Family, Power, and Legacy: Crash Course Latin American Literature #9

0:00 Let me tell you about my family.

0:01 If you arrive late to the party, you got to say hi to everybody.

0:04 Always compliment the cooking.

0:06 And if my theas ask you for a dance, you better say yes.

0:09 A family is like its own little world with its own very particular culture.

0:14 But our families are also a place where we

0:16 absorb ideas and expectations about the world around us.

0:20 And in Latin American literature,

0:22 the family isn't just personal, it's political.

0:25 Hi, I'm Kurly Velasquez and this is Crash Course Latin American Literature.

0:30 [music] Don't you just love a romance novel?

0:36 Give me all the tropes.

0:37 I'll eat them up like a little chocolate FL.

0:40 Enemies to lovers, love triangles, love quadrangles.

0:43 Yes, more.

0:45 Back in the 19th century,

0:46 romance novels in Latin America weren't just about meat cute.

0:50 They were about nation building.

0:52 You see, after Latin American countries fought

0:55 for and won independence from European nations,

0:58 they had a lot of rebuilding to do.

1:00 Political leaders across many countries

1:02 gained power by uniting different regions,

1:05 races, and people under one national identity.

1:09 And romance novels pose a unique vision for how to get it done.

1:12 Maybe love could conquer all.

1:14 Take Brazilian author Jose Dean's 1865 novelasma.

1:19 It follows two star cross lovers in the early 1600s.

1:23 [music] Imagine Romeo and Juliet, but with colonialism,

1:26 power imbalances, and fewer cute balcony scenes.

1:29 Here's the setup.

1:31 She's an indigenous woman named Asimma.

1:33 He's a Portuguese colonist named Marim.

1:35 They're into each other, but of course, the odds are against them.

1:38 It's giving love story.

1:39 This love is difficult, but it's real.

1:42 On one hand, this is an indigenous

1:44 novel in that it's concerned with indigenous people,

1:48 but it's also a kind of Brazilian creation myth,

1:51 [music] a tale of tragic passion that's also like supercharged with patriotism.

1:56 Clear as mud, right?

1:58 We'll unpack it.

1:59 For starters, name is an anagram for America,

2:03 which is referencing Latin America, not the United States of.

2:07 And remember, Latin America at this time was

2:09 a fairly new idea focused on unifying different countries.

2:14 Now, dies after giving birth to a son, Moid, whose name means son of pain.

2:20 Many scholars have argued that death

2:22 symbolizes the idea that indigenous people's way

2:26 of life needed to be destroyed in order to create this new unified nation.

2:31 On the other hand, scholar Doris argues that Irasma's son represents

2:36 the point where an unmistakably resilient

2:39 past blends with an unpredictable future.

2:42 In other words, rather than being indigenous or Portuguese,

2:46 Mosi is something new, a mix that S calls quintessentially Brazilian.

2:52 For this reason, she calls this book

2:54 and other romance novels like it foundational fictions,

2:58 stories that present romance across social divides

3:01 as the bedrock for building a country.

3:04 She argues that this tale of tragic yearning is

3:07 really about encouraging readers to be fruitful and multiply.

3:12 Cuz in case you don't already have

3:13 the on your back about when you're going to have babies, do it for your country.

3:18 See what I mean about the family is political and with all that?

3:21 have kids to save your country business in the air.

3:23 It's no surprise Latin American literature also

3:26 has explored another type of family bond, parenthood.

3:30 Take Chilean poet Gabriella Mistral,

3:33 who's often called La Madre de Laatria or mother of the homeland.

3:38 For real though, her face is on postal stamps and everything.

3:40 In 1945, she went down in history as the first

3:43 Latin American writer ever to win a Nobel Prize in literature.

3:48 And even though Agusto Pinoett's military dictatorship tried to claim

3:52 her as a quaint traditional poet in the 1970s and 80s,

3:56 today she's often celebrated as a feminist and an LGBTQ icon.

4:02 Misad became especially wellknown for her writing for and about children.

4:07 Although she never had kids of her own,

4:09 which was unusual for most Chilean women at the time,

4:12 she was a teacher and she raised her nephew.

4:15 So she cared about kids deeply and often wrote about motherhood.

4:19 Like po Madres, the mother's poems is

4:22 written from the perspective of someone who's pregnant,

4:24 [music] expressing how her body is being made strange and different.

4:29 A new pulse echoing her own.

4:31 But even though Mistral revered motherhood,

4:34 she refused to reduce women's lives to that role alone.

4:37 When she was just 17,

4:39 she wrote an article defending women's access to education.

4:43 And throughout her life,

4:44 Mistral advocated for the rights of people with less power in her society,

4:49 women, indigenous people, and kids.

4:51 I think about that when I read her poem, El Nino Solo, the lonely child.

4:56 In it, the speaker hears a crying baby,

4:58 not her own, and rushes into the house to comfort him.

5:01 Holding the baby, the speaker says, "Trembling,

5:04 a lullaby arose from within me." And we could

5:07 read that as someone who longed to be a parent,

5:10 letting herself experience what that might be like for a moment.

5:13 But when I consider how Misad educated and advocated for kids her whole life,

5:18 I think about how having biological kids isn't the only

5:21 way to have kids in your life or care for them.

5:24 Fiercely cool Thea or Theo, Inspiring Teacher, also options.

5:29 And that's what I love about books, right?

5:31 Our interpretations can reinforce our expectations or challenge them or even

5:37 help us imagine new possibilities for how we might live.

5:40 And when it comes to new possibilities,

5:43 families are often the place where the next generation develops.

5:46 The young people will have to blaze their own paths,

5:49 sometimes in contradiction to their parents' expectations.

5:53 Let me give you the curly notes about a book that tackles these tensions.

5:57 Erica El Sanchez's 2017 novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter.

6:04 This book follows Julia,

6:05 a 15-year-old in Chicago and the daughter of Mexican immigrants,

6:09 much like Sanchez herself.

6:11 And like a lot of firstgen kids, Julia feels pressured to make her family proud.

6:16 It's not that I'm living life for them exactly,

6:18 but I have so many choices they've never had,

6:21 and I feel [music] like I can do so much with what I've been given.

6:25 What a waste their journey would be [music] if

6:27 I had just settled for a dull, mediocre life.

6:30 O, baby girl, that is so real.

6:32 Julia feels indebted to her parents for the life she has,

6:35 especially her amma who cleans houses all day,

6:38 and then comes home and keeps cleaning.

6:39 [music] But she also feels trapped by her mom's traditional expectations.

6:44 She wants to smooch boys, go to the top of the Eiffel Tower,

6:46 become a famous writer, and so do I.

6:50 Sorry, back to it.

6:52 On top of it all, Julia feels like

6:54 she's constantly being compared to her older sister,

6:56 Olga, the actual perfect Mexican daughter who recently died in a car accident.

7:02 As far as Julia can tell, Olga never swore or talked back or did

7:06 anything more exciting than occasionally watching a romcom.

7:09 But, okay, here's the cheese.

7:11 Julia's sister and her mom had stuff going on Julia never imagined.

7:16 Like, Olga owned lingerie.

7:19 So scandalous.

7:21 Amma was once a teenager with a rebellious streak.

7:24 And they [music] both had secrets like oldest private life

7:27 outside of the family and Amma's traumatic border crossing experience,

7:31 which of course shaped her fears for her own daughters.

7:35 These truths shatter Julia's one-dimensional view of the women in her family.

7:39 Forget perfect.

7:41 They're just as real and complicated as she is.

7:43 [music] Just as full of desires

7:45 and contradictions under the weight of cultural expectations.

7:48 [music] And understanding this actually helps Julia feel closer

7:52 to her mom [music] and her sister even after her sister's gone.

7:57 We love to see a family grow closer together,

7:59 but literature lets us explore all kinds of scenarios.

8:03 And in some cases, novels contemplate making

8:06 a new family outside our family of origin.

8:09 We see this theme in Justin Taus's 2011 novel, We The Animals,

8:15 which follows an unnamed narrator whose father

8:17 is Puerto Rican and whose mother is white.

8:20 At the beginning of the book, he's 6 years old,

8:23 roaming wild around his upstate New York hometown with his two older brothers.

8:28 The three boys move together like a pack, a three torsoed beast.

8:33 They're a unit, always calling themselves we and us.

8:38 But there's trouble at home.

8:40 Their dad, Bops, is a volatile guy.

8:43 Sometimes affectionate, but often abusive.

8:45 On the narrator's 7th birthday, Ma implores her son never to grow up.

8:50 She whispered it all to me, her needs so big.

8:53 No softness anywhere, only bops and boys turning into bops.

8:58 You get the sense she's begging her son not

9:00 to become the kind of man his dad is.

9:03 And when the boy replies, "I won't." It's the first time in the book

9:07 he sets himself apart from his brothers, switching from we to I.

9:12 As he grows up, he realizes he is different from his dad and brother's tough,

9:16 aggressive brand of masculinity.

9:18 The narrator is sensitive.

9:20 He's also attracted to men, but he keeps that a secret.

9:23 All the while, he's figuring out what his version of masculinity looks like.

9:27 And just by existing,

9:29 he challenges his family's expectation of what it means to be a man.

9:33 The narrator says, "His brothers smelled my difference,

9:37 my sharp pansy scent, and didn't know what to do with it.

9:41 All at once, they were disgusted

9:43 and jealous and deeply protective and deeply proud."

9:48 But it all comes to a head one night when Ma snoops in her son's journal,

9:52 outing him, and the whole family rejects him.

9:54 It's a dark ending, but there is a light of hope in the last chapter.

9:59 Though the narrator has cut ties with his family,

10:02 he hints that he's found a new intimacy among people like himself.

10:07 We're left with the idea that sometimes becoming who we

10:10 are means seeking kinship outside of the family we started with.

10:14 Family, it's where we first learn how to be people.

10:18 It's hugs and handme-downs,

10:20 generational trauma, and unsolicited relationship advice.

10:24 It's messy.

10:25 It's powerful.

10:26 And in Latin American literature,

10:28 it's a window into bigger questions about nationhood, identity, and belonging.

10:34 Next time, we're talking about other members of the family, animals.

10:38 See you then.

10:39 Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Latin American Literature,

10:42 which was filmed at the Gardlos Hernandez studio in Indianapolis,

10:46 Indiana, and was made with the help of all these people with families.

10:50 If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever,

10:54 you can join our community on Patreon.

10:56 Oh, and if you're interested in learning about

10:58 some of the topics covered in this episode,

11:00 we pulled together a playlist you can dig into.