Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [217]
Colombia, as I wrote after my return, was experiencing ‘the greatest mobilisation of armed peasants (whether as guerrillas, bandits or self-defence groups) in the contemporary history of the western hemisphere, except, possibly, for some moments of the Mexican Revolution’.5 Curiously, this fact was either unnoticed or played down by the contemporary ultra left in and outside South America (all of whose Guevarist attempts at guerrilla insurrection were spectacular failures) on the ostensible grounds that it was linked to an orthodox Communist Party, but in fact because those inspired by the Cuban Revolution neither understood nor wanted to understand what actually might move Latin American peasants to take up arms.
III
It was not hard to become a Latin American expert in the early 1960s. Fidel’s triumph created enormous interest in the region, which was poorly covered by press and universities outside the USA. I had not intended to take a specialist interest in the region, although I also found myself lecturing and writing about it in the 1960s and early 1970s in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere, adding appendices on the Peruvian peasant movement and the Colombian Violencia to the (first) Spanish edition of Primitive Rebels, and in 1971 spending a sabbatical en famille doing more serious research on peasants in Mexico and Peru. I continued to go there several times in each decade, mainly to Peru, Mexico and Colombia, but also on occasion to Chile, before and during the Allende period and after the end of the Pinochet era. And, of course, I did not even try to resist the sheer drama and colour of the more glamorous parts of that continent, even though it also contains some of the most anti-human environments on the globe – the high Andean Altiplano on the limits of cultivability, the cactus-spiked semi-desert of northern Mexico – and some of the world’s most uninhabitable giant cities – Mexico City and São Paulo. Over the years, I acquired dear friends such as the Gasparians in Brazil, Pablo Macera in Peru and Carlos Fuentes in Mexico, and students or colleagues who became friends. In short, I was permanently converted to Latin America.
Nevertheless, I never tried to become or saw myself as a Latin Americanist. As for the biologist Darwin, for me as a historian the revelation of Latin America was not regional but general. It was a laboratory of historical change, mostly different from what might have been expected, a continent made to undermine conventional truths. It was a region where historical evolution occurred at express speed and could actually be observed happening within half a lifetime of a single person, from the first clearing of forests for farm or ranch to the death of the peasantry, from the rise and fall of export crops for the world market to the explosion of giant super-cities such as the megalopolis of São Paulo, where one could find a mixture of immigrant populations more implausible even than in New York – Japanese and Okinawans, Calabrians, Syrians, Argentine psychoanalysts and a restaurant proudly labelled ‘CHURRASCO TIPICO NORCOREANO’ (Typical North Korean Barbecue). It was a place where ten years doubled the size of Mexico City, and transformed the street-scene of Cuzco from one dominated by Indians in traditional costume to people wearing modern (‘cholo’) clothes.
Inevitably it changed my perspective on the history of the rest of the globe, if only by dissolving the border between the ‘developed’ and the ‘Third’ worlds, the present and the historic past. As in García Márquez’s great One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which everyone who knows Colombia recognizes both the magic and the realism, it forced one to make sense of what was at first sight implausible. It provided what ‘counterfactual’ speculations can never do, namely a genuine range