A Tale of Two Countries

July 21, 2009

In the 1880s, two young men, both from affluent Colombian families, leave their exclusive boarding school in Bogotá and make their way to New York. Once there, they are caught up in a series of increasingly bizarre adventures—many involving a complex, independent-minded young New Yorker named Virginia.

Therein hangs the premise of Los Sueños de los Hombres se los Fuman las Mujeres (When Women Smoke Men’s Dreams), by Alister Ramírez Márquez, associate professor in BMCC’s Department of Modern Languages. Written in Spanish, the novel was released this past spring by Planeta Editorial, one of Colombia’s foremost publishers. Among other things, says its author, “it’s a tale of love, punishment and revenge.” (An earlier novel by Ramírez Márquez, Mi vestido verde Esmeralda (My Emerald Green Dress), was awarded the prestigious International Literary Prize by Círculo de Críticos de Arte de Chile in 2005.)   

A different take on the immigrant experience

Ramírez Márquez notes that most immigrant-themed literature recounts the struggles of impoverished people seeking a better life. What sets Los Sueños apart is that its protagonists are wealthy and well-educated.

“This was the other side of the late-19th-century immigrant experience—the side that is rarely told but historically significant,” says Ramírez Márquez. In the 1880s,  Colombia’s chief cities, including Bogotá and Medellín, rapidly evolved into booming industrial centers. Families gained wealth and social influence through holdings in tobacco, textiles and coffee “and would send their children abroad—typically to the U.S.—to be educated so that they could return home and take their place among Colombia’s ruling elite.” The privileged young protagonists of La Sueño arrive in New York “having traveled first-class all the way,” he says.
 
While the novel is richly imagined and clearly a work of fiction, it draws upon extensive research conducted in New York and Colombia.

“These were eventful times in both countries,” says Ramírez Márquez. “The novel takes place against the backdrop of the building of the Panama Canal, an unprecedented surge in immigration to the U.S., and ‘la guerra de los mil días,’ or ‘thousand days war,’ a civil conflict in Colombia.” Ramírez Márquez makes liberal use of real-life figures to enrich his fiction. Historical figures, including Charles Darwin, Theodore Roosevelt and the acclaimed landscape painter Frederic Church appear as characters.

A meticulous eye for detail—not all of it appetizing—is evident on every page. In New York as in Colombia, Ramírez Márquez spent endless hours haunting libraries and museums and walking the streets, taking note of architectural details and local ambience. The pages of Los Sueños are rich with sensory detail, from architectural descriptions to compelling evocations of the smells and sights that characterized a city in the throes of explosive growth.

Local color
“Hygiene conditions were not ideal,” Ramírez Márquez says. “Dead animals and rotten food littered the streets; brothels and opium dens flourished openly.” The streets were thronged with humanity—especially near the west side piers, where immigrants disembarked, newly arrived from Ellis Island. Indeed, much of the story is set in lower Manhattan—in and around what would later become BMCC’s present-day campus.

Like the Colombian émigrés at the center of the story, Virginia comes from a wealthy family and is determined to find her own way in the world—a woman who pursues an intense interest in medicine and science and establishes a successful optician business.

“Several women have remarked that the title of my book suggests an unfavorable treatment of women,” Ramírez Márquez says. “The truth is exactly the opposite.” But what exactly does the cryptic title mean?

“That becomes clear toward the end,” Ramírez Márquez says. “But you’ll have to read it to find out.”

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