Saldo literario de un destino histórico: don Álvaro en el límite del tiempo

Abstract

In this essay, I analyze the way in which the independence of the American viceroyalties affects the formation of concepts such as nation and nationality in the context of the Iberian Peninsula. This political environment is the unstable background that illuminates the animosity raised by the ethnic, social and racial identity of the mestizo, in the society drawn by the Duke of Rivas in Don Alvaro o la fuerza del sino. In 1835, the indiano is an uncomfortable reminder of those limits within which citizenship is defined in the newly constituted nation-state. Don Alvaro, emblem of the irreducible dialectics between loyalty and rebellion, reveals the crisis underneath the discourses in charge of defining the new political body of citizenship, whose task is to give birth to a modern nation from the colonial ruin.