We Created Chávez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution

Five. Manuelita’s Boots: Women between Two Movements

Five. Manuelita’s Boots Women between Two Movements A plane is heard in the sky, the bombs fall to earth a rooster crowed, a child cried she gave birth painfully, she birthed the future . . . Woman of blood and of sun, your soul is a song —Alí Primera September 25, 1828 Three dozen conspirators forced their way into the Government Building in Bogotá, intent on assassinating Simón Bolívar. Through a characteristic combination of folly and misinformation, the Liberator himself dismissed the warnings of his long-time mistress Manuela Sáenz, convinced that the conspirators had backed out of their widely known plan. When the attack finally came, he was thoroughly unprepared. In The General in His Labyrinth , Gabriel García Márquez describes this moment in imaginative detail: ‘‘Manuela helped him to dress as quickly as possible, put her waterproof boots on his feet since the General had sent his only pair of boots to be polished, and helped him to escape . . . With the same shrewdness and courage she had already demonstrated during other historic emergencies, Manuela Sáenz received the attackers. . . .’’ Here, playing a role reminiscent of Odysseus’s Penelope, Sáenz held o√ the assailants with clever replies to manuelita’s boots: women between two movements 127 their interrogation, toying with their self-seriousness while ‘‘pu√[ing] great clouds of smoke from the cheapest kind of wagon driver’s cigar to cover the fresh scent of [Bolívar’s] cologne that still lingered in the room.’’∞ Manuela Sáenz—or ‘‘Manuelita,’’ as she would come to be known—was not the first to save Bolívar, but her sheer daring and presence of mind on this occasion would see her deemed ‘‘The Liberator of the Liberator.’’ Therefore , one might expect the legacy of Manuelita, who had herself rescued the rescuer and saved the savior of the Latin American nation, to have a tremendous impact on gender relations throughout the continent were it not for two factors. The first is her near-complete erasure from much of what passes for Latin American history and, more specifically, the misrepresentation of this, her most visible historical act.≤ Second, while ‘‘liberating the liberator’’ might seem to place Sáenz in a position of momentary superiority, the importance of her act nevertheless depends entirely upon her relation to Bolívar . The limitation of this dependency is one that weighs heavily upon women’s movements in Venezuela, where women’s contributions have long been measured in terms of the great men they support, Chávez included. But is this the only possible reading of Manuelita’s role in history and her symbolic significance for the present? Returning to that smoky room in 1828, if only for a moment, would suggest otherwise. There we find Manuela , barefoot and unarmed (having given both her boots and weapons to Bolívar), confronting with cool serenity a gang of assassins, all the while pu≈ng on a cheap cigar. Contrast this with the image of the Liberator himself: huddled under a bridge, soaked to the bone, and wearing women’s boots. His own vanity—sending out his only boots for shining, bathing himself head to toe in cologne—would have meant his undoing were it not for Manuela’s cool rationality and tactical sense. Prevailing gender roles are symbolically disrupted and reversed, and even liberating the Liberator seems to have been a complexly gendered process in which Sáenz momentarily usurped Bolívar’s position. This was more than a mere moment, however: Manuela, to Bolívar’s great disgust, habitually smoked these same cheap cigars, dressed in men’s clothing, ‘‘rode horseback like the men and smoke and drank like a soldier.’’≥ He regularly consulted her on strategic and military matters, and she was promoted to the rank of colonel (García Márquez describes her as frequently entering soldiers’ barracks in Bogotá in a uniform worthy of this rank).∂ When her arrest was finally ordered by anti-Bolivarian forces, moreover, the bedroom scene of 1828 was repeated, only this time ‘‘she was waiting for them with a pair of cocked pistols.’’∑ This was hardly the passively loyal companion that history might suggest. 128 chapter five Marianismo or Manuelanismo? In an e√ort to grasp what distinguishes Latin American gender relations, many have turned to the concept of ‘‘Marianismo,’’ a counterpart to ‘‘machismo ’’ derived from the Catholic worship of the Virgin Mary...