Juan León Mera

Juan León Mera Martínez (born June 28, 1832 in Ambato , † December 13, 1894 ibid) was an Ecuadorian writer and conservative politician. Because of his novel Cumandá (first edition: Quito 1879), he is regarded as an outstanding novelist in his country in the 19th century and as a founder of romantic indigenism . He is also the poet of the text of the Ecuadorian national anthem . As a politician, he was state secretary, provincial governor, member of the Ecuadorian parliament and at times its president.

Life

Mera grew up in the Ambato area with his mother and grandmother. The father, a merchant from Quito, had left the family before he was born (Mera only met him in 1846 while passing through). In his childhood and youth, Mera was in contact with literature and politics through an uncle studying in Quito and a brother of his grandfather who was an active politician in the opposition to Juan José Flores . From 1852 he lived in Quito, at least for a time. His first publication of his own verses took place in 1854 through the mediation of his uncle and the writer Miguel Riofrío in the magazine La Democracia .

During the civil war of the "National Crisis" of 1859/60 he was appointed treasurer of the province of Ambato, which was newly founded in 1860, by the opposing government under Gabriel García Moreno . He then became secretary of the State Council of the transitional government in Quito and was elected to the Constituent Assembly, dominated by the victorious García Moreno, in 1861. Mera had originally been more of a romantic and liberal attitude, but in the following years swung more and more to the official line of the clerical-conservative García Moreno. Mera became García Moreno's manager of the post office in Ambato, an important transit point in the Andes of Ecuador, as part of the modernization efforts. In 1865 he was elected Secretary of the Senate of the National Congress. In the same year he was commissioned by Senate President Nicolás Espinoza Rivadeneyra to write an anthem, which was set to music by Antonio Neumane and which still serves as the Ecuadorian national anthem. Under the presidency of Jerónimo Carrión , García Moreno's successor, Mera was State Secretary in the Ministry of the Interior; he also worked in charge of various daily newspapers.

In 1867, after the fall of the Carrión government, he briefly resigned from his office of State Secretary, but was reappointed by Carrion's successor Arteta and remained in office until 1869. In 1871 García Moreno, who had meanwhile returned to the presidency (with Mera's support), appointed him transitional governor of the province of Ambato, now renamed after Tungurahua . He also became a member of Ambato City Council and was re-elected to the Senate, where he was one of the most important representatives of the Conservative government. In 1872 he was appointed a corresponding member of the Real Academia de la Lengua .

Shortly after the assassination of García Moreno, he and Ignacio Ordóñez , Bishop of Riobamba and politician, played a leading role in founding the Sociedad Católica Republicana , a conservative political society that became the forerunner of the Conservative Party of Ecuador . He continued to be an active politician and functionary until the Antonio Borrero government was overthrown in Guayaquil and replaced by General Ignacio de Veintemilla . Mera now retired to his finca in Ambato and devoted himself primarily to writing, including working on his now best-known novel Cumandá .

In 1880 his candidacy for parliament was stopped by the government, in 1882 he supported the unsuccessful presidential candidate Julio Zaldumbide , with whom he had been friends as a writer since his youth. He openly opposed the Ventimilla government. When this was overthrown in 1883 and replaced by a Pentavirate, Mera moved again to Quito to support the new government. In 1884, 1885 and 1888 he was again a member of the Senate, but without regaining the influence exercised under García Moreno, although he was again President of the Senate in 1886. The chairman of the government junta and later president José María Plácido Caamaño had made a name for himself as the leader of the conservative Catholic camp and was supported by Mera z. T. criticized as "Hungarian".

Under Caamaño's successor Antonio Flores , he was initially to become vice-president. In the end, however, Luis Cordero was preferred to him. Mera was instead appointed governor of the province of León (today's Cotopaxi province). In 1890 he resigned from this post and became a member of the Finance Council Tribunal de Cuentas . After the death of his friend Ignacio Ordóñez , who had become Archbishop of Quito in 1882 , he retired from his state office and from the capital. Mera died in 1894 on his finca in what is now the Atocha district of Ambato. His friend, the priest Federico González Suárez , who would later also become Archbishop of Quito, gave him the last consecration .

plant

Mera's work was heavily influenced by two sides, the romanticism and Christianity of the Catholic Church . The former led him to believe that he would found an independent national literature for the young state of Ecuador. Chateaubriand was one of its role models in Catholicism . Like his political role model García Moreno, he was also convinced of the positive effect of the mission, especially through the Jesuits , who on the one hand did not share the greed of colonization and on the other hand the "uncivilized" indigenous peoples of South America on the way to Christian faith and the Christian religion for the Led to international understanding. The power of the Christian faith to understand and civilize people is particularly evident in his main work Cumandá , which appeared in 1879 and clearly bears romantic and indigenistic traits. The work was the result of a temporary withdrawal from politics to his finca in Riobamba. It is about a secret love affair between Carlos, the son of a wealthy hacienda owner, and Cumandá, a young indigenous person from the Amazon basin , who ultimately turns out to be the sister of her lover who was kidnapped by a tribal chief as a child. The chief is converted to Christianity in the course of the novel, which is presented as a way of understanding among peoples.

In addition to Cumandá, “Ojeada Histórica. Crítica sobre la poesía ecuatoriana desde su época más remota hasta nuestros días ”, published in 1868, as his main work, a critical literary history of Ecuadorian poetry, which in the following period became the style of the contemporary taste, and thus the foundation for the perception of a national literary tradition in Senses Meras put.

Another important fictional work was his work "La Virgen del Sol", published in 1861, a legend in poetry. Here he describes indigenous rites for the first time - in this case the Inca sun virgins - without grasping their deeper meaning or even depicting them in a factually adequate manner, as they appear more like New Age rituals.

Mera's first publication in book form was the volume of poetry Poesías in 1858 . In 1867/68 he published several volumes of prayer and other Christian-motivated works that were in García Moreno's interests. In the following years he was also to write other Christian-motivated volumes. His work Catecismo de Geografia de la República del Ecuador (1874, 2nd edition 1884), used by the school brothers in the classroom, was used in Ecuadorian schools for almost 50 years. From the late 1880s until his death, he mainly wrote biographies.

His now well-known work "Tijeretazos y Plumadas", a collection of his humorous and satirical newspaper articles, appeared posthumously in 1903, as did his unfinished biography García Morenos in 1904.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i} Pérez Pimentel
2. ↑ Juan León Mera , brief description on El poder de la palabra (Spanish)
3. ↑ Cumandá , posthegemony.blogspot.com , January 27, 2007 (Spanish)

Web links

• Rudolfo Pérez Pimentel, Juan León Mera Martínez , In: Diccionario Biográfico del Ecuador , Guayaquil 1987, Volume 3 (Spanish)
• Mera, Juan León , in Gran Enciclopedia Rialp (GER) 24 Tomos (6ª Ed.) (Spanish)