Marie Arana confesses that she felt a little overwhelmed by the task she set for herself with her latest book.
Silver, Sword & Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story, attempts to explain what distinguishes Latin America’s troubles from other regions.
“It was a very big idea and a very ambitious idea,” she tells Isthmus. “Once I declared I wanted to do it and got my publisher interested, it scared me to death.”
Her book is the culmination of a life spent contemplating Latin America and what it means to be Hispanic. Many of her books have addressed various aspects of this place and identity.
American Chica is a memoir about her childhood and bouncing between the cultures of Peru, where her father was from, and the U.S., where her mother was from. She also wrote a biography of Simón Bolívar, the Latin American liberator.
Silver, Sword & Stone details three issues that have haunted and defined Latin America. “Silver” refers to the exploitation of mineral wealth; “Sword,” the ongoing violence that has plagued the region in the form of coups, civil wars, government oppression and the drug trade; and “Stone,” the zealous adherence to religion. Arana sees roots of all of these pre-dating European colonization, although the European exploitation certainly made things worse.
“How can you generalize about the entire population with very different countries that think of themselves differently?” she wondered. “The history is very clear in these three things. Exploitation, violence and faith march side by side in history and affected one another. So I set out to tell that story.”
The book is a good historical overview, but what makes it engaging is that Arana profiles a real person to illustrate each crucible.
Leonor Gonzáles is a 47-year-old mother who mines scraps of gold with other women at La Rinconada, Peru, the highest habitable town in the world.
Carlos Buergos represents the affliction of the “sword.” A native Cuban, Buergos was sent to Angola to fight in that country’s civil war in support of the leftist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola. In 1980, he was one of 125,000 people who were exiled or fled to the U.S. through the Mariel boatlift. But Buergos found only more violence and trouble in the U.S., where he wound up in prison, says Arana, who first wrote about Buergos in the mid-’90s in a newspaper article. “He seemed to epitomize the violence because he had been brutalized by the war experience in Angola. That changed him and made him violent.”
For “stone,” Arana profiles Xavier Albó, a Spanish Jesuit priest who works with Indigenous communities in Bolivia. “Xavier is an example of someone who is really trying to pay back for the damage that imposing a religion can do,” Arana says.
Arana knows that there’s much more to the Latin American story than these three dark themes.
“There’s a lot of wonderful stuff you could say about Latin American culture and individuals, literature and the arts — a kind of warm family feeling we have, a festive nature that we have,” she says. “But those things don’t move populations, they don’t send people across borders. It’s these three things that explain that cycle of turbulence that Latin America shares.”
Marie Arana will appear at the Wisconsin Book Festival on Oct. 19 at the Central Library, 3 p.m.
