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, highlighting questions of patrimony and power. The Gamboa family’s breadth is a measure of its influence, but what we could euphemistically call “inclusiveness” is also a threat to its power if racial hierarchies within the family cannot be maintained. In her effort to cross color lines, the miscegenated Cecilia nearly succeeds in confounding the social structure they uphold; the novel’s greatest efforts are directed towards avoiding this implosion of patriarchal power and loss of hegemony by 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 independence; this reading is in line with others popularized in the twentieth century, where, for example, Cecilia symbolizes a miscegenated Cuba oppressed by the colonizer Cándido Gamboa. But other analyses of the novel’s tangled politics and racial logic suggest that it actually advocates limiting mestizaje, so as to establish whiteness outside the framework of the madre patria (Luis 1990, Monteleone 2004, Nelsen 2011). 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 mestizo or post-racial nation to come. Rather, they trace struggles for racial hegemony in the formation of the post-Independence state.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 