Franz Tamayo

Franz Tamayo Solares (La Paz, February 28, 1879 - ibidem, July 29, 1956) was a Bolivian poet, politician and intellectual, considered one of the central figures of Bolivian literature. of the 20th century. His thought has been classified as “non-Marxist indigenism”, due to the influences he received from Nietzschean vitalism.

First years of his life

Franz Tamayo was the firstborn of Felicidad Solares, a woman of indigenous blood, and Isaac Tamayo Sanjinez, a Bolivian politician who served as a deputy, diplomat and minister of state. From a wealthy family, he lived part of his early years on the haciendas. parents and abroad. Although he spent a few months in the classrooms of the Ayacucho National School, he mainly received private education in the humanities, piano, German, Latin and French among other subjects. His father was appointed diplomatic representative in Brazil, and after the federal revolution of 1899, He settled with his family in Europe.

Tamayo returned to Bolivia in 1904, but left the country again in 1908 to study at the Sorbonne. In London, he met and married the Frenchwoman Blanca Bouyon. The couple lived for a few years in Europe and another five in Bolivia, after which the union was dissolved. The couple's two daughters died at a young age.

Some time later, around 1910, he met and fell in love with Luisa Galindo, with whom he formalized a relationship outside of marriage, despite family opposition.

Politics

Together with Tomás Manuel Elio and other young intellectuals, Tamayo founded the Radical Party in 1911, which in the following decade would divide into several factions. In 1914 he was elected deputy for La Paz and in 1917 he was a candidate for the presidency of the Republic. Throughout his political career, he was a harsh critic of leaders Ismael Montes, Bautista Saavedra and Hernando Siles.

His political ideology and that of his party were expressed in several articles published in El Diario. In 1915 he founded a new newspaper, El Fígaro , and in 1917, El Hombre Libre , which he edited. From the beginning, Tamayo made continuous criticism of the figures in power, both in parliament and in the press.

However, he served as Bolivian representative to the League of Nations in 1921, to propose the revision of the 1904 treaty with Chile. Then, in 1926, he was appointed consultant to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, during the Siles presidency, and minister of that portfolio in the government of Daniel Salamanca. He was president of the Legislative Assembly in 1931.

During that legislative administration, he was a proponent of the controversial Capital Law, which advocated tyrannicide. Mostly rejected, it was the cause of ridicule by contemporary intellectuals and journalists such as Augusto Céspedes: "[...] the tyrant will be eliminated, which will undoubtedly be carried out by Tamayo in person, giving the condemned man a headbutt in the stomach"

He won the presidential elections of 1934, but could not take office due to the coup d'état that young officers of the Chaco War perpetrated against Salamanca, an event known in Bolivian history as the Corralito de Villamontes. Tamayo did not defend his status as elected president; He considered that, with the fall of the Salamanca government, his victory in the elections was annulled. After the annulment of the elections, acts of vandalism occurred against some of Tamayo's properties, events that influenced his withdrawal from public and political life for 10 years.

In December 1943, the Razón de Patria military lodge and the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement led a coup against Enrique Peñaranda, imposing Gualberto Villarroel as de facto president. The new regime convened a Constituent Assembly in which Tamayo was elected representative for La Paz and designated president of said assembly by acclamation.

During the exercise of his mandate he had to live through the Chuspipata shootings, a series of executions of leaders of an insurrectional movement in November 1944. Villarroel denied having given the execution order, but recognized the responsibility of his government in such cases. facts. The writer would recount his actions in the face of the executions in his booklet Tamayo renders an account, where he clarifies that, although he could not return the first executed to life, he prevented the death of another sixty through his harangue at the Legislative Assembly. He resigned from office in 1945.

Thought

In 1910 Tamayo published Creación de la pedagogía nacional, a compilation of a series of articles published in the El Diario of La Paz that laid the foundations for his thinking.

Although this book highlights the energy coming from the indigenous people, its vision is essentially deterministic. Tamayo handles the concept of race a lot and takes the capabilities of the white, cholo and Indian (expressions that are now obsolete on the scientific level) as natural faculties from birth. He is in any case a promoter of the study of indigenous culture for its inclusion in pedagogical plans, although he speaks little about culture.

Tamayo proclaimed already in his first period as an intellectual that national pedagogy must be reconceived starting from the Bolivian teachers themselves, who must include the indigenous sectors in this task, since the indigenous would be, according to the author, the first being that, unlike the whites and the cholos, he would be in a position to strengthen the country in its identity and in the structuring of a pedagogy.

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Poetry

As a poet, he is considered one of the greatest representatives of modernism in Bolivia, although he generally remained outside the literary circles of the time. Referring to his early works, such as Odes (1898), Enrique Finot describes him as a "solitary poet, isolated in his ivory tower, indifferent to easy success or conventional praise." His original work It was influenced by classical Hellenism, as in The Prometheid or the Oceanides (1917) or Greek Epigrams (1945).

In The new rubayat (1927), probably inspired by the poetry of Omar Jayam, Tamayo addresses diverse themes, from metaphysics, time and illusion. He also published Scherzos (1932), songs in seguidillas (form of Spanish popular poetry); and Scopas (1939), lyrical tragedy dedicated to his son Ruy Gonzalo.

Legacy

Despite the isolation he experienced at certain times in his life, Tamayo has been considered one of the most important figures in Bolivian literature and culture of the first half of the century XX. However, despite being a prominent intellectual figure, much of his literary work is quite unknown, in part due to the lack of dissemination and reissue of his writings.

The figure of Tamayo, due to its multifaceted nature, is generally analyzed from different perspectives. The poet and thinker has received praise from writers such as Óscar Cerruto: «Tamayo is the greatest intellectual figure of the century and a half of the Republic, with an overwhelming personality, a work of poetry that, if we ignore its ups and downs and its lexical intricacy, It is one of the most profound that has been written in America." His strong personality, reflected in his work and evident in his political conduct, was also praised by intellectuals such as Augusto Guzmán: "A non-conformist and melancholic genius, his pride was like the crest luminous of a wave on the brackish sea of pain.

In 1965, a literary contest was established in his honor, which at first was awarded in various genres, but was later limited to short stories.

A province in the department of La Paz bears his name, and also several educational institutions, such as the Franz Tamayo Private University (UNIFRANZ), in La Paz, or the Franz Tamayo Adventist School.

Works