“Colonization was one of the most enormous genocides in history”

A few days ago the prominent Argentine writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (Buenos Aires, 1968) visited Chile to be part of the Penguin Providencia festival.

The author presented her most recent novel “The Naranjel Girls.” In this interview she tells how she came to the story of Catalina de Erauso, a novice who was born in San Sebastián in 1592. At fifteen she escaped from the convent where she lived and with a male costume that would allow her to experience an enormous variety of adventures she arrived in America. . There, she does all kinds of jobs until she ends up in the army and sets out to conquer Chile.

“The colonization It was one of the most enormous genocides in history that I insist, I wish it had ended with the c“There was independence from Spain but it was not over and our Latin American states were also colonizers and genocidal and to some extent still are, that is why we are a sacrifice zone,” says Cabezón.

The writer says that from Catalina de Erauso’s diaries she created the character of Antonio, who finds himself in the jungle with two girls who lead him to question everything.

“There is something that is very interesting and very inevitable, which is that when you you think, you invent either you investigate a story that happened three centuries ago, you are thinking about it from your contemporaneity. So issues like the conquest that one could say happened until 1810 when we made them independent, I hope! That continues to happen, it is something very contemporary,” expresses the author in this interview.

Then he adds that “what does allow me to put history 300 years ago or 300 years forward is a distance from the time that allows me to articulate discourse, play with words, create poetry, add humor, in contemporary times, I “It makes it a little more difficult.”

Check out the full interview below: