We have read with concern a text Attributed to the historian Verni Salazar, this work carries out an operation of ontological emptying whose immediate effect is the negation of who we are. It is an exercise in identity whitening that eradicates the Afro-diasporic roots of the island's memory. Under the banner of mutual respect, the author constructs an idealized and sacred narrative of territorial purity that uses colonial dates as a title deed and racial classification as a criterion for exclusion, establishing a hierarchy where Margarita's religious tradition is presented as a purely Hispanic and superior heritage compared to the Afro-descendant manifestations of the Venezuelan coast.
The first flaw in this argument is that its chronology fails to support the purity it seeks to defend. By claiming that the religious image arrived in 1525 and that Urrutia's license is from 1526, Salazar confuses the date of a particular bureaucratic document with the actual beginning of the African presence in the region. Enslaved African labor was already operating in Cubagua's pearl economy from the second decade of the 16th century, years before that image crossed the ocean. The saint was born amidst the material dispossession that, long before 1525, was already shaping and mobilizing the lives of the Guaiquerí, Lucayo, and African peoples in the same territory. Castañeda himself, the author Salazar invokes to establish his date, documents that towards the beginning of the 18th century, the last African descendants on the island settled, among other places, in the town of San Juan, the same name that is now claimed as proof of an unmixed devotion. The argument falls apart when faced with the very evidence that was supposed to support it.
The second break reveals a more subtle mechanism of control. The name Guaricongo is not a distortion from the mainland, but rather an artifact of linguistic resistance where the Dahomeyan phoneme Guari and the Bantu demonym Congo reconfigure the Catholic saint. The oral tradition collected by Juan Pío Sojo recounts that this image originated from the grief of a man who kept vigil all night at his brother's grave, his brother having taken his own life rather than endure the whip. This same man, now free, organized an annual fund with his community to collectively raise the necessary funds to purchase the freedom of two or three more people each year, money which was ultimately used to commission the image that would bear his name. Guaricongo, then, is not a distortion imposed from the outside; it is an image commissioned and paid for by the enslaved community itself, including those who had already achieved freedom, with the same money that sustained this collective effort. Salazar identifies the linguistic fusion inherent in that name and uses it in reverse, transforming the trace of a nominative sovereignty that the saint could not control into a contamination that must be rejected. But separating traditions and demanding that the island's San Juan not be mixed or confused with the drums and rituals of the coast reveals the inadequacy of that discourse in the face of the existence of ch'ixi, that is, in the face of that condition where culturally opposed elements coexist and mix in a conflictive way without fully merging or assimilating into one another. What is intolerable for traditionalist historiography with a foreign perspective is not the festival of Barlovento or Aragua, but the certainty that its own Margarita Island San Juan is permeated by that same maroon and relational experience that Guaricongo carries, only without a name to betray it.
Margarita Island doesn't need to look to the mainland to confront this fracture. The lives of enslaved African and Indigenous men and women sustained the archipelago's material sovereignty, and the goldwork displayed today as local crafts originated from gems extracted by their hands from that very sea. The five-century-long genealogy that claims to be pure should explain how that same pearl, extracted by enslaved African and Indigenous hands, became the money that paid for the first mud hermitage where the saint was enshrined. A saint doesn't choose their surname; they receive it from the community that prays to them. To demand purity from a space of encounter like the San Juan festivities and their brotherhoods is to demand that it renounce life, reducing the community's power to a static image safeguarded in the oppressor's archives.
