Latin American Cultural Objects and Episodes. William H. Beezley
Charlotte, USA
Call…cry…shout…yell “Ooo‐wa‐ooo‐aaooaaooaa‐ooo!” or “Taaar‐maan‐ganiii”
The call to action, the cry for attention, the shout for followers, or the yell for adventure – the expression of much of Latin America’s history comes through these declarations of political battles, alerts to domestic or foreign dangers, rallies of like‐minded individuals, and introductions of the first step to challenges. These outcries also signal identification of real and imagined communities, built through the appropriation of cultural items in Latin America and the mass media creation of cosmopolitan popular culture. Calls, or gritos, serve a major role in Latin American, for example Mexican, politics and culture. The best known surely is Padre Miguel Hidalgo’s “Grito de Dolores” that in 1810 launched the struggle for Mexican independence. The Catholic rebellion beginning in 1927 against the Mexican revolution leaders featured the iconic cry, “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” Moreover, groups and institutions adopt yells that identify those who shout, such as the National Autonomous University of Mexico students who chant approval, “¡Goya!, ¡Goya!” Searching out these cries for different organizations and different Latin American countries provides an intriguing scavenger hunt that reveals a different dimension of both global and national cultures.
No shout, sounding across Latin America and most of the rest of the globe’s comic strip pages, radio airwaves, and movie soundtracks, has ever equaled Tarzan’s signature roar. When Edgar Rice Burroughs created his fictional hero slightly over a century ago, he described the shout as “the victory cry of the bull ape.” Whatever it sounded like, it called together a global following for the syndicated comic strip that by 1935 appeared in 278 newspapers worldwide. When Tarzan appeared in movies and on radio, fans heard it for the first time. The initial version premiered in the partial sound movie serial Tarzan the Tiger (1929) as a “Nee‐Yah!” noise and then on the first radio serial in 1932 James Pierce as Tarzan yelled something like “Taaar‐maan‐ganiii” (still common in Cuba and other parts of Latin America) that, according to the novels, meant in simian language “White Ape.” For the first full sound movie, the producer wanted a distinctive cry that fans across the Americas and the world could recognize. The movie shout succeeded so well it was adopted and used by young Tarzan fans, called Tarzanistas throughout Latin America.
The newspaper comic strip, radio programs, and subtitled movies attracted great popularity. In Argentina, it resulted in the writing and publication of el nieto de TARZAN (the grandson of Tarzan), by an apocryphal author in 1932 and in 1950 the filming of the unauthorized el Hijo de Tarzan (the son of Tarzan) with Eugene Burns, Johny Colloug, and Mae Comont. Argentina’s first International Comics Convention held in 1968 at the Torcuarto Di Tella Institute featured as its International Guest of Honor Burne Hogarth, the illustrator of the comic strip “Tarzan.” A later parody was done in one of Latin America’s most famous comic strips, Chile’s “El Condorito,” using a Tarzan character called “Condorzán.
”The prominence of the yell suggested using a button like a musical Hallmark greeting card in this prologue. Such a button proved to be prohibitively expensive for the book, but anyone can go to this link: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/12328/disputed‐history‐tarzan‐yell to hear it1 or search videos of Tarzan’s yell in any search engine. Moreover, the objects in this book serve as yells, calling for action, celebration, or adventure expressed in episodes that are linked, however thinly, to the things in each chapter title.
Note
1 1 Bill Demain, “The Disputed History of the Tarzan Yell” (August 22, 2012).
Introduction Res humanitatis, A Montage
Objects can make tangible the thoughts, activities, and performances that characterize the lives of everyday people. They also serve as expressive mementos of past events and expectant symbols of desired futures. Poets have said it differently: Only in the world of objects, even the least remarkable ones, do “we have time and space” (T. S. Eliot), so we “can find the entire cosmos” (Wisława Szymborska). Finding these worlds in objects such as potshards has fallen most systematically to archaeologists, but occasionally other investigators have adopted a similar methodology to chart cultures. Archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians have examined religious relics, ritual regalia, and civic artifacts as well as craft industries, especially ceramics, weaving, and textiles in Latin America. Sam Roberts, in the New York Times, pointed to the marks that things – the wheel, the crucifix, the credit card or the computer chip – have made on civilization. Nevertheless, only a few authors have used an object from daily life, one perhaps overlooked and not necessarily handmade, to describe the larger histories it harbors or the episodes that it introduces.1
Delight and surprise constitute the goals of this book. Delight comes from an appreciation of the imaginative and resourceful aspects of everyday lives that individuals develop in their homes and communities. Surprise comes from their efforts to make lives well lived despite daunting obstacles and haunting legacies of conquest, colonialism, nationalism, and inequalities of resources and authority. Things, that is, objects, provide lessons that make evident both these sentiments. These objects have obvious material properties, but serve as more significant cultural phenomena and point to episodes of everyday life. The different objects examined here each contain several general expressions. Only two of the objects as the subject of chapters deal specifically with visual media, but all of them in some way have been featured in movies, documentaries, television or all three. This, it seems to me, confirms their popular appeal to the general public. Moreover, all the objects are associated with music, another factor that accounts for their ubiquitous popularity. Popular or local religion can be identified as well; it appears obviously in three of the chapters, and more subtly in the others, but it occurs in each, providing a constant thread in Latin American culture and life.
For Latin America, the best example of studies based on objects must be Fernando Ortíz’s now classic investigation Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar), published in 1940, that examines the unique experience of Cubans, and captures their history and culture. In his study of tobacco and sugar, Ortíz explained how processes of “transculturation” shaped the meaning of those products through the impact of slavery during Cuba’s transition from colonialism to independence.
Beyond Ortíz, a few writers have taken objects as the organizing theme for their intriguing narratives to understand Latin American history after the arrival of the Spaniards and the Portuguese. Nearly as iconic as Ortíz is Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Other books include Frederick Smith’s Caribbean Rum, Gregory Cushman’s Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World, and volumes on commodities such as bananas, cocaine, and coffee, and others concerned with clothing, cuisine, and identity. These publications for the most part provide an economic rather than a cultural analysis. An exception comes from Salman Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey, with a chapter on “Sandino’s Hat.”2
Outside Latin America, other publications have centered on objects to explore historical events. These include Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects (2011), based on the British Broadcasting Corporation and the British Museum collaboration in a successful radio series called “A History of the World in 100 Objects.” The book has been reprinted in 10 languages, and, even more striking, its companion 15‐minute podcasts quickly topped 35 million hits and have continued to grow in number. These successes encouraged London’s Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibit displaying 99 “disobedient objects” representing movements for social change over the past 30 years, including a “Silence = Death” poster created