4 - Mothers and Nomadic Subjects: La novia oscura

Summary

La novia oscura is concerned with the new cultural identities created by changing configurations of wealth in Colombia in the 1940s, specifically with the new communities formed around flows of capital present as a result of the insertion of North American wealth in the creation of an oil industry in the north-east of the country. The arrival of multinational capitalism in the region fragments former configurations of community and desire and, to an extent, institutions of class and gender control. Temporary homosocial sub-communities are formed, and these, for a brief time, threaten to disrupt institutions of patriarchy and capitalism. The deterritorialized, nomadic space of La Catunga (a zona de tolerancia) creates the possibility of an alternative symbolic, whilst in other respects remaining complicit with oppressive structures. This challenge is brief, however, as capitalism is quickly able to re-harness patriarchal structures and take advantage of political violence in order to contain this threat. The effects of the new socio-economic circumstances upon gender identity are examined in a context which also explores traditional concepts of the ‘feminine’ – particularly of their uses in the construction of national identity. If narratives of national identity in Latin America have so often had recourse to those of gender and family, and particularly of traditional and conservative feminine stereotypes, then the novel can also be seen as a feminist re-inscription of foundational fictions, inasmuch as the mestiza heroine's quest for identity ends with a rejection of marriage, and with a re-valorization and re-signification of the mother, where this figure undergoes a progression from absent, represented other, to speaking subject.