Pitt Latin American Series

Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution, Colombia, 1795-1831

Marixa Lasso

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780822973256
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book centers on a foundational moment for Latin American racial constructs. While most contemporary scholarship has focused the explanation for racial tolerance-or its lack-in the colonial period, Marixa Lasso argues that the key to understanding the origins of modern race relations are to be found later, in the Age of Revolution.Lasso rejects the common assumption that subalterns were passive and alienated from Creole-led patriot movements, and instead demonstrates that during Colombia's revolution, free blacks and mulattos (pardos) actively joined and occasionally even led the cause to overthrow the Spanish colonial government. As part of their platform, patriots declared legal racial equality for all citizens, and promulgated an ideology of harmony and fraternity for Colombians of all colors. The fact that blacks were mentioned as equals in the discourse of the revolution and later served in republican government posts was a radical political departure. These factors were instrumental in constructing a powerful myth of racial equality-a myth that would fuel revolutionary activity throughout Latin America.Thus emerged a historical paradox central to Latin American nation-building: the coexistence of the principle of racial equality with actual racism at the very inception of the republic. Ironically, the discourse of equality meant that grievances of racial discrimination were construed as unpatriotic and divisive acts-in its most extreme form, blacks were accused of preparing a race war. Lasso's work brings much-needed attention to the important role of the anticolonial struggles in shaping the nature of contemporary race relations and racial identities in Latin America.

1

Introduction

The Wars of Independence

ON NOVEMBER 11, 1811, an angry mob of black and mulatto patriots stormed into the Cartagena town council hall. Armed with lances, daggers, and guns, they gave their petition for independence to the undecided members of the local revolutionary junta. After insulting and beating its members, they forced the helpless junta to sign the declaration of independence against its will.¹ The scene described above faithfully follows most contemporary eyewitness accounts of Cartagena's Independence Day and conforms to historical research that demonstrates the political influence of blacks and mulattoes in the independence movements. Yet to many it still seems incredible to narrate an independence scene in which blacks and mulattoes called the day.² To do so challenges two popular assumptions about the Wars of Independence: that the lower classes were mere cannon fodder and had little, if any, political influence; and that the Wars of Independence were led by elites fueled by foreign “enlightened illusions” with no relevance to Spanish American reality.³

The latter idea can be traced back to the first histories of the Wars of Independence, in which the lower classes were counted among the numerous obstacles that creole patriots had to overcome to create an independent, free, and modern nation.⁴ José Manuel Restrepo—protagonist in the struggles for independence, minister of the interior under Simón Bolívar, and historian and author of the first history of the Colombian Wars of Independence—assessed the lower classes as primitive, in need of education, and prone to follow demagogues; if uncontrolled, they would push the nation down the road to anarchy.⁵ Restrepo acknowledged the presence and decisive influence of pardos (free blacks and mulattoes) in Cartagena's revolution, but he immediately depoliticized their actions. Booze and cash rather than patriotism explained their participation in the independence movement.⁶ Pardo involvement was not a positive proof of popular patriotism; instead it demonstrated the “insolence and preponderance of people of color, which became fatal for public peace.”⁷ Restrepo's foundational history inscribed the acts of pardo patriots within a discourse of danger and irrationality that set their behavior in sharp contrast to the noble and politicized conduct of the creole elite.⁸

In such nineteenth-century creole writings, modernity is the commendable aspiration of creole patriots and one of the principles justifying independence from Spain.⁹ Yet early narratives of the independence wars also contain some of the first denunciations of modern democratic politics as unsuitable for Spanish American societies. These texts did not condemn democracy per se, but rather its excesses. Simón Bolívar is perhaps the most influential representative of this tradition. His attacks on lawyers, demagogues, and incendiary theoreticians for their failure to grasp that modern politics could not be transferred to Spanish America without sufficient attention to local geography and culture are well known.¹⁰ What often goes unacknowledged is his influence on the development of an intellectual tradition that erased the contribution of the Spanish American popular classes in the history of modern democracy, making modernity seem a mere illusion of the elite. Bolívar sought to prove that fully representative politics did not suit South Americans. He created a dichotomy that distinguished between politically virtuous North Americans and South Americans, whose “character, habits and present enlightenment does not suit perfect representative institutions.” An “entirely popular system,” he insisted, was not appropriate for this region.¹¹ He also cast local demands for popular and regional representation as the political pipedreams of a handful of enlightened lawyers.¹² In his address to the Constitutional Congress of Angostura, he criticized the current constitution by reminding legislators that “not all eyes are capable of looking at the light of celestial perfection.”¹³ Representative democracy might belong in paradise, but not in South America. By making representative politics look like the exclusive aspiration of self-deluded lawyers, he detached the new constitutional governments from the societies that birthed them. This narrative's legacy erased from historical memory local struggles over the nature of the new political system. Yet if Bolívar lashed out against lawyers' inability to realize that liberal and perfect institutions did not fit the geography of Colombia, this was because he feared not that the popular classes would remain aloof from modern politics but that they would participate too much. As Germán Carrera-Damas has shown, he feared that democracy in Spanish America could lead to the end of elite rule.¹⁴ He blamed lawyers for not understanding that representative institutions among “the Caribes from the Orinoco, the sailors of Maracibo, the bogas [river boatmen] of Magdalena, the bandits of Patia…and all the savage hordes of Africa and America” would lead to Colombia's ruin, perhaps to a second Haiti.¹⁵ In his famous “Jamaica Letter,” he noted that in Lima “the rich would not tolerate democracy, and the slaves and pardos would not tolerate aristocracy.”¹⁶ Years later, he would warn José Antonio Paez against changing Colombia's republican system, arguing that “the height and brilliance of a throne would be frightful. Equality would be broken and los colores [the colored classes] would see all their rights lost to a new aristocracy.”¹⁷ Future interpretations of Bolívar would tend to forget the strong linkage between pardos and democracy in his writings. Mostly remembered instead is his attack on lawyers' inability to comprehend local society.¹⁸

Paradoxically, this binary discourse of elite illusion and lower-class primitiveness reached new levels in the 1960s and 1970s, when a new generation of historians sought to denounce the elitism of traditional narratives that glorified independence and the historical role of the founding fathers. They wanted instead to understand the social effects of independence and to incorporate the popular classes into national histories. As historians compared the nature and degree of social and economic change from colonial times through the nineteenth century, they concluded that the lower classes had gained nothing by independence; if anything, they had lost.¹⁹ The lower classes had been betrayed by an elite illusion of modernity that proclaimed the equality of all citizens but was characterized by caciquismo (patron-client relations) and electoral fraud—that proclaimed racial equality but continued colonial practices of racial discrimination.²⁰ Therefore, changes in political culture were quickly dismissed as mirages that hid cruel social inequalities.²¹ The wars had secured independence from Spain, but nothing else. The work of Colombian historian Indalecio Lievano-Aguirre is typical of this perspective. Although he highlighted the participation of the popular classes in the wars, he disconnected them from the political ideology of their times. According to him, “the showing of false erudition of creole lawyers was unintelligible to slaves, Indians, the dispossessed, and the colored races.” In spite of his critique of traditional narratives, Lievano-Aguirre remained trapped by the elitist characterization of the lower classes as prepolitical primitives.²² Ironically, it is this focus on the lower classes that makes the Revolution a political chimera; it is their assumed disconnection from modern politics that makes revolutionary politics a mere illusion of the Spanish American elite. Thus, local intellectual and political debates became false erudition, implicitly contrasted with some true—perhaps European?—erudition. Spanish America's crucial, pioneering role in the history of democracy and republicanism became further erased.²³

But in Venezuela and Caribbean Colombia, which were central war theaters and important exporters of revolutionary armies, people of African descent were a demographic majority. They not only constituted the corps of the patriot army but also participated actively in the construction of the new political systems. Even so, some historians still insisted on their irrelevance. Significantly, this blind spot was not due to historians' ignorance of lower-class participation in the wars and receptiveness to certain revolutionary ideas. One of the most complex and brilliant political analysts of the period, François-Xavier Guerra, acknowledged the involvement of people of African descent, as well as the influence of French, particularly Haitian, revolutionary ideas in slave revolts.²⁴ Yet he quickly dismissed such events as exceptional and inconsequential occurrences that at most tended to make the elite more conservative. Thus Guerra's grand generalization was that the lower classes' lack of participation in modern politics set the Spanish American revolutions apart from other contemporary revolutions.²⁵

This persistence in denying pardos' contribution to republican politics speaks to the weight given to nineteenth-century political narratives, which continue to be read as documentary evidence of lower-class attitudes.²⁶ Anthony Pagden's analysis of Dominique De Pradt's 1829 writings about the blacks and mulattoes at the Constitutional Congress of Angostura provides a clear example of the limits of such narratives. De Pradt described the congress in the following terms:

Sybarites of the civilization of Europe, preachers of liberty, I would wish to see your tribunals set by the banks of the Orinoco, your benches of senators mingled with a horrible mixture of Blacks, mulattos, plainsmen, Creoles, of men suddenly dragged out of the depths of slavery and barbarity to be transformed into legislators and heads of state! The same blood, the same language, the same customs, a common heritage of grandeur and of talent, an advanced civilization, all these hold together all the several parts of the societies of Europe. In America all is diversity, the principles of division, and absence of civilization. In Europe one plays, in America one must create.²⁷

One of the most striking features of De Pradt's observation is its endurance. Pagden uses De Pradt to point out Bolívar's failure to understand that his lofty republican ideals would do poorly within such a social environment. Oddly, he accuses Bolívar of not following his own precept—the need to adapt laws to regional specificities—and of not being able to see the chimerical nature of his own program. According to Pagden, local people needed a nationalist ideology based on emotional historical or religious nationalism instead of abstract republican precepts with which they had no connection.²⁸

In Pagden's analysis, one of the salient characteristics of De Pradt's description—the presence of black and mulatto legislators in Angostura—goes unnoticed. One wonders who these senators were; what they thought about their legislative duties; how they experienced, participated in, or followed the congressional debates. Did they influence the debates' outcome? Did Bolívar or any of the other legislators have them in mind as an important public in preparing their addresses? Addressing these questions may cause a different picture of the origins of modernity in Spanish America to emerge. However, this would require going beyond the conservative narrative of the Wars of Independence, which reiterates the unsuitability of republican ideals for Spanish American societies, the proclivity of the lower classes to follow demagogues, and the need for strong governments in societies riven by racial and social differences. This historical interpretation, as Antonio Annino has pointed out, is the result of the “Black legend” of Spanish American political history, which in its national version denounces nineteenth-century suffrage as a practice dominated by caudillos, corruption, and ignorance. This legend tends to have a checklist model of revolution, which inevitably compares Spanish American revolutions to the French and U.S. models in an effort to determine where they failed.²⁹

The problem with this perspective is that it does not help us understand the revolutions and their legacy. It does not do justice to the political and intellectual richness of this period. As Pagden, Guerra, Annino, Jaime Rodriguez, Margarita Garrido, and Jeremy Adelman, among others, have shown, this period witnessed serious and vigorous debates about the nature and future of representative politics.³⁰ The conservative narrative should be seen not as a description of lower-class political characteristics but as only one of several political programs and commentaries that emerged during the wars. Such readings need to be confronted with others that emerged during the Revolution.³¹ They should be understood as part of a larger debate over the nature of political change and the role of the lower classes in the new states, as part of a general nineteenth-century debate over how to reconcile social order and hierarchy with the politics of citizenship and representation. Further, seeing republican politics as an imported concept does not explain how the nineteenth-century Spanish American republics lasted longer than their European counterparts and why they survived in the midst of European monarchical backlash. It does not explain why these early republics enjoyed some of the most ample suffrage laws of their time or why they were replaced with more restrictive codes in the late nineteenth century.³² Moreover, it does not help us understand the mentality of the people who lived through the wars: the protagonists surely wondered at their changing times, at witnessing unprecedented transformations. Perhaps more important, the binary discourse of elite illusion and lower-class primitiveness deprives the Latin American popular classes of their historical role in the construction and development of modern politics. At stake are the very origins of Spanish American modernity.

Building on the methodological developments in peasant studies literature, works on the Wars of Independence have begun to provide a more nuanced conception of the appropriation of elite political discourse by the lower classes and their participation in the processes of state formation in the new republics. These narratives have challenged the assumption of a strong ideological divide between the elite and the lower classes.³³ Peter Guardino, Alfonso Múnera, and Peter Blanchard have taught us that blacks and mulattoes were not mere cannon fodder in the Spanish American Wars of Independence; they participated in and influenced the political debates about citizenship in the revolutionary period, sometimes pushing the elites to acquiesce to radical measures that they had not initially contemplated.³⁴ The historical literature on slavery during the Age of Revolution—in particular the historiography on the French Caribbean—is further changing our understanding of blacks' politics during this crucial period. This literature has examined the multiple ways in which enslaved and free people of African descent appropriated French revolutionary discourse. It has also highlighted the importance of lower-class, geographically mobile men and women in disseminating news about the Haitian Revolution and abolitionist politics among the Caribbean slave population. In addition, it has shown the importance of colonial revolutionary events in the development of European notions of race and citizenship.³⁵ My work follows this literature. I am particularly indebted to the work of Alfonso Múnera, the first historian to acknowledge the crucial importance of Afro-Colombians in Cartagena's independence movement.

In spite of this new research, the revolutionary nature of the wars continues to be hotly contested. Even Eric Van Young's recent insightful and sophisticated analysis of the Mexican Wars of Independence continues to question the relevance of modern politics for the Mexican lower classes.³⁶ In Colombia,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: The Wars of Independence
• 2. Racial Tensions in Late Colonial Society
• 3. A Republican Myth of Racial Harmony
• 4. The First Republic and the Pardos
• 5. Life Stories of Afro-Colombian Patriots
• 6. Race War
• 7. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index