Lope de Aguirre, the Tyrant, and the Prince: Convergence and Divergence in Postcolonial Collective Memory

• Main Author: ESTAVA DAVIS, Jennifer Kate
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2012
• Subjects: Collective Memory; Postcolonial Latin America; Symbolic Convergence; Cultural Discourse; Heteroglossia; Communication; Critical and Cultural Studies; International and Intercultural Communication
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cec_research/4; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=cec_research
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In Latin America, collective remembering is shaped by stories of colonizers whose voracious ambitions left an indelible mark on the landscape and its people. This essay examines a set of narratives about a legendary colonizer, Lope de Aguirre, that continue to be invoked in the collective imagination on the island of Margarita, in Venezuela. Drawing on Bormann’s Symbolic Convergence Theory and Bakhtin’s work on cultural discourse, this analysis shows that on the one hand, the narratives converge to support official records of Aguirre as an archetype of colonial brutality. Yet on the other, alternate versions of the stories reveal a more discordant picture, one that complicates Aguirre’s character and reevaluates his influence on the island and in the wider context of Latin America.