This week’s reading focused on the politics of Latin America in the nineteenth century. I will focus mostly on the short story by Esteban Echeverría, The Slaughterhouse. This story was a revolutionary piece of literature in Latin America, as it was one of the first pieces of socio-cultural reflection. It used allegory in order to portray Echeverría’s personal opinion on the government in Latin America.

The setting of the story sets the scene for Echeverría’s perspective. The environment is like a battlefield, with the human and animals that are described having very little difference in their behaviour. For example, ‘An old woman set off in angry pursuit behind a young man who had smeared her face with blood. His friends, responding to the troublemaker’s yelling and cursing, surrounded and harassed her the way dogs will badger a bull.’ The humans are compared to animals in their behaviour, which illustrates Latin America’s political environment as blood-thirsty.

Moreover, the theme of blood in the text is interesting when analysing the nature of politics. The entire text is filled of extremely explicit violence and gore when it comes to talking about animal blood and parts. I personally interpreted this violence of animal parts as being a metaphor for the politics. Echeverría presents the animal body as the political body, as he describes people fighting for ‘a prize piece of offal’, or ‘a tangle of intestines’. The cannibalistic nature of the people in the text are desperate to have a piece of the animal’s body, which could represent how the people of Latin America are desperate for some form of political power. They are fighting each other for the chance to gain societal power, as the political body is so limited.

In this sense, the parts that certain people are described as having is important, the intestines are shared by ‘four hundred black women’. Also there are ‘capering boys and black and mulatto women… scavenge for chitterlings’. These representations show how the oppressed in Latin American society are treated unfairly, and have little power for finding political power.

In analysing Echeverría’s text, I am not necessarily saying that his ideas are correct and that the government in Latin America actually represented the illustration that he creates. However, it is an important text in thinking about the history of literature in Latin America, and how it helped to shape the culture.