Abstract
To talk about José Vasconcelos’s 1939 screenplay Simón Bolívar (Interpretación) (Simón Bolívar [An Interpretation]), we need to retrace a bit of history. As we touched upon in Chap. 1, Mexico was one of the hemispheric sites of the 1930 centenary celebration of Bolívar’s passing. The year marked a new beginning. For Pascual Ortiz Rubio, who was welcomed as the new president elect by the Pan American Union in Washington, DC, in late 1929, had won a landslide victory in an electoral process that had seen violence against José Vasconcelos’s campaigners and supporters, and balloting compromised by massive fraud, the first act of the political party Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR) established by Plutarco Elías Calles that in 1946 would rename itself the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI).
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- 1.
Brian S. McBeth, “Foreign Support for Venezuelan Political Exiles During the Regime of Juan Vicente Gómez: The Case of Mexico, 1923–1933,” The Historian, 2007, 69, no. 2: 275–304.
- 2.
Homenaje a Bolívar en el primer centenario de su muerte, 1830–1930 (Mexico: Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores, 1931), 26–27.
- 3.
Ibid., 38–55.
- 4.
Ibid., 85.
- 5.
Ibid., 82–83.
- 6.
“Una mirada sobre la América española,” April to June, 1829, in Simon Bolívar: Doctrina del Libertador (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1994), 240–241. “Un bárbaro de las costas del Sur, vil aborto de una india salvaje y de un feroz africano, sube al puesto supremo por sobre mil cadáveres y a costa de veinte millones arrancados de la propiedad.” “A barbarian from the coasts of the South, a vile monstrosity born of a savage Indian mother and a ferocious African, ascends to the highest office stepping over a 1000 cadavers and at the cost of 20 million in property losses.”
- 7.
Ramón Valle, 1885, Bolívar e Iturbide en el centenario de ambos heroes (México: Imprenta de Gonzalo A. Esteva, 1885).
- 8.
See Gustavo Vargas Martínez, Presencia de Bolívar en la cultura mexicana (México: Universidad Nacional de México, 2005).
- 9.
José Vasconcelos, “Bolivarismo y Monroísmo (Temas Iberoamericanos),” Obras completas. Vol. 2 (Mexico: Libreros Mexicanos Unidos, 1957), 1305–1494.
- 10.
Warner Bros., Juárez,
- 11.
José Vasconcelos, “Bolivarismo y Monroísmo (Temas Iberoamericanos),” 1957. Obras completas. Vol. 2. Mexico: Librervasconcelosos Mexicanos Unidos. 1305–1494.
- 12.
See the website “Presencia de Bolívar en la cultura mexicana. Iconografía mexicana sobre Bolívar” by Gustavo Vargas Martínez Fuente who provides a history of portraits of Bolívar and in the plastic arts more generally from the 1920s to 1998: http://www.pacarinadelsur.com/home/pielago-de-imagenes/350-presencia-de-bolivar-en-la-cultura-mexicana-iconografia-mexi.
- 13.
I will be referring primarily to Vanderwood’s Spanish-language essay, “La imagen de los héroes mexicanos en las películas americanas” (“The Image of Mexican Heroes in American Movies”) in México/Estados Unidos: encuentros y desencuentros en el cine, 1996, Ed. Ignacio Durán, Ivan Trujillo, and Monica Verea (Mexico: Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía), 59–83. This is based on the author’s introduction to his edition of the screenplay, Juarez , 1983 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), 9–41. In contrast to his original study, Vanderwood in the later essay attributes the last revision of the screenplay to the beginning of FDR’s movement away from passive isolationism (64–65).
- 14.
Michael E. Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers: The Warner Bros. Campaign against Nazism (New York and London: New York University Press, 1999), 35.
- 15.
Ibid., 66–68.
- 16.
Paul Vanderwood, “La imagen de los héroes mexicanos en las películas americanas” in México/Estados Unidos: encuentros y desencuentros en el cine. Ed. Ignacio Durán, Ivan Trujillo, and Monica Verea (Mexico: Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, 1996), 68–69.
- 17.
José Vasconcelos, “Bolivarismo y Monroísmo (Temas Iberoamericanos),” Obras completas. Vol. 2 (Mexico: Libreros Mexicanos Unidos, 1957), 1305–1494. “una encarnación del panamericanismo aun antes de que éste precisara sus objetivos en congresos.” 1309.
- 18.
Alfonso Taracena, José Vasconcelos (Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, 1982), 121.
- 19.
José Vasconcelos, Simón Bolívar (Interpretación) in Obras completas, Vol. 2. 1721–66 (Mexico: Libreros Mexicanos Unidos, 1957), 1722.
- 20.
See Bosley Crowther, “‘The Life of Símon Bolívar,’ a Mexican-Made Film, Opens at the Belmont—‘Sarong Girl’ at Palace,” New York Times, 18 June 1943, 11.
- 21.
David Bushnell, “Simón Bolívar and the United States: A Study in Ambivalence,” Air University Review, 1986, Vol. XXXVII, No. 5 (July–August): 106–112. As is known, Bolívar in a private letter to the British chargé d’affaires to Colombia Patrick Campbell, dated August 5, 1829, wrote: “Can you imagine the opposition that would come from the new American states, and from the United States, which seems destined by Providence to plague America with torments in the name of liberty?” (“Cuánto no se opondrían todos los nuevos Estados americanos, y los Estados Unidos que parecen destinados por la providencia para plagar América de miserias en nombre de la libertad”). There is an important debate about the significance of the second part of the sentence, which has often been excerpted, particularly in Latin America since the 1960s, to show Bolívar to have been a critic avant-la-lettre of US imperialism. The Bolívar scholar David Bushnell submits that Bolívar penned these words to curry favor with the United Kingdom, with which he desired to foster political and economic relations rather than with the United States. Bushnell writes: “Those who make much of that quotation seldom mention, if they are even aware, the context in which it was uttered. Instead, they commonly imply that Bolívar was foresightedly warning against the later machination of the Central Intelligence Agency in Chile or the not-so-covert struggle of the Reagan administration against revolutionary Nicaragua. In reality, Bolívar’s statement is contained in a letter to the British chargé in Bogotá––Harrison’s counterpart and diplomatic rival––whose favor Bolívar at the time was ardently seeking, and the principal “torment” involved was nothing but the conventional republicanism that US agents throughout Latin America were then promoting in opposition both to the diplomatic and ideological influence of Great Britain and to the protomonarchist schemes associated with Bolívar and his supporters (These agents’ methods often entailed blunt and brazen meddling in Latin American affairs, but their immediate objectives were essentially innocuous).”
- 22.
José Vasconcelos, 1957, Simón Bolívar (Interpretación) in Obras completas, Vol. 2 (Mexico: Libreros Mexicanos Unidos, 1721–66). “Te equivocas, Martel. Detrás de Páez está Inglaterra…. No quiere Inglaterra que seamos fuertes. Una colección de pueblos desorganizados es más fácil de manejar para sus propios intereses que un gran Estado como el que había soñado.” 1760.
- 23.
John Lynch, Símon Bolívar: A Life, 205–206.
- 24.
José Vasconcelos, Simón Bolívar (Interpretación) in Obras completas, Vol. 2 (Mexico: Libreros Mexicanos Unidos, 1957), 1721–66. “Hablemos claro, O’Leary; quien me estorba es la ambición de los extraños…. En estos instantes lo que más me duele es el fracaso de Cuba. Estaba lista la expedición que debía libertarla; Colombia ofrecía el mayor contingente; México también estaba pronto a ayudar. Y ¿quién nos lo impidió? ¡Los Estados Unidos! ¿Por qué se oponen a la liberación de Cuba?” 1752.
- 25.
Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 104–105.
- 26.
José Vasconcelos, 1957, Simón Bolívar (Interpretación). “otro de los nuestros, tiene el mando de la escuadra chilena. Inglaterra no abandona su presa. Ja, Ja, Ja.” 1744.
- 27.
Paul Vanderwood, Juárez (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 9–41. Vanderwood discusses the reception of Juárez in New York and Latin America between 1939 and the early 1940s.
- 28.
Jasper Ridley, Maximilian and Juárez (London: Phoenix Press, 1992), 239.
- 29.
For another view of the film in relation to Mexican cultural developments in the 1940s, see Seth Fein 171–72, who speaks of the negative response to Juárez in Mexico among both the elites and the masses as an early instance of the US-Mexican pact that he sees developing at the time and that will strengthen, he argues, through the war and the postwar. If Juarez, with its “failure” in Mexico, stands for an ideological pact in formation, later films of the war period and of the cinematic Golden Age successfully perform the ideological work of the state linking Mexico to the United States.
- 30.
Gustavo Vargas Martínez, Presencia de Bolívar en la cultura Mexicana.
- 31.
Octavio Paz, Posdata; Crítica de la pirámide (México: Siglo XX Editores, 1970).
- 32.
Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la solead y otros ensayos (New York: Penguin, 1997).
- 33.
Octavio Paz, Posdata; Crítica de la pirámide, 276.
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Conn, R.T. (2020). Vasconcelos as Screenwriter: Bolívar Remembered. In: Bolívar’s Afterlife in the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26218-1_14
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