The editors aim to examine the relationships among empathic politics, transnational solidarity movements, and the creation of art in Latin America during the Cold War. They introduce their key themes as “how community is constructed across transnational political spaces” (2) and how transnational solidarity may be “framed through cultural production and the arts” (3). They posit that solidarity artists seek to inform and expand consciousness through their work, a means of creating empathy and solidarity with “the other.” The editors put forward social movement and cultural studies concepts as a framework for the book, at times unfortunately slipping into rather dense prose.
Herzog's chapter on the black US artist Elizabeth Catlett and her life in Mexico nicely fills out the book's themes. Catlett herself embodied cross-cultural solidarity and the power of art to create empathy. The radical artist's prints and sculptures reflected a blending of art, emotion, and political commitment that awoke powerful responses in both Mexico and the United States; this helped to build transnational bridges between Mexican struggles and the US Black Power and civil rights movements. Coleman's chapter shows how photography can be used to promote solidarity, or its opposite. In his study of the Honduran banana strike of 1954, he contrasts the use of photos by the US Life magazine, which emphasized the supposed Communist threat, and Bohemia of Cuba (which reached major Latin American cities). Bohemia showed Hondurans as capable, organized people taking charge of their own destiny in the midst of hunger and injustice, and its photos elicited empathy and solidarity.
Black's chapter on Latin American “protest music” in the 1960s outlines the work of US activists Barbara Dane and Irwin Silber to popularize “canto libre” in their own country. She illuminates the role of culture in forming personal bonds of solidarity and common cause across borders, tracing the interactions between US singer Phil Ochs and Chilean Víctor Jara, among others, to show how transnational solidarity was built through music. She argues that “for many who opposed the capitalist system and its violent underpinnings, the past [expressed in folk song] provided a sense of comfort … folk music expressed an inherent sense of nostalgia for an idealized past and thus provided an outlet for those paralyzed by the injustices of the present” (119).
In my view, this emphasis on nostalgia, comfort, and paralysis is a misreading. Masses of Latin Americans were participating in social mobilizations in the 1960s, and the new music, born of these struggles, stirred people to further action, with its social conscience and calls for unity. Moreover, nueva canción was not traditional folk music of the past; it was innovative, original, and modern, based in folk but reinventing it, while honoring poor and working-class struggles.
Several of the chapters fit uneasily within the book's stated parameters. Borland's chapter on solidarity networks after the 2009 coup in Honduras makes interesting points about the strengths and risks of solidarity activity in the United States, but this does not fall within the Cold War period. In González's chapter on Brazil, it is not immediately obvious how Ignacio de Loyola Brandão's novel Zero—which the author describes as nihilist, violent, and reflective of the chaos, hopelessness, and repression of military rule—is linked to solidarity or transnational networks. He mentions three ways in which the novel was “solidarity art” (87, 109), but the claim seems somewhat forced. The chapter does not really demonstrate that the novel fostered transnational solidarity networks or empathetic politics.
One jarring, if peripheral, issue appears in two chapters. The authors repeat a historically inaccurate “legend” about the Pinochet regime's murder of folksinger Víctor Jara. Borland writes that after the 1973 military coup Jara was called to sing to thousands of detainees held in Chile Stadium before his hands were cut off by military officers (44), a rendering wrong on both counts. Readily available now are eyewitness accounts by detainees and conscripts, testimony by Joan Jara, who recovered Víctor's body in 1973, and Chilean judicial rulings as well as secondary sources. Black repeats the “legend” in her chapter but includes the facts: that Jara was detained with hundreds of others in his university, sent to the stadium, and then tortured (his hands were broken) and murdered (135).
Aceves Sepúlvida provides a gendered analysis of how art was used in feminist protests in 1970s Mexico as a way of building solidarity with other movements calling for justice. Grinnell analyzes Marxist, lesbian feminism in Mexico and the ways in which activists created artwork to build empathy for their struggle, solidarity with other groups, and unity with international revolutionary movements. Adams provides definitions of solidarity art and the ethos of solidarity, and Capello in his epilogue contrasts the approaches of the contributors.
Overall, the book, while somewhat uneven, provides thought-provoking case studies of the role of art in solidarity movements.
