Modernization and Culture in García Márquez’s Caribbean

Gabriel García Márquez offers rich accounts of the Colombian Caribbean’s experience with the historical forces of progress that test traditional societies and their predominant values and attitudes. Colombian historiography identifies various broad stages of secular change in the Caribbean since independence: (1) the emergence of enclave economies, (2) the arrival of people fleeing violence, (3) the foundation of new settlements in the hinterland, (4) the rapid industrialization of Barranquilla, and (5) the region’s full integration into the national project. García Márquez’s fictional towns and generations exist in phases 1–4, which roughly correspond with one hundred years of postindependence history. His Caribbean, like the real one, follows a messy path to modernity where traditional values are tested. It has fuzzy political, cultural, and economic borders and is governed by overlapping elites who, unintentionally, leave vacuums of power for the reproduction of morally loose, intercultural, and miscegenated societies. These societies see the dominant civilization and are familiar with its technologies and social projects. News of progress comes to them in leaf storms, books of knowledge brought by gypsies, trains arriving out of nowhere, or the speeches of shady politicians. This article argues that such broad changes shape values and attitudes as people adapt to new patterns of organization. In the standard modernization account, traditional values (i.e., survival/family orientation) give way to secular values (i.e., self-expression/trust in anonymous institutions). But this cultural transition is neither smooth nor complete. Rather, traditional and secular values coexist in constant tension, and García Márquez shows how.