Kunapipi XXVI:1

MARTA JIMENA CABRERA
The Dream of an Order: Race and Gender and the Project of An-Other Caribbean History

The historical novel Yngermina or the Daughter of Calamar (1844) is Colombia’s first novel and one that illustrates the difficulties in conceptualising and representing women, natives and blacks in the nineteenth-century nation-making process. In Latin America, this period of national formation is linked to the idealism of the liberal elites, where the masses are romanticised and symbolically integrated into a homogenous ‘imagined community’. Yngermina, a novel written and set in the Caribbean world navigates between two waters: while it seeks to give the indigenous peoples a voice it also relies on narrative strategies to conceal or even avoid the difference that women, blacks and natives embody; at the same time, it also criticises the abuse of power (typical of liberal idealism) and, contradictorily, celebrates the arrival of conquistadors bringing civilisation to the ‘savages’. In fact, Yngermina can be seen as an effort made by local letrado (writer/statesman) Juan José Nieto to delineate an ideal body politic modelled according to his view of civilisation and modernity. In this particular project, race and gender are tools by which the history of a marginalised region is rewritten as the locus of a civilisation that features strong utopian elements.

JUAN JOSÉ NIETO AND THE PROJECT OF AN-OTHER HISTORY
Anyway, my friend, the deputies of this province that have gone to the Congress have disillusioned us. Through them we know that in legislature where there is an excessive majority over the deputies of this region, it is impossible to obtain anything in its favour, because there is a spirit of opposition that degenerates into insult; there runs aground every useful project proposed for the [Caribbean] coast if it is assumed that it affects the interest of the centre, even indirectly, while for [the centre], everything is obtained. (Nieto 1993 23)

Juan José Nieto was born in 1804 under the shadow of a long conflict between the lettered city of the coast, Cartagena, and the lettered city of the highland, Bogotá. He was born into a humble tri-ethnic family but ascended the social ladder through his two marriages to upper-class women (Fals Borda 37B). Nieto, a self-taught man, became a popular leader and a military person, as well as a member of the local intelligentsia,1 despite the initial rejection of Cartagena’s elite (Lemaitre 14). He wrote Colombia’s first regional geography, Geografía histórica, estadística y local de la provincial de Cartagena (1839), a ‘Mercantile Dictionary’, many political texts and three novels: Yngermina (1844), Los moriscos (1845) and Rosina o la prisión del Castillo de Chagres (1850).