The Cultural Attack, And the Response From Latin America

ECONOMIC exploitation quickly shows up in the cultural sphere. The basic reason is simple: There is big money to be made in culture, just as in oil or weapons production. Publishing, recording, and film-making are the largest cultural industries, primarily because they all produce for mass consumption markets.

Unlike more commercially limited art forms, such as painting or sculpture, these three giant industries are accompanied by huge production and marketing system. In recent years, many recording, film and TV studios have been bought up by giant conglomerates experienced in international marketing.

As a result, more and more of the world's mass culture is tied up in corporations large enough to dominate economic and political life of developing nations. In the context of imperialism, the business of culture is just one more business.

But the influences of cultural imperialism are broader. The economic domination of one country by another brings with it an assault on the traditional values and culture of the subordinate country. U.S. businessmen in the third world carry with them an American culture, and their economic strength makes them models for emulation by the native elite. Educated at Harvard of Princeton of Cal Tech or, in the days before the United States became the preeminent imperialist power, at Cambridge or Oxford, the native upper classes contribute to a cultural westernization parallel to, and in large measure caused by, the westernization of the economy.

Westernization of the peasantry and the working class is held off, however, for as long as possible. Industrial imperialism depends on workers' accepting the traditional standard of living while laboring at industrial jobs to support foreign companies and the increasing consumer demands of the emerging Western-style managerial elite. The economic gap between the rich and poor, widened by the exploitation of the people for foreign profit, becomes a broader cultural gap as well.

In Vietnam, as in many other countries, this schism helped maintain dominance by foreigners. Bao Dai, the first head of state of Vietnam to be recognized by the western powers, was at heart a Frenchman. He spent most of his time at his villa in France, and when in Vietnam he lived in regal European style. Bao Dai, the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem, and the other would-be westerners who have ruled South Vietnam in succeeding years are barely thought of as Vietnamese. So it is hardly surprising that they would join forces with foreign armies against their own people.

IT IS crucial to distinguish between free cultural exchange and its perversion, the abandonment of national culture spurred by Western-style urbanization and elitist education. Ho Chi Minh, for example, was educated in France, but his education broadened his understanding of his own culture. In essays such as "The Glories of French Civilization," Ho recognized the brutal effect French dominance had on his own people.

The conflict of cultures demands a political choice on the part of artists, who help mold cultural change. The imitators of foreign art ally themselves with foreign exploitation, both cultural and economic. Octavio Paz wrote that Mexican imitators of the European novel presented "a rather sketchy and superficial image" of the Mexican landscape in contrast to the "somber, intoxicating grandeur" suggested in the description of Mexico by European novelists D.H. Lawrence and Malcolm Lowry.

0PPOSING the sterile Mexican novelists described by Octavio Paz is Paz himself. Cesar Vallejo and Pablo Neruda--with Paz, the finest and most influential of the Latin American poet-politicians--are dead now, but younger writers are following their example.

Maria Vargas Llosa, a 37-year-old Peruvian novelist, has written five novels, all motivated by his belief in the political role of art. "Literature in general and the novel in particular are expression of discontent," he wrote in 1971.

Even stronger has been work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose reputation is based chiefly on the complex novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. This novel's approach to the world grows out of the introspective fantasy to Jorge Luis Borges, who is perhaps the only original, yet uncommitted, modern Lating American writer. But Marquez directly faces U.S. exploitation is grotesque, often surrealistic terms. Marquez's novel has had extremely wide circulation in South America, has been read by people who would hever read the poems of Vallejo, even by fanatic reader of Agatha Christie translations.

Imperialism has forced the morally committed artists of Latin America to take a political stand. In no other part of the world is such imaginative literature being produced in response to such crucial problems. Writers such as Llosa and Marquez recognize that economic and cultural subjugation go hand in hand. They confront issues of culture imperialism because they know that dissension in popular art from the encroachment of a foreign culture is as necessary as political opposition to more overt acts of foreign domination.