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

214 reframing latin america
during the Gómez years must have made anything short of emancipation
seem wholly impractical to Gallegos. There could be no Romantic project
of hegemonic alliances if the enemy refused to negotiate. Nor could Rivera’s
hallucinations have seemed to the point, blurring the instrumental oppositions
between heroes and villains, or between a metaphorized land and
the metonymized husband who might repossess her. 5 Gallegos reinscribes
those oppositions with a vengeance in Doña Bárbara. Neither love across
enemy lines nor a self-critical respect for unconquerable terrain were terribly
promising for a man who had just lost his country to a usurping “barbarian.”
The question of whether or not the country should be controlled
might have seemed irresponsible to the exiles who raged against the control
of Gómez and foreign interests. Instead they asked how best to repossess
the national patrimony.
Gallegos stages that reconquest as a tale of triumphant civilization, in
the person of aptly named Santos Luzardo, who has come home to the llano
after graduating from law school in Caracas. His fi rst intention was merely
to sell the family ranch and to spend the earnings in Europe. But the llano
makes claims on its rightful master, and Santos stays to put his ranch in
order. In the process he must subdue the barbarous woman who has been
rustling his cattle and seizing his land. Her very identity as a domineering
woman is a signal for censure, a rhetorical trespassing of populism’s gendered
code. Gallegos makes her the “personifi cation” (21; 29) of the seductive
land and of lawless usurpations, an oxymoronic obstacle to Santos’s
demand for legally binding terms. 6 She justifi es her territorial trespassing
with a partial reading of the law; but Santos, in his drive for progress, insists
on turning the page and winning his claim (107–108; 176–177). Meanwhile,
his newly fenced-in property adds newly diversifi ed dairy products to the
original meat and hides, and production develops with factory efficiency.
Borders, fences, frontiers are civilization’s fi rst requirements, the kind of
writing that refuses to risk barbarous misreadings (86; 137). Undecidability
was precisely the semiotic transgression that gave seductive charm to the
llano—with its hallucinatory circle of receding mirages—and to Bárbara’s
exorbitant sexuality, her “imposing appearance of Amazon [marimacho]
put [. . .] the stamp of originality on her beauty: there was something about
her at once wild, beautiful, and terrible” (31; 45–46).
With his land, Santos also reins in Bárbara’s wild daughter, Marisela.
Abandoned at birth by her mother, Marisela had been living in a swampy
no-man’s-land between Bárbara’s treacherously expansive Miedo (Fear)
and Santos’s reconstructive Altamira (high view). She lived there with her
father, Lorenzo Barquero, Luzardo’s feuding cousin. This drunken ruin