Pirate Novels: Fictions of Nation Building in Spanish America (review)

Pirate Novels: Fictions of Nation Building in Spanish America. By NINA GERASSI-NAVARRO. Latin American Studies/Postcolonial Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. x, 251 pp. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $17.95.

The decisive role that Latin America's literary intellectuals have played in defining a nation's, even a continent's, cultural identity in the postindependence period is no secret. As the classic works of such luminaries as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Hernández, and Ricardo Güiraldes have helped shape Argentine national identity, so have Uruguayan José Enríque Rodó, Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, and Cuban José Martí contributed to the self-image of all of Latin America as unique and meritorious. Now Nina Gerassi-Navarro has uncovered some overlooked or unappreciated nineteenth-century melodramatic historical novels focusing on pirates. And she's provided an imaginative and intriguing interpretation suggesting that these too should be given serious consideration as influential tools deliberately intended by their authors to help build cultural and political nationalism in their respective states.

Gerassi-Navarro notes the fictional treatment of pirates as romantic heroes that became fashionable in poetry, novels, and opera in early-nineteenth-century Europe, with the exception of Spain, just when piracy itself was finally fading in the Mediterranean and Caribbean. Curiously, she finds the portrayal of pirates in Spanish America in the same era to be far more complicated. Whether portrayed positively or negatively, depending on the agenda and perspective of the author, the pirate in Spanish America was, she discovers, an important icon in the extensive and ongoing debate over national political and cultural identity and purpose in the first decades after independence. The evidence is found in four historical novels produced by widely recognized writers, three of whom were also significant players in the political and cultural issues of their respective countries. The latter three were Yucatecans Justo Sierra O'Reilly (El filibustero, 1841-42) and Eligio Ancona (El filibustero, 1864) and Argentine Vicente Fidel López (La novia del hereje o la Inquisición de Lima, 1854). The fourth, Colombian Soledad Acosta de Samper (Los piratas de Cartagena, 1886), has only recently drawn the attention it merits in spite of her prominence at the time. What Gerassi-Navarro finds in the conflicting interpretations of the pirate as an historical phenomena is a lack of agreement on the lessons to be learned from the past and the cultural values and political formulas needed for uniting and building a nation. And that, of course, exactly reflected the larger cultural and political confusion of the era.

Soledad Acosta de Samper, a conservative advocate for a political and cultural system based on the colonial Spanish heritage, characterized the pirates who preyed on her Colombia as a brutal, foreign, and heretical antithesis of the heroic and civilized Catholic peoples they terrorized. Liberal historian Vicente Fidel López provided a quite different portrait. He employed a love story between a beautiful Peruvian criolla and one of Sir Francis Drake's noble lieutenants to discredit Spanish political, religious, and cultural oppression and to champion an English model for the newly independent states of Spanish America. Eligio Ancona and Justo Sierra O'Reilly, in contrast, featured pirates who were not Europeans but rather Spanish Americans forced into piracy by social or racial injustices from corrupt Spanish officials and institutions. Both authors looked to American, rather than foreign models, for nation-building.

In addition to her analysis of the ways these nineteenth century authors used pirates to suggest a particular national identity, Gerassi-Navarro provides an outline of the history of piracy in Spanish America, a review of the treatment of piracy in the chronicles and epic poems of colonial Spanish American literature, and a discussion of the role of women and race in the nation-building schemes. Together, all make a persuasive case that nineteenth-century pirate novels offer still another piece of literary...