Alejandro Velasco

At the time, of course, you have to remember, it's still unclear what oil is going to do to the world.

Right, it's 1914.

It's 1914, so it's not a sense like, for instance, Norway later in the 60s, when they discover vast reserves in the Arctic, they're like, oh, well, this is great.

1914, there's still no real sense of what this is going to do to the rest of the world.

But really by the 1920s is when you begin to see a tremendous insertion of capital from oil companies from the United States, from Britain and elsewhere, right?

That it seems to be changing the dynamic of Venezuela.

Right.

By the 1930s, and Gomez's dictatorship lasts 27 years, so it really coincides with these first two decades of oil production and exploitation.

By the time his dictatorship comes to an end in 1935, it is unquestionable that oil not only will be the defining factor

driver of Venezuelan economy, but every political faction in Venezuela understands that how they were going to relate to oil, how they're going to define oil, will be the hallmark feature of Venezuela's future.

Well, even at the time, which is to say the 1920s and 30s, it's not to say that everybody saw this as an unproblematic or uncritical, simple path towards a kind of future, whether that's going to be modern or something else.

As early as the 1920s, intellectuals in Venezuela are sounding some alarms about oil being the excrement of the devil.

that if we're not too careful, this thing that seeps seemingly freely from the ground and is viscous and inspires all these visions about the darkness of the subsoil and what that means metaphorically and spiritually for Venezuela, that this may not be the bountiful resource that we might imagine.

It might come with some significant strings attached.

Yes.

So there are alarms raised, although they're not generalized.

And really, again, what the consensus among Venezuela's political elite intellectual class, including its cultural elite, who begin to write novels and, you know,

poetry and plays and music around oil.

They're writing poems to oil?

Well, not to oil, but about oil and about what it might mean for Venezuela because it also just becomes a question of culture more broadly.