Clemencia and El Zarco are some of those "foundational fictions" of Latin American literature. In the first quite a bit more than the latter it is easy to see the role in nation-building that literature played in the emancipated Americas, especially the novel, also called the romance. The word "romance" in this case can be read in two other ways; we can consider novels like the above as love stories and we can also see them as examples of or containing traces of romanticismo, the literary movement. All of those connotations apply in these works of literature whose aim is to diffuse the message "go forth and multiply" in a way that conforms to the hegemony of the newly independent countries. In these novels, we can read, as Sommer does, in Foundational Fictions, an erotics of politics. Or a politics of erotics. Romance or love was exalted in the images of these heterosexual unions (assumed to be eventually (re)productive), usually between characters of different regions, races, colors and class. A private microcosm of the epoch's ideal public citizenry.
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