As the result of a boom in novel writing during the 1960s, Latin American literature finally captured world attention in the second half of the 20th century. Latin American novels, quickly translated into the major Western languages, caught the attention of critics and public alike both for the originality of their topics--all part of the present reality of Latin America--and for their rich, innovative styles. Despite earlier acknowledgment that Latin America had a substantial literary output, it took the "novels of the boom" to demonstrate that Latin American works were more than simply regional products and that many, in fact, altered the course of world literature. Native and Early Colonial Writings Except for the romances of chivalry they knew so well, and, to a lesser extent, the Bible, the Europeans who first came to Latin America in the 15th and 16th centuries had no literary models on which to base descriptions of what they found. Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci therefore described Latin America in terms of the literature they were familiar with. The chronicles of the first conquerors and colonizers likewise contain accounts of feats of courage and bouts of despair that are half-real, half-imagined in the light of the books they had read at home. The land and its inhabitants were often described in idealized terms that suggested the influence of the popular European notion of the noble savage. In practice, however, the natives were enslaved through excessive labor, and their cultures desecrated. The degree of civilization represented by the indigenous tribes living in the New World varied widely. Some examples of the great Mayan, Incan, and Aztecan civilizations were preserved thanks to the efforts of sympathetic friars. The Mayan sacred book Popol Vuh (Eng. trans., 1950), containing their philosophy, cosmology, and history, is an example of this extraordinary culture. The Franciscan Fray Bernardino de Sahagun (c.1500-90) wrote a history of New Spain, as Mexico was then called, basing his observations on material in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs; and a mestizo from the viceroyalty of Peru, \TGarcilaso de la Vega\t, wrote his Royal Commentaries (1609-17; Eng. trans., 1869-71) to record life in pre-Columbian Peru as well as the conquest and civil wars that followed. Most Latin American literature in the 16th and 17th centuries attempted to describe the newly conquered lands for the European reader. Writers wavered between awestruck amazement and hyperbolic language when describing the exotic birds, the vibrant hues of tropical plants, the strange inhabitants, and their rites and temples; at the same time, they recorded and sometimes enhanced their own major feat, the conquest. Perhaps the most engrossing account of this event is given by Bernal Diaz del Castillo (c.1492-1584) in his The True Story of the Conquest of Mexico (1632; Eng. trans., 1956). This amazing chronicle vividly recalls the adventures of the author as a young soldier in the army of Cortes. The writer's memory is prodigious, his writing lively and unencumbered by erudite pretensions. Although the largest number of works dealt with the conquest as a feat of courage and faith, critics of the enterprise were not lacking. Fray Bartolome de \TLas Casas\t, the most distinguished and successful critic, in his Brevisima relacion de la destruccion de las Indias (1552; trans. 1953 as The Tears of the Indians) indicted the Spanish crown and its representatives for their maltreatment and eventual decimation of the native population. His advocacy prompted the king in Madrid to issue ordinances to temper the abuses perpetrated against the Indians. Once colonization ended, picaresque accounts of travel and adventure, such as that written in 1690 by the Mexican Carlos de \TSiguenza y Gongora\t, began to flourish. At the most sumptuous viceregal courts, in Mexico and Lima, baroque verse came into fashion, in imitation of the style then in vogue at the Spanish court. A Mexican nun, Sor \TJuana Ines de la Cruz\t, became well known as the "tenth muse" at the Mexican court for her dramatic pieces, poetry, and sophisticated scientific and philosophical writings. She is considered the most important literary figure of the Spanish colonial era. The Literature of Independence The 18th century and the beginning of the 19th saw the stirrings of a new pride among Latin Americans as independence approached. Most men of letters were by now members of the creole group, that is, descendants of Europeans born in the New World, with an allegiance to and sense of pride in their native land rather than Spain. In 1810 independence was declared in Venezuela, Mexico, and Buenos Aires. Not until the 1820s, however, did most of the continent free itself from Spanish rule. With autonomy a variety of national literatures emerged, and attention was focused on both the land and the Indian, mulatto, or mestizo as its native inhabitant. Poets, realizing at this point that they had to establish their cultural identity, set out to do so by addressing themselves to the battles and heroes of independence, La Victoria de Junin: a Bolivar (The Victory of Junin: Hymn to Bolivar, 1825) of Jose Joaquin Olmedo (1790-1847) being the best-known example. The Indian was the exalted topic of the poem La Cautiva (The Captive, 1837) by Esteban \TEcheverria\t and of the collection of poems called En el Teocalli de Cholula (On the Pyramid of Cholula, 1820) by Jose Maria Heredia (1803-39). Andres \TBello\t and, from a different point of view, Domingo Faustino \TSarmiento\t both grappled with the problem of creating a grammar for the Spanish used in the New World; both also wrote works of description of the land, whereas Sarmiento alone, in his study of the native leader Juan Facundo Quiroga, attacked caudillismo (military dictatorship). It is at this point that barbarism and civilization come to be identified as coexisting and contending forces in Latin American life. To secure the victory of the latter was the task most writers set themselves; at the same time, they evoked with a certain nostalgia the life of the gaucho and of the country dweller that was soon to disappear. The greatest work in this tradition, the epic Martin Fierro (1872) by Jose \THernandez\t, became the national poem of Argentina. Modernism The last decade of the 19th century saw the emergence of a specifically Latin American literary movement, modernism. More directly affecting poetry, but involving prose fiction as well, this literary school was responsible for remarkable poetic innovation in both form and concept. Its main exponent was the Nicaraguan Ruben \TDario\t. Steeped in the French poetic tradition, and in traditional Spanish verse as well, Dario managed to bring to Spanish verse a flexibility that was based on new combinations of sounds, kinesthesia, and evocation of moods, rather than on a direct expression of feelings. He also popularized the idea of Latin America as constituting one homeland, having himself lived in several sister nations as well as in Paris and Spain. Dario thus embodied both a universalization of formal innovations and a passion for the realities of Latin America's past and future. His predecessor, the Cuban Jose \TMarti\t, had introduced these two concerns while actively participating in the struggle to liberate his native land. Literature of the Land and of the Mexican Revolution At the start of the 20th century the so-called novel of the land emerged; this undertook to describe without any romantic idealization the land and its peoples and the ways of life that were specific to the geographic conditions in which they lived. The gaucho in the pampas, the peon on the rubber plantation or in the sugarcane fields, the rancher of the Venezuelan plains, the Indian in his Andean hut--each was the subject of novels that appeared in the first decades of the 20th century: Raza de bronce (A Race of Bronze, 1919) by Alcides \TArguedas\t of Bolivia; Don Segundo Sombra (1926; trans. as Shadows on the Pampas, 1935) by Ricardo \TGuiraldes\t of Argentina; Dona Barbara (1929; Eng. trans., 1931) by Romulo \TGallegos\t of Venezuela; The Vortex (1924; Eng. trans., 1935) by Jose Eustasio \TRivera\t of Colombia; Huasipungo (1934; Eng. trans., 1962) by Jorge \TIcaza\t of Ecuador; and stories of the jungle by Horacio \TQuiroga\t of Argentina. At the same time, the Mexican Revolution received its own treatment both in poetry and in a series of novels that appeared during and after the conflict. The most famous novel was The Underdogs (1915; Eng. trans., 1929) by Mariano \TAzuela\t. The author had fought in support of Madero, and his fictional work records the rise and fall of a peasant fighter for whom the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) brings only suffering and devastation. Unlike the romantic writers, the novelists of the land no longer stood in awe of the Latin American landscape. They began to perceive that injustice was the prevailing order, that it had not disappeared with the coming of political independence. Their not-so-new social institutions, combined with what had been accepted unquestioningly in the previous century as the beneficent influence of European thought, began to seem inadequate to the American reality--so different, varied, untamed, and underdeveloped. These novelists, while at times despairing of ever improving the lot of the downtrodden--even by violent, revolutionary means--ultimately stressed the innate purity of the people of the land, as revealed, for instance, by the peasant fighter in The Underdogs and by the Indian characters in Icaza's works. Even Shadows on the Pampas, produced by a writer refined in the Parisian manner, suggests that spiritual renewal is to be found in the land rather than in the salons. The Brazilian Modernists At the start of the 20th century the Brazilian modernist movement, centered on Sao Paulo, also began to achieve a similar cultural independence through different means. Brazil had gone through the same stages of development as the rest of Latin America, but its political and cultural independence came more gradually. The first emperor of Brazil, Pedro I, was a legitimate member of the royal Portuguese dynasty. Although he declared Brazil's independence from Portugal in 1822, the country remained under imperial rule and the dominance of the court in Rio de Janeiro until 1889. With Brazil thus tied to Portuguese culture, Brazilian writers only little by little assumed responsibility for giving expression to their own landscape and ethnic mix of peoples. The presence of large numbers of former slaves added a distinctive African character to the culture; and subsequent infusions of immigrants of non-Portuguese origin helped the new nation to find its own voice and to use it. Early in the century the novels of Joaquim Maria \TMachado de Assis\t, such as Dom Casmurro (1899; Eng. trans., 1953), of Graca Aranna (1868-1931), and of Euclydes da Cunha (1866-1909) took stock of both urban and rural Brazilian life. About 1922 the modernist group (unrelated to the Spanish-language modernists of the 1890s) broke totally with this past, declaring themselves representatives of a new vanguard, and in numerous magazines and small publications experimented with verse and prose. A great deal of editorial and dramatic activity spread to areas remote from the coast, thus helping to upgrade the cultural validity of regions other than the largest urban centers. In the past the states of both Bahia and Minas Gerais had fostered active but relatively short-lived literary movements. Mario de \TAndrade\t was the foremost exponent of the modernist group. Recent Latin American Literature Brazil has given birth to a number of avant-garde schools since modernism, the best known of which is \Tconcrete poetry\t, and both poetry and prose fiction have continued to develop under local and European influence. Some of the best-known Brazilian authors of recent decades include Jorge \TAmado\t, Erico \TVerissimo\t, Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954), Clarice Lispector (b. 1925), Joao Guimares Rosa (1908-67), and Raquel de Queiros (b. 1910) in prose; and Carlos Drummond de Andrade (b. 1902), Joao Cabral de Melo Neto (b. 1920), Vinicius de Moraes (1913-80), and Jorge de Lima (1893-1953) in poetry. Puerto Rican literature, particularly in response to nationalist and racial concerns, has come into its own only within recent decades. A vibrant indigenous theater movement has been distinguished by the work of Emilio Belaval (b. 1903), Manuel Mendez Ballester (b. 1909), Francisco Arrivi (b. 1915), and Rene Marques (b. 1919). Enrique Laguerre (b. 1906) and Pedro Juan Soto (b. 1928) have dominated the field of fiction, whereas in poetry Luis Pales Matos (1898-1959) pioneered with the theme of "primitivism" versus the cultural imperialism of "civilization." In the rest of Latin America it is safe to say that contemporary prose ranks ahead of poetry in its general quality, particularly in view of the success many authors have had in experimenting with techniques introduced by French novelists and literary critics, such as the "new novel," and with the innovations of such U.S. writers as Faulkner--while retaining a very personal style and a distinctly Latin American voice. Novelists or short-story writers in this vein include Carlos \TFuentes\t and Juan Rulfo of Mexico; Alejo \TCarpentier\t of Cuba; Jorge Luis \TBorges\t, Julio \TCortazar\t, and Manuel \TPuig\t of Argentina; Juan Carlos Onetti (b. 1900) of Uruguay; Gabriel \TGarcia Marquez\t of Colombia; Mario \TVargas Llosa\t (b. 1936) and Jose Maria Arguedas (1911-69) of Peru; and Jose \TDonoso\t of Chile. These writers, who are responsible for the boom of the 1960s, have finally managed to fuse the persistent need for self-definition with the need for modernity and universality. Although they have relinquished none of their Latin American specificity, they have expressed themselves in terms that were equally accessible to the much wider audience that is drawn from contemporary Europe and North America. Many of their novels incorporate painful reassessments of the nation's immediate past as well as suggestions for new courses of action. These range from the creation of a new Latin-American-wide consciousness, which would thus obviate the need for European models, to a return to an almost apocryphal native past. At every turn of history, with every successful choice or error, Latin Americans have evolved their own particular sense of history, and writers have assumed an especially active role in forming this consciousness. The famous Canto General (1950) of Pablo \TNeruda\t, for instance, is a summa of all Latin America: its land, its history, and its peoples. Cesar \TVallejo\t in his poetry grieves for all the Christs of the continent; Nicanor Parra (b. 1914) mocks the banality of ordinary experience; and Ernesto Cardenal (b. 1925) exhorts Latin Americans to union and activism in the original Christian sense of setting all people free. Nicolas \TGuillen\t is the poet who most successfully celebrates the infusion of African blood into the Hispanic cultural mainstream. Octavio \TPaz\t remains the best-known exemplar of the cosmopolitan tradition. Persecution and Exile If Latin American writers have never been far from the historical events that shaped their lives and have borne witness to these in print, they have also had to bear the brunt of political persecution. From colonial times--when many Brazilian poets were banished to Angola--through independence--when many writers had to flee their countries--the price for writing about Latin American reality, as they saw it, has often been exile. Again today many younger Latin American writers are far from the source of their language and of their concerns, yet busily writing about both. Marta Morello-Frosch Bibliography: Arciniegas, German, Latin America: A Cultural History (1966); Bacarisse, S., Contemporary Latin American Fiction (1980); Bhalla, A., ed., Latin American Literature: A Critical Biography of Major Writers (1987); Carrera, Andrade Jorge, Reflections on Spanish American Poetry, trans. by Don and Gabriela Bliss (1973); Coester, Alfred, The Literary History of Spanish America, 2d ed. (1928; repr. 1971); Coutinho, Afranio, An Introduction to Literature in Brazil (1969); Englekirk, John E., et al., An Outline History of Spanish American Literature, 4th ed. (1981); Foster, D. W., Handbook of Latin American Literature (1987); Franco, Jean, An Introduction to Spanish American Literature (1969) and Spanish American Literature since Independence (1973); Franco, Merlin, Tradition and Renewal (1975); Fuentes, C., et al., Latin American Fiction Today: A Symposium (1980); Gallagher, David P., Modern Latin American Literature (1973); Kadir, Djelal, Questing Fictions: Latin America's Family Romance (1986); Lindstrom, N., Woman's Voice in Latin American Literature (1987); Luby, B. J., and Finke, W. H., eds., Anthology of Contemporary Latin American Literature, 1960-84 (1986); Manguel, A., ed., Other Fires: Short Stories by Latin American Women (1986); Monegal, Emir R., ed., The Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature, 2 vols. (1977); Torres-Rioseco, Arturo, The Epic of Latin American Literature (1942; repr. 1959) and New World Literature: Tradition and Revolt in Latin America (1949; repr. 1983). See also: \TBrazilian literature\t.