MRR As you well said, Guamán made an Andean world; Garcilaso, the Inca, brought the Inca empire to the universe. Both were part of the discourse on abundance that featured Latin America in the past. Is there a discourse on abundance today? How is that discourse today?

JO Let us say that three models coexist to represent the American experience. I have called them: abundance, shortage and eventuality. These are discursive models or, in other words matrixes to produce the discourses. In Foucault's sense, they would be some sort of files, generating sources of discursive representations. The model of abundance is still alive and competes with the others. The predominating one is perhaps that of shortage -obviously on account of the recurring crisis that have demoralized Latin America. Folk art is an expression of the discourse on abundance. Folk art today -and one must say that art, after all, are also products of the crisis- is used to represent, to contradict and to underline. This art, in my opinion, enjoy a great creative health and has formed its own distribution market. Ironically, I have found that there are Peruvian artisans in Venezuela, for instance, who make or produce Colombian or Venezuelan folk art -in other words, they have created transnational images. The famous small Venezuelan small wagons are made in several countries now, some times with Colombian names; they are no longer big tourist souvenirs but small emblems -should I say- also representing abundance -the wagons are loaded with fruit and things, after all. Think of all the fruit filling the most varied works of folk art in easels at archaic villages that look like sack cloth; or of those game scenes. Perhaps they suggest something more than the discourse of abundance: some nostalgia of representations of abundance. They may be things that have disappeared but that may be suddenly brought back under a magic spell, through a ritual. On another hand, however, besides folk art, there are also life affirming discourses in some literary forms -perhaps in short stories, for instance. The Latin American short story of today has great flexibility to represent different, contradictory things. The short story representing the ever present shortage has always been a realist, disencumbered, summary story. The short stories that represents exaltations, fruition, joys that we may associate with experiences of abundance such as full significance, harmony, pleasure, dialog are rather multiple-form stories, with multiple voices, we could say. And this popular energy, urban energy, this mixture is often seen in the short story. The presence of urban, oral, popular elements, for instance, seems interesting to me; it is not always traumatic, not always a representation of shortage. An a third example is seen in painting. Mostly in Europe, you enter a museum or an art gallery and if its is Latin American painting color strikes out immediately; it is something that belongs to us, specially the audacity of contrasting colors. Big, flat, bright, contrasting colors. We have the a fruit, vegetal, mineral color, if you want. And that with the plastic language of our color, and I don't mean that it is a typical color but rather an psychic one, a sensory, appealing, vibrant, warm color -if we are going to use adjectives. It is also an underlining of abundance.

MRR The Latin American synchretism has been an precedent of post-modernism by virtue of its inclusive nature. Do you believe that is still a characteristic?

JO Let us say that we are no longer in times of addition. Synchretism is still being evidenced through the "grafts" -I dare say-, following the Inca Garcilaso's model that we share. The Inca recommends, may I remind you, the grafting of European plants on Indian plant because, he says that they produce more due to the more generous ground, et, and Martí develops that image, also, of the American tree trunk with European branches. Synchretism is thus a great metaphor of our ability for cultural knitting. Of course, nowadays, in cultural terms one talks of "cultural luggage", that we all have a bag and that, if we open it, we see a series of elements that are some sort of cultural first-aid items, giving -I don't know- perhaps anything from miraculous small pictures to talismans and maps and family photos, ultimately thousands of things. Each cultural bag surely is a brief summary of greater references having to do with memory, with the individual's identity etc. There is in that cultural valise the migratory essence of our cultural things and, accordingly it cannot be a sum since an addition of cultural data would make too many bags, the luggage would be too heavy. On the contrary, with hybrids and with grafts and, generally with cross breeding of synthetic things, a few things realize many others, a word relates a discourse, a figure tells about a composition with wider fields. In this sense, then, we are not as totalizers as we were in the sixties when things were added-up freely, when countries, regions were added as if a single Latin America were possible. Any way, we have become more selective, we carry lighter luggage, perhaps we are more critical but we keep doing the grafts that fecundate our ability to give sense to the world.

MRR The baroque has been our foremost feature since the beginning. If we could see the baroque with that ability to create abundance from scarcity and if we bear in mind that in Latin America there has never been so much scarcity as today, may we ask you: where is today's baroque?

JO The baroque is still there. There are many baroques. There is, of course, the baroque of the plenty, of abundance. I just saw in England the great Flemish and Italian still lives that grow and multiply themselves since the appearance of the Indies with the reputation for fruit such as pineapples, for instance. The American pineapple predominates in a series of circular and prolific still lives. Of course, perhaps such baroque representation no longer exists in America nowadays, since any such an exuberant and celebrating plenitude of things in America would be quite innocent in our time. Things have their history, each thing responds to a cultural history, to a political history, to a social history. Things have acquired multiple identities. It is hard to represent a scene of nature as a moral scene of plenitude. But, however, there are other things that keep being baroque in the products of Latin American art; think about permutation, combination, synthesis and mostly about the heterogeneous and heterodox features of the displacement from the center. In post-modern practices there is no single central subject with a sight favoring its place in the world but rather a central subject who is always running away from the center or that is always out of the center because it is built in relation to others -to what we could call "otherness" if the neologism were permitted- to what is different, with he himself being a mark of the difference. Nothing remains then but the combination, the permutation, the simulation; and we are all perfect in these baroque practices because we have perfected them to volution, to filigree as the broché producing knitting. Then, the refining that is so much part of us and makes European cultures appear to us as quite cultivated but very scarce in rituals, or in other words quite evident and literal, is still being practiced and the baroque continues to exist, it keeps relating a way of seeing and also a way of naming.

MRR And a way of thinking?

JO Also, of course, because we may say that there are many ways of thinking but it is clear that there is representation in thoughts. Inevitably, when we think, let us say in baroque terms, it does not mean that we think in an illusionary and decorating way we make unforeseen connections. Perhaps, sometimes, these connections are not the best ones when we try to amend social problems or to correct errors, or advance in civic culture etc. It is, however an imaginative way of seeing. If everything must be reduced to the baroque, since it is a style rather than an analytical mode, it would be a style of representing things. Yes, the baroque keeps speaking for ourselves.

MRR What difference would there be between the idea of Latin America in the XIXth. century and that of today?

JO Nationalities came to life mostly in the nineteenth century and they were the result of what now is known as imaginary communities because they are creation of almost an action of will or sometimes of faith. Construction of states began also then. Sometimes the states were more important than nationalities and, accordingly, they expressed a dominant nationality in countries that were multinational by definition as it the case of ours. The nineteenth century is a formation stage. In the sixties one saw the 19th. century with a great deal of skepticism; there were talks of the American emancipation's failure; there were talks of Independence as a civil war, of the fact that the state had always been a mere presence of the dominating class and of dependent modernization. In other words, there was quite a negative vision of the 19th. century, with the added accent of the devaluation of Liberalism. It was thought that Liberals were simply some conservative gentlemen who stopped the forces of emancipation set free by independence; I believe that has been corrected today. With regard to the critique, there is a revaluation of the XIXth., mostly because in the XIXth. there is also the critical conscience of the limits of the state; there is the need for a liberal political civilization; there is the emergence of popular voices through literature and art. They are often unheard but they are there. There is conscience of what is procedural, of the fact that our XIXth. is less canonical and organic than that seen in Europe. If you go to France or England, at the first glance you find out that these are countries that were built in the XIXth. century. From urbanism to the laws and states. In our countries, however the XIXth. has been quite fluid, sometimes too fluid because if we had had a more organic XIXth. -some countries, like Chile, had it- perhaps our institutions would be stronger today. But in all events, we are reading the XIXth. once more to be more fair to.

MRR Then the basic idea between the one we had of the XIXth. and the other we now have...

JO Well, now we have a quite modest idea of ourselves, we are going through times of self-criticism. Sometimes I think that it is traumatic because it goes through the subjects' refusal and there is some kind of self-negative position that is rather illustrating of the moral, mind unease and also of the real difficulties of being able to represent such a complex and long crisis. We see then that it has become something natural because the crisis is normally an exception but now has become the rule. It turns out then that in view of the apparent impossibility of controlling what happens by using analytical language, we have arrived at this self-derogate position, and it is stronger in some countries than in others; it seems then that it turns us into some kind of culture of defeat and makes us enjoy failure -and that, in my opinion, is not dignifying nor intelligent.

MRR Quite differently from North America, Latin America seems more prone to project in paper than in action what ought to be. Why that?

JO Well-, we are great creations of discourse; all America from its origins is a discursive creation; we live within discursive spaces, we fight over a few or more words and sometimes the apparent big differences are nothing but intonations of the same language, different intonations. Of course, it is evident that we have lacked pragmatic sense. We also have lived periods that have been quite marked by ideologies, where reality reflected the color through which it was seen. A lot of energy, time and discourses have been lost in order to verify that and it is because consensus is more difficult in Latin America, where there is no tradition of negotiation but a great deal of intransigence. It is hard to be pragmatic if there is no negotiation and we have lacked and keep lacking -perhaps a bit less now- intermediation practices. Educated or professional people, for instance, should be the natural intermediaries and qualified negotiators between the state and civil society, between powers, within the state, among marginal population and the possibilities to create transit and transition channels for them. They have not performed such role. Normally, they have reinforced party ideologies and state power through bureaucracy. In many countries, then, the intellectual and professional class has not been a modern class. But, as an interesting thing, one observes lately in civil society, mostly in the middle class and even popular suburbs, some mediation practices: groups of women, professionals, neighbors. At a municipal level, one sees a lot of new people as the new end-of-the-century leaders; they are the ones who will negotiate beyond social, ethnic, national and class frontiers. They appear as actors or agents of that great agency of new modernity that we have to keep calling.

MRR Do you think that optimism is strange to us? Do you believe that we are convinced that success is not possible? Is it fear, insecurity? Could Neruda's general song be a late response to Whitman's Leaves of Grass in Latin America?
JO Well- yes- you are probably right, Whitman is an extraordinary poet who had much influence in Latin America. He was one of the North American poets who has widely cast his influence, by virtue of his diction, the way he talked, by his optimism and by his energy arising from a civil poetic voice that is not an intellectual voice. The thing is that Whitman's optimism corresponds to an effectively Faustian North American period, with much creativity and with faith in the future, proven faith in the future. The new world trend -the "novo mundismo", in Spanish- would perhaps correspond to that in Latin America. We see some of that in the notion of our "post Rubén Darío" modernism, with the spread belief that Latin America is the West's barn and that it is an immensely rich world and that the Latin American man is the heir to all cultures and is accordingly a new agent of history. That is all part of the new world movement . It has even led to a Latin American cultural epic that could find its roots in Whitman, in that sense of Faustian optimism. Mariátegui said that one must be optimist in will and pessimist in intelligence. Anyway, I believe that a creative, optimist component is required. One cannot live in pessimism. Pessimism reduces, recuses; it does not generate dialog, only derogate self-conviction. That does not mean that one should reach Candide's "nous vivons dans le meilleur des mondes -" optimism. It would be irresponsible. Ingenuity is not innocence, it is foolishness. One does require, however -I dare say- a minimalist optimist as to possible practices. If we could good do a well done thing every day, such an optimist and practical gesture would take us much farther than a great project.

MRR Anyway, do you think that there is a rather generalized belief in Latin America that success is not possible?

JO Well- it depends on what kind of success. That is measured under what has been called the horizon of expectations. Obviously, the horizon of expectations of Mexican village dweller is very modest. Not so long ago a New York Times journalist was thinking about the Mexican people's apparent passivity in the face of the new economic measures requiring a direct punishment to the most destitute classes. The lack of a reaction seemed incredible to many people and some Mexican political analysts, trying to explain the issue, said that it was due to Latin America's long colonial tradition. It is the permanent rhetoric question: if the poor are so poor why don't they revolt? They don't do it for many reasons. First, their horizon of expectations may be modest . In other countries -Venezuela, for instance- it is in some ways very high and there is no uprising either, there is destruction, looting. Success is possible but it depends on the definition of such realization allowed by that culture. There has been much success in Latin America. The Latin American way of life, for instance, is quite rich by itself; it keeps being a more humanized and more humanizing world -even violence, shortages and crisis are humanized. Culture is so powerful and so rich in survival resources that it performs a repairing or medical task, in a social sense. It humanizes the opposing space, it decorates the empty space, it reforests the desertic space; in other words, it does whatever is possible to handle the environment. In this sense, in spite of all the opposing reasons, life in Latin America keeps being a realized project. The thing is that such potentiality is frustrated by obvious limitations that are obviously of a social and economic nature and a matter of resources available. We still give a lot to the world in terms of creativity, imagination; but we keep being one of the regions with lower life expectation, with less resource capability and with larger loss of talent. MRR I once heard you say that when a Norman becomes French no one protests while there is protest when an indigene integrates. Why does this happen?

JO A friend of mine said that when defending the conversion of Andean peasant into Peruvian citizens. Naturally he was accused of being a racist by anthropologists, who assume that the defense of what is native must go through the preservation of ethnic identities. But then, I do not believe that it is legitimate either to hold the extreme position that we are all meant to be modern citizens. As to that, as in all things, one should ask the people what their option is. If we are democratic we may not impose any model on any one and we must respect what the people choose; if they choose a traditional pre-modern ethnic identity, we just have to admit is and as legitimately as that of the other people who prefer to integrate and become national citizens. Anthropologists have said also that modern Latin American states prove their weakness in the existence of ethnic groups that were quite rapidly integrated by central state power. As a paradox, such weakness becomes a cultural benefit. Homogenizing transnational communication þradio, television, for exampleþ could do what the state has not done: to integrate people in a less interesting standard þif we may say soþ than that of national definitions such as the passive conversion of consumers of a communication culture, of polluting communication, rather.

MRR Do you believe that resentment may not be dissociated from Latin American history? What role has it play in the United States' trajectory?

JO Resentment has been quite strong throughout history. Undoubtedly, it cannot be measured, but the resentment of the South towards the North, in the United States, or of a state towards another, clearly has played a role here. There are those who believe that resentment may be creative. Ricardo Rodr¡guez Juli , in Puerto Rico, believes that resentment is a component of Puertorican colonial identity and that it is a force that moves desire and that it could even be a positive force. I doubt it because resentment as so many other mind-shaded sights do nothing but distort facts and introduce a traumatic subjectivity in the subjects' interaction with the environment. We are already a culture of trauma in many things, although sometimes only discursively. In Mexico, for instance, the obsession with Cort‚s and with the Malinche arises with nineteenth century American nationalism and reaches our days. We see it in Octavio Paz, even in Fuentes. The Sons of La Malinche, La Malinche and loneliness, etc. It is only a discursive obsession. Resentment must be questioned always; it must be mistrusted.

MRR How is the marriage between the intellectual individual and politics in Latin America?

JO Not a good one. I do not know of any happy story of that marriage. They say that if you do not concern yourself with politics, politics will take care of you, but, any way, the intellectual's political practice has been perhaps inevitable and that is a long story. In The nineteenth century people were more inclined towards politics than today. Sarmiento was President. When cruising in the Mississippi and observing the North American progress he concluded that it was due to the aggregate of communication ways, schools and immigration. He applied the same recipe to Argentina and when he failed and wrote his memoirs, he could not understand -as many intellectuals don't either- his own political unsuccess and. Typically, as most intellectuals who fail in politics without having been able to read from their experience, such failure was blamed on others. He did blame others for his failure and said it was a racial problem. If the Latin American race was inferior it could not be successful in a modern project. And the same story goes on. As to that, I do believe that our current skepticism is good. First there is mistrust in political parties as democratic institutions. They are seen as institutions that may not be used to measure participation or representation but that are, rather, big manipulating machines going as far as to usurp the capacity for a fuller participation. By definition, there is in Latin America a prevailing need to act in political debate. On the intellectual side there should be specialization in discourses, with a lesser reach of political space. Discourse should be reduced to proper artistic and literary functions, and also and inevitably intellectual and political. In all events, the frequent failures do not deny the political vocation of the intellectual and, even if there isn't any political ideal for that, I believe that the best one can say is that the best political function for the intellectual is still that of "doubting". If the intellectual does not doubt he no longer is performing a political function but rather a dogmatic one. As long as he doubts there will be sense in criticizing.

MRR It has been said that the Mexican revolution homogenized and modernized Mexico. Peru did not have a revolution. Do you believe that there is today a great difference between both countries?

JO That is a hard question because there are many answers to it. There is a lot of difference between Mexico and Peru also. There is no reason why there should not be. They are quite parallel countries and most imbricated ones as to many things, both in experience with failures as in common hopes. The thing is that Peru did not create a state as Mexico did. The great ironic creation of Mexico is the modern state. Peru did not create that, the Peruvian state has always been quite marginal, very weak. Then, the Mexican revolution did create a national culture. Peru has not had the national cultural conscience of its own plurality. When comparisons are made, differences do not talk well of Peru. Now, of course, as to poverty indicators, problems and consequences of the crisis, they do resemble a lot, there are many parallels. I do think, however, that the most interesting thing is to see the differences, because seeing the differences between our countries we lose the illusion that there is a single Latin America and we realize that experiences of what is national have shaped-up our own realities.

MRR What is, in your opinion, the incidence of Latin American presence in the United States?

JO Well, Latin American presence in the United States is something regular, inasmuch as -and I believe I told you so- the North American identity has its own Hispanic component today. The other component was black and it served to verify the Anglo-Saxon identity. There is another mediation nowadays in that Anglo-Saxon national identity and it is the Hispanic presence. The discovery of the great diversity animating the US may be found in that triangulation of what is African-American, Hispanic-American an Anglo-Saxon -it includes other minorities also. It has been said already that this is a country of minorities, but they are not just ethnic minorities, they are also cultural minorities. Now, of course, there is also great fear -mostly by the conservative classes- of that diversity because diversity is seen as a way towards disunion. Some ultra-conservative politicians go as far as to believe that the example of French Canada may occur only in a bilingual country. That is, of course, an outrageous criticism against the Hispanic because Hispanic culture, as opposed to other minorities, is a culture that has its own space on a larger proportion; its integration process does not go through the suicidal elimination of its language, of its cultural difference. Obviously, many do integrate and fade away in integration. But as to what is Hispanic, the difference lies in the configuration of articulate -yet fluid- spaces, that keep being national in this country; they maintain their original nationality and, accordingly, the Peruvian, Argentinean, Chilean nationality is no longer so important. The importance lies in the cultural nationality that they discover here when they meet each other. Then, this is already part of the XXIst. century USA that has been questioned because it is partially marginal and it is a scapegoat. It is inevitable in this country's development and one may clearly observe among this country' university students -in other words, in the educated leading class- their preference fro Spanish as a foreign language.

MRR For many years you have lived in University campuses of the United States. It has been said that there is a deep decadence of North American society. What are your thoughts on that?

JO There are indeed some worrying signs of a loss of civility as one of the North American great virtues. There still is evident violence, there is bigotry, discrimination of women -no doubt about it. There has been obviously a lot of progress in those campuses. One observes less violence today than five years ago, but then there is drug use, much unease, and some degree of xenophobia. It looked as if the latter had apparently disappeared or had lessened. There is also, for the first time, a conscience of national internal unease, that perhaps it is no longer possible to live in full unity and that maybe one has to resign to the fact that the other is not going to understand our final difference . Now, for instance, in university campuses there is a predominating notion of a voluntary ghetto where African Americans rather live self-segregated. Hispanics prefer to live separately as do Asiatic, on their part. There is no space for confluence. It is a rather curious isolationist attitude; a bit skeptic and perhaps the product of a tired integrating discourse. But, on another hand, it is a country with a huge capacity for self-criticism an to rebuild itself. The most interesting feature during recent years is that, for the first time the North American citizen believes that truth is not within reach. He always believed all that was said in the press, in the news, by politicians and, accordingly assumed public truth as the sole responsible. Wherever he was, a North American felt responsible for his government, for his state, his nation -something quite extraordinary because we all feel quite irresponsible for our states-, well, that no longer occurs. They no longer believe what they are told -on the contrary, they do not believe many things. They have become more Latin American and begin to doubt of themselves and I believe that, on the long run, that is positive.

MRR Do you believe that the students' interest in Latin America has increased or decreased in recent years?

JO I think it has increased. It has a different sign. It is not like the search of a space where one works for justice, for the others etc., but it is also a bit more professional. The students who learn Spanish do it thinking of their professional future, they do it thinking of themselves, they know that the Hispanic world is an interlocutor with whom they will have to work. I believe that is positive for us. We need more legitimate interlocutors, more horizontal interlocutors, more democratic.

MRR What would be the Latin American Utopia?

JO Well- Latin American Utopia today would be to be able to control its own resources in a better way, to rationalize its production, its management, to improve its educational systems, to have more democratic social relations. In other words, the Utopia has today more "pragmatic" agenda. It has not ceased to exist; it is there because there are great demands over us and it has thus become more interesting. It requires more participation by ourselves. The Utopia is more consensual this time, although it dares not mention its name.