Dr. Carlos Colmenares Gil Spotlight

In our latest interview, CRRES interviewed Dr. Carlos Colmenares Gil about an upcoming chapter, “The apparition of Miguel James and the Angelitos Negros of Venezuelan poetry,” and recently published article “Thinking from the Barrio: Location, Modernity, and the Popular in Alejandro Moreno.” We chatted about the forces that inspire his work, how immigration to Venezuela has shaped national discourse about race over time, bringing attention to overlooked Latin American writers, and his current book recommendations.

Could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Dr. Colmenares Gil: I’m from Venezuela. I was born and grew up in a little city near Caracas, the capital. I’m starting here because my dad was a literature schoolteacher, and my mom didn’t go to college or anything but was very involved in politics. Through politics, she started working as a social worker. These two things, literature and, in general, some questions about politics, have always been there for me, and I’ve been trying to understand them in some way. For my bachelor’s, I did psychology, and then I did a master’s in philosophy. I was studying these disciplines with these two things in mind— literature and politics. Of course, those are two very broad topics. They, in a way, flooded everything I was doing. Then, for my PhD, I knew that comparative literature as a discipline would ground me more in literature. I’ve always been reading since I was very young. I read Borges or Kafka, not knowing who they were, and I read other minor authors not part of the so-called Western canon that were as important to me. So, that indiscriminate sort of reading was important for me later. Then I went to UC Irvine for my PhD in Comparative Literature, and it felt like I was combining all these things. I was very conscious after doing my master’s that something like Comparative Literature was the final thing I needed to complete my studies. I mean, I consider myself a student forever. After the MA, I had to work and do different things. Still, I knew that eventually, I would go for Comparative Literature because it’s a discipline that is very undisciplined and wild in some sense, and that’s a good thing for me.

You have a chapter coming out soon in an edited book about contemporary Venezuela and migration. Congratulations! What are the major themes, and the implications for how we think about race in the Latin American context? How does that translate to the U.S. context?

Dr. Colmenares Gil: This chapter I wrote is coming out in a collection that some colleagues put together and I’m contributing to it. It’s supposed to be about new approaches to Venezuelan studies, and it’s going to be in English. It’s a thing for U.S. academia or people who can read in English and maybe can read in Spanish kind of audience. Venezuela is a country that, for more than a decade now, has been going through a very tough migratory crisis. In the U.S., you can feel it because until a few years ago Venezuelans weren’t a minority group that was migrating. There have always been Venezuelans around here and there, but now, anywhere you go, you see them and very often in a very precarious condition. In a way, the spirit of that book is trying to talk about this, but there are also many other histories of how Venezuela as a country has confronted this issue of immigration. I try not to go for the main route that some of these things want to go. I don’t want to change my work to something that it’s not, but I admire it, and I’m very interested in reading my colleagues’ work and learning about that, but I was thinking, “What can I do?” So, I said, well, maybe we can go back and think about when Venezuela was in a sort of better economic and social situation and as a country that received a lot of migrants, right? Many migrants are from Colombia and Peru, but also from places like Trinidad, which is, you know, an island that’s very close to Venezuela. I thought about this Venezuelan poet called Miguel James. There was a chance to explore his work more academically and his role as a migrant. He came to Venezuela when he was five with his family from Trinidad in the late 1950s. This is a moment when many people are coming to Venezuela to work, especially in the oil industry and different areas. Venezuela has an important Black population, so it’s not like he will stand out, but he could see certain things that other Venezuelan poets or writers couldn’t see or didn’t want to see.

In places like Venezuela or Brazil where you see that the most— instead of a country founded on white supremacy, like Jim Crow laws, they’re places where they’re proud of saying, “Well, you know these things don’t happen here because we’re all a mixed race.” So, of course, we have polarization and a violent history, but something different happened. A few centuries ago, the population started to mix so most of us are brown now, so people think it doesn’t really matter, right? I try to examine how literary critique, even when it’s not explicit, assumes this idea. They are unable to read works that are trying to criticize that idea. Miguel James’s poetry does many things, but he is saying that things are not as ideal as the official discourse paints them. This sounds simple, but in a place like Venezuela in the 90s where he was writing that wasn’t legible. That wasn’t a thing. It was read like we have this Black poet who is Afro-Venezuelan and Afro-Trinidadian and incorporates elements of Black culture but is putting that on the same level as everything else, almost like this fantasy of a melting pot. So, of course, he should incorporate that. We celebrate it. I think he’s doing something different. He’s putting in evidence about how this idea that we’re all mixed is another way to erase people who are not really mixed, like people who are Afro-Venezuelan and Indigenous cultures. This belief that we’re all mixed race is the most important thing. It’s a way to put Black and Indigenous people as something from the past. It’s like a folkloric act, and he’s trying to dismantle it in a very particular way. His poetry does not give us a straight-up racial consciousness discourse. He is very playful. It’s almost childish sometimes, but he’s throwing all these things here and there in all these markers so that when we see it, we understand what’s going on there. That’s the sort of intervention I’m trying to do. It can also allow us to read other people’s writing in Venezuela and see these critiques that haven’t been seen as much before.

Are there other recent works that you would like to talk about?

Dr. Colmenares Gil: There’s an article, “Thinking from the Barrio: Location, Modernity, and the Popular in Alejandro Moreno,” that finally came out last year. It talks about Venezuela author Alejandro Moreno, but it’s more like social theory kind of thing. I call him a social theorist, even though he was a priest trained as a psychologist and a philosopher. He has some highly theoretical work that is not well-known. It’s not even studied in other Latin American countries outside of Venezuela. He’s known, but not that well known. It’s an article about the “barrio,” or slum, in Venezuela. As a priest, he moved to this community in Caracas, this “barrio” or slum, and lived there for the rest of his life. He started theorizing what he calls the popular Venezuela instead of the modern Venezuela. He finds that there is a certain culture within the country, especially people coming from the countryside and those from lower classes, that there’s a certain way to experience the world and understand the world that is at odds with what we think about the modern Western kind of citizen. Of course, they can live in both worlds. They know how to handle it because they have to go to work and deal with institutions. But there’s a different way of processing that. He’s very critical of how these communities, slums or “barrios,” have been talked about in sociology and anthropology, almost with this outsider perspective. He reads this in a new way. So, I tried to put him in context with other theories about lower-class communities and communities on the margins. The article is about how his thoughts can inform more mainstream or known ways of thinking about marginalized urban communities.

Are there other authors that you would recommend to people who are interested in similar topics?

Dr. Colmenares Gil: I've been re-reading, but I feel like I'm reading it for the first time because I'm actually getting the full depth of it. This book, Denise Ferreira da Silva’s, “Toward a Global Idea of Race,” a pretty well-known book. As I’m reading it again, I’m seeing much more of the importance of her project, and it's related to what I'm doing. There's also a book that just came out in English. It's an English, Spanish translation. The author is a poet I'm also writing about, Igor Barreto. This book was originally published in 2017 in Spanish and the English translation just came out, translated by Rowena Hill. The book is called “Mandelshtam's Wall.” I don't like saying everyone should read that because I feel like I'm sort of like an influencer, but if people are in some ways interested in some of these things that I'm saying people should. It's one of the most amazing things one can read.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

Dr. Colmenares Gil:I feel very lucky to be reading and writing and to be able to talk to people who are thinking about similar things. We should celebrate the slowness of thought and the slowness of conversation and find joy in that and try to resist any attempt to be sort of like productive machines that are not really thinking but are just writing stuff without reflection.