The Great Depression of the 1930s has long been read as a turning point in Latin American history. This pivotal role became virtually emblematic of the 1960s CEPAL school of economics, which used the external shock of 1929 as the dividing line between the region's nineteenth-century era of ‘Desarrollo hacia afuera’ (export-led growth) and the modern era of ‘Desarrollo hacia adentro’ (inward or indus- trial growth). That strict periodisation has long fallen under the scrutiny of economic historians, particularly in a wave of revisionist studies inspired by the region's external debt crisis and ‘lost decade’ of development of the 1980s. What Paulo Drinot and Alan Knight add in this valuable new survey of the depression era, this time in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial meltdown, is a longer time-frame (from the 1920s to impacts felt as far along as the 1970s) but even more so, a wider disciplinary range and sensibility. Rather than centring on the economics of the crash, exports or import-substitution industrialism in the ‘periphery’, Drinot and Knight's book focuses on the political, social, labour, racial, gender, and cultural shifts arising from the era. As such, their book captures the changing orientations of Latin American historians in the early twenty-first century. Thus, the volume enriches and complicates more than redraws either the classic or revisionist economic history research on the depression.
Paulo Drinot's Introduction lays out these issues, in a widely read and well-internationalised 1930s. Even in political terms, the 1930s were far more than, or more diverse than, just the birth of ‘populism’. Roy Hora, in the first of the book's nine national case studies, writes on ‘Argentine society’ during a period mainly recalled politically as the rightist ‘Década infame’; he pursues instead shifts in migration, gender, the family, and the overlooked roles of communist organisers. Angela Vegarra then surveys Chile, famously hard hit in its nitrates industry, but focuses on positive ways in which workers and governments adapted to the employment emergency. Joel Wolfe, writing on Brazil, finds much ‘change with continuity’; the Vargas regime was weaker than normally assumed in many respects, yet the ‘developmentalism’ planted ideologically in the 1930s (as well as democracy ideals of the 1940s) would bear fruit in decades to come. Drinot himself, with Peru's top economic historian Carlos Contreras, looks at the Peruvian outlier, a country known for clinging closely to export liberalism. However, even here, they detect a growth of ‘statecraft’ influenced by urban labour and APRA, some building upon Leguía's active state projects of 1920s. In the case of Colombia, according to social science historians Marcelo Bucheli and Luis Felipe Sáenz, elites such as the coffee bourgeoisie organised in the FNCC, defended their pre-1929 social positions in a form of ‘export protectionism’, in contrast to enclave type industries such as oil and bananas. Doug Yarrington looks at Venezuela as a difficult transition between extremes: from the long dictatorial Gómez era to the authoritarian 1940s López era, related to pacts and repression of the country's 1936 pro-democracy protesters. Jeffrey Gould tests his ‘indigenista dictators’ of Central America, a proposition that the mestizaje politics of El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua carried longer ripple effects for these regimes. Alan Knight, per usual, dissects Mexico, and the unique and similar ‘character’ of its depression experience. He highlights two unusual actors: upper-crust Finance Minister Alberto J. Pani's role in re-activating Mexico's domestic economy, and on the revolutionary left, President Cárdenas’ regime-defining 1936 national land ‘reparto’. Yet to Knight, Mexico's larger and stronger state would not consolidate until the 1970s. Finally, Gillian McGillivray looks at many sides of 1930s Cuba, but especially how the revolutionary and anti-imperial fallout from the 1933 overthrow of the Machado regime affected black identity movements, gender, cultural nationalism, and Batista's upward career by the early 1940s. Knight returns at the end with an ambitious closing essay (moving beyond the collection of essays themselves) on Latin America's 1930s. His major conclusion: though the depression was not the singular cause of all these energetic movements, albeit ‘refracted through diverse national prisms’ it was a ‘crucial episode’ (p. 312) in Latin America's later social and political evolution.
The excellent book, again, does not concertedly recast the decade into a new overarching interpretation; rather, it successfully diversifies and deepens the 1930s beyond its fairly well-known economic determinants and dimensions. This book will prove highly useful to specialists and other readers looking for a broad updated background on Latin America's active engagement with the 1930s crisis.
