PRESENCE OF A PEOPLE

REMINISCENCE OF THE CITY OF SAN GIL

THIRD CENTENARY OF THE FOUNDATION OF THE CITY OF SAN GIL

PROLOGUE

Bogota, April 19,1953

Mr. Rito Rueda Jr.

My dear countryman and friend: You and my son Rafico have given me your magnificent essay entitled: Presence of a People, which is, without doubt, a valuable historical and social contribution of the people and their events of the dear and noble town of San Gil. I accept with pleasure to write a few words which should be considered as the best concept I have of your work. I have been deeply satisfied to see that you have fulfilled what many of your fellow citizens hoped, to elaborate the most complete chronicle of a land where my ancestral family estate is located. I saw "La Perla del Fonce"(Fonce's Pearl) during my remote school years, on my way from the Republic's capital to the no lesser illustrious land of Ocaa rooted in my soul.Since then, I have been notoriously impressed by the rough topography which contrast with the ancestry of its buildings, but in tune with the austere character and the pure elegance of its inhabitants. Years later, I returned to that traditionalist city in a favorable moment accompanied by President Pedro Nel Ospina, where the people of San Gil offered the governmental party the warmest welcome of that memorable tour. At that time, your father was the Province's Prefect, as the pages of your book reminded me. He was the speaker who upon our arrival soothed with his words the heat of the dog day and the fatigue. Later, my public life contacts with the people of Santander, completed the vision which you present, which I had formed and increased in me a passionate fervor for the whole conglomerate of memories the new writer rightly recounts in interesting and agreeable bookpages.The kind historian from San Gil has reminded me of circumstances which examined my spirit about the how and why of facts linked to my memory throughout the lapse of my life. Now I know, for example, reading your essay with pleasure, what the young Don Miguel Antonio Caro did around San Gil, and about what Don Diego Fernandez Gomez and the Gomez Romano did, whom I heard a lot of chronicles and stories sitting around my warm home's fireplace.I learned about the via crucis of the Comuneros and their efforts to achieve the most important enterprises. And, about Pedro Fermin Vargas, the precursor, who was an example for today's generation. I learned of a new romance in the Liberator's life, and the events of two interesting priests Don Pascual and Don Juan de la Cruz, and lastly of the Ruedas and the Silvas whom you call the typical people of San Gil. I judge that you have not underrated any details in the pleasing chronicle of San Gil which I allude, and when presented to the judgment of your countrymen, in a narrow and adventurous limit, You have managed to make a major epic poem of the provincial trifle. You have fulfilled a commendable investigational endeavor for the historiographers' critique, for your countrymen, and for those of us who knew the vigor of your penmanship from the pages of El Siglo. I will not add to what I have said, other than my frank congratulations for the crystallization of a meritorious engagement about the lineage of Santander of which you are an exponent. And, I hope to see soon molded and shaped in the public notice such an important book.I subscribe most graciously, your fellow countryman and friend,

Laureano Gomez

I. PANORAMIC MURAL OF THE SANTA CRUZ AND SAN GIL OF THE NEW BAEZA

In Colombia lives a great people whose character, virtues and defects are conspicuous to its neighbors. San Gil is unique in the national history. You do a special honor to the author of these pages, by reading about the people of San Gil. From all the country's roads, welcome! On the side of the stretch which leads to the capital of the Department of Santander, the topography is churlish. There are hills of ochre tonality and erected contexture surrounded by hawthorns and rachitic vegetation. The other side is the asphalt paved route from Bogota. This road crosses stony rivers of winter that come out of populated lands dotted by white huts, and hidden by smoking fireplaces behind the banana and tobacco plantations.The traveler who arrives by the Central Boyaca Road is lulled a good portion of the road by the impetuous current of the Fonce River. The river majestically hits the scarps and then makes a contemplative backwater before entering the city streets to form the most beautiful natural park in the world, as it has been perceived by two greatest Colombian writers. The surrounding areas are plateaus enameled by bold varied chromes. Enormous stones set by nature are slope landmarks which warn of a caliginúous abyss. The royal roads of the sunny valleys are crossed by oxen and mules followed by Guanentino peasants who carry machetes on the belt and drive the animals with words as rough as the landscape.There is always a torrid zone nature and a peculiar idiosyncrasy under the blue dome supported by the western cliffs. Four treeless, bare, reddish gray hills with vegetation at half mast, and a cross at the top of each, announce to the traveler the proximity to San Gil, "La Perla Del Fonce"(Fonce's Pearl), named by Licenciado Leonardo Currea Betancur after he overcame the irritating dispute of the town's foundation.

Suddenly, through the skylight of any peak, that marvelous amphitheater presents where the bustling city is embedded. Its main Catholic temple stands out, as in the majority of the Latin American villages, as if the territory of ancient noblemen is stretched out in lace making over a beach. The lace shown is formed by the river froth. Buildings of several floors stand out above the great panoramic model, around which, there is a series of nonsensical Spanish roofs which delimits the singular architecture of the streets.The main park has been baptized "La Libertad"(The Liberty). There, the cupolas of the centenary ceibas grow, guarding the marbled effigy of the favorite son.The modern "El Seminario", the college which was a university, and the Ensayadero Hospital are up in the highest area of the city. They seem raised over spiral stairs and lost in the background of underbrush stretches of the airport road. To the south and west, there are new suburbs surrounded by palm trees. The fruit trees that raise from the roofs give a tropical post card flavor, and the colonial windows pour out potsherds of flowers and ferns toward the street benches.

Santa Cruz y San Gil de la Nueva Baeza is an alkaline, sedentary and fisherwoman city. She is open, colonial and disengaged. The centuries have seen her reclined over the galleries of sierras inundated by cicadas. She has been guarded by silence and blazons. She is crowned by songs and ancient sidewalks. She is an interior port without masts, without chimneys and without nautical caps. But she is the sumptuous and erect sentinel of liberty. Her name evokes the Hispanic-Muslim metropolis of Baeza the Great in the ostentatious Almanzor Caliphate, noble and kind in her golden wheat fields. She is the villa that appears through her parcels of land stained glass windows to receive the river breezes. She is a burgomaster of long ago with a febrile and powerful heart. The abrupt geography flowing with loving hope and forming an echo of murmurs in front of cliffs crashes against the Fonce's crazy eurythmy, and peaks which hold an always clear sky tent. She is a modern town with her smoking factories, her Television antennas, and her telephone and telegraph tangled cables which stand in a soffit of an architrave of crystals of inciting tonalities. Red and white tints glitter insolently everywhere in between the mossy foliage of her households. The sonorous gorge of her bridges is where the limpid street perrons resort.The caravan of metropolises which slide through time over the western sierras emulate her beauty, her sideral grace and her history. Under the great centenary trees of her main plaza palpitates a pontiff's heart. Her maximum queen bronze reposes up between the stony cathedral spires. All around, students, levites, and magistrates walk without haste. Nearby, workers with their disheveled heads bustle and carry on from place to place among the anvil's moans, the gridiron's jolting, the sisal creaking of the cement machines, the front of the aromatic effluvion from the sugar mill piles, or the jelly factories.The San Gil burgomasters confound with the best of the nationality tradition. Thus was the will of the beautiful heroines, brave generals and the learned prelates in remote calends.