A Tale of Two Colonies: Comparing Underdevelopment in Miguel Angel Asturias' El Papa Verde & Richard Wright's Native Son

This paper draws upon the concept of the “internal colony” to enter into a comparative analysis of early formulations of the internal colony in Latin American and African American fiction as a productive intersection for... [ view full abstract ]

This paper draws upon the concept of the “internal colony” to enter into a comparative analysis of early formulations of the internal colony in Latin American and African American fiction as a productive intersection for Latino Studies that draws African American and Latin American studies outside of their disciplinary genres while building upon and expanding their theories of oppression and solidarity. The idea of the internal colony has been an important concept for Latino studies since Mario Barrero’s formulation of it in relation to the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the Black Power movement, a connection between the two movements that Ramón Gutiérrez elaborated in his 2009 study of "Chicano Struggles for Racial Justice: The Movement's Contributions to Social Theory." By looking at the duality of the Chicago that Miguel Angel Asturias and Richard Wright portray in their novels, I argue that these novels present fictional case studies of how underdevelopment within the U.S. city is analogous to underdevelopment of what has become known as the Global South.

Guatemalan Nobel prize winning author Miguel Angel Asturias and African American literary giant Richard Wright both look to 1930-1940s Chicago as the financial engine of the United States and the center of multinational corporate expansion as they explore the deleterious effects of corporate imperialism in the metropole and the periphery in El Papa Verde (1952) and Native Son (1940). I pair the second book of Asturias’s trilogía bananera with Richard Wright’s magnum opus for its scathing critique of what Asturias calls “altruismo agresivo” (aggressive altruism) of U.S. companies as they become more powerful than even the U.S. government and its legal systems.

Asturias fictionalizes the United Fruit Corporation’s take over of Guatemalan agriculture and politics by focusing on the U.S. businessman, Geo Maker Thompson, called “el papa verde” (the green pope), who organizes the financial and political takeover of first, the rich agricultural lands and later, the entire country. A magical realist and modernist text, El Papa Verde situates the “American” corporation as the dominant institution of the twentieth century, a neocolonialist institution that replaces the Spanish church as the institution authorizing and necessitating domination and dispossession in the hemisphere. Richard Wright’s Native Son, a bildungsroman in the classically masculine modernist generic tradition of Faulkner and Joyce critiques philanthropy by putting the capitalist and philanthropist Mr. Dalton on trial for exploiting the black community through invisible channels and multiple layers of ownership that distance him from the slumlords of Bigger’s ghetto even though he is the owner of the umbrella corporation that profits from the slumlords’ businesses.

While the relentless portrayals of oppression in these novels have earned them both the classification of “protest novels” (by Jaime Peralta and James Baldwin, respectively), each imagines the production of the Chicago ghetto as a critique not only of the social and political circumstances that produce such a space but also the ideological moorings that undergird the latter.