Marriage and Family
Carlos Andrés Pérez began courting his cousin Blanca in 1944. He was then working and living in Caracas and would travel to Rubio as he could to visit her. They were wed on 8 June 1948. For the first months, they lived in the provincial city of San Cristóbal but moved to the Venezuelan capital to share a rented house with Julia Pérez, Blanca's mother-in-law.
A few months later, in November 1948, the military launched a coup against the democratically elected government of President Rómulo Gallegos and installed a dictatorship. Carlos Andrés Pérez became the target of harassment and persecution as a member of the Acción Democrática party. Blanca had to endure frequent security police searches of their home as well as tend to her young children while her husband was often on the run or in prison. In 1952, she followed him into exile in San José, Costa Rica.
The couple had six children, five daughters, Sonia, Thais, Martha, María de los Ángeles and María Carolina, and a son, Carlos Manuel.
When the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez was overthrown in 1958, Blanca and Carlos Andrés Pérez returned to Venezuela with the children. Her husband's ascendant political career resulted in Blanca's increasingly prominent role as a politician's wife, one who would be actively involved in supporting his career, campaigning and developing her own charitable activities.
Read more about this topic: Blanca Rodriguez
Famous quotes containing the words marriage and/or family:
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“Our civility, England determines the style of, inasmuch as England is the strongest of the family of existing nations, and as we are the expansion of that people. It is that of a trading nation; it is a shopkeeping civility. The English lord is a retired shopkeeper, and has the prejudices and timidities of that profession.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)