The work of Tomas Carrasquilla (1858-1940) straddles the
consciousness of living in a period of radical changes in Colombian society
(19th and 20th), marked by a social order that is the product of an internal
rhythm of readjustment of the province of Antioquia (his place of birth) on its
way towards modernization, and the traces of confrontation between the
political currents of centralized control and federalism: the result of ideologies
that were generated with the beginning of the republican order after
Independence (1810).
From a chronological point of view, the writing of his fictional world belongs to
the period of Regeneration (1885-1930), the “golden age” of political
conservatism, following several decades of economic and political instability,
and multiple civil wars that ravaged the country throughout the nineteenth
century. However his work is also marked by the certainty that despite all the
tensions of post-construction of the Colombian nation, the elements of outdated
structures inherited from the colonial order persisted. Hence the value of this
writer and sociologist of aesthetic imagination (Americanism / Regionalism vs.
Europeanism) and the stresses and strains in the course of history and cultural
politics in Colombia. This paper intends not only to pay homage to this man to whom tribute has
been rendered for one hundred and fifty years after his birth, but also to show
through the analysis of his short novel entitled “Luterito” (1899) how his
“passion for truth” was not blinded by the religious fanaticism that eventually
penetrated so deep in the heart of his own land (Antioquia) with the
encouragement of the policies of “Romanization” led by Pope Pius IX.