Latin America since Independence

A History with Primary Sources

Alexander Dawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135010362
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Lateinamerikanische & karibische Geschichte

What is Latin America, after all? While histories of the "other" Americas often link disparate histories through revolutionary or tragic narratives, Latin America since Independence begins with the assumption that our efforts to imagine a common past for nearly thirty countries are deeply problematic. Without losing sight of chronology or regional trends, this text offers glimpses of the Latin American past through carefully selected stories. Each chapter introduces students to a specific historical issue, which in turn raises questions about the history of the Americas as a whole. Key themes include:

• Race and Citizenship

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• Inequality and Economic Development

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• Politics and Rights

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• Social and Cultural Movements

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• Globalization

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• Violence and Civil Society

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The short, thematic chapters are bolstered by the inclusion of relevant primary documents – many translated for the first time – including advertisements and posters, song lyrics, political speeches, government documents, and more. Each chapter also includes timelines highlighting important dates and suggestions for further reading. Richly informative and highly readable, Latin America since Independence provides compelling accounts of this region's past and present.

This second edition brings the story up to the present, with revised chapters, new primary documents and images, and a new 'At A Glance' feature that uses a selection of maps and tables to illuminate key issues like the economy, the environment, and demographics.

For additional information and classroom resources please visit the Latin America since Independence companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/dawson.

1
Independence Narratives, Past and Present

The Shot Heard Round the World
Was the Start of the Revolution
The Minutemen were Ready
On the Move¹

In what seems like the stone age of television, millions of North American schoolchildren once spent their Saturday mornings watching Schoolhouse Rock, a series of public service announcements that occasionally interrupted their cartoons. They learned about grammar, math, civics, and science from the program. They were also subjected to a series of lessons about a seminal moment in the national past. The best among the history lessons, the “Shot Heard Round the World,” was a delightfully entertaining rendering of Paul Revere’s ride, in which children learned that “we” kicked out the British Redcoats in order to “let freedom reign.” It was also a clever work of propaganda. Independence was narrated not as the birth of the United States (there was, after all, already a “we” and a “British,” and a pre-existing history covered in another episode called “No More Kings”), but as a moment in which Americans acted out preexisting values through the violent expulsion of tyrants.

Schoolhouse Rock’s rendering of U.S. independence works as history because in the aftermath of the war (a war which in some ways was many different wars, fought in several different colonies) those colonies created a common government, which in turn successfully promoted the belief that North Americans shared a common national history. That national government also endeavored to promote a vision of independence that held that the war was right and just, that the English colonists living here were more American than European, that they were being oppressed by people with whom they shared few common values, and that having escaped religious persecution in Europe more than a century before, it was their destiny to demand political freedom.

There were, of course, silences in this narrative. The “shot heard round the world” story ignores the fact that those who won their freedom were overwhelmingly white male property owners and that women did not gain the right to vote in most of the country until the twentieth century. It overlooks the fact that not all settlers came to the colonies because of religious discrimination, that many atrocities were committed in the name of independence, and that tens of thousands of people who were born in the colonies and no less American than those neighbors who lost their property and community standing after the war because they supported the losing side. It also, of course, ignores other significant silences, such as the role of indigenous peoples in the story, and the fact that the compromise that eventually produced a United States of America actively denied freedom for the majority of those of African origin; a compromise that in turn was partially responsible for a fratricidal conflict that seven decades later, would cost over 600,000 lives.

Those silences remain in the shadows when Americans today celebrate the Fourth of July, largely ignored in favor of the narrative reproduced in Schoolhouse Rock. For all its limitations, the nationalist narrative, reinforced by the state, its educational institutions, and generation after generation of repetitions in literature, art, music, and the movies (not to mention Saturday morning cartoons), continues to privilege the story of the heroic individuals who fought for American freedom.

The power of the story is instructive of the challenge that confronts us when we try to produce a similarly straightforward understanding of independence in the Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonies that lay to the south of the thirteen British colonies that formed the United States of America. There was no “shot heard round the world” to signal a struggle for Latin American independence, in part because there was no single war for Latin American independence. It is difficult to narrate the history of the French, Spanish, English, Dutch, and Portuguese colonies that comprised this part of the world in a way that sets up independence as the logical or inevitable culmination of a national destiny—a story of freedom or otherwise. No single nation with the capacity to control the narrative emerged out of this region’s battle for independence. The battles lasted longer, represented an even greater diversity of interests and claims, and yielded no consistent outcome. We must wonder then, could there be a Schoolhouse Rock version of Latin American independence? Where would it begin? What would be its lesson?

The Problem of Beginnings

The first problem we encounter in trying to narrate Latin American independence lies on the national level. Mexicans, Argentines, Brazilians, Chileans, and residents of other societies in the region all have their own national independence narratives, and they often differ a great deal, not just in the military heroes they venerate, but in the underlying values these stories inculcate. Mexicans for instance, lionize a liberal priest (Father Miguel Hidalgo). Brazilians claim a slave owning aristocrat (Dom Pedro I). Venezuelans, Colombians, and Peruvians credit an autocrat (Simón Bolívar) as the “Great Liberator,” a reference to the fact that he led the military coalition that ultimately drove the Spanish out of their last footholds in South America. Some Bolivians (whose country is named for the Great Liberator) also celebrate Bolívar, but others in this country also venerate Túpac Katari, an Ayamara leader who died in a rebellion against the Spanish more than forty years before independence. Their divided loyalties offer different perspectives on where we should begin and end the story of this era.

As the Bolivian case suggests, the type of independence narrative we choose depends upon what sorts of actors we privilege. Told from the perspective of European descended elite males (criollos), independence was often a story of bravery and sacrifice in the name of ideals (national independence, freedom, self-determination). Told from the perspective of elite women, it was often a much more ambivalent story of frustrated ambitions (see the story of Manuela Sáenz, Bolívar’s lover and savior, on this account ²). Indigenous peoples often opposed these local leaders, fearing that self-determination for colonial elites would signal ruin for themselves, as those same colonial elites were their worst exploiters. African-descended slaves had similarly complex views, supporting a variety of sides in the conflicts depending on where individual and collective opportunities for emancipation seemed to lie.

These challenges might lead us to abandon both the idea of a common independence narrative and a sense that there can be a common story of Latin America. Yet if we do this, we risk losing sight of what seems to be a significant fact: between 1790 and 1830 almost every colony in the Americas (excepting Canada, Cuba, and a small number of other colonies in or bordering the Caribbean) violently dispossessed their European rulers. A shared history of colonial rule marked all of these societies and left common legacies and challenges for most. Moreover, the battles for independence connected societies across the region. News of rebellions in one colony spread to others, as did rebel and imperial armies. The fact that different parts of the region were under the control of different empires also facilitated the process, as rebel leaders could flee from their home to the colony of another European Empire (thus Bolívar’s Letter from Jamaica, excerpted below), and could at times enlist the support of the European enemies of their colonial overlords. This, of course, was possible because during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Europe was consumed by the Napoleonic Wars, leaving the governments of the old world without the wherewithal to fully dominate their colonies.

These phenomena leave us with a series of uncomfortable choices. If we choose one independence narrative, we are given a chance to imagine a common Latin American past at the risk of silencing other, equally valid ways of understanding this history. If we choose too many narratives, we do greater justice to personal and local stories at the risk of losing a larger view of Latin America in the cacophony. My response to this dilemma is two-fold. Below I will tell three stories of independence instead of one. And rather than considering independence as a series of personages and events that need to be remembered and venerated, the sections that follow focus on the ways that independence is narrated—the morals and messages that are usually invoked through the story of Latin American independence.

Stories of Freedom

On November 4, 1780, in the Andean town of Tinta, Túpac Amaru II (José Gabriel Candor-canqui) seized the local Spanish Governor, Antonio de Arriaga, and ordered that he be put on trial. Executing de Arriaga a week later, he declared a rebellion against the Spanish Empire. His rebellion failed, leading to his death and the deaths of thousands of his compatriots. Though short lived, the cathartic (or alternately, frightening) power of his rebellion resonates in much of Latin America to this day. In part because he took his name from the last Inca ruler to be conquered by the Spaniards, and in part because his rebellion took as its goal the elimination of Spaniards from the Americas, the 1780 revolt has long stood for the complete rejection of the evils of the race-based oppression that colonialism and its aftermath entailed. It has been an inspiration to revolutionaries and those battling inequality across the hemisphere.

Colonial Latin Americans lived in unfree and unequal societies, and while most struggled against the injustices they faced in limited ways, stealing from landlords, occasionally poisoning their bosses, Europe’s colonies in the Americas saw their share of spectacularly violent uprisings. Indigenous peoples (locked in a caste system that offered limited rights and made many demands) and slaves (who lacked legal personhood) were the most unfree, and led the most impressive struggles. The Caste War in the Yucatán in 1712, millenarian revolts in the Andes like the one sparked by Túpac Amaru II, and the vast communities of escaped slaves that flourished from Brazil to the Caribbean (the largest, Palmares, survived in Brazil from 1605 to 1694) acted as repeated reminders that those most oppressed by the colonial system were never all that far from responding the violence of the system with violence of their own. At their extreme, these movements envisioned a world without Spaniards, Portuguese, and other colonial overlords. They banished Europeans, their languages, and their food in their effort to return to a distant, utopian past. Nonetheless, as they were fighting against colonial states that were much stronger than them, most struggles for freedom in colonial Latin America were ultimately defeated; that is, until Haitian slaves took on the most powerful European nation of the day in 1791.

If we narrate independence as a story about freedom, Haiti (St. Domingue) is a good place to begin. During the 1780s, St. Domingue accounted for 40 percent of France’s foreign trade, and was arguably the richest colony in Latin America, producing two-fifths of the world’s sugar and half the world’s coffee, virtually the entire volume of each produced by a slave population that reached a half million at its peak. A glimpse of the island in 1791 would reveal hundreds of thousands of recently enslaved Africans, persons who had been born free and longed for emancipation. One would also see a small but significant number of free people of color on the island, individuals who were increasingly important to the island’s economy. Some owned slaves and supported slavery, though they chafed at the fact that the revolutionary Estates General of the French Revolution denied them political rights.

It was in this context that a slave revolt in 1791 metastasized into a civil war, and then a colonial war, leaving the island’s white planters unable to defend their possessions. Slave emancipation came in 1793, when a French appointed governor (Léger-Félicité Sonthonax) used the promise of freedom for the slaves to recruit them into an army that could re-establish French control over the island. Eleven years later, after a decade more of civil strife, occupations by British, French, and Spanish armies, and numerous attempts to re-establish slavery on the island, Haitians won their independence. Theirs was the first republic in the Americas to ban slavery.

Events in St. Domingue had an impact elsewhere. Slave uprisings in the Spanish colonies (e.g., Coro, Venezuela, in 1795) followed news of St. Domingue. Planters around the Caribbean responded in kind, increasing discipline on their estates and mercilessly punishing even the hint of slave resistance. When war broke out in the Spanish colonies just a few years later, slavery was on many people’s minds. Some slaves, like Juan Izaguirre in the Valle de Onato in Venezuela, appropriated the language of criollo liberators to claim their own freedom. Others opted for loyalty to Spain when this seemed a likelier route to freedom. Slaves defended Buenos Aires against the British Invasion in 1806–1807 and supported the royalist forces in large numbers in return for promises of rights and freedoms (commonly the right to be treated as a Spaniard). Not to be outdone, several rebel governments (juntas) outlawed the slave trade and passed (post-dated) free womb laws ³ (Santiago in 1811, Buenos Aires in April 1812, and Lima in 1821). The Venezuelan rebel Francisco Miranda, who was personally opposed to slavery, offered slaves freedom in return for ten years of military service. Bolívar, who followed Miranda as a leading figure in Venezuelan revolutionary circles (and who was a member of the group that arrested Miranda and turned him over to the Spanish), actively recruited slaves beginning in 1816, and would not have succeeded without drawing them away from the royalist cause.

Miranda, Bolívar, and the other rebel leaders who openly opposed slavery have come to be known as Latin America’s early liberals. This term was bandied about constantly during the nineteenth century, used to describe any number of political movements that identified with progress and against tradition. Liberals called for greater freedom, sometimes individual freedom and equality before the law, sometimes the elimination of government imposed trade restrictions, and often an end to the power of the corporate entities that characterized colonial society—the Church, the nobility, the military, and the communal Indian village (the latter because liberals believed that communal land tenure restricted the free circulation of private property and thus limited economic growth).

Other stories of freedom in the region are similarly complex. In Mexico, Father Miguel Hidalgo’s followers responded to his Grito de Dolores by raising a rag-tag army that swept through the Bajío in late 1810. Unlike earlier movements in the Andes, Hidalgo’s armies were multiethnic, composed mainly of people who were already, to a certain extent free, but who, after years of drought and declining wages, viewed wealthy Spaniards (particularly grain merchants) as enemies. Some wanted independence, but many simply wanted the king to intercede in their favor. “Death to Spaniards”—the popular slogan they shouted as they marched—did not refer to the king, but his venal surrogates. More complex still, it appears that beyond economic concerns, many of their grievances were the product of eighteenth-century religious reforms, which undermined traditional religious practices in an attempt to enforce Catholic orthodoxy. They demanded a return to the colonial system as they had known it in the past, and restoration of the old Spanish King.

Freedom, then, was invoked to justify many different things. It could speak to a desire to escape human bondage, the demand that the avarice of your social betters be constrained, or even be framed as the right to worship according to the dictates of one’s ancestors. And for the liberal merchants of cities like Buenos Aires, Caracas, or Mexico City, it might mean freedom to trade directly with their British partners, the manufacturers of Manchester and elsewhere who were forced to work through Spanish intermediaries to send their goods to the colonies. What is more, those urban liberals might view freedom in terms that were diametrically opposed to their rural counterparts. An indigenous peasant in Oaxaca might see freedom as freedom from the pressures of outsiders who wanted to appropriate his land, a freedom best defended through the intercession of the king. For the liberal elites, it could very well mean freedom from the laws and regulations that kept that land out of circulation, and thus made it impossible for them to freely acquire these properties.

Stories of Tradition

Most individuals in the contemporary world ch...