Loca gandoca

Ecology and Ethnicity in Anacristina Rossi’s La loca de Gandoca
Joel Postema Westminster College In Anacristina Rossi’s 1991 novel, La loca de Gandoca, Daniela Zermat fights to protect the Refugio Manzanilla Gandoca, which is located on Costa Rica’s eastern coast, from international development. Rossi’s selection of a semiautobiographical female protagonist who is involved in an ecologicalstruggle has been examined by literary scholars such as Sophia Kearns, who ably points out shared connections between the novel and the ecofeminist movement. I would argue that, while the links that Rossi establishes between her female lead and the environment are central to the novel, the way in which Rossi incorporates racial identity into her novel both privileges Daniela's ecological commentary anddeconstructs racial categories and differentiation. Before moving forward with this line of thought, however, I would like to quickly turn my attention to Central America’s past, examining the ways in which indigenous communities have been separated from European culture. The indigenista movement was born, in a sense, in the sea, or at the very least on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. As thefirst Spaniards emerged from their boats onto the shores of the “New World” and became aware of the Others who were already there, as the first military campaigns were waged on the “Indians,” as native religions and cosmologies were replaced and rewritten by the Catholic church, there was a small group of writers whose social and religious projects bordered on the anthropological. In his Brevísimacarta de relación de la destrucción de las Indias, Bartolomé de las Casas, who embodied many of the Cincinnati Romance Review 27 (2008): 113-24

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ideologies that would later give way to the literary indigenista movement, denounced the brutal treatment of the indigenous populace. As he traveled back and forth across the Atlantic, de las Casas’ goal was, if notto hold at bay the cultural invasion and annihilation that was being launched by sea, to give voice to these populations. While many of the objectives that de las Casas sought never came to fruition, his concern for native peoples and cultures is echoed in the indigenista and neo-indigenista writings of the Twentieth Century. 1 The issue of indigenismo that is at play here is that, as these authorsattempt to integrate indigenous populations, they necessarily draw lines that inscribe these communities. That is to say that, while indigenista authors attempt to deconstruct racial boundaries, they often do so by noticing and drawing attention to ethnic differences in order to validate indigenous peoples. One of the ironies of the indigenista project is that it eventually drowns near theshoreline of the same waters that gave it birth. Gareth Williams, in his examination of José María Arguedas’ final novel, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo, points out that in the novel’s setting in the port town of Chimbote indigenismo begins to unravel. He writes:
Chimbote, it seems, is the site of an ethnic-based genealogy that has been interrupted or suspended. It is the place at which themechanisms and calculations of a certain hegemonic vision of the historical relation between ethnicity and power is ungrounded… Through Los zorros, indigenismo confronts a maritime boundary…. (51)

Williams’ conceptualization of Chimbote as a setting where Otherness and subaltern identities dissolve and are carried away by the tides of an emerging capitalist economy is of interest to this study inthat we find a similar erosion of ethnic distinction in the Gandoca Refuge, the setting for Anacristina Rossi’s La loca de Gandoca. Unlike in the case of Arguedas’ novel, where this dissolution is tied to class issues brought on by capitalistic expansion, in La loca it results as the by-product of environmental activism in response to the challenges faced by Costa Rica. In this study I follow...