Scarcity and Latin America Abundance

From the mid-nineteenth century until the early twentieth century, a broadly Sepúlvedan position held sway. After independence, political fragmentation and the decline of the colonial economy resulted in Latin America falling visibly behind industrializing western Europe and the United States. Capitalist pioneers from those areas after 1850 began to invest in Latin America in alliance with local landowners and businesspeople. Intellectual spokespeople for this process, the "científicos" (advocates of science and progress), saw Latin America as abundant and potentially wealth-producing but constrained by cultural and biological backwardness, especially on the part of darker-skinned lower orders. Scientific racism was in the air, making it easy to blame Latin America's scarcity on Native Americans, African-Americans, and people of mixed European and non-European ancestry. One example of this kind of thought, though not as biologically racist as some, blamed Mexico's underdevelopment on the nutritional deficiencies of corn tortillas, the millennia-old food of the Mexican people, and advocated instead the consumption of wheat bread, associated with Europe. There was little support for this seemingly "scientific" theory, and it ignored how inequality in resources led to nutritional shortfalls. But it seemed to explain Mexico's poverty, offering a suitably progressive path forward.

There were dissenters, however. Two Peruvians, the social theorist José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) and the novelist-anthropologist José María Arguedas (1911–1969), stand out for revaluing indigenous cultures. Mariátegui interpreted the indigenous people of the Andes as a revolutionary class in Marxist terms, while Arguedas deepened attention to highland Peruvian culture per se, noting the continuities of pre-Hispanic thought described above. Generally, though, notions that Latin America should follow external models of progress continued into the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. The models had once been England and France, but in this period the economically and politically overwhelming United States provided the vision of power and abundance. Racist theories declined (though did not disappear), and the key idea was "modernization": that Latin America could engineer progress by discarding its traditional social structures and cultures. A new nationalism crept in, with the central state and local capitalists seen as modernizers as well as, or in replacement of, foreigners. This opened the door for a major reversal in thought.