Discourse on the Amazon of the central jungle. The case of Las mariposas blancas by José T. Torres Lara (1898)

Abstract

This article analyzes the discourse on the Amazon of Selva Central exposed by the Peruvian military and writer José T. Torres Lara in Las mariposas blancas. This novelized travel diary, published in Lima in 1898, describes the experiences of the Jessup Expedition, commissioned by the Peruvian government to follow the Vía Central to contain the federalist uprising that arose in Loreto and to prove the feasibility of this road in 1896. Underlying this story are reflections under a positivist, darwinist and progressive vision of Amazonian nature, culture and inhabitants. Torres Lara, intellectual of the National Reconstruction and Aristocratic Republic, understands as an imperative need the efficient articulation of the internal border territory, as well as the “domestication” of the indigenous population, reaffirming old topics of remoteness, exoticism and strangeness.