The dream of an order: Race and gender and the project of an-other Caribbean history

The historical novel Yngermina or the Daughter of Calamar (1844) is Colombia’s first novel and one that illustrates the difficulties in conceptualising and representing women, natives and blacks in the nineteenth-century nation-making process. In Latin America, this period of national formation is linked to the idealism of the liberal elites, where the masses are romanticised and symbolically integrated into a homogenous ‘imagined community’.