Welcome to the jungle.

Is it paradise?

Or a nightmare?

A place that'll take care of you?

Or destroy you?

For centuries, we Latin Americans have recognized Mama Nature's main character energy.

She can be kind and generous... or dangerous and chaotic.

Sounds like a Pisces, am I right?

Anyways... In literature, Mama Nature doesn't just spill the tea about plants and animals, water and rocks.

She represents the wildness of people, too.

So, what can literature about nature tell us about... Us?

Hi!

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

[THEME MUSIC] Let's start a few millennia ago.

Indigenous people knew Mama Nature first, and they knew her well.

The people of the Andes called her Pachamama.

And the "Popol Vuh" - the collection of sacred narratives of the K'iche people - namedrops their whole natural neighborhood: macaws, cacao, coyotes, calabash trees, bromeliads, and jaguarundis.

The Incas of what's now Peru regarded the sun as an ancestor and a god: often depicted as a flaming disc with a human face.

And to this day, many Indigenous peoples view the land as physically and spiritually connected to themselves.

It's not just a bunch of rocks and dirt.

Fast-forward to the late 15th century, and European colonizers were pretty blown away by the Latin American landscape.

Christopher Columbus praised the Americas for its "soft breezes, high mountains, and fertile lands."

Get outta here, Chris!

And the Spanish botanist Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo gushed over everything good to eat there.

Iguana - delicious!

Prickly pear - it'll turn your pee red!

TMI, Gonzalo.

But the colonizers' attitude wasn't "on this land, we all fam."

It was more like: "what's yours is mine."

For three centuries, European colonizers seized control of this vast landscape, violently forcing out Indigenous peoples and the ways they viewed their environment.

Though to be clear, Indigenous folks are still very much part of Latin America today - and the rest of the world.

In the 19th century, Latin Americans rose up through independence movements, transforming colonies into nation-states.

And those nation-states had to grapple with big questions!

Like: Who are we now?

And who are we going to be, in relation to this land?

Some 19th-century writers, like the Venezuelan-Chilean poet Andrés Bello, drew inspiration from the European Romantics, who tied passionate emotions to the natural world.

While living in England, Bello wrote the epic poem "Silva a la agricultura de la zona tórrida," "Agriculture in the Torrid Zone."

It oozes with idealism about the landscape back home.

Bello addresses the land directly.

Lovingly, even.

With lines like "You give sweet sugarcane, whose pure sap / makes the world disdain the honeycomb."

But Bello also claims there's a responsibility involved.

To "place the fertile soil, / now harsh and wild, under the unaccustomed yoke / of human skill, and conquer it."

Keep your yoke away from Pachamama, Bello!

As the 19th and 20th centuries unfolded, many Latin American writers distanced themselves from the European Romantics' idealism toward the wilderness.

Instead, they often invoked the llanos, plains, and the pampas, grasslands, as "backwards" places.

In them, nature wasn't quaint, and the jungle wasn't paradise.

It was dangerous.

Menacing.

And it held dark secrets about who people really were.

Let's get the Curly Notes on "La vorágine," "The Vortex," a 1924 novel by Colombian author José Eustasio Rivera.

It's a prime example of regionalism - a style of literature where the place the story occurs is as richly detailed as the characters themselves.

Pachamama isn't just the backdrop for human drama.

She is the drama.

"La vorágine" is presented as the diary of a fictional poet named Arturo Cova, who fled the city for the llanos, then the jungle, and then disappeared without a trace.

I mean...except this detailed account of everything that went down.

And, boy, did this guy have feelings about the jungle!

"Oh Jungle, wedded to silence, mother of solitude and mist!

What malignant spirit left me to languish in your emerald prison?"

"Oh Jungle, let me escape your sickly shadows, your living cemetery, your primordial kingdom of agony and resuscitation."

In "La vorágine," the jungle is one mean place.

A "vortex of nothingness," where humanity falls away and chaos prevails.

In the jungle, Cova meets enemies of all kinds - parasites, leeches, and people enslaving other people through the rubber industry.

He finds no kindness, only evil - even in himself.

As literary critic Jean Franco puts it, "If La vorágine has a message, it is that nature is more powerful than civilization in Latin America."

Meaning not just nature in the literal sense, but also the chaos, wildness, and lawlessness of human nature.

Let's move forward in time to the 21st century, where we start to see the focus shift to environmental harm.

Eco-horror is a new genre that explores fractured relationships between humans and the environment through terrifying representations of the natural world.

You know - natural disasters.

Toxic water.

Aggressive, killer hippos.

Which, sidebar: people really aren't as scared of hippos as they should be.

They are murderous Take Argentine author Samanta Schweblin's 2014 book "Distancia de rescate," called "Fever Dream" in its English translation.

In the novel, a mysterious poison in the water kills a horse, then nearly kills a 5-year-old boy named David.

David survives, but he's changed.

Half his spirit has been replaced by some...thing... that makes him talk like a grown-up and be just... creepy beyond belief.

Then when Nina, a little girl on vacation, also ingests the poison, her mother, Amanda, becomes desperate for answers.

And this story was inspired by real-life dangers.

Like, in the 1990s, people living in the city of Ituzaingó became suspicious that there was a link between pesticides and the high rates of cancer, birth defects, miscarriages, and sick kids in their community.

So a group of mothers led a door-to-door study, ultimately proving this link.

But while some pesticides have been banned in Latin America for their links to health issues, others remain widely used, despite scientists debating their safety.

Now compare that real-world context to the title of the book.

In Spanish, "Distancia de rescate," translates to "rescue distance."

That's what Amanda calls "the variable distance separating me from my daughter."

The implied question is this: If Amanda needs to rescue her daughter right now...can she?

How can she protect her child from threats she can't even see?

In an interview, Schweblin described the power of ecohorror: "Fear is what makes you drop a book and run to your computer to Google what is happening, and think, 'Can this happen to me?

Is this really happening?'"

Of course, ecohorror isn't the only way contemporary Latin American writers are engaging with environmental damage and exploitation.

A new crop of ecopoets are highlighting the modern threats of resource extraction, environmental violence, and climate crises - and they're doing it all in verse.

Take the Mapuche poet Elicura Chihuailaf, the first Indigenous recipient of Chile's National Prize for Literature.

He describes how, in the Mapuche view, everything in nature has a spirit and is part of a greater infinite.

And he often explores this aliveness and interconnectedness in his work.

For example, his poem "Itrofill mogen" takes on a cyclical structure, where each element of the natural world -water, air, earth, fire-is dependent on another: "They tell me: Water is Life / But what does Water do / without the Air?"

In question after question, it's clear: you really can't talk about the importance of water without talking about everything else.

Because Pachamama?

She's got her hands in everything.

Chihuailaf presents a hopeful alternative to eco-horror, where materialism and environmental degradation are left behind in favor of a more Indigenous view of harmony with the earth.

Nature has been a source of inspiration for Latin American writers for centuries.

And whether they've shown Mama Nature as a source of wonder, terror, turmoil, or transcendence, those representations often reflect not just the landscape, but the social and political times, too.

In our next episode, we'll explore how Latin American literature has drawn inspiration from another source of turmoil: tyrants and dictators.

Until then, go show Pachamama some love!