The Whitening Project in Venezuela, ca. 1810-1950

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The Whitening Project in Venezuela, ca. 1810-1950
Alana Alvarez
Dissertation under the direction of Professor Ruth Hill
Simon Bolívarâs (1783-1830) still-popular and demagogical notion of the Venezuelan as a mixed-race individual whose supposedly unique racial fusion benefits the construction of the nation, has been a pivotal part of how the Venezuelan´s describe themselves racially through out the 19th and 20th centuries. I begin my investigation with Bolívarâs political speeches in which he depicts the prototypical Venezuelan as a mixture of European, Indian, and African bloodlines. By erasing ethnic, racial, and class distinctions that were still intact from the colonial period, Bolívar intentionally inaugurated a complex system of double discourses and codes to ultimately whiten the hidden colonial heritage of mestizaje.
I then trace Bolívarâs supposedly pro-mestizaje discourse through post independence writers Juan Vicente González and Eduardo Blanco. Adopting a material-culture perspective I turn to manifestations of whitening-through-mestizaje in the Venezuelan magazine El cojo ilustrado (1892â1915). Subsequently, I analyze the counter mestizaje discourse of Venezuelan elites Rufino Blanco Fombona and José Rafael Pocaterra. Separating themselves from Bolívarâs use of double discourses, they display their positivist racial ideologies in their literary representations of the lower economic strata and colored majorities.
Moving further into the twentieth century, my study exhaustively analyzes the continuing negative connotations of mestizaje and the presence of Bolívarâs double discourse in authors like Rómulo Gallegos (1884-1969) and Teresa de la Parra (1889-1936). I further dwell into Venezuelaâs mixed racial reality and how it opposes any attempt of successful whitening. Gallegoâs raza autóctona (âautochthonous raceâ) in Los inmigrantes (1922) and Doña Bárbara (1929) suggests a trope of an uncouth and physically inferior mixed race rooted in Venezuelan soil. Consequently, Gallegos forges a necessity and commodity of Whiteness. Finally, I examine Teresa de la Parraâs Ifigenia (1924) in order to debunk the critical portrait of this novelist as a protofeminist. Parraâs narrative renderings of Venezuelan women are racially, and economically, constrained. Using the scopic concept of the White Gaze, as the critical race theorist George Yancy frames it, my analysis illuminates whitening-through- mestizaje in its class and race dimensions in the 1920s and 1930s.

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1. http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-12072016-162442/

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Identifer	oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-12072016-162442
Date	09 December 2016
Creators	Alvarez, Alana
Contributors	Ruth Hill, Cathy L. Jrade, Emanuelle Oliveira-Monte, Jane Landers
Publisher	VANDERBILT
Source Sets	Vanderbilt University Theses
Language	English
Detected Language	English
Type	text
Format	application/pdf
Source	http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-12072016-162442/
Rights	unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report.