Week 7 – The Export Boom as Modernity

What struck me most from this week’s reading was the extent to which Western ideas, cultures, and customs appeared to be a necessary requirement for urbanization, industrialization, and modernization in Latin America, and to a large extent the rest of the world. This week’s reading continually named modes of culture and society that were originally Western being repeated by Latin America, from dress, to a democratic governing system, to “ideals” of a single family home with a car, a lawn, golf memberships, etc, to the idea and creation of a middle class, to a population filled with Caucasians, etc. The reading seemed to assert that the more of these Western-qualifiers that a Latin American country had, the more successful they would be in terms of modernization and in trade and industry… for example, Argentina, which had a bustling metropolitan city with new architecture and the latest technologies, and which was also doing very well in the global trade economy, had taken to a very Western style of life for the population and (I assume) the government as well.

Of course, from a trans-cultural perspective, one would hope that a country could thrive economically, politically and socially without the dependence or need to adapt to another separate culture – in Latin America, I suppose that this would mean indigenous people rising up through revolution and asserting their own styles of governance and economy that benefited them wholeheartedly and locally without the reliance on “superpower” Western countries… which is an idea that Porfirio Diaz condemned and seemed to claim was impossible and primitive in the document at the end of the chapter. This leads to the question; why was Western culture so imperative for a nation’s success during the time of global industrialization? My thought is that it stemmed from two things: 1) Western nations were the colonizers during the previous century; any economic and political developments for the colonized countries would be served by the imperial power as a proxy; in other words, the Western countries had a head start and were the formal “creators” of a global economy, newly liberated countries would have to adapt to this preformed system of trades, etc. 2) Though a culture was formed through the exchange of Spanish and Indigenous customs during colonization, the real non-Western culture was Indigenous in Latin America… the indigenous people, along with African slaves, suffered the worst oppression and the least political recognition of their customs, cultures and ideas. Thus, these peoples had been oppressed for so long and so brutally that to rise to a place of power wherein economic ideas of trade and industrialization could have been incorporated into the mainstream society of Latin America would have taken a full-scale revolution, a probable impossibility at the time. Again, I look to Japan, wondering how it was able to achieve modernization without Westernizing… though eventually after many unequal treaties it was forced to participate in the same global trade as Europe and the United States, eventually allying and participating with these regions in the First World War.

One more note: Porfirio Diaz seems to be a liar, or otherwise an extremely double edged character based on his interview with the American journalist in this week’s reading…. Though I know he was a sort of old prodigy when it came to capitalism in Mexico, wasn’t he also extremely repressive, and corrupt in terms of his elections? His laid-back attitude about new parties and a new president succeeding him were off-putting in comparison to other documents I have read about him.