THE CREOL NATIONAL PROJECT AND THE SEGREGATION OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES: LITERARY CONFLUENCES IN FOUNDING LATIN AMERICAN TEXTS OF THE 19TH CENTURY
Paulo
Rodrigo Pereira da Silva
PhD student in
Letters-Literature Theory from the Federal University of Pernambuco – UFPE,
Master's degree in Letters from the Federal Rural University of Pernambuco –
UFRPE, Professor of Portuguese, English and Spanish SEE-PE,
Email: rodrigoteacher@hotmail.com
ABSTRACT
Under
the influence of positivism, different projects of the Nation-State in Latin
America in the 19th century were consolidated in forms of government that were
constituted from the creole oligarchic groups that maintained colonial social
and political privileges and that, at the same time, segregated different
indigenous peoples. The term creole is
used here under an ethnic approach to indicate the white-mestizo group born in
America as a result of miscegenation between local inhabitants and Europeans
who came to settle in colonial lands and who generated descendants. In this
perspective, the present research was proposed in order to analyze the thoughts
of several intellectuals of politics and literature of this period who valued
the emergence of new governments from the republican ideals related to the
oligarchies composed by the mestizo/creole groups descended from the conquering
white peoples, excluding slaves and their descendants, Indians and other
minorities from social and political life. Among these intellectuals, names
like Simon Bolívar, José Inácio de Abreu e Lima, José Henrique Rodó, Domingos
Faustino Sarmiento and José de Alencar stand out who, when writing the
different Latin American founding texts, sought in European molds the basis for
the social, cultural, political and economic structures that disseminated in
the continent a highly excluding worldview towards indigenous peoples and other
minorities that did not fit into the thinking and national projects proposed by
the thinkers and leaders of the hegemonic classes that governed the then former
Hispanic colonies and Portuguese .
Keywords: Creole national project. Latin American founding texts. Segregation of indigenous peoples.