Edgardo Rodríguez Julía
The Renunciation
Translated by Andrew Hurley

Acclaimed Puerto Rican novelist Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá — translated into English for the first time — delivers a masterfully structured historic novel about issues of class and race in Puerto Rico's colonial past.

Presented through a series of contemporary lectures interspersed with historic documents, The Renunciation chronicles a prearranged marriage plotted to pacify the slave population and to save Puerto Rico from certain rebellion. The story of Baltasar Montañez, an eighteenth-century Puerto Rican hero and the son of a slave leader, unfolds deliberately, as the lecturer shares with his audience the details of Montañez's life.

In 1753 Montañez renounced his own people and married the daughter of the secretary of state. Her hand was offered by the colonial government, with the backing of the Church, in an effort to create for the slaves an illusion of freedom and social mobility — and to ease growing tension between the two opposing classes.

The plan backfired. Montañez, whose insane visions increasingly preoccupied him, gave in to his consuming madness. He abandoned his marriage and renounced the position to which the marriage entitled him.

As the final lecture draws to a close, the audience learns that Montañez sided with neither the government and church, which gave him the power he craved, nor the slaves, whose bloody uprising in his name brought the Puerto Rican government to its knees.

Edgardo Rodríguez Julía is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is professor of literature at the University of Puerto Rico. He has published eleven works of fiction.

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