Any investigation of collective identity today, if it is not to become an

essentialist quest for a national spirit or soul, must necessarily bear in mind
that knowledge is constructed, and that this construction is endlessly
renewed. Not only is there no such a thing as cultural essence, but our very
conceptualization of collective identity is subject to interpretation, renewal
and criticism.
Amaryll Chanady Latin American Identity and Constructions of
Difference. University of Minessota Press, 1994. Introduction p. x

The indigenous nations of the Latin America found in the quincentennial

(1992) an opportunity to assert a counter history, revindicate their lifeways,
and consolidate present struggles for territory and autonomy. Intellectuals
are called upon to define, or redefine, their relation to the structures of
knowledge and power they produce, and that produce them. In the midst of
ecological catastrophe and continuing imperial adventurism, the
quincentennial underscores what tremendous historical force has been
wielded by the European ideologies of territory and global possessiveness.

Three Approaches to Understand Latin America

Transculturation, Heterogeneity and Hybridity are three concepts that

challenge the monolingual discourse and strategies of nation building in
Latin America from a particular position. Since the nineteenth century the
idea of a nation or national identity in the newly born Latin American
countries was primarily based on the mestizo idea. However, this mestizo
image ended up being a whitening process ignoring huge sectors of the
population, i.e. Amerindians and Afro-Latin Americans.

Transculturation:

The term transculturación has been used by ethnographers to describe how

subordinated or marginal groups select and invent materials transmitted to
them by a dominant or metropolitan culture. Transculturación was coined in
1940 by Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz in his attempt to describe the
Afro-culture in his work Contrapunto Cubano. (1947, 1963) published in
Caracas by Biblioteca Ayacucho.

Ortiz, describing the Afro-Cuban culture, claimed that two plants, tobacco
and sugar, were the two most important figures in its history. This new
approach called the attention of researchers to the fact of how non-human
actants could affect a historical process influencing people’s behaviour:
coloniser’s/colonised; slaves/free; state/individual.

Angel Rama, Uruguayan critic, incorporated the term into Latin American
lietary terms in the 1970s. He saw transculturation as a way to autonomy and
cultural independence, that is a step towards constructing ‘a broad literary
system, a field of integration and mediation that would be functional and
self-regulated. Argueda’s writing in search of a narrative that could express
the Andean mentality in a closer way fits Rama’s view of transculturation.

Mary Louise Pratt (1992) adds that transculturation is a phenomenon of the

contact zone and there is abundance of, and a variety of contact zones in all
Latin American literary work, but primarily in those by writers within the
indigenista and negritude movements.

Heterogeneity

Julio Ortega in his book Crítica de la identidad (1998) states: “Ours

[Peruvian] is a conflictive and hierarchized identity”. Ortega criticizes the
monolithic conception of identity and the incessant production of an official-
national identity by the ideological state apparatuses (p.217). He thinks the
only possible way of understanding identity is being conscious of its
peculiarity and plurality, rooted in a common history and collective project.

Hybridity

Central to Hybridity is the notion that social formation does not necessarily
run from ancient to modern, or from inferior to superior. Canclini affirms
that in their attempt to modernize and still remain culturally pure, Latin
American nations have often legitimated existing inequalities. His approach
combines anthropological and sociological methods to build an autonomous
culture that can survive the transnational market.

Traditions not quite past and modernity not yet wholly present make a
curious hybrid of Latin American culture. Canclini questions whether Latin
America can move towards democracy and compete in a global marketplace
giving in to temptations of elitism or losing its cultural identity.

Canclini argues that there has been too much weight put on the traditional
when dealing with popular culture. He defends the hypothesis that it makes
little sense to study some processes under the light of popular culture.
Almost all the conventional categories and pairs of oppositions
(subaltern/hegemony, traditional/modern) employed for talking about the
popular explode more visibly. Their new modalities of organization of
culture and the hybridization of the traditions of classes, ethnic groups, and
nations require different conceptual instruments.

All these three concepts seen in above revendicate a reconceptualization of

Latin america as plural, hybrid and heterogenoeus, which contrasts with the
monolithic discourse of ‘hispanidad’.

As regards literature, they also question the literary canon to be

representative of what is Latin American. It is in the late twentieth century
that subaltern texts have been included and studied as part of the cultural
identity of Latin America.