When the Centro Mexicano de Escritores (Mexican Centre for Writers, CME) closed permanently on 22 August 2005, it was eulogised by El Universal as ‘the epicentre of Mexican literature’ and its closure declared ‘the definitive end of […] one of the most glorious [periods] of Mexican writing’. Emmanuel Carballo called the Centre one of the most important factors in the boom in Mexican literature.Footnote 1 A list of its graduates supports that claim: they included Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Poniatowska, Marco Antonio Montes de Oca, Jorge Ibargüengoitia, José Agustín, Alí Chumacero, Carlos Montemayor, Juan José Arreola, José Emilio Pacheco, Ricardo Garibay, Rosario Castellanos, Vicente Leñero, Luisa Josefina Hernández, Gustavo Sainz, Emilio Carballido, Inés Arredondo, Carlos Monsiváis, and many others. Almost every noteworthy Mexican writer from the second half of the twentieth century, and especially from the 1950s and 1960s, passed through its doors. It provided a structured workshop environment where students could share and improve their work, and its grants provided a year's income so they could concentrate on writing.
The CME was also, in its first decades of existence, one of the few cultural institutions of importance in Mexico that was not financed by the federal government. In an apparent irony, this ‘epicentre of Mexican literature’ was the idea of a North American writer, Margaret Shedd, and its initial financing came from the Rockefeller Foundation. Celebrated as a glory to the nation when it closed, in its first decades of existence it was sometimes derided as an instrument of Yankee cultural imperialism. In Mexico, foreign funding of art was often controversial and criticised for its anti-national character and ‘Americanising’ potential. If Americanisation refers to the global spread of practices, cultural forms and customs associated with the United States, then Americanisation of thought and knowledge production, as realised through the grants of major US foundations, has been seen by many as part of the construction of US hegemony in the twentieth century. Although major foundations were sometimes perceived as more trustworthy than the US government, they used their initiatives, for example, public health campaigns that reduced suffering from disease while also opening markets, to smooth over the roughest of the many rough parts of capitalism, thus disarming the threat of social revolution and aiding the cause of US imperialism.Footnote 2
In Latin America in particular, scholars have argued that the activities of major philanthropic foundations, including the Rockefeller, were part of a system of domination and ‘spiritual colonisation’.Footnote 3 During the Cold War, private interests merged with those of government to form what Scott Lucas has called a ‘state-private network’ in defence of philosophical and economic liberalism, at the expense of political radicalism.Footnote 4 The battle for minds was a key component of ensuring acquiescence to US imperial rule: in Andrew Rubin's words, during the Cold War ‘the physical occupation of territory was replaced by the occupation of literary and cultural space’.Footnote 5 Even the Iowa Writers' Workshop raised funds by using Cold War arguments on businessmen and government officials, and was the recipient of some money from the CIA.Footnote 6
Other scholars, however, have signalled that there are limits to the power of cultural imperialism. Recipients and collaborators change the meaning of received propaganda and cultural practices. Deborah Cohn and Russell Cobb, for example, have found that some US-sponsored initiatives, like the magazine Mundo Nuevo that appeared in 1966 (funded briefly by the CIA and then by the Ford Foundation), featured writers that rejected US Cold War ideology.Footnote 7 Seth Fein found that that a US Information Agency programme known as ‘Project Pedro’ that produced propaganda newsreels for Mexican cinemas in the 1950s and early 1960s was largely unsuccessful.Footnote 8
The CME provides a fruitful site to evaluate the power of the production of literature to serve Cold War objectives. Its funding came first from the Rockefeller Foundation, and it later received some money attributable to the CIA. Yet a curious silence reigns about its history; major studies of Mexican literature in the twentieth century, not to mention its own graduates, generally refer to its influence only in passing, if at all. Its archive is now a part of the Fondo Reservado of the Biblioteca Nacional de México, but it consists only of early drafts of works, some original contracts and news clippings about the Centre's graduates. As useful as these are for scholars of Mexican literature, they do not permit an analysis of the Centre's institutional past. This article draws from the personal papers of the Centre's founder, Margaret Shedd, and those of its sponsors, especially the Rockefeller Foundation and the CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom, to reconstruct its history. A close examination of the life of the CME reveals that it consistently disappointed the propaganda objectives of its funders. Without question, there were those who hoped that the CME would work as an instrument of cultural empire, serving various interpretations of US national security needs. Yet neither the Rockefeller Foundation, which sought to invest in goodwill between neighbours, nor the CIA, which hoped to elevate the status of non-Communist writers, achieved its goals.
In his study of ‘Project Pedro’ Seth Fein argues that it had limited anti-Communist value because ‘Mexicanization of US resources within the local environment of political and cultural production in Mexico City diminished Project Pedro's ability to “Americanize” Mexican mass media and to propagate Washington's foreign policy’.Footnote 9 The CME produced similar contradictions. Its foreign connections could make it seem to be an instrument of cultural Americanisation. Yet, precisely for that reason, the CME sought to minimise the influence of its foreign connections through a process of ideological and material ‘Mexicanising’. The result was a kind of ‘Mexicanised Americanisation’, an apparent contradiction in terms. Yet ‘Americanisation’ is at once one of the most indisputable phenomena of the twentieth century and one of its most elusive. It has always been wrapped up with the identification of the United States as a market empire, and part of the globalisation of markets that it defended has been the creation of accessible and transformed versions of local culture to embody authenticity. Thus, even if the Americanisation of the world were a clean and clearly identifiable process, which it is not, it would describe something in constant motion. Each place is Americanised in its own way (and so it is even possible for ‘America’ itself to undergo ‘Americanisation’, as historical studies tell us occurred).Footnote 10 This phenomenon was well-understood by the manager of any hotel catering to foreign tourists 50 years ago; it has expanded far enough in recent years to include the self-commodification of ethnic authenticity itself.Footnote 11 To make a Mexico that is ‘marketable’ internationally, Mexican authenticity must be produced and understood as such. Yet what is authentically national is constantly shifting, the product of political debate, economic change and other forces. The gaps that open up between what is authentic and what is foreign made it possible for the CME to be a product of ‘Mexicanised Americanisation’. It was an institution that exported US practices and was paid for in the beginning with US dollars, but its career as a spiritual coloniser was so unsuccessful that it was eventually forgotten. The point is not that cultural imperialism does not exist, nor certainly that the activities of major US foundations are not frequently connected to the expansion of market empire: it is simply that imperial ambitions do not always yield the results they intend, and that the battle of ideas, in addition to producing domination and resistance, sometimes produces unexpected consequences and no little irony.
Margaret Shedd and the Origins of the Centro Mexicano de Escritores
If there was an agent of Americanisation in the CME, it was its founder and long-serving director, Margaret Shedd. She was born in Persia in 1898 to missionary parents and part of an elite and well-connected extended family. Her godfather, her father's cousin, was Charles Dawes, Calvin Coolidge's vice-president from 1925 to 1929. Shedd attended Stanford University, earning a degree in political science in 1920. Though she yearned to become an actress after graduation, her godfather would not allow it and summoned her to his palatial home in Evanston, Illinois. There, she worked as the night clerk at the Mary Dawes Hotel for Women, which provided relief for Chicago prostitutes. In 1923, she married Oliver Kisich, a fellow Stanford graduate. Three years later, Kisich joined the British Honduras Company, the principal landowner in the British colony that would become Belize, and he and Shedd lived for the better part of a decade around labourers in lumber and palm oil camps in British Honduras and Guatemala. Shedd had spent much of the first decades of her life in situations of privilege, but surrounded by the poor. Her first novel, Hurricane Caye, which draws on her time in the future Belize, was published in 1942.Footnote 12
In 1939 Kisich left the British Honduras Company and began to work for the US government: first in Jamaica, and then, during the war, throughout Latin America as an analyst with the US Board of Economic Warfare.Footnote 13 Though the exact nature of his work remains unclear, Kisich eventually became an employee of the US Embassy in Mexico, and he and Shedd divided their time between Mexico City and the San Francisco Bay Area. Shedd continued to write about ‘tropical’ themes, winning an award for one of her short stories in 1946.Footnote 14
The US war effort in Latin America, of which Kisich was a part, was a multifaceted effort to contain German and Italian fascism that predated World War II itself. Concerned about the influence of fascist propaganda, the United States institutionalised new forms of cultural diplomacy during the late 1930s, such as student exchange programmes and the exhibition of US culture abroad in the service of a Pan-American message of continental solidarity.Footnote 15 Large and powerful private US foundations, established at the beginning of the twentieth century (the Rockefeller Foundation began operation in 1913), also incorporated cultural programmes into their foreign activities. There was often slippage between government and private domains in programme and personnel, most obviously when Nelson Rockefeller was selected to head the wartime Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. That office oversaw economic aid that fostered regional integration and ensured the uninterrupted flow of goods needed for the war economy in the United States. It also sponsored cultural programmes, such as the inauguration of the Benjamin Franklin library in the US Embassy in Mexico in 1942.Footnote 16 Shedd's 1944 novel Inherit the Earth features an evil Nazi plotting to aid the German war effort and ruin lives in an unidentified Central American country, and can be considered her novelistic contribution to the war effort.
Two trends in the institutionalisation of cultural production converged in the creation of the CME: the expansion of the cultural apparatus of US foreign policy, and the increasing professionalisation of creative writing programmes in US universities. In the early 1930s, the University of Iowa began awarding MA degrees in English for creative work; one of the first to receive such a degree was Wallace Stegner, who remained at Iowa as it expanded its programme into the famous Writers' Workshop.Footnote 17 Stegner was hired by Stanford University in 1945 to create the second such programme; its Creative Writing Centre opened the following year.Footnote 18 Shedd, who taught extension courses in writing at Stanford, witnessed the building of that programme.
And so Shedd entered the late 1940s as a writer whose career contained considerable promise. She was living in Mexico, which had a vibrant arts scene that was constantly being rediscovered by (North) American and European authors. But whereas many of the expatriates living in Mexico were attracted to bohemian and leftist circles, Shedd moved among more conservative political and cultural elites.Footnote 19 She decided to build a writing centre of her own, to foster and encourage Mexican writers.Footnote 20 She proposed the idea to the head librarian at the Benjamin Franklin library, who passed it around until it landed at the Mexico City College (MCC).Footnote 21
The MCC was an English-language college founded in 1940. It was one of a small number of American international universities whose credits transferred to the United States. Unaffordable for most Mexicans, the school catered to short-term exchange students from Midwestern universities and long-term students looking for a bargain, foreign adventure or business or foreign service careers in Latin America. After World War II, veterans could easily afford MCC tuition and live well on the money they received from the GI bill. (Former GIs also had stories to tell, and were important students in the creative writing programmes at Iowa and Stanford.) Many of these veterans chose the college as an escape from the pressures of social conformity in the United States.Footnote 22 The easy availability of drugs, alcohol and sex was another lure: in 1950, Beat generation icon William S. Burroughs, for one, joined a graduate programme in anthropology at MCC. (Burroughs dropped out that summer, after the distractions of a visit from his friend Jack Kerouac caused him to receive all Ds and Fs in his graduate studies.)Footnote 23 In 1950, Shedd joined the faculty of MCC for the purposes of establishing a ‘Mexico City Writing Center’ of her own. Fees were US$ 100 per quarter, so there were almost no Mexican students in the initial groups of writers supervised by Shedd.Footnote 24 But she did host a series of round table discussions including writers from both Mexico and the United States, and sought a way to extend greater support to Mexican authors. She called on Charles B. Fahs, an expert on Japan who had recently been promoted to director of the Division of Humanities of the Rockefeller Foundation, for financial assistance. Fahs was interested in her idea of providing long-term grants for promising Mexican writers, and would soon provide the funding that made the CME possible.Footnote 25
Mexicanidad and Americanisation in the CME
Shedd consulted some of the most prominent people of letters on the Mexican scene: poet, essayist, classicist, and cultural dean Alfonso Reyes, playwright Rodolfo Usigli, anthropologist Robert Barlow, art critic and historian Anita Brenner, and a group of philosophers including Leopoldo Zea known as the Hyperion group. Reyes, Usigli and Zea were all concerned at mid-century with what Mexican intellectuals considered the problem of discovering the essence of mexicanidad, and, through it, elevating the spiritual level of Mexicans as a way of improving the condition of the nation. The debate about the nature of Mexicanness stretched back into the post-Revolutionary 1920s, where cultural ‘nationalists’, who wanted culture to exalt the popular and the indigenous, debated ‘universalists’ (including the group known as the ‘Contemporáneos’), who wanted to maintain connections to European modernism. Almost all aimed to build a Mexican culture that could hold its own against foreign influence, though they differed on the proper basis for such a construction.Footnote 26
In 1934, Samuel Ramos, one of the universalists, published an influential contribution to the debate about the nature of Mexicanness, describing a feeling of inferiority at the core of the national character. In order to remedy the problem, he argued, the school system should be directed towards ‘knowledge of Mexico’. The task, he thought, was ‘Mexicanising knowledge’, and he believed that literature should be among the bases for the foundation of national culture.Footnote 27 In the late 1940s, Zea's Hyperion group was working within the tradition of analysis of mexicanidad but reached somewhat different conclusions. They agreed with earlier writers about the importance of literature and about the qualities of the Mexican character, such as introspection and sensitivity, but saw them as strengths rather than weaknesses. Zea thought that the self-awareness of Mexicans would lead them towards a universal humanism, in which Mexico could be a leader and so culturally equal, and even superior, to Europe and the United States.Footnote 28
The years of the creation of the CME were precisely those in which Zea and the Hyperion group were crafting such theories, and they help explain how they squared their sense of nationalism and preoccupation with lo mexicano with their desire to cooperate with a US-funded centre. In a draft from 1951, Zea's Hyperion group proposed to Shedd that the new centre, which they hoped to call the ‘Centro de Escritores Americanos’, feature both North American and Mexican writers in an environment in which each nation's authors would receive instruction from the other's. They thought of it as a way of bringing the United States and Mexico closer together through mutual aid and understanding. The Hyperion group proposal imagined a writing centre for Mexicans, with affiliated magazines and focused round tables to include North American writers and lecturers who would teach US literary techniques. Everyone agreed that instruction in (North) American techniques would be a major part of the programme, in part because the circulation of books was so limited in Mexico that increasing sales would depend, at least in part, on translation into English.Footnote 29
Shedd also tended to identify ‘technique’ as one of the major ‘American’ contributions to the Centre: she thought it would be important to teach ‘characterization, exercises in practical observation, uses of symbolism, the point of narration, the differences between story and plot, problems of preliminary workpapers and re-writing, selectivity, problems of dialogue and its role in short story and novel’. The basic assumptions of the future CME represented what was probably the first attempt to implement the idea of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, that it was possible to teach people to be writers, using the workshop as the fundamental pedagogical technique, outside the United States. The Iowa model, identified as ‘American’, would spread widely throughout the United States, a quintessential example of North America's own ‘Americanisation’, and play a significant role in shaping postwar literary fiction.Footnote 30 Styling technique as American, Shedd fitted into a long tradition of cultural stereotyping that perceived Mexico's virtues in its emotional, rather than rational, merits. She thought that Americans participating in the programme would benefit from exposure to the ‘Mexican approach to the arts, which is more fundamental and less conscious than the American and therefore conducive to breaking down “blocks” and other psychological interventions'.Footnote 31
Yet what is striking is the compatibility of Shedd's motivations with the form of cultural nationalism of her Mexican partners. Shedd thought of her project as cultural philanthropy in the mould of wartime Pan-Americanism. ‘Nobody believes more deeply than I do in our American ideas’, Shedd once wrote to Fahs, ‘I believe the kind of understanding this project promotes is the true propaganda.’Footnote 32 Yet she wanted both Mexican and American participants to learn from their experiences, through exposure to working in two languages and in two civilisations. ‘On what basis can this encouragement to Mexicans come from the United States?’ she wrote to Fahs. ‘I do not think this can be on a missionary basis. I think it has to be on the basis of the universality of art.’Footnote 33 What made the Hyperion group and Shedd's agendas compatible was the common belief that the development of Mexico's national culture was a worthy goal.
Any process of Americanisation requires the simultaneous reinforcement of the ‘exotic’ and the ‘foreign’, and Shedd's agenda was no different. In 1950, during planning, she wrote that she wanted Mexicans to work with American techniques, but also prioritised the ‘Mexicanizing of Mexican writers, reintroducing them to their own ethnography, as writing material’.Footnote 34 In a speech given at the fifth anniversary of the Centre, Shedd argued that writers are the best representatives of their nations; writers convey, she said, what ‘the people’ think and feel but cannot express. But, she insisted, no one can evaluate the culture of another country before first understanding how his or her own has been evaluated first, and she added that she wanted the graduates of the Centre to have their ‘first loyalty […] be towards their own country and its culture’.Footnote 35 In the initial planning around the creation of the Centre, both Shedd and the Hyperion group assumed that American influence could simultaneously make Mexican literature more universal in a way that would also deepen its Mexican character.
While Shedd taught techniques that she understood as belonging to the North American tradition of writing, the Rockefeller Foundation wanted to be sure that the new Centre would not be dominated by personalities from the United States. Fahs, the Rockefeller administrator, was more sensitive to the appearance of foreign sponsorship than was Shedd, and declined to serve on the grant's selection committee.Footnote 36 He wanted assurances that the Centre would be seen in Mexico as a ‘Mexican project not a United States project’. The first set of five judges, who determined who would be admitted to the Centre, featured three distinguished Mexican writers (Alfonso Reyes, Agustín Yáñez and José Luis Martínez) and two Americans (Shedd and a giddy Herschel Brickell, the general editor for the O. Henry Memorial Prize Award and a promoter of Latin American works of literature on Pan-Americanist grounds). In the case of a split along national lines, the Mexican group would prevail. So satisfied, in May 1951 the Rockefeller Foundation approved grants sufficient to cover tuition and expenses for five Mexican students, totalling US$ 9,650 for the first year.Footnote 37
To contrast the views of Shedd and Fahs in this manner is not to suggest that US interests were not at the heart of the Rockefeller Foundation's actions. Fahs hoped that the Centre would, like student exchange, lead to greater understanding of, and consequently less antipathy towards, the United States. Philip Raine, the cultural attaché in the US Embassy, approved, writing: ‘Naturally, one would prefer to see these young Mexicans go to the United States to study, but having them know fairly intimately and work with a good group of young American writers in their own country, has real if limited value'.Footnote 38 Brickell concurred: ‘I'm dead sure the Center is one of the soundest Pan-American projects that has yet turned up'.Footnote 39 Shedd herself, while not conservative in the manner of her extended family, certainly disliked some types of left-wing writers. During the creation of the Centre, she theorised that one of the factors holding back a revival in Mexican letters (secondary to the limitations of the book-buying public) was that too many up-and-coming Mexican writers were influenced by the politically partisan American writers like Upton Sinclair and Erskine Caldwell. (The result, she observed, was that ‘left wing Mexican writers are North American in a peculiar literary way whereas the non-leftists are academic’.) ‘I truly believe’, she wrote, ‘that if Mexican writers as a whole understood the real drives and the whole vitality of the United States, it could have an impressive result in orienting them to their own drives and their own vitality’.Footnote 40 The unexamined assumption of Shedd and elite officials in US foundations and government was that a better understanding of the United States would lead to greater cooperation with it, and that the interests of other individuals and nations would be well-served by identifying with its aspirations.
In its first year, 1951–2, the committee provided grants to Juan José Arreola, Emilio Carballido, Sergio Magaña, Herminio Chávez Guerrero, Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, and, by special arrangement, the Spanish poet and philosopher Ramón Xirau, who had been living in Mexican exile since the age of 15. There were some criticisms of the Centre. Some grumbled that the Mexican government, rather than foreign foundations, ought to be supporting Mexican writers. But Agustín Yáñez, one of the CME judges who was also close to the ruling PRI, thought that the existence of the Rockefeller grant had already caused the government to offer more literary prizes.Footnote 41 At the same time, the Centre's separation from government dependence was a point of pride; Shedd thought that it allowed the grant recipients to be free from conformity to rigid nationalistic themes. Sergio Magaña, she believed, would not have written what he did on a government grant.Footnote 42
But Shedd's leadership made the fulfilment of her Pan-American ambitions difficult. One North American writing student, Neal Smith, wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation that mutual understanding had been hard to come by within the Centre. ‘[Shedd] has been “pushing” in every situation, in an atmosphere of extreme nervousness. Mr. Brickell criticised her for her frenetic “lectures”, and she immediately classified him as a senile old fool. But the fact is that her momentum defied stopping for discussion, and the Mexicans were left with the feeling that she was a wild woman'. Visiting North American writers were generally uninterested in the Mexican arts scene, while the Mexican becarios were afraid to lose their fellowships if they criticised Shedd. ‘I hope Miss Shedd will be able to arrange some meeting place away from that fool college’, wrote Smith, ‘with its idiot children, and neurotics “trying to find themselves in writing”, where she can bring about her aims for inter-cultural exchange'.Footnote 43
Shedd also grew frustrated with the crass materialism of the leadership of the MCC; its administration complained to her that Rockefeller fellowships did not bring in much money. There was discussion of moving the Centre to El Colegio de México, but a rift between Alfonso Reyes and Daniel Cosío Villegas, who directed the Colegio, prevented it. Shedd's separation from the MCC was realised in 1952 when an association was negotiated with the Instituto Mexicano Norteamericano de Relaciones Culturales (Mexican-North American Cultural Relations Institute, IMNRC). But that was certainly a no less problematic association ideologically than MCC: the IMNRC was not technically a part of the US government, but it was closely linked to the US Embassy. Its goal was to improve the US image in Mexico, and the salaries of permanent staff were paid by the State Department.Footnote 44 Juan José Arreola, a student who gradually took on an expanded leadership role in the Centre, suggested establishing a legal Mexican institution called ‘El Centro Mexicano de Escritores’. (In 1954 Arreola's suggestion was followed and the ‘Centro Mexicano de Escritores’ was officially created as an independent entity.Footnote 45)
In spite of operating under the umbrella of the IMNRC, the class of 1952–3 was expanded and extraordinary, including Víctor Adib, Alí Chumacero, Ricardo Garibay, Enrique González Rojo, Miguel Guardia, Luisa Josefina Hernández, Neal Smith and Juan Rulfo. It was in that year that the Centre found its star: Rulfo. During 1952–3, he polished and finished a book of short stories, El llano en llamas. His grant was extended for another year, and he proposed to write a novel (originally titled Los murmullos) that became Pedro Páramo. Those slim volumes proved to be the only complete works of Rulfo's life, made possible by two short years of peace at the Centre. (Before his grants, he had worked many odd jobs and struggled to find the time to write; he had spent years, for example, as a tyre salesman to support his family.Footnote 46) The Centre's grants did not provide luxury, but they were enough for peace of mind. Héctor Azar, a grantee in 1957–8, said that the sum was enough for ‘transportation, cigarettes, and tortas', but Ricardo Garibay, in 1952, was able to use the grant to rent a spacious house for his family and buy his children a dog and a bicycle.Footnote 47 For the many writers who were not independently wealthy, the money made a great deal of difference.
Rulfo's short works proved to be enough to make his career. Shedd immediately declared him the most talented student that the Centre had ever had. This did not please everyone. Garibay, a student at the same time as Rulfo, wrote that the degree to which the gringos loved him made him suspicious of Rulfo's exploitation of ‘Mexican curios’ of the ‘noble savage’. Garibay criticised Rulfo's stories during workshops as ‘dense folklore’. (When Shedd asked Rulfo to respond, noting that Garibay thought that his story was bad but that Enrique González Rojo thought it good, Rulfo glumly adjudicated, ‘Perhaps they are both right'.) But even Garibay was won over by the readings of Pedro Páramo.Footnote 48 Others had the opposite response: the sketches of El llano en llamas, published first, were greeted with almost universal acclaim; Pedro Páramo, set in a spectral space between realism and the literature of the fantastic, initially had more critics. Some thought that he partook too deeply of international currents: that there was too much Joyce and Faulkner in his style, and thus that he had departed from expectations of Mexicanness. At the same time, he was accused of being a creation of the Centro, perhaps implying an aesthetic of Americanised mexicanidad.Footnote 49 But in the long run, Pedro Páramo was, with the help of the CME, published internationally in many languages, and in translation it was received with great praise. Outside of Mexico, Pedro Páramo was identified as authentically, perhaps quintessentially, Mexican, in spite of partaking of foreign trends in composition. Abroad, what was cosmopolitan became national and what was national became cosmopolitan.
But, in general, it is doubtful that Shedd served as an effective agent of Americanisation. During the 1955–6 class year, Shedd suffered a personal crisis: as she was separating from her husband, students and staff at the CME resigned their commissions, citing her ineffective leadership. Garibay remembers Shedd demanding regular production and attendance, while he felt that young writers like himself should not have any requirements in exchange for their grants.Footnote 50 Shedd tried to set fines for those who skipped meetings; Luisa Josefina Hernández, who had joined the staff of the Centre, thought that such actions were counterproductive. Furthermore, she ridiculed Shedd's teaching on technique: a class on ‘Theme and Form’ asked students ‘What do you feel when you see an elephant? What when you listen to hoofs? What when you see a horn?’ She thought that Shedd's actions were creating an atmosphere inimical to seriousness. (The once-weekly workshopping of on-going writing was the best thing the Centre did, argued Hernández, ‘though the criticism is frequently dishonest’.) Hernández resigned, as did Emilio Carballido and Sam Hileman (who was there on a grant to translate the work of Carlos Fuentes).Footnote 51 The satirist Jorge Ibargüengoitia, who had travelled to the United States on a Rockefeller grant before joining the Centre as a grantee, resigned for the opposite reason: ‘I had a big fight with the becarios. I hate them, I can't stand them … I am sorry this turned out so bad for all of us. After all I liked the Centro and was grateful for all it did to me.’Footnote 52 The poet Marco Antonio Montes de Oca at first joined those resigning but later changed his mind. The practical consequence of the resignations was that Shedd, while she remained nominally in charge, was present only a few months of each year and gradually ceded operational control to the regular staff. Although the Rockefeller Foundation continued to fund it, the Pan-American ambitions of the CME were largely abandoned, as Shedd herself and North American writers more generally became a smaller and smaller part of its programme.
The Cold War Politics of Literature
Over the course of the late 1940s and 1950s, Pan-Americanism in cultural diplomacy gave way to the anti-Communist imperatives of the Cold War. The CME's relationship with the literary Left had been, during the 1950s, troubled. One literary magazine, Metáfora, frequently mocked Shedd and her efforts: ‘Miss Marget [sic] [is] writing, with a suspicious smile: The Easy Conquest of Mexico. If you would like to collaborate, apply for your Rockefeller [grant].’ Some issues later, it asked: ‘Has Madame Shedd, the boss and dictator of the Gringo-Mexican Institute, already finished her novel: Subterranean Penetration of the USA in Mexico?’Footnote 53 Meanwhile, the Centre's defenders blamed its problems on ‘international Communism’.Footnote 54 In 1958 Shedd acknowledged that ‘[the Centro] has had friends in most of the [literary] cliques [in Mexico] except the left wing ones where it has had enemies’.Footnote 55 Its association with US cultural diplomacy was the fundamental problem. The Centre had an informal policy of not admitting Communist writers, both from conviction and probably from concerns that doing so would affect fundraising in both the United States and Mexico. The Rockefeller Foundation checked indices of names to make sure that Shedd and other American employees of the Centre had not been members of Communist front organisations.Footnote 56
Although the dollar amounts supplied by the Rockefeller Foundation continued to expand, it offered ‘matching’ grants that it hoped would stimulate the development of philanthropic practices in the countries where it operated. Fahs frequently reminded Shedd of the need to find a Mexican base of support that would trigger the release of the corresponding Rockefeller money.Footnote 57 In the mid-1950s, the CME began to get contributions from the charitable arms of the Banco de México and the Fundidora de Monterrey, which both became regular supporters.Footnote 58 Donations from the Mexican state came first through Ramón Beteta, a writer in his own right who had also worked in government. In later years, contributions would come directly from conservative former president Miguel Alemán, as well as the UNAM. There was also support from Mexico City's English-language newspaper The News, edited by Beteta, for whom the CME managed a cultural supplement.Footnote 59
But if the funding remained conservative, the politics of writing and the writer's relationship to society were shifting to the Left. The Pan-American assumptions of the initial Rockefeller funding, of Shedd, and indeed of the Zea group, were about understanding between nations. Increasingly, writers were preoccupied by the problem of social transformation, in which they had a different role to play. One line of division was between the generation of ‘Mexicanists’ and those who saw themselves as ‘cosmopolitan’. In 1957, for example, the CME gave a grant to Carlos Fuentes. He did not need the money: his family had plenty. He did not need the time, either: his novel La región más transparente, that, when published, established the urban environment as a legitimate setting for the Mexican novel, was well along in draft form. But he was clearly one of the most promising writers of the new generation, and he had a defender in Octavio Paz, who had joined the Centre's advisory board with the hope of counterbalancing those he considered ‘professional Mexicanists’, who, as he put it, ‘expected literature to follow the political lines of Mexico's one-party Government’.Footnote 60 Paz used his influence to arrange for his ‘cosmopolitan’ younger counterparts to be given grants, including Fuentes and, the previous year, Montes de Oca.Footnote 61
The fault lines between ‘Mexicanists’ and ‘cosmopolitans’ dated back to the debates of 1920s and 1930s, but they had taken on new political dimensions in the years of the Cold War. Some Mexicanists considered criticism of the PRI out of bounds and were therefore associated with a conservative position by the 1950s. Yet Paz's ‘cosmopolitans’ were hardly a band of merry Marxists; Paz himself was an anti-Communist, albeit in this period a social democratic one, and was deeply distrusted by the more orthodox Marxist Left.Footnote 62 (Indeed, in the field of painting where it was most acute, the Mexicanist/cosmopolitan rivalry largely pitted the Marxist generation of the great muralists who enjoyed government patronage, and the non- or anti-Marxist younger generation, supported by Paz, that disliked performative ‘Mexicanism’ and criticised the PRI through its work.)Footnote 63 Montes de Oca was a Catholic poet from a wealthy and well-connected family; Fuentes had grown up travelling the world as the son of a diplomat. Fuentes, co-founder of the Revista Mexicana de Literatura with Emmanuel Carballo (CME 1954–5), attacked the style of literary criticism that assessed the merit of texts by asking the question ‘whose is most Mexican?’. Fuentes and Carballo also criticised both the United States and Soviet camps in the Cold War and their associated literatures, the socialist realism of the Soviet Union and what Fuentes called the ‘capitalist realism’ of the United States. Both, in his view, reflected self-satisfied and optimistic nationalisms purporting to be universal.Footnote 64
At the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, Mexico's intellectual Left became more comfortable criticising the PRI in power. It also became a more self-consciously identified group centred around the cultural inserts edited by Fernando Benítez; first, as the black sheep supplement in the conservative paper Novedades, until his team was forced out and found a new home in the modestly independent, modestly left-of-centre, and modestly informative newsmagazine Siempre! Many CME graduates, including Elena Poniatowska and Fuentes, wrote essays and journalistic pieces for these cultural supplements and took part in left-wing social movements at the beginning of the 1960s. (Their group developed a reputation for insularity, and was sometimes mocked as a literary ‘mafia’.)Footnote 65 What came to define a left-wing intellectual in the 1960s, however, was above all his or her position vis-à-vis Fidel Castro's exercise of power in Cuba. Castro's appeal extended far beyond the Marxist Left, seeming to offer a form of Latin American nationalism and revolutionary social practice sorely missing from the grind of corrupt politics and enterprise in Mexico. Fuentes, for example, became an active supporter in the early 1960s, though he distanced himself somewhat over the course of the decade. Many Latin American writers were sympathetic to the Cuban project during the 1960s, even to the point of judging criticism of Cuba to be out of bounds. This attitude was shared by many former grantees of the CME.
Even as its grant recipients were drawn more and more often from the political Left, the CME's funding began to tap sources with Cold War agendas. Rockefeller matching grants made continuing support dependent on constantly finding new contributors. Some came from Mexico: the percentage of the budget from Mexican sources was zero through 1954, then 21 per cent until 1957, and then rose to close to 40 per cent until it reached 61 per cent in 1963–4.Footnote 66 But Shedd remained convinced that publicity and outreach were the only way to put her writers on stable financial foundations. As part of the search for new funding, she queried the Farfield Foundation. There is no evidence to suggest that she knew that the Farfield was an important member of a set of dummy foundations whose principal purpose was to act as fronts for CIA funding to cultural and political organisations deemed potentially useful in the Cold War of ideas.Footnote 67
The Farfield's most important connection was to the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), the CIA's principal cultural front organisation during the Cold War.Footnote 68 Though the CCF began as a European operation to combat Soviet cultural propaganda in 1950, it established itself as the centre for organised anti-totalitarian thinking in an era in which the only totalitarian threat came from Communism. (This was basically true by definition, since most right-wing movements were in practice judged by anti-Communists to be merely ‘authoritarian’, not ‘totalitarian’.)Footnote 69 It sponsored important magazines, especially the London-based Encounter, convened festivals of art and culture and generally tried to win intellectuals away from Communism. All the while, its most important administrators were CIA employees; many who worked closely with it also knew of the connection to the CIA, though plenty did not. During the 1950s, it expanded its operations in Latin America, creating national centres and publishing a Spanish-language review, Cuadernos del Congreso por la Libertad de la Cultura.Footnote 70 When Shedd solicited her grant from the Farfield in 1958, the foundation asked its friend in the CCF, the editor of Cuadernos, to investigate the CME. He reported back that he found ‘nothing suspicious of totalitarianism’ and relayed to the Farfield that the CME was an independent and non-political organisation. Shortly thereafter, the CME bulletin, Recent Books in Mexico, began to note that it was published with the financial support of the Farfield Foundation. The CME thus began a relationship in which a small percentage of its budget was either CIA money or, perhaps, money that was given out to disguise the fact that most of the rest of the Farfield's money came from the CIA.Footnote 71 Contacts with the Farfield also provided opportunities to connect to CCF programmes; in the next years some of Shedd's stories appeared in Encounter, as did one of Rulfo's from El llano en llamas.Footnote 72
In spite of this, the CME was in no sense a part of the CCF. Farfield's contributions were only about 2 per cent of its annual budget, an apparently paltry sum that, in spite of not being Mexican, was counted for earning matching funds from the Rockefeller Foundation. The Farfield money and CCF connections helped the Centre further its goals of giving its writers international publishing opportunities; the relationship, however, was by no means exclusive. The CME was responsible for the 1959 ‘Eye of Mexico’ issue of the Evergreen Review, a publication well to the left of Encounter, for example, which marked an important moment in the incipient New Left's looking outside the United States.Footnote 73
In the 1960s, it became clear to the CCF that Cuba and its revolution presented Latin American intellectuals with a far more attractive model than had the Soviet Union in the 1950s. As a consequence, it slowly reoriented its programme to deal with the threat. It forcibly retired national personnel whose anti-Communism had led them in reactionary directions, and sent new staff around the Americas to try to put the Congress operation on a foundation that was more respectable, of better quality, and more open to the Left. The key figure in Mexico was Keith Botsford, a US writer and critic who had been hired by the Congress in late 1961 as a kind of roving fixer for the CCF's most troubled Latin American operations. While in Brazil in 1962, the CIA official who had hired him, his old friend John Hunt, wrote to Botsford about reaching out to the CME.Footnote 74 (Hunt and Botsford had met in the early 1950s, when both were affiliated with the Iowa Writers' Workshop.) As the Congress looked for new connections through which to build relationships with more cultural figures, the CME was, attractively for an anti-totalitarian organisation, one of the only cultural institutions in Mexico in which the state did not exercise a predominant influence. In 1963 Botsford arrived in Mexico to begin the cycle of purging local reactionary members of the CCF. He understood his primary ‘anti-totalitarian’ task as constructing a viable alternative to the centralised power of the Mexican government in the arts, which he saw as stifling cultural freedom and supportive of the Marxist muralists. He and Shedd began to meet regularly about the possibility of expanding the CCF-CME relationship.Footnote 75
The CCF's motivations were political: they were convinced that the CME had played a role in keeping the literary movement out of the hands of Communist writers, noting that Communist affiliation was common among Mexican painters, for whom there was no analogous institution. This was a misreading of the situation of both Mexican plastic arts and writing, but it gives a sense of the motivations that a Cold War outfit like the CCF had in reaching out to the CME.Footnote 76 The problem for the CCF was that the design of the CME was explicitly focused on the US-Mexican relationship, and the CCF wanted something that could be directed toward the rest of Latin America, with the United States excised. Shedd and Ramón Xirau, who had become a naturalised Mexican citizen by this time and who did much of the day-to-day administrative work for the Centre, had recently quarrelled, resulting in Xirau's departure. Shedd asked the Congress to finance a salary for Juan Rulfo, customarily suffering from both depression and alcoholism, to bring him onto the Centre's staff to work with the younger writers.Footnote 77 Botsford judged the idea a sound one: it would keep a Mexican presence on the staff of the CME, to help it retain local and regional credibility. As a gesture of support, the Congress paid Rulfo MX$ 14,000 in 1964, and for him to remain on staff in 1965.Footnote 78 The purpose of paying his salary was to help both the Centre retain its ‘Mexicanness’, against Shedd's influence, and to prop up Rulfo as a high-profile non-Communist author to contrast with prominent Communist artists like the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. With support from the CCF for two years, Rulfo became an established tutor in the Centre and the principal writing teacher of its students for an entire generation of young writers.
But the mid-1960s were, contrary to the expectations that might be held in an era of funding motivated by Cold War interests, the period in which students admitted to the CME were the most left wing. This was probably not by design, but simply a reflection of the temper of the times and the political views common in the pool of available talent. Vicente Leñero wrote his experimental ‘anti-detective’ novel Los albañiles at the CME on a grant from 1963 to 1964; later in the decade, he staged a play based on the life of Che Guevara.Footnote 79 Marco Antonio Montes de Oca, who had been involved with the initial protest against Shedd in 1956, later returned for another grant in 1960–1, and was not generally a poet of social protest. But he considered himself among those who thought criticism of Cuba totally unacceptable; he too crafted an elegy to Che.Footnote 80 But most important were the writers of the onda, the youthful, experimental chroniclers of Mexico's 1960s. Almost all of them were involved in radical politics: José Agustín (CME 1966–7) and René Avilés Fábila (CME 1965–6) were not only enthusiastic supporters of Cuba, but also members of the Communist Youth. Avilés Fábila saw no contradiction between applying for the CME grant and his political commitment: ‘to obtain [the grant] was an honour and a magnificent literary beginning’, he wrote, ‘[…] although the money was important, what moved writers to solicit CME grants was its good reputation’.Footnote 81 It was his best chance to learn how to write and to get the book contract that usually followed, and so he was thrilled to have it. So was Carlos Monsiváis, expelled from the Communist Party as a young man but still very much of the Left, who was proud to have received a grant twice in the 1960s.Footnote 82
The irony was that the CIA was, albeit in a small way, paying for this education, and the CIA was the official enemy of the Left. Jorge Ibargüengoitia (CME 1954–6) was one of the few who saw comedy in the situation. He had befriended Keith Botsford and used their relationship as kindling for satire: his story collection La ley de Herodes describes the general atmosphere of literary suspicion combined with financial neediness that marked the Mexican scene.Footnote 83 ‘Conversaciones con Bloomsbury’ features Bloomsbury as a lightly fictionalised Botsford; there, the stand-in for Ibargüenogitia writes of his surprise at discovering that the CCF's Cuadernos is a real magazine: he had thought ‘Bloomsbury’ a complete impostor when he first met him. And he wrote that ‘Cuadernos, which I had never read, [had] a decidedly anti-Communist air; but on studying it carefully, I began to suspect that it was just the opposite; that is, an apparently anti-Communist magazine, made by the communists, to discredit the anti-Communists.’Footnote 84 At another point in the story, the Ibargüengoitia stand-in and his companion, an English-born painter, are visiting an art gallery when they notice someone who, like ‘Bloomsbury’, is widely whispered to be a CIA agent.Footnote 85 ‘What was Bloomsbury doing in Mexico?’ asks the painter to the man:
‘Is it true that he was a CIA agent?’
‘Why do you ask me that?’
‘Because you are a CIA agent and you should know.’
‘Look,’ he said calmly, ‘suppose that the CIA chooses its agents among people who are sufficiently discreet to hide that they are agents of the CIA. That is, if I were a CIA agent, I would never tell you that I was. Now, as I am not an agent, I will tell you exactly the same thing: that I am not an agent. If I told you that Bloomsbury were an agent of the CIA or that he wasn't, I would be revealing myself as an agent of the CIA, which would be against the discretion that a CIA agent should maintain. For another thing, because I am not an agent of the CIA, I don't know if Bloomsbury was an agent of the CIA or if he wasn't.’
‘As clear as day!’ said the painter when we took leave of the presumed CIA agent. ‘Bloomsbury was a CIA agent.’
‘Why?’
‘Because this man showed himself when he said that CIA agents are discreet people. We all know that they are pack of idiots. For another thing, if this guy is a CIA agent and Bloomsbury wasn't, he would have said Bloomsbury was, because that is what all Mexico is saying of Bloomsbury. But they are partners and this guy has to keep the other's secret; that's why he went into the “If I were but I'm not,” reasoning.’Footnote 86
Although the evidence is not definitive, Botsford may not in fact have been among those who knew of the CIA's connection to the CCF.Footnote 87 Yet even after the CCF exited the picture (Botsford left Mexico in 1965, and public revelations of the CCF's past dependence on the CIA in 1966 and 1967 destroyed its credibility and its future fundraising potential) Shedd continued to work with the Farfield Foundation, the CIA front.Footnote 88 In 1966, Shedd returned to New York to fundraise, where she discovered a changed landscape. She found that the US government was the principal source of institutional grants, and she was eager to find out how the Centre could benefit.Footnote 89 Over the next year she persuaded Farfield to help buy Juan Rulfo land in the country, to help him find the quiet he needed to write. In 1969 she convinced Farfield that ‘to provide him with a place of peace in which to write might just be the single most important contribution that could be made to Mexican letters'.Footnote 90 That proved compelling but incorrect; other than one incomplete novel, Rulfo never published any further writing, nor did he lead a life of anti-Communist public advocacy in the way that the CCF or the Farfield might have hoped. He did, however, go on using the land, in the small town of Chimalhuacán, as a weekend retreat for the rest of his life.Footnote 91 The funding sources that Shedd sought were deeply compromised, but they did not always prove deeply compromising. During the 1960s, the CME had engaged directly with partners and funding sources with anti-Communist Cold War agendas. But there is no evidence that it took other concrete steps to serve anti-Communist ends, or that participation moved its increasingly left-wing students in any particular political direction.
Success through Failure
As the years ran on into the 1970s and beyond, the CME began to lose what had made it a uniquely valuable centre for the training of young writers. Mexican universities began to create programmes for writers, as did the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. Government grants to support writers proliferated, even as funding from the Mexican government came to constitute a more important share of the operating budget of the CME.Footnote 92 By the late 1980s, the Centre was no longer the best prize for an aspiring young writer. The CME's closure came in 2005 after reductions in the budget that came from the Secretaría de Educación Pública combined with its failure to secure support from the Fundación Telmex, which did not get assurances from the government that its contribution would be tax exempt. The CME lived and died by the Mexicanised Americanisation of its finances.Footnote 93
But the fact remained that the CME had, perhaps in spite of itself, managed to incubate much of the most important writing in Mexico in the second half of the twentieth century. It introduced the workshop model to train writers, and that might count as a genuine case of Americanisation. It encouraged experimental fiction that carved out new paths: it helped refine works both rural and urban, of personal testimony and of grand social criticism. And it sponsored so many people, across so many genres of writing, that it seems not to have imposed a house style. Many works that came to be regarded as classics were written there, and many of the authors launched by the CME would have long, influential and popular careers, including as voices on the political Left who were frequently critical of US policies in Mexico and the world. In the end, it did far more than any state institution to foster writing in Mexico, in spite of the many efforts made by the state to use the support of artists and intellectuals to gild a reputation marred by the corrupt and undemocratic exercise of power.
The Centro Mexicano de Escritores did not fulfil the expectations of any of its institutional funders: neither the Pan-American understanding of the Rockefeller Foundation, nor the Cold War anti-Communism of the Farfield Foundation. (Nor indeed did it fulfil the hopes of the Mexican government in the era in which it dominated the donor list, as the Centre was unable to reproduce the success of its first two decades and burnish Mexico's reputation for cultural sophistication.) It is little wonder that it eventually fell victim to neglect.
Seth Fein, in his study of ‘Project Pedro’, posited the possibility of a ‘cultural empire without cultural imperialism’, and the experience of the CME provides an example of this unexpected formulation.Footnote 94 Cultural empire existed (and exists), but the teaching of creative writing was probably too diffuse a vehicle to successfully occupy literary space in the interests of imperialism. But if the CME operated below expectations as an instrument of Yankee cultural imperialism, it remains the case that, in an era of genuinely compromising tendrils of foreign political interest, the Centro was one of the most successful writing centres in the world. It remains in memory as a monument to a kind of success achieved by a different kind of failure, and to the frequently unrealisable promise of cultural diplomacy. The Rockefeller Foundation and the CIA funded writers in Mexico for political purposes. But if the effects on literature were minimal, or at least not politically predictable, then who, in the end, was using whom?
