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| Duration: | 12:12 |
| Uploaded: | 2025-11-20 |
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| MLA Full: | "Dictators & Resistance: Crash Course Latin American Literature #4." YouTube, uploaded by CrashCourse, 20 November 2025, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh4I1hMvubU. |
| MLA Inline: | (CrashCourse, 2025) |
| APA Full: | CrashCourse. (2025, November 20). Dictators & Resistance: Crash Course Latin American Literature #4 [Video]. YouTube. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Nh4I1hMvubU |
| APA Inline: | (CrashCourse, 2025) |
| Chicago Full: |
CrashCourse, "Dictators & Resistance: Crash Course Latin American Literature #4.", November 20, 2025, YouTube, 12:12, https://youtube.com/watch?v=Nh4I1hMvubU. |
Strongmen, tyrants, and dictators have marked Latin America’s history — and literature — for hundreds of years. In this episode of Crash Course Latin American Literature, we dive into some of the novels that have challenged authoritarian governments in real time and in their aftermath.
Introduction: The Power of Stories 00:00
Novelas de la Tierra 0:34
"Facundo" 2:16
Novelas del Dictador 4:58
“El Señor Presidente” 6:12
"In the Time of Butterflies" 8:09
Review & Credits 10:50
Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eE7g4-k6PD7C6wNBzeJIO8GCDHpoJl8ldDjKyq_2yYg/edit?tab=t.0
To learn more, check out these videos:
Geopolitical history of Latin America: War and Nation Building in Latin America: Crash Course World History 225 https://youtu.be/v6xi8_7Fy6Y?si=paRg7m_G3tMAX4vW , Latin American Revolutions: Crash Course World History #31 https://youtu.be/ZBw35Ze3bg8?si=P4HnEqr1_rEP2YGv
***
Support us for $5/month on Patreon to keep Crash Course free for everyone forever! https://www.patreon.com/crashcourse
Or support us directly: https://complexly.com/support
Join our Crash Course email list to get the latest news and highlights: https://mailchi.mp/crashcourse/email
Get our special Crash Course Educators newsletter: http://eepurl.com/iBgMhY
Thanks to the following patrons for their generous monthly contributions that help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever:
oranjeez, Jason Terpstra, Chelsea S, Alan Bridgeman, Roger Harms, DexcilaDou, Krystle Young, Allison Wood, Stephen Akuffo, Katrix , Gina Mancuso, Shruti S, Martin G. Diller, Matthew Fredericksen, Brandon Thomas, Breanna Bosso, Ken Davidian, UwU, Jennifer Wiggins-Lyndall, Samantha, David Fanska, Kristina D Knight, Andrew Woods, Elizabeth LaBelle, SpaceRangerWes, Matt Curls, Quinn Harden, EllenBryn, Johnathan Williams, Leah H., Laurel Stevens, Steve Segreto, Michael Maher, Liz Wdow, Toni Miles, Perry Joyce, Evan Nelson, Katie Hoban, Mitch Gresko, Kevin Knupp, Kyle & Katherine Callahan, Tanner Hedrick, Emily Beazley, Jack Hart, Rie Ohta, Dalton Williams, Scott Harrison, Barbara Pettersen, AThirstyPhilosopher ., Thomas Sully, Bernardo Garza, Jason Rostoker, Rizwan Kassim, Indija-ka Siriwardena, Emily T, Ian Dundore, Joseph Ruf, Alex Hackman, Thomas, Constance Urist, team dorsey, Stephen McCandless, Triad Terrace, Erminio Di Lodovico, Evol Hong, Luke Sluder, Eric Koslow, Katie Dean, Tandy Ratliff, Jennifer Killen, Jason Buster, Trevin Beattie, Wai Jack Sin, Caleb Weeks, Nathan Taylor, Siobhán, Les Aker, Barrett Nuzum, John Lee, Ken Penttinen, Sarah & Nathan Catchings, Pietro Gagliardi, ClareG, Duncan W Moore IV
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Introduction: The Power of Stories 00:00
Novelas de la Tierra 0:34
"Facundo" 2:16
Novelas del Dictador 4:58
“El Señor Presidente” 6:12
"In the Time of Butterflies" 8:09
Review & Credits 10:50
Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eE7g4-k6PD7C6wNBzeJIO8GCDHpoJl8ldDjKyq_2yYg/edit?tab=t.0
To learn more, check out these videos:
Geopolitical history of Latin America: War and Nation Building in Latin America: Crash Course World History 225 https://youtu.be/v6xi8_7Fy6Y?si=paRg7m_G3tMAX4vW , Latin American Revolutions: Crash Course World History #31 https://youtu.be/ZBw35Ze3bg8?si=P4HnEqr1_rEP2YGv
***
Support us for $5/month on Patreon to keep Crash Course free for everyone forever! https://www.patreon.com/crashcourse
Or support us directly: https://complexly.com/support
Join our Crash Course email list to get the latest news and highlights: https://mailchi.mp/crashcourse/email
Get our special Crash Course Educators newsletter: http://eepurl.com/iBgMhY
Thanks to the following patrons for their generous monthly contributions that help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever:
oranjeez, Jason Terpstra, Chelsea S, Alan Bridgeman, Roger Harms, DexcilaDou, Krystle Young, Allison Wood, Stephen Akuffo, Katrix , Gina Mancuso, Shruti S, Martin G. Diller, Matthew Fredericksen, Brandon Thomas, Breanna Bosso, Ken Davidian, UwU, Jennifer Wiggins-Lyndall, Samantha, David Fanska, Kristina D Knight, Andrew Woods, Elizabeth LaBelle, SpaceRangerWes, Matt Curls, Quinn Harden, EllenBryn, Johnathan Williams, Leah H., Laurel Stevens, Steve Segreto, Michael Maher, Liz Wdow, Toni Miles, Perry Joyce, Evan Nelson, Katie Hoban, Mitch Gresko, Kevin Knupp, Kyle & Katherine Callahan, Tanner Hedrick, Emily Beazley, Jack Hart, Rie Ohta, Dalton Williams, Scott Harrison, Barbara Pettersen, AThirstyPhilosopher ., Thomas Sully, Bernardo Garza, Jason Rostoker, Rizwan Kassim, Indija-ka Siriwardena, Emily T, Ian Dundore, Joseph Ruf, Alex Hackman, Thomas, Constance Urist, team dorsey, Stephen McCandless, Triad Terrace, Erminio Di Lodovico, Evol Hong, Luke Sluder, Eric Koslow, Katie Dean, Tandy Ratliff, Jennifer Killen, Jason Buster, Trevin Beattie, Wai Jack Sin, Caleb Weeks, Nathan Taylor, Siobhán, Les Aker, Barrett Nuzum, John Lee, Ken Penttinen, Sarah & Nathan Catchings, Pietro Gagliardi, ClareG, Duncan W Moore IV
__
Want to find Crash Course elsewhere on the internet?
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thecrashcourse/
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/YouTubeCrashCourse
Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/thecrashcourse.bsky.social
CC Kids: http://www.youtube.com/crashcoursekids
(00:00) to (02:00)
Curly Velasquez: Stories have power and they can be wielded for good or evil.
One guy who knew just how true that waa, Rafael Trujillo, one of the cruellest dictators in Latin American history.
He bought into the idea that history was an official and singular story. So in order to control the Dominican people, he tried to take away the stories they told about themselves.
Hi, I'm Curly Velasquez, and this is Crash Course Latin American Literature.
[Theme music]
The countries of Latin America are no strangers to authoritarianism, the kind of government that requires unquestioning loyalty and offers little individual freedom in return.
Strong men, tyrants, and dictators have marked the region's history and literature for hundreds of years. So much so that a whole genre distinct to Latin American literature emerged around it.
La novella del dictator — the dictator novel.
These books offer something different from an officially sanctioned singular story. They give us multiple perspectives, critiques, and glimpses behind the scenes into people's everyday lives.
Let's start in the 19th century. A lot of Latin America's trouble with tyrants stemmed from something unexpected.
Geography.
Seriously, this is such a big deal that there a whole genre called novelas de la tierra — novels of the earth.
And no, this isn't your Rosa de Guadelupe kind of novel.
These novels explore the relationship between Latin America's physical landscape and its political and cultural landscapes.
See, in the 19th century, large swaths of Latin America were undeveloped jselva, llanos, and pampas — jungle, plains, and grasslands.
And even once fledgling countries like Argentina were free from colonial rule, they didn't have the infrastructure to govern or maintain any sort of orderly democratic control.
Enter the caudillos, on horseback.
(02:00) to (04:00)
These guys were like the most intense gauchos ever. They were more like cowboys and they rode their horses across the pampas, seizing political power through charisma and sheer brute force.
They were unfortunately just another type of authoritarian leader.
And just like they dominated the Argentinian pampas, caudillos also dominated the literature of the period.
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's 1845 novel, Facundo: civilización y barbarie — civilization and barbarism — is a prime example.
It's a fictionalised biography of the titular Facundo, who's pretty much the platonic ideal of the corrupt caudillo, but he's not 100% fictional.
He's based on the lieutenant of real-life Argentinian dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas.
And just like his right-hand man, Rosas came from a wealthy landowning family and used his power to become a swaggering caudillo.
Then he kept forcing his way to the top, eventually becoming dictator of Argentina for 17 years, using tactics like spies and secret police to silence political opposition, and exiling guys like Sarmiento, who dared to question his authority.
Now, the Argentinian pampas are huge about the size of Beyoncé's Texas, and Sarmiento describes them lyrically.
"...immense the plains, immense the forests, immense the rivers: the always uncertain horizon."
Apparently, everything is bigger in Argentina, too.
But Sarmiento also thinks the region is "barbaric", because the pampas are so isolated from so-called civilisation.
Sarmiento hoped to convince readers that as long as Argentina existed as an untamed region, the land would continue to produce dangerous strong men like Rosas and Facundo.
He writes, "...from these characteristics arises in the life of the Argentine people the reign of brute force, the supremacy of the strongest, the absolute and irresponsible authority of rulers."
(04:00) to (06:00)
In other words, the caudillo strong msn is a direct result of the undeveloped landscape.
Quite the theory.
Sarmiento called for economic development and improving the country's education system to finally rid the region of tyrants. And he led some of that himself when he was elected president of Argentina in 1868, 16 years after Rosas was overthrown.
But he also propped up a false binary of barbarism and civilisation.
Although the pampas were isolated and not heavily populated, they weren't empty of people or communities.
They were home to Indigenous groups like the Mapuche, and Pampas Indians of Argentina, and the Guaraní Indians of Paraguay — people who Sarmiento aimed to erase, both in his literature, and as a president who waged a decades long war against indigenous peoples.
So, although Sarmiento was democratically elected and made meaningful strides for the country, he's still a controversial figure.
Now, let's travel forward in time to the 20th century, which was, you guessed it, chock full of dictators, strong men, and bloody revolutions.
Wow, this episode really has no chill.
In 1910, Mexico rose up against the 30-year tenure of dictator Porfirio Díaz, resulting in a decades long revolution that killed over 1 million people.
In 1959, Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban military officer turned dictator, was overthrown in the Cuban revolution, and Chile's 1973 Golpe de Estado coup d'état, which resulted in the death of President Salvador Allende, and helped establish the military dictator Augusto Pinochet in his place.
All of this was topped off with guerrilla warfare, police violence, kidnappings, and disappearances at the hands of the government and a whole general vibe of persecution that eas decidedly not it.
And from all this bloody violence emerged more novelas del dictador.
(06:00) to (08:00)
Many of these novels were part of the boom. The literary movement we talked about in an earlier episode that saw Latin American novels in translation popping off around the world.
In fact, many folks consider the boom period to start off with one novella del dictador in particular.
El señor presidente — Mr. President — by the Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias. Here are the Curly Notes.
[Title card: Curly Notes]
Published in 1946, El señor presidente tells the story of a fictionalised dictator who rules over an unnamed country with an iron fist.
Known only as "the president," he rarely appears in the text, and yet he hangs over every character and action like a cloud of tyrant scented Fabreze.
The main character is actually the president's favourite advisor, Miguel Angel Face, who carries out his boss's dirty work in exchange for safety and power.
But when Angel Face falls in love with the daughter of an alleged traitor, he starts to question his loyalties.
You know how the story goes. Boy meets girl, boy falls on love, boy gets in trouble with the terrifying dictator.
Anyway, the novel also includes elaborate dream sequences, blending realistic elements with magical ones in a technique called magical realism.
And this makes it hard for both the characters and the reader to sort out fact from fiction, which mirrors some of the psychological effects of living under a dictatorship.
I won't spoil the end of El señor presidente, but suffice it to say Asturias has a message to get across about loyalty and power in the face of tyrants.
And while some argue that the president might be modelled on Guatemalan leader Manuel Estrada Cabrera — allegedly, allegedly — other scholars say the decision to write about an unnamed dictator in an unnamed country tells us something else.
That the novel is less interested in recounting the story of one historical figure and more interested in exploring the effects that a dictatorship has on a society.
(08:00) to (10:00)
Those lessons can be applied across Latin America and the rest of the world.
Now, let's move forward to the 1990s.
Here, we start to see many dictator novels being written after the dictatorships ended, giving modern readers new perspectives on tyrants of the past.
Like, Julia Alvarez's English language novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, takes place during the dictatorship of Raphael Trujillo, the guy we talked about at the top of this episode, but it was published 60 years later in 1994.
I wonder what they'll be writing about us in 60 years from now.
In the Time of the Butterflies tells the story of ordinary Dominicans, the real life of the Mirabel sisters, Patria, Minerva, and Maria Teresa.
The sisters were part of the underground resistance against Trujillo's brutal regime and they were killed on his orders on November 25th, 1960.
Unwittingly, Trujillo turned the Mirabel sisters into martyrs for the revolutionary cause. They became known as Las Mariposas, the butterflies. Just 6 months later, he was assassinated.
Alvarez had a personal interest in the story of the Mirabel sisters. Four months before their murder, her own family had escaped to the US when her father was targeted by the Dominican Republic's secret police.
But when she turned to the sisters' story years later, she felt that their roles as martyrs had flattened who they were as people. So, she decided to write about their personal lives through historical fiction.
In the novel, each sister, including the sole survivor, Dee, narrates several chapters from her own point of view. We follow them as they grow up, fall in love, and dream about their futures.
In other words, as their everyday lives continue, even in the face of a dictatorship, Trujillo makes only 4 brief, menacing appearances, and each of the sisters comes to realise he's not the benevolent figure he claims to be.
I wonder what they'll be writing about us in 60 years from now.
In the Time of the Butterflies tells the story of ordinary Dominicans, the real life of the Mirabel sisters, Patria, Minerva, and Maria Teresa.
The sisters were part of the underground resistance against Trujillo's brutal regime and they were killed on his orders on November 25th, 1960.
Unwittingly, Trujillo turned the Mirabel sisters into martyrs for the revolutionary cause. They became known as Las Mariposas, the butterflies. Just 6 months later, he was assassinated.
Alvarez had a personal interest in the story of the Mirabel sisters. Four months before their murder, her own family had escaped to the US when her father was targeted by the Dominican Republic's secret police.
But when she turned to the sisters' story years later, she felt that their roles as martyrs had flattened who they were as people. So, she decided to write about their personal lives through historical fiction.
In the novel, each sister, including the sole survivor, Dee, narrates several chapters from her own point of view. We follow them as they grow up, fall in love, and dream about their futures.
In other words, as their everyday lives continue, even in the face of a dictatorship, Trujillo makes only 4 brief, menacing appearances, and each of the sisters comes to realise he's not the benevolent figure he claims to be.
(10:00) to (12:00)
When Minerva finally gets to go to school, where she learns the truth about Trujillo, she laments, "I'd just left a smaller cage to go into a bigger one, the size of our whole country."
Yearning for freedom is a pretty relatable sentiment for anyone who's ever been a kid. And Minerva's discovery that freedom is an impossibility for everyone in her country is a painful reversal.
By reading about real ordinary people like the Mirabel sisters, we get a richer understanding of life under dictatorship, and fiction provides a window into history that's different from textbooks and official documents.
Like Alvarez writes in her post script, "A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart."
The novela dictador is a distinctly Latin American genre, and there are even more dictator novels than the ones we talked about today.
The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela, Doña Bárbara by Rómulo Gallegos, Vo el Supremo by Augusto Roa Bastos, and The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat, to name just a few.
And these novels prove that fiction can give us a lot more perspective and nuance than the tyrannical voice of a dictator, which is a big deal, but unfortunately, dictatorships aren't a phenomenon of the past.
Today, over 50 countries in the world are living under authoritarian regimes. Tyrants, like, want their victims to buy into a single story. But when we step into the hearts and minds of others through fiction, we learn to see the world and ourselves more complexly.
Next time, we'll talk about the role of memory in the aftermath of dictatorships. See you then.
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 storytellers.