Rivera, Jose Eustacio

Jose Eustacio Rivera was born February 19, 1888 in the town of Aguas Calientes - a suburb of Neiva . In the same year, the town was included in the municipality of San Mateo, which later received the name Rivera in honor of the writer. His father was Eustacio Rivera Escobar, his mother was Catalina Salas. Jose was the first son, and the fifth of eleven children, eight of whom (José Eustacio, Luis Enrique, Margarita, Virginia, Laura, Susana, Julia and Ernestine) survived to adulthood. ^[four]

Despite the meager means of the family, he was educated at a Catholic school thanks to the help of his relatives and his own efforts. He attended the Santa Librada School in Neiva and the San Luis Gonzaga School in Elias. In 1906, he received a grant to study at a secondary school in Bogotá. In 1909, after graduation, he moved to Ibague , where he began to work as a school overseer. In 1912, he entered the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of the National University of Colombia , and graduated from it in the profession of a lawyer in 1917. ^[five]

After losing the election to the Senate, he was appointed secretary of the Colombian-Venezuelan border commission to determine the borders with Venezuela, thanks to which he got the opportunity to travel through the jungle, rivers and mountains, which allowed him to make his own impression of the things that his work would later be devoted to. Frustrated by the insufficient amount of funds provided to him by the government, he left the commission and continued traveling on his own. After some time, he returned to the commission, but before that he visited Brazil, where he got acquainted with the works of Brazilian writers of that time, in particular - Euclidis da Cunha . During this period, he became more familiar with life on the plains of Colombia and the problems associated with the extraction of rubber in the Amazon jungle. This issue will occupy a central place in his main work, the novel Whirlwind (La vorágine , 1924), which is now considered to be one of the most important in the history of Latin American literature. To write this novel, Rivera read a lot about workers in the rubber industry in the Amazon.

After the success of the novel in 1925, Rivera was elected to the Foreign and Colonization Service. In addition, he published articles in Colombian newspapers in which he expressed dissatisfaction with violations of government contracts and condemned the decline of the rubber industry and the mistreatment of workers.

Rivera came to New York in the last week of April 1928 with the hope that his novel would be translated into English, published in the United States and filmed, as he believed that this would bring fame to Colombian culture in other countries. On November 27, he suffered an attack of seizures, and was taken to a hospital, where he remained in a coma for four days until his death on December 1, 1928. ^[4]

After his death, his body was transported from New York to Barranquilla on the Seahola ship owned by the United Fruit Company . Upon arrival at the port, the writer's body was transported with a procession to the Cathedral of St. Nicholas from Tolentino, where he was given a requiem on the River and the body was laid in the chapelle ardente chapel . Then, down Magdalena, he was taken to Girardeau on the Gonzalez Carbonel mail ship, and from there by train to Bogotá on January 7, 1929, the body was delivered directly to Capitolio Nacional, where it was placed in a coffin for public viewing. Rivera was finally buried in the Central Cemetery of Bogota on January 19. ^[four]

• La Vorágine [ Whirlwind ] . Bogotá: Xavierian of the Pontifical University. 1924. Number ISBN 978-958-683-760-6. Oclc center 255563404 .
• Tierra de Promisión [ promised ] . Bogotá: Xavierian of the Pontifical University. 1921. Number ISBN 978-958-683-958-7. Center oclc 230814677 .

• Jorge Isaacs
• Leon de Graiff