Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

civilized folk marry the barbarians 213
One of the recurrent features of Latin America’s foundational fi ction
novels is that, for all their attempts at forging a new society, the hero is
almost always a white, propertied male, and a quintessential member of
the lettered society. The writing elite, while willing to envision and build
a new society, is unwilling to give up its position of privilege. This can be
attributed, in part, to the fact that readers in the nineteenth century were
primarily bourgeois. In this way we can see that foundational fi ctions exhibit
some typically modernist hierarchies.
Doris Sommer, FOUNDATIONAL FICTIONS 4
Rómulo Gallegos became Venezuela’s fi rst freely elected president as the
culmination of his career as educator and novelist. Before much direct involvement
in politics, Gallegos published his best-known novel, Doña Bárbara
(1929) during a trip to Spain, almost as if he were smuggling the book
out. It responded to a series of events that led up to the 1928 riots, incited by
some of Gallegos’s best students, against Juan Vicente Gómez. The dictator
tried to silence the students with a paternal warning; continued demonstrations
would bring harsher measures. His patriarchal authoritarian style
of address had generally secured a proper reception, counting on a paradoxical
combination of traditional respect for caudillos—who dared to subdue
regional interests to national cohesiveness—and the modern militarycommunications
technology that guaranteed obedience. For an elite class
that would have preferred to share his power, this became especially irritating
in 1927 while foreign companies were extracting oil from Lake Maracaibo.
Venezuelans might fi nally have looked forward to the enormous
sums of money needed to develop their own industries, as well as to build
schools, provide good housing, create jobs. But very little money went to
local businessmen or to reform, an oversight that lead Gallegos’s students
to make public accusations and demands. [. . .] But when Gómez insisted
that Gallegos fi nally take sides by appointing him as senator for the State
of Apure, the gentle but ethical man saw no way but out. He followed his
students into exile, returning in 1936 as the father of that new generation.
[. . .] Long before they came home, the exiled intellectuals took up the novel
as the narrative projection of their future victory [. . .].
Published after his disciples had already left Venezuela, at the nadir of oppositional
activity, Doña Bárbara is Gallegos’s fantasy of return and repair.
It proposes a double emancipation, from an internal tyrant and her external
ally; that is, from the local boss, Bárbara (Gómez), and her North American
accomplice, Mr. Danger (oil industry). The failure of any internal resistance