Resumen de Nation Building as Child's play: Teresa de la Parra's "Las memorias de Mamá Blanca" (1929)
In the literary sphere, abundant attention has been given to the ways in which national dramas of self-determination have been played out in the tradition of the essay or the novel, where tensions can be explicitly addressed. Attention should also be directed to childhood memoirs, including ones written in the guise of fiction. One such site is Teresa de la Parra's Las memorias de Mamá Blanca (1929), a text that contributes to the framing of the issues of self-determination and legitimization. What is a seemingly naive presentation of topography and genealogy grounded in childhood evocations is in reality the articulation of an impulse, marked simultaneously by nostalgia and a ludic vitality, to recuperate a lost sense of self and, by extension, a moment in the birth of a nation. Teetering between a beloved colonial past-whose assumptions and relations continued to prevail even after Independence-and a yet-to-be-defined republican future, this novel conjures up personal and national crossroads situated in mid-nineteenth century Venezuela. In the wake of the liberal-positivistic values of progress, capital and competition that had begun to take hold of the country, the creole elite, still infused by a colonial spirit, compensated for its loss of political and economic dominance by focusing on the last bastion of its control: the family and the home. Piedra Azul, the family sugar plantation in Las memorias de Mamá Blanca, becomes a critical space fraught with ambivalence and tension as the narrator re-enacts the relationships of control and complicity that reflect the patrimonial legacy underlying social and political order in the New World.
