Latin America since Independence

A History with Primary Sources

Alexander Dawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000571684
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Now in its third edition, Latin America since Independence explores the region's rich and diverse history through carefully selected stories, primary source documents, maps, and tables that offer a diverse approach to dominant historical narratives.

While histories of the "other" Americas often link disparate histories through revolutionary or tragic narratives, this text 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, the book offers a distinctive conceptualization of the region as a diverse social landscape with a multiplicity of peoples and voices. 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:

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• Race and Citizenship

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• Inequality and Economic Development

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• Politics and Rights

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• Foreign Interventions

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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 Environment

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Chapters also include timelines highlighting important dates and suggestions for further reading. This third edition has been updated throughout and includes a new Chapter 9 that discusses foreign intervention in Central America, and new text on the drug wars, resource extraction, and indigenous self-determination.

Richly informative and highly readable, Latin America since Independence provides compelling accounts of this region's past and present that will be of interest to students of Latin American history and society.

1 Independence Narratives, Past and Present

DOI: 10.4324/9781003146094-2

1717–1790s	1780–1781	1791–1804	1807–1808	19 April 1810	May 1810	16 September 1810	15 December 1812	1815	9 July 1816	February–July, 1819	28 July 1821	24 August 1821	7 September 1822	6 August 1825	1829–1830
Bourbon Reforms	Túpac Amaru rebellion in Andes	Haitian Revolution	Napoleon invades Iberian Peninsula, installs his brother on Spanish throne	Cabildo of Caracas deposes Spanish governor, establishes Caracas Junta	Revolution in Argentina	Grito de Dolores by Father Miguel Hidalgo (Mexico)	Simón Bolívar announces support of independence in Cartagena Manifesto	Brazil made co-kingdom with Portugal	Congress of Tucumán declares Argentine Independence	Congress of Angostura leads to creation of Gran Colombia	Peruvian Declaration of Independence. Struggles with royalist forces continue until 1824	Treaty of Córdoba recognizes Mexican independence	Pedro, son of Portuguese King, declares Brazilian Independence, is crowned emperor of Brazil in December	Bolivian Independence	Dissolution of Gran Colombia

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

Back in the stone age of television, millions of North American schoolchildren had their Saturday morning cartoons interrupted by Schoolhouse Rock, public service announcements that mixed animation and music to teach them about grammar, math, civics, and science, and 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 their values through the violent overthrow of a tyrannical system.

Schoolhouse Rock’s rendering of U.S. Independence works as history because in the aftermath of a war 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 past. That national government also endeavored to promote a vision of independence that held that the war a just cause, that the English colonists living in the 13 colonies 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 enjoy political freedom.

Of course, there were 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 migrated to the colonies because of religious discrimination, that many atrocities were committed in the name of freedom, and that tens of thousands of people who were born in the colonies and no less American than those neighbors lost their property and community standing after the war because they supported the losing side. It also 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 cost over 600,000 lives.

Contemporary Fourth of July celebrations, which echo the nostalgia of Schoolhouse Rock more than a careful reflection on the past, reinforce those silences. Their nationalist narratives, reinforced by the state, its educational institutions, and generation after generation of repetitions in literature, art, music, and the movies, continue to privilege the story of the heroic individuals who fought for American freedom.

Latin Americans face significant challenges in producing a similarly straightforward understanding of independence in the Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonies that lay to the south of the 13 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 lessons?

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 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 venerate Túpac Katari, an Aymara 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 account²). 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 enslaved peoples 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 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 moved between empires (thus Bolívar’s Letter from Jamaica, excerpted below), and could at times enlist the support of the European enemies of their colonial overlords. With Europe consumed by the Napoleonic Wars, rebels in the colonies found unprecedented opportunities to seize power for themselves.

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 approach to this dilemma is twofold. Below I will tell three stories of independence instead of one. And rather than considering independence as a series of heroes and events 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 4 November 1780, in the Andean town of Tinta, Túpac Amaru II (José Gabriel Candorcanqui) 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 he called for the expulsion of Spaniards from the Americas, the 1780 revolt has long been an inspiration to those battling racial 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 enslaved peoples (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 Túpac Amaru II’s, and vast Maroon³ communities in Brazil and the Caribbean (the largest, Palmares, survived in Brazil from 1605 to 1694) acted as reminders that those most oppressed by the colonial system were capable of responding to 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.

For those who lived on the margins of empire, deep in mountain ranges or far away from the economic and political centers of the colonies, these rebellions could be sustained for decades, even centuries. Only when they became too dangerous (either because the empires were expanding, or they were newly perceived as a threat to European control) did the overlords mount sustained efforts to wipe out these acts of resistance. The fates of Tupac Amaru II, the Mayan rebels in the Yucatán, the people of Palmares were meant as reminders to others who might challenge the empire. And yet, the rebellions continued.

In what was perhaps the most audacious act of rebellion in the eighteenth century, on 21 August 1791, the enslaved people of Haiti went to war against the French Empire. 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 an enslaved 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 enslaved peoples and supported slavery, though they chafed at the fact that the Estates General of the French Revolution denied them political rights.

It was in this context that a revolt of the enslaved in 1791 metastasized into a civil war, and then a colonial war, leaving the island’s white planters unable to defend their possessions. Emancipation came in 1793, when a French appointed governor (Léger-Félicité Sonthonax) used the promise of freedom for the enslaved 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. Uprisings of the enslaved in the Spanish colonies (e.g., Coro, Venezuela, in 1795) followed news from St. Domingue. Planters around the Caribbean responded in kind, increasing discipline on their estates and mercilessly punishing even the hint of resistance. When war broke out in the Spanish colonies just a few years later, slavery was on many people’s minds. Some enslaved, 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 if it seemed a likelier route to freedom. Enslaved people 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 laws⁴(Santiago in 1811,...