Objective:

This article analyzes the metaphors and images with which historical actors, such as Santiago Pérez, José Caicedo Rojas, Ramón Torres Méndez and the anonymous painter of the Chorographic Commission, compare men's freighters with pack animals in mid-nineteenth-century Nueva Granada. It postulates that these visual and linguistic acts, and the means that allow their circulation, crystallize and, at the same time, mobilize a conglomeration of temporal strata with which the actors, from an uncertain present, interpret the past and project the future.

Methodology:

We analyze images and metaphors, and the means where they circulated, to see how these actors used them to express their historical experience; they are considered in the context of their temporal and spatial trajectories to account for the specificity of their use in mid-nineteenth-century Nueva Granada.

Originality:

We use images and metaphors from travel literature and manners, and the means that allow them to circulate, to inquire about temporal experience in the context of debates on historical semantics.

Conclusions:

The article shows that these historical actors are not passive receivers who repeat European clichés, but instances of a circulation network that momentarily capture visual and linguistic resources to account for the way in which they experienced their historical present.