous folks, not people from India.

Classic Columbian Era stuff.

So he's saying, like, who are we?

We no longer have the culture of Indigenous peoples because we've been influenced by centuries of European colonization.

But we haven't become European, either.

We're still our own thing.

For the critic Roberto González Echevarría, Bolívar's conundrum is the starting point of most modern Latin American literature: how do you balance a European mindset with regional history and culture?

And how do you pin all that down in a work of literature, or in your own identity, for that matter?

Over the following centuries, as Latin American writers worked through these questions and discovered their unique voices and cultural identities, people outside the region began to discover that Latin American secret sauce, too.

And I'm not talking jabanero.

By the time the 1960s rolled around, the Latin American Boom had begun - a literary movement that saw Latin American writers achieve unprecedented international success.

The nueva novela, "new novel," was the most popular literary form during this time, and Boom Era novelists turned to centuries of Latin American history and literary tradition for inspiration... all the way back to the Popol Vuh.

And like the poetry of the independence movement, Boom novels tended to be pretty political.

All those years of colonization and revolution inspired these writers, as did more recent political movements like the Cuban Revolution of the 1950s and the dictatorships in Argentina, Peru, Chile, Brazil, and Paraguay.

But this type of political and cultural upheaval wasn't limited to Latin America.

In the 1960s, the world was changing everywhere.

There were dozens of independence movements across Africa.

The Berlin Wall was going up, and the Civil Rights Movement had begun in the U.S.

- just to name a few examples.

So these political themes resonated with international readers.

But what really made the Boom novel famous was the introduction of magical realism, a literary genre that blends magical elements with reality.

What's so unique about magical realism is that, in the world of the novel, those magical elements aren't perceived as being magical.

Like: A levitating priest?

Casual.

A flying carpet?

Whatever.

A five-year rainstorm?

No biggie.

All extraordinary moments presented as ordinary.

And no, I didn't just make up those examples myself.

I'm good, but I'm not that good.

The credit's due to Gabriel García Márquez.

Born in Colombia on March 6, 1927, García Márquez authored more than 24 books - including his 1967 masterpiece "Cien años de soledad," "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

Which sounds like a dream - leave me with a good book and a snack and I'm there.

Oh!

How'd you know?

Let's get into the Curly Notes.

Set in the fictional town of Macondo, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" tells the story of the Buendía family over the course of seven generations.

That's a lot of abuelas.

And the setting is so important.

We see that in the beginning, Macondo is isolated from the outside world.

The village is made of just twenty adobe houses along a river lined with stones that look like prehistoric eggs.

García Márquez writes, "The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point."

Not at me!

Rude.

But over time, new technologies, political unrest, and foreign businesses start reshaping the village - many of them real historical events, like Colombia's War of a Thousand Days.

By blending myth and reality, García Márquez uses Macondo as a stand-in for all of Latin America, creating an intimate setting to discuss a whole region's complicated politics.

Beyond Macondo, what's most memorable for many of us is García Márquez's use of magical realism, including a rain of yellow flowers after the family's patriarch dies.

"They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors.

So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by."

This scene is so beloved that when García Márquez passed away in 2014, people paid homage to him with memorials filled with yellow flower petals.

Of course, García Márquez is just one master of magical realism.

Can we save that for later, please?

Boom writers like Julio Cortázar, Elena Garro, Carlos Fuentes, Maria Luisa Bombal, and Mario Vargas Llosa have also woven fantastical threads into realistic stories, a tradition that traces all the way back to pre-colonial times.

Now, for the global literary community, magical realism came to over-define Latin American literature, reducing its diversity to just one thing.

This is why we can't have nice things, global literary community.

But, we'll talk more about that in a later episode.

Our history is a part of us.

It informs everything we do, think, and create.

And the same goes for the literature of Latin America.

The region has a long and complex history, littered with political strife and the struggle for identity - but also regional pride... and fútbol.

That history is reflected in the novels, poems, letters, and essays of the people who helped to shape it.

Next time, we're heading to la jungla, the jungle, to explore what nature can teach us about humanity.

See you then.