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Since the end of the nineteenth century, there have emerged profound and convincing criticisms of the notion of the transcendent modern self that thinks and perceives the world from a non-place, and is therefore “objective.”^[1] Those to whom Paul Ricoeur referred as the “masters of suspicion” may have been the first major figures responsible for identifying the limitations of, and subterranean influences on, an ostensibly sovereign “reason.”^[2] Karl Marx, Frederick Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud demonstrated how economic structures, the will to power, and the dynamics of bodily desire intensely affected the supposedly transcendent modern self. From these three points of departure, Heidegger, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and others^[3] have elaborated their own theoretical contributions, making the Cartesian ego progressively more limited, further from atemporal objectivity, and more transparent to the agenda of personal interests (economic, political, and sexual) that lie behind it.

In approaching a historical event or figure, “situating reason” means remaining fully aware of the context in which one thinks and the hermeneutic distance that separates researchers from the object of their study. Those who have situated their own reason are aware that they regard everything around them through the prism of their present moment, which allows them to uncover certain insights into history only to the extent that other truths and perspectives are concealed. The need to recognize that prism and its revealing/concealing function, and to make it explicit to readers, could not be clearer. Credibility lies in the consistency of varying historical interpretations over time. Primary sources embedded in concrete social and historical contexts constitute foundations from which hermeneutical buildings may rise; awareness of this basic intellectual architecture is what separates serious academic frameworks from mere political pamphlets.

The case of Lope de Aguirre is emblematic. Historical studies and depictions of Aguirre represent him in different and often contradictory ways. For example, Miguel Otero Silva holds that Simón Bolívar saw Lope de Aguirre as the first secessionist revolutionary of the Americas.^[4] In fact, Bolívar tried to publish the letter of rebellion that Aguirre had sent to the king of Spain declaring war on the Spanish empire. Bolívar hoped this would serve as an inspiration for the revolts that would later occur on the continent. Following this positive vision of the conquistador, some twentieth century Latin American and Basque thinkers, mainly associated with leftist movements, elevated the figure of Aguirre to that of a martyr who died in the name of freedom and in protest of imperial oppression. For example, the Basque Segundo de Ispizúa, the Venezuelans Casto Fulgencio López and Miguel Otero Silva, the Peruvian Emilio Choy, and the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano, among others, were captivated by the figure of Aguirre, who for them seemed to embody the whole identity of Latin America in its struggle for liberation.

On the other hand, Aguirre’s marañón rebellion^[5] against the Spanish monarchy⁠—which took place at the very heart of the continent⁠—also installed one of the most terrible colonial systems of oppression and extreme violence, one that resulted in numerous deaths, even that of Aguirre’s own daughter. From the first chronicles in which Aguirre appears, one sees a man who borders on madness, a bloodthirsty tyrant capable of eliminating any adversary. Unlike those who saw in Aguirre a liberating hero, for the historians and writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries⁠—and, still today, for some writers of the twentieth century⁠—Aguirre has represented colonial oppression.

This liberating/oppressive and anti-imperial/colonizing duality is present in the nicknames that the colonial writers often assigned to Lope de Aguirre: “Prince of Freedom,” on the one hand, and “Tyrant,” on the other. This double personality, which permeates the canon of literary and artistic representations of Aguirre, has generated an immense fascination in the social imaginary as few other figures in history have; it is a flashpoint of both outright condemnation and absolute admiration. Even in the western part of Venezuela⁠—specifically in Trujillo and Barquisimeto, where Aguirre was captured and killed⁠—popular celebrations and rituals are observed to commemorate him, as the people there believe that his ghost inhabits those lands, both seducing and terrorizing their imagination.

Ingrid Galster, who has conducted a thorough and rigorous study of the history of Aguirre representations, suggests that they have served as political justifications for liberals as well as for conservatives, for anarchists and communists as well as for nationalists, opening an infinite range of possible interpretations.^[6] Nonetheless, Galster criticizes the lack of historical rigor of many of these appropriations.^[7] An example is the popular film by Werner Herzog, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, in which Aguirre serves as a means of critiquing colonialism and Nazism from a postmodern viewpoint. In order to achieve this end, the German director had to modify several elements of the colonial narratives, such as chronological events, the Aryan characteristics of Aguirre and his daughter, the number of soldiers present, the circumstances of the murders, and so on. He even eliminated the entire conquest of Margarita Island by Aguirre, the moment in which the conqueror exercised his most brutal tyranny. This type of adaptation “situates reason” in its selection of details that highlight the story’s relevance for twentieth-century Germany, although it does so at the expense of historical accuracy.

If there are different and contradictory interpretations of Lope de Aguirre, are there also common elements or contours among them? The enormous volume of essays and fictional works about Aguirre makes it difficult to answer this question. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that the liberating/oppressive and anti-imperial/colonizing dimensions of the conquistador are recurring elements. Starting with the first relaciones and the three letters Aguirre wrote himself, there is a clear uniformity in this central theme: the fight against the empire coincided with the implantation of an oppressive and violent system.

To recognize the importance of situating reason does not imply abandoning historical sources or textual consistency. An extreme version of situated reason poses the challenge of radical relativism, which dilutes any attempt at historical reconstruction with questions concerning political interests and points of view. In order to navigate between the Scylla of unsituated reason and the Charybdis of an extreme relativism, it is necessary to support interpretations with explicit connections between the researcher, on the one hand, and the object of study⁠—and its many historical source materials⁠—on the other, even as one recognizes the researcher’s particular interests and subjectivity. Historical texts cannot be disengaged from their context and made to speak to a current reality as though they came to us from outside of time and space; this is the temptation of naive historians on both sides of the first of Habermas’s ruptures. As Rolena Adorno states, one is “precisely to avoid divorcing texts from the circumstances that produced them. . . . To be not only theoretically enlightened but also historically responsible is a twin goal worth pursuing.”^[8]

This book is part of the discipline of cultural studies and does not search for a “truth” behind the texts in the way that a classical nineteenth-century historiography might.^[9] Rather, it tries to illuminate the Latin American social imaginary as it is expressed in appropriations of Aguirre, especially in anti-imperial and liberationist discourses. For this reason, I limit my initial investigation of Aguirre and his rebellion to the liberating/oppressive and anti-imperial/colonizing dimensions. Affirming that these binaries are porous (just as all binaries are) is only the initial step of the analysis. But the richness of the work before us lies in analyzing connections between the poles, asking how one passes from one to the other, and using the historical materials to see how they operate at a discursive and political level in the social imaginary.