Tides of Revolution

Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela

Cristina Soriano

• Éditeur: University of New Mexico Press
• Année: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780826359872
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: Latin American & Caribbean History

This is a book about the links between politics and literacy, and about how radical ideas spread in a world without printing presses. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Spanish colonial governments tried to keep revolution out of their provinces. But, as Cristina Soriano shows, hand-copied samizdat materials from the Caribbean flooded the cities and ports of Venezuela, hundreds of foreigners shared news of the French and Haitian revolutions with locals, and Venezuelans of diverse social backgrounds met to read hard-to-come-by texts and to discuss the ideas they expounded. These networks efficiently spread antimonarchical propaganda and abolitionist and egalitarian ideas, allowing Venezuelans to participate in an incipient yet vibrant public sphere and to contemplate new political scenarios. This book offers an in-depth analysis of one of the crucial processes that allowed Venezuela to become one of the first regions in Spanish America to declare independence from Iberia and turn into an influential force for South American independence.

PART 1

Media

CHAPTER 1

Literacy and Power in Venezuela’s Late Colonial Society

IN 1792, A YEAR AFTER ACCEPTING A POSITION AS A PRIMARY school instructor, Simón Rodríguez struggled to find the books he needed in Caracas, the capital of the Captaincy General of Venezuela. In a city without a single printing press or bookshop, Caracas’s readers, teachers, students, and university professors had to find other ways to access printed material. Bodegas and pulperías offered a variety of inexpensive printed materials, such as catechisms, cartillas, and devotional books, alongside bottles of olive oil, sacks of grain, soap, and stockings.¹ Hundreds of such texts were sold every year to a public that had learned to read with a Catholic syllabary or with a religious catechism.

Rodríguez, however, did not belong to this massive group of novice readers. He had been educated in one of Caracas’s three schools and was well on his way to becoming an advocate for improving primary education in the city. After doing some research, he compiled a list of more than fifteen books, all recently published in Spain, on a range of pedagogical fields, including “the Arts of reading and writing, general instructions on the teaching of Algebra and Arithmetic, and innovative teaching methods for Primary Schools.”² Desperate, Rodríguez contacted a respected member of the Caracas elite, don Feliciano Palacios, and asked for help in finding these precious printed materials in Spain. Rodríguez had met Palacios in the city council building, where the teacher worked as a scribe.

Palacios sent the book list to his son, Esteban, who was spending some months in Madrid. “I’m sending a list of books for you to buy,” Palacios wrote. “Ask Iriarte to give you the money you need. These books are for don Simón, the brother of Cayetanito Carreño.” Following his father’s directions, Esteban diligently searched for the titles in the bookshops of Madrid. Three months later, he sent the volumes along with a note to his father: “I am sending the books you requested, but not all of them because they are quite expensive.”³ Esteban had spent 270 pesos on Rodríguez’s books. Don Feliciano was not pleased to learn of this expenditure (equivalent to the cost of a luxurious piece of furniture or an entire library of sixty used volumes), as he knew he could not ask the humble schoolteacher to pay this sum. He ultimately decided to present the books to Rodríguez as a gift. A year later, Rodríguez would accept the young and rebellious grandchild of Palacios, Simón Bolívar, as a student in his school and would later become his mentor.

The story of Rodríguez’s books serves to illustrate the complex networks that connected social and economic status, literacy, and education in colonial Venezuela. Rodríguez himself was an abandoned child, or hijo expósito, who was raised, along with his brother, José Cayetano Carreño, in the household of a parish priest, Alejandro Carreño. Although he was an orphan and grew up in a humble home with limited resources, Rodríguez was considered a white creole and was thus able to receive a formal education. This allowed him to work as both a scribe in the city council and a teacher in a primary school.⁴ Neither of these positions, however, was particularly lucrative, at least not sufficiently so as to allow Rodríguez to buy the new books he needed. As they had to be imported from Spain, books were expensive luxury items that remained inaccessible to the majority of the population. Venezuela was not, however, a class society in a strict sense, and Rodríguez’s lack of money did not prevent him from acquiring these printed materials. His connections to Caracas’s elite ultimately provided the economic and logistical means to pursue his goal.

Eighteenth-century Venezuela was notable for its highly stratified but permeable society, offering significant social mobility. Race, family ties, education, occupation, honor, and economic resources all played important roles in defining individual identities. Overlapping social and economic networks, and the absence of a single class hierarchy, facilitated social mobility. Still, not all social groups had equal access to education or to printed matter; literacy and the possession of books represented markers of high social status and power. Literate and formally educated people generally belonged to the white elite. Most members of this group possessed large libraries and the economic means to continue enlarging their book collections, while the majority of the supposedly nonliterate population fit into the lower social groups, who barely had the means to buy a couple of religious broadsides and relied largely on oral media for the transmission of knowledge.⁵

By the end of the eighteenth century, however, this picture had begun to change: the number of people who owned books had increased, and the size and diversity of private libraries had grown significantly. At the same time, an incipient and informal book market had begun to operate, feeding new networks for the circulation of books and printed materials. Many Venezuelans adopted the Spanish reformist model that promoted literacy and formal education for the “common people” while calling for the secularization of knowledge and the promotion of useful sciences (ciencias útiles). This movement implicitly entailed the social expansion of literacy, which was coincidently later reinforced by the torrent of printed materials that arrived from the Caribbean during the last years of the eighteenth century.

Although elites continued to possess the majority of important libraries in the urban centers of the province, a more stable book market brought members of lower social groups, such as artisans and laborers, into more regular contact with the printed or at least hand-copied word. In a colonial society with no printing press, books and printed texts were expensive, but it is clear that lack of money did not prevent Venezuelans of modest means from acquiring printed and hand-copied materials: social networks, public auctions (remates), an expanding circuit of book lending, and a widespread practice of transcription of texts represented some of the strategies that made written texts accessible to a larger group of people. A number of teachers, including seminary and university professors, sought to open the world of reading to uneducated individuals, and new networks for disseminating texts connected the farthest reaches of the province. During the French and Haitian Revolutions, these incipient networks for the circulation of written materials also served to spread antimonarchical propaganda, abolitionist and egalitarian ideas, and anticolonial sentiments.

From 1789 to 1808, revolutionary texts from Europe and America, as well as Saint-Domingue, Trinidad, and Spanish Santo Domingo, filtered into Venezuela, mortifying local officials and elites and arousing the curiosity of the population. These revolutionary texts arrived at a moment when reading, as a cultural practice, was undergoing important transformations locally. This chapter explores this complex process of transformation and provides the basis from which to argue that the political and social changes occurring in Venezuela toward the end of the eighteenth century and on the eve of independence resulted not merely from the intellectual endeavors of exceptional individuals but, among other things, from a complex set of modifications of everyday practices of reading and writing, and of changes in readers’ relationships with the written word. What matters, in other words, is not so much what people read and how these readings influenced their thinking, but rather how they read and shared texts, and how these practices of reading led to the emergence of public spaces for the discussion of ideas, political projects, and social prerogatives. What is important to analyze here is the nature of the cultural and social practices that allowed readers (and listeners) to share spaces, connect their texts and readings with their realities, and vice versa.⁶

Although it is certainly important to identify the kinds of books that filled Venezuelan private libraries and to analyze how literary tastes changed over the course of the second half of the eighteenth century, one must analyze also the transformation of reading as a cultural practice that opened new spaces for discussion and debate. A broad question of this book is: How did reading become a tool for socialization and for the integration of political communities in Venezuela at the end of the eighteenth century? This chapter is the first step toward reconstructing late colonial Venezuelans’ approach to literacy and to understanding as well the diverse strategies designed to access books and printed materials in the absence of printing presses or bookstores. Practices of lending books, reading excerpts aloud, and transcribing texts crossed social and racial boundaries. These practices, in turn, reveal the sociopolitical dimensions of print culture in late colonial Venezuela.

Curtailing the educational proposals of Spanish reformists who encouraged the education of the masses (peasants, artisans, and laborers), Venezuela’s colonial authorities and local elites actively tried to restrain the social expansion of literacy. It was clear for them that this expansion not only compromised socioracial hierarchies but also opened dangerous paths for political awareness. Members of the social and political elite warned that the intellectual simplicity of popular groups would lead novice readers to misunderstand written ideas and thus endanger the tranquility and harmony of the provinces. Colonial officials and church representatives feared that the ongoing tensions between different socioracial groups, the revolutionary events in France and the Caribbean, and the increasing circulation of revolutionary texts would make Venezuelans of lower social status, especially people of color, vulnerable to ideological contagion.⁷

Indexes of prohibited books and papers were read aloud at Sunday mass and posted on the doors of the church and walls around squares; agents of the Inquisition visited private houses to collect or censor prohibited books, or to rip out particularly offensive pages.⁸ During Sunday sermons, priests reprimanded readers of seditious tracts and described the hellish punishments they would suffer for reading such evil texts, which promised to spread “revolutionary disease.”⁹ The lack of printing shops, the absence of formal booksellers, and the prevalence of smuggling activities along Venezuela’s long Atlantic coast made efforts at controlling and censoring reading material much more difficult.¹⁰ Samizdat materials—copied by hand—flooded the cities and port towns; networks for borrowing and copying books flourished; and people of diverse social backgrounds soon learned that reading, listening, transcribing, and writing were effective ways to put information in circulation, transmit knowledge, and participate in an emergent sphere of public opinion.

Venezuelan Society on the Eve of the Atlantic Revolutions

By 1750, Venezuela was a stable but not necessarily peaceful province, which just recently had won relevance within the Spanish Empire. The colony remained a province within the Viceroyalty of New Granada (modern-day Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador), yet Venezuelan officials and white elites enjoyed virtual autonomy, as New Granadan officials rarely interfered in local affairs. The creation in 1777 of the Captaincy General of Venezuela, which added six provinces (Maracaibo, Cumaná, Margarita, Trinidad, Guayana, and, later, Barinas) to the jurisdiction of the original Province of Venezuela, confirmed the need for administrative and political centralization, reaffirming the economic importance of the greater Caracas region.¹¹

During the eighteenth century, the Venezuelan economy was divided between two main productive activities: the raising of cattle, horses, and mules, and the production of leather in the western plains and on the coast; and the cultivation of export crops—tobacco, cacao, indigo, sugar, and coffee—on the northern coast of the region, also known as the Atlantic littoral or the Costa de Caracas. The cattle economy developed mostly in the western and southern plains, known as the Llanos de Caracas. The geographic conditions of the region allowed for the sustainable and increasing reproduction of cattle with minimal labor investment. However, due to a poor road system that impeded transportation, the presence of plagues and diseases that affected the cattle, and the relatively small internal market for meat and leather products, this economic sector did not expand as quickly and effectively as the cacao-producing sector.¹²

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, small haciendas located along the northern coast of the region and also in the fertile central valleys of the province produced crops such as tobacco, indigo, sugar, coffee, and cacao, which supplied both the small internal market of Venezuela and other nearby Spanish American markets such as Santo Domingo, Cuba, and New Spain. During the mid-eighteenth century, however, the popularity of cacao in European markets grew considerably and sparked the Crown’s interest in Venezuela, a region known from the seventeenth century as ideal for cultivating cacao. In fact, Venezuela first drew the careful attention of the monarchy when it received reports of active smuggling of cacao among Venezuelan and Dutch merchants. In order to take advantage of Venezuela’s chocolate bounty, in 1728 the Crown autho...