Fals Borda’s Historia doble de la Costa: The Anatomy of a Book Unfolding into Queerness

• Author: Álex Pereira
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221103858
• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Date: 01 July 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles: Zavaleta Mercado, Cueva, and Fals Borda

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221103858

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 245, Vol. 49 No. 4, July 2022, 191–206

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X221103858

© 2022 Latin American Perspectives

191

Fals Borda’s Historia doble de la Costa

The Anatomy of a Book Unfolding into Queerness

by

Álex Pereira

Translated by

Mariana Ortega-Breña

Tracing of the queer elements in Orlando Fals Borda’s Historia doble de la Costa,

written as part of the development of his participatory action research method, suggests

that these elements provide a subversive lens and the strength to destabilize academic

conventions and take risks in the analysis of class, race, and gender issues. In addition,

they can be seen as stimulating other types of thought and different ways of seeing and

understanding social reality.

Es posible rastrear elementos queer en el libro Historia doble de la Costa, escrito por

Orlando Fals Borda como parte de su puesta en práctica del método de investigación

acción participativa. En esas marcas queer se halla su fuerza para transgredir convencio-

nes académicas, y que ellas le posibilitan tomar riesgos en el análisis de cuestiones de clase,

raza y género, además de estimular otros tipos de pensamientos y maneras distintas de ver

y entender la realidad social.

Keywords: Historia doble de la Costa, Orlando Fals Borda, Participatory action

research, Queer, Caribbean

I was in love with the white piano. And she knew it. She discovered it with the same

astounding ability women have for discovering such things, or the homosexuality of

men who jealously hide it.

—Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, 1954

In a way, the reading that I am about to undertake of Historia doble de la Costa

can be traced back to my teenage years and my initial approach to its four vol-

umes: Mompox y Loba (1979), El presidente Nieto (1981), Resistencia en el San Jorge

(1984), and Retorno a la tierra (1986). At the time I thought that its author, the

Álex Pereira is a historian, translator, and literary critic. He has taught Colombian history, oral his-

tory and biography, autobiography, and autofiction in Colombia and Latin American literature and

history in the City University of New York system in Brooklyn. He is interested in the tension

between literature and history, with special emphasis on the field of Caribbean and queer studies.

He has written several articles on Orlando Fals Borda and has practiced the participatory action

research methodology with Colombian oil workers. He is currently studying Fals Borda’s Historia

doble de la Costa for his Ph.D. thesis in Latin American literature and cultural studies at Georgetown

University. Mariana Ortega-Breña is a freelance translator based in Mexico City.

1103858LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X221103858Pereira/FALS BORDA’S HISTORIA DOBLE

research-article2022

192 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda (1925–2008), had hidden in its pages

a kind of secret that I would today describe as a covert erotic force. It was an

impression encouraged by my youthful capacity to eroticize everything found

amidst the humidity of the Colombian Caribbean coast, the region on which

the book is focused. This impression was motivated by the experimental format

of the book and the rare anatomy of its textual body, the layout of which allows

for different modes of reading. My first identification with this book was, there-

fore, related to all the traits that make it “raro,” “queer,” or “affected,” for I saw

myself as un muchacho amariconado who jealously hid his homosexuality from a

violent world.

The word “identification” is perhaps not the most appropriate when refer-

ring to my first approach to Historia doble. The term “disidentification,” as

expounded by José Esteban Muñoz, might better express my initial experience

while also pointing to the kind of reading I intend to undertake. For Muñoz,

“disidentification” describes the attraction that people with peripheral identi-

ties may experience with regard to a cultural document that was not necessar-

ily created to establish a connection with those identities but, through a

particular way of reading it, allows them to establish positive connections with

parts of it to the point of appropriating it for themselves through a process of

cannibalization that includes an unveiling of the exclusive elements it may pos-

sess (Muñoz, 1999: 1–31; Butler, 1993: 4, 219). In terms of my own experience as

a reader of Historia doble, I would say that I was attracted to the aspects that

departed from standardized forms and made the work raro (unusual).

When I say “raro” I use this word in its original sense of “weird” but also in

the sense in which the term “queer” is understood in the Colombian expres-

sions “marica, tú eres como raro” or “this woman is rara, she dresses like a man”

or “a raro guy” (Montoya, 2017: 34–35). Given that my gaze is informed by

queer studies, I will use “raro” interchangeably with “queer,” even though they

are not precisely equivalent (Rodríguez, 2003: 23–25). Like the term marica,

“queer” can be used as an adjective, a noun, or a verb to mean “weird,”

“strange,” “eccentric,” or “questionable.” Thus designating something deviant,

it is usually used as a synonym for “gay,” “lesbian,” “fag,” “homosexual,” or

some other denigrating appellation for people on the basis of their sexuality

and behaviors that deviate from what is considered normal (de Lauretis, 2015:

109).

Being out of the ordinary, “queer” applies to something that is considered

marginal and, therefore, is a notion that, when politicized, expresses resistance

to the dominant order (Warner, 1999). In social criticism, queerness functions

as a destabilizing notion of norms considered natural by the hetero-patriarchal

and capitalist regime—norms that go across gender, ethnicity, race, and class

relations, among other social aspects (Ferguson, 2004: 1–29, 138–148). “Queer”

exists in opposition to “straight” as a definition of that which is correct or right,

and it is oppositional in that it expresses a violation of the feminine/masculine

binary hierarchies (Sullivan, 2003: 43). It can therefore be said that this word

implies a resistance to what are seen as ideal behaviors on the basis of values

linked to a Eurocentrically Christian morality, which positions the white bour-

geois male as its universal subject (Butler, 1993: 226–228).