Crónica fundacional en Colombia: La raza, la clase y el género en el discurso nacional
Abstract
This dissertation examines the racial, class and gender representations of Colombia as a new nation through the analysis of chronicles written in the nineteenth century. After the Spanish-American independence, creoles, people born in America from Spanish parents, from all the new nation-states envisioned homogeneous societies as the models for their new republics. In Colombia, the idealized representation in writing of this homogeneous white society was in stark contrast to the reality of a mixed-race social group. This investigation focuses on two different ways that Colombian chroniclers addressed the presence not only of whites, mestizos, Indians and blacks, but also of women and low classes in the project of nation. On the one hand, in the chronicles from Bogota non-white and poor people were underestimated or simply ignored because they were a threat for the white social class represented by the creoles. Jose Maria Vergara y Vergara’s Las tres tazas [The Three Cups] illustrates this perspective. Vergara differed from most creoles who thought that France and England were the models to imitate. He wanted to maintain the bond with Spain because he considered it as his motherland. Therefore, he imagined a nation that resembled colonial society with the same privileges the high social class of Bogota had by that time. Vergara’s representation of the new republic becomes problematic because of the ambivalence it suggests between a nostalgic desire for a colonial past and a yearning to build an independent nation, and how this ambivalence also affected his depiction of the non-white people. On the other hand, chroniclers from Medellin portrayed a local social group in which all races were represented, but to whom Bogota was the model to follow in terms of education, culture, and fashion. Emiro Kastos’ Mi compadre Facundo [ My Buddy Facundo] depicts the society of Medellin as a local and isolated one where mestizaje or racial amalgamation, was crucial to the conformation and development of the new republic.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
No, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Latin American literature
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