The Chimalpahin Conference 2007:

Colonial and Post-Colonial Remembering and Forgetfulness

Luis Ramos

Department of Comparative Literature

UC Berkeley

This paper examines the largely ignored link between South American revolutionary hero Simón Bolívar and Cuban Independence intellectual José Martí. In the first half, I examine how categories race and gender inflect the way that the sovereign subject of Spanish American revolution is conceived in both Bolívar's and Martí's political writings. By comparing Bolivar's "Carta de Jamaica" with Martí's "Nuestra América" I draw links between the way that sovereignty is understood in masculinist terms in both of their writings. Similarly, I demonstrate how their conception of race in the Americas (i.e., as neither Spanish nor Indian) not only suppresses the very racial heterogeneity they appear to address but ultimately offers a narrowly conceived space for political representation across racial and gender lines. Thus I argue that both their liberationist projects ultimately follow a rhetorical logic of European domination and masculine control. In the second half, I address the place that Bolívar holds in Martí's poetry and prose. Bolívar, I argue, figure as a specter whose legacies of national liberation remains incomplete. However, he figures not only as a specter that awaits its fulfillment, but moreover, one who calls attention to the limits of his own emancipatory demands.

About Luis Ramos

I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, where I have taught courses on contemporary immigrant literatures and the postcolonial novel. My dissertation deals with questions of race and gender in twentieth century representations of nineteenth century revolution in the fiction of José Martí, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Marquéz, V.S. Naipaul and Aimé Césaire.