The records are difficult to make out at first—blurred rows listing the names of slaveholders, enslaved individuals, and prices under the dim light of the microfilm reader. But once brought into focus, they reveal a harrowing moment: enslaved men and women being appraised for the last time in their lives, a valuation made with abolition in service of direct payments to their former owners. There’s the record listing the enslaved man Santiago Servacio, possessed by the mistress Tereza Castaño, whose value was set at 9,900 pesos. And there are those described as “Many without names” (Varios sin nombre) claimed by Placida Colón for 2,000 pesos—likely elderly given their low assessment. Thousands more like these are stored away, accumulating dust in Colombia’s national archive, in the capital.

We often think of the abolition of slavery as a single, triumphant moment. But in reality, across the Americas, it was a slow process that was rife with concessions for slaveowners. The documents in Bogotá are one example of this. They are what historians call “compensation records,” which guaranteed government payment to former slaveholders to make up for their “lost property” after abolition. According to economic historians Jorge Andrés Tovar Mora and Hermes Tovar Pinzón, the Colombian treasury invested nearly 2.5 million pesos in compensating the former owners of 16,468 enslaved people after the abolition of slavery in 1852. The records are proof of the great lengths that governments went to in order to appease slaveholders.

A page out of thousands of Colombia’s compensation records. Courtesy of Yesenia Barragan.

Compensation to slaveholders after the abolition of slavery was the political consensus among elite powerbrokers across the 19th-century Atlantic World. After 1838, when the British crown abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies, nearly 20 million British pounds were paid out to former masters. In Uruguay, which had a smaller enslaved population, an 1842 abolition law offered indemnification for owners. The French Revolution of 1848 terminated slavery in the country’s Caribbean colonies, again with compensation. Abolition with compensation swept the South American republics—Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, Venezuela, and Peru—in the 1850s. The only exceptions to the rule were Brazil and the United States—save for Washington, D.C., which provided slaveholders loyal to the Union $300 for every enslaved person that was emancipated by the District of Columbia Emancipation Act of 1862, as historian Tera W. Hunter has shown.

But even before emancipation, compensation to slaveholders by other means had been taking place. Since the late 18th century, across the Americas, conversations about indemnifying slaveholders for their lost “property” were common when what were called “gradual abolition” or “gradual emancipation” laws started to be passed. “Gradual abolition” was a legislative approach to terminating chattel slavery through gradual, rather than immediate, means.

At the center of gradual emancipation legislation were what were called “Free Birth” or “Free Womb” laws, which sought to gradually end chattel slavery by terminating a long-standing cornerstone of slavery’s logic: partus sequitur ventrem, or the idea that a child’s status as slave or free derives from that of the mother. The Free Womb laws declared that the children of enslaved women born after a specific date would be freed either immediately or after serving their mother’s master for a particular period.

In 1780, the state of Pennsylvania was the first government in the Americas to adopt such a law—“An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” emancipated “Free Womb” children upon reaching the age of 28. It became the blueprint for future gradual emancipation models, followed by Connecticut and Rhode Island, which passed similar laws in 1784. During the Wars of Independence against Spain, the revolutionary governments of Chile and Argentina adopted gradual emancipation laws in 1811 and 1813, respectively. And when the newly christened Colombian republic approved its gradual emancipation law in 1821—in part inspired by these precedents—it legally “freed” the children of enslaved women born after the law’s promulgation, but it kept these children bonded to their mothers’ masters until the age of 18. This decision was the result of incredibly contentious debate, and the question of compensation to slaveholders was at its heart. Colombian statesmen struggled to come to an agreement about the length of bondage that would provide slaveholders with adequate recompense for their eventual loss of their human “assets.”

From late June to mid-July 1821, over 45 delegates from Colombia’s prosperous late-colonial elite debated the composition of the Free Womb law in what would become known as the Congress of Cúcuta. In his opening remarks to the congress, lawyer and author of the gradual emancipation law José Félix de Restrepo argued that Free Womb children’s labor could provide ample compensation to their owners if they were emancipated at age 16 or 18. As part of his argument, Restrepo presented an account of the “standard” life cycle of an enslaved person in their early years, a racial arithmetic that reflected the profoundly violent commodification of Free Womb children.

According to Restrepo, the first two years of an enslaved child’s life imposed little economic burden on the master. As the child aged and their expenses increased, so did their potential productivity. From ages 9 to 12, the enslaved child could perform small but important domestic tasks. Once they reached the age of 12, the youth was considered ready for hard labor, however defined by the individual master; this meant, Restrepo claimed, that masters could retrieve at least double their investment by the time the child reached the age of 14. From 14 to 18 years of age, the investment would quadruple. Slaveholders would consequently be handsomely indemnified for their eventually lost human “properties.”

Other congressional delegates disagreed with Restrepo’s assessments. Delegate Domingo Briceño y Briceño, who argued that the emancipation law would ultimately bring the republic’s downfall, used his own racial accounting to support extending the Free Womb children’s age of bondage. He claimed that masters expended nearly 400 pesos from the moment of an enslaved person’s birth to the age of 8, while they could only produce 144 pesos for their owner from ages 8 to 16, not even half the master’s investment.

After much deliberation, Colombia’s delegates voted 28-17 to set the age of emancipation for Free Womb children at 18. Their gradual emancipation law would serve as a model of white abolitionism with compensation to slaveholders across the continent. In 1824, for example, a few months after the Demerara Rebellion, a massive slave uprising that took place in Britain’s colony in present-day Guyana, Britain’s Marquess of Lansdowne petitioned the House of Lords to pass an abolitionist measure by calling attention to how, in Colombia’s “provisions for the gradual extinction of slavery[, …] care had been taken to secure to all parties compensation for loss.”

As though having benefited from human property for centuries were not enough, freedom for the enslaved people in the Americas came with compensation to slaveholders—first in the form of Free Womb laws, later in direct payouts. It forces us to understand the plentiful ways that slaveholders received reparations during the gradual and final abolition of slavery. The struggles of formerly enslaved people and the enduring stranglehold that slaveholders had over them make clear the need for reparative justice for people of African descent across the Americas. For the thousands of Free Womb children across Colombia and the Americas that were the test subjects of gradual abolition. And for the enslaved men like Santiago Servacio and the “Many without names” whose paper bodies fill the archives of abolition.

The post Why Did Governments Compensate Slaveholders for Abolition? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

American media covers only two types of the 7 million-plus immigrants who have left Venezuela in the past decade.

The first consists of the refugees and asylum seekers who walked across the border after perilous journeys through South and Central America, pressing their luck in a country with ever-increasing immigration restrictions. Last fall, Governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott turned the plight of nearly 50 of these Venezuelan immigrants into a cruel political theater when they loaded them in buses and planes to move them outside of their states. Neither worried about the political cost of using Venezuelan migrants as political props—and that’s in part because of the second group of immigrants from my country.

These Venezuelans got to America because they had the money and resources to hire a lawyer to cut through the red tape, validate their college degrees, and find a good enough job after some hardships and effort. In the U.S., many of them have quickly become part of a bloc of older, wealthier, more established, voting Venezuelans. This group seems to find the desperation of the first group to be alien and hard to empathize with.

Why has such a chasm opened up in the Venezuelan diaspora? And what does it mean for the country they left behind, and the country where they are building new lives? On one hand, it’s tempting to argue that class, privilege, and assimilation play bigger factors in defining migration than we have traditionally been led to believe. On the other hand, there’s the risk of jumping from one false dichotomy to another, falling into generalizations, and robbing different diasporas all over the world of their own individual stories and realities.

I can only speak from my own experience as a Venezuelan.

How, rather than empathizing with the masses fleeing from the same social, financial, and political crises that forced them to also leave their native home, many of the generally wealthier, more established Venezuelans are applauding and supporting punitive actions against their fellow countrymen.

How more than a few obsess over what private university you went to, or which gated community you lived in back in Caracas. In many cases, they would rather see similarities with those in power—perhaps as they once were or aspired to be back home—than with other immigrants trying to rebuild their lives in a new, foreign land. Indeed, the experience of being forced to move to a new country reinforced the mindset of mourning a lost country instead of encouraging reflection on past mistakes.

I’ve heard U.S.-based colleagues describe how there’s a subset of Venezuelans abroad that find support and justification for their views in right-wing populism and almost seem to take glee when bad things happen to average Venezuelans back home. They talk as if living under Chavismo—with rampant inflation, crumbling infrastructure, and authoritarian government—was divine punishment. They share, too, a generalized hopelessness about Venezuela’s future, blaming the bipartisan liberal democracy that ruled the country from 1958 to 1999 for populism, clientelism, and the rise of the Bolivarian Revolution. Taken together, it all begs the question: What do they miss about Venezuela, exactly? The country that was, or who they were back home?

Many of these Venezuelans push a sort of personal mythology that seems to be common in many assimilated minority groups: I’m here because I earned it, because I worked hard, I studied, and nobody helped me. Those coming behind me? They want a shortcut, or even to walk the same path I walked? They don’t deserve it.

Never mind that in many situations there was help, privilege, and luck involved. Burning bridges seems the preferred choice over building them.

Venezuela’s mass exodus has been going on for almost a decade now with virtually no sign that things will improve. Nations across Central and North America are enacting new policies that attempt to slow down the influx of migrants from my country, which means those with fewer resources are facing even more closed doors than ever before. It’s only exacerbating the gap between the refugees on foot, and those with money and resources.

I wish I could offer solutions or alternatives to this current situation, but I don’t have any. Like many of my fellow citizens, I’m tired and trying to make a semblance of a life in a foreign country (in my case, Spain), hopelessly feeling like I’m lagging behind locals of my age while trying to do my best to take care of my loved ones back home.

A few months ago, I went to a screening of a recent documentary on Rómulo Betancourt, the two-time Venezuelan president who some regard as “the father of Venezuelan democracy.” He spearheaded Venezuela’s first free elections in the 1940s, fought a military dictatorship in the 1950s, attempted an agrarian reform in the 1960s, and was part of the party that nationalized oil in the 1970s. However, he was also a sectarian with a spotty human rights record. The collapse of the inflexible two-party system he established brought about the rise of Hugo Chávez.

My maternal grandparents credit Betancourt for helping them leave behind the impoverished countryside for a life of middle-class comfort and opportunity in Maracay, Venezuela’s fifth largest city, and my hometown. To me, the question of whether Betancourt was a deeply principled reformer forced to make concessions or a pragmatic opportunist consolidating his power is key to understanding today’s Venezuela. So I had high hopes for the documentary.

But to my dismay, its scant analysis felt superficial. Instead, the documentary spent what felt like a disproportionate amount of time focused on the filmmaker’s childhood. I saw the movie here in Madrid, which has become a hub of Venezuelans abroad, along with Miami and Lima. What resonated most for my fellow audience members seemed to be references to some preppy private Catholic school I’d never heard of. To add insult to injury, one of the speakers after the screening praised the documentary for reflecting a childhood anyone in Venezuela could relate to. I felt so lonely in the middle of a crowd that day.

As the Venezuelan diaspora grows around the globe, the gaps among us—of geography, time, class—will deepen. I can’t help but wonder if the meanings of what our country is, was, or could be will continue to move further away from one another as well, until one day we’ll no longer recognize ourselves as coming from the same land.

The post A Tale of Two Venezuelan Diasporas appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I recently learned that the world-making activity Jesús and I shared is known as paracosm. According to a study cited by the Wall Street Journal, about 17 percent of children tend to develop a detailed personal universe that they outgrow later in life, not unlike an imaginary friend. Nonetheless, while a make-believe friend might be a companion, the imaginary world is more about the joy of discovery and curiosity, from conjuring a forest in your mind and wondering what creatures are lurking over the next hill to dreaming up a city far more exciting than the one you live in and wondering who lives there, what drives their lives, if they love someone, or if they are happy. Before you know it, you’re doodling wondrous beasts and crude maps, trying to make sense of the world inside your head.

Interestingly enough, the kids who developed a paracosm didn’t score any better than their peers in terms of intelligence, vocabulary, memory, or creativity. The only reported major difference from other children was that those who created paracosms showed having more problems at filtering out irrelevant thoughts.

Some famous writers who have mentioned making paracosms in their youth are Stanislaw Lem, Oxford don C.S. Lewis—with the help of his brother Warren—and Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë (with the help of their brother Branwell). Some of these unreal realms, unsurprisingly, were influenced by the children’s perspectives on the adult world that surrounded them. In a 1984 essay, Lem points out the irony of how he amused himself as a child in interwar Poland by creating fictitious passports, permits, and government memos only to have his family survive the Nazi takeover with the aid of forged documents. He wonders if these games were a reflection of “some unconscious sense of danger.”

The imaginary worlds of the two sets of siblings, meanwhile, mirrors the British culture, politics, attitudes, and imperialism of the time: The Brontës’ world of Glass Town was set in an imaginary West Africa (later moved to the Pacific Ocean) with characters based on British explorers, Napoleon, and the Duke of Wellington. The sisters’ earliest writings are the extensive correspondence and poems of the inhabitants of Glass Town. The Lewis’s world, Boxen, was born out of Warren’s tales about India and his more famous brother’s love of stories involving talking animals, such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

My own paracosm started when I was a weird, curious, and somewhat lonely tween growing up in Maracay, a mid-sized city in Venezuela, in the early 2000s. My source of fascination was not India or Africa, but the United States. Or at least a distorted version filled with everything I found mesmerizing about a place I only knew through media. The setting was not some hypothetical ancient era or an idealized version of the Middle Ages, but vaguely reminiscent of the mid to late 20th century—the height of the American empire, so to speak. I named this nation Urbania.

In Urbania, there’s an equivalent city to New York and places analogous to New Orleans, California, and Texas. There are enormous cities filled with skyscrapers and subways, endless suburbs and prisons with electric chairs. There are wealthy industrialist families bound through fraternities and clubs, immigrants on crowded ocean liners looking to start a new life, and reactionary militias boiling on the fringe. There’s a colorful past that carries the sins of colonialism and endless foreign wars, which ultimately seal the country’s fate.

Characters and places, although imaginary, had names taken from all sorts of sources: Bertolt Brecht plays, classic black and white movies, Saturday Night Live cast members. When you were a middle-class tween in Venezuela in the early 2000s, you either studied a musical instrument, played sports or learned English. I did the latter and, as soon as I could, I began working on my imaginary universe in the language I’m writing these words because it felt “right.”

The adults around me, though supportive, were irked that I didn’t try to write about something closer to my own culture and reality. On one hand, I was a child of globalization. Like many millennials around the globe, I had prefabricated childhood ideas from watching The Simpsons and playing Pokémon. The very first book I read in its entirety was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. When I was 7, I knew who Bill Clinton was but not the president of my own country.

On the other hand, I had a hard time connecting with other kids, didn’t have the best family situation, and tried to distance myself from a world that felt overwhelming. For me, Urbania offered an escape. It started out as a way to channel my creative impulses. I have always liked to tell stories. Urbania started out as a comic book, then a movie script and finally a book series with no clear beginning or end that has been started, abandoned, or lost dozens of times over 20 years. Despite working so many years on Urbania, I’ve never been able to even finish a short story set there.

However, I can’t say all those years I spent developing a universe in my head has been a waste of time. My protagonists were exploring their sexual orientation and gender performance way before I admitted to myself that I was attracted to men. Trying to flesh out my little realm of the unreal made me research history, geography, world cultures, mythology, religion, politics and linguistics, essentially turning it into a shorthand to try to understand the real world.

In my case, I started to write thanks to my paracosm, which is what eventually led me to become a journalist and to getting short stories published every now and then. There was a time when I was worried that I might pass on, like Jesús did, and felt concerned that the little scraps—the first chapters of novels that never had a follow-up, drawings of maps and flags in yellowish notebooks at my mother’s apartment—might end up as puzzle pieces for an image that was never fully completed. But now, if I never manage to publish a single word about the small world located in the back of my head I wouldn’t be upset.

Jesús, too, used his paracosm to relate to the world. He wasn’t a writer, he was a political scientist, but his life was defined by working hard and passionately on little things, always hoping something bigger and better was coming, and having an infinite love for humanity and what it has been able to achieve. That was one of the many things that made me relate to him. The make-believe country that was his own personal realm of the unreal was also an intellectual game where he could design and apply social and political ideas that appealed to him. The blue, white, and green flag he was buried with not only served as the symbol of his personal utopia, but also the banner that a better world was possible.

Talking with some friends and colleagues about my making worlds as a hobby, I realize it’s a far more common activity than I suspected for individuals with a natural passion, admiration, and curiosity about why people do what they do. Many of them aren’t writers like the Brontë sisters or Lewis. They are journalists, economists, historians, and many of them still continue to dream on. People might claim this activity is for a novel they are writing or for a tabletop game they play, but in all those cases I see the sign of the fellow traveler who enjoys more the endless journey to find out what’s over the next hill than hurrying to the purported destination.

I can’t help but think about the study cited by the Wall Street Journal and wonder: Maybe all those so-called irrelevant details that as children we were meant to filter out, really have helped us to gain a different, broader insight about the society we live in. Looking back, all that I have achieved, at least career-wise, has been indirectly derived from chronicling the rise and fall of Urbania, an imagined land that has given me so much in real life.

The post Now Entering Make-Believe Country appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Sometimes, when I try to put facts and events in order, I struggle to believe it myself. I wind up explaining the situation over and over like some kind of mantra: how, for instance, we ended up with two presidents at the same time, both with disputable legitimacy—one recognized by most of the Western hemisphere, the other by Russia, Cuba, Turkey, and China.

The current pandemic only adds another inconceivable layer to an already exhausted country. The official toll has gone from 1,662 cases in early June to 19,443 at the beginning of August to 85,005 in mid-October, with no signs of slowing down. Limited testing capacity and political pressure hint at more dire figures to come. Yet state media shows how to make face masks from paper tissues. Despite the slow-motion collapse, keeping up appearances remains the top priority.

When reality turns this surreal, fiction may be the best tool to try and make sense of it. Narratives about injustice, exploitation, and authoritarianism have long helped us to shape, voice, and comprehend our real-life nightmares. Speculative fiction in particular, having the advantage of being divorced from the constraints of the real world, can be the ultimate playground to explore these social and political realities.

George Orwell’s 1984 is, without a doubt, the most prominent work to use speculative fiction to explore such themes. But the book that for me hits closer to how life in Venezuela feels is the 1975 dystopic novel High-Rise.

Written by J.G. Ballard (who, as it happens, was another English man born in a former British colony), High-Rise can be read as an elaborate allegory for what happens when a society—particularly a modern, liberal democratic one—fails, and all pretensions of a caring, stable order are dropped. What is left are some of the worst vices and basest impulses this order has fostered: Get ahead, get even, stand your ground, take back what is yours.

The novel centers on an enormous, upscale, state-of-the-art apartment complex equipped with a school, gym, and supermarket serving its well-off residents. Its central cast of characters includes young, upcoming physiology professor Robert Laing; rebellious, frustrated documentarian Richard Wilder; and Anthony Royal, designer and owner of the titular high-rise.

As soon as the residents begin settling in, the flaws in Royal’s all-encompassing design start to show through: The garbage chute gets clogged; the power goes out in some parts; water becomes irregular. Royal dismisses these problems as merely part of the adaptation process. A statue terrace with a playground on the roof—too rough and risky for actual children to play in—perfectly sums up the lack of human consideration on Royal’s imposed vision.

In this sense, Royal is no different than any ruler demanding faith in himself and his vision for society, no matter how narrow-minded or impractical. But unlike, say, Orwell’s Big Brother, Royal has no need to actively coerce his residents or persecute the dissenters, at least not at first. He lets the structure he’s created take care of that. “By its very efficiency,” Ballard writes, “the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all.”

In theory, all the residents of the 1,000 apartments have the same rights and benefits. Ballard describes them as “well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future boxed up in … expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities.” But as the structure holding them together starts to fail, the social order also breaks down. People start to skip work to spend time in their apartments. Parties last for days, and the sense of time becomes loose. Resentment and distrust take their toll, with small differences ballooning into irreconcilable points of contention.

Locked away in his penthouse, Royal, the architect, insists on maintaining his vision, even as the tensions among residents become unbearable. Finally, the lower floors fight back in protest against the upper ones. At first, these attacks are in a subdued manner: throwing garbage off their balconies to hit the cars of top-floor residents lined up in front of the building, or breaking the swimming pool rules. But soon, things turn violent. Raiding parties assault rival floors to get food and other necessities. Liberated from the social order, life in the high-rise turns into equal parts bacchanal and guerrilla warfare.

The most compelling part of the story to me is that despite society crumbling around them, with infrastructure failing and food becoming scarce, people won’t leave the building. Some enjoy the brutal power they have gained within anarchy, while others try their best to cling precariously to whatever remains of the social order and its increasingly meaningless bourgeois signifiers.

I don’t need to imagine any of this, because I have lived through it. The past decade in Venezuela has been marked by the collapse of the new society that many imagined the Bolivarian Revolution was building, with shortages and violence becoming all too common.

Currently, more than 90 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. For most, getting basic foodstuffs is a constant struggle—while wealthier people show off American cereal boxes and Nutella jars as status symbols on social media.

Gangs and irregular armed groups lord over many poorer and rural communities, sometimes with the tacit agreement of Maduro’s government. Prisons have nightclubs and supermarkets better stocked than those outside. A U.N. report found more than 5,000 killings by special forces in 2018, turning the government into simply the biggest faction, retaining power through abuse, violence, and intimidation.

Yet just like in High-Rise, where those who are able to do so hide away in the locked penthouse, clinging to small markers of something resembling a normal life, many Venezuelans have also tried to maintain the paper-thin illusion of a normal life in a normal country. Whether out of necessity, responsibility, a desire for distraction, or staving off despair, baseball games were still played in empty stadiums, beauty contests were held in increasingly decadent fashion, morning television was filled with cooking shows nobody can afford or find the ingredients for.

It’s tempting, too, to see in the character of Royal, a Hugo Chávez or a Nicolás Maduro. The former came to power in 1999 under the promise to build a new society, supported by oil wealth. When flaws started to appear—corruption, cronyism, political favoritism, tighter controls on the media and the economy—these were excused as necessary for the making of the Bolivarian Revolution. Likewise, in the first half of the book, Royal dismisses increasingly serious problems in his design as mild “teething problems.”

Chávez’s successor, Maduro (whom Chávez anointed before dying of cancer in 2013), has insisted on following the same path, despite lacking the revenue and popular support to do so. He deploys any means necessary to remain in power, from police repression to cracking down on opposition parties, putting more docile figures in power, and barring, expelling, or jailing dissidents.

Chávez was elected just seven years after he had tried to stage a coup against a democratically elected but increasingly unpopular president of a liberal democracy that many felt had failed to its people. Some thought at the time that Chávez and his Bolivarian Revolution were a throwback to a time when Venezuela and the rest of the continent were ruled by charismatic military leaders. But now, I can’t help but wonder whether the death of liberal democracy in Venezuela was prophetic of the age we now live in.

Around me today, I see a growing—and not completely undeserving—disappointment in the Western hemisphere toward liberal democracy and its capability to address economic inequality, its supposed foundation of individual freedom and equality that is belied by actions, and the rise of far-right fringe movements heralding a more fractured society filled with resentment, distrust, and tribalism. With COVID-19, which itself seems pulled out of science fiction, this process of decomposition seems to have accelerated rather than slowed down.

It’s no surprise that in the past two decades or so, fiction concerning dystopian themes has grown in number and audience while utopias—in fiction or as a more serious thought experiment—seem to have disappeared. Utopias and dystopias offer vastly different conceptions of what society could be, but both are born from the problems and anxieties that affect people at a given time and place. The rise of dystopic books and movies could be because of the utopias of the 20th century that turned out to be obsolete, unfeasible, or outright nightmares. But it may also be because of the difficulty of imagining how to dismantle the structure we all live in. Whichever it is, it’s clear that speculative fiction is being used more than ever to explore these issues—but doesn’t necessarily offer a solution.

Perhaps the attempt to provide an answer to the questions raised in these works would come off as arrogant and deceitfully easy, particularly in a time where we distrust the idea of a better world. Ballard’s High-Rise was written 45 years ago, and what makes it so current and intriguing—speculative fiction without any real speculative elements—is that the residents of the building (with the doubtful exception of its architect) never have the illusion they’re living in an ideal society built on values of community and interdependence; instead they’re 1970s middle-class homeowners that take their social neuroses to the extreme. As Ballard writes, “the high-rise was a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation …”. Ultimately, it’s a body of individuals, living and abusing each other in a flawed structure they cannot dismantle without destroying themselves.

At the end of the novel, the high-rise lies in ruins. Royal is dead and with him the status quo that made the building possible. Wilder, the guerrilla documentarian, whose idea of making a documentary about the high-rise’s descent to chaos turns into an obsessive quest to reach to the top floor, is also dead after his Pyrrhic victory of finally reaching the penthouse.

Laing could be seen as a victor, in the sense that he has managed to survive the structure. Not by his conviction to an idea—like Royal or Wilder—but by his self-erasure, disappearing into the organism that is the high-rise. The book ends where it starts, Laing is eating a piece of roasted dog, he looks out at a neighboring high-rise where one floor has just gone completely dark. “Laing watched them contently,” Ballard wrote, “ready to welcome them to their new world.”

The post In Venezuela, Dystopian Fiction Hits Close to Home appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In Venezuela, I was a professor, but as the economy fell apart I found work as a freelance journalist, covering my country’s current events despite dealing with blackouts and failing communications. Since October, whenever I haven’t been working on a news story in Madrid, I’ve either been taking a small rest from my previous beat or thinking up my next one. My life has been my job, and I love my job; otherwise, I wouldn’t be a journalist.

On the day of the announcement, I didn’t buy Death in Venice. Still, the image of Aschenbach, Mann’s novelist protagonist wandering a Mediterranean city abandoned by cholera remained with me as Madrid changed suddenly from a vivacious European capital into a state of solitude and uncertainty. Restaurants and bars in the trendy districts of Malasaña, Chueca, and the main venue of Gran Vía emptied. Like Mann’s early 20th-century Venice stricken by cholera, the once-gentle streets and squares soon acquired a more menacing appearance.

By evening people had gathered at their local supermarkets in long lines to buy canned goods and toilet paper. Many left the city, with more than a few probably carrying the virus themselves.

The day after, instead of doing any of the necessary things like shopping and laundry, I went to the Prado Museum.

The visit offered me a rare moment to think. In my case, focusing on my work helps to keep other concerns at bay. There’s a time and place to think and worry about Venezuela and my family there, but that’s usually late in the evening or during the weekend. For me and many of my classmates, having a virus suddenly open up so much free time to think is unnerving.

Those of us who are non-Spaniards and, like the protagonist of Death in Venice, foreigners, marveled at the opportunity of being part of a beautiful, historical metropolitan city, only to find ourselves stranded and isolated in a moment of crisis. Many of us had come to Spain to find new opportunities, to discover our own new worlds. Now we were in a lockdown, desperately trying to make the most out of the limitations.

And so, perhaps in the spirit of Aschenbach, I went to the Prado seeking something that felt beautiful and eternal before the viral outbreak put a stop to life as we know it.

The Prado is an excellent place to visit in a crisis because it has had such a convoluted life itself. When the museum opened its doors in 1819, the then-recent Napoleonic invasion had destabilized the country. Long decades of war between liberals, conservatives, absolutists, and opposing royal bloodlines were soon to come.

I entered the museum through an atrium with a triumphant statue of Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire by Leone Leoni. It stands over a chained figure, called The Fury, which has been interpreted either as the Ottoman Empire or Protestantism.

It’s a proper introduction to the Spanish Hapsburgs and the Siglo de Oro, the zenith of imperial grandiosity and cultural influence, the era of Miguel de Cervantes and Diego Velázquez. However, knowing what lies behind all the splendor, you discover a strong warning about the false reassurances of opulence and power in front of disease and social strife.

As a result of the priorities of its rich patrons such as the Hapsburgs, countless portraits of aristocrats and saints fill a great part of the main floor of the Prado. It’s interesting how these paintings, in most cases meant to exalt the figures they portray, are celebrated, while their subjects have drifted off into oblivion. A few paintings by El Greco, for instance, feature distinguishing-looking men—Portrait of a Nobleman, Portrait of a Doctor, and most famously The Nobleman with His Hand on his Chest. Whoever these gentlemen were has become irrelevant in comparison to the great El Greco himself.

In a room filled by royal portraits painted by Diego Velázquez, the work that stands out is his subversive masterpiece, Las Meninas. There, Charles V’s great-grandson Philip IV is reduced into a small, blurry figure in the background while granting the foreground to the painter and other members of the household staff—all the people who made this royal opulence possible.

Despite the Hapsburgs’ wealth and power, the art that they financed ultimately outlived them, but only by surviving a fire that destroyed the royal residence in Madrid in 1734. Hundreds of invaluable works of Da Vinci, El Greco and Raphael turned into ashes. Las Meninas was among the few paintings that were saved, but it could have easily turned into dust.

During my visit, the museum appeared to be half empty. Most of the visitors were tourists who probably wanted to make the most of their time in the city before it shut down. An elderly couple, both in wheelchairs, stopped and contemplated Renaissance art. A school group moved along quickly. Young art students commented on this or that piece. Despite the fear and the tension in the world outside, here there was a sense of routine and calmness. Maybe it was a temporary distraction, but for a moment there was the illusion of disconnection from the rest of the world.

Maintaining the illusion of being a distant witness, unaffected by your surroundings, is also part of being a journalist. Some of my professors in the Master’s program have covered train accidents, plane crashes, and terrorist attacks. When they talk about these things, their usual cool, professional, generally friendly manner sometimes changes, taking on a more distressed tone when a particular nerve is touched.

One artist who thoroughly shatters the illusion of disconnection is Francisco Goya. I remember growing up and being intrigued by his Disasters of War illustrations, which used to decorate the walls of an elderly uncle who lived in Caracas. Penitents wearing conic hats standing trial, tormented figures haunted by demonic-looking birds. I didn’t expect art from so long ago to be so nightmarish.

Goya pretty much has his own wing. His earlier paintings are mostly picturesque scenes of gentry life, with young aristocrats playing the blind man’s bluff, allegories of the seasons, lots of hunting. But the special attention he gives to the poor, the old, and the disabled in the margins is noticeable.

On the upper floor of the wing, its walls painted in dark gray under dim light, is where you can see some of Goya’s most famous and haunting creations. The soft, placid art meant to decorate drawing rooms and hunting lodges would hardly recognize the faceless Napoleonic soldiers and the blood-stained corpses of The Third of May 1808.

But even this painting is overshadowed by Goya’s Black Paintings—surrealistic and esoteric images he painted directly on the inner walls of his house, named later Saturn Devouring His Son, The Witches’ Sabbath. By then, Goya was in his 70s and was traumatized by war, embittered with politics, and alienated from a Spanish society that rejected the constitution and embraced the absolutism of Ferdinand VII and the Catholic Church. His favorite subjects became witches, madmen, half-human beasts.

The faces are darkened and distorted, the brush seems quick and choleric—though it’s impossible to know how much those effects are Goya’s and how much are from the transference to canvas and the modifications done by the museum staff decades later when they brought it to the Prado. The New York Times once described it as “at best a crude facsimile” of Goya’s original artwork. We are fortunate to admire it, as we are fortunate to see Velázquez’s Las Meninas.

Art is a reflection of the artist’s mind—and the time and place they lived. In this sense, walking around an art gallery is roughly similar to the pleasure I get from browsing books in a bookstore. I can lose myself inside the minds of others without focusing too much on my own.

Being a journalist, I’ve learned that you either try to divide your professional and your personal mindset or your job will encompass the entirety of your life. Coming so recently from Venezuela, I find the adjustment to being in Spain now similar: I have to define a headspace for the country I come from and another for the country I am in—and making these two headspaces is a slow, painful process. When I look at Goya’s Black Paintings I see what happens when all those hatches collapse and you’re flooded with anger, sadness, and outrage.

I continued to the lower main area of a lower floor and joined the little crowd of tense onlookers in front of Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death. Looking at an army of skeletons rounding up and massacring the living—kings, beggars, maidens, and gamblers—it is hard not to think that our fears of worldwide epidemics aren’t new. We visitors eyed each other uneasily and then moved on.

But one piece in this section that captured everyone’s attention, and had the museum staff yelling at us to stop taking pictures, was The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, a large triptych of connected wooden panels filled with strange, dreamlike imagery.

On the left panel, Adam and Eve are with Christ in the Garden of Eden surrounding a strange pink structure that could be the Tree of Wisdom. On the right panel, a twisted and somewhat playful vision of hell is filled with puzzling demons and musical instruments and other objects of pleasure turned into torture devices, with a burning city in the background.

The middle and largest panel has been variously described as the world, a perfect utopia free of sin or a false, terrestrial paradise filled with mundane pleasures. Naked, sensuous figures frolic in a pasture filled with wondrous animals and strange, colorful edifices that imitate the pink “tree” seen in the Garden of Eden.

I suppose that Bosch’s painting could be interpreted as an indictment of the frivolities of ephemeral, empty joy in contrast to the eternal salvation offered by God and the Christian faith. However, under that logic, then those of us who came to the Prado to admire the painting for its masterful craft and imaginative design instead of its religious message would be falling into the false, terrestrial paradise that Bosch warns us about.

Maybe those of us who aren’t particularly religious obtain the same comfort in paintings, architecture, books, and movies in our modern, secular era that others get from religion. The sensation that art, skill, and imagination are something majestic: bigger and more lasting than our short, common lives.

I left the Prado with a poster of The Garden of Earthly Delights. That night, I met up with my fellow journalism students and had a few drinks at a terrace near Gran Vía. Later, I went down to a 24-hour supermarket in Plaza de Tirso de Molina to get provisions for the quarantine.

In the 10 days since, I have been self-isolating due to the coronavirus, only going out of my apartment to do shopping and laundry. The Spanish government has established fines of up to 600,000 euros for going out without a motive, so it’s not like I have much of a choice in the matter.

The first official cases of coronavirus have just been reported in Venezuela a few days ago, so I’m more concerned for my family over there than for myself in Madrid, since I know that my country’s decayed healthcare system isn’t properly prepared for an outbreak of this scope.

I don’t know what will happen in the following months. I hope things don’t end as tragically as they did for Aschenbach in Death in Venice, who was consumed by cholera while looking at the unattainable beauty of the young man who had become his obsession. But in these times of uncertainty, I have the satisfaction of having stood in the building that for over two centuries has been a sanctuary for Velázquez, Goya, Bosch, and other beautiful things that still endure, despite the chaos that has sometimes surrounded them.

The post A Letter from Madrid, Where Impending Quarantine Permits a Last Look at Goya appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Despite some missed chances, I can’t say some things have gone badly for me, work-wise. I have college friends working in warehouses in the United States, and colleagues cleaning floors or attending tables in Chile. And the last I heard, my former editor at the newspaper where I did my internship is now a janitor in Peru.

I understand why they have left, along with many of my friends and relatives, and over 10 percent of the country’s population.

For the most part, the lives of Venezuelans who have departed are relatively easier than the grand majority of those who have stayed. Life here is famously marked by food shortages, hyperinflation, rampant violence, and a decrepit infrastructure that leave many of us without power for hours. Running water is erratic. And as time goes on, all of these problems have only deepened, making even the most basic activities increasingly difficult to endure.

Yet, here I am, writing these words, struggling with daily blackouts and a feeble internet connection. I’ve been writing since I was very young; it helps me to organize my ideas, express myself, and try to understand the world around me. Though I never imagined myself as a journalist, at the same time I never saw myself doing anything but writing. In my career reporting, I’ve found an energy and urgency that I never felt with fiction. Something like Venezuela constantly challenges you; you don’t get easy, simple answers.

I think what I write helps a little, because Venezuelans need narratives now. Both inside and outside the country, we are always having to explain ourselves over and over—even as we face a situation that we ourselves can’t quite grasp. This sense of confusion has only increased in the past few months, with the country falling into a constitutional crisis that has put us in the international spotlight.

On January 24th, the day after the speaker of the nation’s legislature Juan Guaidó took over the presidential post after the legislature declared it vacant, I was flooded with messages. Some were from people I’ve never met before, including a message from a journalism student in California asking what everyone else is asking: Why is this happening to Venezuela?

Now, despite tension having died out since the failed military uprising led by Guaidó on April 30th, the question remains.

According to the government headed by President Nicolás Maduro—and the explanation I see and hear again and again on state media and pro-government outlets—all our problems come from acts of sabotage, and from a strategy of U.S. imperialism against the Bolivarian Revolution and Maduro, who was appointed by Hugo Chávez on his last public appearance.

I can see why it sounds plausible enough. Latin America’s history is one that has been defined by colonialism, imposition, and exploitation, and Venezuela has been no exception. In the last century we have been bound economically and culturally to the United States, a process propitiated by and impossible to untangle from oil, which today remains the country’s main revenue source.

But if I have learned anything about journalism, it is that if you know how to write a news story you don’t need to lie, you simply omit. That’s the problem with easy answers and one-size-fits-all narratives: you ignore, disregard, or move things just a little bit to make the story work.

In the past, the majority of private media companies were very critical of Chávez and Maduro. With time, some outlets were sold to Chavismo-allied business people, while others were forced out of the business. And a few simply became compliant, wary of straying too far from the government’s official version. The vague, euphemistic phrase “an irregular situation” has almost become an icon of self-censored news in today’s Venezuela.

Outside of a few websites, there are virtually no nationwide outlets most people consider reliable. Instead, Venezuelans seeking a version of reality other than Maduro’s rely heavily on social media where fact and truth are always in danger of being supplanted by immediacy and bias. Newscasts from Miami and Colombia on YouTube, message groups on WhatsApp and Telegram, and a constant feed of communities on Facebook and Twitter are how people get breaking news, for better or for worse. You get up with this sort of news, go to bed with it, and you check it through the day as a reminder that you’re not alone in this tragedy.

I see some of the same distortion and ignorance when it comes to international news about my country. On one side, you have Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump championing the Venezuelan cause while taking the chance to dust off the old bogeyman of socialism—loosely defined as everything to their left—to paint anyone against them with the same brush, while curtailing sensible and necessary reforms in their own countries.

Things don’t exactly fare better on the other side. Many on the left supported the Bolivarian Revolution in its early years, and some still do, either for ideological affinity, economic investment, or a bit of both. For many in this position, my country is an uncomfortable truth, which is better dismissed, ignored, or left alone and out of sight. Others choose to defend the revolution to the very end, arguing that—despite its flaws, excesses, and abuses—there’s no better alternative in this time and age.

Venezuela, therefore, is either a bogeyman or a punch line. But this, too, is a simplification where I have taken out or left out facts to make my point.

For the 90-plus percent of people in my country who live in poverty, the statements of Trump, or Bolsonaro, or Putin, or a bunch of Americans in a Washington, D.C., embassy are alien and distant.

When you spend a good deal of your time living with blackouts and obtaining food, water and other essentials—in other words, surviving—you don’t have the privilege of thinking too much about the future.

I can’t help but turn to history to try to make sense of this situation and maybe find some glimmer of hope.

Last year, I visited Berlin and saw the remains of the Berlin Wall. Different parts of the Cold War’s most apt and enduring symbol have been used for different things. On one end there’s a memorial, lest you forget how this country was divided, and on the other an art gallery, where the former symbol of oppression now displays, among other things, the famous kiss between Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and German Democratic Republic leader Erich Honecker. Tourists gathered in front to take selfies as if it were the Mona Lisa in the Louvre Museum.

In Berlin’s Mitte, I walked through Checkpoint Charlie, a small wooden shed that served as a gate between the East and the West. Now it’s surrounded by McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Street vendors sell you old Soviet caps, pieces of the wall in small plastic cases, and other tokens that celebrate the victory of Western liberal democracy.

There, tacky actors in military uniforms waved U.S flags and took pictures with American tourists, who were unable to hide a certain triumphalist smugness. I couldn’t help but think of the East Germans who, in 1989, gathered in Alexanderplatz, protesting for freedom, peace, and democracy, risking their own lives for what they believed in.

Is this the kind of future for which they fought? And what is the meaning of a society’s suffering anyway? Maybe it’s all cyclical, and in the long run there are times of peace and plenty and times of hunger and chaos. Maybe, whether we like it or not, nations and individuals are simple subjects to major forces beyond their control, like leaves in the wind.

Maybe, the most simple and dispiriting notion of all, there’s no meaning in suffering. It just happens. But we continue fighting back in the hope that what we achieve with our struggle will retroactively provide it with some meaning.

The post Neither Global Leaders nor Local Residents Have a Narrative That Fits Today’s Venezuela appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A middle-aged Cuban man, the friend of a friend of a relative, picked me up from the airport and took me to Walmart to buy some basic goods to take home with me. Unsurprisingly, the topic of Venezuela’s current situation came up. He said he remembered back when Caracas was an important metropolis—he had visited it in the late ‘70s—and Miami was a small, backward town in comparison.

The man took out his phone to show me a video of a 1985 Christmas greeting from RCTV, the Venezuelan TV network that was closed down by government pressure in 2007. With all the glitz 1980s South American television could offer, the network’s stars—most of them unknown to me—paraded around cartoonish backdrops of folkloric Christmas vignettes surrounding a minimalistic manger while lip-syncing a Christmas-style song about how RCTV is part of your family.

Every now and then, they were interrupted by a lion, the network’s mascot, dancing.

As much as I tried to relate, that Venezuela was foreign to me. The video was made 6 years before I was born and I wouldn’t exactly call tacky Christmas messages a cornerstone of my national identity. I’ve spent two-thirds of my life under the Bolivarian Revolution initiated by Hugo Chávez, and I’ve long been outraged and shed tears about my country. But I also have learned to pick my battles and measure my frustrations. So it was bizarre to sit stoically and nod while this person I just had met cried and ranted for my own country, my fallen country, my kidnapped country, my corpse of a country, which I was preparing to return to while continuing to keep myself afloat.

Nostalgia is powerful. For migrants, refugees, and any group forced to abandon home, nostalgia is not only a way to connect to their roots, but also a tool for preserving part of their own identity. For Venezuelans, nostalgia manifests in a variety of forms with different, contradictory meanings. It can be a respite, an obsession, and a painful reminder of missed chances and losses. At its most extreme, nostalgia becomes the only reality people can face: The present is bleak, the future is uncertain, only the past is safe.

But nostalgia today is not the private experience it once was. This is particularly true in Venezuela, where a constant stream of videos and images shared from dozens of social media accounts focused on the country’s past is difficult to ignore. Many of these accounts are linked to institutions such as the prominent newspaper El Nacional or the Archivo de Fotografía Urbana. Others are focused solely on a medium like television or a place like Caracas.

Many of the most popular, such as GFdeVenezuela, lack any specific theme or time span beyond the sharer’s mood. Today it could be about Christian Dior opening shop in Caracas in 1953. Yesterday, it was Charles de Gaulle’s visit in 1964, or hotel architecture in 1930s Maracaibo, or the commercial hub of Sabana Grande in the early ‘80s.

These purveyors of images have formed a community of dedicated, anonymous individuals obsessively collecting and sharing material from all sorts of sources. A vast majority seem to come from public archives and publications, such as TIME, or from commercial stock. Exactly how accurate these images are is a matter of contention, particularly since many of them are now taken as fact, especially when they reaffirm popular opinions about better days gone by.

Spend enough time falling through this social media rabbit hole, and nostalgia becomes something soothing, an analgesic to a home you no longer recognize. This is understandable. In a way, it’s a logical counterweight to the ever-present reports of inflation, scarcity, violence, and government abuse.

Paradoxically, it’s also a source of pain to remember when our nation was not a bogeyman or a cautionary tale but a regular country with regular problems. It’s especially bitter to recall Venezuela at its best, as something of a beacon of progress, democracy, and stability in a continent beset by hunger, poverty, and military regimes.

But nostalgia is not really history; it’s more an evocation of the past, which may explain why it’s usually born from the most mundane, unsuspecting things, like eating hallacas at Christmas surrounded by family, a TV ad for a toilet cleaner, or old foreign newsreels showing a radiant Caracas that now looks so dim and dismal.

The YouTube comments on the Christmas video I watched in the Miami parking lot are proof of that. “This revolution ended our country. Even Christmases are sad,” said one. “We didn’t see the disaster that was coming,” said another. “How not to cry seeing this? My beautiful Venezuela! You will return! You will reborn!”

One of the most repeated sentences in the comments was: “We were happy and we didn’t know it.” Over the years this expression has become a motto of sorts for this bittersweet variant of nostalgia.

This broad, incoherent limbo where the quaint 1950s Caracas, still with its red-tiled roofs, coexists with the sprawling city filled with skyscrapers from the ‘80s. The opulence of the booming ‘70s merges with the austere ‘90s. All of these past, pre-Chávez Venezuelas are compressed into a simplified composite Venezuela that is both very intimate and easy to relate to.

And whose Venezuela is this? My grandparents’ generation still wants the country where they lived most of their lives; those of my parents’ age want the nation that could have been but wasn’t. My generation inherited a second-hand nostalgia—the evocation of a past that isn’t ours. The youngest, who have spent their entire lives under Chavismo, get conflicted feelings, a strange mix of pride and shame, but ultimately this past is mostly alien.

Ultimately, when a whole country spends so much time admiring these different images and moments from the past, the question of when we took the wrong turn arises. Was it in 1998? 1983? 1958? Nostalgia then can be an efficient tool not only to stir emotions, but also to create narratives, lead minds, and control people.

It’s interesting that one of the first sites to take advantage of Venezuelan nostalgia on social media was Venezuela Inmortal. At first glance, it appeared to be just another source for pictures and videos from the 1950s, particularly newsreels and publicity stills of large construction projects built under the right-wing dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1952-1958): Housing projects, highways, cable cars, and the Rockefeller Center-like Simón Bolívar Center.

But if one paid enough attention, you would notice videos of military parades and speeches of general Pérez Jiménez—a chubby, dull little man who was friends with Perón, Trujillo, and Franco. And next to those were comments portraying the democratic governments that came after as corrupt unpatriotic populists who caused Venezuela’s decline. Unsurprisingly, Venezuela Inmortal has connections with fringe far-right movements.

Another Pérez Jiménez admirer, at least in his early years in politics, was Hugo Chávez himself. He even invited him to his swearing-in in 1999. Perhaps, Chávez was simply capitalizing on a general disappointment in the bipartisan democracy that had been established in 1958 but came to be considered self-serving and out-of-touch by the early ‘90s.

Like Pérez Jiménez, Chávez saw Venezuela through the lens of nostalgia; for him, the rule of Simón Bolívar as a long-gone Heroic Age. So Chávez’s “Bolivarian Revolution” sought to reframe the century and a half between the country’s independence and Chávez’s tenure as one long dark age of exploitation and injustice—with very little difference between dictatorships and democracies.

In this understanding of history, Chávez was a redeeming figure, seeking to fulfill an updated version of Simón Bolívar’s dream. Complex and pragmatic historical figures and events were clearly divided between good or bad, while a couple of figures were rescued from the dustbin of history to fit the official narrative. Simply having a sense of history was to subscribe to one pole or another: The Chávez revisionist history, or all the histories that came before that.

Venezuelan historian Manuel Caballero, in his book Contra la abolición de la historia (Against the Abolishment of History), argues that the process of reducing history to a straight line between its original, founding myths and the current power figures robs history of its living, collective essence, in the service of creating new, inalterable legends.

Caballero points out that the Chávez movement was hardly alone in using a historical redemption to justify itself. Movements across the political spectrum, from far-left guerrillas to right-wing dictators like Pérez Jiménez, also employed the same narrative—a glorious past, the decadence and corruption that led to the present, and the need to restore that moment of glory, that golden age.

In this way nostalgia, and its simplification of the past, can be dangerous. Instead of being just a shared reminiscence, nostalgia becomes a rock upon which we can crash our feelings of frustration and discomfort with the seemingly unsolvable problems of the present. This surrender to nostalgia is all but a declaration of hopelessness about the future, as if to say that Venezuela, where over 27 million people still live, is only worth existing as a memory.

Now that I am back in Venezuela, my mind often goes back to that Cuban man showing me that nostalgic video in the Walmart parking lot. Of course, it wasn’t his nostalgia, and the truth is that it is not mine either.

I don’t know what’s going to happen in Venezuela in a year or even a week but I deeply hope my people will learn from the past instead of idealizing it. And I wish that, when the time comes, we help each other build a new, better country. One where we can focus our admiration and our hopes on the future, once again.

The post Why Rising Venezuelan Nostalgia Makes It All the Harder to Imagine a Future appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Ever since, writers and intellectuals have spilled ink trying to understand how the oil changed the path of Venezuela, not to mention Venezuelans themselves. One of the first was Arturo Uslar Pietri and his 1936 essay “To Sow the Oil.” In it, he warns that relying on oil may cause the decline of agriculture, and calls for the new wealth to be applied to creating a strong and modern economy. Perhaps the most influential public intellectual of his generation, his concerns were prescient. “To Sow the Oil” turned into a battle cry for an ideal that became more difficult to reach as the 20th century rolled on.

Incidentally, Uslar Pietri was also the originator of the term “magical realism,” to characterize the Latin American literary trend that emerged in the 1930s and ’40s as a marked departure from European literature because it found elements of the fantastical within the mundane and vice versa, expressing a constant duality.

But while Latin American literature became famous for its use of magical realism, the genre was rarely seen in Venezuela. Instead, the most prominent works were generally historical fiction or social novels—written by intellectuals trying to understand who Venezuelans are, where we come from, and which problems and shortcomings characterize our reality. In the shadow of oil, Venezuela’s authors charted a unique territory between politics and literature.

Consider, for example, the career of writer and politician Rómulo Gallegos, who wrote Doña Bárbara in 1929. Hailed as Venezuela’s greatest literary work and one of the classics of Latin American literature, Doña Bárbara has been adapted into two movies, one opera, four TV series—including a telenovela by Telemundo in 2008—and was recently included in PBS’s Great American Read.

The cover of Rómulo Gallegos’s 1929 novel Doña Bárbara, about a despotic Venezuelan cattle baroness. Many regard the book as a veiled critique of Juan Vincente Gómez’s dictatorship, which was propped up by oil wealth. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The novel focuses on Santos Luzardo, a young Caracas lawyer who returns to manage his family hacienda, and Doña Bárbara, the most feared cattle baroness in the grassland region. Luzardo is order and civilization, a reconciliatory patrician who demonstrates he can be both leader and equal to his peons. Doña Bárbara is anarchy and violence; she schemes with greedy foreigners and corrupt authorities. Victory comes when Luzardo asserts himself to Doña Bárbara and makes laws to be abided.

Many saw Doña Bárbara as a veiled critique of Venezuela under the dictatorship of Juan Vincente Gómez, who ruled the country from 1908 to 1935 and whose power was strengthened by an agricultural monopoly and amicable relations with foreign oil companies. He is commonly caricatured as a cruel and illiterate farmer managing the country as his own personal hacienda. Not long after publishing Doña Bárbara, Gallegos went into exile, joining an entire generation of important Venezuelan writers who were persecuted by the Gómez regime.

This generation’s worldview was shaped not only by living in Paris, Madrid, and Mexico, with their different literary styles and trends, but also by the political nature that exile gave to their work.

Such is the case of Teresa de la Parra, whose first novel Ifigenia was published in Paris in 1924. Ifigenia is a fascinating work, dealing with class, womanhood, and race in Venezuela at the time. Protagonist María Eugenia is a modern, independent woman living in Paris who returns to Caracas to manage her late father’s estate. Since she’s a woman, she can’t inherit, and is forced to live with her grandmother and maiden aunt, who expect her to only knit, pray, and sit by the window until she marries a proper suitor.

Oil is only a whisper on the horizon, but in one telling scene, during one of the upper-class dinner parties, the question of democracy comes up and is quickly shot down. Democracy, one of the guests states, only works in civilized nations with a white population. Dictatorships were necessary in poor, mixed-raced countries like Venezuela, until they became civilized. In this, the characters echoed the way that intellectuals close to Gómez justified his regime.

At the time, the connection between literature and politics was so strong that, in 1948, Gallegos himself became the country’s first democratically elected president—only to be ousted by a military junta a few months later. A dictatorship remained in place for 10 years, but Acción Democrática, the political party that Gallegos helped to found, would go on to dominate Venezuelan politics until the end of the 20th century.

In the tumultuous democracy after 1958, a new generation of writers began focusing, once again, on the interplay between politics, society, and oil in Venezuela. One of them was leftist journalist, politician, and newspaper owner Miguel Otero Silva, whose novels Casas Muertas (1955) and Oficina Nº 1 (1961) follow the life of Carmen, a young woman from a dying town during the Gómez dictatorship, where locals reminisce about the glory days but all she can see are the empty, run-down houses with cracked walls, and her own early death. Eventually, Carmen ends up in a settlement started by American oil prospectors in eastern Venezuela, based on a real town founded by Gulf Oil in 1933. The ambiguous modernity that Americans bring seems inevitable.

After the oil well dries up, Carmen sees with pride the thriving community the town has become. Children, without distinction of race or origin, play together, and news that political parties and unions have been legalized brings optimism about the future. For Otero Silva, it’s apparent that the ideal of “Sow the Oil” could exist in an egalitarian democracy that created structures that united Venezuelans as a whole, bringing progress and opportunity.

By the mid-1960s, writers and intellectuals focused less on oil itself than on its social and cultural consequences. As the democratic government led by Acción Democrática navigated between left-wing guerrillas and right-wing threats, the country was ambivalent about the overwhelming role of the United States, both in buying oil and interfering in democracy—much as it had supported previous dictators.

But the northern neighbor’s cultural influence spread rapidly, and in less than a generation, the nascent Venezuelan middle class embraced an Americanized lifestyle, while many rural poor moved to haphazard housing in the cities. This story is well told in the 1973 satirical novel El mago de la cara de vidrio by Eduardo Liendo, which describes how buying a TV set brought about an Everyman’s downfall—showing him the wonders of the world while also making him self-conscious about his clothes, and causing his children to abandon folk tales for hot dogs and Disney cartoons.

Probably the most iconic Venezuelan novel from this time is País Portátil by Adriano González León, published in 1968. Protagonist André Bazarte is a department store employee who is trying to cross Caracas at rush hour while carrying a briefcase, on a special mission from the guerrilla group he belongs to.

For Bazarte, joining the guerrillas has less to do with a collective, ideological agenda than an individualistic, existential one. His beef is not with the current Venezuelan government, Cold War politics, or U.S. imperialism. Instead, he seeks authenticity in an increasingly artificial society by recalling men like his ancestors, whose rustic masculinity has been made almost extinct through oil’s modernization and its complicit governments.

The 1970s were a boomtime for Latin American literature, with iconic authors like Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julio Cortázar writing from Paris, New York, Mexico City, and Madrid, as their own countries were engulfed by violence and authoritarianism. But Venezuelan authors, finding themselves in a privileged position, were notably absent.

As residents of one of the few democracies in Latin America, the country’s intelligentsia had little motivation to project themselves outside its borders. What is more, with the nationalization of the oil company in 1975, state-funded publishing houses such as Monte Ávila published books that weren’t commercially inclined and didn’t seek to reach a broad audience. This led to an insular, self-indulgent literary bubble, seldom noticed by mainstream society. Unconsciously, writers no longer focused on the consequences of oil, as the former generations had—but their insularity was itself a consequence of oil.

The next phase of Venezuelan literature arrived in the late ’90s, with the downfall of traditional parties like Acción Democrática and the rise of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution. Over the years, the slums had grown, brewing a discontent from a population that felt ignored by the established political system. In many ways, the upper classes grew isolated and everyone took for granted that the wealth from oil, directly or indirectly, was something that would never run out.

When Pim, Pam, Pum by Alejandro Rebolledo was published in 1999, it was the first book to confront the general malaise Venezuelans were experiencing, particularly the younger generation. The discontent that it expressed has changed and evolved, becoming a constant in today’s Venezuelan novels.

Written in slang, the book focuses on the drug-fueled escapes of a group of dissatisfied youth in late-’90’s Caracas. They see Venezuelan society as inherently corrupt and impossible to change. The narrator has never voted and says that if he had any money, he wouldn’t pay taxes either. One of his clique ironically wears a Chávez T-shirt, more as a statement than in actual support for the then presidential candidate.

I suppose this new literature of discontent could be considered post-oil, in the sense that it reflects the consequences of not addressing the consequences of oil. Venezuelan literature, both high and low, now repeats the same themes: decadence, loss, migration, corruption, abuse, and nostalgia under the Bolivarian Revolution.

One such literary attempt to capture the current zeitgeist is Blue Label by Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles, about a young woman from Caracas venturing to the countryside to seek her estranged grandfather, a French national who represents her chance to get out of a Venezuela she has no attachment to, and sees no future in.

If 1924’s Ifigenia was about a young woman coming to Venezuela and looking for something to call hers, Blue Label is the opposite: a young woman seeking to leave Venezuela, convinced that, whatever the country is now, it isn’t hers. In a way, her character also has shades of the protagonist of Casas Muertas, constrained by the limitations of her dying town.

As during the Gómez regime, once more Venezuelans feel disoriented, unable to recognize their own country. And once more this common experience is good for Venezuelan literature—both readers and writers. This loose and undefined time is inspiring writers to find ways to depict the debates Venezuelans are having every day and, in that way, connect with the general public.

Perhaps, as both writers and readers scatter from Venezuela itself, a new diasporic literature will find a voice that is unequivocally Venezuelan but also something else. Oil’s future today seems uncertain as the country’s production drops, but its cultural influence, the failed promise that was “To Sow the Oil” and the memory of the brief moment of peace and prosperity that it brought, now seem quintessential to our sense of ourselves.

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The plaque tells a quick story: Miranda was born in Caracas in 1750, fought with the Spanish troops during the American Revolution, served as a general during the French Revolution, briefly led an independent Venezuela, and died while jailed in a Spanish fortress in 1816.

I can’t blame you if you haven’t heard of Miranda before—though the most nationalistic of my fellow Venezuelans would no doubt be offended. They would boast that Miranda’s name is engraved on the Arc de Triomphe, and that he was allegedly a lover of Catherine the Great.

Unlike many born in Spanish America at the time who either saw themselves as Spaniards born overseas or identified with a specific colonial region, Miranda saw himself as part of a single unified identity, distinct from the European, and bound by language, culture, and geography, ranging from northern Mexico to Tierra del Fuego. It was Miranda’s dream of a united Spanish American nation that inspired the ideals of Simón Bolívar. The flags of Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador were based on Miranda’s design. He died, filled with sadness, without seeing his dreams of independence fulfilled.

His tragedy, two centuries old and so unique, feels strangely resonant and universal to me. Today, as I watch my fellow Venezuelans try to understand themselves, their place in the world, and the meaning of an increasingly-distant place we all once called home, I can’t help but wonder if his life is a warning to those who look back, an inspiration for freedom and cosmopolitan values, or just a meaningless act of Quixotic romanticism.

In Venezuela, Miranda is part of our history, but he is also part of something more emotional—our national mythology—which puts Simón Bolívar at the center and Miranda as his mentor. Bolívar not only occupies a Washington-like role of Father of the Nation, his name and face are a constant, from every main street and square in every town to our highest mountain, our largest state, our main airport, and our currency.

National mythologies, though, are like the statues of great men on high columns. They force you to admire them from below, but they are so far away that you can’t see the small details and imperfections of the real men. They get robbed of any semblance of humanity.

When Hugo Chávez became president in 1999 and started the Bolivarian Revolution by calling himself a “son of Bolívar,” he was hardly being revolutionary. He was following our long-established republican cult, as many have before him, where all of Bolívar’s mistakes are justified, all his contradictions forgotten. Growing up—as I did—in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela meant spending an entire class in middle school learning about Bolívar, seeing portraits and out-of-context quotes of his speeches decorating the walls of public buildings. We even watched his remains get exhumed on live TV for the production of a CGI portrait of the “real Bolívar.” And so Bolívar became nothing but the great man in the column, Zeus in a long, monotonous pantheon of seemingly interchangeable portraits of independence heroes in military regalia.

It was Miranda who stuck out.

There is, for starters, an Arturo Michelena painting titled Miranda en La Carraca. Here, Miranda is portrayed in the cell where he would die. He’s not standing tall, or mounted on horseback. He appears almost humble, far from the luxurious lifestyle and the glittering personalities he was famous for keeping company with. He looks at the viewer with slight reproach. One can’t help but wonder what he is thinking as he sets his eyes on you.

A few years ago, when UNESCO added Miranda’s diary and documents to the Memory of the World Register, they were digitalized and uploaded on a website with lot of fanfare, proclaiming that these papers were available to everyone for the first time. At the time of this writing, that website is broken.

Last year, I found a copy of Miranda’s papers—a collection of 24 volumes printed in Cuba in the early 1950s. They were stacked in a cardboard box filled with cockroaches that I bought from an old book peddler whose house was falling apart.

It’s easy to lose myself in these diaries—even though I can only half-guess what’s written in French—because they reveal an intimate and precise view of a man who I always have regarded as exceptional but never quite human.

Take, for instance, his trips to the United States. His descriptions are filled with life: He lists the names of rivers and the number of miles he travels between towns. He also talks to George Washington’s former slave at Mount Vernon. And then Thomas Jefferson insisted on showing him his two-headed snake.

On his first trip in 1783, when he went from Cuba to South Carolina to New Jersey, you sense him marveling at the institutions of a strange, nascent nation. He compares a barbecue, where townspeople enjoy beer and pork and talk about politics, to Plato’s Symposium.

Yet he’s candid in his criticism. He finds Americans to be overly religious and regrets that theater was banned in most of the country at the time. Despite his admiration, he complains about the cult of personality surrounding George Washington. He derides the way the people of Philadelphia greet Washington, saying that Christ entering Jerusalem looks small by comparison.

During the French Revolution, Miranda was brought to trial and almost sent to the guillotine by Robespierre. In the process, he became a far savvier and more pragmatic politician.

On his second trip to the United States in 1804 he went from New York to Washington, D.C. to meet with Jefferson and his cabinet with one thing in mind: to get assurance that the United States would not intervene in favor of Spain if the Spanish colonies rebelled against the Crown.

Although his meetings with Jefferson were brief—and Miranda didn’t think the author of the Declaration of Independence had the right qualities to be president—he got a positive response.

He then made several observations that, in retrospect, show his keen geopolitical insight. First, he realized that the United States would expand westward and eventually add Mexican territories to the union. Secondly, he realized that the United States was the only nation in the Americas capable of building a canal on the Panamanian isthmus—something Spain had tried to do, but failed. And he hoped that a united Spanish America would be able negotiate a good deal with the United States for that canal.

Eventually, this trip would lead him to buy a ship in New York City. With the help of a mostly American crew, he tried to invade Venezuela in 1806. Ten Americans were captured and executed for piracy. There’s a small monument in my hometown dedicated to these Americans, though hardly anyone knows who it commemorates.

In a 1815 letter, John Adams describes Miranda’s charm and intelligence, but also his single-mindedness and his power to rope others into his impossible dream:

“His constant topic was the independence of South America, her immense wealth, inexhaustible resources, innumerable population, impatience under the Spanish yoke, and disposition to throw off the dominion of Spain. It is most certain that he filled the heads of many of the young officers with brilliant visions of wealth, free trade, republican government, etc., etc., etc., in South America.”

In 1811, Miranda returned to help Venezuela become one of the first Spanish colonies to declare its independence, setting up a federal republic modeled on the United States. It fell apart because of factional squabbles, economic problems, and a devastating earthquake that left the most important cities in ruins. Miranda, then leader of the haphazard government, was arrested by the other patriots and given to the Spanish Crown to guarantee their safe passage into exile.

Looking again at Miranda en La Carraca, I know he always will be entangled in myth, but I can’t help but wonder what Francisco de Miranda is thinking. Today, his life feels more relevant than ever.

As Venezuelans leave their country in droves, and try to make sense of their new identity as a diaspora, it’s tempting to see Miranda as a role model. Despite living less than half of his life in South America and, at different times, adopting names such as Merond, Martin, or Meroff to hide from his persecutors or to pass unnoticed in a foreign land but he was driven by his dream of seeing those he regarded as his own people be freed from Spanish rule.

Both he and Bolívar met tragic ends. But while Bolívar’s fate—dying of pneumonia on his way to exile, after being expelled by the nations he had liberated—was tangled with South American independence, and carries almost the gravitas and inevitability of religious martyrdom, Miranda’s fate is Byronic.

One could imagine him living out the rest of his days in his townhouse in London with his wife Sarah and his children, but instead he chose to follow his impossible dream. In that way, Miranda en La Carraca feels like a warning from a romantic, an adventurer, the father of a nation that never was, a doomed soul telling you to save yourself and never look back, because there’s nothing to salvage.

But then I go back to his diaries, to his stories of escaping from the Spanish Inquisition and his quotations of John Milton, and comprehend that a lost cause is no less great, no less inspiring than one that succeeds. For many Venezuelans, our homeland is a lost cause; but for me, whether that’s true or not, it’s no reason to give up.

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My subjects were “Introduction to Cinema” and “Basics of Scriptwriting.” They may seem shallow, a poor attempt to retain normalcy in a country falling apart, but I found the experience to be a distraction from my other job, which was reporting on current events in Venezuela. Talking with my students, I realized that I wasn’t alone in seeking to forget, if only for a while, our daily tragedy.

The first thing I asked my students was about what kind of movies they watched. Less than a decade separated us, and it was easy to see generational trends that were no different from those of our demographic counterparts in other countries. You had your fans of Marvel and Harry Potter, users of Reddit and Tumblr, viewers of 13 Reasons Why or Game of Thrones, and even readers of literature ranging from Jane Austen to 50 Shades of Grey.

At first, it’s all too easy to declare all of this pure escapism: a release from inflation, food shortages, and one of the highest crime rates in the world. And while normal life is a struggle, finding foreign movies and TV shows is relatively easy and nearly free, as long as your internet connection allows it. Piracy is commonplace in Latin America, but what makes Venezuela stand out is the gradual inaccessibility of legal media. Even before the country was caught in quadruple-digit inflation, getting new books or going to the cinema regularly was seen as something of a luxury. Most of my students read their books not from paperbacks or on Kindle, but on Wattpad or as PDFs in their phones or laptops.

Looking deeper, though, you can see there’s also another kind of release involved, the one you get when you can put into words and images what you don’t have any other way to express.

Browsing Facebook and Twitter, it’s easy to find memes comparing the opacity and abuses of the Maduro government to the court intrigue in Game of Thrones’ Westeros, or memes juxtaposing the violent survivalism of The Walking Dead with daily life here—food shortages, failing infrastructure, and a very limited supply of medicine.

Earlier this year, social media followed closely the death of renegade security official Óscar Pérez—including videos he uploaded himself on Instagram. It was a scene that wouldn’t have been out of place in The Hunger Games or V for Vendetta, both of which younger Venezuelans reference to their own situation—sometimes as a joke, other times more seriously.

It’s ironic, really, that we end up defining our struggles through foreign media. When Hugo Chávez became president in 1999, he was seen as a nationalist, a military commander, a common man. But above all, he was a llanero, a plainsman, a Venezuelan cowboy who would lead not only a social or economic revolution, but also a cultural one.

He was seen by many as a return to our roots, a U-turn to a “real Venezuela”—a country that, incidentally, had been defined by the rule of charismatic strongmen.

A couple of artists and intellectuals soon adapted to this new situation, some because of political affinity, others for funds. Román Chalbaud, arguably the Bolivarian Revolution’s most prominent artist, used to be a filmmaker well-known for his realistic—if lurid—social dramas. Today, he mostly directs historical epics where llaneros read Karl Marx in the 1850s.

For 15 years there was a boom in Venezuelan cinema, in no small part thanks to a heavy investment and promotion by the government. It managed to make terrific, thought-provoking, award-winning films, and every now and then it made the occasional piece of propaganda, mostly by the hand of Chalbaud and his kind.

Yet, my students still disparaged Venezuelan movies as “snoozefests about Simón Bolívar” or “filled with thugs and prostitutes.”

The success of Papita, Maní, Tostón a couple of years ago—a bland, cheap gag-filled romantic comedy set in the world of baseball fandom—makes the case that Venezuelans do see Venezuelan movies, but probably don’t enjoy those that think too deeply about the state of the country.

In any case, most Venezuelan movies are hard to find since there’s very little market for home media or streaming here. And, for this reason, bootlegs aren’t easy to get. To watch Venezuelan cinema, your best option is YouTube, where you can find La Balandra Isabel”—one of the two Venezuelan films to win at Cannes—and “Papita, Maní, Tostón. But once those pixilated videos are deleted due to copyright infringement, your chance to watch the movie is gone, probably for good.

In a top 10 list of highest-grossing Venezuelan movies you’ll find three comedies, two action movies, two period pieces, one horror film, and two LGBT dramas. With the exception of these last two, and the action movies, which invariably focus on crime and corruption but never explore the reasons behind them, none expresses any sort of insight about today’s Venezuela.

So it made sense that when I asked my students to develop a plotline for class, most of them set their story either in the United States or in Western Europe. These were places they didn’t know and filled with obvious flaws—they thought that Minnesota is a city; Manhattan is outside New York City; Rome is a country. The few set in Venezuela were revenge stories or overflowing with eye-rolling nationalism.

These kids, born around the time Hugo Chávez took power, couldn’t imagine stories of love, comedy, adventure, or people’s difficulties set in their own society. Despite the government’s communications machinery—made up of several television channels, dozens of radio stations, and a handful of newspapers—and Chavismo’s cultural revolution, newer generations don’t see any images of themselves beyond despair and disillusionment. But at the same time, the opposition never managed to conceive a credible alternative to this situation.

In many ways, Venezuela has been rediscovering itself. As the country deepens into a crisis never seen here within living memory, we question supposedly inalterable facts that once defined ourselves and our nation. For 40 years Venezuela was a bipartisan democracy, made prosperous by spectacular oil revenues. One of the goals of the architects of what was dubbed “Saudi Venezuela” was to modernize the country or, at very least, to appear modern. This meant building contemporary art museums, an international literary contest, and state-of-the-art performance centers: The face of democratic Venezuela was Niemeyer-inspired architecture and art installations by Carlos Cruz-Diez.

But for many people—especially those impoverished after the economic catastrophe of the 1980s—the leaders were disconnected, elitist, more attentive to Miami or Bern than to the rural states or the slums of Caracas. It’s no surprise that apátrida, literally meaning “stateless,” was one of Chávez’s most used insults for his enemies. In his eyes, those against him weren’t “real Venezuelans.”

In response, the artists and intellectuals were baffled at how a man who had staged a coup against a democratic government could be voted in as president. For them, a question emerged: “Where did we go wrong?”

For most of the Chávez years, when you walked into any bookstore it seemed that 90 percent of the books written and published in Venezuela tried to answer this question. From journalists to college professors to former ministers, every kind of armchair expert gave their own national diagnosis and prescribed some vague formula to steer the country back on course.

This is no longer the case, though. As Chavismo solidified to become the new establishment, those experts faded from the spotlight. Partly this is due to the government quietly taking over media but it also reflects a younger generation that is not interested in restoring a flawed country they never lived in.

Today, the bookstores that haven’t closed fill their spare bookshelves with remaindered books, some of which go as far as the ’70s. Did you know there were Happy Days novelizations in Spanish? Some have a few new-ish books that easily cost a month’s salary. But lately even the trade in used books—which used to be healthy because so many people were leaving the country and trying to make quick money—has fallen off as inflation has risen.

As Venezuelans scatter around the globe, a new question takes relevancy: “What is Venezuela?” Is it a place? A memory? An ideal? Gone forever?

This question dogs the visceral, heartfelt crónicas of Héctor Torres as well the reflective, melancholic songs of La Vida Bohème. To so many Venezuelans—including those who have left, never to look back, those who look back from all directions, and those of us still remaining in the country without knowing what the future will bring—this question hovers around, unable to be ignored.

At the moment, it doesn’t have an answer. But I can’t wait to see the books and movies that we will create to answer it.

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