Birds with 10-and-a-half-foot wingspans!

Fish with terrifying teeth.

Five-hundred-pound anacondas!

And tiiiiny little pink armadillos.

Latin America is filled with all sorts of strange and wondrous creatures.

So it makes sense that animals have figured big in Latin American culture from the beginning.

Like, the Mayans saw animals as messengers to the gods.

And the Aztecs worshipped Quetzacoatl, a god who took the form of a feathered serpent.

All of that cultural connection laid the groundwork for centuries of literature.

And centuries of exploring the parallels between animals and human animals.

Hi!

I'm Curly Velasquez and this is Crash Course Latin American Literature.

[THEME MUSIC] Humans and other animals have had relationships for millennia.

We've got "man's best friend" and... "cat ladies."

We've got chupacabras terrorizing people's livestock.

And in literature, we've got animals as metaphors.

Let's go back to the 17th century, when one writer turned to the animal kingdom to talk about a very human subject: slavery.

See, European settlers from Spain and Portugal had a record of subjugating and enslaving Indigenous populations.

And they weren't exactly open to constructive criticism.

Which meant critiques had to be subtle, or masked by symbolism.

Enter the Jesuit missionary António Vieira.

He knew the Portuguese settlers who had taken control of what's now Brazil wouldn't listen to his "radical" take that maybe they shouldn't be enslaving human beings.

So instead of addressing them directly, he picked a different audience: fish.

"Sermão de Santo António aos Peixes," "The Sermon of St.

Anthony to the Fish," is one of Vieria's most famous literary works.

And if you're thinking, "Curly, since when is a sermon a work of literature?"

May I point you to the gospel of Beyoncé's Renaissance?

Anyway, Vieira wasn't actually talking to fish, of course.

They don't speak Portuguese!

In his sermon, he compares human behavior to fish behavior, describing how "the big ones eat the little ones" and "men, with their evil and perverse desires, become like fish that eat each other."

See how the big fish stand in for the colonizers, and the concept of "devouring" the smaller fish represents the enslavement of the indigenous communities?

But, critically to Vieira's point, even the big fish aren't safe in this ecosystem: there's always the possibility that an even bigger fish - say, the Portuguese monarchy - might come swimming by and eat the colonizers up, too.

"Does this seem right to you, fish?"

he asks.

"For this is exactly what you do."

In this way, he's reminding the colonizers that they aren't at the top of the seafood chain.

And he's invoking the Golden Rule: treat your fellow fish how you want to be treated.

Can you imagine it being so hard to convince people that slavery was a bad thing that you had to break it down like a Sesame Street episode?

Ay, Dios mío.

By couching this political message in something non-controversial that everyone understood, Vieira was able to get his point across.

And he actually sorta got his way.

Days after delivering his sermon, he met with the biggest fish of them all: the king of Portugal himself.

King João the Fourth listened to what Vieira had to say, and outlawed the forced labor of Brazil's native population.

Of course, that didn't mean everything went swimmingly for Brazil's Indigenous communities after that.

And it didn't make Vieira a saint either: as a Jesuit, he actively worked to erase Native culture and religions by converting the Indigenous population to Catholicism.

So yeah, there are multiple scales on every fish.

OK, so, Vieira tapped into the animal kingdom as a metaphor to talk about human relationships.

But some authors take this link even further, where the connection isn't just metaphorical, but literal.

Let's get the Curly Notes on Cuban author Alejo Carpentier's "El Reino de este Mundo," "Kingdom of this World."

This 1949 novel tells an alternate story of the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave revolt in history.

And it imbues real-world events with magical flourishes.

Now you might think, hm, real events with some magic tossed in?

Sounds like magical realism to me.

And you're not far off.

Carpentier's work is actually a precursor to magical realism, and it would go on to influence authors like Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende.

But Carpentier called his style something else: lo real maravilloso, the marvelous real, and it had one big difference: the elements that might seem "magical" to non-Latin American readers are pulled straight from Afro-Haitian culture and folklore.

In other words, they're a real part of Latin American culture and belief.

One of the novel's most noteworthy elements of lo real maravilloso is the ability of two of the main characters to shape-shift into animals.

For example, the narrator, Ti Noël, is a young Black man enslaved on a sugar plantation.

When his friend and fellow enslaved person Macandal loses his arm in an accident, Macandal flees to the mountains, where he discovers secret herbs and plants with otherworldly properties.

Over time, he gains the ability to transform into different animals, and he visits nearby plantations in these guises to help the enslaved people revolt.

On the surface, Macandal's marvelous ability is an adaptation to escape the clutches of white enslavers.

Like, when he's captured and about to be executed, he transforms into an insect and disappears.

But the link between human and animal also serves as a commentary on the subjugation of one group by another.

Even after the Haitians have won freedom from their white enslavers, the lighter-skinned Haitians continue to perpetuate violence against their darker-skinned neighbors.

And when Ti Noël picks up Macandal's skill and starts shapeshifting to escape this cycle, he finds the animal dynamic... pretty much the same.

As a goose trying to join up with other geese, "he encountered sawtoothed beaks and outstretched necks that kept him at a distance."

Carpentier seems to be saying that whether animal or human-animal, oppression and abuses of power persist.

It's not pretty, but it's nature, the novel argues - and understanding nature can help us make sense of the human world we live in.

OK, we've been talking about a lot of wild animals so far.

But in the 21st century, the animals most of us are familiar with... are our pets.

*vocalizing* And if my Instagram feed is anything to go on, people these days have some pretty interesting relationships with their furbabies.

Though maybe no human-animal relationships are stranger than the one in Colombian author Pilar Quintana's 2017 novel.

We can't actually say the title here, but in both Spanish and English it means "the female dog."

It tells the story of an unhappily childless woman, Damaris, who adopts an orphaned puppy.

At first, the dog takes on the role of infant in Damaris's life.

Quintana writes that Damaris "carried her against her bosom.

The tiny dog fit in her hands, smelled of milk, and made Damaris long desperately to hold her tight and cry."

She christens the puppy Chirli, the name she's been saving for the human daughter she hopes to have someday.

But Chirli doesn't spend long in the role of Damaris's surrogate daughter.

She repeatedly escapes from Damaris, and on one of these ventures becomes pregnant herself.

Then, Chirli jumps paws-first into another role we humans know intimately: flawed mother.

Now this is where things go off the rails.

Rather than doting on her offspring, Chirli eats one of her puppies!

And then abandons the other three so she can lie in the sun.

And we thought La Llorona was bad.

As Chirli rejects her own puppies, Damaris becomes increasingly violent toward the dog.

She seems angry that Chirli refuses to behave as she's expected to.

Even the title of the book speaks to this failure to comply.

It might refer to Chirli, the literal female dog of the novel, but it has the double meaning of being a not-so-nice term for women who don't conform to societal expectations.

As Damaris personifies Chirli, first as an infant daughter and then as a vindictive absentee mother, Quintana casts light on the character of Damaris.

Like Chirli, she was abandoned as a baby; like Chirli, she fails to step into the idolized role of mother; and like Chirli, she ends up perpetuating this cycle of abandonment when she gives the dog away.

Maybe Damaris doesn't see these things about herself, but she sees them in her dog - which helps us, the readers, understand Damaris better.

And reflect more broadly on the roles of mothers and daughters in the animal - and human-animal - kingdom.

In the end, we're all just animals.

Some of us are just fluffier and more self-obsessed than others.

What?

Latin American culture has a long-standing connection to our fellow fauna, and we can learn a lot from how that connection is explored in literature.

Because the better we understand our relationship to all things fishy, feathery, and ferocious, the better we can understand ourselves.

Next time, we'll look at how science and technology show up in Latin American literature.

See you then.