Venezuela’s Mixed-Race People and the Jew: Spectrums of Whiteness in Rufino Blanco Fombona’s Judas Capitolino and Rómulo Gallegos’s “Los inmigrantes”

Abstract

The work of Rufino Blanco Fombona (1874–1944) and Rómulo Gallegos (1884–1969) is generally understood as reinforcing the then-common Venezuelan representation of race as biological and binary – as separable into either “white” or “non-white”, with the latter category including all mixed-race people who made up 60% of Venezuela’s total population at the time. These authors’ narratives attempt to reinforce these binaries by racially classifying Jewish immigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century – by understanding where they fit within this racial taxonomy. Instead, as I show, these attempts destabilise the categories themselves, leaning first on biological determinism, and then on cultural and ethnic profiling. To make this argument, I analyze Blanco Fombona’s Judas Capitolino (1912) contextualised by his writings on race outside of his fiction, alongside Gallegos’s short-story “Los inmigrantes” (1922). These works take biologically deterministic positions on race in their caricatures of Jews and mixed-race individuals, demonstrating the inability of Jewish immigration to whiten what Gallegos denotes as the “raza autóctona”, the Venezuelan mixed-race individual that he believes to be barbaric and impure. Without the correct shade of whiteness to lighten Venezuela’s mixed-race majority, the “raza autóctona” will take over positions of power, becoming a ruling “barbarocracia”, threatening the white order and dooming Venezuela’s (white) future.

Keywords:

• mestizaje
• pureza de sangre
• Jewish studies
• whiteness studies
• critical race studies
• Latin American literature
• Venezuelan literature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This racial classification of a mixed-race majority (pardos) hinges on a 1800’s census of the Venezuelan population where mixed-race individuals occupy a 62.2% (Brito Figueroa 1961).

2 All translations from Spanish to English are mine, unless stated in parentheses.

3 “Juanito” (1898) was the winner of a short-stories competition organized by the prestigious magazine El cojo ilustrado in 1897, then it became part of the collection Cuentos americanos (1913).

4 The notion of classifying whiteness comes from Michael Root, who also uses a confusing classification of race. By questioning the biological categorization of race, Root also asserts how race is not culturally transmitted but rather biologically transmitted. Leaving intact – as Blanco Fombona does – a confusion between race as biological or cultural (Root 2000, 634).

5 The notion of whiteness as a political category comes from Charles Mills, who argues white supremacy operates as an unnamed political system essential for the continuation of the modern world (1997, 1). On race as political, Sheth argues how race can be used to organize and distinguish populations to maintain a given political and social order (2009, 22).

6 Jacob Carciente in his book La comunidad judía de Venezuela (1991), distinguishes between the Jew that came from Holland to help Venezuela’s independence war, and the Jews that were arriving at the end of the nineteenth century coming from Northern Africa (23).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alana Alvarez

Alana Alvarez earned a Ph.D.in Spanish (2016) at Vanderbilt University and also graduated magna cum laude (Licenciada en Letras) at Universidad Central de Venezuela (2008). My current research focuses on critical race studies, whitening studies, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Venezuelan literature, nationalist discourses, and cultural studies (with an emphasis in cultural material studies). Part of my research also includes eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Venezuelan history. She is currently an Associate Professor at Mercer University.