CELARG held a conference to commemorate the birth of Rómulo Gallegos

Published at: 03/08/2026 01:31 PM

The 142nd anniversary of the birth of Venezuelan writer Rómulo Gallegos was commemorated last Sunday, August 2, at the headquarters of Librería del Sur, located on Solano Avenue in Caracas, with a conference dedicated to analyzing the validity of his work.

The activity entitled “The narrative of Rómulo Gallegos from the conception of being the philosophy of Rodolfo Kusch” was organized by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies Rómulo Gallegos (CELARG) and was led by Professor Gregorio Valera-Villegas, who highlighted the author's permanence in Latin American thought and literature.

“Gallegos is a classic because it keeps telling us and making us say it,” Valera-Villegas said during the conference, referring to the writer's legacy and the validity of his literary production.

The day was also attended by the Minister of Popular Power for Culture, Raúl Cazal, who highlighted the transcendence of the work of Gallegos, author of renowned novels such as Doña Bárbara and Cantacaro, whom he described as “a force of literary nature” in his time.

Cazal offered a vision of Gallegos as a totalizing and current figure, and used the metaphor of the “iceberg” to refer to the dimension of his literary production. At the same time, he pointed out that the writer does not represent only the tip or the bottom of that iceberg, but that he “is all the mud”, as an expression of the totality of Venezuelan and even Latin American literature.

He also questioned the way in which Gallegos's work has traditionally been approached in schools, considering that presenting him as a simple “picture” or static figure ended up diminishing the interest of the new generations.

In view of this, he invited a rereading of his literary production to rediscover his capacity to question and rethink the Venezuelan identity, whose validity remains in force today.

MINCULTURA/Mazo News Team