Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s narrative saga, Crónica de Nueva Venecia, revisits eighteenth-century history in Puerto Rico, taking some principal facts and names of that epoch, trying to offer a wide interpretation of the refusal of the island to take political control over its own national destiny. This saga, composed by the novels La noche oscura del Niño Avilés (1984) and El camino de Yyaloide (1994), introduced a new concept in Latin American postcolonial studies, which Antonio Benítez Rojo named as the palenque of Latin American mentality, by means of the utopic city of Nueva Venecia, erected by maroons on the outskirts of San Juan city. Rodríguez Juliá’s aim has been to express the frustration caused by the absence of a realistic political model of independence, which would allow Puerto Rico to end its traditional dependence on the USA.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the relations between the fictional city of Nueva Venecia and the traditional representations of nationalism in Puerto Rico, all of them criticized by the author as developing both aesthetical and utopian discourses that eventually identify freedom as a mere desire, instead of a realistic and mature model of nation. The floating and isolated city of Nueva Venecia that Rodríguez Julia imagines remains as a myth which he uses to express the popular conscience of the colonial subject, when political dependence appears to be commonly accepted, as the results of Puerto Rico’s two referenda for independence (1987, 1999) would indicate.