Decolonizing Aesthetic Representation: The Presence of the European Savage in Bolivian Modernity

• In Event: Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Cultures 2

Abstract

Behind the seemingly local nature of the foundational costumbrista fictions of Bolivia (1920-1950), is sheltered, as I will hypothesize in this essay, the colonial presence of wild European ancestors. In fact, no research on Bolivian identity formation has considered decolonization as a way to discuss the presence of wild European women unconsciously entrenched in the Bolivian imagination. But cholas, the wild mestizo women occupying an important role in the formation of the Bolivian novel of the first half of the twentieth century, may be considered a mutated product of the Colonial past, particularly of an specific medieval figure of homo sylvaticus: the serranas or the medieval wild women written with extraordinary humor by Juan Ruiz, the Archpriest of Hita, in the Castilian Libro de Buen Amor. I intend to prove that the mutated medieval serranas brought to the present an important topic that inflamed the revolutionary nature of Bolivian society: a sexual aggressiveness that announced, beyond the oligarchical pastoral gentleness or rural tranquility, the spirit of a social upheaval that would become a reality with the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, the most important moment of the country’s modernization through the construction of the Nation-State.

Author

• Javier C Sanjinés, University of Michigan