Santa Evita de Tomás Eloy Martínez: la excritura del pasado para otra comunidad

Abstract:This article analyzes the writing of Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Santa Evita. Although this novel share certain narrative strategies with the New Latin American Historical Novel, I argue that Santa Evita proposes a different kind of writing of the past in its effort to create a new community. It does this by creating two narrative voices (first person and omniscient) that test the exhaustion of the claim for truth in modern historical writing. While one voice problematizes the reliability of the archive, the other performs a modern historiographic writing of the past that questions its own verisimilitude. By showing how these two voices exhaust the modern pretention to unveil unique truths about the past, the author proposes a new mode of writing that unites a community, not via myth, but through writing praxis. Santa Evita is therefore a meticulous critical exercise about what kind of writing coincides with a new community to come.