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1. American Asylum and the Rhetoric of Escape
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21 Chapter 1 American Asylum and the Rhetoric of Escape Stay there, where peace will find Sacred asylum, beautiful independence; Stay there, where finally you’ll receive A glorious prize for your august actions. (Quédate allá, donde sagrado asilo Tendrán la paz, la independencia hermosa; Quédate allá, donde por fin recibas El premio augusto de tu acción gloriosa.) —José Manuel de Quintana, “Al la expedición española para propagar la vacuna en América bajo la dirección de don Francisco Balmis” (1806) When he referred to “America” as “an asylum for mankind”in his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense,Thomas Paine gave an old political concept new life in the particular context of the struggle for independence (Thomas Paine 30). Characterizing the entire Western Hemisphere as an antechamber to European history, an escape valve whose discovery on the heels of the Protestant Reformation seemed almost preordained, “as if the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted in future years, when home should afford neither friendship nor safety” (20), Paine invited his readers to consider their own historical position as paradoxically related to European history. On the one hand, theirs was a narrative of originality, and their space that in which the difficulties and prejudices of the mother continent need not apply. On the other hand, his 22 Tropes of Enlightenment in the Age of Bolívar formulation envisioned a broader historical narrative in which a seminal event of European history, the Protestant Reformation and its bloody aftermath , becomes the raison d’être for American colonial civilization and, specifically, the thirteen English colonies of North America just entering open revolt. Simón Bolívar’s 1805 “Oath at the Sacred Mountain” (Juramento en el Monte Sacro) would make a similar claim for his New World, invoking it as the space in which “the great problem of human freedom” (el gran problema del hombre en libertad) might finally be solved after having been neglected by so many centuries of otherwise progressive European history (Rodríguez 2:378). While Paine’s Common Sense was a media event designed to spur an indifferent or even loyalist North American public to support a rebellion that had begun with a handful of actions in a few northeastern cities, the circumstances of Bolívar’s text are more complex. Ostensibly uttered aloud on a hill outside Rome in 1805, the “Juramento” has come to be viewed widely as the culminating event of the Liberator ’s walking tour from Paris, a journey in which he was accompanied by Simón Rodríguez, his former tutor, and during which the pair had stopped to witness Napoleon’s coronation at Naples. The “Juramento” itself, while referred to in an 1824 letter from Bolívar to Rodríguez, was first published by Manuel Uribe Angel after his 1850 interview with Rodríguez—more than four decades after the event. Susana Rotker has thus classified it as an imagined history, more concrete than a myth but something less than a fact: “I am referring here to episodes that are invented or reproduced or accepted with such resonance by the community that it ceases to be important whether they occurred or not: the image is so coherent that it should have happened that way” (Me refiero aquí a episodios inventados y reproducidos o aceptados con tal eco en la comunidad que deja de tener importancia si sucedieron o no: la imagen es tan coherente que debio suceder así) (“Evangelio” 31). And indeed the “Juramento” has achieved remarkable staying power, since, as Christopher Conway has argued, it “faithfully represents a foundational scene of Latin American identity” and “has become one of the cornerstone texts of the myth of Bolívar” (Cult 152, 151).1 In a sense Rotker and Conway agree that the “Juramento” derives its longevity from the felicitous concision with which it combines an image of the historical torch passing from East to West with the mythical figure of Bolívar.The doubtfulness of the text is the one aspect a contemporary scholar can be sure of, [18.221.146.223] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 21:18 GMT) American Asylum and the Rhetoric of Escape 23 and Tomás Polanco Alcántara joins Rotker in pointing out that the story could not be exactly as Rodríguez described it, since his account eliminates the presence of the third member of the party and describes Bolívar, a twenty-two-year-old widower, as...