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Populist Anxiety: Race and Social Change in the Thought of Romulo Gallegos*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2015
Extract
Novelist and statesman Rómulo Gallegos (1884-1969) played a key role in the emergence of Venezuelan populism, first by inscribing the populist rationale for change in a series of novels—most famously in Doña Bárbara (1929)—and later by lending his prestige to Acción Democrática (AD), the nation’s most successful populist party. A founding member of AD, Gallegos supported the coup that brought the party to power in 1945 and became the party’s standard bearer in 1947, winning Venezuela’s first presidential election based on universal suffrage and direct voting. As president, he advanced AD’s reform agenda for almost a year before the military removed him from office and imposed a reactionary dictatorship. Forced into exile, Gallegos returned to his homeland when the dictatorship fell in 1958 and spent his remaining years as a revered elder statesman and acclaimed cultural figure.
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- Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1999
Footnotes
The author thanks Judy Ewell, Naomi Lindstrom and Orlando Pérez, as well as three anonymous reviewers, for comments on earlier versions of this work.
References
1 Representative works sympathetic to Gallegos include Liscano, Juan, Rómulo Gallegos y su tiempo (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1980);Google Scholar and Dunham, Lowell, Rómulo Gallegos, vida y obra (Mexico City: Ediciones de Andrea, 1957).Google Scholar For more critical approaches, see Alonso, Carlos, “Otra sería mi historia: Allegorical Exhaustion in Doña Bárbara,” MLN 104:2 (March 1989), 418–438;Google Scholar Howard, Harrison Sabin, Rómulo Gallegos y la revolución burguesa de Venezuela (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1976);Google Scholar and Claudette Rosegreen-Williams, , “Rómulo Gallegos’s Doña Bárbara: Toward a Radical Reading,” Symposium 46:4 (Winter 1993), 279–296.Google Scholar
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58 Cited in Martz, , Acción Democrática, p. 47.Google Scholar
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66 Knight, Alan makes the same argument regarding Mexican populism in “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910–1940,” in The Idea of Race, pp. 71–113.Google Scholar
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