For Glory and Bolívar: The Remarkable Life of Manuela Sáenz, 1797–1856

Abstract

Pamela Murray has provided the field with the biography of Manuela Sáenz that we have needed for many years. As studies of the history of the fledgling United States have long recognized, both women as individuals and gender roles as frames of reference were significant factors first in the break with England and then in the formation of the new nation. We have been aware of this on a theoretical level as regards Latin America as well. We now understand, for instance, the importance of the tertulias (which we might translate as “salons”) hosted by women in the unfolding independence movements, and the significance of the status demanded by early republican mothers. But we have tended to lack specifics, studies grounded in the lives of real people. Flamboyant, half-fantastical figures like Manuela Sáenz and Policarpa Salavarrieta have danced around the edges of what is commonly known; now Murray has performed the valuable service of taking one of these women and making her real.Murray’s definitive biography first treats Sáenz’s youth, in itself fascinating as it vividly illustrates the experiences of children born out of wedlock to members of high-status families in the late colonial period. We then watch a real marriage in operation, that of a young woman of Quito to an English merchant, and observe a genuine example of the kind of power that wives are now understood to have held, even in the patriarchal era of the Bourbon reforms. After Sáenz meets Simón Bolívar, Murray finds herself writing about a much-mythologized period. But with her careful use of extant correspondence — including a more thoughtful and undoubtedly correct sequencing of some undated letters than has hitherto been attempted — she manages to convey the sense of a very real relationship and gives a more than usually believable account of this crucial period in Latin America’s struggle for independence. These long-dead heroes and martyrs were, after all, people who did not always know what they were about, who doubted, changed their minds, argued with each other, and made mistakes. The movement, in short, was bigger than they were.Perhaps most remarkably of all, the biography continues where all the mythological accounts of the protagonist end, that is, after Bolívar’s death, following Sáenz into the 20 years she spent in exile in Peru. Here her life allows us to consider how real people coped with the political near-chaos that erupted in this period. We as readers can test the varying theories we have been offered in studies concerning the differences (or lack thereof) between the political parties, and consider what was at stake as we attempt to understand the depth of the bitterness that existed. Sáenz carved out an understanding of this new world and of her place in it, and the author allows us to follow her thoughts.Murray does not shy away from any detail that might help us better understand either this woman or her era — the financial details of her establishment, her changing appearance as the years passed, or her relationship with the black women who worked for her, first as slaves and then as servants. If I have any criticism at all, it would be that there are moments when certainty eludes us and where Murray might have offered more, might have hazarded a guess about events or thought out loud about possible meanings. Still, she clearly refrained from such ventures for the best of reasons: a determination to avoid at all costs the kind of projecting and mythologizing that has been ordinary fare in past studies of “romantic heroines” like Sáenz.Even without the intellectual rewards this book offers in comparing Sáenz’s lived experience with the stories that shroud her life, I would strongly recommend it. For Sáenz was a fascinating, strong-minded woman, and one well worth knowing. The reader’s own life is improved by coming face-to-face with hers.