One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I began to think of the Macondo people as subalterns, and Latin Americans as subalterns as well. In writing this novel, Garcia Marquez is giving the subalterns a voice. In his Nobel Prize lecture, Garcia Marquez says that the "rational talents" of the world, (which I take to be "The West," namely, the US and Europe), "insist on measuring us [Latin America] with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all...the interpretation of reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown" (2-3). I began to think that One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel Garcia Marquez (GM) wrote as example of a Latin American "pattern,"--a yardstick by which we could measure the region. If we approach it with open minds, this novel could be a way for us to understand the Latin American experience.
GM's assertion that rational countries don't interpret Latin America through a Latin American perspective resembles Spivak's argument that even well-intentioned intellectuals who speak on behalf of subalterns are serving actually to silence them; the problem is that, like rational countries, these intellectuals are not actually expressing the views of the subaltern. Spivak opposes essentialism, and essentializing the subaltern in particular. Yet, it seems that to even utilize the term subaltern and apply it to certain people is a form of essentialism. When you call a group of people subalterns, you imply that all of these people stand "in an ambiguous relation to power--subordinate to it but never fully consenting to its rule" (Spivak handout). The way I understand it, and the way we have been discussing it in class, it seems "subaltern" is generally applied to entire nations that are subordinate to other nations--often to colonial powers. Yet, there may be individuals within the colonized nation that fully embrace the colonizing power--Baby Kochomma in The God of Small Things seemed to whole heartedly revere English customs.
In relation to this, Garcia Marquez's statement that "the ravages of life are not the same for all" seems ironic, because, if I'm correct, he's speaking about Latin America in relation to the West. Because he's speaking about Latin America as a whole, or even if he is only speaking about Columbia, then his statement seems to imply that "the ravages of life" are the same for all Latin Americans. But Latin America, and any country or region, including "the West," is composed of myriad individuals, and those individuals "belonging" to the same place do not all think and feel the same way. Nationalism or a national identity seems to be just another form of essentialism, negating the diverse individuals that live in a given country. And this form of essentialism is especially problematic because it is leads to political chaos (often alongside violence) and war. To overcome essentialism, we would need to see each person as an individual, apart from the myriad groups with which we typically associate these individuals.