El Señor Presidente’s Liberal City and the Modern Scriptural Economy

Abstract

As we contemplate the city represented in Miguel Ángel Asturias’s El Señor Presidente, our analysis will rely on both the general dynamics of progress and the city, put forth by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), and on the particular implementation of a program intended toward progress and modernization carried out by the Liberal government of Manuel Estrada Cabrera at the turn of the nineteenth century that inspired Asturias’s text. De Certeau traces the structural similarities between his notion of the scriptural economy and the modern city itself:

Combining the power of accumulating the past and that of making the alterity of the universe conform to its models, it [the scriptural economy] is capitalist and conquering. The scientific laboratory and industry […] are governed by the same schema. And so is the modern city: it is a circumscribed space in which the will to collect and store up an external population and the will to make the countryside conform to urban models are realized. (135)