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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Crafting a Republic for the World in 19th-Century Colombia

By Lina del Castillo

The powerful myth of ‘American exceptionalism’ would have us think that the United States alone offered the world universal ideals of democracy, self-determination, and shared prosperity. However, if we open our eyes beyond canonical nineteenth-century writers such as Alexis de Tocqueville, an alternate story emerges. The long-ignored yet staggering number of works by publicists, historians, geographers, novelists, economists, and jurists from Caracas, Bogotá, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Mexico, Quito, and Lima begin to reveal the remarkable dimensions of modern republican experiments in Spanish America.Early republican experiments in Spanish America occurred at a time when there were no models to follow. While republicans in Europe battled monarchists and the clerical old regime, while they increasingly imagined their republics as colonial empires of racial inferiors, and while republicans like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the United States built their republic on white supremacy and industrialized slavery in cotton plantations, a generation of Spanish American sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and political philosophers became the world’s republican vanguard.

One of their most resilient inventions was rhetorical. Spanish Americans consistently portrayed the period of Spanish rule as obscurantist, tyrannical, and corrupt. This discourse of Latin America’s “colonial legacies” is pervasive today. During the early nineteenth century, Spanish Americans invented distinct “colonial legacies” to legitimize their intellectual and political work in rejecting Spanish rule. They believed science could diagnose, treat, and excise those pernicious colonial legacies. Their radical new form of political modernity required they take a systematic approach to understanding and changing their society, their economic structures, and their political processes. As perceived obstructions changed over time, so did proposed solutions, which in turn contributed to the invention of new philosophies, anthropologies, sociologies, geographies, and sciences.

José María Samper (Cultura Banco de la República).

The case of a little-known Colombian jurist and writer, José María Samper, illustrates this creative process. Samper posed hard questions to both Europeans and U.S. Americans as he wrote about the history of Colombia while traveling through Europe from 1858 to 1862 with his newly wedded wife, Soledad Acosta de Samper. With so many innovative studies by Spanish Americans available, Samper wondered why Europe remained deaf to the socio-political complexity and innovation of Spanish America. He knew the unfortunate answer: the confounding noise produced by the political storms that crashed through Spanish America during the first half of the nineteenth century. Narratives about chaos, violence, and caudillos drowned out any discussion about how these republics were experimenting with democracy, sovereignty, universal male suffrage, republican equity, and self-determination.

Map of Nueva Granada, 1832-1855 (Carta XII del Atlas geográfico e histórico de la República de Colombia, 1890. Wikipedia)

Samper represented a generation who creatively re-imagined republicanism for New Granada (a polity that encompassed roughly today’s Colombia and Panama). He, along with hundreds of other men in the emerging republic, formed the Caldas Institute (Instituto Caldas) in the late 1840s. This scientific society crossed the political spectrum and championed a circulatory ideal for New Granada. The circulation of people, goods, and ideas would undo the supposed Spanish colonial legacy of fragmentation and exploitation of territories that led to stagnation and poverty locally. Rather than foment export-led growth on the backs of enslaved people, a range of government officials from an array of provinces instead focused on identifying and strengthening the internal circulation of goods and services. Provincial chapters quickly formed and worked to identify what industries needed improving, how to ensure proper morality, and where infrastructure needed to be built. Circulation of people, goods, ideas, and credit was further supported by steamship navigation along the Magdalena River flowing through the newly created Puerto Colombia in Barranquilla, a port intended not just for export but also internal circulation among New Granada provinces.

Manuel Peña’s maps.

Caldas Institute members also helped identify the brightest minds from the provinces. Those young men won scholarships to attend New Granada’s military school in Bogotá. Cadets learned new mapping techniques from foreign experts through apprenticeship. As revealed by the fanciful imaginary landscape drawn by sixteen-year-old Manuel Peña, cadets learned to express the implications of local and global circulation for the Republic. Consider how Peña’s map drew together California, London, Lima, and Carabobo, along with existing New Granada cities and towns such as Medellin, Socorro, Vélez, Oiba, and Cajicá. All these places, according to Peña’s cartographic imaginary, also participated in a war for liberation as signaled by crossed swords strewn throughout the territory.

The ideal of free circulation to combat a colonial legacy of fragmentation, exploitation, and economic stagnation helps us better understand why early republicans in New Granada not only moved towards the abolition of slavery by 1851, but also worked tirelessly towards identifying the best routes for canals and roads. The circulation of free people, ideas, and trade required infrastructure that could traverse the Andean mountainous terrain, after all. The Chorographic Commission, first conceptualized by members of the Caldas Institute, was to bring to fruition New Granada’s long-term development projects. The work this scientific expedition carried out from the 1850s through the 1860s was deeply entwined with the development of a republican political ideology based on the abolition of slavery and experimentation with universal male suffrage.

Agustín Codazzi of the Chorographic Commission camping with his collaborators in Yarumito, Soto Province (1850, Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia, Colección Comisión Corográfica. Wikipedia).

While some Caldas Institute members engaged in such remarkable experiments with republican circulation, others experimented with what José María Samper termed the science of constitutionalism. Their work culminated in the constitution of 1853, which was radically democratic even by today’s standards. No electoral college would get in the way of the will of the people. In the wake of slavery’s abolition, presidents were directly elected through universal male suffrage, as were all representatives of Congress, members of the Supreme Court, and provincial governors. The 1853 constitution also permitted the provinces of New Granada to develop their own charters, and a flurry of constitution writing ensued. The most remarkable of these was that of Vélez, which granted universal suffrage to women as well as men. The 1853 constitution proved such a radical re-working of the democratic system that Civil War broke out. The devastation was overwhelming. An alternate constitutional plan emerged, also led by José María Samper, that vested sovereignty in the states rather than individuals. These were the kinds of constitutional experiments Samper and his cohort shared with the world.

Cover page of the Constitution of 1853.

Spanish Americans have too often been simplified as either detached racist elites with little knowledge of local realities looking only to profit from export led growth at any cost, or violent anti-democratic caudillos. De-exoticizing Spanish American thinkers allows us to take their early republican projects – and their discontents– seriously.

Highlighting the nineteenth-century invention of colonial legacies also allows us to begin to question why thinkers, writers, scholars, and educators in the United States, in the wake of independence, did not create the category of colonial legacies for themselves. Why did they not identify legacies of British rule that needed to be rooted out in order to produce a republic of equal citizens, no matter their race? Why, indeed, can we see colonial legacies so easily for Spanish America, but we have such a hard time identifying the persistent colonial legacies that continue to make universal democracy and shared prosperity in the United States so difficult to achieve?

Lina del Castillo, Crafting a Republic for the World: Scientific, Geographic, and Historiographic Inventions of Colombia (2018)

Further Reading:

James Sanders, The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation, and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (2014).
Sanders underscores how republicans in Colombia and Mexico, but also other republics such as Chile, Uruguay, and Venezuela, saw themselves as shaping political modernity in the world.

Nancy Appelbaum, Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia (2016). This focused study on the Chorographic Commission in Colombia reveals the richness and complexity of that state-sponsored scientific expedition.

Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea (2017).
Tenorio-Trillo offers a short essay on why the idea of Latin America has proved remarkably resilient since the mid-nineteenth century.

Hilda Sabato, Republics of the New World: The Revolutionary Political Experiment in Nineteenth-Century Latin America ( 2018).
Sabato’s book effectively describes the fundamental innovation of Latin American politics in the nineteenth century as the revolutionary decision to adopt popular sovereignty as the founding principle of the polity and as the only source of legitimate power.

José M. Samper, Ensayo sobre las revoluciones políticas y la condición social de las repúblicas Colombianas (Hispano-Americanas); con un apéndice sobre la orografía y la población de la Confederación Granadina  (1861/2018).

Top image: Watercolors by Manuel María Paz, a member of the Chorographic Commission: A Bridge on the Ingara River (L), The Village of Tebada (M), The Square of Quibdo (R), Chocó Province (World Digital Library).

The Disappearing Mestizo, by Joanne Rappaport (2014)

By Adrian Masters

Disapearing Mestizo coverFrom Mexico to Chile, Latin American intellectuals, artists, and activists proudly proclaim that they, their nations, and their cultures were born from a mix of Spanish and Indian heritage. The adjective for this mix is “mestizo;” individuals of Spanish-Indian descent are “mestizos.” These terms, along with the general word for mixing (mestizaje), have become increasingly prominent in North American scholarship in recent years, especially since the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, when many U.S American activists with Latin American heritage sought to explore and embrace their Indian roots.

The category of mestizo first arose in the 16th century Spanish Empire. In The Disappearing Mestizo, Joanne Rappaport takes readers to 16th, 17th, and 18th-century Colombia, where she questions whether mestizos constituted a real social group. Many scholars have treated colonial mestizos as a sort of ethnicity or collective, a concept frequently influenced by the era’s spectacular paintings of genealogical mixes between Africans, Indians, and Spaniards. These colonial Mexican paintings create the appearance of a hierarchical society, a “caste system,” where a colonist would fall into one of dozens of categories and would live his or her life according to the privileges and limitations of that group. The idea of the caste system has recently come under the scrutiny of contemporary scholars, who argue that the rigid idealized world of caste paintings never materialized in day-to-day life.

Casta painting

Casta painting by Luis de Mena

Rappaport’s book builds on this growing suspicion towards the caste system and colonial-era terms like the mestizo. Whereas Africans, Indians, and Spaniards often had languages, histories, and legal statuses that brought them together, Rappaport argues that mestizos were adrift between colonial ethnicities. This meant that they appeared and disappeared from colonial documents with ease, “becoming” Indians or Spaniards at times and becoming mestizos at other times. If there were no mestizo sociological or ethnic group, Rappaport reasons, we must set out to determine not “Who is a mestizo?” or “What is a mestizo?” but “When and how is someone a mestizo?”

Casta Painting from the end of the 18th century or beginning of 19th century. Author unknown. The caption reads "From a Spanish man and an Amerindian woman, a Mestizo is produced"

Casta Painting from the end of the 18th century or beginning of 19th century. Author unknown. The caption reads “From a Spanish man and an Amerindian woman, a Mestizo is produced”

This book seeks to answer why colonists called others mestizos, through a handful of fine-grained “ethnographic” vignettes that appear in the archives of Spain and Colombia. The author begins by exploring the importance of markers of difference that go beyond 19th and 20th century markers of “race:” religion, appearance, dress, blood, honor, reputation, occupation, and even ideas regarding breast-milk (ideas that colonists summarized as calidad, or “quality”). Readers meet a moreno (dark-skinned man) who seduces a high-born Spanish woman with love letters but shames and threatens the reputation of her family when he reveals his physical appearance to her. A half-Spanish, half-Indian girl brings dishonor upon her father by dressing as an Indian. A distinguished conquistador’s enemies accuse him of being a Moorish slave from Oran, throwing his Christian genealogy and virtue into question. These cases force us to think beyond “race” as a simple category of genetic difference and to focus instead on the cultural reasons why colonists did or did not use so-called caste categories when describing themselves and others.

Casta painting by Miguel Cabrera

Casta painting by Miguel Cabrera

Rappaport then turns her attention directly toward mestizos (and occasionally mulattos), presenting various stories in which Crown officials struggled with caste terms. There is Juan de Medina, the self-proclaimed Indian whose enemy, an Indian, insults him as a mestizo after a bloody brawl involving a severed nose. When a tax collector confused Juana Galván for a tribute-paying indigenous woman, she complained that she had a Spanish father and was in reality a mestiza (colonial Iberians and their mestizo children did not normally pay taxes). Rappaport also notes the cases of mulattos Lázaro, who lived and paid taxes as an Indian, and Manuel Rodríguez, who lived among Spaniards and Indians, even as he terrorized them with robberies and rape. There was Ana de Mendoza, an elite mestiza who became “hispanized” by her marriage, and Juan Birvez, a man who witnesses outed as a mestizo as he lay in bed with the daughter of a powerful landowner. Birvez, in turn, revealed that the daughter was a mestiza herself. Rappaport concludes from these episodes that the matter of who was and was not a mestizo was highly contingent on the time, the place, and who was doing the naming. She argues that mestizos and mulatos did not live in a caste system; they moved in and out of their categories with ease.

A painting of a Spanish man and a Peruvian indigenous woman with Mestizo child, 1770

A painting of a Spanish man and a Peruvian indigenous woman with Mestizo child, 1770

Some mestizos, however, experienced very tangible discrimination at the hands of Crown officials and clergymen. One was the famous Gonzalo García Zorro, who became a cathedral canon in spite of stiff resistance from members of the Church. His brother Diego was less fortunate. He had close ties to Indians and found that townspeople disdained him and his pretensions to public offices due to his mixed lineage. A similar case, well known among historians of colonial Colombia, was the struggle of two mestizo “caciques” – Indian chiefs – to win the recognition of the Crown for their position. Both Alonso de Silva and Diego de Torres were sons of conquistadors and Indian women, and both lost their rights to act as caciques when their enemies raised questions about their eligibility. Mestizos in colonial Colombia were often either too Spanish or not Spanish enough, depending on the position they sought to achieve.

Casta Painting from Peru, 1770.

Casta Painting from Peru, 1770.

Rappaport’s book does admirable work at dismantling the myth of the caste system, showing that colonists hardly ordered themselves into clean-cut categories. This observation brings up a mystery that the author does not answer, however. Why did Crown officials and clergymen frequently describe individuals as mestizos to begin with?

Rappaport all but ignores the problem of mestizo laws – the Crown decrees that insisted that mestizos not enter the priesthood, not live in Indian towns, not act as caciques, and so forth. This is a critical weakness in a work that pivots around the reasons colonists categorized one another.

Mestizo laws are difficult to understand at first glance. My research into the sixteenth-century creation of the term reveals more chaos than clarity. For every law forbidding mestizos’ entry into the priesthood, for example, there are two allowing it. The same follows for many similar decrees regarding mestizos’ rights to carry arms, inherit land, and so forth.

also known as the New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians, were issued on November 20, 1542, by King Charles I of Spain and regard the Spanish colonization of the Americas.

Front cover of the New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians. The New Laws were issued on November 20, 1542, by King Charles I of Spain and regard the Spanish colonization of the Americas.

The solution to this mystery lies in the nature of Spanish imperial law, and has important consequences for the practices of naming mestizos. The King desired close contact with his colonists – from the humblest Indian to the richest Spaniard. He also desired to resolve conflicts and avoid bloodshed. The Monarch and his Council thus oversaw all sorts of legal disputes, simultaneously providing colonists with mediation and collecting hordes of information on the New World all at once. It was in this flurry of colonial petitions to the Crown that the meaning of the term mestizo arose. Countless petitioners thus created different meanings for the term mestizo from below, in the process sowing legal chaos on a grand scale.

Emblem of the Council of the Indies from the frontispiece of the 'Recopilacion de leyes de los Reynos de Las Indias', Madrid, 1681.

Emblem of the Council of the Indies from the frontispiece of the ‘Recopilacion de leyes de los Reynos de Las Indias’, Madrid, 1681.

The archives reveal that the true question baffling colonists and officials alike was how to deal with the petitioner-driven, ever-evolving world of mestizo law. The true “disappearing” or ‘”floating” aspect of mestizos was their shifting and contradictory legal status. Thus to understand why mestizos seem to disappear, we must open a new inquiry into the nature of Spanish imperial law. We need a case-by-case account into each specific petition and counter-petition that shaped this category.

The Disappearing Mestizo suffers from this inattention to legislation on mestizos. For one, it often sinks into an “ethnographic present” – the illusion among many anthropological writings that cultures remain stable over time – because it does not recognize how decrees on mestizos could abruptly reshape ideas about mixture. A second problem is Rappaport’s overstatement of Crown officials’ difficulty in properly identifying mestizos. In reality, most Crown functionaries could determine a person’s part-Indian, part-Spanish genealogy simply by requesting an individual provide it. Mestizo laws had little to say about more extreme cases, where a colonist was an orphan, illiterate, or too marginal in Spanish society to merit official interest. This is not a reflection of difficulty so much as indifference on the part of bureaucrats and secretaries.

Many of the concepts about race that emerged during European colonialism remain with us (in different ways) in the 21st century. Virtually all Latin American countries point to the contributions of both Spanish and indigenous peoples in shaping what they call their “mestizo nations.” Some scholars today go so far as to argue that immigration and intermarriage are returning North America to colonial times, back to the era of the mestizo. Rappaport’s book will therefore be valuable not only to historians of colonial Colombia and scholars of race, but also to a reading public from Chile to Canada that is increasingly interested in the “mixing” of peoples who created their countries. As more and more authors assert that the future itself is mestizo, the next step for scholars – a step already taken by Rappaport – will be to think deeply about that category, its history, and its hidden baggage and complexities.

Joanne Rappaport, The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada (Duke University Press, 2014)

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You may also like:

Ann Twinam discusses her work on Purchasing Whiteness in Colonial Latin America

Naming and Picturing New World Nature, by Maria Jose Afanador LLach

Kristie Flannery’s review of Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America, edited by Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara (2009)

Susan Deans-Smith on the Casta Paintings

 

For more on casta paintings:

Magali M. Carrera, Imagining identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (2003)

María Concepción García Saiz, Las castas mexicanas: un género pictórico americano (1989)

Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (2004)

 

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All images via Wikimedia Commons.

 

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