“La patria es nuestra madre”: family metaphor and race in the La Guaira Conspiracy

Thomas Francis Genova

doi:10.1590/1517-106x/2017192231253

Abstract

Abstract This paper explores the intersection of race and the metaphor of the national family in the texts generated during the Conspiración de La Guaira, a failed 1797 republican independentista revolt in colonial Venezuela led by Mallorcan enlightened intellectual Juan Mariano Picornell. Turning away from traditional representations of the dynastic state in terms of paternity, the La Guaira conspirators figure the nation as a mother and creoles and Afro-Venezuelans as brother citizens. Yet, at the same time that it indicates a transition from dynastic to republican paradigms, the conspirators’ emphasis on revolutionary brotherhood serves to contain the radical notions of equality unleashed by the republican independence movement.

Highlights

Citizen Blood and Social DeathWhile African chattel slavery traditionally has been regarded as an exception –or, at best, a blind spot– in early New-World republican programs, following the 1966 publication of intellectual historian David Brion Davis’s landmark Problem of Slavery in Western Civilization, which argues that “Negro slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries posed a genuine moral problem that reflected deep tensions in Western culture and involved the very meaning of America” (DAVIS, 1966: 28), studies have begun to consider racialized non-wage labor as a constitutive other in the formulation of New-World definitions of citizenship
This paper explores the intersection of race and the metaphor of the national family in the texts generated during the Conspiración de La Guaira, a failed 1797 republican independentista revolt in colonial Venezuela led by Mallorcan enlightened intellectual Juan Baustista Mariano Picornell y Gomilla
Hoping to introduce the La Guaira texts into this important conversation on the dialectical relationship between slavery and citizenship, this paper explores how New-World racial hierarchies influenced the development of the La Guaira conspirators’ republican project through an analysis of the evolution that the family allegory undergoes between the texts produced during the St

Summary

Citizen Blood and Social Death

While African chattel slavery traditionally has been regarded as an exception –or, at best, a blind spot– in early New-World republican programs, following the 1966 publication of intellectual historian David Brion Davis’s landmark Problem of Slavery in Western Civilization, which argues that “Negro slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries posed a genuine moral problem that reflected deep tensions in Western culture and involved the very meaning of America” (DAVIS, 1966: 28), studies have begun to consider racialized non-wage labor as a constitutive other in the formulation of New-World definitions of citizenship. Shklar as the inability to vote and feudal subjection to a master.) This situation, which Patterson would dub “social death,” was achieved through the slave’s status as an outsider lacking in kinship ties which would enmesh him or her in the social network and guarantee respect for his or her rights.. Shklar as the inability to vote and feudal subjection to a master.) This situation, which Patterson would dub “social death,” was achieved through the slave’s status as an outsider lacking in kinship ties which would enmesh him or her in the social network and guarantee respect for his or her rights.6 This article probes how the La Guaira texts negotiate these tensions between racial inclusion and exclusion in their formulations of republican citizenship

Family Metaphors

Brotherly Love

Conclusion