All three novels are key works in their national canons, and are set largely on slave plantations. Like several other narratives from the Latin American nineteenth century, their plots feature romances that fail due to a varying combinations of incest and miscegenation. In Cecilia Valdés most clearly, the patriarch Cándido Gamboa is the literal father of both lovers, separated too far by race and yet joined too closely by blood. Endogamy and exogamy come together in such a way as to highlight questions of patrimony and power. In her effort to cross color lines, the miscegenated Cecilia nearly succeeds in confounding the patriarchal structure they uphold; the novel’s greatest efforts are directed towards avoiding the implosion of patriarchal power and the hegemony of the Spanish and criollo elites. Sommer reads Cecilia Valdés’ exposure of the irrationality of the racial system as an argument for integration in the struggle for an independent Cuba, but other analyses of its tangled politics suggest it demonstrates the urgency of limiting mestizaje so as to establish whiteness outside the framework of the madre patria. That is, this and other writings on race and national projects from this period are precisely not, or not entirely, signs and symptoms of a union or mestizo or post-racial nation to come. Rather, they trace struggles for hegemony in the formation of the post-Independence racial state.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 