Reading Maps with La vorágine: Cartographic Illusion on the Río Negro

Abstract

Chapter 1 investigates the relationship between José Eustasio Rivera’s service on a mapping commission to chart the border between Colombia and Venezuela and the novel he wrote during the expedition. La vorágine (1924) was not only an extension of Rivera’s political campaign to denounce the state’s approach to the cartography of its frontier zones as negligent, but it is also allowed the author to explore the possibilities of navigating the Colombian Amazon sensorially. In this chapter, the senses become a pedagogy to forestall the violence of official cartographic omissions, but despite this critical intervention in situatedness, the legacy of the novel has involved the perceived exaggeration of Rivera’s descriptions of rubber industry violence.