Nataniel Aguirre (1843-1888) was a statesman and active participant in shaping Bolivian politics and economics. His novel, Juan de la Rosa (1885) functionalizes the memories of the last soldier of the Wars of Independence. The story is told as the reminiscences of Colonel de la Rosa whose memories take him back to his childhood on the eve of Independence and his youth fighting in the Bolivian army. Jaun grows up an orphan and his individual struggle allegorizes the national quest for a modern identity. The novel exemplifies 19th-century thinking on racial issues and offers an unusual perspective on the Independence period.
Sergio Waisman's recent translation of Ricardo Piglia's Nombre Falso won the Meritorious Achievement Award in the 1995 Eugene M. Kayden National Translation Contest.
Long considered a classic in Bolivia, Juan de la Rosa tells the story of a young boy's coming of age during the violent and tumultuous years of Bolivia's struggle for independence. Indeed, in this remarkable novel, Juan's search for his personal identity functions as an allegory of Bolivia's search for its identity as a nation.
Set in the early 1800s, the novel is narrated by one of the last surviving Bolivian rebels, octogenarian Juan de la Rosa. Juan recreates his childhood in the rebellious town of Cochabamba, and with it a large cast of full bodied, Dickensian characters both heroic and malevolent. The larger cultural dislocations brought about by Bolivia's political upheaval are echoed in those experienced by Juan, whose mother's untimely death sets off a chain of unpredictable events that propel him into the fiery crucible of the South American Independence Movement. Outraged by Juan's outspokenness against Spanish rule and his awakening political consciousness, his loyalist guardians banish him to the countryside, where he witnesses firsthand the Spaniards' violent repression and rebel's valiant resistance that crystalize both his personal destiny and that of his country. In Sergio Gabriel Waisman's fluid translation, English readers have access to Juan de la Rosa for the very first time.
