Colonialist Attitudes in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: White European Men in the New World in Friedrich Gerstäcker’s The Search for Gold

COLONIALIST ATTITUDES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LATIN AMERICA: WHITE EUROPEAN MEN IN THE NEW WORLD IN FRIEDRICH GERSTÄCKER’S THE SEARCH FOR GOLD Anabel Aliaga-Buchenau Friedrich Gerstaecker, a native of Braunschweig, Germany, left his homeland as an emigrant at the age of twenty-one in 1837. Inspired in his youth by Robinson Crusoe and John Fenimore Cooper’s writing, the young man became a writer by default as his mother took the diary-like letters from her son to a publisher. When Gerstaecker returned after six years in the New World, he found his descriptions published. He continued to write for the rest of his life and found that he could not stop traveling , either. In 1849, he undertook travels that took him to Latin America, Oceania, Australia, and Java for three years. His travels found expression in many stories, novels and essays. In 1860 he embarked again for Latin America. However, this journey was different in that he was contracted by the British based Ecuadorian Land Company to travel to Ecuador. In return for his passage he agreed to serve as assistant director of the colony to be established on the coast of Ecuador. His duty was to report in writing about the development of the colony. Numerous letters and documents of this 18 month period abroad reveal Gerstaecker’s frame of mind when he lived in San Lorenzo, a small village not far from Esmeraldas, the town featured prominently in his novel “The Search for Gold.” In this novel, he tells an adventure story of two immigrants who leave Esmeraldas in search of gold. As with most of his other works, he bases his fiction on his personal experiences of places and people. In a very direct sense, then, Gerstaecker participates in the colonial endeavor, although he is a German traveling to the New World in 1860 when Germany does not own colonies. His job with the Ecuadorian Land Company makes the company’s goals his own. They want to establish a thriving community, use the raw materials and resources available locally to produce goods or products that can be exported and turned to profit. They want to exploit the products and workforce available in the colony. Gerstaecker supports the Land Company by petitioning the Ecuadorian government to build a street to the new colonist’s town, for example. In this paper, I examine Gerstaecker’s stance towards the project of colonization as expressed in “The Search for Gold.” The nineteenth century sees a proliferation of texts published in Germany about the New World. Alexander von Humboldt’s travels and subsequent published narratives have inspired many to emigrate, to travel, C  2010 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 71 The Latin Americanist, March 2010 and to write about the Americas. Throughout the century, the tone and stance of these texts changes. While the 30s and 40s witness an idealized and romanticized version of life in the Americas,1 in 1855 Ferdinand Kuernberger publishes a reaction against this entitled “Those who are tired of America.”2 Gerstaecker seems to strike a balance between these two extremes in that he tries to correct both the positive and negative idealization of America.3 He claims that his works are based on his own experiences and therefore present an accurate picture of life in the New World as it is.4 Many of the works inspired by Humboldt’s text present as their favorite topic “heroic conquests in which Columbus like figures discover, explore and take possession of [. . .] virgin forests and terrains.”5 One common trait found in such narratives is the description of the supremacy of the white male—that is the discoverer-explorer. Both race and gender play an important role in the definition of the white European male: “..race became defined as a series of immutable physical properties, accompanied by equally immutable intellectual and moral characteristics and [. . .] gender was constituted as a naturally hierarchical difference between the sexes.” The colonial environment proved to be the perfect context in which the white European male could define himself in contrast to the colonized peoples “whom they displaced or desired.” In fact, it is only in this...