“Perennial celebration” Civic holidays, hero worship and the politics of national identity

Abstract

Once the War of Independence came to a close and with it the dissolution of the former Republic of Colombia, the newly-created State of Venezuela was characterized, since its very inception, by the effort of creating a set of historical references aimed at strengthening the process of nation-building. Both the adoption of patriotic holidays as well as civic commemorations, centered fundamentally on the worship of the heroes of Independence on a national scale, played a key role in this effort to achieve both a sense of the territorial integrity and political cohesion that could fulfill the role of creating a “national identity” for the new Republic. The purpose of this article is to explore the mechanisms that served to create such symbolical references, analyze its contents and, ultimately, study how these symbols were conceived, sustained over time and formalized in order to give way to a “Perennial Celebration” which involved the Venezuelan society at large.