Neighbors north and south: Literary culture, political rhetoric and inter-American relations in the era of the Good Neighbor Policy, 1928--1948

During the Good Neighbor policy, which dominated U.S.-Latin American relations from 1928-1947, the United States set out to convince people in the Americas to see one another as neighbors in order to strengthen economic and political ties within the hemisphere. In this dissertation, I argue that the reciprocal relationship between culture and foreign policy during the 1930s-40s can be understood by tracing the deployment and circulation of the trope of the neighbor in social and cultural texts in the United States and Latin America. Forged in a crucible of domestic concerns, the metaphor of the good neighbor relied on and promoted a normative notion of neighborhood, drawing its meaning from images and ideals associated with literal U.S. neighborhoods, even as it was adjusted to address shifting historical contingencies.; I begin by tracing the development of the good neighbor as a political metaphor, arguing that the United States engaged in a process of strategic rescaling with the creation of the hemispheric neighborhood. During the 1920s, the idea of the neighbor was linked with small-town provincialism, but as world attention turned toward the war in Europe, the metaphor and the policy gained support from prominent American authors, including Sherwood Anderson, Thornton Wilder and Sinclair Lewis. In many instances, the metaphor facilitated the articulation of U.S. imperialism in Latin America. I explore how this is true in U.S. popular novels that exploit the conventions of detective literature to confront anxieties surrounding the policy, and in a series of 1940s Coca-Cola advertisements that reflect exclusionary ideas of community that operated domestically and internationally. However, critics returned the metaphor to the United States in ways that not only challenged the rhetoric of the policy, but also questioned persistent domestic U.S. racial divisions. In their picaresque narratives, Peruvian authors Manuel Seoane and Cesar Falcon use the trope of the neighbor to critique the policy, calling for genuine solidarity to replace false friendship. African Americans and Mexican Americans adopted the metaphor to argue that the U.S. government should be as concerned with issues of inequality at home as it professed to be in international policies.