Representations of the Venezuelan society in the discourse of President José Tadeo Monagas

Abstract

The present article identifies the representations that Jose Tadeo Monagas, president of Venezuela in the nineteenth century, offers about the Venezuelan society in his annual discourses before Parliament. In this analysis, the narrations are understood as enculturation products, which provide axiological and cognitive models with the objective of mediating between what is happening and the interpretation that people make about reality. The categories used are obtained from a content analysis, which has been employed to register the referents and their representation in the eight speeches studied. The results show that José Tadeo Monagas’ representations of Venezuela’s reality are usually divorced from the facts and events of the period studied, in order to avoid explaining the changes that occur and the problems of Venezuelan society in that historical moment