Stories have power.

And they can be wielded for good... or for evil.

One guy who knew just how true that was?

Rafael Trujillo, one of the cruelest dictators in Latin American history.

He bought into the idea that history was an official - and singular - story.

So, in order to control the Dominican people, he tried to take away the stories they told about themselves.

Hi!

I'm Curly Velasquez and this is Crash Course Latin American Literature.

[THEME MUSIC] The countries of Latin America are no strangers to authoritarianism, the kind of government that requires unquestioning loyalty and offers little individual freedom in return.

Strongmen, tyrants, and dictators have marked the region's history - and literature - for hundreds of years.

So much so that a whole genre distinct to Latin American literature emerged around it: la novela del dictador, the dictator novel.

These books offer something different from an officially sanctioned, singular story.

They give us multiple perspectives, critiques, and glimpses behind the scenes into people's everyday lives.

Let's start in the 19th century.

A lot of Latin America's trouble with tyrants stemmed from something unexpected: geography.

Seriously - this is such a big deal that there's a whole other genre called novelas de la tierra, novels of the earth.

And no, this isn't your Rosa de Guadalupe kind of novela.

These novels explore the relationship between Latin America's physical landscape and its political and cultural landscapes.

See, in the 19th century, large swaths of Latin America were undeveloped selva, llanos, and pampas - jungle, plains, and grassland.

And even once fledgling countries like Argentina were free from colonial rule, they didn't have the infrastructure to govern or maintain any sort of orderly, democratic control.

Enter the caudillos, on horseback.

These guys were, like, the most intense gauchos ever.

They were more like cowboys, and they rode their horses across the pampas, seizing political power through charisma... and sheer brute force.

They were, unfortunately, just another type of authoritarian leader.

And just like they dominated the Argentinian pampas, caudillos also dominated the literature of the period.

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's 1845 novel, "Facundo: Civilización y Barbarie," "Civilization and Barbarism," is a prime example.

It's a fictionalized biography of the titular Facundo, who's pretty much the platonic ideal of the corrupt caudillo.

But... he's not one hundred percent fictional.

He's based on the lieutenant of real-life Argentinian dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas.

And just like his right-hand man, Rosas came from a wealthy landowning family and used his power to become a swaggering caudillo.

Then he kept forcing his way to the top, eventually becoming dictator of Argentina for seventeen years, using tactics like spies and secret police to silence political opposition, and exiling guys like Sarmiento who dared to question his authority.

Now the Argentinian pampas are huge - about the size of Beyoncé's Texas.

And Sarmiento describes them lyrically: "immense the plains, immense the forests, immense the rivers: the always uncertain horizon."

Apparently everything is bigger in Argentina, too.

But Sarmiento also thinks the region is "barbaric," because the pampas are so isolated from so-called civilization.

Sarmiento hoped to convince readers that as long as Argentina existed as an untamed region, the land would continue to produce dangerous strongmen like Rosas and Facundo.

He writes, "from these characteristics arises in the life of the Argentine people the reign of brute force, the supremacy of the strongest, the absolute and irresponsible authority of rulers."

In other words, the caudillo strongman is a direct result of the undeveloped landscape.

Quite the theory.

Sarmiento called for economic development and improving the country's education system to finally rid the region of tyrants.

And he led some of that himself, when he was elected president of Argentina in 1868, sixteen years after Rosas was overthrown.

But, he also propped up a false binary of barbarism and civilization.

Although the pampas were isolated and not heavily populated, they weren't empty of people or communities.

They were home to Indigenous groups like the Mapuche and Pampas Indians of Argentina, and the Guaraní Indians of Paraguay.

People who Sarmiento aimed to erase, both in his literature and as a president who waged a decades-long war against Indigenous peoples.

So, although Sarmiento was democratically elected and made meaningful strides for the country, he's still a controversial figure.

Now, let's travel forward in time to the 20th century, which was, you guessed it: also chock-full of dictators, strongmen, and bloody revolutions.

Wow, this episode really has no chill.

In 1910, Mexico rose up against the thirty-year tenure of dictator Porfirio Diaz, resulting in a decade-long revolution that killed over one million people.

In 1959, Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban military officer-turned-dictator, was overthrown in the Cuban Revolution.

And Chile's 1973 golpe de estado, coup d'etat, resulted in the death of President Salvador Allende... and helped establish the military dictator Augusto Pinochet in his place.

All of this was topped off with guerilla warfare, police violence, kidnappings and "disappearances" at the hands of the government, and a whole general vibe of persecution that was decidedly not it.

And from all this bloody violence emerged more novelas del dictador.

Written sometime between 1950 and 1975, many of these novels were part of the Boom - the literary movement we talked about in an earlier episode, that saw Latin American novels in translation popping off around the world.

In fact, many folks consider the Boom period to start off with one novela del dictador in particular: "El Señor Presidente," "Mr.

President," by the Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias.

Here are the Curly Notes.

Published in 1946, "El Señor Presidente" tells the story of a fictionalized dictator who rules over an unnamed country with an iron fist.

Known only as "the president," he rarely appears in the text.

And yet he hangs over every character and action like a cloud of tyrant-scented Febreeze.

The main character is actually the president's favorite advisor, Miguel Angel Face, who carries out his boss's dirty work in exchange for safety and power.

But when Angel Face falls in love with the daughter of an alleged traitor, he starts to question his loyalties.

You know how the story goes: boy meets girl, boy falls in love, boy... gets in trouble with a terrifying dictator...?

Anyway, the novel also includes elaborate dream sequences, blending realistic elements with magical ones in a technique called magical realism.

And this makes it hard for both the characters and the reader to sort out fact from fiction.

Which mirrors some of the psychological effects of living under a dictatorship.

I won't spoil the end of "El Señor Presidente" for you, but suffice it to say that Asturias has a message to get across about loyalty and power in the face of tyrants.

And while some argue that the President might be modeled on Guatemalan leader Manuel Estrada Cabrera - allegedly!

allegedly!

- other scholars say the decision to write about an unnamed dictator in an unnamed country tells us something else: That the novel is less interested in recounting the story of one historical figure, and more interested in exploring the effects that a dictatorship has on a society.

Those lessons can be applied across Latin America, and the rest of the world.

Let's move forward now into the 1990s.

Here we start to see many dictator novels being written after the dictatorships ended, giving modern readers new perspectives on tyrants of the past.

Like, Julia Álvarez's English-language novel "In the Time of the Butterflies" takes place in the Dominican Republic during the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo - the guy we talked about at the top of this episode.

But it was published 60 years later, in 1994.

I wonder what they'll be writing about us 60 years from now.

"In the Time of the Butterflies" tells the story of ordinary Dominicans: the real life Mirabal sisters - Patria, Minerva and María Teresa.

The sisters were part of the underground resistance against Trujillo's brutal regime, and they were killed on his orders on November 25th, 1960.

Unwittingly, Trujillo turned the Mirabal sisters into martyrs for the revolutionary cause - they became known as las mariposas, the butterflies.

Just six months later, he was assassinated.

Álvarez had a personal interest in the story of the Mirabal sisters.

Four months before their murder, her own family had escaped to the U.S.

when her father was targeted by the Dominican Republic's secret police.

But when she turned to the sisters' story years later, she felt that their roles as martyrs had flattened who they were as people.

So she decided to write about their personal lives through historical fiction.

In the novel, each sister - including the sole survivor, Dedé - narrates several chapters from her own point of view.

We follow them as they grow up, fall in love, and dream about their futures.

In other words, as their everyday lives continue, even in the face of a dictatorship.

Trujillo makes only four brief, menacing appearances, and each of the sisters comes to realize he's not the benevolent figure he claims to be.

When Minerva finally gets to go to school, where she learns the truth about Trujillo, she laments, "I'd just left a smaller cage to go into a bigger one, the size of our whole country."

Yearning for freedom is a pretty relatable sentiment for anyone who's ever been a kid - and Minerva's discovery that freedom is an impossibility for everyone in her country is a painful reversal.

By reading about real, ordinary people like the Mirabal sisters, we get a richer understanding of life under dictatorship.

And fiction provides a window into history that's different from textbooks and official documents.

Like Álvarez writes in her postscript, "A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart."

The novela del dictador is a distinctly Latin American genre.

And there are even more dictator novels than the ones we talked about today: The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela, Doña Bárbara by Rómulo Gallegos, Yo, El Supremo by Augusto Roa Bastos, and The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat - to name just a few.

And these novels prove that fiction can give us a lot more perspective and nuance than the tyrannical voice of a dictator.

Which is a big deal.

Because unfortunately, dictatorships aren't a phenomenon of the past.

Today, over 50 countries in the world are living under authoritarian regimes.

Tyrants like Trujillo want their victims to buy into a single story.

But when we step into the hearts and minds of others through fiction, we learn to see the world, and ourselves, more complexly.

Next time, we'll talk about the role of memory in the aftermath of dictatorships.

See you then.

Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Latin American Literature, which was filmed at the Carlos Hernandez Studio in Indianapolis, and was made with the help of all these storytellers.

If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our community on Patreon.

Oh, and if you're interested in learning about some of the topics covered in this episode, we pulled together a playlist you can dig into.