A Companion to the History of the Book (28 page)

Brazil, which became a monarchy in 1822 and a republic in 1889, remained in relative peace during the wars for independence in the rest of the region, and so the role of the printing press diverged in some respects from trends in other countries. Nonetheless, Brazil’s road to independence (while preserving the monarchy) was not without turmoil. Major events of public interest – such as separatist movements in Pernambuco (1817 and 1824), the abdication of Prince Pedro I (1831), and the Regency years (1831–40) before the heir, Prince Pedro II, assumed the throne – produced an upsurge in political pamphleteering and periodical production, with rival newspapers espousing partisan views on the fate of the country. Laurence Hallewell (1982) reveals that, throughout the nineteenth century, the book trade was heavily dependent on exports from Lisbon and Paris, where there was a substantial Portuguese-language publishing industry. This was largely due to the prohibitive costs of domestic publishing as well as to cultural preferences for all things French. Rio de Janeiro (the imperial capital and main administrative, political, and cultural center until the emergence of São Paulo in the 1880s) was by far the leader in domestic publishing. Spurred by economic prosperity and increased literacy rates toward mid-century, literary and cultural works predominated over the political and administrative topics that had occupied presses earlier. As in other countries in the region, beginning in 1839, the main outlet for local authors was the
folhetim
or serialized novel that appeared in newspapers and was sometimes reprinted in book form.

Of particular note during this period is an increase in female readership that was substantial enough to influence the market, broadening the book trade to include topics geared to upper-class women and family-oriented issues. The first women’s magazine in Brazil,
A mulher do Simplicio, ou a Fluminense exaltada
, ran from 1832 to 1846 and was quickly followed by others. Its publisher, Francisco de Paula Brito (1819–61), rose from humble origins to become a literary visionary, the first actively to cultivate aspiring Brazilian authors: he published Antônio Goncalves Texeira e Sousa and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis not on commission (as was generally the custom) but for a salary. Another important publisher of fiction was the French émigré Baptiste Garnier (1823–93), of the Parisian firm Garnier Frères, who settled in Rio in 1844.

Between 1880 and 1930, a period of sustained economic prosperity brought about a modest expansion of the Spanish-American book industry. Book publishing in Rio suffered a temporary setback during the political turmoil of the newly formed republic during the decade of the 1890s. As the industrialized countries of the North Atlantic sought Argentine meat and grain, Brazilian and Colombian coffee, sugar from Cuba, silver from Mexico, bananas from Honduras and Costa Rica, nitrate and copper from Chile, foreign capital poured in, helping to build railroads, introduce new technologies, and fuel urbanization. Literacy rates increased, and a growing urban middle class could afford to purchase consumer goods, including reading material. Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and southern Brazil attracted vast numbers of immigrants (largely Italian and Spanish, but also Irish, Eastern European Jewish, German, Austrian, French, and British) to work in agriculture-related industries and factories. The case of Argentina was particularly striking, with a population that ballooned from 1.7 million in 1869 to 7.9 million in 1914, when half the population of Buenos Aires was foreign-born. A number of recent studies trace the impact of this largely urban reading public (which now included the working class) on the book trade, local publishing, and print culture (Prieto 1988).

Although Mexico did not experience such massive foreign immigration, a cultural renaissance, emphasizing revisionist views of national history along with artistic and literary accomplishments, flourished after the Revolution of 1910–17 was consolidated. In the 1920s, spearheaded by José Vasconcelos and his successors in the newly created Secretaría de Educación Pública, the government implemented a successful national campaign to educate rural populations, founded public libraries, distributed free textbooks to schoolchildren, and launched a number of publishing ventures and other cultural initiatives fostering fresh perspectives on Mexican history, literature, and the arts.

As in Brazil, the Spanish-language book market in America was dominated by France, until Catalan firms began to take the lead around 1912, with the establishment of branches in major Latin American cities. However, by the 1920s a handful of local publishers – Porrúa and Bota in Mexico; Zig Zag and Ercilla in Chile; Claridad, Babel, and Minerva in Argentina; and Monteiro Lobato in Brazil – were beginning to make strides in the market, producing cheap editions of world classics in translation and actively cultivating national and regional authors. In Buenos Aires, there were publishers who had specialized niches, such as textbooks, musical scores, medical and scientific literature, telecommunications, jurisprudence, supremely popular detective and “pulp” fiction, Argentine avant-garde writers, or popular magazines and literary journals. There was a surge in local publishing in the wake of World War I, when Latin American firms stepped in to fill the wartime shortfall in European publications.

The two decades between 1930 and 1950 would be the “Golden Age” of Latin American publishing. This period was characterized by a substantial increase in domestic publishing output, a marked trend toward professionalization and specialization of labor (printing, editing, binding, distribution) in the book industries, and the internationalization of Latin American literature within the countries of the region and abroad. The Spanish Civil War (1936–9) and World War II (1939–45) both spurred this development. In the first few months of the peninsular conflict, Spanish publishing all but ceased, leaving 80 percent of the Latin American book market without supply, according to one estimate. The response was import substitution in those countries with larger domestic markets and/or a higher standard of living. Argentina, Mexico, and Chile expanded book production to fill the gap and satisfy the demand of increasingly literate masses at home as well as the Spanish-language market abroad.

Those three countries also received the largest proportion of exiles fleeing the Spanish Civil War. Most were educated, many were intellectuals sympathetic to the Republican cause, and they brought with them an intimate knowledge of the book trade as writers, publishers, printers, editors, or booksellers. Many settled in Buenos Aires, the largest publishing center in the region at the time, but the Mexican government implemented a concerted policy to offer asylum to Spaniards fleeing the conflict or certain retaliation by the victorious Franco regime. Nearly five thousand of those who emigrated to Mexico were academics, intellectuals, or book industry professionals. In all three countries, Spanish
republicanos
quickly established themselves by collaborating with existing publishers (such as the recently founded Fondo de Cultura Económica in México), founding their own firms (Emecé, Sudamericana, and Losada in Argentina), or working as translators or print technicians. The result, especially in Mexico and Argentina, was an invigorated domestic publishing scene that eventually placed Buenos Aires and Mexico City as industry leaders within the Spanish-speaking world, a position they hold to this day. Though the Chilean book industry also experienced a boom, the lack of official support, reflected in the imposition of taxes on printed material and bureaucratic obstacles to publishing, hampered further expansion after the 1950s. The increased activity of domestic publishing in Spanish America also broadened the catalogue of regional authors to include the works of Brazilian writers in translation for the first time.

The publishing industry received the benefit of government and professional institutional support during these years. In many countries, governments subsidized publishing ventures or established firms that disseminated the work of national and regional authors at affordable prices. In the wake of the petroleum boom in the 1940s, the Venezuelan government emerged on the publishing scene, spurring the domestic textbook industry in response to official educational promotion and, in later decades, founding Monte Avila Editores and Ediciones Ayacucho, which have produced important works with a regional focus and international distribution. Beginning in the 1940s, public and private sector participation in publishing also led to the founding of national and regional associations of book professionals to discuss intellectual property, translation rights, paper production, and other matters of common interest to the region, as well as to lobby for state regulation of the industry.

The spectacular growth of the Spanish-American book industry (Argentina grew from 823 registered titles published in 1935 to a peak of 5,323 in 1944) would prove to be short-lived with respect to its competitive edge with Spain. In the 1950s, peninsular publishing houses set out to regain their prewar status in the Spanish-language book market. The Franco regime, anxious to promote a transatlantic sentiment of
hispanidad
in this and other cultural arenas, provided subsidies to the industry and legal measures to facilitate production and exports, to the point where texts censored within Spain were allowed to be published and distributed abroad. While Spain successfully regained its predominance, the postwar years nonetheless altered the publishing landscape in Latin America.

Expanded print production, along with increased national and international circulation, had an impact on newly literate and mass readerships and helped to consolidate national identities, for example in post-revolutionary Mexico or in Argentina during the first decades of the twentieth century. Many personal accounts, memoirs, and reminiscences written by founders, publishers, and other individuals who participated in major editorial projects reveal that publishing houses were not just commercial establishments but craft industries, cultural and often political ventures engaged with broader ideals. For the first time in Latin American history, cultural production was shared by wider audiences, not just elites, and those who worked in the major houses of this period convey a sense of contributing to this process, something that eludes quantitative analysis.

The Cuban Revolution (1959) merits particular attention in the history of print culture in the region for a number of reasons. Almost immediately, the Castro regime implemented a series of initiatives on the educational and cultural fronts designed to increase literacy, remove barriers to the circulation of printed material, and actively promote Cuban writers in all fields of intellectual and scientific activity. Other interventions by socialist and Marxist governments, such as the short-lived Allende regime in Chile (1971–3) and the Sandinistas’ literacy campaign in Nicaragua in the 1980s, made print accessible for the first time to all sectors of society. Conversely, there were also episodes of repression and censorship of printed works, such as during military rule in Brazil (1964–85), the Pinochet regime (1973–90) in Chile, the dirty war carried out by the military in Argentina (1976–83), and the Cuban state in varying degrees since the late 1960s.

The expansion of literacy and publishing in Latin America set the stage for a “boom” of Latin American literature, when the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa achieved international recognition. Both the Cuban Revolution and New York publishing houses played important parts in this phenomenon. Within months of taking power, the Castro regime implemented a cultural policy beyond its borders through the Instituto Casa de las Américas: it promoted the literature, arts, and social sciences of the region and attracted Latin American intellectuals by subsidizing publications, awarding prizes, founding journals, and sponsoring conferences. In response, the Ford Foundation, the Center for Inter-American Relations, and other US-based sources – many of them governmental or quasi-governmental entities – launched a concerted effort to promote Latin American literature through literary journals, prizes, and subsidizing translation series in major New York publishing houses and in Europe. The “boom” was thus as much the product of commercial interests and Cold War politics as a literary phenomenon.

Moreover, the intellectual repression exercised by the Cuban state in the late 1960s, and especially by the early 1970s, further polarized Latin American writers, critics, and artists, alienating some who had initially supported the regime. The result was that initial critical assessments of the Latin American “boom” that did not center on aesthetic or literary evaluations were largely driven by partisan political fervor from either the right or the left. By the 1970s and 1980s, several critics, most notably Angel Rama (1981), turned to sociological studies of book production and distribution, mass readership, and marketing techniques to ground their understanding of the “boom” on more solid foundations. Since then, the disciplinary shift away from text-based literary analysis to the role of cultural institutions and the material conditions of cultural production has produced a growing body of work on the intersections of print and literary production, including analyses of media beyond print.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, government engagement in publishing, either through joint ventures (for example, in Brazil and Venezuela) or outright ownership (as in Cuba), often countered the tendency of large presses to become part of transnational capitalist corporations. While the latter, particularly Spanish multinationals in Spanish America, grew to dominate certain fields by the early twenty-first century, the continuing tradition of successful small publishers in the region suggests that the role of print culture in nation-building remains recognized and appreciated by Latin Americans. Perhaps what characterizes publishing in Latin America is its exceptional capacity to survive different economic and political regimes, to cope with substantial national instability and still publish books recognized as important for worldwide consumption. Latin America is no longer dependent on foreign presses, as it was in the nineteenth century, when Brazil produced only one-quarter of the number of books it imported. Today Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Santiago de Chile, Caracas, and Santafé de Bogotá are all major publishing centers, though the challenge of uneven and inadequate distribution channels remains.