Bogotá: Alfaguara. 2022. 424 pages. 

Alejandra Jaramillo Morales prepared at length to write Las lectoras del Quijote (2022), a novel in which she returns to her preoccupation with “foundational violence,” the complexities of women’s participation in the construction of knowledge, and reconnection with the spirituality of the Muisca culture. 

Las lectoras del Quijote narrates the friendship between two women from opposing worlds in Bogotá during the first decades of the seventeenth century. One is Suánika, a young Muisca woman predestined to fulfill an important spiritual role, who is violently displaced to the capital of New Granada. The other woman is Inés, a young Sevillian whose religious calling is thwarted by marriage, a form of payment within the clientelism that guarantees her father’s social prominence. 

The novel does not idealize the reality of the economic and social subordination of the Muisca woman in her capacity as a servant to the Andalucian. On the contrary, it offers a glimpse into a space of mutual learning. Such space becomes possible despite the highly repressive context for women, radical in terms of Catholic practice and politically unstable.

Both Suánika and Inés are predestined to live a religious and spiritual life, but in the masculine world where they live, there are other plans for them. It is an age marked by the extermination of indigenous peoples from the Andean region of what is now known as Colombia and by colonizing violence in the urban setting of a budding colonial city. 

A book that Inés steals during her transatlantic voyage to New Granada turns into an opportunity for survival in the face of pain and loneliness and ends up symbolizing the possibilities of dreaming and living for both women. At first, El Quijote is an exceptional and secret amulet for Inés, but soon she will have to share it with Suánika; this evokes the democratizing potential of reading, even in a colonized, pro-slavery, misogynistic society. 

Inés will lose the cultural monopoly that her social status and her usurpative access to printed matters grant her. She will then move, under Suánika’s protection, toward a different experience of appropriation of the natural Andean space, the history of the conquest of Nueva Granada, and her love for Táuziga, Suánika’s brother. 

Las lectoras del Quijote develops an intertextual relationship with Don Quijote de la Mancha as a canonical text par excellence in Hispanic literature. This intertextuality unfolds through adventures around stolen texts and scenes of forbidden readings in a women’s context in which Inés and Suánika go from being secret readers of the Quijote to organizing public performances. These performances represent scenes from the book that tap into the theatrical elements of Cervantes’s work. This performativity present in Las lectoras del Quijote connects with other postmodern versions of Cervantes’s book, such as the film Toy Story (1995, directed by John Lasseter) and its sequels. It also connects with the series Breaking Bad (2008-2012), produced and directed by Vince Gilligan, among many other audiovisual products studied by Bruce R. Burningham in Tilting Cervantes: Baroque Reflections on Postmodern Culture (2008). 

Jaramillo Morales’s novel has also entered into a specific realm of Latin American texts in which critics have explored different degrees of connection with Cervantes’s novel. This endless list of “readings and readers of the Quijote”—as posed by Sarah de Mojica and Carlos Rincón in Lectores and autores del Quijote (1605-2005)—can be complemented with titles such as Cien años de soledad (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez, Terra nostra (1976) by Carlos Fuentes, and La otra mano de Lepanto (2005) by Carmen Boullosa, among many others. 

“Las lectoras del Quijote fills the silence in the early memory of the colonization of the Americas that needed to be narrated”

Las lectoras del Quijote comes to inhabit a necessary space in the corpus of Colombian contemporary historical novels about the colonial period in New Granada. Addressing the sixteenth-century period, there are published works such as El país de la canela (2008) by William Ospina. Among works about the seventeenth century, La tejedora de coronas (1982) by Germán Espinosa and La ceiba de la memoria (2007) by Roberto de Burgos Cantor stand out. And the eighteenth century has been represented in Del amor y otros demonios (1994) by Gabriel García Márquez. 

Las lectoras del Quijote enhances the scarce corpus of historical novels about the seventeenth century in Colombia. Jaramillo Morales’s novel shows a strong intertextuality with La ceiba de la memoria by Burgos Cantor. Their point of connection is embodied in the characters Gudrun Bechtloff, Dominica de Orellana’s Austrian governess in La ceiba de la memoria, and Dorothee, Inés’s German governess and companion in Las lectoras del Quijote. 

La ceiba de la memoria takes place in Cartagena de Indias during the first half of the seventeenth century; that is, at the apex of the period of enslavement of African people and their descendants. Las lectoras del Quijote is framed within the first decade of the same century, when the servitude of indigenous people still prevailed in New Granada, especially in its Andean region. 

Burgos Cantor dives into the hazy memories of the enslaved. Jaramillo Morales penetrates into the cosmovision and memory of indigenous people in ancient Bacatá. Each novel complements the other, and the memory-building task that Burgos Cantor and Jaramillo Morales undertake is done with historical thoroughness, a revolutionary impulse toward the past, and respect for African people and their descendants as well as indigenous peoples from the Americas, respectively. In this way, their memories are restored within the complex framework of colonization in the Caribbean and Andean region of seventeenth-century New Granada. 

Las lectoras del Quijote shows a deep and genuine interest in the representation of little-known aspects of the Muisca people, who lived and continue to live in Colombia’s central region. A preoccupation with the spiritualities of indigenous Americans has scarcely been present in the Colombian historical novel. This dimension brings Las lectoras del Quijote and the novel Las andariegas (1984) by Albalucía Ángel closer together. Both works show a complex approach to astral and magical indigenous thought, which contributes to the reconstruction of forgotten zones of ancestral memory. Las lectoras del Quijote fills the silence in the early memory of the colonization of the Americas that needed to be narrated. This book offers a view of the colonial history of New Granada during the first decades of the seventeenth century from the perspective of women. As part of this endeavor, the book gives voice to an indigenous woman who connects the reader to secret zones of her people’s wisdom, exploring—in a new way—the ancestral spiritualities of the Muisca. Finally, this book approaches the Spanish-language novel-writing tradition from the recreation of global reading contexts surrounding the Quijote, probing the emergence of a novel that invaded colonial spaces in the Americas and continues to be rewritten from other perspectives and languages. 

Translated by Adriana Vega Mackler