Conclusion: Other Signs, Other Worlds

Our review of twenty-first-century Spanish-language narrative fiction began with a consideration of the signs that precede the end of the world. The hero we considered, Maquina, had left the old village to enter a new border world. Maquina’s only weapon in this new no-man’s-land teeming with violence and erased identities was, as had been the case previously, language. But there, the already trilingual Maquina, appeared to be forging a new way forward via a new tongue. Always “jarchando,” she kept on keeping on.

We ended our study of new-millenium fiction with a collection arising from another alternative linguistic tradition, as ancient—if not as exotic—as that which produced the “jarchas.” In both cases—Mozarabic or Asturian—alternative ways of speaking, writing, and thinking challenge the linguistic and discursive hegemonies of modernity. But while Maquina found herself in an unfamiliar, newly emergent borderland, the protagonists of Bello’s stories occupy what would appear to be the most familiar of spaces, a homeland older than the Spanish nation itself.

Yet this homeland provides the ground for a model of a new kind of space from which new forms of citizenship for a new world might arise. If in Herrera’s novel a world was ending with just a hint provided of how to get there (“jarchar”), in Bello’s stories, essays, and poems a new space-time appears to be opening up. We have referred to the novels examined in this study as “novels for the end of a world.” And yet the conclusions we have drawn from nearly all of them hint at ways of continuing on after the end has come. In story after story, we reach the darkness at the center of the tunnel with sometimes only the tiniest glimmer of light visible in a nearly impossible-to-envision distance. But in every case, our protagonists—even when their end point is death or insanity—appear to find some way of continuing on, of “jarchando.”

This repetition of conclusions may merely be a result of my own optimistic readings. But ending with stories from Asturias grounds a more material argument for such optimism; worlds may end, but out of their ashes new ones arise. Only fifty or so years ago, Asturias was, like so many of the regions represented by the Latin American selections in this study today, a country still confronting a recent legacy of deep suffering and staring into a very uncertain future. While Asturias in 1970, like the rest of Spain, was a decade or so into a period of unprecedented economic growth, politically it was still governed by a military dictator, a man who had made war on his own people. That war had killed hundreds of thousands and produced decades of authoritarian rule, marked by tens of thousands of political imprisonments and frequent executions. That dictator had, in fact, first shown himself for what he was in the very region of Asturias, where he brutally crushed a coal miners´ strike in the early 1930s. The strike itself arose out of conditions of grinding poverty and endless, dangerous toil experienced by generations of Asturian miners. Living in 1970s Asturias one could have been forgiven for being pessimistic about the future. Even as the dictator’s death approached, there would have been little light at the end of the tunnel.

And yet fifty years on, so much has changed. Today Asturias enjoys secure status as an autonomous community within a relatively mature Western democracy that has celebrated regular, peaceful transitions of power for decades. Despite a slow recovery from the 2007–2008 global recession, Asturias, like the rest of Spain, enjoys per capita income at near record highs. Measures of overall human development, including considerations of income inequality, show equal promise. The cosmopolitanism displayed in story after story by Bello’s protagonist—studying in California, traveling to New York, engaging with intellectuals across the globe—would have been unthinkable one hundred years ago to a rural Asturian, a child of Paniceiros, and still highly unlikely in 1970.

Today that same citizen of Paniceiros can afford a weekend in Brittany celebrating local nationalist identities. He has, first and foremost, the economic resources. But perhaps just as telling, such celebrations are no longer forbidden. Certainly, Catalan separatist sentiments have made recent headlines around the world, but despite the cries of self-interested national politicians to the contrary and the attempts of equally self-interested politicians on the Catalan stage, to date Spain has yet to collapse: “España (no) se rompe” [Spain is (not) breaking up]. Despite noisy protests and notorious government missteps, not a single person has died in the decade-long controversy. Even the Basque provinces today, at long last, enjoy a relative peace. Spain may be a frustrated state, but it is hardly breaking up, nor is it cracking the skulls of its dissident citizens. If its politicians can still be somewhat ham-fisted in their approach to certain problems, long gone is the iron fist of military dictators. There is reason for optimism.

In sum, while in hindsight we can see that Asturias in 1970 was in the early days of what have since been fifty years of almost constant economic growth, expanding political freedoms, and improvement in the overall conditions of life, at the time in question little of that could be seen. Asturias was still a world known, above all, for economic crisis, political injustice, and a sense of existential hopelessness. Kind of like Latin America today.

We might be forgiven for asking, then, if the rest of the Spanish-speaking world today, like Asturias fifty years ago, stands at the brink of something new—at the end of one world and the beginning of another. While Latin America still suffers from a number of seemingly intractable problems—it remains the lowest-ranked continent in the world with respect to economic freedom, including lack of rule of law and property rights—there is also serious evidence that the continent is turning a corner.

After a half century in which every last country in Latin America save one experienced some form of military rule or civil war, today not a single country suffers from large-scale civil war, while only one traditional dictator remains in power. In 2018, seven hundred people died in the slowly deescalating Colombian conflict while ten lost their lives in Peru. Too many to be sure, but a far cry from the 200,000 killed during Colombia’s La Violencia or the 70,000 casualties of Peru’s La Guerra. As for the rest of Latin America, not a single death was reported in 2018 from formal warfare. Certainly, violence still racks parts of Central America, and Mexico spent a large part of the first two decades of the twenty-first century waging a bloody and mostly fruitless war on drugs (22,500 killed in 2018 alone). But large-scale civil warfare is on the wane and even violence looks to be winding down. Honduras’s San Pedro Sula, known as the murder capital of the world, saw homicide rates drop by 62% from 2014 to 2016.²⁰ Similarly, in Colombia homicide rates dropped from 79.3 per 100,000 in 1991 to 25.9 in 2015.²¹

Meanwhile with warfare and general violence on the sharp decline, democracy and the rule of law are on the rise. While authoritarian rulers haven’t disappeared entirely—Nicaragua, Honduras, and Venezuela come to mind—they now cloak their behavior behind democratic claims and institutions. If there is still violence and limited press freedoms, few would compare their extremes to those of so many of the military rulers of the last century. Moreover today’s pseudo-democratic demagogues are outliers who enjoy little support from the international community. Gone are the Cold War dynamics that lavished economic resources and ideological justifications on brutal governments from both sides of the political spectrum. Today the Cato Institute’s Political Freedom Index ranks Latin America as a whole at dead center between complete freedom and none at all. There’s still a long way to go, but today only Venezuela receives a failing grade. The Freedom House Index breaks the political progress of Latin America down numerically. In 1976 it listed only eleven countries in Latin American as “free,” with nine listed as “not free.” The remainder fell somewhere in between. Today the “free” list has more than doubled from eleven to twenty-six, while only two remain “not free.” Moreover, the Freedom House annual report shows these numbers to be part of an ongoing, consistent trend toward a better, freer Latin America.

But is the progress of states matched by improvement in the lives of their citizens? The numbers again indicate steady economic growth across Latin America—even over the course of the bloody and oppressive twentieth century (Prados de la Escosura ). In 1890, the first year for which data is available, 90% of Latin Americans lived in poverty. Today, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century that number hovers between 25% and 30%, with particular improvement in the decade between 2002 and 2012 when poverty rates dropped from 41.6% to 25.3% (World Bank 7–8). The same decade saw the halving of the number of people in extreme poverty, from 24.5% to 12.3%, accounting for seventy million people. Moreover the middle class, long an indicator not just of economic growth but of future political stability, grew over the same decade from 23% percent to 34%. Finally, in answer to those who claim that so much of the new wealth is going to an elite sliver of the population, in Latin America the GINI index of inequality actually declined between 2002 and 2017, from .543 to .466 (Cepal.org), still poor but at least an improvement. Not factored into the index was the doubling of investment in social programs by Latin American governments during that time—an indirect form of tackling inequality.

Significant spending has, happily, led to greater educational opportunities, laying a strong foundation for the coming century. In the last decade of the twentieth century, primary education rates increased by 23% across Latin America, growing the number of children enrolled in elementary school by over thirteen million. Nearly complete gender parity in enrollments was achieved in the process. Current primary school enrollment in Latin America stands at around 97%. Secondary education grew almost as much during the same decade from 53% to 81%, while adult literacy improved to 89% percent (UNESCO EFA Global Monitoring Report).

While certain problems in Latin America today may continue to feel intractable, it’s important to remember that just because a problem doesn’t go away, doesn’t mean it continues to kill, maim, or starve. Spain and the national question serves again as a case in point. Nationalist and separatist movements continue to frustrate citizens and their political representatives on the Iberian peninsula. But it is worth considering whether the issue of Catalan nationalism in the twenty-first century is really the same as that of the first half of the twentieth. Nationalists on both sides may continue to reference the same heroes and the same historic battles with their same historic victories and defeats, but a Catalan struggle for greater autonomy or even independence from a democratic state deeply embedded in multiple, overlapping intergovernmental organizations, themselves embedded within a complex global economy, and carried out by militants whose first wish it is to immediately embed themselves within that same complex political and economic web, does not carry the same possibilities for terrible, enduring violence as did earlier struggles against decadent monarchies and recalcitrant dictators. Certain problems may not go away, but external conditions may change to such an extent that those problems eventually become more symbolic than material. Furthermore, in a globalized world experiencing an ongoing technological revolution, development that once took decades if not centuries can now happen in a matter of years and even less. Diseases can be eradicated sometimes within weeks, as in the case of the SARS pandemic, and the introduction of simple, affordable technologies like cell phones can transform subsistence farmers to global entrepreneurs literally overnight. For all its mistakes, the twentieth-century Green Revolution guaranteed food where once the prospect of famine was constant. Crop technologies today continue to improve, feeding more mouths for less money and, happily, without many of the environmental and health problems of the first Green Revolution.

Finally there is little reason to believe that any of this will not continue. In case after case, Latin America is today where the United States was forty years ago and Western Europe was shortly before that. Despite occasional wars, natural disasters, economic downturns, and less-than-ideal leadership, measures of health, wealth, and overall prosperity on both continents continue ticking upward. There is no reason not to expect Latin America to follow suit. In sum, there is plenty of reason to believe that the twenty-first century will be, for the majority of Spanish speakers, a different world.

But if such is the case, why is there so much pain and suffering in the novels considered? If narrative fiction allows readers to enjoy the experience of the worlds they create, and if those worlds can forge for us a sense of reality, even of truth, and if the truth, as the data above shows, is quite positive, why have we spent the past couple of hundred pages working our way through so much suffering?

Two answers come to mind. First, as in Asturias fifty years ago, conditions in Latin America are still in general not good. All the above-mentioned data shouldn’t dull us to the fact that the starting points for the upward trends were, across the board, abysmal. Thankfully fiction, as we’ve noted throughout this study doesn’t merely alert us to this fact but allows us, in a sense, to live it. The data may have improved but the day-to-day can still be rough.

The second answer is related. Once again it comes down to the fact that we have been reading stories. And rare is the story that gives a bird’s-eye take on the history of a place or a time. Stories do not offer overviews of an entire nation or continent across decades or centuries. Stories are not statistical analyses. They are, to the contrary, particular (which explains a great deal of their value). Particular individuals suffering the effects of the 2001 Argentine economic crisis do not care that what they are living is a mere brief reversal in an overall trend of increased economic growth and equality. Victims of Colombia’s official “peace” do not care that the so-called peace is part of broader trends which, over time, are making their country safer. In the midst of the violence that they continue to live, they care only that the peace for them is still a farce, as it was for the seven hundred killed in the Colombian “non-conflict” in 2017. And even when democracy enjoys now decades of continuity in Latin America’s southern cone, the children of Operación Condor’s victims still deal with the effects of emotionally short-circuited childhoods.

The insights of fiction—its truths, if you will—are rarely if ever any kind of big-picture truth. They are, rather, human truths, very much small truths of the lowercase t variety, as much as they may feel via the reading process like capital T ones. John Keats famously attributed to artists the gifts of “negative capability.” Artists, fiction writers included, have the ability to tolerate the pain and confusion of not knowing. If others fall back on grand metanarratives and moral certitudes (or perhaps broad statistical analyses) to argue that we live in the best of all possible worlds, writers see messes, hopeless cases, and tragic injustice. And then they have the ability to narrate what they see, to tell the tale. Authors of fiction remind us how humans live their own particular reality and how they interpret it, inviting us to participate in that meaning making and value-making. This is the “truth,” we noted in the introduction to this study, that fiction offers. Merely one piece of the picture, but the one that often helps us to at last understand.

That being said, for all the pessimism expressed in the novels studied over the last two hundred pages, we conclude by returning to my reading of hope, or at least to the possibility of hope that arises time and again from the stories. It was not my intention at the outset of this project to conclude so many of my readings with the concept of movement, even the simple act of walking. But it is precisely the activity in which we find both Maxi and Maquina, as well as the fictional Lalo and the fictional Zambra at the ends of their stories. Rosero’s profesor, though soon to be dead, insists on stepping toward the soldiers and refusing to be silent. He will continue to speak, to educate. Likewise Roncagliolo’s Chacaltana, rather than participating in a state apparatus that denies his people’s violent reality, has taken to the hills where he runs wild alongside the graves of the dead, a constant reminder to all of his truth. Guerra’s Nieve, despite the failure she sees around her, refuses to abandon ship. The same goes for Rey Rosa’s Elena and Joaquín. Their particular movement is to stay and live, while Silvestre’s is to roam free. Martínez’s Cadogan, it appears, will not stay or go, but return, not to produce or record but simply to hear and experience anew. Even Gopegui’s Edmundo Gómez Risco has taken his truths to the edge of his world from where he appears to invite poetry back in. Santos-Febres’s Julián Castrodad will write, as will Cercas’s autofictional alter ego. In case after case, the world appears to collapse in on our protagonists—each collapse another apocalyptic sign lived at the local, individual level, signalling to that person in particular that their world is coming to an end—in the words of Maquina, “estoy muerta.” And yet, in every case, a glimmer of something new, a yet unnamed and sometimes scarcely identified dynamic appears. That dynamic is not the way forward but more akin to the going forward itself, like Maquina “jarchando.” In the movements of each protagonist a new language takes shape, a language that may never arrive at anything or anywhere but that, for now, will carry us not where we need to go but simply where we can go, or at least sustain us as we await, a new always better world.