Petrona and Rosalia

Petrona y Rosalía, written in 1838, is an anti-slavery novella by the Colombian living in Cuba, Félix Tanco Bosmeniel. It was published in 1925 in the magazine Cuba Contemporánea.
The purpose of Tanco Bosmeniel is to present the private and public customs of slave society in a critical way. To be faithful to reality, to create a veristic literature that describes the relations between masters and slaves, to divulge inside and outside the island the true social and moral conditions that prevail.
The plot of Petrona and Rosalía brings together the elements of an archetypal family that we will often see in slave-themed novels:

• The cruelty of Fernando, the son of a capricious, immoral and unproductive family.
• The mulatto Rosalia, fruit of the master’s love affair with Petrona, his black slave. She is the beautiful and naïve mulatto, victim of the despotic and corrupt master.
• And, of course, the submissive acceptance by the two women.

“God forgive you” and “be patient, my daughter, and offer the work to the Lord,” says Petrona, about to die, to her pregnant daughter, and condemned to endure the cruelty of the mayoral.
Félix Tanco y Bosmenial (Bogotá, 1797-Long Island, United States, 1871). Colombia. At a very young age he moved with his family to Cuba. A friend of Domingo del Monte, in 1844 he was imprisoned as an abolitionist. He collaborated in the weekly El Iris, El Plantel , the Revista de la Habana, La Aurora de Matanzas, El Amigo del Pueblo, and Brisas de Cuba.
Some of his poems were included by Ignacio Herrera Dávila in the book Rimas americanas (1833).