Uprooting and irony on the edge of new stories: Gabriel René Moreno’s Últimos días coloniales en el Alto Perú (1896)

Abstract

This paper is a commentary on Últimos días coloniales en el Alto Perú (1896/1901), a work by the Bolivian historian Gabriel René Moreno (1836-1908). Its aim is to situate this historical text in the context of nineteenth-century Latin American historiography. I set out to show that this work transcended then prevalent historiographical paradigm – that of monumental republican histories – and that, due to his attitude toward both his subject matter (clearly forwarded in the book title) and historical writing in general, Moreno went ahead of his own time, thus opening new horizons to republican interpretations of Latin American history. I interpret the work’s insightful and untimely freedom with by means of a close-reading of Últimos días and with recourse to the author’s biography, which was marked by patriotic distance.