EL BARROCO LATINOAMERICANO: TEORÍA Y PRÁCTICA

Abstract

A study of the history of Latin American culture implies among many aspects that special attention should  be paid to the “barroco de Indias” (new world baroque), one of the names that was usually given to baroque in Latin America.  The European baroque, which develops principally during the seventeenth century and which extended his influence during the eighteenth century, was transplanted to the New World where it would be rapidly developed by the presence of new aesthetic cultural elements with a strong slant to the new American realities.

This appears a different baroque from the one that comes from the European Continent.  The new form of expressions are the result of an intense cultural syncretism, real but not openly declared that shows itself as a new way of feeling and thinking and it is most of the times unnoticed in a most deeply significant way.  In fact, it is a new aesthetic that reveals new social initiatives whose protagonists are the subject of a cross-breeding of cultures established discreetly on the margins of the official rules laid down by the colonial order. This is one main characteristic of the concept: the subversion in the sense of being rebellious when confronted by the hegemonic discourse of that period.

In this way, the American baroque would be another alter, a special type of subconscious reality, in a way revolutionary among the whole society. Besides the process of cultural development of the Latin American baroque in its wide significance doesn’t stop, it goes away along the whole nineteenth century and until today.

As we have previously said, since the mid-twentieth century until the present day, the history of culture in Latin America mentions the neo-baroque as being the legacy of baroque and more than anything, a feature of the cultural life of the global modernity. To analyze the variety and the repercussion of the baroque messages is an interesting challenge to understand in a more accurate way the complexities of the postmodern age.