I appreciate the significance of Mama Blanca’s Memoirs, as history is not often recollected from the perspective of women, much less pieced together from memories of girlhood. The written iteration of Blanca’s oral reflections on her childhood provides a uniquely personal look into 19th-century Latin America. I found the book quite dense and granular in its detail, which is somewhat to be expected of a book of this genre and subject. There are, however, interesting themes here, namely the inherence of privilege and classist attitudes exhibited by Blanca’s family.

The lecture compels us to think about why we should look backwards to an era that seems long forgone. Much of this book seems quite dated, such as its quaint obsession over freshly-produced milk and how it depicts explicitly colonial hierarchies. What is overall striking about Mama Blanca’s Memoirs is its applicability to the 21st century even in societies outside of Venezuela as classism, colonialism, and racism are obviously still prevalent today. History demonstrates how humans have changed- or, more importantly in this context- how little we have changed despite seemingly significant developments. The relentless teasing and fighting between Blanca’s sisters in Chapter 4, for example, vaguely resembles my experience with relatives in Canada more than a century later. Blanca’s obliviousness of the treatment of Piedra Azul’s servants parallels the cliché of today’s tone-deaf elite. There is hence enormous value in having a historical piece like a memoir to capture a snapshot of the dynamics of a certain time period for comparative reasons. I can then understand some justification behind the young girl’s decision to publish the memoir against Blanca’s wishes. However, this is a clear violation of privacy but also calls into question exactly why Blanca would wish to hide the contents of her memoirs in the first place.

Childhood nostalgia is the driving force of this novel. Blanca feels some longing for her life pre-Caracas, as farm life might be considered simpler and less abrasive than a bustling city. Cousin Juancho, a “cool” relative who seems to know everything, is somewhat idolized despite any outsider being able to interpret Juancho’s confidence as a conflation of annoying know-it-all behaviour. Even milk, “the pleasantest of all [treats]” (90), is portrayed as a comforting means of revisiting Blanca’s childhood. As modern readers, we may not harbour much admiration or nostalgia towards the traditional ways of the late 19th century- the opposite may be true of the initial readers of Mama Blanca’s Memoirs in the 1920s who perhaps lived through this era as children.

Blanca was able to condense her childhood into <150 pages. My question for the class is: if you were to write a memoir of your childhood, which memories or significant events would you include? What makes these memories significant? Would you wish for this memoir to be publicly published or would you, like Mama Blanca, be firmly against these personal recollections being shared with the world?