Editorial

Abstract

This article considers the way in which documentary writing was used to represent both Cuba and the US South as sites of economic underdevelopment. Focusing on Carleton Beals and Walker Evans’ collaboration of text and photography, The Crime of Cuba (1933), I reorient conventional understandings of 1930s documentary from its focus on the US South and argue that the origins of the form can be traced to a much broader interest in representing poverty throughout the Americas. As areas of the South sunk into uncharted depths of hardship, the nations of Latin America became a frequent point of comparison and served as a way to measure poverty in the US. The role of Latin America as economic and cultural counterpoint to ‘modernization’ took on new significance during the Depression, and the inhabitants of the US South were simultaneously incorporated into this construction of underdevelopment. The narrative of progress was applied to both of these regions as a way of explaining the unequal distribution of wealth in the hemisphere.