The drawing on the quilt of my novel Short War — “América invertida,” or “Inverted Map,” a 1943 work by the Uruguayan painter and sculptor Joaquín Torres García — is hanging on a wall in my home. It’s additionally on magnets and shirts and hats and notebooks throughout Uruguay. I obtained my copy there 11 years in the past, as a going-away reward from a buddy I made throughout a semester at Montevideo’s Universidad de la República. It jogs my memory of why I went to Uruguay: to be taught 20th-century Latin American historical past, which in lots of circumstances is inextricable from the historical past of the US, from a Latin American standpoint. I needed to invert my psychological map.
“América invertida” was at all times meant to be a mission assertion. Born in Uruguay in 1874, Torres García moved to Barcelona at 17, the place he designed stained-glass home windows for the architect Antonio Gaudí. Over the following 40 years, he lived in Spain, France, and the US, becoming a member of forces with an array of great artists and art-world figures: He was an affect on Joan Miró, co-founded a bunch of abstractionists — Cercle et Carré — that included Wassily Kandinsky and Fernand Léger, and befriended Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who went on to discovered the Whitney Museum. Throughout that point, Torres García each developed and theorized an idiosyncratic type that merged geometric abstraction with figurative inclinations. In a review of his 2015 retrospective on the Museum of Trendy Artwork, critic Holland Cotter wrote that Torres García’s work “seem like a cross between stained-glass home windows and toy chests stuffed with concrete however symbolic issues.”
A number of the artist’s most popular symbols seem in “América invertida,” with its benevolent solar and moon, and its ship headed, sails billowing, for Montevideo, to which he returned in 1934. On shifting again, he based an artwork college known as the Escuela del Sur, or College of the South, for which “América invertida” turned the emblem. He needed his college students to construct an inventive custom that emerged from and belonged to Uruguay and its neighbors quite than seeking to the US and Europe for inspiration. “Our North,” he declared, “is the South.”
It’s powerful for me to say the place my North is. I’m an American citizen, the descendant of Jewish immigrants who selected the US and had been grateful to it. In a 1944 letter written from a military camp whereas getting ready to battle in World Conflict II, my great-uncle Leon reminded my then-13-year-old grandfather, “Don’t overlook that due to America you’ll be able to maintain up your head and say, ‘I’m a Jew.’” I take that legacy critically. I additionally take critically the US’s legacy of obstructing different international locations’ self-determination. Within the 1960s, the US despatched its — our — brokers to show Uruguay’s police to torture political prisoners. Within the subsequent decade, we helped foment a coup in Chile. We supported the ensuing dictatorship by way of a covert and unlawful scheme known as Operation Condor, which helped far-right governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay coordinate violently repressive actions. I don’t see how I can name myself an American with out accepting that that is my historical past, and I don’t see how I may perceive that historical past with out finding out it from the angle of those that suffered due to my nation’s actions.
Quick Conflict is about an American household fractured by the results of US intervention in Chile. It’s a novel about US historical past informed from an American perspective, however earlier than I may write it, I needed to spend years instructing myself not solely the historical past of Chile, however these of all of the international locations Operation Condor affected. I already had a model of Quick Conflict in thoughts once I went to Uruguay in 2012; I selected the Universidad de la República partly for its interdisciplinary program studying the recent past. I needed badly to know my nation. So as to take action, I had to take a look at it from exterior its borders. “América invertida” stored me firm in that course of. I wrote it into my novel; I dreamed of placing it on the quilt, a dream that designer Emily Mahon made come true. I hope — that is nonsensical, I understand, nevertheless it’s how I really feel — that my ebook makes the drawing proud.
