Once Authors didn’t make PoCs out of Important Historical Figures? 😂

You haven’t read The General in His Labyrinth, then.

Because in this novel published 1989 by Gabriel García Márquez, Simón Bolívar is literally Black. You know, that guy who was a Latinx Washington and after whom the whole country was named. Is Black. In Márquez’s novel.

Brace yourselves because I have a Spanish version, not an English one.

El más antiguo de sus retratos era una miniatura anónima pintada en Madrid cuando tenía dieciséis años. A los treinta y dos le hicieron otro en Haití, y los dos eran fieles a su edad y a su índole caribe. Tenía una línea de sangre africana, por un tatarabuelo paterno que tuvo un hijo con una esclava, y era tan evidente en sus facciones que los aristócratas de Lima lo llamaban El Zambo. Pero a medida que su gloria aumentaba, los pintores iban idealizándolo, lavándole la sangre, mitificándolo, hasta que lo implantaron en la memoria oficial con el perfil romano de sus estatuas.

You have everything here. Secret history. Hidden ancestors. Whitewashing. Whitewashing above all.

The premise is that Bolívar took after his Black great-great-grandmother with his “Carribean looks” and “African blood” but later, his portraits were whitewashed. And there’s something perfectly logical to it.

If he was Black—in the broader meaning of this word—then it must have been concealed in the world ruled by the myth of the noble Basque blood and by the fear of limpieza de sangre and casta system. If Bolívar was Black, history must have been rewritten to make him white.

And the funniest thing is that it could have happened and there was indeed a missed child on his family tree. A great-grandmother called María Josefa Nárvaez, the daughter of a Spaniard and of unknown woman. An unknown woman. If you read Absalom, Absalom! or Wide Sargasso Sea, you probably know what secret rich white families, rich planters’ families, were hidding.

It’s quite probable that Bolívar had a similar one.

If I’m mentioning all this, then it’s because I think that remembering is important.

Remembering what way, usually, portraits have been repainted and history has been rewritten.

Sources:

Gabriel García Márquez, El general en su laberinto

María Teresa Pascual de Pessione, Herencia de negros. Elementos raciales en las configuraciones de los Escritos Políticos de Simón Bolívar y El General en su laberinto de Gabriel García Márquez