Curly Velasquez: Welcome to the jungle. Is it a paradise or a nightmare? A place that'll take care of you or destroy you?

For centuries, we Latin Americans have recognised Mama Nature's main character energy. She can be kind and generous or dangerous and chaotic.

Sounds like a Pisces, am I right?

Anyways, in literature, Mama Nature doesn't just build a sea about plants and animals, water, and rocks. She represents the wildness of people, too. 

So what can literature about nature tell us about us?

Hi, I'm Curly Velasquez, and this is Crash Course Latin American Literature. 

[Theme music]

Let's start a few millennia ago  

Indigenous people knew Mama Nature first, and they knew her well. 

The people of the Andes called her Pachamama. And the Popol Vuh, the collection of sacred narratives of the K'iche' people, name drops their whole natural neighbourhood: macaws, cacao, coyotes, calabash trees, bromeliads, and jaguarundis. 

The Incas of what's now Peru regarded the sun as an ancestor and a God, often depicted as a flaming disc with a human face. And to this day, many indigenous peoples view the land as physically and spiritually connected to themselves. It's not just a bunch of rocks and dirt. 

Fast forward to the late 15th century, and European colonisers were pretty blown away by the Latin American landscape. 

Christopher Columbus praised the Americas for his "soft breezes, high mountains, and fertile lands". 

Get out of here, Chris. 

The Spanish botanist Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo gushed over everything good to eat there. 

Iguana? Delicious. 

Prickly pearl? It'll turn your pee red. 

TMI, Gonzalo. 

But the colonisers' attitude wasn't, "On this land, we all fam." It was more like, "What's yours is mine." 

For three centuries, European colonisers seized control of this vast landscape, violently forcing out indigenous and the ways they viewed their environment. 

Though, to be clear, indigenous folks are still very much part of Latin America today and the rest of the world. 

In the 19th century, Latin Americans rose up through independence movements, transforming colonies into nation-states.

And those nation-states had to grapple with big questions like, "Who are we now? And who are we going to be in relation to this land?"

Some 19th century writers, like the Venezuelan-Chilean poet Andrés Bello, drew inspiration from the European Romantics, who tied passionate emotions to the natural world. 

While living in England, Bello wrote the epic poem Silva a la agricultura de la zona tórrida — Agriculture in the Torrid Zone. It oozes with idealism about the landscape back home. 

Bello addresses the land directly, lovingly even, with lines like, "You give sweet sugarcane, whose pure sap makes the world disdain the honeycomb."

But Bello also claims there's a responsibility involved to

"...place the fertile soil 
Now harsh and wild, under the unaccustomed yoke.
If human skill, and conquer it."

Keep your yoke away from Pachamama, Bello. 

As the 19th and 20th centuries unfolded, many Latin American writers distanced themselves from the European Romantics' idealism toward the wilderness.

Instead, they invoked the llanos — plains — and the pampas — grasslands, as backwards places. 

In them, nature wasn't plain, and the jungle wasn't paradise. It was dangerous, menacing, and it held dark secrets about who people really were. 

Let's get the Curly Notes on La vorágine — The Vortex — a 1924 novel by José Eustasio Rivera.

It's a prime example of regionalism, a style of literature where the place the story occurs is as richly detailed as the characters themselves. 

Pachamama isn't just a backdrop for human drama, she is the drama. 

[Title card: Curly Notes]

La vorágine is presented as the diary of a fictional poetry named Arturo Cova, who fled the city for the llanos, then the jungle, and then disappeared without a trace. 

I mean, except this detailed account of everything that went down. And boy, did this guy have feelings about the jungle. 

"Oh Jungle, wedded to silence, mother of solitude and mist! What malignant spirit left me to languish in your emerald prison?

"Oh Jungle, let me escape your sickly shadows, your living cemetery, your primordial kingdom of agony and resuscitation."

In La vorágine, the jungle is one mean place, a vortex of nothingness, where humanity falls away and chaos prevails. 

In the jungle, Cova meets enemies of all kinds: parasites, leeches, and people enslaving other people through the rubber industry. He finds no kindness, only evil, even in himself. 

As literary critic Jean Franco puts it, "If La vorágine has a message, it is that nature is more powerful than civilization in Latin America."

Meaning not just nature in the literal sense, but also the chaos, wildness, and lawlessness of human nature.

Let's move forward in time to the 21st century, where we start to see the focus shift to environmental harm. 

Eco-horror is a new genre that explores fractured relationships between humans and the environment through terrifying representations of the natural world. You know, natural disasters, toxic water, aggressive killer hippos.

Which, sidebar, people really aren't as scared of hippos as they should be. They are murderous. 

Take Argentine author Samanta Schweblin's 20q4 book, Distancia de rescate — called Fever Dream in its English translation.

In the novel, a mysterious poison in the water kills a horse and then nearly kills a 5-year-old boy named David. 

David survives, but he's changed.

Half his spirit has been replaced by something that makes him talk like a grown-up and be just creepy beyond belief. 

Then, when Nina, a little girl on vacation, also ingests the poison, her mother, Amanda, becomes desperate for answers. 

And this story was inspired by real-life dangers. 

Like in the 1990s, people in the city of Ituzaingó became suspicious that there was a link between pesticides and the high rates of cancer, birth defects, miscarriages, and sick kids in their community. 

So, a group of mothers led a door-to-door study, ultimately proving this link.

But while some pesticides have been banned in Latin America for their links to health issues, others remain widely used despite scientists debating their safety. 

Now, compare that real-world context to the title of the book. In Spanish, Distancia de rescate translates to rescue distance. That's what Amanda calls the variable distance separating me from my daughter. 

The implied question is this:

If Amanda needs to rescue her daughter right now, can she? How can she protect her child from threats she can't even see? 

In an interview, Schweblin described the power of eco-horror. "Fear is what makes you drop a book and run to your computer to Google what is happening, and think, 'Can this happen to me? Is this really happening?'"

Of course, eco-horror isn't the only way contemporary Latin American writers are engaging with environmental damage and exploitation. 

A new crop of ecopoets are highlighting the modern threats of resource extraction, environmental violence, and climate crises, and they're doing it all in verse. 

Take Mapuche poet Elicura Chihuailaf, the first indigenous recipient of Chile's National Prize for Literature. 

He described how in the Mapuche view, everything in nature has a spirit and is part of a greater infinite. And he often explores this aliveness and interconnectedness in his work.

For example, his poem Itrofill mogen takes on a cyclical structure, where each element of the natural world — water, air, earth, fire — is dependent on another. 

"They tell me: Water is Life
But what does Water 
Do without the Air?"

In question after question, it's clear you really can't talk about the importance of water without talking about everything else. Because Pachamama, she's got her hands in everything. 

Chihuailaf presents a hopeful alternative to eco-horror, where materialism and environmental degradation are left behind in favour of a more indigenous view of harmony with the earth. 

Nature has been a source of inspiration for Latin American writers for centuries, and whether they've shown Mama Nature as a source of wonder, terror, turmoil, or transcendence, those representations often reflect not just the landscape, but the social and political times, too. 

In our next episode, we'll explore how Latin American literature has drawn inspiration from another source of turmoil: tyrants and dictators. Until then, go show Pachamama some love. 

Thanks for watching Crash Course Latin American Literature, which was filmed at the Carlos Hernandez studio in Indianapolis, and was made with the help of all these treehuggers. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon.