THE CREOL NATIONAL PROJECT AND THE SEGREGATION OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES: LITERARY CONFLUENCES IN FOUNDING LATIN AMERICAN TEXTS OF THE 19TH CENTURY

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 .