The drawing on the cover 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 house. It’s also on magnets and shirts and hats and notebooks all over Uruguay. I got my copy there 11 years ago, as a going-away gift from a friend I made during a semester at Montevideo’s Universidad de la República. It reminds me of why I went to Uruguay: to be taught 20th-century Latin American history, which in many cases is inextricable from the history of the United States, from a Latin American point of view. I wanted to invert my mental map.
“América invertida” was always meant to be a mission statement. Born in Uruguay in 1874, Torres García moved to Barcelona at 17, where he designed stained-glass windows for the architect Antonio Gaudí. Over the next 40 years, he lived in Spain, France, and the United States, joining forces with an array of significant artists and art-world figures: He was an influence on Joan Miró, co-founded a group of abstractionists — Cercle et Carré — that included Wassily Kandinsky and Fernand Léger, and befriended Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who went on to found the Whitney Museum. During that time, Torres García both developed and theorized an idiosyncratic style that merged geometric abstraction with figurative inclinations. In a review of his 2015 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, critic Holland Cotter wrote that Torres García’s paintings “look like a cross between stained-glass windows and toy chests filled with concrete but symbolic things.”
Some of the artist’s preferred symbols appear in “América invertida,” with its benevolent sun and moon, and its ship headed, sails billowing, for Montevideo, to which he returned in 1934. On moving back, he founded an art school called the Escuela del Sur, or School of the South, for which “América invertida” became the logo. He wanted his students to build an artistic tradition that emerged from and belonged to Uruguay and its neighbors rather than looking to the United States and Europe for inspiration. “Our North,” he declared, “is the South.”
It’s tough for me to say where my North is. I’m an American citizen, the descendant of Jewish immigrants who chose the United States and were grateful to it. In a 1944 letter written from an army camp while preparing to fight in World War II, my great-uncle Leon reminded my then-13-year-old grandfather, “Don’t forget that because of America you are able to hold up your head and say, ‘I am a Jew.’” I take that legacy seriously. I also take seriously the US’s legacy of obstructing other countries’ self-determination. In the 1960s, the US sent its — our — agents to teach Uruguay’s police to torture political prisoners. In the next decade, we helped foment a coup in Chile. We supported the resulting dictatorship through a covert and illegal scheme called 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 call myself an American without accepting that this is my history, and I don’t see how I could understand that history without studying it from the perspective of those who suffered because of my country’s actions.
Short War is about an American family fractured by the effects of US intervention in Chile. It’s a novel about US history told from an American perspective, but before I could write it, I had to spend years teaching myself not only the history of Chile, but those of all the countries Operation Condor affected. I already had a version of Short War in mind when I went to Uruguay in 2012; I chose the Universidad de la República partly for its interdisciplinary program studying the recent past. I wanted badly to understand my country. In order to do so, I had to look at it from outside its borders. “América invertida” kept me company in that process. I wrote it into my novel; I dreamed of putting it on the cover, a dream that designer Emily Mahon made come true. I hope — this is nonsensical, I realize, but it’s how I feel — that my book makes the drawing proud.
