Representing the Barrios

A monumental endeavor aimed at recounting an alternative narrative of Venezuela, Representing the Barrios provides a unique vantage point into some of the most significant events in Venezuela’s history.

Through a rich tapestry of literary analysis, cultural criticism, and historical introspection, Jarman paints a vivid portrait of barrios as dynamic spaces of resistance and resilience. She skillfully navigates the complexities of representation, exposing the tensions and contradictions inherent to certain depictions of urban poverty. Erudite and innovative, this book provides insight into the mentalities that constructed in assimilable subjects and spaces (los marginales and el barrio) which, in turn, undermined the nation.

An excellent starting point for those hoping to grapple with the complex role that Venezuela’s urban barrios have played in the nation’s self-representation.

We can’t understand Venezuela today without understanding the barrios. Representing the Barrios provides an imaginary topography of the barrios of Caracas as both object of anxiety and historical subject, a space for radical politics and for the territorial remapping of political life more broadly. Moving effortlessly from literature to film to politics and back again, the book is ambitious, erudite, elegant, and essential.

Jarman sheds urgent new light on one of Venezuela’s most important—and enigmatic—social actors: residents of Venezuela’s sprawling urban barrios. With equal parts theoretical sophistication, analytical insight, and narrative elegance, she digs deep into the country’s cultural landscape, finding in novels, chronicles, and film a subject that for over a century has at once been the source of elite angst and the nation’s potential redeemer, cast always either as threat or hero with little in between. Deftly walking us along that knife’s edge, Jarman does more than chart the literal and figurative fault lines of a country long polarized; she helps us imagine other possible landscapes.

The barrios of Caracas have played an outsized role in twenty-first-century Latin American politics. Before they were mythologized as the vanguard of a revolutionary movement, they were depicted as spaces of abject misery. In Representing the Barrios, Rebecca Jarman expertly traces the changing image of Venezuela’s urban popular sectors. This is a nuanced, insightful account of how the barrios were made to play the foil to Venezuela’s nation-building project; it is also an argument about why such representations continue to matter. An exceptional work of scholarship.