Chapter 09 Summary

CHAPTER 9

From the late 1920s through the 1950s, as urbanization, industrialization, and the shocks of the Depression and World War II continued to transform Latin American societies, notions of national culture, identity, belonging, and citizenship were reshaped as well. Many of the groups left out or left behind during the age of progress and modernization – people of indigenous and African descent, the rural and urban poor, women, immigrants – were incorporated in new ways into national culture and society, though often still on contested and ambivalent terms. Changes in media production, dissemination, and consumption – especially the rise of film, radio and commercial recording, and comic books – broadened and deepened the ways in which Latin Americans could represent themselves and their national cultures. Governments took an active role in shaping debates over identity, through ministries of culture and education, museums, public schools, support for the arts, and, at times, outright propaganda.

Overall, notions of citizenship and belonging broadened. Intellectuals, artists, and activists in Mexico, Guatemala, and the Andean nations developed new ideas about mestizaje – celebrating national culture as a mix of indigenous and European elements – and indigenismo – attending to the unique identities of and challenges facing indigenous cultures. Brazilians came to celebrate their society as racially mixed and depicted anti-black racism as a thing of the past – despite considerable evidence that racism and racial inequality endured. Women across the region pushed for and gradually won the right to vote, though it was not until late in this period or afterward that the region's electorates expanded to include all adult citizens regardless of race, sex, place of birth, or property. As modern national cultures and identities formed and re-formed, old patterns of exclusion and hierarchy proved at once malleable and persistent.