Lejos del nido: the Indigenous Character as the Bad (and the Ugly) in the Melodrama

Abstract

Lejos del nido is a novel written by Colombian author Juan Jose Botero born in Rionegro (Antioquia) and first published in 1924. The proposal of this article is to point out the underlying melodramatic elements of that novel and which basically have to do with a pejorative and manichean characterization of the indigenous character: he is portrayed as the bad of the story and his evilness is always related to physical characteristics such as ugliness and portrayed in degrading characterizations in relation to animals,monsters and criminals. The interest of the melodrama is to simply make up a story where opposites are clearly identified: the white is pure and beautiful and the indigeneous character is evil and ugly. In Lejos del nido all of this is intended to create an atmosphere where the narrator from the start wants to achieve an alliance with the reader through these simplistic images to clearly define an identifiable guilty character; all inserted into the common function of the melodrama that is the loss of a family stability. In this case, the loss of the family stability of whites by the evil actions of the indigenous characters.