hispanic american historical review. volume 90, number 3, august 2010

HAHR90:3

August 2010

Published in cooperation with the

Conference on Latin American History

of the American Historical Association

Special Issue: Latin American Independence

In This Issue 389

Articles

The Rites of Statehood: Violence and Sovereignty in Spanish America, 1789 – 1821 jeremy adelman 391

“This England and This Now”: British Cultural and Intellectual Influence in the Spanish American Independence Era karen racine 423

The “Ancient Constitution” after Independence (1808 – 1852) josé carlos chiaramonte 455

Liberal Justice: Judicial Reform in Venezuela’s Courts, 1786 – 1850 reuben zahler 489

Book Reviews

General and Sources

Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, edited by David Eltis and David Richardson, reviewed by David Northrup 523

Siervos libres: Una propuesta antiesclavista a finales del siglo XVII, by Epifanio de Moirans, edited by Miguel Anxo Pena González, reviewed by Edward R. Sunshine 525

The History of the Conquest of New Spain, by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, edited and with an introduction by Davíd Carrasco, reviewed by Matthew Restall 526

Bonds of Blood: Gender, Lifecycle, and Sacrifice in Aztec Culture, by Caroline Dodds Pennock, reviewed by Susan Kellogg 527

ii HAHR / August

De protagonistas a desaparecidos: Las sociedades indígenas de la Gran Nicoya siglos XIV a XVII, by Meritxell Tous Mata, reviewed by Eugenia Ibarra 529

De Guancane a Macondo: Estudios de literatura hispanoamericana, by Rolena Adorno, reviewed by Gonzalo Lamana 531

Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities, edited by Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, reviewed by S. Elizabeth Penry 532

Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics, by Peter Burke and Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke, reviewed by Amy Caldwell de Farias 534

Feeding Chilapa: The Birth, Life, and Death of a Mexican Region, by Chris Kyle, reviewed by John E. Kicza 536

Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World, by Marcy Norton, reviewed by Susan G. Polansky 537

Colonial Period

Invaders as Ancestors: On the Intercultural Making and Unmaking of Spanish Colonialism in the Andes, by Peter Gose, reviewed by David T. Garrett 539

The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750 – 1830, by Hal Langfur, reviewed by Zephyr Frank 541

Imaginarios ambiguos, realidades contradictorias: Conductas y representaciones de los negros y mulatos novohispanos: Siglos XVI y XVII, by Úrsula Camba Ludlow, reviewed by Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas 542

Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500 – 1800, edited by Daniela Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan, reviewed by Felipe Fernández-Armesto 544

Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico, by Sherry Fields, reviewed by Noble David Cook 546

Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues: The Court Society of Colonial Mexico, 1702 – 1710, by Christoph Rosenmüller, reviewed by John S. Leiby 548

Redes sociales e instituciones comerciales en el imperio español, siglos XVII al XIX, by Antonio Ibarra and Guillermina del Valle Pavón, reviewed by Juan Carlos Sola-Corbacho 549

Castigar y perdonar cuando conviene a la república: La justicia penal de Córdoba del Tucumán, siglos XVII y XVIII, by Alejandro Agüero, reviewed by Beatriz Vitar 551

Contents iii

National Period

The Mexican Wars for Independence, by Timothy J. Henderson, reviewed by William Schell Jr. 553

San Martín: Argentine Soldier, American Hero, by John Lynch, reviewed by John S. Leiby 554

The Emperor’s Last Campaign: A Napoleonic Empire in America, by Emilio Ocampo, reviewed by David Bushnell 556

Las otras ideas: Estudio sobre el primer socialismo en México, 1850 – 1935, by Carlos Illades, reviewed by Pablo Yankelevich 557

Hijos del Pueblo: Gender, Family, and Community in Rural Mexico, 1730 – 1850, by Deborah E. Kanter, reviewed by Susan Schroeder 559

Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax Priísta, 1940 – 1962, by Tanalís Padilla, reviewed by Paul Hart 561

Immigration and Xenophobia: Portuguese Immigrants in Early 19th Century Rio de Janeiro, by Rosana Barbosa, reviewed by Brad Lange 562

The Financial Crisis of Abolition, by John Schulz, reviewed by Douglas C. Libby 564

Historia del capitalismo agrario pampeano: Tomo 4: La agricultura pampeana en la primera mitad del siglo XIX, by Julio Djenderedjian, reviewed by Patricia Juarez-Dappe 566

La matanza del Seguro Obrero (5 de septiembre de 1938), by Marcus Klein, reviewed by Claudio Robles-Ortiz 568

Ese gol existe: Una mirada al Perú a través del fútbol, edited by Aldo Panfichi, reviewed by Charles F. Walker 569

International and Comparative

Guerrillas: War and Peace in Central America, by Dirk Kruijt, reviewed by Craig Auchter 571

Fórmula para o caos: A derrubada de Salvador Allende (1970 – 1973), by Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, reviewed by Sarah Sarzynski 573

The Cuban Connection: Drug Trafficking, Smuggling, and Gambling in Cuba from the 1920s to the Revolution, by Eduardo Sáenz Rovner, translated by Russ Davidson, reviewed by Eric Paul Roorda 574

Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities, by Laura Lomas, reviewed by Raúl Fernández 576

iv HAHR / August

Race, Colonialism, and Social Transformation in Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Jerome Branche, reviewed by Rebecca Earle 578

La frontera que vino del norte, by Carlos González Herrera, reviewed by Arturo Rosales 579

Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: A Reader, edited by Denise A. Segura and Patricia Zavella, reviewed by Marie Woodling 581

Conflict and Commerce on the Rio Grande: Laredo, 1755 – 1955, by John A. Adams Jr., reviewed by Richard B. McCaslin 583

From Many, One: Indians, Peasants, Borders, and Education in Callista Mexico, 1924 – 1935, by Andrae M. Marak, reviewed by Ariadna Acevedo-Rodrigo 584

Communication 587

Editors

Senior EditorsGeorge Reid Andrews, Alejandro de la Fuente, and Lara Putnam

Associate/Book Review Editors Paul Eiss and John Soluri

Managing Editor Sara Lickey

Editorial Assistant Crystal Reardon

Board of Editors

Alejandra Bronfman, University of British Columbia (2014) Kathryn Burns, University of North Carolina (2011) Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, University of Texas–Austin (2014) Sueann Caulfield, University of Michigan (2015) Sidney Chalhoub, Universidade Estadual de Campinas (2011) Margaret Chowning, University of California, Berkeley (2013) Ariel de la Fuente, Purdue University (2013) Rebecca Earle, University of Warwick (2016) Thomas Holloway, University of California, Davis (2016) Marial Iglesias Utset, Havana, Cuba (2016) Kris Lane, College of William & Mary (2015) Hal Langfur, State University of New York at Buffalo, Representative of CLAH (2014) Valerie Millholland, Representative of Duke University Press John M. Monteiro, Universidade Estadual de Campinas (2015) Fernando Purcell, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (2016) Charles F. Walker, University of California, Davis (2015)

Contributors

jeremy adelman is the Walter Samuel Carpenter III Professor of Spanish Civilization and Culture and Director of the Council for International Teaching and Research at Princeton University. Among his recent books are Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, 2006) and the coauthored Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World from the Beginnings of Humankind to the Present (New York, 2008). He is currently completing an intellectual biography of Albert O. Hirschman.

josé carlos chiaramonte is Profesor Honorario at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) and a senior researcher for the Consejo Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (CONICET). He is also Director of the Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana “Dr. Emilio Ravignani” (UBA). The intellectual history of Latin America, especially the history of political thought in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish America, is his main field of research. His published works include Nacionalismo y liberalismo económicos en Argentina, 1860 – 1880 (1970), Formas de sociedad y economía en Hispanoamérica (1983), La Ilustración en el Río de la Plata: Cultura eclesiástica y cultura laica durante el Virreinato (1989), Mercaderes del Litoral (1991), Ciudades, provincias, estados: Orígenes de la nación argentina, 1800 – 1846 (1997), and Nación y estado en Iberoamérica: El lenguaje político en tiempos de las independencias (2004).

karen racine is an associate professor of Latin American history at the University of Guelph. She earned her PhD at Tulane University and is the author of Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution, 1750 – 1816 and several academic articles related to travel, national identity, Spanish American independence, and transatlantic romanticism. Most recently, she and Beatriz Gallotti Mamigonian have coedited two anthologies of historical mini-biographies: The Human Tradition in the Black Atlantic, 1500 – 2000 and The Human Tradition in the Atlantic World. She is finishing a book on Spanish American independence leaders in London from 1808 to 1829, and another on the British poet laureate Robert Southey and his work on the Luso-Hispanic world.

reuben zahler received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2005 and is currently a visiting assistant professor at the Clark Honors College of the University of Oregon. He studies political and legal culture during Latin America’s middle period (ca. 1750 – 1850). He has previously published on the changes in Venezuela’s adoption of liberal administrative standards during this period and is working on another article on conditions for Europeans living in Venezuela during the 1820s. His current book project illuminates the enormous transformations in honor, law, and political culture that occurred as Venezuela moved from a colony to a liberal republic, and how ordinary men and women promoted, adopted, and rejected these changes.

Hispanic American Historical Review 90:3 Copyright 2010 by Duke University Press

In This Issue

This issue brings together four examples of the kind of new scholarship on the independence era that is advancing our understanding and raising new questions as we reach the two hundredth anniversary of the first declarations of local, regional, and national sovereignty within the Spanish Americas. The questions of who would rule what territory, how, and toward what ends would be fiercely disputed across the Americas over subsequent years and decades. Not surpris-ingly, given the history of tumultuous events and sharp local reversals, which nevertheless generated profoundly similar panoramas across time and space, debates over the degree of rupture versus continuity have been central to the historiography of the independence era. Articles in this issue offer intriguingly contradictory contributions to these debates, finding transformation alongside persistence. These studies foreground local fractures as well as transnational connections and slow evolution of idea and practice as well as rapid responses to contingencies and innovations.

In “The Rites of Statehood: Violence and Sovereignty in Spanish America, 1789 – 1821,” Jeremy Adelman surveys the local dynamics of violence on a conti-nental scale, arguing that the “break in sovereignty” occasioned by Napoleon’s invasion of Spain “altered the practice of political violence” in consequential ways. “Enforcements that were once seen as the rites of natural justice [came] to be seen as the exercise of tyranny,” and uprisings begat retaliatory savagery in region after region. Yet if deadly practice had consequences, so too did distant projects. In “ ‘This England and This Now’: British Cultural and Intellectual Influence in the Spanish American Independence Era,” Karen Racine argues that it was Great Britain, rather than France or the United States, that pro-vided prominent Spanish American patriots with “their most important cultural model, their animating energy, and their major material support.” José Carlos Chiaramonte in “The ‘Ancient Constitution’ after Independence (1808 – 1852)” carefully parses political rhetoric, jurisprudence, and proclamations to uncover Iberoamerican conceptions of an ancient constitution that governed the legiti-mate exercise of power, and then tracks the persistence of this doctrine of just governance and collective rights in the post-independence era. Last, in “Lib-

390 HAHR / August

eral Justice: Judicial Reform in Venezuela’s Courts, 1786 – 1850,” Reuben Zahler marshals both quantitative and qualitative evidence to show continuities in the recourse to the judicial system across the era of independence, while also dem-onstrating the courts’ serious engagement with the new liberal principles of equality and due process that republican constitutions and laws introduced.

As a group, the articles reveal profound continuities in political concep-tualizations and judicial practices alongside unmistakable change in the form of spiraling local responses to contingent events and in new goals and strate-gies developed in the intellectual ferment of the broader Atlantic world. These divergent trends coexisted and overlapped: the Venezuelan and rioplatense locales that figure prominently in Adelman’s panorama of political violence are also the foci of Chiaramonte’s and Zahler’s accounts of political and judicial continu-ities, respectively. Meanwhile, placing Adelman’s and Racine’s articles side by side gives us vivid portraits of those aspects of the independence era easiest to demonize or to idealize. Adelman show us skulls left to rot in cages and former shopkeepers mastering the theatrical butchery of civilian populations as a cru-elly effective tactic within the exigencies of wartime struggle among balanced foes. Racine shows us a moment of self-confident aspiration in which it seemed privilege and shared progress might go hand in hand, as Spanish American lead-ers, inspired by British aristocratic reformism, sought to spur local initiatives that would take advantage of international innovations in medicine, engineer-ing, education, and social reform. All four articles unsettle any presumption that divides of caste and class dictated the course of revolutionary violence or postrevolutionary state formation in a simple or mechanistic way.

Serious attention to these apparently contradictory findings should spur new studies, which might well shed light on some of the core questions of post-revolutionary state and society. While classic studies saw nineteenth-century “caudillismo” and civil strife as evidence of the utter breakdown of the rule of law, these articles together suggest otherwise. In line with the findings of a broad array of recent scholarship that has moved to rethink the political in Latin American history — working from a salutary range of theoretical coordinates and methodological stances — these articles suggest that observing nineteenth-century practices of governance, public debate, and collective engagement on their own terms may allow us to see the apparently disparate trends in mili-tarized regional conflict, national jurisprudence, and popular mobilization as components of cohesive political systems, whose systematic frictions reflected the endurance of conflicting ideals and hopes, rather than their absence.

I am grateful to the editors and reviewers of the HAHR for valuable comments, and to colleagues and students at the University of Chicago and Columbia University, where earlier versions of this essay were presented.

1. Some important and valuable exceptions are Christon I. Archer, ed., The Wars of Independence in Spanish America (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000); Clément Thibaud, Repúblicas en armas: Los ejércitos bolivarianos en la Guerra de Independencia en Colombia y Venezuela (Bogotá: Planeta, 2003).

2. For recent surveys of the independence period, see Antonio Annino and Rafael Rojas, La Independencia: Los libros de la patria (Mexico City: Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas / Fondo de Cultura Economica, 2008); John Charles Chasteen, Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,

Hispanic American Historical Review 90:3 doi 10.1215/00182168-2010-001 Copyright 2010 by Duke University Press

The Rites of Statehood:

Violence and Sovereignty in Spanish

America, 1789 – 1821

Jeremy Adelman

What was the relationship between savagery and state formation in Span-ish America’s passage from colonial to postcolonial times? Some clues to this question have come from a distinguished past tradition of military history of the region. But the emphasis on martial narratives passed out of fashion with the demise of patriotic histories of “the liberators” and their foes.1 Indeed, the eclipse of military history coincided in the 1960s with a general turn away from politics, which attributed to violence underlying structural forces and sought to examine them. Under the combined influence of dependency approaches, Marxism, and the Annales-informed histories, historians focused on what they thought were “primal” sources of social strife and deemphasized événementielle features of political life, including therefore political ruptures that shook up social relations. What ruptures could be found were treated as the effects of global commercial changes and the proletarianization of labor. When political history came back into vogue it was often stripped of violent features. Indeed, as the allure of “revolution” faded in the 1980s and despots returned to the barracks, historians became more interested in exclusion than exploitation, and so the emergence of a public sphere and new practices of representation took center stage.2

392 HAHR / August / Adelman

Yet violence hangs over Spanish American historiography like a cloud. Perhaps this has escaped analysis because violence was such an obvious fea-ture of political life; for so many, cruelty was sown into a tradition of conquest and dictatorship. Without wishing to debunk the “fire and brimstone” style of chronicling the region’s past, this essay puts wrath into a context, with attention to its specific causes and mutations. It seeks to explore ways to combine some of the insights of military historians who have thought about the organization and conduct of group violence with the political historian’s concern with civic practices, rhetoric, and institutions, looking at how violence shaped the public sphere by making it highly charged or constrained, and how the public sphere became the setting in which the apostles of political violence vindicated their methods.

One way to think of political violence more actively is to consider it within a broadened spectrum ranging from the activities of standing armies to infor-mal means of settling scores, a space where crowds, bandidos, militiamen, and semi-organized mobs struggled for control of state power, and against it. It may help to borrow and adapt insights from studies of how angry hordes, rioters, and rebels attacked authorities who failed to provide customary forms of jus-tice. Inspired by the work of George Rudé, E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and others, historians of early modern Europe and colonial Latin America (and more recently nineteenth-century Latin America) have catalogued the ways in which groups of men and women took to the streets with pitchforks and guns to assail officials and their associates. But seldom did rebellious crowds call for new regimes. They more often sought a restoration of order than a revolution-ary successor. For the most part, public violence in eighteenth-century Spanish America conforms to this model of a defense of a moral economy against the perceived failures of its political guardians. Studies of the nineteenth century increasingly suggest the same, albeit in more “republican” terms.3

2008). The literature on the public sphere is also expansive. Isabel Lustosa, Insultos impressos: A guerra dos jornalistas na independência, 1821 – 1822 (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000); Rafael Rojas, La escritura de la independencia: El surgimiento de la opinion pública en México (Mexico City: Taurus, 2003); Véronique Hébrard, Le Venezuela indépendant: Une nation par le discours, 1808 – 1830 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996); Victor M. Uribe-Uran, “The Birth of a Public Sphere in Latin America during the Age of Revolution,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 2 (Apr. 2000): 425 – 57.

3. Classic studies include George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730 – 1848 (New York: Wiley, 1964); Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester: Univ. of Manchester Press, 1959); E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy

The Rites of Statehood 393

Yet, widening the spectrum of organized violence may not be adequate to deal with the upheavals from 1808 to 1821. In this conjuncture, large groups and their leaders fought for more than better governors; they struggled for new governments. This was more than a really big rebellion; it was a revolution to cleanse the world of the sources of bad rulers, for this was a specific type of crisis of a moral economy. Occasioned less by the insinuations of a market economy (though that was going on) than by the collapse of a model sovereignty that enforced exploitation and legitimated social inequality, it sired a revolution. And the concept of revolution comes burdened with historiographic baggage that specifically addresses the legacies of its primum mobile, violence. Edmund Burke’s prophecy — that men who make their careers by seizing power violently to rid the world of evil cannot help but be consumed by their own devices — has rung through the centuries. Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution captured the grow-ing alarm about rising worldwide belligerence and argued that violence did much more to destroy than to create. Echoes of her jeremiad could be found among historians of the French Revolution, especially leading up to and during the debate about the bicentenary of 1789. For François Furet, the revolution was the work of ideological agents who created primal oppositions in order to justify bloodshed; once in place, the inner “logic” of revolution could only end in terror and gulags.4

of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50, no. 1 (Feb. 1971): 76 – 136. For the New World, see William B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1979), and more recently Sergio Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2003). For some recent examples of nineteenth-century studies of political violence, see Hilda Sabato, La política en las calles: Entre el voto y la movilización: Buenos Aires, 1862 – 1880 (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1998), and especially Buenos Aires en armas: La revolución de 1880 (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2008), and for an example of a slave rebellion with its own particular “restorationist” aspirations, see the pathbreaking study by João José Reis, Rebeliao escrava no Brasil: a história do levante dos malês em 1835 (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003). Useful anthologies on rebellion in Mexico and the Andes, where the research has been most advanced, include Friedrich Katz, ed., Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution: Rural Social Conflict in Mexico (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988); and Steve J. Stern, ed., Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987).

4. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Penguin, 1986); Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963); Jim Wolfreys, “Twilight Revolution: François Furet and the Manufacturing of Consensus,” in History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism, ed. Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys (London: Verso, 2007), 50 – 69.


This approach to revolution shaped Spanish American scholarship. Rev-olutions took ordered, stratified societies and flattened them while creating a new type of social order that favored violence and uncivil modes of politics. The caudillo exemplified the antithesis of the idealized public sphere and his triumph marked its failure, ushering in Spanish America’s long detour from liberalism. For John J. Johnson, this was the birth of a military “tradition.” For others, violence upset what might have been a peaceable transformation man-aged within the coordinates of a transatlantic Spanish constitutionalism under the charter of 1812. Once armed spoilers dominated the stage, gentlemanly civic change guided by legislators gave way to brutality and extremism. Perhaps the most influential scholar operating in this scheme was, not surprisingly, working in France: the late François-Xavier Guerra argued that the French Revolution disrupted the conceptual order across the Spanish Empire, so that precocious experiences with modern representation were overwhelmed by colonial ana-logues of Paris’s Jacobins.5

The problem with this formulation was that violence did not require much explanation since it was endowed with a macabre ability to reproduce itself. Once unleashed, it simply “escalated.” The role of primal bloodshed was cen-tral to the master narrative of Spanish America’s long history and yet was not a subject of study. It is time to study it, to pose questions like “how and why did violence escalate?” The end of the Cold War and the visibility of crimes against humanity have renewed attention to political violence because it is not treated as a simple by-product of ideology or the human psychology of cruelty. More recently, the study of civil wars, blood feuds, and reciprocal bloodletting by members of the same political communities has illuminated how violence unfolds within societies, without assuming that the making of modern states was about curbing primordial passions through what Norbert Elias called “the civilizing process.”6

5. John J. Johnson, The Military and Society in Latin America (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1964); John Lynch, Caudillos in Spanish America, 1800 – 1850 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992); François-Xavier Guerra, Modernidad e independencias: Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas (Madrid: MAPFRE, 1992). There is a way in which Jaime Rodríguez O.’s important Independence in Spanish America echoes an aspect of this lament for a constitutional order that might have emerged from 1808 and the crippling of successor states and making them prey for new kinds of imperial predation. Independence in Spanish America (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998).

6. Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2007); Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000); David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).


By exploring how politics became a matter of life and death, this essay seeks to put viciousness and slaughter into context and to make some sense of the rhetoric of public cruelty. In what follows, political violence does not conform to some fundamental logic of revolutions or some deep-seated animosity (based on ethnicity, nation, class, or some other social divide), as if group identities and animosities predicted an inexorable sequence of escalating hatred that inevitably led from peace to war. It will be important to recapture the truces, backsliding, side switching, flight, pauses, and outbursts as reflections of the ways in which revolutionary upheaval entwined peace and violence — and the choices between them — precisely because the bloodshed was so fratricidal and not rooted in ancient discord. While the steps and countersteps varied, violence was central to the course of revolutions not because large numbers of people became more fanatical but because it was a means to rid the world of threats and enemies.

Violence is not a timeless expression of frustration endowed with the same meanings and significance across time and space, as if what we might under-stand by “terror” meant the same thing two centuries ago as it does now. Vio-lence has specific causes and connotations that compel us to ask where these threats and enemies came from and what caused the crisis in the moral economy. The implosion of the Spanish Empire shook the principles of sovereignty that enforced exploitation, legitimated social inequality, and held the fabric of moral economy together. The carnage with which this essay is concerned came from a context in which the labor of dividing and separating large groups of people into rival camps was part of a civil war, understood as “armed combat within the boundaries of a recognized sovereign entity between parties subject to a com-mon authority at the outset of hostilities,” occasioned by a break in legal author-ity, the fragmentation of juridical spaces, and intensified by efforts to restore an old order.7 Violence depended on and shaped political choices over who was the enemy and how to rid it in an effort to restore, or create anew, a model of sovereignty. Understanding these choices requires attention to particular cir-cumstances whose effects cannot be reduced to some basic, underlying logic.

An important precaution is in order: the molecular decomposition of state authority meant that the “space” of Spanish America became more differenti-ated as the crisis spread. Some of the important subregional differences may be lost in this essay’s effort to tease out general patterns about microsocial pro-cesses. More finely grained studies of violence will help evaluate some of the general claims proposed below. Furthermore, this essay does not systematically compare older viceroyalties, for example, where loyalism had more ballast, and

7. Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), 5.


newer ones, where town councils and the press more easily raised the banner of change, or societies where belligerents began to arm slaves earlier versus those that deferred it. This would be an illuminating exercise, but it is not my purpose here. For all the variety, a common fate awaited the Spanish American colonies, with the exception of Cuba and Puerto Rico. The ensuing civil conflict ended not on the battlefield but with one side’s collapse. It left to the “victors” the chal-lenge of reassembling the parts of fratricidally divided societies whose memories of bloodshed did not easily lend themselves to uplifting narratives of national redemption.8

Crowds, conspiracies, and collective banditry had long been the source of public violence in colonial Spanish America. They did not arise from a fundamental crisis of sovereignty, though they reflected colonial subjects’ unease with their governments. Early mass rebellions reached their crescendo in the 1780s and spread panic among colonial administrators, but the combination of commer-cial expansion and the relaxation of some fiscal demands on colonial subjects relieved the tension. Still, grievances and unrest did not evaporate.

Authorities in Quito worried about the news of subterranean plots. They woke up in the mornings to find public walls painted with ominous warnings. “lybery, sto, felycy7a7em, e7, gloryam, consecuento,” announced one. Important intersections had banners and flags with a white cross and red letter-ing across the axis that read “salva cruce.” Flyers and broadsheets also carried the viceroy’s message that “sedition (could be) found all over Quito . . . directed to hallucinate and provoke the Plebe.” What exactly all this meant was unclear then and remains so now. But it did not prevent frightened authorities from arresting and interrogating a local school teacher. This was in 1794, shortly after the creole publisher and tertulía impresario Antonio Nariño translated Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man into Spanish. Copies of it were now thought to be circulating in Cartagena, Santa Fé, and beyond. Viceroy José de Ezpeleta put his officers on high alert for seditious acts.9

Fear of insurrection was already spreading. The French Revolution sent panic across the Atlantic world, unleashing witch hunts for Jacobins and their allies. But in Spanish America, especially in the slave belts, the specter of Saint Domingue was more frightening. The 1790s saw a spike in thefts and destruc-

8. The literature on civil war and memory is expansive. A fine example is David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001).

9. José de Ezpleta to Duque de la Alcudia, 19 Nov. 1794, Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI), Estado, Santa Fé, 53/55.


tion of property, which many saw as a sign of spreading unrest, especially among rural and urban slaves. Some of this appears to have aggregated into low-intensity social banditry. The late Alberto Flores Galindo left us with an impression of late colonial Lima as rife with ambiguous tensions, stable in contrast to the upheaval of the 1780s and yet simmering with popular disrespect for patrician property. There were plenty of places where the stability was only superficial. If authorities in Santa Fé were worried, imagine the concern in Caracas, where slave revolts and rumors of them abounded. It was not only seditious slaves that brought concern; there were the occasional creole secessionists to worry about as well, like the botched conspiracy known as the Gual and España plot (named after the two schemers). In the cache of discovered documents were Spanish translations of the Rights of Man and copies of songs, some of which were meant to be chanted to the tune of the Marseillaise. One was called “La Cancion Americana,” whose verses included some troublesome words:

Viva tan solo el Pueblo el Pueblo Soberano.Mueran los opresores, Mueran sus partidarios.

The idea of slaying the enemy was already on some peoples’ lips. But what worried governors most was a convergence of local Jacobins with slaves and Indians. General Mateo Pérez warned his superiors that “we must not under-estimate nor irritate mulattos, zambos, and blacks with disdain and mistreat-ment!” Indeed, of the 65 men arrested in the conspiracy, only 34 were white; the rest were either pardo or free black.10

Warnings became prophecies. In 1799, the slave coast from Venezuela to Cartagena was seized by a wave of conspiracies and local uprisings. One group tried to seize the Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas overlooking the harbor of Cartagena. Others took over estates and burned mills. In Maracaibo, there were rumors that runaway slaves and Guajiro Indians were preparing an army to assault the town. Authorities reported that squadrons of slaves (quadrillas) were patrolling the country roads, seizing carts and pillaging white farms. One cap-tured slave confessed that he was on a mission with others “to kill all Whites,

10. Alberto Flores Galindo, “Bandidos de la Costa,” in Bandoleros, abigeos y montoneros: Criminalidad y violencia en el Perú, siglos XVIII – XX, ed. Carlos Aguirre and Charles Walker (Lima: Instituto de Apoyo Agrario / Pasado y Presente, 1990), 57 – 68; and Alberto Flores Galindo, Los rostros de la plebe (Barcelona: Crítica, 2001), 61 – 102; AGI, Estado, Lima, 75/48, 1796, Carta Anonima; General Mateo Pérez to Principe de la Paz, 30 Aug. 1797, AGI, Estado, Caracas, 71/2.


to plunder the King’s treasures as well as those of his subjects.” The fugitives, once the lockdown had apparently defused the crisis, scattered into the social wilderness, leaving behind them the smoke of fear and panic. As the revolution on Saint Domingue finally drove Napoleon’s forces from the island, boats of insurgents landed around the area of Río Hacha to join squads of runaways, freed plebeian forces, and Indians. The bottom-up unrest was not restricted to slave provinces. Some of Jalisco’s gangs (gavillas) formed in bars, jails, and gam-bling dens graduated from highway robbery to social banditry. In Riobamba, Andean Indians bearing sabers and machetes confronted the corregidor Xavier Mantúfar in 1803 to protest his way of ruling. The turn of the century in gen-eral saw fewer coordinated defenses of “community” (as one might understand the acts of Comunero predecessors or the more potent spasm of violence of the 1780s in the central Andes) but rising resistance to the more basic components of the colonial moral economy and displays in favor of expanded freedoms (of labor, expression, and trade, and from taxes). Very seldom did this unrest call for an overturn of colonial rule or monarchy. It exemplified the exhaustion of a model of exploitation and system of public finance in the age of heightened inter imperial warfare.11

But to the authorities, unrest, sedition, and insubordination were pre-ambles to revolution, especially after 1789. They responded in predictable ways. One was to bolster local militias to patrol neighborhoods and countryside. In the frontiers of the Banda Oriental, lancers toured the byways between estates to keep the peace. Squadrons of riflemen, often funded by merchant guilds to make up for the government’s penury, were dispatched to prevent slaves from fleeing plantations. In 1794 this was a regular practice in Caracas, where the Consulado in effect bankrolled the colonial state in its effort to preserve social order and enforced a local passport system for slaves off the plantations.12

11. AGI, Estado, Santa Fé: Pedro Mendinueta to Francisco Saavedra, 52/76; Report by Governor of Cartagena, 53/77; Mendieta to Ceballos, 25 Mar. 1803, 52/84. William B. Taylor, “Banditry and Insurrection: Rural Unrest in Central Jalisco, 1790 – 1816,” in Katz, Riot, Rebellion and Revolution, 208 – 10. On exhaustion, see Enrique Tandeter, Coacción y Mercado: La minería de la plata en el Potosí colonial, 1692 – 1826 (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1992), 253 – 63; John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750 – 1940 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986), chap. 2; Richard L. Garner, Economic Growth and Change in Bourbon Mexico (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 1993), 37 – 71. More generally on bankruptcy, see Carlos Marichal, Bankruptcy of Empire: Mexican Silver and the Wars Between Spain, Britain, and France, 1760 – 1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007)

12. Archivo General de la Nacion, Caracas (hereafter AGNC), Real Consulado, Actas, 2526, ff. 37 – 38.


Seditious literature, which included all books or newspapers printed in French, was simply banned, leaving to the censors the task of separating legal from illegal tracts. Nariño’s translation of the Rights of Man landed him in prison. The oidor of the Santa Fé Audiencia described lurid nightmares to Charles IV’s minister, “the Prince of Peace,” to justify the censorship and incar-ceration, which only confirmed the general view in Madrid that Jacobin agents could be found under beds all over the empire. When posters and other broad-sheets began to appear on the streets, roundups began. In spite of protests by, among others, the magnates of the cabildo, there was no leniency. Eleven “con-spirators,” including Nariño, were dispatched to Spain to face trial (where it was felt that the courts would be free from the pressures of local subjects). Nariño understandably felt scapegoated, and when his appeal was rejected he fled to Paris to become an avowed lifelong opponent of Spanish rule.13

These were preemptive measures and expressions of the manifold ways in which fear mutated into loathing. They represent only one end of a spectrum of deterrence. Ironically, Nariño printed only a hundred copies of the tract, and when he heard that he might be arrested he had them all burned, save two copies. But there was harsh justice for those who crossed the line. Those caught conspiring faced stricter penalties and even death sentences. After Miranda’s failed attempt to lead a revolution from Coro in 1806, his followers who had not managed to escape with him or to slip away in canoes to Margarita Island were rounded up. All were denounced as “traitors” dedicated to whipping up the “gente reboltosa” and who threatened to bring to Venezuela something akin to “the black tyrant Dessalines.” Ten of Miranda’s followers were summarily hung, their bodies left dangling from the gallows. The rest were sent to Spain to lan-guish in prison. This kind of violence exemplified what Lynn Hunt has called a “pageantry of pain,” public spectacles of corporal punishment from whippings to executions, a gamut of bodily desecration meant to dishonor the criminal and demonstrate the baseness and powerlessness of the condemned as well as the might and glory of rulers.14

13. Conde de Torre Velarde to Principe de la Paz, 19 July 1797, AGI, Estado, Santa Fé, 53/59; Anthony McFarlane, Colombia before Independence: Economy, Society and Politics under Bourbon Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 284 – 89.

14. Andrés Bello, “Observaciones sobre la situacion de Coro,” 2 Sept. 1806, AGI, Gobierno, Caracas, 458. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 93. The most evocative narrative of this model of justice is Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin, 1991). See also Gene E. Ogle, “Slaves of Justice: Saint Domingue’s Executioners and the Production of Shame,” Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 29, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 275 – 94.


Armed social conflict is one thing; war is quite another. Society at this point was far from a cycle of civil strife and terror, and certainly no breakdown of the basic colonial system had occurred. The violence lacked the “organiza-tional” personality it would have in a few years’ time. Desecration and rumors of killing came nowhere close to the language or threat of extermination. Indeed, colonial subjects for the most part combined their unease with officials’ heavy-handedness with a vision of the monarch as a source of justice and appealed to this sense of justice in self-defense in the unfortunate event of arrest. It would take a specific kind of break in the legal order for enforcements that were once seen as the rites of natural justice to appear as the exercise of tyranny, or for plebeian violence to be seen as more than vindictiveness.

There was no shortage of motives for fear and unrest in late colonial Span-ish America. Events in 1808 aggravated them all. Napoleonic armies streamed into Spain and Ferdinand fell into the French ruler’s hands. Gone was the mon-archy, the central legitimating symbol for the empire and source of Christian justice. With the king unable to rule his subjects, who or what would fill the gap, and how? It was this break in sovereignty that altered the practice of political violence. The late Charles Tilly, following an insight by Trotsky, argued that revolutionary situations were those in which more than one power bloc exer-cised control over part of the state apparatus. Dual or manifold sovereignties provoke different classes, sectors, and alliances to lay claim to state power. This is what started to happen in 1808 across the Iberian Atlantic. The fissuring of the ancien régime did not widen under pressure from Jacobin plots or the revo-lutionary wars of the 1790s but only when the interimperial rivalries blew open with the coronation of Napoleon as the emperor of France and his campaign for European supremacy.15

If a break in sovereignty occasioned a revolutionary situation it did not determine its course. For this, we need to come to terms with the contingencies of the conflicts that ensued and the violence they magnified. As Spaniards and colonists grappled with how to improvise a system of rule, they set off a debate about local autonomy and representation that cascaded into confrontations over who had voice and how and where they were allowed to express it. The cycle upset the delicate equipoise of urban patrician models of political domination, which only intensified authorities’ suspicions and, in some cases, such as Mexico City, their reactionary reflexes. It took little time for the war of words to lead to violence. In July 1809, a group of well-to-do creoles in Quito grew increasingly

15. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978), 190 – 91.


frustrated with the Audiencia’s foot-dragging and denounced the viceroy’s local officials, calling for an autonomous junta to govern the province in the name of the king. This was not a declaration of independence, but it was an affront to some royal officials. There had been arrests and verbal assaults, but now a harsh reaction was coming. The viceroy ordered troops to smother the quiteño “trai-tors,” and their leaders were rounded up. Lima sent 800 soldiers to patrol the city. More suspects were detained. While the government in Spain was debat-ing new principles of representation and elections, prosecutor Tomás Aréchaga ordered that the property of all the “rebels” be seized and requested to the vice-roy that they all be executed. Quiteños heard rumors that the repression would spread and lead to bloodshed, until a group of armed men stormed the prison and released the detained. One guard died in the melée. Then all hell broke loose. Soldiers opened fire on a crowd in the plaza mayor. Civilians attacked the presidio to get guns but were trapped inside. Troops finally captured them and shot them on the spot. One escaped. By then, fears of the Bastille-style crowd filled the minds of frightened Peruvian troops, who panicked and went on a spree of assaults and killings in search of the ringleaders and their supporters. Using swords, knives, bayonets, and axes, they found and slaughtered 28 of the men who were awaiting sentences, including some scions of the creole aristoc-racy. Spanish officials, who had lost control, retreated to the presidential palace to pray for a miracle. The absence of authority led to days of revenge killings and retributions. Civilians began to target soldiers from rooftops and windows; soldiers responded in kind and proceeded to pillage the shops around the now seething plaza mayor. President Ruiz de Castilla thought that a sign of force would do the trick to restore order; he commanded that a hanging gallows be erected in the plaza and that disloyal subjects should be left to dangle without trial. In the end, it was the bishop who defused the crisis for the moment. The toll was about 800 civilians dead in the streets, including 13 children. One hun-dred soldiers also died.16

These at least were the figures and the images that circulated at the time. Silence and fear descended on Quito. But the news spread, especially now that censorship was lifted, provoking outrage. In Santa Fé, Camilo Torres seized upon the news of the killings in Quito to cajole the Cabildo of Santa Fé to issue a Memorial de agravios, which catalogued the atrocities and urged subjects to reconsider their loyalties, less to Spain itself than to its governors. Sangui-

16. José Manuel Restrepo, Historia de la Revolución, vol. 1 (Bogotá: Bedout, 1969), 118 – 23; Jaime Rodríguez O., La revolución política durante la época de la independencia: El reino de Quito, 1808 – 1822 (Quito: Universidad Andina Simon Bolívar, 2006), 71 – 73.


17. El Argos Americano, 11 Nov. 1811; Aline Helg, “The Limits of Equality: Free People of Colour and Slaves during the First Independence of Cartagena, Colombia, 1810 – 1815,” Journal of Latin American Studies 20, no. 2 (Aug. 1999): 7 – 8.

18. Restrepo, Historia de la Revolución, 183.

nary news gave definition to a line that was once imperceptible. It also revealed how much the pattern of violence had changed from that which poised colonial militias and enforcers against plebeian sectors. The pattern of violence was less clearly molded to the landscapes of class and broke the association of enforce-ment with elites and resistance with subaltern populations.

Violence also summoned new coalitions, some even calling for secession to restore peace. Consider Cartagena, where pro – Spanish Regency factions had threatened since 1810 to roll back local autonomy and tried to seize the gover-nor’s palace and mobilize the garrison to occupy the city. After several lower-ranking officers leaked the plan, crowds took to the streets to preempt the coup and called out the mixed-race militias and lancers. When Cartagena seceded from Spanish rule in November 1811, it was an interim measure until the crisis in the metropole could be resolved. But secessionists also felt that the break was needed to reestablish legitimacy and bring an end to the carnage and its threat. The city’s assembly issued an urgent call to disarm all colonial militias to pre-vent opponents from militarizing the conflict. The authors of the declaration framed their vindications in a memory of bloodshed: “We note with horror for our consideration the three hundred years of vexations, miseries, and sufferings of all types, which accumulated over our country with the ferocity of the Con-quistadors and Spanish rulers.”17

The polarization gave rise to an ever more intransigent rhetoric. Some of it baptized the new autonomist movements with sacrificial imagery and warnings of a more redemptive, totalizing war. Antonio Nariño, who had plenty of time in Spanish prison to nurse his enmity, returned to the printing presses. His newspaper La Bagatela was dedicated to denouncing the venality and vicious-ness of Spanish authorities and publicizing every rumored repression; it invoked the epic choice in September 1811: “salvar la patria o morir.”18 Bernardo Mon-teagudo grew tired of the polite Gaceta de Buenos Aires and founded his own more vitriolic Mártir o Libre. In Venezuela, Juan Germán Roscio, otherwise a less intemperate figure than Nariño or Monteagudo, also justified self-rule to save the peace, because the Spanish could only compensate for their illegitimacy with bloodletting. The selfsame blood, however, could be the bonding agent for a new fraternal association: “We must recognize a legitimate Government and decide to seal with the blood of its very last inhabitants the oaths which have


19. Juan Germán Roscio, “Alucacion del Reglamento para la eleccion de diputados del Primer Congreso de Venezuela Independiente de 1811,” in Obras, vol. 2 (Caracas: Secretaría General de la Décima Conferencia Interamericana, 1953), 20; Mariano Moreno, “Plan de Operaciones,” in Escritos politicos y económicos (Buenos Aires: Cultura Argentina, 1915), 307.

20. Ricardo R. Caillet-Bois, “La revolucion en el virreinato,” in Historia de la Nación Argentina, vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional de Historia, 1936), 152 – 55; Charles W. Arnade, The Emergence of the Republic of Bolivia (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1957), 35 – 36.

been pronounced at the altar of loyalty and patriotism.” Mariano Moreno was practical about the need to shed blood for the revolution. Though he was asked to draft an outline for the makeup of a provisional government of Buenos Aires in July 1810, Moreno also suggested means to this end and to resort to gruesome measures if necessary: “We should not be scandalized by my words, to sever heads, spill blood, and sacrifice at all costs, even when they have all the appearances of the customs of Cannibals and Caribs” (emphasis in original).19

Demonizing the government meant that the violence could cut both ways. Indeed, no longer were crowds and civilian coalitions taking the place of govern-ments to perform what they considered to be government’s dutiful obligations to subjects, especially the supply of food — a common target of early modern riot-ing. They were increasingly claiming to be the government, with rights to wield its weapons against enfeebled incumbents. In May and June 1810, the highlands around Potosí were swept by similar unrest over loyalties to splintering sover-eignties. But when the news arrived in November that Porteño armies under General Antonio González Balcarce had defeated Spanish troops at Suipacha, crowds took to the streets. One set off for the house of the Governor Francisco de Paula Sanz, who had earlier quashed dissent. The Arequipa Division of Royal Troops opened fire; as in Quito, this ignited an urban insurrection. By the time the smoke cleared, Paula Sanz was under arrest and the city was in rebel hands. When Buenos Aires’s Juan Jose Castelli arrived in Potosí, he ordered that fir-ing squads execute the governor and his associates. Vengeance begat avenging. Lima’s viceroy Abascal dispatched armies to the highlands to drive the Porteño forces from the region. What is more, commanders were under orders to purge the cities of all sedition. These operations had to be more extensive and dig deeper than those that followed the Túpac Amaru revolt and could rely less on collaboration from local caciques (as we shall see below). From La Paz to Potosí, rebel leaders were hung in the main squares and their bodies left to rot or to be picked apart by scavenging birds. By 1816, one of the few republiquetas to survive the savagery of Spanish repression was Ayopaya, whose guerrillas, based in the highland hamlets of Palca, Machaca, and Inquisiui, menaced the roads and sil-ver caravans around La Paz, Cochabamba, and Oruro.20


In the borderlands of the Banda Oriental, the crisis of sovereignty was fur-ther complicated by the competition for dominion on the shores of the Rio de la Plata. The ratcheting up of conflict between rival autonomist and pro-junta factions coincided with — indeed, occasioned — the rapid decomposition of the viceroyalty. In the vacuum that opened up, Portuguese armies were willingly sucked in, giving the disequilibrium an imbalance of its own. Viceroy Francisco Javier de Elío holed up with his troops in Montevideo, and his fighters gave up all hope of a peaceable solution. José María Salazar, a royal naval commander, concluded that “no other methods than the force of Bayonets can pacify these provinces now.” His enemies agreed. One of the military commanders, José de Artigas, gathered his cavalry to besiege the port in an early opening of the city-country divide. His force was made up of lancers and gaucho volunteers. In the battles that ensued, the distinction between formal and informal warfare was as fluid as the alliances that fought them. The siege itself lasted almost three years and turned the prosperous outpost into a hub of disease and famine. The clash soon gave way to something more chaotic and would only partially resolve itself by the late 1820s with the formation of an “independent” Uruguay. When Arti-gas’s coalition broke up in mid-1811 (and some factions threw their lot in with the enemy when they saw the tides quickly turn), Portuguese troops began to mass along the border. This inflamed matters. The siege of Montevideo yielded to sacking and pillaging on both sides. Even Artigas’s ranks began to fill with internal agitation; the massive refugee camp of Ayuí seethed with anger and fear. To assert his authority over the camp, Artigas ordered the public execution of three men on criminal charges. The war of attrition was such that no single group could assert authority until the Spanish finally evacuated Montevideo, by which time the autonomist coalition was at open war with itself. This was less a war conducted by standing armies than organized banditry and despolia-tion conducted by all sides. When Portuguese troops did finally invade under General Diego de Souza, they faced the dilemma of most occupiers surrounded by an armed society; they too had to resort to burning and pillaging to thwart attacks. Where entire towns evacuated, the Portuguese moved in and began to settle their own footholds in abandoned counties.21

The cycle from increasing intransigence to stepped-up vengeance and civil war was especially notable in central New Spain. In Querétaro, militiamen plot-

21. Salazar to Ministero de Marina, 4 Dec. 1810, AGI, Estado, Buenos Aires, 79/26; Agustín Beraza, La economía en la Banda Oriental, 1811 – 1820 (Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 1964), 18 – 29; Pablo Blanco Acevedo, El federalismo de Artigas y la independencia nacional (Montevideo: n.p., 1939), 70 – 92.


ted the overthrow of gachupín power in response to repression in the viceregal capital, sowing the seeds for popular mobilization. Father Miguel Hidalgo, the moral crusader of the Bajío, proclaimed, “Long live Our Lady of Guadalupe, death to bad government, and death to the Spaniards!” Four days later, his armies plunged into the Battle of Guanajuato, culminating in sacking, plun-dering, and the public execution of the city’s defenders. While defenders were being mutilated, attackers broke into shops and began to parade through the streets dressed up in fancy clothes, emboldened by pilfered alcohol; the festive and the horrific combined in a single scene of confusion. In one September fortnight, hundreds of thousands of Indians, blacks, and mulattos joined the rebellion. Bishop Manuel Abad y Queipo, enraged that the rebels had painted their standards with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, warned of a deadly contagion (mortífero contagio). “Terror pánico” swept through loyalist ranks.22 As Spain’s armies in New Spain stumbled in the face of insurgents, provincial cit-ies emptied not only of their peninsulars, but often all whites, for fear of the government’s collapse. Querétaro and Mexico City filled with refugees from the provinces. While Hidalgo’s forces had some hallmarks of armies, there was a way in which they more resembled an armed mob than an army — a crowd of some 80,000 that was poised to seize Mexico City. Behind the lines (such as they were), a social order was in upheaval. Villagers seized haciendas. The owners and managers were routinely killed, their bodies desecrated. Local governors and mayors faced the same fate. One witness of the takeover of the Hacienda Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe observed that attackers “were still stabbing (the bodies) with swords, and Santiago Cuenca cut off their heads with a long knife given to him by Juan Agustín González, and Luciano Telles threw them [the heads] in a sack and tied it to the pommel of his saddle.” In the pueblo of Atla-comulco, crowds rioted, looted, and killed four Spaniards. Outbursts like this multiplied across Central New Spain. Once royalists organized and stood their ground, the Army of the Center quickly turned the tide and levied a series of devastating defeats. In the mayhem that followed, untold numbers of civilians became victims of exemplary justice. After Hidalgo’s execution in July 1811, the victor, General Félix María Calleja, ordered that his decapitated head and those of his co-conspirators be hung in cages for ten years from Guanajuato’s gra-nary, where the worst of the rebel massacres had transpired. After that, Calleja imposed a reign of fear. When he learned that people were tearing down his posted decrees at night, he ordered his soldiers to find the culprits. They failed.

22. Hugh M. Hamill Jr., The Hidalgo Revolt: Prelude to Mexican Independence (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1966), 142.


23. Christon I. Archer, “ ‘La Causa Buena’: The Counterinsurgency Army of New Spain and the Ten Years’ War,” in The Independence of Mexico and the Creation of the New Nation, ed. Jaime Rodríguez O. (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center, 1989), 85, 90, 93; Eric Van Young, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810 – 1821 (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2001), 98, 129, and for the case of Atlacomulco, see chap. 15.

Instead, 40 plebeian men were arrested, and when none would name names, 4 of them were chosen by lot to face a firing squad.23

The fact that the cycle of violence in New Spain escalated so quickly and swept across such vast territories (unlike the more localized and still largely urbanized clashes in much of the rest of Spanish America) helps explain what came after. By containing and then crushing the “insurgency” so decisively, Calleja succeeded in legating to the viceroyalty’s patrician classes a fear of what might happen in the event of a renewed contest over sovereignty. This grand peur coincided, more or less, with the restoration of Bourbon authority in Madrid. For the next six years, it was possible to convey an impression of reconstituted imperial sovereignty and so avert the kind of dynamics that ratcheted up the contestation in the Northern Andes and the River Plate.

As images of bloodbaths and news of plotting filled the press and fueled rumor mills, they could also stoke fears of treasonous behavior from within autonomist coalitions. The Porteño regime — understandably paranoid about peninsular schemes for a “reconquest” and federalist uprisings in the littoral provinces — announced that all Spanish “horrendas conspiraciones” would invite the harshest of penalties and declared that Artigas was a “traidor a la patria!” His arrest and summary execution were ordered; his killer or captor would earn 6,000 pesos’ bounty. Caracas was at odds with Puerto Cabello; Santa Fé de Bogotá (as it was now renamed) fought Cartagena, and so forth. The feuding spread. As it did, the demonizing of the enemy that was once directed outward turned inward and widened local fissures. The competition for political loyalty mobilized popular sectors, but it also gave rise to a sense of futility among many of the original “patriotic” leaders; the rebel populacho may not have been as men-acing as the defenders of the junta, but they were untrustworthy. Uncensored newspapers that once filled pages with news of a crumbling Spanish govern-ment and its cruelties in the colonies soon began to report on the dangers of “the multitude” at home. In Cartagena, the victory of popular forces demon-strated precisely why they could not be trusted, at least from the point of view of centralists like Nariño, whose Bagatela was almost as vitriolic about the masses as it once was about the Spanish government. Events in Cartagena drove him to distraction. From the neighborhood of Getsemaní, black and mulatto militias


organized by the Cuban-born mulatto Pedro Romero took up light arms and began to patrol their own streets to defend themselves against their own local authorities, which wanted them disarmed. The Getsemaní battalions became the core of the armed forces of the city and soon found themselves defending the city against Spanish attacks (mainly from Santa Marta) and centralists from Cundinamarca.24

As local coalition governments weakened, their publicists worried about the limits of citizenship. No longer was the threat from the enemy without, but the danger within. By 1812 in Caracas, the independence coalition traded accusations of treason, and on April 12 of that year the crumbling government promulgated the death penalty for treasonous acts. All opposition, the decree cried out, was treason because it was, by definition, an expression of particular interests against the general will of a newly freed “public.” Monteagudo, a wit-ness to the fragmentation of the River Plate region, pointed to the persistence of “destructive and antisocial” passions; for a people tutored only in centuries of tyranny there were no virtues. “A people who so suddenly passes from servitude to liberty is in close danger of precipitating itself to anarchy and then regress-ing to slavery.” The danger, he noted (some would say prophetically), was that passions would “renew a more pernicious internal war against liberty than one waged with all the weapons of tyrants.”25

Internalized violence begat despair, heightened suspicion, justified spying, and raised the temptation to deal with the growing instability with yet more violence. When the first Venezuelan government crumbled in July 1812 and prepared to withdraw, a handful of its younger leaders, Simon Bolívar among them, schemed to turn their president Francisco de Miranda over to the Spanish commander to face imperial magistrates. They were furious at him for allegedly

24. Juan Canter, “La Asamblea General Constituyente,” in Historia de la Nación Argentina vol. 6 (Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional de Historia, 1936), 183; Véronique Hébrard, “Opinion Pública y representacion en el Congreso Constituyente de Venezuela (1811 – 12),” in Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica: Ambiguedades y problemas, siglos XVIII y XIX, by François-Xavier Guerra, Annick Lampérière, et al. (Mexico City: Centro Francés de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos / Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1998), 211 – 24; Alfonso Múnera, El Fracaso de la Nación: Region, clase, y raza en el caribe colombiano (1717 – 1810) (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1998), 179 – 192; Marixa Lasso, Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution, Colombia 1795 – 1831 (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 44 – 46.

25. Bernardo Monteagudo, “Observacion,” in Escritos Politicos (Buenos Aires: n.p., n.d.), 57 – 58; Gustavo Montoya, “Pensamiento político de Bernardo Monteagudo,” in La independencia del Perú y la fantasma de la revolución (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2002), 152 – 88.


betraying the cause (though there is some evidence that Bolívar himself was on the verge of switching sides preemptively). Miranda, arrested and taken away in chains, would waste away in a cell in Cádiz. By late 1812, the new local ruler Domingo de Monteverde announced to his government that Venezuela was now “pacified.” Like so many claims to victory in fratricidal conflicts, this was premature. Behind the lines, the province was in upheaval. Though the repub-lican leadership had fled, local chieftains filled the void; José Francisco Bermú-dez, Santiago Mariño, and the mulatto Manuel Piar mobilized slaves and freed blacks in the east and eventually helped drive Monteverde from the capital. The seesaw continued; the second republic was even weaker, and more short-lived, than the first. Each side was strong enough to neutralize its adversary; none had the power to impose a decisive victory.26

What happened in Venezuela reveals, in extremis, a more general pattern: where there was a standoff and the armed conflict disintegrated the lines that divided camps from each other, violence engulfed noncombatants. Mariño, for instance, capped victories with butchery. After taking Cumaná, he ordered the execution of 47 Spaniards and creoles; Barcelona saw 69 of its citizens shot. “The life of such men,” he noted, “was incompatible with the existence of the State.” Royalist reprisals were not far behind. As civilians and soldiers fled before the republican caudillos, they also regrouped. And they responded in kind. The Canarian shopkeeper Francisco Rosete pushed back through the valleys of Tuy, liberating slaves along the way, and when he reached Ocumare his retaliatory campaign ended with systematic desecration of civilians: noses, ears, breasts, sexual organs were all systematically and publicly sliced off the bodies of cap-tives, ending with mass decapitation. When Bolívar got the news, in a white fury he ordered the immediate execution of every captive Spaniard; this was the beginning of the War to the Death. The political violence reached a fever pitch at the hands of José Tomás Boves’s Lancers, whose axial years of carnage became the core of Arturo Uslar Pietri’s classic fictional account, Las lanzas colo-radas. The Asturian merchant turned his multiracial recruits into a slaughtering machine that worked over the Llanos in 32 months (until a spear did him in on the plains of Urica in December 1814). In units of 50 to 60 horsemen, they were organized not so much to win open battles with republican forces (though this did occur), but more to establish territorial control through fear, sweeping into towns and pillaging, raping, and murdering the occupants into submission. Boves was not always a mass murderer; he became one. His early fighting did not show the signs of the calculated sadism that eventually accompanied his

26. Oficio de Domino Monteverde, 22 Nov. 1812, AGI, Estado, Caracas.


Lancers. At first, Boves wore no uniform and often went shirtless; the fighting was more spasmodic and his troops less organized. But by the middle of 1814 his vestments had become more formal and his methods of terrorizing more elabo-rate. The turning point appeared when he learned of a civilian plot to infiltrate his ranks at Espino. Boves sought revenge. He caught the plotters and ordered their execution. Even the whistle-blower lost his head. This was followed by a victory celebration in which Boves paraded the heads of his victims on top of pikes, marching them around town with a band of musicians. After the Battle of Victoria in June 1814 (where a trounced Bolívar had fled), Boves took mor-bid delight in his victory, mixing the festive with the funereal: he dined with a captured commander Colonel Diego Jalon, then publicly humiliated him before his fellow captives, ordering 200 lashes. Then they all watched his execution; his head shared the fate of others’, displayed at the end of a pike for all to see. The night after another battle, an insouciant Boves invited the townswomen to a banquet, after which, whip in hand, he ordered them to dance while, beyond the walls, their husbands and brothers were rounded up and massacred.27

Boves’s violence and the local calculus of pain still await in-depth historical research. His actions and those of his like-minded peers across the Llanos illus-trate the ways in which perpetrators wavered between the domain of politics and the realm of theater. But one should not lose sight of the strategic purposes of the slaughter. Consider the way preying and pillaging became commonplace in the Platine borderlands, where power rivalries were more internationalized. Unlike the Llanos of Nueva Granada and Venezuela, popular monarchist forces were for the most part hemmed in at Montevideo. The furies of rural violence stemmed from a different source, for in the countryside it was Portuguese divi-sions that were bogged down in a brutal cat-and-mouse war with guerrillas. While Joaquina Carlota was plotting from Rio de Janeiro to reestablish a Bour-bon monarchy in the borderland region with herself on the throne (in advance of her reconquest she had sent a printing press and some personal goods, including, allegedly, her jewels), she had to wait for her armies to put down the insurgency, which was on the run by mid-1812. But the war had degenerated into a cruel exchange of guerrilla ambushes and army depredations of civilian

27. The work on Boves and his epigones is more extensive than deep. For details, see John Lynch, Simón Bolívar: A Life (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2006), 76, 82 – 87; Stephen K. Stoan, Pablo Morillo and Venezuela, 1815 – 1820 (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1974), 52 – 55; Tomás Pérez Tenreiro, José Tomás Boves: Primera lanza del rey (Caracas: Ministerio de Defensa, n.d.), 91 – 92. Perhaps the best single study is Germán Carrera Damas, Boves: Aspectos soci-econonómicos de su acción histórica (Caracas: Ministerio de Educacion, 1968), which emphasizes how pillaging was a war technique.


hamlets. The empress’s field marshal, General Gaspar Vigodet, formally acting on orders of the Spanish Regency, defended his actions — noting among other things that his proxy war would free the Spanish armies to stamp out rebellions in the Andes — to create a vast multilingual coalition of regal armies crushing insurgents in the backlands to restore what the French Revolution came peril-ously close to annihilating: imperial monarchy.28

For all the grand designing, the situation on the ground was highly unsta-ble and in some places led to wholesale dislocations. Wherever the fighting became inconclusive and protracted, refugees filled churches and overwhelmed the meager supplies of the armies that could not protect them. As Boves’s slay-ing frontier moved eastward, encroaching on the capital, panic seized Caracas. Families of all ranks began to pack carts and horses to prepare to flee. Bolívar gave the order to evacuate, starting with his own emaciated troops. Civilians streamed out of the city and made for Barcelona and Cumaná, starving, shoe-less, and petrified. Bolívar’s troops could not defend them. The stragglers at Aragua were simply wiped out. Royalist troops went on hunting expeditions, killing refugees en route to Barcelona. Towns swollen with refugees became easier targets for the marauders, who did more than kill. One royalist chieftain, Francisco Morales, took care of Maturín, and gloated that he personally raped every woman of the town.29 Fear and flight also possessed the Banda Oriental, where noncombatants also became excuses for target practice and bodily des-ecration by both sides. As Portuguese armies moved forward, burning and pil-laging, the exodus began: up to 80 percent of the rural population — estancieros, merchants, peons, and slaves — began their long march north to the littoral, where federalist chieftains were preparing their recruits. Meanwhile, Spanish royalists, plundered and immiserated in a blockaded Montevideo, also sought refuge, fleeing to Brazil and after 1814 back to Spain. News from far away could spark a stampede of frightened civilians. In early 1815, following rumors that Ferdinand was sending his massive expeditionary force to the River Plate, all sides began to pack their bags for fear of an all-out war. A resolution of March 1815 announced that all Spaniards suspected of collusion with Madrid’s recon-quista would face the consequences for their treason. José Battle y Carreo, for instance, fled, leaving his wife and children behind, hoping to rescue them later and praying that “that class of woman would not be persecuted.” In September, Artigas began rounding up Spanish and Portuguese subjects, as well as his cre-

28. AGI, Estado, Buenos Aires: José María Salazar to Min. de Marina, 1 Sept. 1810, 79/38; Vigodet to Joaquina Carlota, 22 June 1812, 79/59.

29. Lynch, Simón Bolívar, 86.


ole opponents, and herding them into a concentration camp he called, without irony, “Purification.” Then he gave away their property to “free blacks, zambos, indios, and poor creoles” in proclamations that rolled off Princess Carlota’s old printing press. When the Portuguese armies (once more with the complicity of Buenos Aires) returned in 1816, they trounced the artiguista forces, wiping them out in a succession of battles. But this time the Luso-Brazilian campaign was a longer and more brutal one. General Federico Lecor’s army became an occu-pation force. While the Banda Oriental had been converted into an embattled province of refugees perpetually in search of shelter, Lecor’s divisions were sur-rounded by guerrillas, and so lashed out at defenseless civilians in the standard style of counterinsurgency. Fed up, an entire regiment of Artigas’s plebeian force comprised of freed slaves surrendered on condition they would be allowed to seek refuge in Buenos Aires, where they were welcomed with open, if some-what duplicitous, arms. This phase of the protracted war ended at Tacuarembo with Artigas’s final defeat, his personal flight to Paraguay, and the Portuguese annexation of the province to Brazil, setting the stage for another decade of direct conflict with Buenos Aires.30

Body parts and cadavers became instruments of politics; public execu-tions and torture were intended to terrorize noncombatants into either sub-mission and loyalty or flight and exit, these being two pendular alternatives in the deterioration of public life. The violence served to constrain the features of an emerging public sphere in late colonial Spanish America — the formation of public opinion in the press, deliberation in town councils and business associa-tions, and debate in the salons — that had been such a prominent part of the contest over sovereignty in the aftermath of the French invasion. The politics of terror was not an end in itself: these lethal crowds also acted as magistrates issuing justice (in their view) as a way to exterminate the enemy. What started out as a campaign against corruption, or as shaming rituals with the hanging of a few royalists and rebels, had now become mass killing, a cleansing operation of ever greater proportions. Historians once tended to see killing and maiming like this as a breakdown of “normal” war into deviant personalized vendetta, as a failure to cohere armies as prototypical affiliates for nations coming into being stocked with citizens in arms, as an aberration from a normative sequence of state formation. But we might also see this in reverse, as a rite more familiar

30. Manuel Diego to Consulado, 30 Sept. 1812, AGI, Consulado, 345; Blanco Acevedo, El federalismo de Artigas y la independencia nacional, 200 – 209; Beraza, La economía en la Banda Oriental, 73 – 87; Lucía Sala de Touron, Nelson de la Torre, and Julio C. Rodríguez, Artigas y su revolución agraria, 1811 – 1820 (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1978), 71 – 97.


to early modern historians that did not automatically subside with the creation of modern states, whose own birth could even augment it. Thus we could see it as the extreme violence of crowds who behaved strategically and who saw their cause as legitimate and their method as logical, as militarized groups with more or less aptitude for regimentation that assumed the role of justice-dispensing magistrates where the state has collapsed. It is a subset within a broader family type of civil war. Such a view helps explain why noncombatants got swept up in the fratricide with such malice.31

One anonymous limeño lamented to his sovereign in 1810 that the appeal of rebellion to many of his subjects reflected less the sense of ingratitude to the king (which could be remedied because all children could learn gratitude) than something more pernicious and not easily cured: love of “tyranny.”32 While the view of rebels as deadly agents, not mere malcontents, spread with the fighting, the fighting was hardly the expression of some prepolitical logic but rather was the function of the (im)balance of forces. Consider Peru, where Viceroy José de Abascal, the spiritus rector of continuism, responded to rebellions with an iron fist and thus projected a view of how to dispense with those who loved god-less tyranny over the rule of a beneficent Bourbon king. Having driven Buenos Aires’ armies from the highlands, Abascal assured the Spanish government that “we can restore in motion the minerals of Potosí.” What is more, he added, between his armies in the Andes and the royalists troops in Montevideo (this was written before the city’s evacuation), the government’s pincers could now squeeze Buenos Aires back into submission. After all, he had mopped up Pasto, Quito, and Alto Peru — in the latter two cases leaving behind the trademark odor of plunder and executions. And the news from Santa Fé and Buenos Aires regarding their imminent collapse confirmed that only force would compel insurgents “to enter reason.”33

Discourses such as these have appealed to those fond of coercive solutions to political impasses, especially those who happen to favor their own lust for power. This was certainly true for Ferdinand, who was determined to restore imperial grandeur. It also had an aura of plausibility: Calleja’s and Abascal’s counter-

31. Paul Friedland, “Beyond Deterrence: Cadavers, Effigies, Animals and the Logic of Logic of Executions in Pre-Modern France,” Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 29, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 295 – 318; Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1975), 154 – 62.

32. Anonymous letter, 10 Aug. 1810, AGI, Indiferente General, 1568.33. AGI, Estado, Lima: José Abascal to Secre de Estado, 23 May 1812, 74/2; José

Abascal to Secr de Estado, 13 Oct. 1812, 74/8; Marquéz de la Concordia to Secr de Estado, 25 Jan. 1813, 74/51; Joaquin de la Molina to Consejo de la Regencia, 23 July 1813, 74/72.


34. AGI, Indiferente General: “Consultas del Consejo de Indias,” 3 Oct. 1814, 1568; Consulado to Secr de Estado, 7 Mar. 1815, 2320. Memorial del doctor Juan Antonio Queipo, 21 Dec. 1816, AGI, Estado, 71/81.

insurgencies in Mesoamerican and Andean hamlets subdued the uprisings; Bue-nos Aires itself was “free” but the littoral and borderlands were engulfed in civil war or occupied by Portuguese armies; and in Venezuela and Nueva Granada, fledgling self-rule movements collapsed into fratricidal conflict. In this context, the restored emperor chose to rebuild his empire by arrogating to himself the providential powers of the avenger, despite the warnings of some of his envoys and ministers that the delicate impasse was leaning his way without the need for a massive intervention. There was a political reason for this decision: to resolve Trotsky and Tilly’s “revolutionary situation,” in which the task of the revolu-tion or the counterrevolution is to reintegrate state power through the exercise of force. This is what Ferdinand sought. But there was also a historic mem-ory of violence nurtured by Abascal and loyalists, inscribed in consultas to the (restored) Council of the Indies arguing that some “evildoers” took advantage of the French invasion to take power for themselves, to introduce “libertinaje of the press” in order to “corrupt public opinion” and “demoralize the people.” What was needed was a decisive crushing of “impiety” and “insurrection,” a purging of “all the prejudicial novelties introduced to our constitución indiana.” “Send an Inquisitor!” pleaded one cleric. The full force of the Spanish Empire would be dedicated to a massive cleansing operation to root out evil and corruption as the precondition for a new peace premised on “the solemn and general forgetting of the past.” This would be a war to bring real peace. “Pacification” plans were laid to reconquer the provinces from rebellious infidels and restore the image of a “Padre tierno” among subjects who had been seduced to forget his magnanim-ity. For this the king needed an avenging angel to deliver the message, to root out the sources of liberal venality, and to destroy the false gods of constitutional idolatry.34

The angel was Brigadier General Pablo Morillo, and his task could not help but erase what was left of the lines between combatants and noncomba-tants. But it would be unfair to charge the fernandina counterrevolution with singlehandedly turning the unarmed into victims. We have seen evidence that armed crowds could quickly mutate into plebeian “armies” and that sieges and pillaging were becoming methods of warfare on all sides. The lines had become all but meaningless. Whole towns and cities became targets, not just their defenders. By the time Morillo arrived to “liberate” the province as a prelude to pacifying the Andes and eventually choking Buenos Aires into submission,


it really meant wresting control from royalist chieftains and disbanding their plundering bands. (This was a mistake whose consequences became clear later, when republicans like José Antonio Páez filled the rural vacuum with guerrilla forces of their own.) A senior cleric, who had joined the republicans in 1811 but was appalled by what followed, switched sides, applauding the pacification in Venezuela as the restoration of God’s authority and sharing his own tactical recommendations for liquidating the Antichrists.35

The next stop was Cartagena, the gateway to Nueva Granada. Morillo’s forces besieged the port for 106 days, promising food and mercy in return for surrender. Though many immediately swore loyalty to Ferdinand to avoid recriminations, Cartagena held out, and its leaders responded by pulling their Spanish prisoners out of jail and dragging them through the streets before shooting them on the ramparts of the fort for the besiegers to witness. But star-vation finally brought the city to its knees, and it surrendered. When Morillo marched in, he was greeted by the stench of death: six thousand people had died from disease or starvation, and their corpses had to be mounted on huge pyres for burning to control the contagion. “The city,” noted Morillo, “was a most horrific spectacle.” A group of merchants petitioned the king, thanking him for sending “a destroyer of our past anarchy, and real restorer of the peace under which we now live.”36

This reconquest (how deliberate was this allusion to the crusade against Muslims in the peninsula in the fifteenth century is unclear) was as bloody as it was rapid. As with Boves, Bolívar, and Artigas, however, the degree and nature of violence mutated according to circumstance. Morillo was not vicious when he took Cartagena. The siege decimated the port, yet he pardoned opponents. But he soon found himself fighting on several fronts; some fronts had vaporized altogether in spite of his efforts to make this a “conventional” war. Back in Ven-ezuela, the occupiers soon found themselves surrounded by revitalized insur-gents. Morillo began to worry about the feasibility of the whole operation as his reconquering front expanded and exposed itself to rebels. What was worse, the “liberation” in Nueva Granada was not going cleanly. Morillo agonized. Indeed, he offered to resign his commission but was turned down. Stuck with war on all

35. “Juan Antonio de Rojas Queipo sobre la pacificacion de Venezuela,” 21 Dec. 1816, AGI, Estado, Caracas, 18.

36. “Sobre el restablemimento del Consulado de Cartagena de Yndias;” 10 Dec. 1816, AGI, Gobierno, Santa Fé, 961; Múnera, El fracaso de la nación, 212; Christiane Laffite Carles, La costa colombiana del Caribe (1810 – 1830) (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1995), 236 – 38.


fronts, or no fronts, his justice took a cruel turn. After pulling down an already weak government, the avengers sought to ensure that it would never revive. After executing the 25-year-old president, Liborio Mejía, Morillo issued a public state-ment in November 1816 to the pacified Neogranadines in which he promised a new reign of peace and justice. The assumption was, as with many self-styled “liberators,” that the population was living under tyranny (in this case a treason-ous, republican, ungodly regime) and that it was awaiting deliverance. But in this case, deliverance did not mean leading the oppressed from the lands of republi-can pharaohs but rather eliminating the oppressors and purging the country of those who worshipped false idols. The “army of brothers,” announced Morillo, has brought an end to war. But peace meant getting rid of those who “burn towns, hang their inhabitants, destroy the country and do not respect sex or age, who replace the peaceful farmer and his sweet customs with a ferocious guerrero and the minister of Vengeance of an irritated Sovereign.” The proclamation was posted all over the capital and was followed by mass arrests and killings not just of men who were involved in republican rule, like Camilo Torres, but of those who sympathized with it. The avenger signed a death sentence for the scien-tist Francisco José de Caldas. A Tribunal of Purification hunted down suspects, seized their properties, and “processed” their cases. Three hundred were pub-licly executed, many of their heads sent to adorn the central squares around the viceroyalty. According to Victor Uribe, one quarter of the viceroyalty’s lawyers were executed in an effort to expunge dissident letrados.37

In New Spain, while the insurgency of 1810 shocked and frightened the viceroyalty’s gentry, the rebel forces were soon crushed. But the victors wanted more than a battlefield triumph. They wanted vengeance and a deterrent. Herein lay a dilemma. Much of the army was made up of Mexicans, which prompted its commanders to hesitate before ordering them to wipe out the rebels. As viceroy, Calleja recognized that terror could be counterproductive. When he heard that one of his commanders burned the towns of Medellín and Rancho de Tejar near Veracrúz, he informed the colonel that “we do not wish to convert the country into a frightful desert and increase the evils that exist and the hatred with which measures of this nature are viewed.” His successor found himself in the same

37. Morillo Proclamation to Viceroyalty, 15 Nov. 1816, AGI, Estado, Santa Fé, 57/34; Laura F. Ullrick, “Morillo’s Attempt to Pacify Venezuela,” Hispanic American Historical Review 3, no. 4 (Nov. 1920): 539 – 45; Victor M. Uribe, “Kill all the Lawyers! Lawyers and the Independence Movement in New Granada, 1809 – 1820,” The Americas 52, no. 2 (May 1995). For more on this kind of model of “purging,” see Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985).


position and likewise wavered between appealing to loyalties and giving in to the temptations of exemplary justice. Yet, Calleja also knew that long sieges would pin down his forces and prevent them from expanding the frontier of Spanish peace. Towns like Zitácuaro, Cuautla, and many others were pillaged, burned, and in some cases demolished to deliver the message to other rebel posts to give in. Summary execution of captured officers became standard practice. Anyone captured with weapons or caught in suspicious acts was to be shot and the cadaver mounted publicly. And if viceroys wavered, local commanders tended not to; their fears often led them to be much less squeamish about harsh measures.38

Avengers enhanced the cruelty on all sides. In Mexico, royalist triumphs and repression deepened the hatred of gachupines. José Vicente Gomez began, around late 1812, to castrate his Spanish captives; assassinations became routine as hatred simmered below the surface of the restored viceroyalty. This was the backdrop to Bolívar’s proclamation of a “War to the Death” in June of 1813. “Jus-tice demands vengeance,” he intoned. But at the same time he invited Spaniards to follow a “path of reconciliation and friendship,” “to live peacefully among us” if they would cooperate and share fealty to the Republic. Those who did not would be considered an enemy, treated as a traitor, and “inevitably” shot. In a later letter to the governor of Curaçao, he explained this lamentable exigency. He bemoaned the “ravenous fires of war” and “the furies of unrest (that) agitate the remotest settler.” After accusing the reconquerors of turning on their own “sons whom he had brought forth in the land that he had usurped,” the Liberator felt that his crusaders had no option. “I resolved,” he concluded, “to put in effect a war to the death, in order to deprive the tyrants of the incomparable advan-tage of their organized methods of destruction.” Until then, Bolívar had usually rejected his commanders’ requests to kill civilians and reprimanded those who sent him the dripping heads of captives. In the course of the escalation, how-ever, the conventions of gentlemanly warfare went by the wayside. John Lynch has noted that Bolívar viewed his struggle now as asymmetrical: Spaniards had adopted exterminating practices even though republicans had been lenient with Spaniards, an imbalance that put his cause on the perpetual defensive. Now, liberating armies were under orders to keep no prisoners. This was no longer a matter of deterring loyalists or releasing avenging furies to extirpate the enemy. It was expedient; where fronts had evaporated and civilians were killed and des-ecrated, civil peace required a total war.39

38. Archer, “ ‘La Causa Buena,’ ” 92 – 94.39. I am grateful to Alfredo Avila for the account of José Vicente Gomez.

“Proclamation to the People of Venezuela” (15 June 1813) & SB to Governor of Curaçao,


Valencia, 2 Oct. 1813, in Selected Writings of Bolívar, ed. Harold A. Bierck Jr. (New York: Colonial Press, 1951), 31 – 32, 37 – 43; Lynch, Simón Bolívar, 73.

40. Sala de Touron et al., Artigas y su revolución agraria, 175 – 232; Beraza, La economía en la Banda Oriental, 75.

Warfare changed more than the determination of its leaders; it also trans-formed the social composition of armed conflict. Some movements, like the casta-Indian uprising in the Bajío, were born plebeian. But others mobilized popular sectors more gradually. Cotton growers of Guerrero’s Costa Grande, mulatto sharecroppers and Indian villagers, became mortal enemies of Span-iards and formed the backbone of the province’s guerrillas, which was crucial for the continuity of the insurgency after 1814. In the Oriental borderlands, Arti-gas’s September 1815 Reglamento Provisorio enlisted plebeians, especially slaves and Guaraní Indians, to its ranks; 400 Abipones moved from the Chaco to take advantage of land being parceled out. By 1816, there was a full-blown assault on estate properties, which yielded to the desperate plea from estancieros and mer-chants for an avenging intervention, and thus the second Portuguese invasion and its scorched-earth war on revolutionaries. The Banda Oriental came as close as one might imagine to a cross-ethnic class war within a civil war.40 In general, the complexion of violent upheaval varied depending on local conditions. In the Andes, the specter of Túpac Amaru returned. What started as an urban insur-rection spread to the countryside and reached deeper into lower social strata, shredding incumbent structures of indigenous governance. When reforms of previous years were revoked and the power of the crown (and its envoys in the highlands) was restored, villages rose up. In Cuzco, the royalist cacique Mateo García Pumacahua, a former ally in the suppression of the 1780s and again in 1808 – 9, rallied to the ayllu uprisings to contest Lima’s tribute and tax demands to fund the war. In so doing, he gave the armed opposition some lethal cohesion. The uprising spread more quickly. So did attacks on the unarmed. A crowd of Indians seized a five-year-old José Rufino Echenique and his family from their uncle’s estate south of Cuzco; one attacker plucked the child from the mob as it murdered the rest of the family. In the ayllu of Ocongate, Indian villagers formed their own military unit, which swelled to three thousand men armed with farm tools and clubs (“buenos palos”), while local whites took refuge in the church. But seasoned royal troops eventually crushed the rebels, capturing and massacring thousands of prisoners. Pumacahua himself was executed in front of a mass of his followers. While Abascal endorsed vicious reprisals and Lima’s armies crushed the insurgency, they may have pacified the region but they did little to bolster the regime’s popular credentials. The new viceroy, Joaquín de


41. Pezuela to Secr de Estado, 12 Nov. 1818, AGI, Estado, Lima, 74/30; David Cahill and Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy, “Forging their Own History: Indian Insurgency in the Southern Peruvian Sierra, 1815,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 11, no. 2 (May 1992): 125 – 67; David Cahill, “Una vision andina: El levantamiento de Ocongate de 1815,” Histórica 7, no. 2 (Dec. 1988): 133 – 59; Charles F. Walker, Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780 – 1840 (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1999), 98 – 100; Peter F. Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, Guerrero, 1800 – 1857 (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996), 52 – 53, 71.

la Pezuela, was forced to lament several years later that “the opinion of the cholos and indios is not especially favorable to the King; and among the multi-tude of slaves they are openly siding with the rebels from whose hands they await their freedom.” Montoneros prowled central Peru; guerrillas assaulted royal troops in the Mantaro Valley. The viceroy’s troops were deserting in droves.41

In joining sides en masse, indigenous peoples and especially slaves changed the nature of political violence. Their claims radicalized the ideologies of the contest. They manned militias and guerrillas. And they left in ruins old elites whose fortunes depended on their toil. But this was not a foreordained result. Peter Blanchard’s recent work illustrates how in many colonies slaves remained loyal to the king. Ramon Piñero joined Boves, “arms in hand,” and “served with much love and faithfulness my king.” Domingo Ordoy, a slave in Montevideo, petitioned for his freedom in Peru, having served loyally in the defense of the River Plate. The course of war, however, shifted allegiances as the moral econ-omy went up in flames. Revolutionaries trumped the supplicative ethos of kings with promises of freedom. Rebel after rebel promised to release slaves from bondage in return for their loyalty to the cause. As Artigas’s rebels encircled Montevideo in 1811, they promised freedom to all slaves who belonged to Span-iards and joined the uprising. Francisco Estrada did, bolting from his master to march “under the flags of freedom.” Not all slaves joined the revolution; some seized the opportunity to flee all sides, starting with their masters. As rebel armies neared plantations along the Peruvian coast, slaves gathered their belongings and hit the road. And yet, innumerable captives joined the ranks of the armies and would rise up in them as the wars dragged on. What the process of Indian and slave mobilization did was transform the original patri-cian struggle into a vertical one in which plebeian sectors shaped the fate of sovereignty. Plebeian participation raised the stakes of struggle to make it more than a conceptual displacement of the regime; it became a shattering of the legal fundaments that legitimated colonial exploitation. Early outrage against viola-


42. Peter Blanchard, “The Language of Liberation: Slave Voices in the Wars of Independence,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 3 (Aug. 2002): 499 – 523; and Blanchard’s full-length study, Under the Flags of Freedom: Slave Soldiers and the Wars of Independence in Spanish South America (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 41.

43. Memorial del doctor Juan Antonio de Rojas Queipo, 21 Dec. 1816, AGI, Gobierno, Caracas, 71/18.

44. Pezuela to Secr de Estado, 29 Apr. 1817, AGI, Estado, Lima, 74/13; AGI, Estado, Santa Fé, 57/35; Lozano to Garay, 2 Sept. 1817, AGI, Estado, Santa Fé; Minuta del Oficio del Secretario de Estado, 29 Jan. 1818, AGI, Estado, Santa Fé.

tions of a moral colonial code gave way to demands for equality that invoked ideas for new codes.42

Mobilizing plebeian sectors turned countrysides into theaters for a pro-tracted, unwinnable war for the Spanish side. The king’s representatives in Caracas could see as much, and warned that unless the royalist cause embraced the abolitionist one, they were doomed: “We will be the victims of barbarian fury.” Military “containment of the obstinate insurgents” was grinding down. As a result, avengers found themselves on perilous legal grounds. In the words of one, “we are merely the lords of the ground we walk on.”43 Viceroys, once heralded as saviors, were flooded with pleas from loyal subjects. Taxes, forced appropriations, and continued arrests became the source of local elites’ disen-chantment and eventual detachment from royal authority. The Cabildo of Cuzco beseeched Lima to lift martial law and the shadow of suspicion covering the region and to respect the honor of its good subjects. Local appeals had echoes in the metropole, where ministers were growing increasingly anxious about the costs, financial as well as moral, of pacification. This was most acute where the campaign had run aground in the sands of a savage civil war. Reports abounded of atrocities. Without salaries, soldiers had to resort to pillaging. Even one of Morillo’s officers, Colonel Leon Ortega, submitted a report to Madrid decrying the conditions of the army. By November 1817, authorities in Cartagena issued testimonies about “the violences” committed by the expeditionary troops. The Secretario de Estado suggested to the Minister of War that a proper viceroy be sent to Santa Fé; for too long the provinces had been subjected to “the arbi-trarinesses of the Chiefs and Subaltern Officers” of Morillo’s armies. It was an “anti-political system.”44 But the proposal to have civilian authorities restore governance while generals focused on insurgents went nowhere, because the end to the armed struggle seemed more remote than ever, in large part because violence had so pervaded all aspects of political life.

At this stage, the issue was which side would implode first. In retrospect it easier to see which it was, for the shifts in the rebels’ strategies and popular


bases gave them more stamina over the longer haul, though many inside the struggle worried about the depth of Ferdinand’s reconquering appetite and fret-ted about the dangers of arming huge swaths of plebeian populations. Whereas the resolve to settle the sovereignty crisis with a return to a fictive model once enjoyed a kind of plausibility, it was equally prone to self-deception, political intransigence, blindness to cruelty, and circular justifications of brutality. The king stood steadfast behind his model of martial pacification. In 1817 and 1818, the king issued personal “memorials” to all his officials in the Americas to spurn all peace entreaties, especially offers of mediation. By then, Morillo’s troops were on their heels, royal soldiers were soundly beaten in Chile, Lima’s war on the republiquetas was grinding nowhere, and trade arteries of New Spain were under constant assault from guerrillas. Back in Madrid, the king did not flinch, that is, not until the regime he sought to restore collapsed under the weight of his own costly determination. His army, amassed in Cádiz to launch another pacification campaign in the River Plate, rose up before it could set sail, its offi-cers demanding to put constitutional shackles on the king before doing his bid-ding in colonies that had lost confidence in the rhetoric of transatlantic affec-tion. The king, bereft of an army, had no choice but to accept, following with an exculpatory letter to all his subjects in the Americas asking that the carnage of the past be forgotten. By then it was too late; the memory of violence acquired a life of its own that no sovereign could rein in.45

Political violence made the process of imperial decomposition more and more concentric: the global contest between empires ignited wars within wars, revo-lutions within revolutions. It is important to remind ourselves that it did not begin with an epochal, irreversible colonial break with empire. Instability cre-ated a struggle for power and evolved into a struggle about power, and the nature of this instability provoked all sides to violent measures to put an end to it. The resort to violence altered basic identities and created new ones. It nurtured a self-image of oppressed “colonial” peoples among those who hitherto had imagined themselves the subjects of a distant, magnanimous monarch. It made Spaniards feel encircled, hated, and unwelcome. These are examples of some of the better-known, if conventional, affiliates. But what of the identities of “fed-eralist” peons of the Banda Oriental, “republican” villagers in the Altiplano, or popular Catholic loyalists in Pasto, for whom national or proto-national collec-tive identities paled beside those that made sense of their struggles to defend local meanings of sovereignty? Further research into the micro-foundations of

45. “Memorial en nombre de Fernando VII,” AGI, Estado, Americas, 88/3.


46. Stuart Carroll, Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), 207.

political violence can enrich our understandings of the complex relationship between behavior — even atrocious conduct — and values without assuming that one necessarily precedes or explains the other, and illuminate the interlocking dynamics of the making of social divides and the handling of political conflict.

Violence was not the exclusive recourse of one side or another. Ransack-ings, public slaying, desecration of bodies, and violent humiliations appeared from the outset in all camps as part of the repertoire, or rites, inherited and augmented from an earlier age. Moreno called for sacrificial bloodshed in Bue-nos Aires while his nemesis Viceroy Abascal in Lima did the same. The events in Guadalajara anticipated what would become more widespread elsewhere as the struggle wore on: human bodies would become the site for resolving the increasing polarization of politics and the radicalization within competing coalitions. Boves and Artigas may have been at opposite ends of an ideological spectrum, and the former was unarguably more morbid in the delight he took in victimizing on a large scale, but the point is that they both were prepared to make victims of people who were once their neighbors. Killing and mutilating need to be put alongside the institutional improvisations and innovations of the era — such as a free press and new practices of representation — as shapers of political life as old regimes fell and new ones emerged.

Violent escalation in Spanish America cannot be simply adduced to some basic psychology of a people who lacked civic traditions (though many, like Bolívar, would look back at their handiwork and despair that what they had really freed were latent furies of colonial subjects and not modern citizens). We know of too many examples in history in which societies accustomed to living by civic rules quickly found themselves engulfed in civil carnage. The history outlined in this essay represents a passage of a particular sort, from violence associated with acts of vengeance directed against particular agents (be they venal judges, predatory tax collectors, or rabble-rousing publicists) to avenging activities directed at groups. (A historian of early modern France calls this a dis-tinction between vindicative and vindicatory violence.) In the first instance, the bloodletting was more targeted, aiming to remove the wicked so that the virtu-ous may rule. With time, violence became more unbridled as people sought to set things straight by force to restore an old equilibrium or create a new one. In Spanish America this was resolved less with the decisive triumph of one side than with the utter moral and fiscal collapse of the other.46

These examples of collective violence are reminders that they do not neces-


sarily deviate from the “normal” process of institutional politics, although they do have spiral features that surface when the originary structures of sovereignty are shattered. We can abhor them and mourn the human losses. But to treat them as the pathologies of ideology, the eruption of man’s inner brutality, or the outbursts of primordial enmities misses the point and the lessons that might be derived from the histories of which they were a part. For this reason, the accent is on political violence, which did not obey “natural” psychological laws or reveal the underlying mindlessness of large groups of people, whether angry crowds or petrified soldiers. Latin American history has been rife with examples. One that comes to mind has been analyzed by Inga Clendinnen, for the conquest was a history steeped in remembered bloodshed in which narratives came into being in the course of the carnage to make sense of the “other” — indeed to create an image of the other — and thus validate the (unequal) exchange of terror. The independence revolutions can be seen in a similar way but with different mean-ings. If Clendinnen was grappling with the brutality of one society’s assertion over another, this essay has been concerned with how a crisis of sovereignty set off forces that would decompose it, suggesting the need for some political contextualization for reckoning with the longue durée of political violence in Spanish America.47 The question of what to do with the enmities and hostilities while creating new basic values for political communities confronts all heirs of sovereignties created by violence, for whom politics remains a matter of life and death. Spanish America was no exception.

47. Inga Clendinnen, “ ‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty’: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico,” Representations, no. 33, special issue, The New World (Winter 1991): 65 – 100.


“This England and This Now”:

British Cultural and Intellectual Influence in

the Spanish American Independence Era

Karen Racine

To choose thy time and place did Fate allow,Wise choice would be this England and this Now.

— Robert Southey, The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo (1816)

Although the French and American Revolutions are reflexively assumed to be the inspiration for Spanish American independence movements, a stronger argument can be made that the region’s patriot leaders derived their most impor-tant cultural model, their animating energy, and their major material support from Great Britain. Between the years 1808 and 1830, over 70 independence era leaders of the first rank lived and worked together in London, including Fran-cisco de Miranda, Bernardo O’Higgins, Simón Bolívar, Andrés Bello, José de San Martín, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, Lucas Alamán, Agustín de Iturbide, Bernardino Rivadavia, Manuel Belgrano, Vicente Rocafuerte, Juan Germán Roscio, Mariano Montilla, Francisco de Paula Santander, Antonio José de Iri-sarri, youthful members of the Aycinena and García Granados families of Gua-temala, José de la Riva Agüero, Bernardo Monteagudo, José Joaquín de Olmedo, and Mariano Egaña. Other important patriot leaders, including José Cecilio del Valle, Juan Egaña, and Carlos María Bustamante, remained in America but sent their works to be published in London. The men of this generation also carried on purposeful correspondence with famous British figures such as abolitionist William Wilberforce, prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, scientist Humphrey Davy, and vaccination proponent Edward Jenner. These conscious and practical personal choices tell us much about the kind of cultural model the Spanish American independence

424 HAHR / August / Racine

leaders admired and the sorts of future countries they wanted to cultivate for themselves as the independence wars were drawing to a close.

Spanish American leaders placed orders for their new state china to be made at the famous Wedgwood factories; brought over British gardeners, doctors, and engineers to reconstruct their cities; and affiliated themselves with British Masonic lodges. They modeled their new school curricula after Joseph Lancast-er’s mutual education method and sent over young patriots to be trained at his Borough Road School for future service in America. They were obsessed with the workings of a vigorous press and started to learn the value of public opinion on both sides of the ocean; significantly, most of the European news published in their newspapers came from British sources. They sent their own children to schools in England. Patriot leaders hired Cornish miners to rebuild their metal industries, recruited Scottish settlers to cultivate their fields, and solicited Irish artists to engrave their portraits. Jeremy Bentham enthusiastically responded to their requests to draft constitutions and other laws for Colombia, Buenos Aires, Guatemala, and Venezuela. Indeed, central themes of interest to this generation included such British-inspired ideals as an aristocratic brand of reformism, a respect not just for liberty but also for the preservation of property and status, the expansion of state-sponsored primary education, the controlled abolition of slavery, a concern for the establishment of constitutional authority rooted in local tradition, the adoption of specific laws related to libel and freedom of the press, trial by jury, an acute awareness of the power of public opinion, a fondness for certain historical precedents commonly deployed in British Radical rhetoric, and the utilitarian ideal of usefulness to the nation. All of these reformist notions were conditioned by what Spanish American leaders saw (or thought they saw) going on in Britain during the first decades of the nineteenth century.

British-style aristocratic reformism was a strategy in which a genuine desire for humanitarian social uplift (education, social services, expanded franchise, a more inclusive public sphere) was tempered with a robust, elite-led control of the pace, tone, and content of any such change (libel laws, transportation, creation of national police forces).1 One author has recently described this constellation of reforms as a new ethos of embourgeoisement, or a worldview based on “ambi-tion, desire, competitive individual achievement, and industry.”2 By the early

1. Following an argument made in Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707 – 1837 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992).

2. David Hogan, “The Market Revolution and Disciplinary Power: Joseph Lancaster and the Psychology of the Early Classroom System,” History of Education Quarterly 24, no. 3 (1989): 383, 397. Hogan derives some of his argument from Max Weber (“the rationalization of the world”) and Michel Foucault (discipline, punishment, surveillance).

“This England and This Now” 425

decades of the 1800s, this practical and paternalistic, yet ultimately still liberal model was far more attractive to Spanish Americans than was either the French or American revolutionary and republican experiments, which they had come to believe had resulted in virulent class antagonism, territorial expansion, and a marked diminution in the respect for hierarchical order. By emulating their British counterparts, creole patriot leaders expected they could retain a privi-leged place for themselves while training their co-citizens in the proper exer-cise of freedom. In fact, Spanish American patriots shared the same Romantic notions of the people, nature, progress, and controlled change that characterized early nineteenth-century British reformism. It surely is not a coincidence that the boat involved in the incident that led to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s unfortunate drowning in 1822 was called the Bolívar, or that Lord Byron debated long and hard about whether to fight for liberty in Colombia or Greece before settling on the latter fateful choice. Britons and Spanish Americans were intensely aware of each other’s struggles for liberty and considered themselves to be natural allies. Indeed, well into the 1820s, many Spanish Americans leaders still har-bored monarchist tendencies and were actively considering a variety of hybrid state forms based on Spanish constitutionalism, the Greek and Roman clas-sics, Jewish law, British constitutional monarchy, the reimagined Aztec and Inca pasts, and the republican experiments in the United States and revolutionary France. In all ways imaginable, Great Britain provided more than just military backing, commercial opportunities, and financial support to Spanish American independence leaders; it also offered a powerful, practical, living model for the construction of their post-independent nationhood.

This essay contributes in several ways to the significant reassessment of Latin American independence being undertaken on the occasion of the 1810 bicentennial. First, it rejects the hoary old assumption that the American and French Revolutions provided the primary inspiration for Spanish American independence; instead, it argues that Great Britain, as the traditional home of Lockean freedoms and aristocratic reformism, provided a much more rel-evant contemporary model for Spanish American leaders as they constructed a shared vision of their desired future. On a practical level, closer association with Britain not only offered Spanish Americans greater commercial oppor-tunities and military protection on the high seas; it also provided them with a meaningful counterweight both to the hemispheric ambitions of the United States, which was already beginning to make them nervous, and the jealous desire of Spain and its French ally to return them to the imperial fold. Span-ish American independence, when viewed in the context of the patriot leaders’ intense and personal connections formed during a residence in London or


undertaken in collaboration with British reformist figures, clearly takes on a global perspective.

Rather than perpetuating fragmented narratives based in regional theaters of war or centered on the biographies of important individuals, this essay clearly shows that independence was a major watershed in the process of cultural rein-vention and national identity formation. The events in this process were directed by a group of men who had a hemispheric network of fellow patriots who were engaged in similar projects of nation building at the same time, almost always undertaken with reference to British examples. Finally, I intend to counter some of the cynicism of the past 40 years of scholarship, which has tended to diminish the ideas, goals, and sincerity of leaders and elites as it undertook the valuable work of restoring the voices of lower classes and marginalized racial and ethnic groups to the historical record.

It would be ridiculous to claim that the French Revolution, with its shining ide-als of liberty, equality, and fraternity, did not have an impact in Spanish America just as it did in Spain, Russia, Poland, Greece, Ireland, and other parts of the Western world that chafed under varying degrees of tyranny and monarchi-cal control. Indeed, its influence was wide and inspirational.3 In the 1790s and early 1800s, important Spanish Americans like Pablo de Olavide, Francisco de Miranda, Antonio Nariño, Simón Rodríguez, and Servando Teresa de Mier lived in Parisian exile for various periods. Francisco Antonio Zea, during his tenure at Madrid’s botanical gardens, was part of a tertulia (salon) of like-minded Spanish and Spanish American devotees of the Enlightenment known as the afrance-

3. See for example Catalina Banko, “Influencia de la revolución francesa en la constitución de Barcelona, Venezuela del año de 1812,” Boletín de la Academia Nacional de la Historia 81, no. 318 (Apr. – June 1997): 43 – 57; Solange Alberro, Alicia Hernández Chávez, and Elías Trabulse, eds., La Revolución francesa en México (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1992); Ricardo Krebs and Cristián Gazmuri, eds., La Revolución francesa y Chile (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1990); Noemí Goldman et al., eds., Imagen y recepción de la Revolución Francesa en la Argentina: Jornadas nacionales (Buenos Aires: Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 1990); O. Carlos Stoetzer, “L’influence française au Rio de la Plata à travers les régimes politiques et les textes constitutionnels, 1811 – 1848,” Cahiers des Amériques Latines 10 (1990): 65 – 80; Jorge Amado, ed., L’Amérique latine et la Révolucion française (Paris: Le Monde, 1989); Robert M. Maniquis, Oscar R. Martí, and Joseph Pérez, eds., La Revolución Francesa y el mundo ibérico (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal Quinto Centenario / Turner, 1989); Teodoro Hampe Martínez, “La revolución francesa vista por el ‘Mercurio Peruano’: cambio político vs reformismo criollo,” Boletín del Instituto Riva-Agüero 15 (1988): 163 – 78. Issue no. 54 (1990) of the Toulouse-based journal Caravelle was entirely devoted to the French Revolution and Latin American independence.


sados.4 The Spanish Inquisition was certainly concerned enough about writers like Rousseau and Voltaire to issue blanket bans on their works in an effort to forestall the spread of potentially seditious ideas, although the sheer num-bers of book confiscations and conspiratorial conversations indicate that port authorities were never all that successful. There were several Spanish American translations of The Rights of Man and Citizen, albeit not always complete or literal ones, and some conspirators like Francisco de Miranda in Valencia in 1811 did try to emulate aspects of the French revolutionary culture by inviting women and mulattos to join their movements as respected participants.

Nevertheless, by 1808, France had fallen under the sway of the aggressive Napoleon Bonaparte, and rumors of his designs on Spanish America created both fear and trepidation across the Atlantic. Memories of the Great Andean Revolt, the Haitian Revolution, and the Hidalgo revolt had raised fear about the advisability of rapid change in colonial societies characterized by tremendous race, class, and ethnic divides. The French revolutionary experiment, which had passed through the Terror, the Thermidorian reaction, and an aggressive imperialist phase, was still a living memory for them. That traumatic event had resulted in the Bonapartist invasion of Iberia and violent plebeian assaults on property and status in France, Haiti, and elsewhere, and was just too threaten-ing for Spanish Americans to want to replicate. Furthermore, by the time the Spanish Americas began their independence movements in 1809, the French themselves were disenchanted with their revolution and were turning to the study of English history for ways to restore a participatory, constitutional mon-archy after a revolutionary, republican interlude.5 Finally, on a more practical level, France simply was not in a position to offer military support, loans, or material investments to the patriots in the 1810s and 1820s. Contemporary Great Britain was mentioned approvingly as a living, practical model far more

4. Roberto Botero Saldarriaga, Francisco Antonio Zea (Bogotá: Ediciones del Concejo, 1945), 73.

5. Geoffrey Cubitt, “The Political Uses of Seventeenth-Century English History in Bourbon Restoration France,” The Historical Journal 50, no. 1 (2007): 86. See also Geoffrey Cubitt, “Revolution, Reaction, Restoration: The Meanings and Uses of Seventeenth-Century English History in the Political Thinking of Benjamin Constant, 1797 – 1830,” European Review of History 14, no. 1 (Mar. 2007): 21 – 47; Sudhir Hazareesingh, “Napoleonic Memory in Nineteenth-Century France: The Making of a Liberal Legend,” Modern Language Notes 120, no. 4 (Sept. 2005): 747 – 73; Beth S. Wright, “Implacable Fathers: The Reinterpretation of Cromwell in French Texts and Images from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century,” Nineteenth Century Contexts 20 (1997): 165 – 85; J. R. Jennings, “Conceptions of England and Its Constitution in Nineteenth-Century French Political Thought,” The Historical Journal 29, no. 1 (1986): 65 – 85.


frequently than was France by the time that Spanish American patriots actually set about the arduous tasks first of fighting for their independence and then constructing new nations.6

Others have researched the influence of a revolutionary model that was closer to home, and it is true that Spanish Americans were both aware of and interested in the process of the American Revolution.7 George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were well-known figures. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man was translated into Spanish at least five times, in Caracas (1811), Santiago de Chile, (1812), London (1819), Lima (1821), and Philadelphia (1821), although the more dangerous sections attacking institutional religion and monarchy were fre-quently redacted, essentially rendering the work unrecognizable.8 The American Revolution had the appeal of being a successful revolt against a colonial power, one located in the same hemisphere and which managed to preserve social order as it passed into a new political structure. Spanish Americans, however, were not convinced of the merits of an as-yet-untried republican model and found much to make them nervous in the U.S. experience. The separation of church and state was unsettling and too controversial for all but a few to contemplate. The United States still upheld the institution of slavery and had designs on Mexican

6. I base this statement on my extensive examination of full runs of over 40 contemporary Spanish American newspapers, 5,000 pamphlets and broadsides, the personal correspondence and published work of at least 60 major figures from the era, and extensive reading in patriot government documents spanning the entire continent.

7. See James E. Lewis, The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1783 – 1829 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1998); Piero Gleijeses, “The Limits of Sympathy: The United States and Latin American Independence,” Journal of Latin American Studies 24, no. 3 (1992): 481 – 505; Javier Ocampo López, La independencia de los Estados Unidos de América y su proyección en Hispanoamérica: El modelo norteamericano y su repercusión en la independencia de Colombia (Caracas: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia, 1979); and Javier Ocampo López, “La agitación revolucionaria en el Nuevo Reino de Granada y el ejemplo de la independencia de los Estados Unidos,” Revista de Historia de América 82 (1976): 29 – 52; Mario Rodríguez, “The Impact of the American Revolution on the Spanish- and Portuguese-Speaking World,” in The Impact of the American Revolution Abroad (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1976): 101 – 25; Charles C. Griffin, The United States and the Disruption of the Spanish Empire, 1810 – 1822 (New York: Octagon Books, 1968); Arthur P. Whitaker, The United States and the Independence of Latin America, 1800 – 1830 (New York: Norton, 1961). William R. Manning published a three-volume collection called The Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States Concerning the Independence of the Latin American Nations (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1925).

8. Rafael Gómez Hoyos, “Un granadino traductor de Tomás Paine en 1819,” Boletín de Historia y Antigüedades 57, no. 666 – 67 (1970): 194.


and Cuban territory, both of which significantly complicated its appeal. Many patriots instead were more attracted to a British-style constitutional monarchy as the best guarantor of social stability and gradual reform; in fact, San Martín, Bello, and Rivadavia all contemplated such arrangements well into the 1820s, and Iturbide in Mexico actually attempted it. Others, particularly Mexicans and Argentines, were wary about U.S. hemispheric ambitions and wished to find a way to check their northern neighbor’s power. Bolívar pointedly did not want to invite the United States to the Panama Congress in 1826, yet he was willing to permit Great Britain to send a representative. Furthermore, the United States was neither strong enough militarily to be much of a guarantee against Span-ish royalist counterattacks, nor were those at the highest administrative levels inclined to toss in their lot with rebels in the southern hemisphere, no matter what the doctrine of universal liberty might imply.

There has been much scholarship on the rivalry of great powers in the region, and much that treats Spanish American independence as a series of diplomatic events.9 The international dimension was powerfully expressed in R. R. Palmer’s famous book The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political His-tory of Europe and America, 1760 – 1800, and academics have tended to project its arguments forward to include Spanish America. More recently, this geospatial approach to intellectual and cultural history has taken the form of Atlantic stud-ies, the best of which are truly cross-cultural and able to bridge languages and fields, but which are often nothing more than imperial history in a new guise.10 The most interesting and convincing reevaluation of intra-empire reformism

9. John Johnson, “United States–British Rivalry in Latin America, 1815 – 1830: A Reassessment,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft, und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas 22 (1985): 341 – 91; Lester D. Langley, Struggle for the American Mediterranean: United States – European Rivalry in the Gulf-Caribbean, 1776 – 1904 (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1976); J. Fred Rippy, Rivalry of the United States and Great Britain over Latin America, 1808 – 1830 (New York: Octagon Books, 1972).

10. María Teresa Calderón and Clément Thibaud, eds., Las revoluciones en el mundo atlántico (Bogotá: Taurus, 2006); J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492 – 1830 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2006); Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006); Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2005); Karen Racine, Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003); Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500 – 1820 (New York: Routledge, 2002); Thomas Benjamin, Timothy Hall, and David Rutherford, eds., The Atlantic World in the Age of Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001); Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750 – 1850 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1996).


has come from those who argue for the primacy of an endogenous Hispanic liberal constitutionalism, namely the impact of the Constitution of Cádiz and its subsequent iterations.11 These arguments are provocative, compelling, and valu-able. It should be noted, however, that the personnel of the liberal Cortes were often Anglophiles themselves and their debates were heavily influenced by con-temporary British politics and philosophy, including issues such as the abolition of the slave trade, freedom of the press, libel law, and the proper arrangement of a moderate constitutional monarchy. Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos regu-larly praised British constitutional monarchy and was profoundly influenced by Locke’s concept of the duty of citizens to rebel against unjust authority; he read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations daily and even translated part of John Milton’s Paradise Lost in his precious leisure moments.12 José Canga Argüelles quoted British abolitionists in his fiery speeches. Antonio José Ruiz Padrón and Juan Antonio Llorente railed against the Inquisition using quotes and arguments taken from British polemicists who had long viewed it as the epitome of Spanish tyranny. All these British ideas circulated widely among Spanish Americans in the independence era and fortified the image of a people in solidarity with their own liberty. For their part, British parliamentarians and public alike cheered Spanish resistance to Napoleon and devoured news of its emerging constitu-tional order with glee and a sense of vindication. The Constitution of Cádiz and various deputies’ speeches were published in London to great fanfare (a version was later reprinted in Mexico in 1820, complete with its English editor’s notes).13

11. This argument has recently surged in popularity. See Roberto Breña, El primer liberalismo español y los procesos de emancipación de América, 1808 – 1824 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2006); 153 – 80; Jaime E. Rodríguez O., ed., The Divine Charter: Constitutionalism and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Manuel Chust, ed., Doceañismos, constituciones e independencias: La Constitución de 1812 y América (Madrid: MAPFRE, 2006); Jaime E. Rodríguez O., La revolución política durante la época de la independencia: El reino de Quito, 1808 – 1822 (Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2006); Manuel Chust and Ivana Frasquet, eds., La trascendencia del liberalismo doceañista en España y en América (Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, 2004); François-Xavier Guerra, ed., Las revoluciones hispánicas:Independencias americanos y liberalismo español (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 1995).

12. Robert Sidney Smith, “The Wealth of Nations in Spain and Hispanic America, 1780 – 1830,” Journal of Political Economy 65, no. 2 (Apr. 1957): 106; O. Carlos Stoetzer, The Scholastic Roots of the Spanish American Revolution (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 1979), 66.

13. Political Constitution of the Spanish Monarchy, trans. Daniel Robinson (London: J. J. Stockdale, 1813); Representación de la Diputación Americana a las Córtes de España en 1 de agosto de 1811, con notas del editor inglés - Londres: Schulze y Dean, 1811 (Mexico City: Alejandro Valdés, 1820).


Even poet William Wordsworth became a champion of the Spanish cause, trudging through the snow at 2 a.m. to receive the most recent news about the Peninsular War and fiercely protesting the Convention of Cintra after Welling-ton agreed to a shameful cease-fire and retreat.14 British and Hispanic liberalism were not as far apart as one might suspect, given the long history of contact, exchange, admiration, and enmity between the two ancient monarchies.15

In a very real and practical way, British politicians and propagandists had been chipping away at the Spanish Empire for at least two centuries before the independence movements launched, not only creating a military and economic orbit that later appealed to the patriots’ search for a viable alternative order, but also laying the foundation for a long-standing and deep cultural attrac-tion to all things British.16 Successive English naval victories had killed off the idea that the Spanish Crown was able to defend its subjects abroad or protect its commercial enterprises, and strength always attracts admirers. Slowly but surely, the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588), the adventures of Sir Francis Drake, the seizure of Jamaica (1655), the formal cession of Trinidad (1802), and the ever-increasing presence of the British Navy in the South Seas provided an alternative source of both material goods and international news, along with the chance to observe the habits and norms of another nation’s people. In living memory, Admiral Nelson’s infamous victory over Napoleon’s fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar (1804), the British invasion and occupation of the Río de la Plata (1806), Britain’s timely evacuation of the Portuguese royal family from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro (1808), and its staunch support for the Spanish guerrillas on the Iberian peninsula solidified Britain’s image as the creoles’ strongest, most

14. Erasmo Buceta, “El entusiasmo por España en algunos románticos ingleses,” Revista de Filosofía Española 10, no. 1 (1929): 8n. Diego Saglia has written extensively on Hispanic themes and tropes in British literature. His best works include Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000); “ ‘O My Mother Spain!’: The Peninsular War, Family Matters, and the Practice of Romantic Nation-Writing,” English Literary History 65, no. 2 (1998): 363 – 93; “ ‘The True Essence of Romanticism’: Romantic Theories of Spain and the Question of Spanish Romanticism,” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 3, no. 2 (1997): 127 – 45; “The Exotic Politics of the Domestic: The Alhambra as Symbolic Place in British History,” Comparative Literature Studies 34 (1997): 197 – 225.

15. Pedro Grases, Britain and Hispanic Liberalism, 1800 – 1830 (London: Canning House, 1975).

16. Gabriel Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance and Reform in Spain and Its Empire, 1759 – 1808 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and “The Image of British Imperial Spain in British Political Thought, 1750 – 1800,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 81, no. 2 (2004): 187 – 214.


vigorous potential military ally and their most desirable commercial partner. Furthermore, even Spanish liberals had fled to exile in London, following the well-worn path of generations of others who had sought protection abroad from persecution at home.17 There were both idealistic and practical reasons for this pilgrimage. British liberty had long protected foreign dissidents and allowed them space to meet, publish, and reconstitute their communities in exile; more prosaically, its government provided pensions for many Spanish American exiles and expatriates living in dire poverty during the revolutionary era.

As nations and empires, Spain and England had enjoyed a long and often fraught relationship. Dating from the days when Henry VIII repudiated his Spanish-born first wife Catherine of Aragon, through the Great Schism of the Anglican Reformation and England’s long-standing support for the indepen-dence and the autonomy of both Portugal and the Low Countries in the face of Spanish expansionism, British concepts of freedom often defined themselves in contraposition to the Spanish Empire. Over time, these images not only seeped into Spanish colonial discourse itself but also crossed the ocean and perme-ated the Spanish American consciousness, laying a deep foundation of belief that England was both the natural home of liberty and the best potential ally. Bartolomé de Las Casas’s tracts appeared in English translation as early as 1583 and elicited a raft of defensive responses from the Spanish Crown and its chroniclers, which, of course, introduced the Protestant Black Legend critiques into the Spanish-speaking world by proxy. In an anecdote that was frequently repeated by Spanish American patriot writers during the independence era, Garcilaso de la Vega claimed that there was a tradition among Andean Indians which prophesied that they would recover their independence with the aid of England, invoked respectfully as “that Great part of the world.”18 Examples abound. Servando Teresa de Mier called the Laws of the Indies “our Magna Carta.” Juan Germán Roscio thanked Great Britain for giving the world a centuries-long example of resistance to tyranny first set out in “their Magna Carta.” Both men had spent time in England and were profoundly affected by the experience.19 Even the congresses at Chilpancingo (1813) and Apatzingán

17. Vicente Lloréns, Liberales y románticos: Una emigración española en Inglaterra, 1823 – 1834 (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1979), and “Colaboraciones de emigrados españoles en revistas inglesas, 1824 – 1834,” Hispanic Review 19, no. 2 (Apr. 1951): 121 – 42.

18. José de la Riva-Agüero, Manifestación histórica y política de la revolución de la América (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de los Expósitos, 1818), 172.

19. José Servando Teresa de Mier Noriega y Guerra, Historia de la revolución de Nueva España antiguamente Anáhuac . . . (Paris: La Sorbona, 1990), 476. Juan Germán Roscio, El Triunfo de la libertad sobre el despotismo (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1996), 125, 228.


(1814) praised “the celebrated English law of habeus corpus” as the best way to safeguard citizens from the abuses of tyrannical government.20 The Argen-tine O’Gorman family named one of their daughters Ana Bolena in the 1820s, and a series of articles in El Centinela encouraged young girls to be like the strong Queen “Isabel of England” whose forces defeated the fanatical agents of inquisitorial Spain.21 José de San Martín intentionally paid homage to Oliver Cromwell, the moralistic leader of England’s New Model Army, when he took on the title of Protector in 1821. There can be no doubt that educated Spanish American creole patriot leaders had absorbed the lessons and values of British history and deployed them with great skill and selectivity in their struggle for emancipation from Spain and for legitimacy at home.

Of course, in order to have meaning, rhetoric must be translated into power, and power into concrete action. Words and theories alone do not consti-tute influence. The Spanish Americans leaders who went on to have the great-est impact in reconstructing the institutions and cultures of their nations after independence were the same ones who actively traveled to, and solicited material support from, Great Britain over the course of nearly two decades.22 The earli-est example of this collective search for British patronage can be found in the so-called Grafton Street symposium. In the summer of 1810, representatives of the newly established Spanish American creole juntas in Caracas and Buenos Aires, and assorted private citizens made the pilgrimage to London to meet Francisco de Miranda and appeal to the British government for aid, friendship, and mediation with Spain, a seditious act that brought their real intentions out into the open and clearly revealed where they thought their best interests lay.23

20. Guadalupe Jiménez Codinach, La Gran Bretaña y la independencia de México, 1808 – 1821 (Mexico City: Fondo de la Cultura Económica, 1991), 45.

21. Ignacio Benito Núñez, Autobiografía (Buenos Aires: Comisión de Cultura del Senado de la Nación, Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1996), 164. El Centinela, no. 10, 20 Sept. 1822, pp. 154 – 55.

22. For a collection of primary source documents, see C. K. Webster, ed., Britain and the Independence of Latin America, 1812 – 1830: Select Documents from the Foreign Office Archives (New York: Octagon Books, 1970); R. A. Humphrey, ed., British Consular Reports on the Trade and Politics of Latin America, 1824 – 1826 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1940). See also Carles Pi Sunyer, Patriotas americanos en Londres: Miranda, Bello y otras figuras (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1978); William W. Kaufmann, British Policy and the Independence of Latin America 1804 – 1828 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1951); María Teresa Berruezo León, La lucha de Hispanoamérica por su independencia en Inglaterra, 1800 – 1830 (Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, 1989).

23. See the chapters in Racine, Francisco de Miranda; Pi Sunyer, Patriotas americanos en Londres; Pedro Grases, Tiempo de bello en Londres y otro ensayos (Caracas: Biblioteca Venezolana de Cultura, 1962).


24. Bell’s Weekly Messenger (London), 18 Jan. 1818. The Times (London), The Morning Chronicle (London), Carrick’s Morning Post (Dublin), and numerous other daily newspapers carried regular announcements of ships’ departures, goods for sale, and passages taken during the years 1817 – 1820.

For nearly two months, from July to September 1810, Venezuelans Simón Bolí-var, Luis López Méndez, and Joseph Tovar Ponte; Argentine Matías Yrigoyen; Ecuadorean José María Antepara; and Mexicans Francisco Fagoaga, the Mar-qués del Apartado, and Wenceslao Villaurrutia congregated at Miranda’s Grafton Street house to talk about the issues that concerned them all. These men met abolitionist William Wilberforce; toured Lancaster’s Borough Road School; visited the docks, naval hospital, and observatory at Greenwich; and dined with the dukes of Sussex and Gloucester. They were amazed at the vigor-ous public press and quickly teamed up with James Perry, influential editor of the Morning Chronicle, to learn how to best present their case to the court of public opinion. Most of all, they were impressed to learn that the English model offered a way to combine the cherished ideals of freedom and social reform with the maintenance of order, status, and property. If the king could sponsor free schools for poor children, if the House of Lords could initiate prison reform, and if wealthy and educated citizens like Robert Owen (who later thought of emigrating to Mexico himself ) could experiment with improved labor condi-tions on behalf of workers, then that would be the aristocratic yet still reformist model they set out to emulate.

The British military and diplomatic role in Spanish American indepen-dence has been well studied and will only be briefly acknowledged here. Once the so-called “mask of Ferdinand” came off in 1814 and it became apparent to all that the Spanish American patriots had no intention of returning to their colonial status after a four-year experiment in self-government, the need to shore up military defenses and find an ally became all the more pressing. Great Britain was their natural choice, even though its foreign secretary Lord Cas-tlereagh and his successor George Canning both adhered to an official policy of neutrality. In practice, however, Spanish American agents in London openly recruited military personnel for their armed forces. Between 1817 and 1819, London newspapers were filled with advertisements for buttons, muskets, tai-lors’ services, leather goods, and everything a young man would need to out-fit himself. Bell’s Weekly Messenger spoke of the “South American mania” that gripped London streets.24 The Bloomsbury home of Bolívar’s agent Luis López Méndez became known as “the colonel factory” because he handed out so many promotions to former British servicemen willing to sign up for duty in the land


25. Alfred Hasbrouck, Foreign Legionaries in the Liberation of Spanish South America (New York: Octagon Books, 1969), 49. For the most comprehensive study of the British and Irish Legion see Matthew Brown, Adventuring through Spanish Colonies: Simón Bolívar, Foreign Mercenaries, and the Birth of New Nations (Liverpool: Univ. of Liverpool Press, 2006).

26. The phrase is David Hogan’s in “Market Revolution and Disciplinary Power,” 381.27. David J. Cubitt, “The Manning of the Chilean Navy in the War of Independence,

1818 – 1823,” Mariner’s Mirror 63 (1977): 115 – 27.28. See Cochrane’s memoirs: Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald, Narrative of

Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, 2 vols. (London: J. Ridgway, 1859). See also the new book by David Cordingly, former director of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, Cochrane the Dauntless: The Life and Adventures of Admiral Thomas Cochrane, 1775 – 1860 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007).

29. John de Courcy Ireland, The Admiral from Mayo: A Life of Almirante William Brown of Foxford, Father of the Argentine Navy (Dublin: Edmund Burke, 1995).

of El Dorado.25 Approximately 5,000 foreign soldiers, nearly all of British ori-gin, enlisted in the armies of northern South America, and a large proportion of them remained there once the wars were over. These men intermarried with local Spanish families and eventually became leaders in business, diplomacy, medicine, banking, mining, and other elite ventures and thus provided a direct link to the British-led “market revolution.”26

British influence in the Pacific maritime theater was also pronounced in ways not matched by the United States or France. One of Bernardo O’Higgins’s greatest dreams was to turn Chile into a world-class naval power able to domi-nate the Pacific trade. The obvious contemporary model was the British Navy, which he greatly admired. Antonio Alvarez Jonte went to London to recruit sailors for him and, along with Antonio José de Irisarri, managed to secure the services of Lord Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, to head up a new national fleet that would operate according to the British naval code of behavior.27 Cochrane sailed from England in August 1818 and arrived in South America to much fanfare. At home among the growing British community of Valparaiso, he and his British officers outfitted a fairly impressive force and headed north to support San Martín’s Army of the Andes. Since then, the Chil-ean Navy has had five battleships and destroyers named Lord Cochrane, and its navy (like others in South America) still retains a vestigial aristocratic British tone.28 Similarly, Admiral William Brown was a native of Ireland who became the first commander of the Argentine Navy. He remains a national hero for his grand exploits during the wars of independence and has lent his name to a World War II cruiser, an entire class of destroyers in the 1980s, an Antarctic research station, a maritime studies center, and several Argentine soccer clubs.29 There are no comparable figures from France or the United States.


Yet Spanish American patriot leaders were attracted to Great Britain not just for the immediate practical goals of solidifying diplomatic and military support for their break from Spain but also for the tantalizing model of aris-tocratic reformism that it offered to them. England had outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and was spearheading the international effort to abolish slavery itself, a condition which was considered to be both an affront to humanity and a form of labor that was inherently tyrannical. On a rhetorical level, patriot leaders were fond of using slavery as a metaphor for their own political strug-gle for freedom. In Caracas, Ignacio Rodríguez de Ribas wrote, “No nation will be enslaved that does not wish it.”30 From Cochabamba, Francisco Xavier Iturri Patiño called for an army to “rid our countrymen from that heavy yoke that Europeans have maintained by despotism for three centuries.”31 Bue-nos Aires director Nicolás Herrera described Spain as “our common enemy [who] would return to bend our necks under the abominable yoke of Euro-pean despotism.”32 The slavery metaphor was constant, widespread, and ubiq-uitous during the independence era, and its invocation mirrored the strate-gies and rhetoric of British abolitionists (and radical labor leaders too, for that matter), news of which was widely disseminated in the Spanish American periodical press.

Many of these same patriot leaders translated their antislavery rhetoric into concrete policies once they were in a position to do so. One of the most vocal proponents of the abolition of the slave trade at the Cortes of Cádiz, José Canga Argüelles, had long been observing closely the strategies of the British abolitionists Wilberforce, Clarkson, and Sharp, frequently referred to them in his speeches, and modeled his proposed reforms after their work.33 Cartagena ended the importation of slaves and created a manumission fund in 1812; the state of Mariquita did the same in 1815. Bolívar issued his first proclamation of emancipation as early as 1816, which was followed by a manumission law at the Congress of Cúcuta in 1821 and a series of other decrees in 1822, 1823, 1827, and

30. Ignacio Rodríguez de Ribas, Caraqueños: Llegó la época feliz del desengaño (Cádiz: Imprenta Real, 1812).

31. Francisco Xavier Iturri Patiño, Proclama del mas perseguido americano a sus paysanos de la noble, leal y valerosa ciudad de Cochabamba (Buenos Aires: Real Imprenta de Niños Expósitos, 9 Aug. 1810).

32. [Argentine Republic] Director [Nicolás Herrera], “Circular. Desde que D José Artigas vió recompensados prodigamente . . .” (Buenos Aires, 30 Mar. 1815).

33. Humberto Triana y Antorveza, “La abolición del comercio de negros de Africa en la política internacional de la Gran Colombia,” Boletín de Historia y Antigüedades 82, no. 388 (1995): 22.


1828 affirming the end of slavery.34 Indeed, patriot leaders throughout Spanish America were keenly aware that both Castlereagh and Canning viewed aboli-tion as one of the key requirements for any Spanish American country wishing to receive formal political recognition from Great Britain. In 1825, Colombia signed a formal treaty with Great Britain in which it promised joint coopera-tion in ending the slave trade by shutting down the activities of the traders themselves.

Not coincidentally, many of the men who were the driving force behind these policies had close personal connections to England; these included Bolí-var, Santander, José Rafael Revenga, and Francisco Antonio Zea. Even José Manuel Restrepo, who favored property rights and a more cautious approach to emancipation, noted in his diary that events in his country were closely tied to British interests; he wrote, “The African Institution of London has spoken approvingly and to much applause of the manumission law here which has given liberty to the children of slaves while prohibiting any further imports.”35 In Mexico, José María Fagoaga had spent much time in England in the 1810s and used that experience to draft the Mexican Congress’s position on abolition in the 1820s. Even some enslaved people themselves apparently were aware that an entity called Britain was on their side; in 1811, a domestic slave named Gregoria Santos presented herself to Lima’s cabildo with a petition that her sale to “a Brit-ish individual” be upheld.36

Another of the major arenas in which British cultural influence was domi-nant above all others was in education reform. Always pragmatic, Spanish American patriot leaders recognized the economic value that a literate popula-tion represented and hoped to harness the vast potential of the printed word to their nation-building purposes. As José Cecilio del Valle, the first president of the United Provinces of Central America, bluntly put it, “Chinautla is poor

34. Harold A. Bierck Jr., “The Struggle for Abolition in Gran Colombia,” Hispanic American Historical Review 33, no. 3 (Aug. 1953): 366, 385; and James F. King, “The Latin American Republics and the Suppression of the Slave Trade,” Hispanic American Historical Review 24, no. 3 (Aug. 1944): 387 – 411. The best and most recent work on aspects of this theme can be found in Aline Helg, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770 – 1835 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2003); Marixa Lasso, Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution, Colombia 1795 – 1831 (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2007); Peter Blanchard, Under the Flags of Freedom: Slave Soldiers and the Wars of Independence in Spanish South America (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2008).

35. Restrepo, quoted in Triana y Antorveza, “La abolición del comercio de negros,” 39.36. Christine Hunefeldt, “Los negros de Lima, 1800 – 1830,” Histórica 3, no. 1

(1979): 36.


37. José Cecilio del Valle, “Ilustración,” in Sistema político y otros escritos (Tegucigalpa: Secretaría de Cultura y Turismo, 1980), 53.

38. Hogan, “Market Revolution and Disciplinary Power,” 384, 407.39. Joseph Lancaster, Epitome of Some of the Chief Events and Transactions in the Life of

Joseph Lancaster (New Haven: Baldwin and Peck, 1833), 35.

because it is ignorant; London is powerful because it is enlightened.”37 Educa-tion reform was never far from the hearts of Spanish American patriot leaders, who revealed their personal predilections by sending their children to school in England. The families of San Martín, Rivadavia, Iturbide, Vicente Rocafuerte, and Buenos Aires’ governor Martín Rodríguez; Chile’s prominent Toro family; and Guatemala’s Aycinenas and García Granados were among the many who sent children to be trained in Great Britain in the 1820s. Others, such as Bolívar, Santander, O’Higgins, and Alamán, became convinced that Joseph Lancaster’s system of mutual education, known as the monitorial method, offered Span-ish America a cost-efficient, effective way to educate large numbers to basic literacy in a short amount of time. They contracted with the British and For-eign School Society (BFSS) to send out teachers instructed in the Lancasterian method to aid them in their national projects. Lancaster’s insistence that he was acting as a “citizen of the world,” one whose only motive was love of country, resonated with Spanish American patriot leaders who saw themselves the same way. This shared vision of national improvement through the advancement of useful knowledge, coupled with Lancaster’s claim that one master alone could educate 1,000 poor boys to basic literacy in three months, was a hallmark of British-style aristocratic reformism, and it proved just as irresistible to them as it did to citizens in Russia, the United States, and France who were adopting it at the same time. Lancaster’s structure “transformed schooling into a meri-tocratic marketplace,” one that was a “manufactory of desire and ambition, a marketplace of competitive achievement, and an engine of disciplinary power,” and which perfectly suited the mood and vision of the Spanish American patriot leaders.38

In 1810, during his brief summertime visit to London on behalf of the Cara-cas junta, Bolívar made a point of touring Lancaster’s Borough Road School and promised to send over two Venezuelan youths to learn the monitorial system from the master himself.39 Bolívar’s association with Lancaster lasted for nearly 20 years. In 1824, the Liberator invited Lancaster and his family to come to Caracas to superintend a school for Colombian youth, and he even made a grand speech at Lancaster’s wedding to Maria Robinson in February 1827. Their pro-fessional relationship, however, soon soured over unpaid wages, poor facilities,


and a fundamental incompatibility between two outsized personalities.40 The BFSS register of students indicates that at least eight Spanish Americans trained there and several Britons were sent out to South America for both boys’ and girls’ schools. Future president of Ecuador Vicente Rocafuerte and Colombian diplomat José María Vergara both were voting members of the BFSS during their time in London in the 1820s and actively diffused its mission once they returned home.

The relationship between the new Spanish American patriot governments and BFSS agent-evangelist-entrepreneur James Thomson was a complicated one, partly because of his idiosyncratic and messianic personality, but also because the newly active state intervention in the field of public education threatened one of the Catholic Church’s traditional roles in society.41 Indeed, many of the most sensitive post-independence issues related to the role of reli-gion in the newly independent states (public education, burial of non-Catholics in cemeteries, freedom of the press) arose from the patriot leaders’ desire to accommodate British merchants and settlers. By encouraging private study, an emphasis on material rewards as an incentive to learn, and the none-too-subtle profit motive accompanying the sales of the New Testament, Thomson and his Spanish American patrons hoped to disseminate a spirit of improve-ment and entrepreneurial energy among their young charges while at the same time instilling in them a capitalist ethic, obedience to authority, and respect for their masters.42 It was the British aristocratic model adapted to a Spanish

40. The text of the wedding toast, dated 2 Feb. 1827, is found in Lancaster Papers, American Antiquarian Society, box 13, folder 7. The full account of their long and complicated relationship is available in Edgar Vaughan, Joseph Lancaster en Caracas, 1824 – 1827, 2 vols. (Caracas: Ediciones del Ministerio de Educación, 1987).

41. For good studies of the Lancasterian method in various Spanish American countries, see Eugenia Roldán Vera, “Reading in Questions and Answers: The Catechism as an Educational Genre in Early Independent Spanish America,” Book History 4 (2001): 17 – 48; Dorothy Tanck de Estrada, “Las escuelas lancasterianas en la ciudad de México, 1822 – 1842,” Historia Mexicana 22, no. 4, Ensayos sobre la historia de la educación en México (Apr. – June 1973): 494 – 513; Webster E. Browning, “Joseph Lancaster, James Thomson, and the Lancasterian System of Mutual Instruction, with Special Reference to Hispanic America,” Hispanic American Historical Review 4, no. 1 (Feb. 1921): 49 – 98; Domingo Amunátegui Solar, El sistema de Lancaster en Chile i en otros paises sudamericanos (Santiago: Imprenta de Cervantes, 1895). James Thomson published his own account of his South American tour, Letters on the Moral and Religious State of South America (London: J. Nisbet, 1827).

42. Karen Racine, “Commercial Christianity: The British and Foreign Bible Society’s Interest in Spanish America, 1805 – 1830,” in Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture, Commerce and Capital, ed. Matthew Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 78 – 98.


American environment: idealistic, educated, cosmopolitan elites who desired controlled social uplift through charitable works and their own benevolent acts. The educational goal was to create useful citizens, not necessarily democratic ones.

In 1819, immediately after being elected president by the Congress of Angostura, Bolívar started to set up schools that utilized the Lancasterian method of mutual education throughout the territory under his control.43 Fran-cis Hall noted that there were functioning Lancasterian schools for poor boys not only in the large Colombian municipalities of Boyacá and Bogotá but also “in several other principal towns.”44 San Martín and his aide Bernardo Mon-teagudo decreed the establishment of a national school system in Peru based on Lancasterian escuelas normales in 1822.45 In Mexico, Secretary of State Lucas Alamán actively sponsored the establishment of schools of mutual education and promoted them in the various regional presses.46 By 1828, the British and Foreign School Society was pleased to receive reports that Veracruz’s vice- governor Antonio López de Santa Anna had taken a personal interest in patron-izing public education and to that end had appointed a Lancasterian commit-tee and endowed their work with 30,000 pesos per year. Indeed, it seemed that everywhere the schools had been established, they had been “hailed with joy, and the utmost zeal shewn in supporting them.”47

The greatest influence of the Lancasterian school system was probably

43. Dario Guevara, “Bolívar y Lancaster,” Boletín de la Academia Nacional de la Historia (Caracas) 51, no. 201 (1968): 81.

44. Francis Hall, Letters written from Colombia during a journey from Caracas to Bogotá and thence to Santa Martha, in 1823 (London: G. Cowie & Co., 1824), 101, 136, and Colombia, Its Present State (London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, 1825), 56. A letter from British bookseller W. Turner to Joaquín Mosquera dated Bogotá, 10 June 1834, indicates that the Lancasterian influence among the liberal leadership continued well beyond Bolívar’s death and Lancaster’s huffy departure. Indiana University, Lilly Library, Latin American MSS, Colombia 1819 – 1890.

45. José de San Martín [signed by Secretary Trujillo and Bernardo Monteagudo], “Decreto,” Lima, 6 July 1822, printed as an appendix to Peruvian Pamphlet, being an exposition of the administrative labors of the Peruvian Government (London: Applegate, 1823), 86 – 87.

46. Lucas Alamán, “Instrucción para el establecimiento de escuelas, según los principios de enseñanza mutua . . .” La Sabatina Universal 1, 5 Sept. 28, and 5, 12 Oct. 1822, pp. 266 – 74, 279 – 99. One typical advertisement for the Lancasterian schools was published in El Sol, 20 Mar. 1822.

47. British and Foreign School Society Annual Report, May 1827, p. 26, and May 1828, p. 14. Santa Anna’s decree no. 100 dated Veracruz, 20 Mar. 1828, in Indiana University, Lilly Library, F1227 Agency 385, broadsides.


found in Chile and the Río de la Plata, where Camilo Henríquez, Rivadavia, and O’Higgins all sought closer relations with Great Britain. In 1819, the Chilean Senate accepted O’Higgins’s request to establish a national school system using the monitorial method and borrowed the rules set out by Manuel Belgrano in Argentina. The Chilean government clearly viewed its adoption of the British system as a form of participation in cosmopolitan modernity. Juan de Dios Vial enthused that “in the greatest part of Europe, and in much of Asia, Africa and America, they have adopted the Lancasterian method with admiration and util-ity, which happily has now been planted in Chile.”48 Aristocratic families enthu-siastically sponsored the mutual education project, which continued to receive official support through 1828, when Francisco Antonio Pinto’s administration agreed to pay the costs of printing books for their schools. Pinto himself was a devotee of all things English and had spent time in London.49

In Buenos Aires, El Censor ran a series of articles advocating the monito-rial system which included transcripts from British and Foreign School Society meetings in London. The society, they took care to emphasize, was supported both by members of the aristocracy such as the Duke of Sussex and by impor-tant reformists like abolitionist William Wilberforce.50 Joseph Lancaster’s work was translated and published as Origen y progresos del nuevo sistema de enseñanza mutua del Señor Lancaster. The editor stressed that this system had spread rap-idly throughout England because wealthy, patriotic citizens had sponsored its growth to their own great credit; within three years, a subscription list for the Lancasterian Society of Buenos Aires contained the names of 166 patrons, each of whom paid six pesos per year as a membership fee and often donated an additional lump sum.51 Rivadavia’s secretary Ignacio Benito Núñez personally

48. Antony Eaton to James Miller, Santiago de Chile, 16 June 1820, Cambridge University, British and Foreign Bible Society Archives, File Central America/South America. Eaton’s contract with Irisarri is found at Chile, Archivo Nacional, Archivo Fernández Larraín, vol. 42, pieza 22; Amunátegui, El sistema de Lancaster en Chile, 13 – 14, 76, 100, 111 – 12; Aviso: A los padres que tienen hijos en las nuevas escuelas de Lancaster (Santiago: n.p., 1827).

49. Francisco Antonio Pinto, “Decreto,” Santiago, 18 Apr. 1828. Chile, Archivo Nacional, Fondo Varios, vol. 697, f. 281.

50. El Censor, no. 116, 21 Nov. 1818, and no. 117, 28 Nov. 1818. 51. Origen y progresos del nuevo sistema de enseñanza mutua del Señor Lancaster

(Buenos Aires: Imprenta de los Expósitos, [1820?]); Subscriptores y reglamento de la Sociedad Lancasteriana (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de Hallet, 1823); “Proyecto de reglamento para la formación de una sociedad elemental en Buenos Aires,” El Centinela, no. 42, 11 May 1823, pp. 335 – 36.


delivered papers from the British and Foreign School Society to government officials in Buenos Aires when he returned home from London in 1825, telling its director that he was proud his native land was sharing in the light emanat-ing from London to the rest of the world.52 One Argentine reader remembered that “a long time ago I read two small books written in England for use in these primary schools, and I admired them very much for their simplicity, wisdom, and the profound learning displayed by their author.”53 Public education was a key aspect of British aristocratic reformism and was directly emulated by Span-ish American patriot leaders anxious to make their citizens happier and more productive, while ensuring that they were trained to respect authority, status, and property.

The concept of liberty, as it was understood in the British tradition of John Milton, John Locke, Adam Smith, David Hume, Dugald Stewart, and Edmund Burke, stressed not only political rights but also the rights of property, and it found a sympathetic audience among Spanish American independence leaders. For example, Francisco José Planes, the editor of the Buenos Aires weekly El Grito del Sud, struck a Lockean note in 1812 when he wrote that “The time has arrived in which insults to the oppressed nature of all have ended, and we enter into the enjoyment and exercise of those sacred rights of which tyrants deprived us for so long. Property, liberty, security are gifts that are placed in our hands today.”54

Unlike the French revolutionary model characterized by abstract ideals of liberty, fraternity, and equality, British aristocratic reformism was always grounded in tradition, property, hierarchy, and controlled change, something which had obvious appeal for Spanish American creole elites in a still mainly rural, racially heterogeneous society. Furthermore, Locke, like Adam Smith and many other British philosophers and entrepreneurs who came after him, believed that economy and society were inextricably linked and argued that it was possible for morality to exist within a competitive environment. These notions had great contemporary appeal because they buttressed the patriots’ desire to lessen the church influence in public life while valorizing the rational individual’s ability to advance himself on behalf of the whole.55 For this rea-son, Locke was widely read and quoted in pamphlets, periodicals, and speeches

52. Núñez to Mr. Miller, Buenos Aires, 5 May 1825, British and Foreign School Society Archives.

53. “Educación de Lancaster y Bell,” El Censor, no. 7, 15 May 1817, pp. 6 – 7.54. Francisco José Planes, “Prospecto,” El Grito del Sud (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de

Niños Expósitos, 1812), 2. 55. Hogan, “Market Revolution and Disciplinary Power,” 401.


throughout the hemisphere. Peruvian jurist Manuel Lorenzo de Vidaurre wrote in his Cartas americanas, “No one can deny that England was the first to spread the rays of clarity. In Locke and in Milton, there are sublime ideas.”56 The great Andrés Bello taught himself English using Locke’s Essay on Human Understand-ing and frequently invoked Lockean arguments once he settled in Chile and helped to draft the 1833 Portalian constitution. Indeed, the Lockean emphasis on freedom grounded in order, progress, and property was much more suited to the Spanish American patriot leaders’ view of an imagined future nation and their role in it than has previously been acknowledged.

Alexander Pope was also widely read, quoted, and translated by Spanish Americans in the independence era. In 1816, in the midst of contentious consti-tutional negotiations in Buenos Aires, Manuel Moreno quoted Pope’s comment about the need for “precautions, without which the law and judicial power will always be weak for the strong, and strong for the weak.”57 José Cecilio del Valle, the eminent Guatemalan statesman and publisher of the moderate periodical El Amigo de la Patria (1821 – 22), frequently alluded to Pope’s Essay on Man and its famous dictum that the proper study of mankind is man. Del Valle wrote that “the study most worthy of an American is America,” and also that “Guatemala is, for Guatemalans, the primary object of their consideration.”58 In June 1821, Ecuadorean poet-diplomat José Joaquín de Olmedo offered a translation of one of Pope’s short poems in El Pacificador del Perú and two years later published a full Spanish translation of the Essay on Man, which, he took care to advertise, was taken “from the English version.”59 Andrés Bello, Olmedo’s close friend and confidante from their days together in London, also translated the Essay and even closed a poetical treatment of the Spanish American revolutions by quot-ing from Pope’s poem Windsor Forest:

“Oh stretch thy reign, fair Peace! Till conquest cease, and slavery be no more

56. Manuel Lorenzo de Vidaurre, Cartas americanas, ed. Alberto Tauro, Colección documental de la independencia del Perú, vol. 1 (Lima: Comisión Nacional del Sesquicentenario de la Independencia del Perú, 1973), 325.

57. Moreno in El Independiente no. 8, 3 Nov. 1816. 58. Del Valle, “Soñaba el Abad de San Pedro; y yo también se soñar” and “Comercio,” in

Sistema político y otros escritos, 36, 42. Echoes of Pope’s views on humanistic education are also found in del Valle’s Memoria sobre la educación (Guatemala: Imprenta de la Unión, 1829), 38.

59. Olmedo, Ensayo del hombre de M. Pope (Lima: Imprenta de Masías, 1823); Augusto Tamayo Vargas quotes Estuardo Núñez’s attribution of the translated poem in “Olmedo en su ‘Canto a la victoria de Junín,’ ” La literatura iberoamericana del siglo XIX (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1974), 25.


Till the freed Indians in their native groves Reap their own fruits and woo their sable loves Peru once more a race of Kings behold And other Mexicos be roof’d with Gold.”60

Pope’s appeal to Spanish Americans attracted to aristocratic reformism is clear. Not only did he mock the pretensions of foppish elites who did not take seriously their governing work or status as moral role models for the people, he was also a Catholic who was able to reconcile faith and reason by stressing good works, hope in the future, and limiting one’s ambition to its proper sphere. His idealized, aristocratic, yet still humane and reformist view resonated with their own self-image.

Spanish American patriot leaders were keen to make sure that their ideas were heard in Britain and to ensure that their new countries were presented in the best, most accurate light. In 1825, José Cecilio del Valle sent two sci-entific articles to Ackermann’s publishing house in London to correct errors about Guatemala that had appeared in their Catecismo de geografía.61 Although Carlos María de Bustamante retained a healthy skepticism that English bank-ers would prove no better for Mexico than either “Fernando mercantil” or the Cádiz monopolists, he nevertheless dedicated his edition of Lorenzo Boturini Benaducci’s Texcoco en los últimos tiempos de sus antiguos reyes to George Can-ning. Bustamante sent the British prime minister 27 copies along with his grati-tude for the politician’s “good offices” and credited independence itself as “your great philanthropical work.”62 In his view, Canning was the man who “protects the cause of humanity” and who presided over the “trumpet of judgment” that sounded in London when Spain finally acquiesced to the recognition of Mexi-can independence in 1827.63 The next year, Bustamante’s four-volume Resumen

60. Bello, El Censor Americano, as quoted in Antonio Cussen, Bello and Bolívar: Poetry and Politics in the Spanish American Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 89.

61. Eugenia Roldán Vera, The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 219n.

62. Jiménez Codinach, La Gran Bretaña y la independencia de México, 1808 – 1821, 82; Carlos María de Bustamante, ed., Tezcoco en los últimos tiempos de sus antiguos reyes (Mexico: Imprenta de Mariano Galván Rivera, 1826), frontispiece. Bustamante to Canning, Mexico City, 7 Feb. 1827, West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds, George Canning MSS, bundle 132.

63. Carlos María de Bustamante, La trompeta de juicio tocada en Londres en 23 en 23 do agosto de 1827, ó sea Diálogo entre un barbero y su marchante (Mexico City: Imprenta de Galván, á cargo de Mariano Arévalo, 1828), 2, 4.


64. Victoria, quoted in Justin Harvey Smith, “Poinsett’s Career in Mexico,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 24 (1914): 82.

65. Robert D. Aguirre, Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2005), 28. Michael P. Costeloe has also written about their relationship in “William Bullock and the Mexican Connection,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 22, no. 2 (2006): 275 – 309.

66. Egaña to his son Mariano Egaña residing in London, in various letters dated June 1825, 22 Sept. 1825, 22 Nov. 1826, printed in Cartas de don Juan Egaña a su hijo Mariano, 1824 – 1828 (Santiago de Chile: Sociedad de Bibliófilos Chilenos, 1946), 123, 128, 145, 196.

67. Nota, Chile, Archivo Nacional, Fondo Varios, vol. 700, pieza 5.

histórico de la revolución de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos was published in London as part of an effort to entrench his own version of recent events in the histori-cal record. In a similar show of political fandom, Mexican president Guadalupe Victoria treasured a letter that Canning had written him and regarded Canning as “the natural Ally and Protectress of Mexico.” He even declared an official day of mourning in Mexico to mark the death of the Duke of York.64 It seems that even republican presidents could retain a fondness for aristocratic reformism.

The British model was so powerful because it could appeal to liberals and conservatives alike. Lucas Alamán, the secretary of state with close ties to both the Mexican mining industry and English investors, was a vocal advocate of restraint and respect for tradition and noble status. He permitted the British museum curator William Bullock to come over and make plaster casts of impor-tant Mexican antiquities for display in London, and even strategized with his friend Vicente Rocafuerte to make a gift of Aztec statues and codices to the British Museum, despite his own recently made laws against the export of cul-tural artifacts.65 In Chile, Juan Egaña had the impression that, unlike Chilean legislators, British parliamentarians were “cultivated with habits of order.” He had enough awareness to realize that “religious intolerance will not be accepted in London and therefore it will not be convenient to publish [my Ensayo sobre la tolerancia religiosa] there.”66 Nevertheless, having one’s works appear in print in London, the media capital of the world, meant one had achieved an inter-national level of prominence, and so Egaña arranged for the rest of his works to be transported to London for publication. He even remarked with impish satisfaction that, when news reached Santiago de Chile that The Courier had published a little biography about him, the city erupted in a firestorm of contro-versy that prompted several anonymous, jealous condemnations to appear in the city’s pamphlet press. Even the Chilean government was so keen to ingratiate itself with the British monarchy that it sent a gift of the best Chilean horses to the King of England in 1824.67


Spanish American patriot leaders’ fascination with all things British extended to legislative practices, including the concept of trial by jury and various other constitutional arrangements. In this context, their connection to the famous utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham is notable. Bentham was a friend and associate of Francisco de Miranda, who had thought of emigrating to Mexico in 1808 until Jovellanos gave his application a “civil put off.” His sub-sequent plan to go to Venezuela instead also died on the vine.68 Nevertheless, Bentham had been keeping records of the commercial reports about Spanish America that appeared in British newspapers. He clearly viewed the region as an open field for both merchants and scientists, as well as a perfect laboratory for his constitutional experiments. For their part, the Spanish American patriot leaders were pleased to receive the attention of a famous British philosopher-legislator, and they turned to him for advice and recommendations.69 When Miranda returned to Venezuela in late 1810, he took with him Bentham’s draft called “Constitutional Legislation. On the Evils of Change,” and another called “Proposed Law for securing the liberty of the press against persons having the exclusive command of the printing presses of a new country when in small number.”70 The Gaceta de Caracas printed excerpts from Bentham’s writings on freedom of the press several times in 1811 – 12. One estimate holds that 40,000 copies of Bentham’s translated works were sold in Spanish America before 1830. Bentham himself liked to boast to friends that in Spanish America, young men were not considered to have received a full and proper education if they had not read his works.71

Bentham was well known to Rivadavia, del Valle, and Santander. His “Junctiana Proposal,” a scheme for creating a trans-isthmian canal, was wildly popular among Central American liberals at the time and also tempted British merchants and investors, who salivated at the idea. In 1820, Bentham worked

68. Bentham to Aaron Burr, Queens Square Place, London, 19 Jan. 1811, U.S. Library of Congress, Aaron Burr MSS. See also the letters printed in John Bowring, ed., Memoirs of Jeremy Bentham, including autobiographical conversations and correspondence (Edinburgh: 1843), x, 439 – 55. A copy of the petition of “Geronymo Bentham” to go to Mexico is found in Lord Holland’s papers, British Library, Add. MSS 33, 544, f. 418.

69. See Miriam Williford, Jeremy Bentham on Spanish America: An Account of His Letters and Proposals to the New World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1980).

70. Both laws were drafted specifically for Caracas, dated August 1810, and are preserved at University College London, Bentham MSS, box 22, ff. 7 – 56, 57 – 76. See, for example, the Bentham extract printed in the Gaceta de Caracas 3, no. 142, 30 Apr. 1811.

71. Antonio Larrazával, quoted in Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, Bolívar and the Political Thought of the Spanish American Revolutions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1938), 34n.


up a draft proposal for the Guatemalans to give to George Canning, adding his personal impression that “the affections of Guatemala had, it is true, always leaned to England, in preference to any other country.”72 In August 1825, an article in the Gaceta de Gobierno Supremo de Guatemala discussed the goals of a patriotic government, quoting approvingly the doctrine of the greatest happi-ness for the greatest number and adopting Bentham’s emphasis on “subsistence, abundance, equality, and security” as its own mantra. Shortly thereafter, del Valle wrote to the master directly, saying that the assembly had charged him with drafting a civil code and that he himself considered Bentham’s works to be “of infinite value.”73 Del Valle remained nervous about the Junctiana Canal idea, however, fearing that it would prove too tempting a target for English or other capitalists to seize and control once it had been completed. Yet, when the sad news of Bentham’s death reached Central America on August 31, 1832, del Valle got the members of Congress to vote to commemorate the event solemnly in their deliberative chamber, mourning, as he said, “the light of Westminster.”74

Rivadavia’s relationship with Bentham was more personal. The two men met in London several times and carried on an intermittent correspondence between 1818 and 1825. According to Bentham’s friend and secretary John Bow-ring, Rivadavia “professed Utilitarian principles, and was occupied for some time in translating the works of Bentham into Spanish, but the translation has never seen the light.” Bentham called Rivadavia “mon frère cadet” and lobbied hard against the idea of a king for Buenos Aires, a recommendation Rivadavia grudgingly came to accept finally in 1822. Bentham also pushed for the adoption of his Panopticon prison scheme, where convict labor could be put to work for the benefit of all, saying, “with the help of machinery from England, think of the profit extractible from that number of hands, not one of which need have a morsel of bread till his task was done!”75 Indeed, the Panopticon prison scheme, based on the idea that constant surveillance could cultivate proper behavior by using a complex combination of corrective punishment and reaffirming rewards

72. Bentham to José María del Barrio, 19 and 20 Nov. 1823, University College London, Bentham MSS, box 60, ff. 69 – 85.

73. Gaceta del Gobierno Supremo de Guatemala, 43, 1 Aug. 1825, p. 324; del Valle to Bentham, University College London, Bentham MSS, box 12, f. 346.

74. Robert S. Smith, “Financing the Central American Federation, 1821 – 1838,” Hispanic American Historical Review 43, no. 4 (1963): 509. Louis E. Bumgartner, José del Valle of Central America (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1963), 267.

75. Bentham to Rivadavia, Paris, 19 Aug. 1818, British Library, Add. MSS 33, 545, ff. 310 – 11; Bentham to Rivadavia, 13 June 1822, University College London, Bentham MSS, box 12, ff. 387 – 88.


to inculcate social values, was an important part of the aristocratic reformist tradition, not unrelated to the methods endorsed by the Lancasterian method of education. And, just like the monitorial school method, it was also disseminated in several countries in Spanish America, with varying degrees of success, as an economical way to reform recalcitrant citizens.76 For his part, Rivadavia sent back a translation of the federal ordinance on the operation of a police force set up in 1822, which antedated by a decade the creation of London’s famed police force, the “bobbies,” but shared the impulse of aristocrats everywhere to guar-antee order and protect property.

Rivadavia revealed much about his admiration for all things British when he praised Bentham as “the Newton of Legislation”; he stated that he wanted to set his own young state on the “path opened by Bacon, Locke, Newton, and Smith. How great and glorious is your country!”77 On a more tangible level, he created a chair in civil law at the University of Buenos Aires, whose instructors were directed to use Bentham’s Theory of Legislation as a text, and created a rule book for the National Assembly based on his Tactique des assemblées législatives. Their correspondence seems to have come to a sudden stop in 1825, leaving one scholar to speculate that it became politically inexpedient for Rivadavia to be seen to be aligning himself too closely with the mercantile interests of Buenos Aires’s growing British community.78 Francisco de Paula Santander, Colombia’s own “Man of Laws,” also ordered Bentham’s writings to be used as texts in Colombian law schools in the 1820s and ran into some similar resistance when a conservative faction charged that Bentham’s works promoted atheism; the con-troversy over the texts raged for nearly three decades after that.79 Nevertheless,

76. Ricardo D. Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre, eds., The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America: Essays on Criminology, Prison Reform, and Social Control, 1830 – 1940 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1996), 9.

77. R. A. Humphreys, Liberation in South America, 1806 – 1827: The Career of James Paroissien (London: Athlone Press, 1952), 106. Rivadavia to Bentham, Paris, 25 Aug. 1818, British Library, Add. MSS, 33, 545, f. 312. Jonathan Harris states that their relationship was more practical in its early phase, focusing on issues of translation and political independence, and after 1820 it became more theoretical and didactic. Harris, “Bernardino Rivadavia and Benthamite ‘Discipleship,’ ” Latin American Research Review 33, no. 1 (1998): 134. A general study is Klaus Gallo, Great Britain and Argentina: From Invasion to Recognition, 1806 – 1826 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).

78. Harris, “Bernardino Rivadavia and Benthamite ‘Discipleship,’ ” 145.79. Jaime Jaramillo Uribe, “Bentham y los utilitaristas colombianos del siglo

XIX,” Ideas y Valores 4, no. 13 (1962): 11 – 28; Armando Rojas, “La batalla de Bentham en Colombia,” Revista de Historia de América 29 (1950): 37 – 66.


80. Harris, “Bernardino Rivadavia and Benthamite ‘Discipleship,’ ” 136.81. O’Higgins (July 1811), quoted in Jaime Eyzaguirre, O’Higgins, 6th rev. ed.

(Santiago de Chile: Editorial Zig-Zag, 1968), 66; Stephen Clissold, Bernardo O’Higgins and the Independence of Chile (New York: Praeger, 1968), 83.

82. Freire to Diego Benavente, Concepción, 3 Feb. 1824, Chile, Archivo Nacional, Fondo Varios, vol. 821, f. 101.

Santander retained his appreciation for Bentham and even befriended him while in exile in London in 1830.

Spanish American patriotic leaders embraced several types of reforms inspired by British-style aristocratic reformism and liberal ideals, including the establishment of national banks, the encouragement of national literary insti-tutions, a limit to monastic orders, the creation of a Sociedad de Beneficencia with state support to assume direction of social services like orphanages and hospitals, and the substitution of direct taxation for customs duties on imports as the best way to encourage trade and build up state coffers.80 They exhibited a practical interest in the workings of the British parliamentary system and tried to learn its rules of order in order to ascertain the secret of tempering reform with stability. They admired its unmatched ability to preserve aristocratic order while making room for men of talent to rise out of the popular classes, just as their patron George Canning had done. An awareness of British norms and practices pervaded local discussions. For example, when Santiago residents were trying to stack the Congress and claim 12 deputies for themselves, Bernardo O’Higgins wrote back to his constituents in Los Angeles that “even London, in a country of more than of a million inhabitants, only has two deputies.” He loved to discuss the merits of the British constitution and the liberty of its peo-ple since 1215; he even translated the Magna Carta for the entertainment of his likely bemused friends.81 Ramón Freire regularly used the Hispanicized word parlemento to describe a deliberative body he hoped to set up in Concepción.82 In February 1811, the Gaceta de Caracas reproduced the House of Commons rules of debate in translation. English legislative and constitutional influence can be found in Bolívar’s Jamaica Letter (1815), in the Angostura Congress (1819), Río de la Plata’s Constitution (1816), the Venezuelan Constitution (1821), the Con-stitution of Bolivia (1826), the deliberations of the Convention of Ocaña (1828), and Bolívar’s message to the Constitutional Congress of Colombia (1830), among many, many others. It is not insignificant that French and U.S. influ-ences are more pronounced in the short-lived constitutions of the early 1810s, while a more hierarchical, aristocratic, British-style vision tended to dominate the documents of the 1820s.


83. Apéndice a la Constitución, sección 1, artículo 1, “Del poder moral,” Actas del Congreso de Angostura 1819 – 1820 (Bogotá: Fundación Francisco de Paula Santander, 1989), 174.

84. John Mayo, “The Development of British Interests in Chile’s Norte Chico in the Early Nineteenth Century,” The Americas 57, no. 3 (2001): 363 – 94; Barbara Tenenbaum, “Merchants, Money, and Mischief: The British in Mexico, 1821 – 1862,” The Americas 35, no. 3 (1979): 317 – 39; Claudio Veliz, “Egaña, Lambert, and the Chilean Mining Associations of 1825,” Hispanic American Historical Review 55, no. 4 (1975): 637 – 63.

85. Frank Griffith Dawson, The First Latin American Debt Crisis: The City of London and the 1822 – 25 Loan Bubble (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1990).

86. H. W. Dickinson and Arthur Titley, Richard Trevethick: The Engineer and the Man (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1934); Tristan Platt, Historias unidas, memorias escondidas: Las empresas mineras de los hermanos Ortíz y la construcción de las élites nacionales en Salta y Potosí, 1800 – 1880 (Sucre: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 1998).

87. Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, The First Britons in Valparaiso 1817 – 1827 (Valparaiso: Gordon, Henderson & Cía., 1884); D. C. M. Platt, Finance, Trade, and Politics in British

Perhaps the oddest and most idiosyncratic example of the attraction that aristocratic reformism held for Spanish American patriot leaders when trying to design their new governments was the Areopagus scheme outlined in an appen-dix to the 1819 Angostura Constitution. Designed as a fourth power, the body would be comprised of a president and 40 members and “shall exercise a full and independent authority over public customs and primary education.”83 Charged with monitoring the patriotism and public morals of the citizenry, the Areopa-gus was instructed to impose harsher penalties on elites who transgressed rules, because it viewed the elite as a class that was supposed to serve as a model for those lesser citizens-in-training. Clearly, there was a strong element of aristo-cratic self-image at stake in the independence era, and elites often expressed this by emulating their British counterparts.

British influence permeated all public arenas during the Spanish American independence era, not least the financial sector and material culture.84 British capital financed many of the military campaigns and economic reconstruction projects of the 1810s and 1820s, even as its terms proved disastrous in the long term.85 Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Guatemala all turned to British houses for their first national loans. Peruvian Francisco Uvillé hired Richard Trevithick and his expert Cornish miners to reconstruct their failing enterprises.86 British-made goods flooded the continent and altered not only domestic decoration, fashion, and household economy but the nature of commerce and industrial production as well. Certain cities like Veracruz, Valparaiso, Buenos Aires, Cart-agena, and Caracas grew dramatically as a result of the influx of British mer-chants, immigrants, and traders.87 In fact, Maria Graham observed that Val-


Foreign Policy, 1815 – 1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), and Latin America and British Trade, 1806 – 1914 (London: A. & C. Black, 1972).

88. List of books and machines purchased, London, 22 Oct. 1818, Chile, Archivo Nacional, Fondo Varios, vol. 801, ff. 139 – 42. Manning, Marshall & Barclay, expediente sobre la máquina para la acuñación de la moneda, México, Archivo General de la Nación, Casa de Moneda, vol. 28, exp. 29, f. 323. James Bevan to J. B. Sharpe, Buenos Aires, 12 Jan. 1823, University College London, Bentham MSS, box 12, ff. 93 – 97. “Agua Potable,” El Centinela 21, 15 Dec. 1822, p. 353.

89. Registro Oficial del Gobierno de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, 22 Nov. 1830.90. Mier and Bello, “Translations,” National Vaccine Establishment Report 9 (Mar. 1813):

12. Courtesy of Wellcome Library for the History of Science and Medicine, London.91. “San Jorge, 23 de abril de 1823,” El Centinela 40, 1 May 1823, 301 – 3.

paraiso reminded her of nothing more than a British port town with its English signs, innkeepers, taverns, tailors, pianofortes, chimneys, and saddlers. Latin American archives are filled with records of equipment purchased from British businesses on the new states’ accounts. Chile, for example, imported books for the new Biblioteca Nacional, industrial machines, and printing presses. Mex-ico sent to London for a machine to mint coins. Argentina bought scientific equipment for chemistry, botany, geological experiments, and medical care. Its government also hired engineer James Bevan to deepen Buenos Aires’s harbor and sent to London for two sets of boring apparatus to aid in his work. Bevan also introduced the same river filtration system that produced potable water from the Thames for use in rivers in Argentina.88 Vicente Rocafuerte person-ally drew up plans for a scheme to introduce British-style gas street lamps into Mexico and managed to get at least some of them built.89

Practical and personal connections between important Spanish American patriot leaders and their British counterparts are far too numerous to record here. Servando Teresa de Mier and Andrés Bello were members of London’s Jennerian Vaccination Society and compiled surveys of the state of vaccines in Mexico and Caracas, respectively, for their journal in 1813.90 In London in 1822, at a dinner celebrating Colombian military victories, Francisco Antonio Zea and abolitionist-parliamentarian Sir James Mackintosh rose arm in arm and toasted Bolívar and the great cause of liberty that joined the British and South American people. In Buenos Aires, the celebration of St. George’s Day became a public event; in 1823, the city’s leaders raised their glasses and offered toasts to their international partner.91 Rivadavia (in English) toasted “England, the most moral and enlightened nation.” Carlos María de Alvear praised “the memory of Nelson, hero of Trafalgar,” while Valentín Gómez admired “the


Duke of Wellington, as great at Waterloo as he was at Verona.” Juan Varela expressed his admiration of “the full complement of civil liberties guaranteed in the English constitution, particularly trial by jury — soon may it be established in my own country!” These comments went beyond a mere desire to flatter the resident English merchant community. Spanish American liberal patriot leaders genuinely admired the model of aristocratic reformism that had allowed Brit-ain to become a world power and whose system allowed for controlled social uplift while maintaining respect for status, property, and elite culture. They were impressed.

Spanish Americans throughout the hemisphere were aware of contempo-rary British reforms and regularly invoked British historical references to frame their own arguments. While in London, Vicente Rocafuerte formed a cordial friendship with prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, once leaving a jaunty little poem in her commonplace book. In Peru, Bernardo Monteagudo used an epigraph (quoted in the original English) from Junius’s letters to defend himself from charges of treason and bad government: “I should be inconsistent with the prin-ciples I profess if I declined an appeal to the good sense of the people or did not willingly submit myself to the judgment of my peers.”92 When Francisco de Paula Santander was defending himself against calumnies and making the case that Bolívar had been a dictator and a tyrant, he did so with reference to an episode from British history, quoting (again, in English) an English historian who wrote, of a patriot sacrificed under Charles II, “we only know that the condemnation of a man who was at that time pursued by the court, forms no presumption of his guilt.”93 In Chile, Juan Egaña discussed the dangers of reli-gious tolerance through an extended examination of the history of Tudor and Stuart England, concluding that by permitting the coexistence of two religions, Catholic and Protestant, the Tudors had sown the seeds of dissent and had only succeeded in turning them against each other, a sad development which had led to the impoverishment and persecution of the Irish.94 Great Britain was never far from the minds, hearts, or cultural vision of Spanish American indepen-dence leaders.

92. [Bernardo Monteagudo], Memoria sobre los principios políticos que seguí en la administración del Perú, y acontecimientos posteriores a mi separación (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Nacional, 1823).

93. Santander to the Editor of the Morning Courier (New York), 20 Dec. 1831, in Santander en Europa, 5 vols. (Bogotá: Fundación Francisco de Paula Santander, 1989), 3:185 – 87.

94. Juan Egaña, Memoria política sobre el conviene en Chile la libertad de cultos (Lima: Reimpreso en la Imprenta de Masías, 1827), 26.


95. O’Higgins to Mackenna, early Jan. 1811, quoted in Jay Kinsbruner, Bernardo O’Higgins (New York: Twayne, 1968), 44 – 45.

96. Maria Dundas Graham (Lady Maria Calcott), Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822; and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 (New York: Praeger, 1969), 358; W. B. Stevenson, A Historical and Descriptive Narrative of Twenty Years’ Residence in South America, 3 vols. (London: Hurst, Robinson & Co., 1825), 3:277.

97. Santander to Francisco Soto, London, 28 June 1830, in Santander en Europa, 3:32 – 41.

98. Entry for Thursday, 11 Jan. 1827, in Sir Robert Ker Porter’s Caracas Diary, 1825 – 1842: A British Diplomat in a Newborn Nation, ed. Walter Dupouy (Caracas: printed by Editorial Arte, 1966), 200.

As the long, drawn-out process of Spanish American self-emancipation drew to a close, and the even more difficult era of making independence mean-ingful began, it is not coincidental that many of the most significant patriot leaders found themselves looking toward Britain wistfully and wishing to settle there eventually themselves. Bernardo O’Higgins commented to his good friend Juan Mackenna that he had learned from his Irish-born father “the primordial importance that work and honesty have in the merit of man” and thought that he would have made a good farmer and useful citizen; “would I have had the luck of being born in Great Britain or Ireland, I would have lived and died in the country.”95 In fact, in 1823 O’Higgins had been preparing to depart for an extended residence in Ireland, a place he called “the country of his fathers,” when he fell ill at Callao and had to disembark.96 San Martín had sailed off to England after his fateful meeting with Bolívar at Guayaquil in 1822 and devoted the rest of his life to cultivating his precious little daughter Mercedes, whom he installed in a private school at Hampstead while he shuttled back and forth between England, Scotland, and Belgium. Santander lived for several years in European exile, spending much of that time in a close personal study of British norms and institutions. He enthusiastically wrote back to a friend that England was “without a doubt the most advanced nation in its industry and adminis-trative science. . . . The aristocracy has all the power, influence, respect, and wealth, but democracy nevertheless can be perceived in the popular assemblies which remain open to men of talent and destiny.” Santander marveled at the vigorous press debates and thought the jury system was “an admirable system which could hold down all the abuses of power.”97 In 1827, tired of the strife and endless bickering that surrounded him, Bolívar told Robert Ker Porter that England was “the only country of true liberty, glory and enlightened talent, and where he desired to pass the years of his life to come.” 98 Just a few months before his untimely death, the Liberator repeated the sentiment to his friend Richard


Illingworth, saying he was “thinking of going to England soon, even though times are bad and many boats that sail from this bay suffer shipwrecks; despite everything, I think I will not delay here much longer because I am deeply both-ered by the lamentable state of the country which I can neither remedy nor look upon with indifference.”99 If we are to gauge Spanish American patriot leaders’ own predilections by where they themselves actually went, at the end of the wars of independence, in 1830, they headed for England, just as they had done in the beginning.

Great Britain’s history and its contemporary culture clearly exerted a power ful hold on Spanish American patriot leaders during the independence era. In their day, Britain was the world’s strongest naval power, had led the opposition to Napoleon’s predations, and boasted a vibrant, innovative com-mercial culture. Its scientists led the field in mechanization, steam power, engi-neering technology, and medical research. Its banks and private investors had been willing to extend lucrative loans to Spanish American countries that had not yet been formally recognized. Trial by jury, freedom of speech, religious tolerance, and publicly supported popular education all held great appeal for liberals. At the same time, British aristocratic reformers managed to control the pace of change through the creation of a national police force, sensible prison reforms, libel laws, and an expansion of the government’s supervisory roles, which could appeal to those of a more conservative outlook. Spanish American patriot leaders identified themselves with what they perceived to be the British tradition of incremental, controlled change, led by a generous, enlightened, and public-spirited elite, with liberty entrenched in a constitution that guaranteed liberty, freedom, and property. This was exactly how the patriot leaders viewed themselves. As ardent believers in liberty, and as pragmatic politicians who were interested in concrete reforms, the patriot leaders consciously drew themselves closer to the British present as part of the process of separating themselves from the Spanish past. Indeed, poet laureate Robert Southey could have been writing for them when he boasted that the leaders of the world could not do better than emulate “this England and this now.”

99. Bolívar to Illingworth, Cartagena, 2 Aug. 1830, Indiana University, Lilly Library, Illingworth MSS, box 2.

Translated from the Spanish by Ian Barnett. — eds.I am very grateful to Professors Nora Souto and Julián Giglio for their invaluable assistance in tracking down information, and for their criticisms and suggestions regarding the text. My thanks go also to Carlos Marichal for his stimulating critique of the first draft. — au.


The “Ancient Constitution” after

Independence (1808 – 1852)

José Carlos Chiaramonte

In the Hispanic world, the expression nuestra antigua constitución was, from the second half of the eighteenth century, the most commonly used equivalent for what in English-speaking countries was referred to as the “ancient constitution” or “fundamental law.” Yet attempts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in both Spain and Spanish America to establish the content of that con-stitution, lacking as it did an overarching written text, were not convincing. References to the ancient constitution, when not mere polemics, were impre-cise allusions to Spanish legislation for the Indies. And later, among historians, the concept “ancient constitution” would give way to “legacies,” “continuities,” “vestiges,” terms that referred to a far broader set of political and economic features of the pre-independence period.

But on the political stage opened up by independence, often regarded as a time of anarchy devoid of political rules ordering society, the emergent sover-eign entities did in reality possess constitutional rules that, among other things, justified their various positions with regard to the design of possible national states. However, the often informal nature of the constitutional rules by which they were governed could encompass institutions of widely differing origins. Rules consistent with the “ancient constitution,” such as the Ordenanza de inten‑dentes or the Leyes de Indias, persisted alongside innovations designed to institute representative regimes.

Río de la Plata, for example, saw failed attempts first to impose a revolu-tionary dictatorship between 1810 and 1813, then to establish a constitutional representative political system from 1813 on, and especially after 1820. In the face of the meager success of these constitutional endeavors, reality nevertheless

456 HAHR / August / Chiaramonte

demonstrated the persistence of the ancient constitution, alongside innovations of varying magnitude yet in keeping with it, such as “facultades extraordinarias.” Traditionally considered one of the main proofs of the absence of legality, these powers were in fact a form of the ancient institution of dictatorship, established according to the rules of the law of nations by consent of those who granted the powers, and with limits on their time and scope.

In sum, the most common perspectives on post-independence political pro-cesses share a limited approach to the problem in that they put the emphasis on the formation of a constitutional imaginary rather than inquiring into the con-stitutional rules in force. Even though scholars no longer cling to the dichotomy of civilization and barbarism, views of the history of the independence crisis and the processes initiated by it persist in prioritizing attention to modernizing innovations and their frequent failure, and distort the era’s political practices and conceptions through labels such as caudillismo that conceal the existence of a coherent political and intellectual universe founded on a set of doctrines, many of which arose out of the law of nature and nations.1

This essay sets out to show that that universe consisted of a regulatory com-plex commonly cited under the name “ancient constitution,” the persistence of which has, as a rule, been neglected by Latin American historians, given as they are to viewing the political practices of the independence era as a realm of ille-gality. With this in mind, I look in the first part at various different views of the ancient constitutional norms. In the second part, I consider the complexities of the concept “ancient constitution” and trace the forms of its discursive utiliza-tion over the course of the Spanish American independence movements. Next, in the third part, I deal with the problem of greatest interest to me: namely, the actual weight of the ancient constitution in the complex political reality of the day, over and above its rhetorical invocation. I tackle this issue with data from recent research on Río de la Plata, focusing on three points that confirm the survival of the ancient constitution long after independence: the persistence of Spanish law, both “private” and “public”; the intellectual background of the so-called caudillos and their advisers; and the legal nature of exceptional powers or “facultades extraordinarias.”

1. Any mention of natural law is conspicuously absent from The Cambridge History of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell, vol. 2, Colonial Latin America, and vol. 3, From Independence to c. 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984). The sole references to natural law are limited to the sixteenth-century Spanish neoscholastic theologians Suárez, Mariana, and Vitoria. See David Brading, “Bourbon Spain and its American Empire,” 1:393 and 1:437. This omission is in keeping with traditional approaches to caudillismo.

The “Ancient Constitution” after Independence 457

Divergent Perceptions of the Ancient Constitution

Authors writing on Spanish America in the first half of the twentieth century were not unaware of the survival of social norms and policies from before the independence era.2 More recent works likewise acknowledge the continuity of ancient traits in passages such as the following, summing up observations from various regions in addition to the Americas: “We must also recognize that behind many of these new associations were older networks of estate, kinship, ethnicity, religion, and locality. The world was not always as new as it seemed and we need to understand the ways in which residues of the imperial past lived on in the public life of the new nations.”3

From another perspective, François-Xavier Guerra reported the phenom-enon as the endurance of “traditional” features as opposed to other “modern” ones, a dichotomy he explored in greater depth in a later work that traced the rapid emergence of “modernity” and in which he reconciles modern and tra-ditional features under the concept of “heterogeneity.”4 Regarding Mexico, Charles Hale addressed the problem by analyzing Mora’s and other liberals’ initiatives to eradicate colonial vestiges, while Antonio Annino uses the con-cept of “material constitution” for nineteenth-century Mexico, where a Span-ish colonial tradition of “moderate government” would converge with new lib-eral principles rooted in the Constitution of Cadiz.5 Tulio Halperín Donghi mentioned “survivals [supervivencias]” and “archaisms [arcaísmos]” in Río de la

2. Carraciolo Parra-Pérez, Historia de la primera república de Venezuela, 2 vols. (Caracas: Academía Nacional de la Historia, 1959), 1:240, 1:418, and 2:188; Carraciolo Parra-Pérez, El régimen español en Venezuela (Madrid: Javier Morata, 1932), 240; Manuel José Forero, “La primera república,” in Historia extensa de Colombia (Bogotá: Lerner, 1966), 5:213; and Joaquín Gabaldón Márquez, El municipio, raíz de la república (Caracas: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía y Historia, 1961). See also the various references in José Carlos Chiaramonte, “Capítulo 5. Estado y poder regional: constitución y naturaleza de los poderes regionales,” and “Capítulo 6. Estado y Poder Regional, las expresiones del poder regional: análisis de casos,” in Historia General de América Latina, vol. 6, La construcción de las naciones latinoAmericanas, 1820 – 1870, ed. Josefina Z. Vázquez and Manuel Miño Grijalva (Paris: UNESCO / Madrid: Trotta, 2003).

3. Joseph W. Esherick, Hasan Kayali, and Eric Van Young, introduction to Empire to Nation: Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World, ed. Joseph W. Esherick, Hasan Kayali, and Eric Van Young (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).

4. François-Xavier Guerra, México: Del antiguo régimen a la revolución (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988), 1:157. Also Guerra, Modernidad e independencias, 2nd. ed. (Mexico City: MAPFRE / Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 16.

5. Charles Hale, El liberalismo mexicano en la época de Mora (1821 – 1853), 2nd ed. (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1977).


Plata.6 In the well-known text by Stanley J. and Barbara H. Stein, the predomi-nant concepts — not exclusive to these authors — are those of “heritage [heren‑cia],” “survivals [supervivencias],” and “vestiges [resabios].”7 Likewise, in an earlier text, Richard Morse remarked on the persistence in Latin America of ancient Spanish political doctrines and old structures and practices, which he viewed negatively as foundations of a process of anarchy and personalist tyrannies.8 Relying on the concept of “legacy,” Mario Góngora described it as follows: “If, therefore, we begin with the Spanish legacy, we could sum up this heritage as follows: the Catholic religion; the Castilian language and literature; Spanish Law and its Roman inspiration; the medieval and later modern State originating on the peninsula; the aristocratic social hierarchy and social model of the cabal-lero; finally, the military spirit of the people, forged in the Conquest and the War of Arauco.”9 Meanwhile, Spanish American intellectual and political his-tory has been hobbled by the priority given to the influence of the major figures of Western political thought (Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Constant, on the one hand; Thomas Aquinas and Suárez, on the other) at the expense of trac-ing deeper, more consequential intellectual structures.10 Concepts drawn from what we might call the social science of the day played a key role in these struc-tures. This was a science transmitted by the study of natural law (scholastic or iusnaturalist), canon law, and civil law, and spread by media that, in those days, were also often oral, such as gatherings, sermons, educational dissertations, and

6. Tulio Halperín Donghi, Revolución y guerra: Formación de una élite dirigente en la Argentina criolla (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 1972), 396.

7. Stanley and Barbara Stein, La herencia colonial de América Latina (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1970). For a critique of this perspective, see Jeremy Adelman, “Introduction: The Problem of Persistence in Latin American History,” in Colonial Legacies: The Problem of Persistence in Latin American History, ed. Jeremy Adelman (New York: Routledge, 1999).

8. Richard Morse, “The Heritage of Latin America,” in The Founding of New Societies, ed. Louis Hartz et al. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964), 162 – 63.

9. “Si partimos, por lo tanto, del legado español, podríamos recapitular ese acervo así: la religión católica; el idioma y literatura castellanos; el Derecho español y su inspiración romana; el Estado de tipo medieval y después moderno acuñado en la península; la jerarquía social aristocrática y el modelo social del caballero; en fin, el espíritu militar del pueblo, forjado en la Conquista y en la Guerra de Arauco.” Mario Góngora, Ensayo histórico sobre la noción de estado en Chile en los siglos XIX y XX (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1986), 286.

10. Chiaramonte, “Capítulo 21: El pensamiento político y la reformulación de los modelos,” in Historia General de América Latina, vol. 4: Procesos Americanos hacia la redefinición colonial, ed. Enrique Tandeter and Jorge Hidalgo Lehuedé (Paris: UNESCO / Madrid: Trotta, 2000).


so on. The role of natural law in conditioning political concepts and practices has thus been neglected, sometimes by omission, other times by recognizing only its scholastic expressions.11

The Complexity of the Concept of Ancient Constitution

Let us also remember that the terms “constitution” and “constitutionalism” in modern history are prone to a misunderstanding rooted in the distinction between written and unwritten constitutions. The misunderstanding consists of limiting one’s frame of reference to the heyday of constitutional texts that began in the late eighteenth century with the constitutions of the new Anglo-American states, particularly the State of Virginia in 1776. But there is another way of reading the concept, one in which the term “constitutionalism” denotes instead a process that stretched across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and placed limits on power through a set of rules of diverse origin and date that simultaneously aimed at moderating the exercise of popular sovereignty.12 An example of this can be seen after 1775 in the reaction to the Anglo-American states’ constitutionalist excesses, a reaction that contributed to the birth of the Constitution of Philadelphia.13 We must distinguish between two distinct uses of the term “ancient constitution”: first, to denote a particular set of constitu-tional rules in force at a given time; second, as an invocation of a supposed or real ancient right, utilized as a discursive weapon by opponents of innovations deemed illegitimate.14 In the latter case the phrase offered a framework of argu-

11. The most widely circulated version on the scholastic roots of the doctrines that informed the independentists is O. Carlos Stoetzer, Las raíces escolásticas de la emancipación de la América Española (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, 1982). See also Stoetzer, El pensamiento político en la América Española durante el período de la emancipación (1789‑1825) (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1966). For a different version of this thesis and for the general function of natural law in Spanish American history, see José Carlos Chiaramonte, Nación y estado en Iberoamérica: El lenguaje político en tiempos de las independencias (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2004). José Carlos Chiaramonte, “The Principle of Consent in Latin and Anglo-American Independence,” Journal of Latin American Studies 36 (2004): 563 – 86.

12. On seventeenth- and eighteenth-century “constitutionalism,” see Otto von Gierke, Giovanni Althusius e lo sviluppo storico delle teorie politiche giusnaturalistiche, Contributo alla storia della sistematica del diritto (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), 147. An excellent synthesis of the early U.S. constitutional process is to be found in Gordon S. Wood, “Foreword: State Constitution-making in the American Revolution,” Rutgers Law Journal 24, no. 4 (Summer 1993).

13. Wood, “Foreword: State Constitution-making,” 923.14. José Carlos Chiaramonte, Ciudades, provincias, estados: Orígenes de la nación argentina

(1800 – 1846) (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1997), 159. This use of the concept may constitute a kind


ments for debate, similar to the role of English political literature in North American independence movements, in which the right to resist tyrannical gov-ernments was ascribed to the ancient constitution.15 Indeed, prior to indepen-dence, the idea of “unwritten constitutional law” or unwritten “fundamental law” was widespread in the Anglo-Saxon colonies.16 In Spain, the penchant for the law of nature and nations and the study of Spanish history contributed to the formation of the idea that there was an ancient constitution that supported popular restriction of royal power through the representative Cortes.17 One who expressed this view was the author of the Teoría de las Cortes (1813), Fran-cisco Martínez Marina, who, notes Maravall, held that “constitution” refers to a country’s political structure, the “fundamental laws of the Constitution of the State,” and is synonymous with “conditions of the pact.”18

In the widely varying understandings of the concept “ancient constitution” (customs, rules prescribed by the legislature, or a set of immutable principles beyond the reach of any government institution), in the Anglo-American case its equally varied relationship with “common law” and, more importantly, with

of “political argument that has been deployed in widely different historical situations”; M. I. Finley, “The Ancestral Constitution,” in The Use and Abuse of History (London: Pimlico, 2000), 34. The volume also contains a comparative analysis of the argument’s use in fourth-century-BC Athens, seventeenth-century England, and the twentieth-century United States. A summary of this use of the concept in modern Europe is to be found in Rafael D. García Pérez, Antes leyes que reyes: Cultura jurídica y constitución política en la edad moderna, Navarra, 1512 – 1808 (Milan: Giuffrè, 2008), 60.

15. Ronald Hamowy, introduction to Cato’s Letters, or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects, by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, 4 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), 1:xxii. J. G. A. Pocock demonstrates another view on adding the ancient constitution’s use as the sole reference to immemorial custom. See Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Norton Library, 1967), 16.

16. Thomas C. Grey, “Origins of the Unwritten Constitution: Fundamental Law in American Revolutionary Thought,” Stanford Law Review, 30, no. 843 (May 1978), 852 – 53. Alessandro Passerin d’Entrèves, Natural Law: An Introduction to Legal Philosophy, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Hutchinson’s Univ. Library, 1970), 62.

17. Richard Herr, España y la revolución del siglo XVIII (Madrid: Aguilar, 1979), 369. See also Ignacio Fernández Sarasola, “Estudio Preliminar. El pensamiento político de Jovellanos,” in Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Obras completas, vol. 11, Escritos políticos (Gijón: Instituto Feijóo de Estudios del Siglo XVIII, 2006).

18. “. . . leyes fundamentales de la Constitución del Estado . . . condiciones del pacto”; José Antonio Maravall, “Estudio preliminar,” Francisco Martínez Marina, Discurso sobre el origen de la monarquía y sobre la naturaleza del gobierno español (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, 1988), 76.


natural law, loomed large. What was at stake, as others have noted, was “cus-tomary law.” For “customary” we should not read “unwritten,” for, in addition to the custom and practice that served as central sources of authority for “fun-damental law” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there stood a variety of written material, including the Magna Carta; the Bible; key laws like the 1689 Declaration of Rights and the 1701 Act of Settlement; prominent treaties, particularly those by “Vattel, Pufendorf, and Grotius”; and philosophical works, among which Locke’s were probably the most important.19 The same criteria were commonly invoked in Latin America. When “facultades extraordinarias” were discussed in Buenos Aires in 1832 — a debate we will look at later on — one representative voiced his opposition as follows: “Vattel asks whether the Legis-lature can derogate fundamental laws, and he resolutely says no . . . it may not put itself above them, nor revoke them. . . . The paramount laws of public soci-ety are founded on the natural right of man: they are impressed upon the hearts of all and are therefore inalienable.”20

Discursive Usage of the Concept of Ancient Constitution

We will now look first at two forms of the use of the concepts “ancient con-stitution” or “fundamental laws” in Spanish America. One, condemnatory, denounced that constitution as the foundation of colonial domination and was predominant early on in the independence processes, when allegations against the mother country were more frequent. The other view expressed a positive appraisal of the ancient constitution either before independence, when it was deemed necessary to base on it the rights of the monarchy’s American subjects to be treated on equal terms with their peninsular counterparts, or later on, once the mother country’s power had waned and the absence of a new constitu-tion made it necessary to resort to the ancient one to support various claims.

Thus the ancient constitution was not always cited favorably in the course of the process that led to Spanish American independence. As long as demands

19. Larry D. Kramer, “In Substance and in Principle, the Same as It Was Heretofore. The Customary Constitution,” in Larry D. Kramer, The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), 10 – 13.

20. “Pregunta Vattel si el Poder Legislativo puede derogar las leyes fundamentales, y resueltamente dice que no . . . no puede sobreponerse a ellas, ni revocarlas. . . . Las leyes primordiales de la sociedad pública, están fundadas en el derecho natural del hombre: ellas se hallan impresas en el corazón de todos, y por consiguiente son inalienables.” Diario de Sesiones de la H: Junta de Representantes de la provincia de Buenos Aires, vol. 141, no. 283, session of 5 November 1832.


for Americans’ rights were being formulated within the confines of monarchical belonging, people appealed to the fundamental laws of the kingdom to legiti-mize those demands. But when demands for political independence coalesced and the assertion of Americans’ rights led to calls for a constitution to protect them, the new constitution was conceived as cancelling out the ancient one and the ancient one was denounced as the foundation of injustice.

An example of the use of the concept in condemnatory fashion is found in the works of the Rioplatense Mariano Moreno, who wrote in November 1810, “Would the King wish us to continue in our ancient constitution? We would indeed reply to him, that we know of none; and that the arbitrary laws enacted out of greed for slaves and settlers cannot govern the fate of men who wish to be free.”21 This contradictory reference to the ancient constitution, which first mentions then denies it, reflects Moreno’s wish to reserve the term “constitu-tion” for a document issuing from a constituent assembly. He therefore refused to see the Leyes de Indias as part of a broader constitution.

With a similar criterion, in July 1811, Venezuela’s Act of Independence proclaimed the inalienable right of peoples to “destroy any pact, convention, or association that does not fulfill the ends for which governments were insti-tuted,” and declared it was time to provide for “our preservation, security, and happiness, changing essentially all the forms of our previous Constitution.” This repudiation had been foreshadowed by Fernando de Peñalver in June of the same year, when he attributed the lack of enlightenment among the peoples of the Venezuelan interior to the “system of the ancient Constitution.”22

The need to replace the ancient constitution with another one designed to limit the rulers’ power was enunciated in the first constitutional text of Río de

21. “¿Pretendería el Rey, que continuásemos en nuestra antigua constitución? Le responderíamos justamente, que no conocemos ninguna; y que las leyes arbitrarias dictadas por la codicia para esclavos y colonos, no pueden reglar la suerte de unos hombres que desean ser libres.” Mariano Moreno, “Sobre el Congreso convocado y Constitución del Estado . . . ,” cited in Noemí Goldman, Historia y lenguaje: Los discursos de la Revolución de Mayo (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1992), 103. This is an article that Ricardo Levene did not include in his edition of Moreno’s writings: Mariano Moreno, Escritos (Buenos Aires: Estrada, 1956), vol. 2.

22. “. . . destruir todo pacto, convenio o asociación que no llena los fines para que fueron instituidos los gobiernos . . . nuestra conservación, seguridad y felicidad, variando esencialmente todas las formas de nuestra anterior Constitución . . . sistema de la antigua Constitución.” “Acta de Independencia de Venezuela (5 de julio de 1811)” and “Fernando de Peñalver: Memoria sobre el problema constitucional venezolano (1811),” in Pensamiento político de la emancipación, ed. José Luis Romero and Luis Alberto Romero, 2 vols. (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1977), 1:108 and 1:127.


la Plata, the Reglamento de la división de poderes (Regulation of the Division of Powers) of September 1811, presented by the Junta Conservadora as intended to “lay the foundations for a liberal and equitable constitution” that would restrain “the arbitrariness of those in whom power is deposited.”23

But in contrast to these repudiations of the Spanish colonial system, other texts of the day reflect the need to present the autonomist uprisings after 1808 as in keeping with the constitution of the monarchy. So, for example, the Memo‑rial de agravios by the New Granadan Camilo Torres cited both “a fundamental law of the kingdom” and that kingdom’s “primitive and constitutional bases” in order to establish relations between the mother country and its colonies as based in justice founded on natural law.24

Similarly, in Cuzco, José Angulo, leader of the 1814 uprising, invoked the Spanish monarchical constitution and natural law as justification, alleging that it was the authorities’ infraction of that constitution that had provoked the insurgency.25 In July 1811, in a sermon delivered at the cathedral in Santiago de Chile, Camilo Henríquez tried to reconcile the new projects with recognition of Fernando VII’s sovereignty and “the fundamental pacts of our [Spanish] Con-stitution.”26 In New Spain in 1808, the creoles sought support in the ancient constitution to legitimize their attempt to form a junta. The proposed congress, wrote Fray Melchor de Talamantes, “upholds and safeguards all the fundamen-tal laws of the kingdom.” Licenciate Primo y Verdad was even more explicit in invoking the Spanish “monarchical constitution” to support creole initiatives to constitute a new government into which the sovereignty of the absent monarch could be invested.27 Even more elaborate reference to the ancient constitution

23. “. . . poner los cimientos de una constitución liberal y equitativa la arbitrariedad de los depositarios del poder.” “Reglamento de la división de poderes sancionado por la Junta conservadora, precedido de documentos oficiales que lo explican, 30 de septiembre a 29 de octubre de 1811,” Asambleas constituyentes argentinas, ed. Emilio Ravignani (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1937), vol. 6, part 2, 599 – 602.

24. “Memorial de agravios . . . una ley fundamental del reino . . . bases primitivas y constitucionales.” “Camilo Torres: Memorial de Agravios (1809),” in Romero and Romero, Pensamiento político de la emancipación, 1:37.

25. “José Angulo: Manifiesto al pueblo de Cuzco (1814),” in Romero and Romero, Pensamiento político de la emancipación, 1:204.

26. “. . . los pactos fundamentales de nuestra Constitución [española].” “Camilo Henríquez: Sermón (1811),” in Romero and Romero, Pensamiento político de la emancipación, 1:226.

27. “. . . sostiene y ampara todas las leyes fundamentales del reino.” “Fray Melchor de Talamantes: Idea del Congreso Nacional de Nueva España. Conclusión (1808)” and


to back up an argument was made by another New Spaniard, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, in defending Americans’ right to independence in 1813. Fray Servando’s Historia de la revolución de Nueva España, published in London in that year, showed little admiration for written constitutions and enjoined Americans to take the example of the British, not the U.S. constitution: “I believe that your model . . . must be the constitution of this blessed nation where I write, and where there is to be found true freedom, security, and property.” He went on ironically: “You shall not find it written out in scenes like a comedy: such things belong to the light and comic temper of the French.”28

Throughout the fourth part of his History, Fray Servando gave a detailed account of the laws that had governed Americans since the conquest. Accord-ingly, in developing the widespread thesis that the Americans had made a fun-damental compact not with the Spanish nation but with the Castilian crown, he refers to that pact as “our magna carta,” and elsewhere as the “American Con-stitution.”29 These ancient laws were “the constitution given to America by the kings, founded on agreements with the conquerors and indigenous peoples, a constitution which is equal in its monarchic constitution to Spain’s [constitu-tion], but independent from it.” On this ancient constitution Fray Servando bases the right not to accept that of Cádiz:

Our social pact cannot be changed without our consent, which we have not given either through delegates or personally. According to this pact the only sovereign is the king, in whose absence sovereignty reverts to the American people, who by the laws that govern them are not subject to the

“Licenciado Francisco Verdad: Memoria póstuma (1809),” in Romero and Romero, Pensamiento político de la emancipación, 1:89 and 100. On the concept of “deposit” of sovereignty and its difference to that of “retroversion” of sovereignty, see José María Portillo Valdés, Crisis atlántica: Autonomía e independencia en la crisis de la monarquía hispana (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2006).

28. “Historia de la revolución de Nueva España “Me parece que vuestro modelo . . . debe ser la constitución de esta nación dichosa donde escribo, y donde se halla la verdadera libertad, seguridad y propiedad . . . No la hallaréis escrita como comedia por escenas: éstas pertenecen al genio ligero y cómico de los franceses.” José Guerra (a.k.a. Fray Servando Teresa de Mier), Historia de la revolución de Nueva España, antiguamente Anáhuac, o verdadero origen y causas de ella, con la relación de sus progresos hasta el presente año de 1813 (London: Impr. de G. Glindon, 1813), vol. 2, book 14, cited in Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, Ideario político, ed. Edmundo O’Gorman (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1978), 162.

29. “. . . nuestra magna carta,” Mier, Ideario político, 78 – 81. “Constitución Americana,” cited in Luis Villoro, El proceso ideológico de la Revolución de Independencia, 3rd ed. (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1981), 47.


people of Spain but rather their equals: and can therefore act as they judge best for their preservation and happiness, this being the “imprescriptible supreme law” and “ultimate goal of every political society.”30

Further on, he makes it clear that he is not calling for “the ancient constitu-tion of the monarchy” to be amended but instead improved. Likewise he sought not the destruction of “the fundamental laws” but application of the good ones, and called on rulers to act in accordance with “the constitution which the kings agreed upon with our fathers.”31 All told, he adds, it is by virtue of these laws that New Spain became independent from the monarchy and it is because of them that “not only shall other nations thus recognize the Law of Nations [derecho de gentes] in our separation, but all Americans shall stay united, for they are led by the same custom of obeying the rule of ancient example and of law.”32

Fray Servando’s argument was adopted by Simón Bolívar in his Carta de Jamaica: “Emperor Carlos V made a pact with discoverers, conquistadores and settlers of America which is our social contract, as Guerra [Fray Servando de Mier] says.” Thus the American subjects of the Spanish king “in a manifest violation of laws and pre-existing compacts” had been deprived “of the constitu-tional authority provided by their code.”33

In Río de la Plata, while a negative idea of the ancient constitution emerges from Moreno’s words above, a few months later in a dispute between two mem-bers of the Junta Grande (which succeeded the Primera Junta after Moreno’s resignation), one of the contenders, Presbítero Gorriti, repudiated it, while the other, Dean Funes, considered substantial aspects of the ancient constitution of the Spanish Indies to be still in force. The dispute arose over the enactment in February 1811 of a regulation, in line with the 1782 Ordenanza de intendentes, that created principal and subordinate juntas according to each city’s importance.

30. “. . . la constitución que dieron los reyes a la América, fundada en convenios con los conquistadores y los indígenas, igual en su constitución monárquica a la de España; pero independiente de ella . . . Nuestro pacto social . . . suprema ley imprescriptible . . . fin de toda sociedad política.” Mier, Ideario político, 97 – 98.

31. “. . . la antigua constitución de la monarquía . . . las leyes fundamentales . . . la constitución en que los reyes concordaron con nuestros padres.” Mier, ibid., 105.

32. “. . . no sólo las naciones respetarán así en nuestra separación el derecho de gentes, sino que todos los americanos seguirán unidos, porque los conduce la misma costumbre de obedecer al imperio del ejemplo antiguo y de las leyes.” Mier, ibid., 163.

33. “Carta de Jamaica,” 6 Sept. 1815, in Simón Bolívar, Doctrina del Libertador, 2nd ed. (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1979), 64. “Guerra” was the pseudonym of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier.


34. “. . . el mismo impedimento con que la antigua Constitución los ha separado de los cargos concejiles.” “[Reglamento del 10 de febrero de 1811],” in Las provincias unidas del sud en 1811 (Consecuencias inmediatas de la Revolución de Mayo), ed. Ricardo Levene (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1940), 12 – 30. These regulations, attributed to Dean Gregorio Funes, were published in the Gazeta de Buenos‑Ayres, 14 Feb. 1811, p. 36.

35. “[El Cabildo de Mendoza a la Junta de Buenos Aires pidiendo su separación de la Intendencia de Córdoba],” 10 July 1811, in Las Provincias Unidas del Sud en 1811, 256. The city of Jujuy made similar arguments.

36. “El Dr. Mier, que escribió en Inglaterra su historia de la revolución de la Nueva España, conociendo que en un pueblo donde las leyes son tan respetadas como el inglés, era menester fundar la revolución de las posesiones españolas de América en la infracción de un pacto, para darle el mismo origen que tuvo la de las colonias inglesas, que hoy son los

An article banning members of the clergy from sitting on the juntas cited “the same impediment with which the Ancient Constitution has separated them from public posts” in the local councils.34 The Ordenanza de intendentes had also been cited as a constitutional rule by the city of Mendoza when it appealed against the Reglamento of 1811 because it made Mendoza a dependency of Córdoba.35

We can see, then, that in Spanish America, as in Europe and Anglo- America, citing the fundamental laws or the ancient constitution was often a rhetorical resource that performed a similar function of defending interests affected by a government’s action. Its validity as an indicator of the actual con-tinuing legal force of that constitution is therefore only partial. A remark by Lucas Alamán contains a ruthless critique of Fray Servando’s arguments:

Dr. Mier, who wrote his history of the revolution of New Spain in England, aware that before a people like the English, among whom laws are so respected, it was necessary to base the revolution in Spain’s American possessions on the infraction of a pact, in order to give it the same origin as the revolution of the British colonies, today the United States, drew from the Leyes de Indias everything that might appear to be a fundamental pact and tried to make the contracts made with the conquerors pass for such . . . forming with all this a kind of Spanish American constitution that never had existed, or had been forgotten many years before, and on the infraction of this constitution he bases the right to independence.36

One might argue that Alamán’s criticism disregarded a facet of Fray Ser-vando’s arguments, namely, their quality as political fiction, a quality shared by many other cases of political or legal fictions on which contemporary nations are built and which are effective despite their possible historical falsehood.


Estados-Unidos, extractó del código de Indias todo lo que podía parecer pacto fundamental, y pretendió hacer pasar por tal los contratos que se hacían con los conquistadores . . . formando con todo esto una especie de constitución de la América española, que nunca llegó a existir, ó que estaba olvidada largos años hacía, y en la infracción de ésta funda el derecho de la independencia.” Lucas Alamán, Historia de Méjico, 30th ed. (Mexico City: Jus, 1972), 125. The political role of this rhetoric, however, did not escape his notice: “the City Hall and the Americans relied on the original laws and the independence established by the Leyes de Indias in addition to the general doctrines of the previous century’s philosophers on the sovereignty of nations.” Ibid., 127.

37. Hale, El liberalismo mexicano en la época de Mora, 121. On the subject of this ancient constitution, Hale adds in a footnote: “Bishop Abad y Queipo defended clerical immunity in 1799 [Representación sobre la inmunidad personal del clero], considering it inherent to the ancient constitution, originating in the Fuero Juzgo.”

38. “. . . se mostrará viva a lo largo de las sucesivas experiencias liberales en la primera parte del siglo XIX . . . la anterior multiplicidad de poderes -característica de una particular constitución histórica que se consideraba legítima- se había mantenido sólidamente.” Marco Bellingeri, “De una constitución a otra: Conflictos de jurisdicciones y dispersión de poderes en Yucatán (1789 – 1831),” in El liberalismo en México, ed. Antonio Annino and Raymond Buve, Cuadernos de Historia Latinoamericana 1 (Münster: Lit Verlag, 1993).

The Ongoing Force of the Ancient Constitution

A problem quite separate from that of the rhetorical use of the ancient consti-tution involves the actual persistence of ancient constitutional rules in post- independence social and political life. Even as Alamán was penning his dismis-sive screed, and in his own Mexico, the ancient constitution proved to be much more than a rhetorical device when continuing attempts at reform over the first half of the nineteenth century clashed with facets of it that were firmly rooted in political society and activity. This was the reality faced by the liberal leader José María Luis Mora in the arena of Mexican constitutional disputes. Referring to the events of 1834 that forced him into exile, Mora insisted they had been part of a struggle to defend the 1824 Constitution against the esprit de corps of “the country’s ancient constitution.” He judged this esprit de corps to be embodied in the corporate groups that resisted liberal reforms in order to defend privileges of a patriarchal state that survived despite the fall of its monarch.37 Likewise, in Yucatán, where the Bourbon Reforms only superficially affected the country’s ancient constitution, it “would prove itself to be very much alive throughout the successive liberal experiences of the first part of the nineteenth century,” since “the previous multiplicity of powers — a feature of a particular historical constitution thought to be legitimate — was steadfastly maintained.”38 But any attempt to study the problem over Spanish America as a whole founders on the dearth of existing research, so I will now focus on Río de la Plata.


Keeping in mind the inherent ambiguity of the concept of “ancient con-stitution,” a complex including both written and unwritten elements, one can nevertheless recognize that in Río de la Plata the Leyes de Indias; the 1782 Real ordenanza de intendentes; Spanish legal corpora like the Fuero juzgo, the Siete partidas, and the Ordenanzas de Bilbao; and local documents like the Reglamento provisorio of 1817 all formed a part. One must add to these written sources, in addition to a variety of customary practices, certain authors whose authority seemed indisputable, just as noted above for the U.S. case by L. Kramer and in the session of November 5, 1832, at the House of Representatives of Bue-nos Aires. The written sources specified are clearly cited, at differing times and for differing reasons, in the documents of the day, be they from government sources or various constitutional debates.

With its 1783 amendments, the Real ordenanza de intendentes would last through the first half of the century, as would the Reglamento provisorio of December 1817, which anticipated in important ways the subsequently failed 1819 Constitution, and, in its absence, would remain in force over the following years. Many of the Ordinance’s provisions stayed in force not only during the first revolutionary decade, under supposedly national governments (the First and Second Triumvirates, and the Directory), but even later as well.39

After 1820, attempts at representative regimes began in the provinces. The Intendencias ceased to exist, and between 1822 and 1834 all of the cabildos in the territory of the former viceroyalty would be abolished and replaced by legislatures. In addition to these innovations, the ancient constitution would also be partially modified by the constitutional measures adopted in the vari-ous sovereign entities that, under the name of “provinces,” replaced the sov-ereignty of the Castilian crown.40 After the failed attempts (1813, 1819, 1826, and 1828) to impose a constitutional text on the whole of the United Prov-inces of the Río de la Plata, informal systems existed in each of the provincial states until the successful passing of the 1853 Constitution. Some states gave themselves written constitutions that were at times explicitly recognized as complements to the old Spanish legislation and certain constitutional docu-

39. On the persistence of the Ordenanza, see José María Díaz Couselo, “La Real Ordenanza de Intendentes y la revolución,” in Estudios sobre la Real Ordenanza de Intendentes del Río de la Plata, ed. José M. Mariluz Urquijo (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Investigaciones de Historia del Derecho, 1995).

40. On the provincial constitutions of the period, see José Carlos Chiaramonte, “¿Provincias o Estados? Los orígenes del federalismo rioplatense,” in Las revoluciones hispánicas: Independencias americanas y liberalismo español, ed. François-Xavier Guerra (Madrid: Complutense, 1995).


ments issued by creole governments after 1810, such as the oft-cited Regla‑mento provisorio of 1817.

The states of the Río de la Plata that were already beginning to think of themselves as “Argentine” would later recognize the 1831 Federal Pact as another of the elements of that informal constitution. But almost all of them also under-went a process in which the establishment of representative regimes would lead to varied combinations of the ancient constitution and post-1810 innovations. In general, the legislatures would not manage to assert themselves as such and would instead endure in some cases as mere organs destined to endorse gov-ernment provisions and, in others, as limited by the facultades extraordinarias granted to the governors. In Buenos Aires’s case — that of greatest reformist momentum — instead of adopting a constitutional text, the ancient constitution was amended with a set of laws stipulating innovations aimed at establishing a representative regime — including those of the electoral system, the extinguish-ment of ecclesiastical privileges, and the suppression of the cabildos and their replacement by a legislature. These innovations would quickly be undercut by the first administration of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829 – 32), particularly during his second term beginning in 1835. For all that this reformist momentum had temporary, though important, success in creating legislative power, it did not achieve the same in the field of justice.41

The Persistence of Spanish Law

It is common knowledge that one of the defining features of Spanish Ameri-can societies after independence, in apparent contradiction to its revolutionary spirit, was the survival of much of the Spanish legal system.42 This has hardly

41. Marcela Ternavasio, “Entre el cabildo colonial y el municipio moderno: Los juzgados de paz de campaña en el estado de Buenos Aires, 1821 – 1854,” in Dinámicas de antiguo régimen y orden constitucional: Representación, justicia y administración en Iberoamérica, siglos XVIII – XIX, ed. Marco Bellingeri (Torino: Otto, 2000), 327 – 28.

42. On the legal code after Mexican independence, see the “Estudio introductorio” by María del Refugio González in Pandectas hispano‑mexicanas, ed. Juan N. Rodríguez de San Miguel (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1962), 1:xviii. The Pandectas were intended specifically to facilitate the work of jurists through the compilation of the current legal rules, the vast majority of which dated from the colonial period. See also Jorge Mario García Laguardia and María del Refugio González, “Estudio preliminar,” in José María Álvarez, Instituciones de derecho real de Castilla y de Indias (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1982, facsimile of the 1826 Mexican reprint), 1:58. The first edition of Álvarez’s work was published in Guatemala in 1818.


43. On the inappropriateness of the distinction between public and private law in the colonial period and its first appearance in the years following independence, see Víctor M. Uribe-Uran, “The Great Transformation of Law and Legal Culture: ‘The Public’ and ‘the Private’ in the Transition from Empire to Nation in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, 1750 – 1850,” in Esherick, Kayali, and Van Young, Empire to Nation, 77. In a similar vein, another author writes about Europe: “The difficulties encountered by jurists trained in the ius commune in separating public and private law can also be understood, for, from a certain point of view, all law was primarily or secondarily public to the extent that it sought to secure the common good, i.e. pursued public interests. . . . The ius civile . . . was, therefore, a public and private ius, and was called such in contrast to the ius canonicum, the guiding law of another body, not political but mystical, . . . the Church.” “. . . se entienden también las dificultades que encontraron los juristas formados en el ius commune para separar el derecho público del privado, pues bajo cierto punto de vista todo derecho era primaria o secundariamente público en la medida en que miraba a la consecución del bien común, esto es, perseguía intereses públicos. . . . El ius civile . . . era, pues, un ius público y privado al mismo tiempo que se llamaba así por oposición al ius canonicum, derecho rector de otro cuerpo, no político sino místico, . . . la Iglesia.” García Pérez, Antes leyes que reyes, 71.

44. “. . . leyes fundamentales que forman el derecho constitucional de Inglaterra . . . nosotros mismos tenemos leyes de derecho público y privado que cuentan siglos de existencia. En el siglo XIV promulgáronse las Leyes de Partidas, que han regido nuestros

been ignored by Latin Americanist historiography. However, considered in iso-lation, ignoring its link to the ancient constitution, it is incomprehensible.

The persistence of Spanish legislation is, in fact, inseparable from the ancient constitution and is proof that it was far more than mere rhetoric. First of all, as Juan Bautista Alberdi recalled in 1853, this legislation included — in language already coming into use — not only what was considered in its day as part of the realm of private law, but also what would belong to public law.43 Discussing the “fundamental laws that form the constitutional law of England,” Alberdi remarked that

we ourselves have laws within the realms of public and private law that have existed for centuries. In the fourteenth century the Leyes de partidas were promulgated, which have governed our American communities [nuestros pueblos americanos] since their foundation, and our Leyes de Indias and our Ordenanzas de comercio y de navegación are also centuries old. Let us remember that we have, in our own way, had ancient public law. . . . During the revolution we changed governments thousands of times because the laws were not observed. But we have not therefore taken as insubsistent and void the Siete partidas, the Leyes de Indias, the Ordenanzas de Bilbao, etc. We have implicitly confirmed these laws and called on the new governments to abide by them.44


When the independence movements erupted, the need to ensure the social order had translated into a decision to maintain legal continuity through the persistence of the ancient laws of Spain and the Indies. As a result, the aspiration to reform the legal system bequeathed by the colony would remain unfulfilled. As one Buenos Aires newspaper put it in 1818, such a reform aspired “not to see our civil rights and actions enveloped in a multitude of musty and repugnant institutions” belonging to the “old system.”45 The continuity of law was con-firmed in official measures, with the sole exception of elements that might con-tradict the new governments’ resolutions. The Reglamento provisorio of 1817 set a norm that would prove more enduring than expected, declaring that, as long as no constitution had been passed, “all legislative codes, warrants, regulations, and other general and particular provisions of the former Spanish government shall endure, as long as they are not in direct or indirect opposition to the free-dom and independence of these Provinces or this Regulation, as shall any other provisions enacted since May twenty-fifth of eighteen hundred ten that are not contrary to [this Regulation].”46

With only slight variations, this text reiterated the content of an article in the Estatuto provisional of 1816. But the provisions of the 1811 Regulation also

pueblos americanos desde su fundación, y son seculares también nuestras Leyes de Indias y nuestras Ordenanzas de comercio y de navegación. Recordemos que, a nuestro modo, hemos tenido un derecho público antiguo. . . . Durante la revolución hemos cambiado mil veces los gobiernos, porque las leyes no eran observadas. Pero no por eso hemos dado por insubsistentes y nulas las Siete Partidas, las Leyes de Indias, las Ordenanzas de Bilbao, etc. Hemos confirmado implícitamente esas leyes, pidiendo a los nuevos gobiernos que las cumplan.” Juan Bautista Alberdi, Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República Argentina, in Alberdi, Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de La Tribuna Nacional, 1886), 3:539.

45. “. . . no ver envueltos nuestros derechos y acciones civiles en una multitud de instituciones añejas y repugnantes . . . antiguo sistema.” El Abogado Nacional, 2, Buenos Aires, 1 Nov. 1818. However, it demanded preserving the old system’s primitive and eternal truths of natural law, albeit pruning back “many useless, dead, or corrupt branches.”

46. “. . . subsistirán todos los códigos legislativos, cédulas, reglamentos y demás disposiciones generales y particulares del antiguo gobierno Español, que no estén en oposición directa o indirecta con la libertad e independencia de estas Provincias ni con este Reglamento, y demás disposiciones que no sean contrarias a él, libradas desde veinte y cinco de Mayo de mil ochocientos diez.” “Reglamento provisorio dictado por el Congreso de Tucumán para las Provincias Unidas de Sudamérica,” sect. 2, Del poder legislativo, chap. 1, art. 2, in Ravignani, Asambleas constituyentes argentinas, vol. 6, part 2, p. 686. Similar provisions are recorded in New Granada and Mexico: M. C. Mirow, Latin American Law: A History of Private Law and Institutions in Spanish America (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2004), 125.


bear a similarity: “The deputies of the united provinces present in this capital form a junta with the title of Junta Conservadora of the sovereignty of Sr. D. Fernando VII and the national laws, insofar as they do not oppose the supreme law of the civil liberty of the American peoples.”47

Two observations need to be made about this text: one, that, when it men-tions “national laws,” these should be understood to be the Spanish laws; and two, that the provision is no mere consequence of continued subjection, feigned or real, to the Castilian crown, but an inevitable effect of the lack of rules to replace the peninsular ones.

Given the diversity and complexity of the Indian Spanish legal framework, the ancient custom of adopting an order of preference was oft repeated, as in the text of the Guatemalan José María Alvarez, cited above, one of the most widely used in higher education in the first half of the nineteenth century. The order of priority indicated by Álvarez was as follows: recent Disposiciones reales, the Recopilación de Indias, the Recopilación de Castilla, the Fuero real and the Fuero juzgo, statutes and municipal jurisdictions, and the Leyes de las Siete partidas. All this referred to written law, to which had to be added customary law.48

Legal Studies

The continuity of Spanish legislation was consistent with the orientation of legal studies and the conception of society they conveyed. A salient testimony to this is the reprint of Álvarez’s work in Buenos Aires in 1834, which was meant to replace the Benthamist civil law course given by Pedro Somellera, a professor exiled after the fall of Rivadavia.49 This edition was not just the result of the change of political direction implied by the defeat of the Unitarian Party, but also a telling symbol of the constitutional reality of the province of Buenos Aires, usually considered the most “modernized” of the states of Río de la Plata. The

47. “Los diputados de las provincias unidas que existen en esta capital, componen una Junta con el título de Conservadora de la soberanía del Sr. D. Fernando VII, y de las leyes nacionales, en cuanto no se oponen al derecho supremo de la libertad civil de los pueblos americanos.” “Reglamento de la división de poderes sancionado por la Junta conservadora, precedido de documentos oficiales que lo explican, 30 de septiembre a 29 de octubre de 1811,” art. 11, in Ravignani, Asambleas constituyentes argentinas, vol. 6, part 2, p. 600.

48. Álvarez, Instituciones de derecho real de Castilla y de Indias, 1:58 – 65.49. José María Álvarez, Instituciones de derecho real de España (Buenos Aires: Imprenta

del Estado, 1834). Pedro Somellera, Principios de derecho civil (Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, Facultad de Derecho y Ciencias Sociales, 1939). This was the course given by Somellera in 1824.


publisher, Dalmacio Vélez Sársfield, who much later would write the Argentine Civil Code (1871), proclaimed that Álvarez’s book was the most thoroughgoing course on Spanish jurisprudence, designed to accord with the Leyes de Indias and post-1810 local rules. The reprint of this work suggests that the lawyers of Bue-nos Aires were educated to conceive of a society governed by unequal rights. Fol-lowing norms of Roman law, Álvarez warned that legally only those who possess estado — “a quality or circumstance by reason of which men enjoy different law, for one law is enjoyed by the free man, another by the servant, one by the citizen and another by the pilgrim” — are in fact legal persons.50

This orientation of legal studies, consistent with the ancient constitution, came from the colonial universities and had been modified only partially by initiatives considered “enlightened.” In Spanish America before independence, the universities offered either one or two of the courses of study of Spanish uni-versities: namely, theology and law. Law studies included Instituta as a central subject. In such cases as that of the University of Córdoba del Tucumán, while Instituta was the course of study within the jurisprudence curriculum created in 1791, students also had to attend the theology faculty’s classes on canon law and morality. Later, lectureships in canon law and property law (derecho real) (1793), and the law of nature and nations (1815) were added.

Roman law and canon law had been basic studies in a graduate’s education in universities across Spanish America, not just Río de la Plata. The field of Insti‑tuta was based on Justinian’s Institutions, whose second chapter dealt with the preeminence of natural law, plus part of the same authority’s Digest and Code. After the expulsion of the Jesuits and the ban on Suarist authors, the writings of Arnoldo Vinnius, edited by Heineccius, were prescribed by royal provision, no doubt because of their regalist views. A manual of the law of nature and nations by Heineccius had been translated when this field of study was instituted in Spain in 1771, a translation expurgated of any passages that might be inconve-nient for the monarchy and the church. The work circulated widely until well into the nineteenth century.51

50. “. . . una calidad o circunstancia por razón de la cual los hombres usan de distinto derecho, porque de un derecho usa el hombre libre, de otro el siervo, de uno el ciudadano y de otro el peregrino.” Álvarez, Instituciones de derecho real de Castilla y de Indias, 1:66.

51. On law studies in the River Plate universities, see Batia B. Siebzehner, La Universidad americana y la Ilustración: Autoridad y conocimiento en Nueva España y el Río de la Plata (Madrid: MAPFRE, 1994); Juan M. Garro, Bosquejo histórico de la Universidad de Córdoba (Buenos Aires: Impr. de M. Biedma, 1882); Silvano G. A. Benito Moya, Reformismo e Ilustración: Los Borbones en la Universidad de Córdoba (Córdoba: Centro de Estudios Históricos, 2000); Agustín Pestalardo, Historia de la enseñanza de las ciencias jurídicas y sociales


As I have explained elsewhere, the function of natural law has traditionally been misinterpreted by treating it as just one form of the law without acknowl-edging its place as the foundation of the social and political conceptions of the period.52 Let us add that canon law since the Middle Ages had been the main means of conveyance of natural law, which, in both scholasticism and iusnatu-ralism, worked to regulate social relations, providing as it did a precise code of rules that governed social and political institutions such as marriage, property, and civil authority.53

The teaching of natural law had continued after independence. Besides the case of the University of Córdoba mentioned above, the jurisprudence depart-ment of the University of Buenos Aires, created in 1821, “spent its first thirty years completely devoted to natural law,” which briefly coexisted with Bentha-mist influence in the teaching of civil law.54 In addition to courses of study in the law of nature and nations and civil law, first-year law studies included ecclesiasti-cal public law, taught by Presbítero Eusebio Agüero and aimed at questions of canon law relating to the Catholic congregation’s relations with secular power. The work of an Austrian canonist advocate of regalism, Franz Xavier Gmeiner, was published in 1835 in its original Latin for use in teaching this field. It had already been used by Agüero in the previous decade.55

In 1850, Juan Bautista Alberdi was still recommending the study of Roman

en la Universidad de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Alsina, 1914); Mirow, “Legal Education and Lawyers,” chapter 13 in Latin American Law; Pablo Buchbinder, Historia de las universidades argentinas (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2005). For law studies in Spain, see Mariano Peset and José Luis Peset, “Capítulo XII: Leyes y cánones,” in La universidad española (siglos XVIII y XIX): Despotismo ilustrado y revolución liberal (Madrid: Taurus, 1974).

52. Chiaramonte, Nación y estado en Iberoamérica, 103.53. Passerin d’Entrèves, Natural Law, 80.54. “. . . vivió sus primeros treinta años completamente entregado al derecho natural.”

Pestalardo, Historia de la enseñanza, 86.55. This is the Institutiones juris ecclesiastici: Gmeineri Xaveri:Metodo cientifica adornatae,

2 vols. (Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Estado, 1835). Eusebio Agüero’s classes were published as Instituciones de derecho público eclesiástico (Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Estado, 1828). See Roberto Di Stefano, “De la cristiandad colonial a la Iglesia nacional: Perspectivas de investigación en historia religiosa de los siglos XVIII y XIX,” Andes: Antropología e Historia 11 (2000): 100. See also Di Stefano, “Eusebio Agüero,” in Los curas de la Revolución: Vidas de eclesiásticos en los orígenes de la nación, ed. Nancy Calvo, Roberto Di Stefano, and Klaus Gallo (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2002). José María Mariluz Urquijo, “Libros antiguos de derecho: Las instituciones de derecho eclesiástico de Gmeiner,” Revista del Instituto de Historia del Derecho (Buenos Aires) 1 (1949): 39-42.


and canon law, which he considered sources of Spanish law. “The Roman law is to our own,” he claimed, “what an original is to a translation.” And he added that the Siete partidas “that govern us even today are a wise and discreet trans-lation of the Roman Pandects and Code.”56 The Universities of Buenos Aires and Córdoba maintained the study of canon law across their various syllabus reforms until the end of the century.

The persistence of Spanish legislation for the Indies was inseparable from that of natural law. The view that had become prevalent over the course of the eighteenth century and was still in force at the time of independence ranked natural law above any positive legislation. Even customary law was often thought of as an expression of natural law.57 This order of priority would be emphatically underlined by the State of Buenos Aires as late as 1852 and 1860 to justify its refusal to accept the Acuerdo de San Nicolás, an interprovincial pact signed after the overthrow of Juan Manuel de Rosas in preparation for the constituent federal convention of 1853. This rejection, according to Barto-lomé Mitre, one of the main political leaders of Buenos Aires, was founded on “the general principles of good governance, the rules of our written law, and the fundamental bases of natural law.”58 This view was reiterated in 1860 in the convention of the State of Buenos Aires, convened to propose reforms to the 1853 federal constitution as a condition for its reentry to the Argentine nation: “Civil rights, constitutional rights, all the rights created by laws, the very sover-eignty of peoples, can vary, be altered, and even end . . . but natural rights, both of men and of peoples constituted by Divine Providence (according to the words of Roman law) must always stand steadfast and immutable.”59

56. “El derecho romano es al nuestro . . . lo que un original es a una traducción . . . que nos rigen hasta hoy, son una traducción discreta y sabia de los Pandectas y el Código romanos.” Letter from Juan Bautista Alberdi to Lucas González (a young Argentine studying law at the Univ. of Turin), Valparaíso, 16 April 1850, in Alberdi, Obras completas, 3:345.

57. Víctor Tau Anzoátegui, El poder de la costumbre: Estudios sobre el derecho consuetudinario en América hispana hasta la emancipación (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Investigaciones de Historia del Derecho, 2001), 101.

58. “. . . los principios generales de buen gobierno, las reglas de nuestro derecho escrito, y las bases fundamentales del derecho natural.” Bartolomé Mitre, “Discurso contra el acuerdo de San Nicolás,” 21 June 1852, in Mitre, Arengas (Buenos Aires: Biblioteca de “La Nación,” 1902), 1:12.

59. “El derecho civil, el derecho constitucional, todos los derechos creados por las leyes, la soberanía misma de los pueblos, puede variar, modificarse, acabar también . . . pero los derechos naturales, tanto de los hombres como de los pueblos constituidos por la Divina Providencia (según las palabras de la ley romana) siempre deben quedar firmes


In short, studies of law in both the colonial period and thereafter need to pay heed to courses in natural and canon law and focus, beyond strictly legal matters, on their special character as vehicles of ideas of the social science of the day, ideas consistent with the persistence of the ancient constitution, for which they acted as a support.

The Intellectual Education of the Clergy and Military Leaders

The claim that arbitrary caudillismo arose as a reaction against modernizing elites’ attempts to impose constitutionalism ignores the existence of rules of political behavior based on other kinds of constitutional views among both the rural and the urban leaders of the day. Evidence encourages us to approach the history of the first half of the nineteenth century from a different angle.

Approaches to the conduct of the so-called caudillos that fail to attend to their intellectual education are similar to certain treatments of the political action of the clergy. It is useful to spend a little time on this example, as it will give us a clearer grasp of the matter in hand. The usual interpretation is to see the men of the church as mere representatives of a religious cult. But equally or more important for intellectual and political history is to recognize their role as bearers of opinions from what was then the science of society, that is, the set of doctrines of natural and canon law taught to them over the course of their educations. So, for the purposes of understanding the political motivation of the players involved, it is of no consequence that many of these men of the church had no religious vocation and had been groomed for an ecclesiastical career out of calculated convenience according to family rules common at the time. Whether or not they had genuine faith, they had all received a similar schooling in classrooms and tertulias, and, in addition to the scholastic versions of those disciplines that persisted in curricula, some had made critical adjustments after consulting works by nonscholastic authors of natural law (Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel, et al.) and the regalist versions of canon law.60

Discussions of the so-called caudillos have highlighted their military and

e inmutables.” “Informe de la Comisión Examinadora de la Constitución Federal,” in Ravignani, Asambleas constituyentes argentinas, 4:766.

60. On the education of the River Plate clergy and their social projections, see Di Stefano, El púlpito y la plaza: Clero, sociedad y política de la monarquía católica a la república rosista (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2004), chap. 3. See also Valentina Ayrolo, Funcionarios de dios y de la república: Clero y política en la experiencia de las autonomías provinciales (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2007), chap. 3.


61. Jorge Newton, Alejandro Heredia: El protector del norte (Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra, 1971), 14 – 15.

62. Papeles del General Echagüe (1796 – 1826), ed. Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de Santa Fe, 2nd ed. (Santa Fe: Ministerio de Justicia y Educación, 1951), 19.

political background and paid little heed to their intellectual background. It may therefore come as a surprise to note that some of them had pursued higher or middle education. This means that, like the clergy, they received the basic ideas of what used to be called “the science of morality and costumes,” ideas consistent with the norms of the social and political life of their day. We should add that, with or without higher education, they were generally surrounded by lawyers who had received these ideas during their education, some of whom were their advisers and held governmental posts at various levels.

Information on the formal education of the political leaders of the period is scarce, and historians who have explored the biographical traits of these leaders tend to neglect the issue. However, we do have supporting evidence in certain celebrated cases from the history of Río de la Plata during the first half of the nineteenth century. Take two famous caudillos, for example: Alejandro Heredia, from Tucumán, and Pascual Echagüe, from Santa Fe but politically active in neighboring Entre Ríos as well. These men were both doctors of theology and both had worked as lecturers.

Heredia (1788 – 1838) received his primary education in schools run by religious orders in Tucumán, continued his studies at the Colegio de Nuestra Señora de Loreto in Córdoba, and graduated in 1808 as a doctor of theology at the University of Córdoba. He had also won a chair in Latin by competition in 1806. Later he would begin his military career in the independence armies and he was already a colonel when, in 1816, he joined the Congress of Tucumán, which would declare the independence of Río de la Plata. Among other his nota-ble activities, he was also member of the Constituent Congress of 1824 – 27.61

Pascual Echagüe (1797 – 1867) undertook primary studies in Latin lan-guage and culture in the city of Santa Fe and, in 1812, entered the Colegio de Monserrat in Córdoba. In 1818, he graduated as a doctor of theology from the University of Córdoba and was given an assistant tutorship. On his return to Santa Fe he was appointed schoolmaster of First Letters in 1820, government prosecretary in 1821, and government secretary in 1824, and later became gov-ernor of Entre Ríos Province between 1832 and 1841, and neighboring Santa Fe between 1842 and 1851. He was, until his death in 1867, active not just militar-ily, but politically too, holding government posts and representative functions at both provincial and national levels.62


Something similar can be seen in other prominent political figures of the period. Manuel Dorrego, the famous Federal Party leader of the 1820s and gov-ernor of Buenos Aires from the fall of Rivadavia in 1827 until his execution by the Unitarian general Juan Lavalle in December 1828, had studied at the Real Colegio de San Carlos in Buenos Aires beginning in 1803 and had moved to Santiago de Chile to study jurisprudence at the University of San Felipe, a career he interrupted due to the events of May 1810 in Buenos Aires.63 Pedro Molina, the most prominent of Mendoza’s governors, studied law at the same university, albeit without graduating. General Jose María Paz, the most famous military leader of the Unitarian Party, entered the University of Córdoba in 1804 and enrolled in the first year of philosophy, the third and last year of which he completed in 1806. In the same year, he earned the titles of bachelor and then master of arts. In February 1807, he enrolled in the first course of theology, the examination for which he passed at the end of that year. He also took the canon law course, which he passed at the end of 1810. Paz was only one year and one examination short of becoming a bachelor of law when he withdrew owing to the political events of those years.64

Other caudillos had done secondary studies before embarking on their military careers. Juan Bautista Bustos, governor of Córdoba between 1820 and 1829, studied at the city’s Dominican college. Jose Vicente Reinafé, the Cór-doba governor tried and executed for his alleged involvement in the murder of Facundo Quiroga, had studied at the Colegio de Monserrat, which he entered in 1801. The leading caudillo and governor of Santiago del Estero Juan Felipe Ibarra attended the Colegio de Monserrat between 1801 and 1802, leaving in his second year due to lack of resources. Martin Güemes, the hero of the con-tainment of the Spanish in northwest Río de la Plata, studied at the Franciscan convent in Salta and attended the arts lectureship of Dr. Manuel Antonio de Castro. The Entre Ríos caudillo Ricardo López Jordan, whose career was long and eventful, had studied at Colegio de San Ignacio in Buenos Aires.65

63. As I have said, information about the subject is very scarce. For Dorrego, I have drawn on data in Gabriel Di Meglio, “Manuel Dorrego y los descamisados: La construcción de un líder popular urbano en la Buenos Aires posrevolucionaria,” Estudios Sociales (Santa Fe, Argentina) 29 (2005); and Lily Sosa de Newton, Dorrego (Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra, 1967). Unless expressly indicated, the other biographical data are from Vicente Osvaldo Cutolo, Nuevo diccionario biográfico argentino (1750 – 1930) (Buenos Aires: Elche, 1971).

64. Aldo Armando Cocca, Los estudios universitarios del General Paz (Buenos Aires: Centro de Historia “Mitre,” 1946).

65. Valentina Ayrolo, “Juan Bautista Bustos,” in Historias de caudillos argentinos, ed. Jorge Lafforgue (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 1999); Luis Alén Lascano, “Juan Felipe Ibarra,” in ibid.


Where advisers to the so-called caudillos are concerned, we find similar backgrounds in either ecclesiastical studies, as in the case of Artigas’s adviser Father Monterroso, or legal studies, like José Simón García de Cossio, a gradu-ate of Charcas and adviser to Governor Pedro Ferré in Corrientes. In short, members of the elites of the period had commonly studied theology or law at the Universities of Córdoba, Charcas, or Santiago de Chile. The latter univer-sity was an alternative to the prestigious but distant Charcas for Rioplatenses wanting to study jurisprudence when there was no such subject as yet in Cór-doba. Naturally, the inhabitants of Cuyo were more likely to enroll there due to its proximity, and likewise a sector of the Mendoza elite who would be politi-cally active between 1828 and 1851.66

The Inconsistency of the Concept of Caudillismo

The above references are intended to show that the so-called caudillos, gener-ally thought of solely as men of military action, possessed ideas about society and politics, and are accordingly also valid subjects of study for what I term intellectual history. This does not mean thinking of them as professionals in that field, but as bearers of social and political conceptions consistent with their actions.

We said at the start that the political conduct of the sectors that resisted post-independence reforms has been misinterpreted due to a failure to recog-nize that they belonged to a conceptual world governed by rules attributable to the ongoing force of the ancient constitution. One of the most evident effects of this limitation is on the phenomenon termed “caudillismo.” The classic dichot-omy set up by Sarmiento in Facundo o Civilización y barbarie offered a distorted picture of the social and political reality of his day. This was the result of the combined influences of romanticism — from which Sarmiento took his portrait of a rural world under the sway of grand feudal ownership — and European trav-elers’ accounts, whose descriptions of landscapes and human types he used to fill in for his personal ignorance of such realities.67 Although, as I pointed out

66. I am grateful to Prof. Hernán Bransboin for this information from his ongoing doctoral thesis at the University of Buenos Aires, “La provincia de Mendoza en la Confederación Argentina (1835 – 1852).”

67. Adolfo Prieto has shown these peculiarities of the Sanjuanino’s work, providing us with an example of the effect of various literary mediations in the apparent view of reality. Adolfo Prieto, Los viajeros ingleses y la emergencia de la literatura argentina, 1820 – 1850 (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1996). On the view of caudillos as feudal barons, see Ernesto Quesada, “La Edad Media argentina,” in La época de Rosas, su verdadero carácter histórico (Buenos Aires: Moen, 1898).


above, our image of the crisis of independence has changed a great deal, we still have not totally abandoned approaches, like the one evoked by the term “caudi-llismo,” that stand in the way of a clearer understanding of what happened after independence.68

Caudillismo is treated as the other side of the historical process, oblivi-ous to the civilizing task and hostile to the rule of law: “Peace perpetuated the structures of war and established in Spanish America a dual process, constitu-tionalism on the one hand, caudillismo on the other.”69 Absent from this per-spective is any perception of the existence of constitutional norms prior to post-independence attempts at political reform. Tulio Halperín Donghi pointed out long ago that the term “caudillismo” was “a derogatory label, applied very liber-ally by certain politicians to their rivals.” “Caudillo” denoted “one who aspired to achieve power through violence, or exercised it outside the bounds of legal-ity, or obtained it illegitimately.” And he added, “the expression covers a set of meanings similar to those covered by tyrant a century earlier.” Halperín Donghi did not propose to define a “caudillo regime,” a label he felt covered “irreduc-ibly diverse realities,” but instead merely to describe the social and economic conditions in which four of the most famous Rioplatense caudillos — Güemes, Ramirez, Ibarra, and Quiroga — emerged, albeit without addressing the intel-lectual facets of these political leaders’ educations.70 Jeremy Adelman does not

68. I include myself in this observation. José Carlos Chiaramonte, “Legalidad constitucional o caudillismo: El problema del orden social en el surgimiento de los estados autónomos del Litoral argentino en la primera mitad del siglo XIX,” Desarrollo Económico (Buenos Aires) 26, no. 102 ( July – Sept. 1986). See also the examination of the different trends in interpretations of caudillismo in Frank Safford, “Politics, Ideology and Society in Post-Independence Spanish America,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America, 3:347. A more recent review of the various historiographical criteria relating to caudillismo and of the progress toward a clearer understanding of how power was exercised in the decades following independence is to be found in Noemí Goldman and Ricardo Salvatore, eds., Caudillismos rioplatenses: Nuevas miradas a un viejo problema (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1998). For a general overview, see the introduction by the compilers in the same work, and the chapter by Pablo Buchbinder, “Caudillos y caudillismo: una perspectiva historiográfica.”

69. John Lynch, Caudillos in Spanish America, 1800 – 1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 84.

70. “. . . un calificativo denigratorío, aplicado muy liberalmente por ciertos políticos a sus rivales . . . aquél que aspiraba a lograr el poder por medio de la violencia, o el que lo ejercía al margen de la organización legal, o el que lo obtenía de forma ilegítima. . . . la expresión cubre un conjunto de significaciones semejantes al que un siglo antes cubría la de tirano . . . régimen de caudillos . . . realidades irreductiblemente diversas.” Tulio Halperín Donghi, “El surgimiento de los caudillos en el cuadro de la sociedad rioplatense postrevolucionaria,” Estudios de Historia Social 1 (1965).


71. Jeremy Adelman, Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999), 280, and 112 – 13.

72. “. . . un tipo de dominación basado eminentemente en la psicología colectiva, no en la desaparecida o dudosa legalidad racional o tradicional”; “un derecho ad hoc propio de bandas.” Mario Góngora, “Mario Góngora: Un texto y una entrevista. Reflexiones sobre la tradición y el tradicionalismo en la historia de Chile,” in Góngora, Ensayo Histórico, 287; Fernando Díaz Díaz, Caudillos y caciques: Antonio López de Santa Anna y Juan Álvarez (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1972).

73. For Mexico, see José Antonio Aguilar Rivera, En pos de la quimera: Reflexiones sobre el experimento constitucional atlántico (Mexico City: Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas / Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001), 78. Aguilar Rivera, El manto liberal: Los poderes de emergencia en México, 1821 – 1876 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2001). For Colombia, see the paragraph, “El uso de las autorizaciones extraordinarias,” in David Bushnell, El régimen de Santander en la Gran Colombia, 3rd ed. (Bogota: El Áncora, 1985), 51. Bushnell describes the frequency of use of facultades extraordinarias and mentions the requisite of the Congress’s consent. But he calls them “semi-dictatorial” powers and deems them contradictory in a republican regime like Gran

agree with this type of analysis, nor with Lynch’s, but rather relies on the con-cept of “caudillo regime.” He asserts that “local chieftains eschewed the rule of law in order to squelch internal discord,” and characterizes Rosas as a caudi-llo whose power “rested on the rule of quasi-law: sanctions and dictates of an unstable state bereft of deep legitimacy and lacking an accepted covering law for public affairs.” According to Adelman, “If the caudillo personified anything, it was this transitional incompleteness.”71 Even more frequently caudillismo has been viewed from a psychological perspective. For Mario Góngora, these were charismatic men who exercised “a kind of domination based fundamentally on collective psychology: based not on any vanished or questionable rational or traditional legality” but on “an ad hoc gang law.” A similar approach, even more explicitly founded on the Weberian concepts of ideal types and charisma, has been applied by Fernando Díaz Díaz to the case of Mexico.72

Facultades Extraordinarias and the Ancient Constitution

Facultades extraordinarias were one of the most important political instruments of the era and, what is more, one of the phenomena most responsible for the attribution of despotism to the conduct of governors in general, whether they are individually considered caudillos or not. But these powers were in fact an expression of a specific dictatorial resource widely utilized at the time to deal with political emergencies. Such powers were also employed in other countries in Spanish America, such as Mexico, Colombia, and Chile.73 Study of these


Colombia. As a result, with this lack of perception of the dictatorial nature of these powers and their compatibility with a Republican regime, he attributes them to Article 21 of the Constitution of Cúcuta of 1821. For Peru, see Cristóbal Aljovín de Losada, “¿Una ruptura con el pasado? Santa Cruz y la Constitución,” in Cultura política en los Andes (1750 – 1950), ed. C. Aljovín de Losada and Nils Jacobsen (Lima: Fondo de la Universidad Mayor de San Marcos / Institut Français d’Études Andines, 2007); and Aljovín de Losada, Caudillos y constituciones: Perú: 1821 – 1845 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000), 84. For Chile, see the various cases of the constitutional validity of facultades extraordinarias during the nineteenth century in Humberto Nogueira Alcalá, “La delegación de facultades legislativas en el ordenamiento jurídico chileno,” Ius et Praxis (Universidad de Talca, Facultad de Ciencias Jurídicas y Sociales) 7, no. 2 (2001) (available online at http://www.scielo.cl/).

74. Aguilar Rivera, El manto liberal.75. “. . . en el remoto y extraordinarío caso de comprometerse la tranquilidad pública

o la seguridad de la patria, podrá el gobierno suspender este decreto mientras dure la necesidad.” “Decreto de seguridad individual,” 23 Nov. 1811, in Ravignani, Asambleas constituyentes argentinas, vol. 6, part 2, p. 605.

powers has been dominated by concern over their incompatibility with liberal-ism, to the detriment of any examination of their consistency with the ancient constitution as natural expression of the dominant social, legal, and political norms of the era.74 For, as we shall see below, facultades extraordinarias, tra-ditionally considered one of the main proofs of the absence of legality, were on the contrary a form of the ancient institution of dictatorship, established legitimately by consent of the people, who granted the facultades and with limi-tations on their endurance and scope. One must recall that dictatorship, from classical antiquity onward, was a legal institution, while the abuse of power by rulers was instead dubbed “tyranny.”

Dictatorial-type powers were already envisaged in Rioplatense docu-ments produced shortly after May 1810, which, although designed to pro-tect individual rights against the excesses of power, nevertheless allowed for emergency measures. Article 9 of the Decreto de seguridad individual passed by the Primer Triunvirato in November 1811 stated that “in the remote and extraordinary event of the public peace or security of the motherland being compromised, the government may suspend this decree for as long as the need should last.”75

Recourse to facultades extraordinarias recurred during the 1813 Assembly, the first attempt to draw up a constitution for the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata. At the special session of September 8, 1813, convened to discuss a report by the executive (the Segundo Triunvirato) on the extraordinary circumstances generated by events in Alto Perú and the Banda Oriental, it was decided to grant


76. “Sesión extraordinaria del Miércoles 8 de Septiembre,” El Redactor de la Asamblea, no. 16, 11 Sept. 1813, in El Redactor de la Asamblea de 1813, facsimile ed. (Buenos Aires: La Nación, 1913), 64.

77. “. . . queda autorizado con las mismas facultades extraordinarias que se le confirieron por el Soberano Decreto de 8 de Setiembre último.” “Reglamento dado por la Asamblea General Constituyente para la suspensión de sus sesiones,” El Redactor de la Asamblea, no. 18, 20 Nov. 1813, in ibid., 73.

78. “. . . jamás podrán suspenderse . . . la seguridad de la Patria,” “Estatuto Provisional para la Dirección y Administración del Estado dado por la Junta de Observación,” 5 May 1815, in Ravignani, Asambleas constituyentes argentinas, vol. 6, part 2, p. 648.

79. “Reglamento provisorio dictado por el Congreso de Tucumán para las Provincias Unidas de Sudamérica,” Constitución de 1819, sect. 5, chap. 2, art. 122; 1826 Constitution, art. 174; and 1853 Constitution, art. 23; all cited in Ravignani, Asambleas constituyentes argentinas, vol. 6, part 2, pp. 719, 760, and 800, respectively.

the government facultades extraordinarias and suspend the operations of the assembly for as long as they remained in effect.76 For similar reasons, sessions were again suspended in November the same year with a regulation, Article 3, which declared executive power to be “authorized with the same facultades extraordinarias as were conferred on it by the Sovereign Decree of September 8 last.”77 Article 21 of the chapter on individual security of the Estatuto de 1815 contained a similar provision, albeit presented in rhetorical language that could not hide its nature. The article begins by stating that the dispositions laid out in the chapter “may never be suspended,” but adds in the same breath that if by some extraordinary circumstance the public peace or the “security of the Patria” were to be threatened, it would be admissible to suspend its provisions.78 We find similar language in Article 14 of the chapter on individual security of the 1817 Reglamento, while the Constitutions of 1819 and 1826 also include similar clauses.79

Facultades extraordinarias did not cancel the fundamental laws in force in each province. These powers were not unilaterally usurped by the governor but rather granted by the legislative body in accordance with the formality required by the principle of consent, whereby the institution representative of popular sovereignty consented to divest itself temporarily of certain powers, generally for reasons attributed to grave internal or external circumstances that could not be properly addressed by the procedures built into the division of powers. The same formality even governed the concession of the suma del poder público (sum of public power) to Juan Manuel de Rosas in 1835, as is apparent from the condi-tion he placed on his acceptance of them, that is, that the sovereign organism had to comply with requirement of consent, as did the sovereign pueblo itself


through the mechanism of a plebiscite.80 Contemporaries were well aware of the dictatorial nature and Roman precedents of facultades extraordinarias. In 1830 in the debates of the Buenos Aires House of Representatives, one of the staunchest advocates of such powers, Ramón Olavarrieta, denounced criticisms of “certain facultades to which Rome owed its greatness and power.” Another of the representatives, Juan José Cernadas, declared present circumstances similar to those when “ancient Rome proceeded to the appointment of dictators, to save the patria, without any limitation other than time.” And Pedro Feliciano Cavia, one of the most influential politicians of those years, claimed that “only a dictatory power can, with iron hand, crush the machinations of the perverse and tumultuous spirits in a day.” He clarified these words a little further on when calling for the granting of facultades extraordinarias: “Dictatorship, gentlemen, is one of the greatest scourges to have afflicted and devastated free states. We are well aware. And yet sometimes it is necessary, to curb the anarchizing spirit. Republics ancient and modern have, in their extreme troubles, resorted to this terrible, but salutary medicine.”81

Two years later, at the end of 1832, in response to a bill to extend the powers granted to Rosas after Governor Dorrego’s overthrow and execution by firing squad in 1828, there was a heated debate in the Buenos Aires Legislature that revealed a majority preference to lift the facultades extraordinarias in the name of current constitutional rules. Supporters staked this argument on the basis of

80. The sum of public power handed to Juan Manuel de Rosas in 1835 amounted to the total delegation not only of legislative authority but of judicial functions, too. Víctor Tau Anzoátegui, “Las facultades extraordinarias y la suma del poder público en el derecho provincial argentino (1820 – 1853),” Revista del Instituto de Historia del Derecho 12 (1961): 93. On the vicissitudes of the attempts to implement a representative regime with division of powers, see Marcela Ternavasio, Gobernar la revolución: Poderes en disputa en el Río de la Plata, 1810 – 1816 (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2007).

81. “. . . unas facultades a que Roma debió su grandeza y poder . . . la antigua Roma procedía al nombramiento de sus dictadores, para salvar la patria, sin más limitación que la del tiempo . . . sólo un poder dictatorio [sic] puede reprimir en el día con mano fuerte las maquinaciones de los genios perversos y tumultuarios . . . La dictadura, señores, es una de las mayores plagas que han afligido y devastado a los estados libres. Lo sabemos bien. Sin embargo ella es necesaria a las [sic] veces para enfrenar el espíritu anarquizador. Repúblicas antiguas y modernas han recurrido en sus extremos males a esta terrible, pero saludable medicina.” “Diario de Sesiones de la H. Junta de Representantes de la provincia de Buenos Aires,” XI, Sessions of July 17, 19, and 23, 1830, respectively. It is to be noted that, in a similar way, Ramos Arizpe and other Mexican deputies in the 1823 – 24 Congress warned that “extraordinary cases may occur that require extraordinary measures, as demonstrated by the reason and experience of free countries like Rome in Antiquity or Colombia in our own day,” cited in Aguilar Rivera, En pos de la quimera, 79.


82. “. . . esperanzas de vivir constitucionalmente . . . las leyes que reglan la elección directa, y que establecen el principio de la inviolabilidad de las propiedades y la publicidad de todos los actos de la administración pública . . . trastornaría completamente las condiciones del pacto, bajo el cual hemos entrado a formar parte en la sociedad . . . mina y destruye por su base nuestras leyes fundamentales.” “Correspondencia: Los Argentinos,” La Gaceta Mercantil, Diario comercial, político y literario (Buenos Aires), 6 and 14 Nov. 1832.

83. “. . . no ven constitución donde no ven cuaderno . . . tenemos leyes constitucionales, que encierran los mejores elementos de una constitución; que por ellas está establecida la división y construcción de los tres poderes; la responsabilidad de los ministros; la seguridad del individuo, y la inviolabilidad de su propiedad; el ejercicio de sus derechos; la facultad de levantar impuestos; el saludable sistema de presupuestos y cien cosas más . . . La provincia tiene, pues, constitución; y . . . a la pregunta de ¿puede marchar el Gobierno con las facultades ordinarias que tenía antes del motín de 1828? Diré que sí . . . sin destruir las bases fundamentales de nuestro sistema.” “El Federal,” La Gaceta Mercantil, Diario comercial, político y literario (Buenos Aires), 12 Nov. 1832. Regarding the European discussion about

respect for those constitutional rules and, to that end, insisted that Buenos Aires did possess a constitution in spite of the absence of a written text. One letter in the Buenos Aires newspaper, La Gaceta Mercantil, expressed “hopes of liv-ing constitutionally” under the republican representative system then in effect. The author understood that that republican system had been adopted in Buenos Aires via the enactment of “the laws that govern direct election and that estab-lish the principle of inviolability of property and publicity of all acts of public administration.” The bill under debate, he argued, exceeded the scope that the people, exercising their sovereignty, had placed in the hands of their representa-tives; it would be destructive of the republican representative system and “would completely disrupt the conditions of the pact we have entered into to be part of society.” Thus, the bill under discussion, he claimed, “undermines and destroys our fundamental laws at their base.”82

A few days later, another anonymous contributor in the same newspaper again attacked the bill, insisting that Buenos Aires was not unconstituted in spite of the claims of those who “see no constitution where they see no notebook [cuaderno].” On the contrary, “we have constitutional laws, which enshrine the best elements of a constitution; that establish the division and construction of the three powers; the responsibility of the ministers; the security of the indi-vidual, and the inviolability of his property; the exercise of his rights; the power to levy taxes; the salutary system of budgets and a hundred other things.” In a similar vein, he added, “The province, then, has a constitution; and . . . to the question of whether the government can work with the ordinary powers it had before the mutiny of 1828, I say it can,” because to these powers could be added others, “without destroying the foundations of our system.”83


But supporters of this position would eventually be defeated. Such was the result of the process that ran from the reforms of the 1820s to the suma del poder público in 1835. The explanation of this development is not simple, but a fundamental component depends on understanding, as shown above, that the Rioplatense societies of the day were configured by long-standing constitu-tional rules that went hand in hand with congruent forms of social conduct and political action, and that, although the new constitutional reforms adopted after 1810 had many a defender, they lacked the rootedness necessary to take hold in the long term.

In Buenos Aires, the suma del poder público granted to Rosas after the anni-hilation of the Federals’ liberal wing became a negation of the legal order when the legislature declined to limit or control that concession of power. But in other cases this did not happen, as shown by events in Corrientes, where the use of this government expedient was far less common.84 We see something similar in the case of Mendoza. In February 1829, facultades extraordinarias were granted to the governor, ceasing in August that year. The legislature granted them via a regulation stating that the legislature would resume its functions once the risks making the extraordinary powers necessary should cease, or earlier if a third of the representatives should so request, and that the executive should inform the legislature of all laws enacted during that period, observing the provisions of the Reglamento de Debates de la Sala and the laws of the province.85 Facultades extraordinarias were again resorted to from March 23 to December 17, 1831; January 9 to July 1836; July 2 to December 6, 1840; December 1847 to Febru-ary 1848; and November 1850 to March 1852. The suma del poder público was granted to Governor Correa in July 1840 and handed back in December the same year, and to Governor Aldao in May of 1842 and handed back in May 1844. So, between 1829 and 1853, Mendoza spent 190 months governed by its constitutional rules and 90 under facultades extraordinarias or the suma del poder público. But through all of this the House of Representatives suspended its sessions only in the two years when Aldao held the suma del poder público,

emergency powers and the liberal critique of them, see Aguilar Rivera, En pos de la quimera, chap. 2.

84. For Corrientes, see José Carlos Chiaramonte, Mercaderes del litoral: Economía y sociedad en la provincia de Corrientes, primera mitad del siglo XIX (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1991), 195.

85. Registro Ministerial, Year 1829, 19 Feb. 1829, Archivo Histórico de Mendoza. Information from the ongoing doctoral thesis by Prof. Hernán Bransboin, cited above in note 66.


under the heavy pressure of the political crisis caused by the blockade of the port of Buenos Aires.86 The use of facultades extraordinarias and the suma del poder público in Mendoza thus demonstrates the features outlined above. The House of Representatives granted them in risk situations, toward specific ends, and with various constraints depending on the case. In every instance the pow-ers were handed back to the house when the grounds justifying them ceased. In other words, we have here a representative political system that approached crisis situations by establishing temporary dictatorships, following the precau-tions proper to the ancient norms of political law.

Closing Thoughts

When judging the value of ideas in history, it is necessary to distinguish between ideas that arise out of great works that win acceptance at a given moment and can resonate across the centuries — Aristotle and Plato, or Montesquieu, Vol-taire, and other eighteenth-century figures spring to mind — and notions that emerge by consensus over the course of time and become a means of support for human actions. The latter phenomena are shaped by various, sometimes imperceptible factors, although they may also include ideas from the kind of great works mentioned above, which can become part of a social heritage whose origins are lost in time.

What is called for, then, would be not a mere intellectual history or straight-forward history of ideas but something different, a history of what we often call collective beliefs, which become patterns for group or individual, private or public behavior. In other words, what is needed is a history of fundamental ideas, ranging from those governing everyday life to those influencing great events, ideas that moreover perform the sometimes imperceptible function of condi-tioning the acceptance of new ideas and the scope of their effects. A history, we might say, of social consensus, or of the agreements of the distinct sectors that make up society: not just in the sense Mosca underscores when referring to the consensual notions on which the ruling classes need to found their use of power,

but, far beyond that, the notions with which humans have sought to regulate their conflicts of individual or collective interest or belief.87

86. Reconstruction by Prof. Hernán Bransboin based on information in the Registro Ministerial and the Congressional Record of the House of Representatives of the Province of Mendoza, Archivo Legislativo de Mendoza.

87. “In all countries that have attained a regular level of culture, the political class justifies its power by basing it on a generally accepted belief or feeling in the period and


The history of nineteenth-century Spanish America may seem a tangle of contradictory processes, whose defiant refusal to conform to something approaching intelligibility we have often shrouded in weak categories such as “political anarchy,” “particularism,” and “caudillismo.” What I have attempted to do here is explore another way of accounting for much of that history. To this end I have tried to comprehend the features of the political life of the period, going beyond an approach to intellectual history centered on the influence of the great exponents of European thought and trying instead to give priority to a history that pays closer attention to the ancient norms that conditioned the social and political life of the period. It is from this perspective that the concept of the ancient constitution sheds light on the kind of consensus described above and can help us understand the persistent resistance to the reformist efforts touched off by independence.

among the people.” Gaetano Mosca, Storia delle dottrine politiche, cited in Norberto Bobbio and Michelangelo Bovero, Origen y fundamentos del poder político, 2nd ed. (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1966), 20.

I would like to thank Linda Arnold, Arlene Díaz, Tamar Herzog, Máximo Langer, and Kim Morse for helping me to think about this topic. I also owe much gratitude to Matthew Brown, Matthew Mirow, and Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo, and to the HAHR reviewers for reading preliminary drafts of this article and providing invaluable suggestions. I also thank the investigators in the Sala de Historia at the Academia Nacional de Historia in Caracas, particularly Juan Carlos Reyes, who helped to assemble the quantitative data and organize it by geographic regions. Additional thanks to Richard Luna for help with the graphics.

1. Archivo General de la Nación de Venezuela (hereafter cited as AGN), Expedientes Criminales y Civiles (hereafter cited as CC), 1822, L-06.


Liberal Justice: Judicial Reform in

Venezuela’s Courts, 1786 – 1850

Reuben Zahler

In January 1823, Policarpo Mendo found himself in a jail cell, and to a large degree his uncertain future hinged upon his reputation. The events that brought him to this precarious situation had begun a few days earlier, when he stood in a Caracas plaza and watched as a cartload of women accused as godas (Span-ish loyalists) was driven out of the city. He had spoken with another onlooker, Lameda Cipriana. Though the two did not know each other, they began to argue, exchanged insults, and she called him a godo. According to Cipriana and her six witnesses, Mendo then struck her to the ground and kicked her; accord-ing to Mendo and his three witnesses, he merely pushed her away. Mendo soon found himself locked in a jail cell, charged with verbal and physical injury. More worrisome than the injury charges, Cipriana and her witnesses also asserted that Mendo was known to support the royalist cause. Royalist troops still fought republican forces in some coastal cities, so an accusation of treason was no trifling matter. Further, for centuries reputation had formed one of the most important types of courtroom evidence for determining a person’s credibility or guilt. The testimony of Cipriana’s six witnesses, therefore, placed Mendo in a precarious situation. In what probably surprised both parties, however, the judge saw the case in a different light; he considered the evidence against the defendant so weak as not to merit the court’s attention, so he released Mendo and ordered him and Cipriana to split the court costs.1

490 HAHR / August / Zahler

This trial offers valuable insights into not only honor conflicts and fears of loyalists but also the profound changes that occurred within the Venezuelan courts in the first half of the nineteenth century. This article examines the court system across the middle period (1786 – 1850) spanning the late colonial era through the first decades after independence. During the late colonial period, the court system represented a powerful arm of the government and an impor-tant sphere of contact between the state and its subjects. Colonial subjects looked to the king as the ultimate arbiter of justice and used the courts as one arena (along with church and communal institutions) to resolve disputes and maintain social harmony. The republican government hoped to maintain the importance and legitimacy of the courts but to infuse them with liberal standards. Using a quantitative methodology, I demonstrate that republican Venezuelans used the courts in numbers similar to those of their colonial forebears; this indicates that the courts remained an important feature of Venezuelan society despite the disruptions of the independence wars and the accompanying crisis of legitimacy. Further, calling on a qualitative methodology, I examine court documents to show that the republican courts not only upheld numerous colonial standards and procedures but also implemented significant reforms commensurate with liberal-republican models in four areas: questions of jurisdiction, transparency, due process, and standards of evidence.

Historiographical Context

Inspired by Enlightenment ideals, post-independence governments sought to establish a judiciary that would follow specific, rule-based procedures rather than more abstract notions of traditional justice. However, exactly how court procedure responded to this new interest in precise legislation remains under-studied. Until recently, historians believed that the new republics, in general, and the judicial system, in particular, achieved virtually no profound liberal reform until the late nineteenth century. Jorge Esquirol suggests that an intense pessimism among scholars concerning Latin America’s judiciary took root in the 1960s, when U.S. and Latin American scholars studied the judicial system as part of a development project. This pessimism, which became fully established in academia by the 1970s, assumes that contemporary Latin American law is dysfunctional, detached from actual social norms, and largely unused by the citizenry. Academics have projected this analysis backwards in history to apply to the entire modern era.2 Among historians of Venezuela, it is still a truism

2. Jorge L. Esquirol, “Continuing Fictions of Latin American Law,” Florida Law Review 55, no. 31 (2003): 41 – 46.

Liberal Justice 491

that the judicial system, though strong and well respected during the colonial period, virtually collapsed after independence. This interpretation holds that republican citizens stopped using the courts because they trusted neither the competence of the judges nor the potency of the courts to enforce a decision (for example, to collect a fine) and therefore saw little reason to waste time with them. Plus, after a decade of war, a culture of violence had pervaded the popu-lation, making people too impatient to bother with inept state officials and far too willing to take matters into their own hands. The courts, then, serve as an example of state institutions that failed to garner the public’s trust.3

Over the last 20 years, however, historians have reconsidered Latin Ameri-ca’s early republican era and have found that liberal reform was more far-reaching than previously thought, going beyond official rhetoric to have a meaningful effect on institutions, officials, and citizens.4 Investigations of the judicial sys-tem have added to this revised understanding of republican transformations, though large lacunae remain, particularly with regard to actual judicial proce-dures. While we have several illuminating studies of late colonial judicial stan-dards and procedures, we have few such studies for the early republican period.5 Most investigations into this period’s legal systems are based on legislation or discourse in the press and congress but do not use court documents to show actual courtroom procedures.6 Studies that do rely on court documents have tended to focus on a particular type of case, such as honor disputes or domestic

3. For example, see John V. Lombardi, Venezuela: The Search for Order, the Dream of Progress (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), 158 – 59.

4. Pamela Voekel, Alone before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2002); Sarah C. Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780 – 1854 (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1999); Peter Guardino, The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750 – 1850 (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2005). For studies of Venezuela, see Elías Pino Iturrieta, País archipiélago: Venezuela 1830 – 1848 (Caracas: Fundación Bigott, 2002); Elena Plaza, El patriotismo ilustrado, o la organización del estado en Venezuela, 1830 – 47 (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 2007).

5. Linda Arnold, “The Professionalization of the Bureaucracy in Late Colonial Mexico City,” New World 1 (1986): 92 – 107; Tamar Herzog, Upholding Justice: Society, State and the Penal System in Quito (1650 – 1750) (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2004); Michael Scardaville, “Justice by Paperwork: A Day in the Life of a Court Scribe in Bourbon Mexico City,” Journal of Social History 36, no. 4 (2003): 979 – 1007.

6. John Henry Merryman and Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo, The Civil Law Tradition: An Introduction to the Legal Systems of Europe and Latin America, 3rd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2007); M. C. Mirow, Latin American Law: A History of Private Law and Institutions in Spanish America (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2004); Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo, Latin American Lawyers (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2006).


violence, rather than judicial routines.7 Nonetheless, a small but growing num-ber of studies focus on judicial practices, through examining both legislation and courtroom documents, and have found that the post-independence judicial system underwent inconsistent but noteworthy liberal reform.8

Congruent with this historiographical trend, this study finds that the Venezuelan courts enjoyed more use and underwent more liberal reform than previously realized.9 Despite the drop in population and damage to institu-tions caused by the independence wars, republicans used the courts in numbers roughly comparable to their colonial counterparts. Furthermore, the courts underwent significant changes in standards and procedures that reflected liberal norms and greater adherence to legislation. At the same time, this investigation agrees with previous studies on the Venezuelan judiciary in many regards. As John Lombardi argues, the Venezuelan courts often had great trouble assert-ing their authority, which could cause endless delays in bringing a defendant to trial or collecting a fine.10 Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo points out that Venezuela did not have the potential to achieve real juridical formalism (adherence to pre-scribed rules or forms) until the creation of a unitary, codified body of law in 1876.11 However, though the courts faced these serious obstacles, they remained

7. Sarah C. Chambers, “To the Company of a Man Like My Husband, No Law Can Compel Me: The Limits of Sanctions against Wife Beating in Arequipa, Peru, 1780 – 1850,” Journal of Women’s History 11, no. 1 (1999): 31 – 52; Arlene J. Díaz, Female Citizens, Patriarchs, and the Law in Venezuela, 1786 – 1904 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2004). On criminality and the relationship between prison reform and the state, see Carlos Aguirre, The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds: The Prison Experience, 1850 – 1935 (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2005).

8. Linda Arnold found that the jurists of the Mexican Supreme Court made regular visits to jails (visitas de cárceles) to ensure that prisoners received appropriate legal procedures and protections. Linda Arnold, “Vulgar and Elegant: Politics and Procedure in Early National Mexico,” The Americas 50, no. 4 (1994): 481 – 500. On the inconsistent protection of liberal individual rights and privacy rights in Peru and Bolivia, see Sarah Chambers, “Private Crimes, Public Order: Honor, Gender, and the Law in Early Republican Peru,” and Rosanna Barragán, “The ‘Spirit’ of the Bolivian Laws: Citizenship, Patriarchy, and Infamy,” in Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin America, ed. Sueann Caulfield, Sarah Chambers, and Lara Putnam (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2005), 27 – 49, 66 – 86.

9. In Venezuela, use of court documents by historians is relatively rare, in part because documents are in poor condition and difficult to locate. Arlene Díaz and Kimberly Morse have done insightful work based on court cases.

10. Lombardi, Venezuela, 159.11. Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo, El formalismo jurídico y sus funciones sociales en el siglo XIX

venezolano (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1978), 14.

Liberal Justice 493

a viable state institution even as they enforced standards that, at times, differed significantly from colonial practices.

Centralizing the State

From one perspective, legal and juridical trends across the middle period reflect the state’s effort to centralize its power and rationalize its administration. Both Bourbon and republican governments sought to increase state wealth and power through establishing clearer administrative guidelines and hierarchies as well as increasing the central state’s penetration into spheres previously dominated by the church and local authorities. Both the monarchical and republican regimes can be described as overly ambitious and a mixed success, lacking the adminis-trative infrastructure and funds to enforce such far-reaching changes in agri-cultural societies spread across such enormous territories.

Within Venezuela, the Bourbon Reforms elevated Caracas to become the province’s clear administrative capitol, and the policy of comercio libre greatly augmented the region’s export economy.12 By the end of the colonial period, these conditions led to the creation of a type of protoliberalism, as the hacendado- merchant class favored freer trade and developed a sense of private rights, par-ticularly inviolate rights to private property.13

The wars for independence broke out in 1811, led by radicals who called for a rapid transformation to a liberal, republican order. The independence wars in Venezuela were the most destructive in all of Spanish America, as Venezuelans fought the Spanish and each other across political, racial, class, and regional lines.14 Venezuela existed as a region within Gran Colombia from 1821 until it

12. Caracas became the location of Venezuela’s Capitanía General and Intendencia (1776), Audiencia (1786), merchant guild (1793), and Archdiocese (1803). Along with Cuba, Venezuela became “Spain’s most successful agricultural colony.” Malcolm Deas, “Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador: The First Half-Century of Independence,” in Cambridge History of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethel, vol. 3, From Independence to c. 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 511. Also see David Bushnell, The Santander Regime in Gran Colombia (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1954), 1.

13. For example, in 1799 the consulado and cabildo of Caracas argued against the crown’s trade restrictions. Their discourse about property rights sounded nearly liberal in content in that they asserted that “their private rights practically entitled them to violate political dictates, which came close to claiming that private property rights came before political decisions.” Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006), 113.

14. For a brief account of Venezuela’s war, see Jaime E. Rodríguez O., The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 109 – 22, 84 – 92, 219 – 22.


achieved full independence in 1830. Throughout all this turbulence, the liberal leadership retained its call for a republic guided by legislation. During the war, Simón Bolívar, El Libertador, assured his compatriots that they would estab-lish a republic of laws: “The imperium of the laws is more powerful than that of tyrants, because they are more inflexible, and everyone should submit him-self to the benefit of their rigor. . . . the exercise of justice is the exercise of liberty.”15 Similar sentiments were expressed in the post-independence period by periodicals such as El Venezolano and El Argos, which argued that “our new liberal laws” should guide the government.16 Significantly, in many ways the republicans sought to continue some of the most controversial of the Bourbon Reforms, particularly the efforts to rationalize administration and centralize control through empowering state legislation.

Compared to other Spanish American republics, in its first decades Ven-ezuela was comparatively liberal and stable. To a large degree, there existed a powerful consensus among the country’s elites to establish liberal institutions and practices.17 Overwhelmingly, economic, political, military, and intellectual leaders advocated representative government, civil rights, freedoms of expres-sion and religion, legal equality, a free market economy, and reduction of the power of the church and the military. The constitutions, which theoretically would undergird all legal and political institutions, supported liberal structures and freedoms.18 However, like early nineteenth-century liberals elsewhere, Ven-

15. Simón Bolívar, “Discurso Ante el Congreso de Angostura, 1819.” Found in Manuel Perez Vila, ed., Simón Bolívar: Doctrina del Libertador (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1985), 105. Bolívar himself spent considerable energy composing legislation and restructuring legal institutions, in part because “he viewed efforts dealing with the legal system as an essential part of seizing political control and governing.” M. C. Mirow, “The Power of Codification in Latin America: Simón Bolívar and the Code Napoléon,” Tulane Journal of International and Comparative Law 8 (2000): 103. Bolivar’s 1827 decrees touched on wide-ranging subjects such as how and when to plant particular crops; the university’s curriculum and testing procedures; streamlining the hierarchy and reducing corruption in government offices; the dress uniforms for public employees; and the design and operation of the military hospital. Simón Bolívar, Proclamas y decretos por Simón Bolívar, 1828. Located in the archive of the Fundación John Boulton, Caracas, Item #III-17.

16. El Venezolano (Caracas), no. 84, 1 May 1824; El Argos (Caracas), 8 April 1825, 1 – 2.17. On the liberal consensus among elites, see Pérez-Perdomo, El formalismo

jurídico, 71; Elena Plaza, “Las limitaciones del liberalismo venezolano en la visión de sus protagonistas, 1830 – 1847,” Politeia (Caracas) 1, no. 34 – 35 (2005): 69 – 93.

18. The final paragraphs of the 1821 constitution guaranteed to “protect your security, liberty, property, and equality before the law”; Article 128 promised, “no type of work . . . or commerce will be prohibited to the Colombians, except those that for now are necessary for the subsistence of the Republic.”

Liberal Justice 495

ezuela’s leaders sought to increase liberal freedoms for property-owning males, but not for everybody else. Slavery persisted until 1854, women remained sub-ordinate to men, suffrage laws disenfranchised the poor, and labor laws greatly curtailed the movements of the rural poor. The republic’s elite males, who ben-efited most from the liberal reforms, disagreed with each other on numerous issues, but they tended to do so within the framework of a liberal discourse. When political parties formed in the 1830s, both the Liberals and Conserva-tives presented very liberal platforms and, oddly enough, the Conservatives were actually more liberal than the Liberals.19

This widespread agreement among the elite class meant that, compared to other Spanish American republics, Venezuela’s liberal project experienced less conservative resistance and suffered less widespread violence. Violence persisted at the local and regional levels and in the form of banditry and small upris-ings but did not tend to engulf the entire country or to threaten the capital. Elite-led rebellions occurred in 1831, 1835, and 1848. However, all of these were short lived and did not overthrow the government. The conservative rebellion of 1835 succeeded in taking Caracas, but within three weeks civilian militias restored the legitimate government. Thereafter, no conservative movement seriously threatened the ruling order, and the short rebellion of 1848 was actu-ally a struggle between liberal factions. Aside from the brief interlude of 1835, all of Venezuela’s governments transferred through peaceful, electoral means from 1821 until the country’s most serious civil war, the Federal War, broke out in 1859.

Use of the Courts

The aforementioned assumption that use of the courts plummeted after inde-pendence has persisted despite the lack of any quantitative studies on the sub-ject. Recently, however, the Academia Nacional de Historia (ANH) has created a database of their collection of colonial expedientes (legal files or folders) that makes more robust quantitative comparisons possible.20 Republican court cases

19. The basic platforms of both parties promoted classical liberal principles, mentioned above. To a large degree, elite consensus broke down due to an 1834 law that deregulated lending practices. By the late 1830s, this disagreement led to the formation of political parties. The Conservatives upheld strict principles of an open market while the Liberals called for greater regulation of interest rates and more traditional protections for debtors. In time, the Liberals also made common cause with the rural poor and called for a wider franchise.

20. The “Base de datos de expedientes civiles y criminales” is located in the Sala de Investigadores of the Academia Nacional de Historia.


housed at the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) have not yet been cata-logued, so we cannot make a direct comparison between extant colonial and republican court cases. Nonetheless, the AGN possesses the Índice de expedientes civiles y criminales, which provides the scribal list of the court cases that occurred each year, starting in 1800. The figures below represent a combination of two data sources: the database from the ANH, which provides a count of extant colonial expedientes, and the Índice from the AGN, which provides a list of late colonial and early republican expedientes.

In order to test the reliability of these two sources, figure 1 compares their data for the years in which they overlap (1800 – 20).

As figure 1 shows, the number of cases from the Índice and the ANH’s database overlap and corroborate each other across this 20-year period. The fact that the numbers from the ANH collection at times exceed those from the Índice may be due to clerical errors and the fact that the Índice has missing, torn, and damaged pages. Despite these flaws, the manifest quantitative similarity between these two data sets lends credibility to both.

Figure 3 shows the number of expedientes across six decades (1786 – 1846), beginning when the Audiencia was founded in Caracas. From 1800 to 1821, the

Figure 1. Reliability of the data: comparison of data from Índice de expedientes

civiles y criminales, Archivo General de la Nación de Venezuela, and Base de datos

de expedientes civiles y criminales, Sala de Investigadores, Academia Nacional de

Historia, Caracas.

Liberal Justice 497

AGN Índice lists expedientes for all of Venezuela. After independence, however, the Índice lists only cases from an area that, under the republic, was called the provinces of Caracas and Carabobo (see figure 2).21 The following charts, then, present the number of expedientes from this area, not from all Venezuela. This area contained one-third to one-half the population and produced the majority of all expedientes.22

21. For the colonial years, regional courts sent copies of their paperwork to the Audiencia in Caracas. Therefore, the ANH’s database and the AGN’s Índice provide numbers for all of colonial Venezuela. The comparison between these two data sets in figure 1, for the years 1800 – 1820, corresponds to expedientes in all of Venezuela. With independence, however, regional courts no longer had to send their paperwork to Caracas. After 1821, therefore, the Índice lists the court cases for only the provinces of Caracas and Carabobo.

22. In 1811, this area encompassed 31% of Venezuela’ population. Pedro Cunill Grau, Geografía del poblamiento venezolano en el siglo XIX (Caracas: Ediciones de la Presidencia de la República, 1987), 29. According to the 1831 census, this area held 48% of the population. Antonio Arellano Moreno, ed., Las estadísticas de las provincias en la época de Páez (Caracas: Academia Nacional de Historia, 1973), xxxiii; found in the Fundación John Boulton, Caracas, Item #NC383. The ANH’s database shows that, from 1786 to 1810, this area accounted for 80% of all of Venezuela’s expedientes.

Figure 2. Independent Venezuela’s provinces. This map reflects Venezuela’s internal

borders after the congressional act of March 29, 1832, and is based on the atlas

composed by Agustín Codazzi in 1842.


The time period represented in figure 3 can be broken into three sections: the last 25 years of the late colonial period (1786 – 1810), the independence war years (1811 – 21), and the first 25 years of the republican period (1822 – 46). Dur-ing the colonial years, the number of cases averaged 445 per year, and during the republic 327 per year, so that the average for the republic was 27 percent lower than for the colony.

As figure 3 shows, the quantity of cases during the republic was lower than but comparable to the late colonial period. The clearest patterns that emerge are that the level of court use persisted through the war years and the early republic, and that rapid drops in court use occurred during periods of intense violence or instability. Historians have long recognized the importance of the courts as a highly respected branch of Spanish colonial administration.23 Use of the courts in the late colonial period rose rapidly, with a high across 1803 – 9 and a zenith in

23. See Michael Scardaville, “(Hapsburg) Law and (Bourbon) Order: State Authority, Popular Unrest, and the Criminal Justice System in Bourbon Mexico City,” in Reconstructing Criminality in Latin America, ed. Carlos A. Aguirre and Robert Buffington (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000).

Figure 3. Number of expedientes, provinces of Caracas and Carabobo, 1786 – 1846.

Data from Índice de expedientes civiles y criminales, Archivo General de la Nación

de Venezuela, and Base de datos de expedientes civiles y criminales, Sala de

Investigadores, Academia Nacional de Historia, Caracas.

Liberal Justice 499

1805. Why exactly these years saw such a high number of cases will require fur-ther study; one possible reason would be the increase in Venezuela’s commercial activity at this time, though other factors surely played a part.24 Thereafter, all rapid drops correlate exactly to peaks of political stress or violence (1810, 1812 – 14, 1820 – 21, 1830 – 31, and 1835).

When comparing numbers, we must also consider the demographic fac-tors that may have affected the production of expedientes. The late colony’s population was considerably larger than that of the early republic due to the high numbers that perished or went into exile during the independence wars. Independence-era observers estimated that the wars caused the population to drop by one-third, and some scholars estimate that the population dropped by as much as 44 percent.25 The creole property-owning class was most devastated by the violence, as nonwhites and the poor attacked haciendas for vengeance and booty. This was precisely the demographic group most likely to bring con-flicts to court. Given that the republic had a population 33 – 44 percent smaller than the colony and had 27 percent fewer court cases, it is possible that repub-licans actually used the courts with greater frequency per capita than did the colonists.

Furthermore, throughout the 1820s a disproportionate number of young men were in the military. These men comprised the demographic group most likely to commit crimes, but they would not have appeared in civilian courts for two reasons: they were under the military fuero (legal jurisdiction and privilege) and would be tried in military courts, and during some years they were sta-tioned elsewhere in Gran Colombia or in Peru. After Venezuela became fully independent in 1830, her soldiers returned home and the government rapidly reduced the size of the army.26 This transference from military to civilian life could account in part for the low numbers of civilian cases in the 1820s and the

24. Very likely both increased commerce and administrative changes caused this jump in expedientes. Coffee exports rose 400% in 1805 – 9 and expedientes based on financial transactions such as real estate (tierras and casas), slaves (esclavos), and collecting debt (cobro de pesos) grew dramatically in 1803 – 9. Nonfinancial expedientes (such as those regarding marriage conflicts, homicide, assaults, and robbery) also rose.

25. Cunill Grau, Geografía del poblamiento venezolano, 70. For a discussion of the imprecision and inconsistency of population estimates during the middle period, see Manuel Pérez Vila, “El gobierno deliberativo: Hacendados, comerciantes y artesanos frente a la crisis, 1830 – 1848,” in Política y economía en Venezuela, 1810 – 1976, ed. Alfredo Boulton (Caracas: Fundación John Boulton, 1976), 36 – 37.

26. From 1830 to 1840, the Venezuelan government reduced the size of the army by 60% from 2,683 to 1,000 men. Pérez Vila, “El gobierno deliberativo,” 61.


27. Tulio Chiossone describes the war years as “juridical chaos.” Tulio Chiossone, Formación jurídica de Venezuela en la colonia y en la república (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1980), 124 – 29.

28. Elena Plaza, personal communication, April 2008.29. On Bogotá see Bushnell, Santander Regime, 46; on Arequipa see Chambers, From

Subjects to Citizens, 141 – 45. 30. Public law concerns relations between the state and individuals, while private law

concerns relations between individuals or groups.31. For instance, in colonial Arequipa, Peru, the great majority of criminal cases

were de parte, partially because charges of theft and verbal injury (injuria de palabra) were de parte (the victim had to initiate charges against the defendant and gather witnesses). After independence, these two charges, and the majority of criminal cases, became de oficio, as prosecutors initiated most cases and managed all aspects of the investigation and prosecution. This procedural change may help explain why Arequipa had more criminal trials after independence. Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens, 143 – 44.

higher numbers in the 1830s. The post-independence trends seen in figure 3, which shows a drop in the number of court cases followed by a steady increase, seem consistent with a population and government rebuilding after a war.

Structural changes, too, may have affected the creation of expedientes. The war caused havoc in the judicial system and greatly reduced its efficiency, as each side dissolved the courts of the other when regions traded hands.27 Struc-tural changes may also have increased the creation of expedientes. For example, a lower-level colonial judge could oversee a case in his house. Republican tri-als, however, had to occur within government buildings designated as tribunals and therefore post-independence judges probably paid more attention to paper-work.28 Colonial cases, therefore, were more likely than republican cases to go undocumented, which means colonial use of the courts may have been greater than the number of expedientes would suggest. In Bogotá, Nueva Granada, and in Arequipa, Peru, the number of expedientes actually rose after independence, perhaps because republicans enthusiastically sought to exercise their newfound rights, or because of structural changes that affected law enforcement and the process of civil litigation.29

In order to measure the level of public trust of and engagement with the courts, it would be helpful to distinguish between trials initiated by the state prosecutor and those initiated by private parties. Roughly, such cases would be classified as criminal trials (the state prosecutes the defendant) and civil trials (a private party sues the defendant). However, depending on the type of charge, criminal trials would be initiated either by the state prosecutor (de oficio) or the injured party (de parte). Post-independence changes in public and private law30 and in courtroom procedure could affect the classification of a trial as civil or criminal, and further as de oficio or de parte.31 Tracking such classifications

Liberal Justice 501

would be illuminating as civil cases and de parte criminal cases require greater civilian participation than de oficio criminal cases and therefore demonstrate more clearly the level of public trust in the courts.

Unfortunately, neither the database of the colonial expedients nor the Índice of the republican cases distinguish between civil and criminal cases or between de parte and de oficio cases. Therefore, such precise categorization is not avail-able at this time. Nonetheless, in order to gain some insight into the degree to which civilians initiated court cases, figure 4 shows numbers for one type of civil litigation, cobro de pesos (collecting debt).

As figure 4 shows, republican civilians clearly used the courts in the civil matter of debt collection in numbers commensurate with colonial subjects; the average annual number of expedientes was 19 percent lower during the republic than during the colonial period (52 per year vs. 64 per year). In this type of civil case, therefore, republicans used the courts with a frequency closer to colonial practice than for overall court cases.

Further, these patterns demonstrate that litigation in the republican period responded to legislation from congress. In 1834, congress passed the Ley de

Figure 4. Civil cases. Expedientes of cobro de pesos, provinces of Caracas and

Carabobo, 1786 – 1846. Data from Índice de expedientes civiles y criminales,

Archivo General de la Nación de Venezuela, and Base de datos de expedientes

civiles y criminales, Sala de Investigadores, Academia Nacional de Historia,

Caracas.


libertad de contrato (Law of Freedom of Contracts), which made finance laws much more favorable to creditors and is notorious in Venezuelan history for forcing numerous debtors to sell their property. The following year, 1835, saw a considerable drop in expedientes overall. This drop was probably due to the conservative rebellion of 1835, which may have dissuaded people from using government institutions. By 1836, however, we see a large surge in expedientes overall, and particularly in cases of cobro de pesos. This particular spike, there-fore, indicates that civilians responded to legislation when collecting debt and clearly trusted the courts enough to cause a 147 percent increase in such cases from 1835 to 1836, and another 24 percent rise from 1836 to 1838.

To summarize, the numerical trends indicate that the culture of using the courts to resolve disputes remained in force across the 60 years under study. Use of the courts fell in moments of intense political stress or violence but consistently rebounded after each of these moments. Indeed, court use during 1810 – 20 was higher than one would expect given our knowledge of these turbu-lent years. Under the republic, use of the courts started at a low level, rebounded to levels lower than but comparable to those of the late colonial years, and may reflect more use per capita than during the colonial years.

“The Majesty of the Law”: Legalism and Centralism

Reforms in the field of law represented one of the many seismic changes attempted during the Age of Revolution. The modern assumptions of legal equality and the dominance of legislation over other normative orders ran counter to centuries of medieval and early modern traditions. The foundation of early modern administration and justice throughout the Civil Law tradi-tion, which dominated continental Europe and the Hispanic world, was ius commune.32 A composite of numerous legal traditions including ancient Roman law, ius commune based justice on compliance with several norms, specifically natural law, the king’s law, canon law, widespread traditions, and local customs. These norms, however, did not exist in any particular hierarchy, so that a royal decree did not necessarily carry greater weight than, say, a church law or a tra-dition. A Hispanic judge would balance these several norms and would seek a judgment not designed to tenaciously uphold legislation but rather designed to

32. The Civil Law tradition is distinct from the Common Law tradition, which holds sway in the Anglo-American sphere, including Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Today the Civil Law tradition is practiced in continental Europe, Latin America, parts of Asia and Africa, and the U.S. state of Louisiana.

Liberal Justice 503

uphold justice. Justice was understood as giving each person his due and sought to preserve social harmony and legal inequalities based on estate, gender, race, religion, and occupation.33

Over the eighteenth century, the Bourbon kings sought to increase cen-tral authority through, among other strategies, asserting the dominance of state legislation over ius commune. Within Spain, the Bourbons eventually asserted royal legislation over competing legal traditions. Colonial subjects, however, successfully resisted such centralization and upheld the tradition of ius commune, due largely to the size of the Americas and their distance from the metropolis,34 and the fact that metropolitan officials attempted to force the changes rather than gain the voluntary cooperation of the locals.35 In the Americas, therefore, judges continued to achieve a just decision by considering various norms (religious and royal law, traditions and customs) that had no clear hierarchy, so that a judge could determine that a local custom held more weight than a royal decree.36

The French Revolution generated tremendous momentum toward the effort to rationalize the legal system. The French revolutionaries sought to establish a representative legislature that would produce a unified, rational, orderly cor-pus of laws that would define justice and guide the actions of both the state and the citizenry. This effort became the model for all countries within the Civil Law tradition, and Napoleon’s Civil Code of 1804 became “the Northern Star by which other Latin American civil codes oriented themselves.”37 In some regards, this new legal direction represented a continuation of the efforts of absolutist

33. Hispanic legal tradition formally recognized these inequalities and stipulated that legal decisions and punishments had to vary depending on the status of the parties: “We cannot establish a certain amendment or punishment . . . because people and their acts are not considered equal.” Siete partidas, parte 7, título 9, ley 21. On the legal weight granted to custom, see parte 1, título 2, ley 5.

34. Christopher Peter Albi, “Derecho Indiano versus the Bourbon Reforms: The Legal Thought of Francisco Xavier Gamboa,” in Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and Its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750 – 1830, ed. Gabriel Paquette (London: Ashgate, 2009); Osvaldo Barreneche, Crime and the Administration of Justice in Buenos Aires, 1785 – 1853 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2006), 23.

35. From the perspective of the officials, the goal to establish the dominance of legislation over custom, or to reduce drunkenness and idleness, “was something to be established through force, not persuasion. . . . In reality, the Bourbon state lacked the technology and personnel it would have needed to thoroughly enforce any of its policies.” Guardino, Time of Liberty, 111 – 17.

36. Scardaville, “Justice by Paperwork,” 990.37. Mirow, Latin American Law, 138.


38. “Legality” means there can be no crime or penalty without a statute enacted by the legislature, and therefore actions are criminal only if they violate a piece of legislature that preexisted the action. Merryman and Pérez-Perdomo, Civil Law Tradition, 127.

39. 1821 Constitution, Articles 3 and 5. The 1830 Constitution covers similar ideas in Articles 12 and 188.

40. “Mensaje del Presidente de Venezuela al Congreso de 1836.” Found in Pensamiento político venezolano del siglo XIX: Textos para su estudio, ed. El Congreso de la República, vol. 12 (Caracas: Ediciones Conmemorativas del Sesquicentenario de la Independencia, 1983), 96.

41. Reuben Zahler, “Complaining Like a Liberal: Redefining Law, Justice, and Official Misconduct in Venezuela, 1790 – 1850,” The Americas 65, no. 3 (2009): 351 – 74.

42. The number of lawyers dropped by more than one-third, from more than 100 in 1805 to 65 in 1830. Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo, Los abogados en Venezuela (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1981), 85 – 88.

kings of the eighteenth century, specifically in regard to the desire to establish the dominance of legislation produced by the central government. However, this revolutionary direction in legal thought advocated some dramatic changes from the old regime, such as the principles of popular sovereignty, equality, positivism, and legality.38 The law, therefore, would resemble scientific rationalism to the extent possible, and would eschew feudal inequalities and inconsistencies.

In keeping with these principles, Venezuela’s constitutions established, “It is the obligation of the nation to protect, through wise and just laws the liberty, security, property and the equality of all Colombians,” and asserted, “Every Colombian is obliged to live beneath the Constitution and the laws.”39 Expound-ing further this veneration for legislation, in 1836 President José Vargas addressed Congress, “the government has imposed upon itself the unvarying rule not to stray one point away from the legal path. . . . To save the majesty of the law and national honor in the fight against dishonor and subversion of the legal order, this should be and has been the Northern Star of the Government.”40 It should be noted that these lofty sentiments penetrated beyond mere presidential rheto-ric. Court documents and government correspondence from the 1830s to the 1840s demonstrate that legalism became the paradigm for discussing the duties of officials; discourse surrounding misconduct and specific complaints against officials ceased to include numerous norms (such as religion, social harmony, and customs) and instead focused almost exclusively on legislative norms.41

During the independence period, both judicial institutions and personnel suffered considerable turbulence but also provided consistency and stability to the justice system. Many jurists embraced the independence movement and par-ticipated forcefully in the wartime republican governments and armies. The war years took a heavy toll on jurists so that their numbers had been greatly reduced by the time of independence.42 At the same time, the majority of creole jurists

Liberal Justice 505

collaborated with whichever government was in power. For most of the war years (1812 – 21), the royalists controlled the majority of the territory, most creole jurists worked with the colonial regime, and the colonial legal apparatus remained largely in force. The Audiencia continued to function and the Universidad de Caracas continued to graduate students with law degrees.43 With the republican victory in 1821, creole jurists now worked actively with the new regime, serving within the legal profession and in all branches of government.44 The republican government expelled those Audiencia judges who were peninsulars but allowed creoles to remain and continue within the judiciary.45 Judicial personnel, there-fore, retained sufficient continuity to serve as ballast for republican legal institu-tions, furnishing them with experience, stability, and legitimacy.

With independence, the training of lawyers changed to promulgate a lib-eral legal culture. In 1827, the law school in Caracas altered its curriculum to include prominent Enlightenment authors such as Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Constant, and Jeremy Bentham. The new curriculum also attended less to canon and Roman law than was the case in the colonial period and instead concentrated more on natural law and national law (Spanish law, Gran Colombian law, and then Venezuelan law).46 However, lawyers were not the only practitioners of law. Because of the paucity of lawyers throughout Span-ish America, the republics maintained the colonial practice of using nonlawyers to serve as court officials and municipal and parochial judges.47 Legal educa-

43. By decade, the total number of law graduates from the Caracas University was 58 in 1790 – 99; 63 in 1800 – 1809; 37 in 1810 – 19; 43 in 1820 – 29. Outside of Caracas, Venezuela’s only other law school was in the distant Andean city of Mérida. Pérez-Perdomo, Los abogados en Venezuela, 64 – 66. During periods when the republicans controlled Caracas, the Audiencia moved to Puerto Cabello.

44. Ibid., 84 – 88. Colonial jurists who served in the republican judiciary included Cristóbal de Mendoza (president of the Corte Superior of Venezuela province within Gran Colombia), Ramón García Cádiz (judge on the Alta Corte of Gran Colombia and fiscal in the Corte Superior of Venezuela province), and Luis Tomás Peraza (president of the Tribunal del Almirantazgo in Angostura). For their biographies, see Diccionario de historia de Venezuela (CD ROM, Caracas: Fundación Polar, 2000).

45. For example Francisco Espejo, Miguel José Sanz, and Andrés Level de Goda. For their biographies, see Diccionario de historia de Venezuela. Thanks to Arlene Díaz and Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo for helping me identify these jurists.

46. Pérez-Perdomo, Los abogados en Venezuela, 105 – 16. 47. Victor Uribe, “Colonial Lawyers and the Administration of Justice,” in Judicial

Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, ed. Eduardo Zimmermann (London: Univ. of London, 1999), 30 – 32, 45. Gran Colombia’s Ley de 17 de mayo de 1826, capítulo 1, artículo 13 stipulated that in municipalities without sufficient attorneys, the government should appoint “good men of reason” as judges.


tion, therefore, was not restricted to lawyers. In 1840, a Caracas press published Joaquín de Escriche’s highly influential Diccionario razonado de legislación civil, penal, comercial y forense. Though Venezuela had only 140 lawyers at the time, the book sold 919 copies, indicating that not only lawyers but also numerous educated laymen read and used common legal books.48

Still, the government faced numerous obstacles to advancing republican change, and much of the legal system demonstrated continuity with the colonial system. As was the case throughout Spanish America, reforms faced numerous structural impediments, such as widespread poverty and illiteracy, war-damaged infrastructure, and an indebted, inexperienced government.49 Writing new leg-islation alone posed a daunting task, and for the first decades Venezuela retained colonial laws alongside new codes. The government established a hierarchy of the numerous codes (colonial, Gran Colombian, Venezuelan), with the stipu-lation that more recent legislation always superseded older laws.50 Law codes required judges to uphold legislative rules and justify their decisions by citing legislation, which is a fundamental practice in a legalistic system.51 However, Pérez-Perdomo points out that there was no legislated sanction against judges if they did not do so, and republican judges, like their colonial counterparts, typically did not. In written decisions, judges discussed the evidence but not the specific law that motivated their decision. Judges did not regularly use legisla-tion to explain their judgments until after the codification of a full civil code in 1876.52

The remainder of this article will explore ways in which the Venezuelan courts developed formalist practices that conformed to the legalist, positivist standards that elites hoped to achieve. Though many legalist/formalist practices did not appear until the end of the century, a number of formalist practices developed as early as the 1820s – 40s, far earlier than scholars have assumed. I will examine a random sampling of 97 court cases (21 colonial, 76 republi-can) that cover a variety of topics, including insults to honor, assault, homicide, libel, subversion, economic matters (collecting debt, declaring poverty, seeking a moratorium on paying debt), disrespect for authority, and accusations against

48. Pérez-Perdomo, Latin American Lawyers, 68. 49. In both Mexico and Rio de la Plata, post-independence instability seriously

weakened the judiciary. See Arnold, “Vulgar and Elegant”; Barreneche, Crime and the Administration of Justice.

50. For a list of the hierarchies, see Chiossone, Formación jurídica de Venezuela, 192.51. Ley de 11 de mayo de 1825, título 7, artículo 161; 1830 Constitution, artículo 155;

1836 Código de procedimiento judicial, título 3.52. Pérez-Perdomo, El formalismo jurídico, 55.

Liberal Justice 507

officials. Extending beyond the area covered in the quantitative section, the cases here come from the north-central provinces of Caracas, Carabobo, and Coro. Though these three provinces encompassed approximately half of the republic’s population, they do not represent the entire republic.53 The cases used for this study represent both public and private law but do not involve all branches of law (for example, family law).54 This examination of court reforms, which combines analysis of legislation and court proceedings, is therefore a pre-liminary investigation into a topic that merits further attention.

Reforms in Court Standards and Procedures

In this section I will examine changes that occurred from the late colonial through the early republican periods in four areas of court reform: jurisdiction, transparency, due process, and evidence. Moving from one topic to the next will require jumping back and forth chronologically.

Ambiguity of Jurisdiction and Hierarchy

The colonial government did not possess a separation of powers and was com-posed of the overlapping jurisdictions of military, church, and administra-tive spheres.55 Hence, alcaldes, oidores, and intendentes (mayors, attorneys, and intendants) could have both executive and judicial functions and their hierar-chy within administration or the court system was not entirely clear. While

53. Caracas, Carabobo, and Coro provinces held approximately 51.4% of the population at the time. Arellano Moreno, Las estadísticas de las provincias, xxxiii. They correspond to all or parts of the following contemporary departments: Guárico, Miranda, Vargas, Distrito Federal, Aragua, Carabobo, Cojedes, and Falcón.

54. In her study of courts in early republican Barcelona and Cumaná (in northeastern Venezuela), Kimberly Morse found that provincial courts followed legislative procedures. Below the provincial level, however, local courts still treated people differently based on status, and judges seemed little concerned with legislated guidelines until the 1860s – 70s. Morse’s observations suggest that reform in local courts may have been different in the eastern provinces than in the north-central region studied in this article. Kimberly Morse, personal communication, June 2008. See also Morse, “ ‘Many and Repeated Are the Injustices We Have Suffered’: Indigenous Land, Law, and State Formation in Eastern Venezuela, 1836 – 1853,” paper presented at the Rocky Mountain Council of Latin American Studies, 2008.

55. See Linda Arnold, “Sociedad Corporativa, Corrupción Corporativa: la Resistencia a la Subordinación y al Abuso de Poder,” in Vicios públicos, virtudes privadas: La corrupción en México, ed. Claudio Lomnitz (Ciudad de México: CIESAS, 2000).


this situation allowed for a certain flexibility and responsiveness at the local level, it also caused considerable competition among officials over questions of jurisdiction and hierarchy. Seeking a more efficient administration, Bourbon reformers sought to build a more centralized, hierarchical bureaucracy. None-theless, the attempt to establish the dominance of crown-appointed officers and institutions (that is, intendentes and peninsular-dominated Audiencias) within a clear hierarchy met local resistance and did not achieve full success. Colonial court records are full of cases in which officials challenged the jurisdiction and authority of their colleagues. For example, in the city of Coro between 1800 and 1806, the comandante general and the intendente subdelegado fought five separate trials concerning their mutual hierarchy, thus demonstrating the ambiguity and rivalry that could exist within colonial administration.56 Within the Audiencia in Caracas, we find bitter competition among scribes and notaries over questions of seniority, jurisdiction of office, proper bureaucratic procedure, and honor.57

The republican government attempted to eliminate this sort of internal confusion and competition by establishing a clearer list of official responsibili-ties, duties, and rank. The constitutions specifically delineated a separation of powers and the obligations of government officials and also presented a clear hierarchy of courts, from local to provincial to national levels.58 Gran Colom-bia’s laws laid out the specific steps judicial officers should take if they had ques-tions over jurisdiction, and these regulations persisted in Venezuela’s first ley orgánica as an independent republic, the 1836 Código de procedimiento judicial.59 Fights over jurisdiction rarely appear in the republican court records. Looking through the ANH database, we find that over a 25-year period (1786 – 1810), there were 57 colonial cases that scribes specifically described as questions of jurisdiction (competencia). In contrast, the AGN’s Índice shows that in a 25-year

56. Archivo de la Academia Nacional de Historia in Caracas (hereafter cited as AANH), Causas Civiles (hereafter cited as CC) 13-5034-1; 13-5127-3; 14-5744-1; 16-6444-3; Sevilla, Ministerio de Educación y Cultura, Archivo General de Indias, Ags/Secretaria Guerra, 7205, Exp. 9.

57. See AANH, CC, 1798, 12-4802-1; 1800, 13-5078-5.58. On the distinct powers and responsibilities of the legislative, executive, and judicial

branches, see the 1821 Constitution, títulos 3 – 6; 1830 Constitution, títulos 10 – 23.59. Ley de 13 de mayo de 1825, título 1: capítulo 10: “De las competencias”; 1836

Código de procedimiento judicial, título 1, ley 3, artículos 1 – 10. Before Venezuela’s first law codification in 1836, the republic relied on its constitution and Gran Colombian legislation. Very little has been written about the 1836 Código, and debates surrounding its composition remain unexplored. See Tomás Enrique Carrillo Batalla, Historia de la legislación venezolana, vol. 2 (Caracas: Academia de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, 1984), 123 – 35; Plaza, El patriotismo ilustrado, 176 – 92.

Liberal Justice 509

period under the republic (1822 – 46), only 4 cases specify competencia as the focus of the case.60 Even colonial cases that did not list competencia as the sub-ject could often include a struggle over jurisdiction between two officials, such that a third official might have to intervene to decide who had authority. Of 76 republican court cases reviewed, none included this sort of rivalry.

Republican officials periodically had questions over matters of procedure, but such questions tended to be resolved quickly and smoothly. For instance, in 1834 a governor wrote to the Ministry of the Interior to verify whether a juez de letras (lower court judge) had jurisdiction over a particular case. The ministry referred to the Ley orgánica de tribunales to clarify that the judge had jurisdic-tion.61 In 1850, a question came to the Corte Superior concerning a juez de paz (justice of the peace) and a juez de primera instancia (lower court judge), both of whom claimed jurisdiction in a case involving water rights. The Corte Superior promptly decided that the water was private property, not public domain, and therefore was under the jurisdiction of the juez de primera instancia.62 Though these cases indicated that government officials could be ignorant of all the proper steps in a legal matter, they also show that existing procedural guidelines could quickly resolve questions of jurisdiction.

The drop in competition among officials may have had more than one cause. The legislated hierarchy, duties, and procedures established a far clearer set of guidelines than existed previously, and the central government possessed the power to enforce this hierarchy. At the same time, officials may have had less motivation to fight for more responsibility and jurisdiction. Under the colonial system, government posts could bring profit, privilege, status, and honor. Under the republic, government service offered far fewer tangible benefits; officials were legally equal to other citizens, could not practice nepotism, and could not gain materially from their post beyond their salary. Further, the government frequently could not pay a steady salary to its civil servants, and the archive of the Ministry of Interior and Justice is full of their complaints. As a result, holding a position became a duty, not a privilege. Competition between offi-cials may have dropped after independence due to clearer written guidelines but also because the administrators had less incentive to protect or expand their jurisdiction.

60. This shift contrasts with conditions in early republican Mexico, “where the Supreme Court decided hundreds of conflicts of jurisdiction.” Linda Arnold, “Privileged Justice? The Fuero Militar in Early National Mexico,” in Judicial Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, ed. Eduardo Zimmermann (London: Univ. of London, 1999), 49.

61. AGN, Interior y Justicia (hereafter cited as I&J), 1834, tomo 91, expediente 38.62. AGN, CC, 1850, C-14 #1.


Transparency

In 1798, Felipe Rodil formally petitioned to resign his post as a notary in the Audiencia. The regente of the Audiencia, Antonio Quintana, refused the request, stating that the timing of the resignation was inconvenient. Rodil sought the support of the captain governor of Venezuela, who wrote a letter to the king that accused Quintana of a number of improprieties and recommended that he be recused from this matter with Rodil. Despite this intervention, Quintana even-tually succeeded in blocking Rodil’s resignation. In order to protect himself, the regente then hid all of the case’s documentation, including a copy of the damag-ing letter from the captain governor, in the Royal Audiencia’s secret archive.63

The ability to hide court case documents was a legal technique that colo-nial judges could employ at their discretion. If a judge considered a case to be inflammatory and dangerous to social stability, he could put the documents into the court’s archive or safe so that nobody could access them. Hiding documents held tremendous legal and symbolic importance. As Tamar Herzog explains, “Documents were treated not only as texts but also as objects. Their physical and material possession permitted a judge to control the judicial proceeding. . . . it was more important to have the trial documents than the criminal. The trial could continue in the absence of the accused, but it was completely paralyzed if the file had disappeared.”64 The practice of hiding documents was therefore a powerful act of controlling legal reality.

Documents held a commanding importance in the justice system, and hid-ing the documentary evidence of an event could, in a legal and formal sense, establish that the event had not occurred. In Coro in 1801, Juan Iturbe, a trea-sury official, charged Agustín de Anza, also from the treasury, and Andres Bog-giero, the comandante militar, with making false and insulting statements. The Superior Council of the Treasury in Coro not only decided in favor of Iturbe, it decreed that the insulting expressions not be written into the court record because they could somehow damage Iturbe’s honor again in the future.65 Though the council did not state it directly, the declaration also served another purpose; it allowed the two defendants to go unpunished. If there was no written record of their crime, they could not be penalized, and notably the expediente does not record any form of punishment, not even verbal chastisement. The mechanism of not writing down the insults, therefore, accomplished several

63. “. . . archivado el Expediente en el Archivo Secreto de [la Audiencia Real]. . .” AANH, CC, 13-5078-5.

64. Herzog, Upholding Justice, 50.65. AANH, CC, 13-5127-3.

Liberal Justice 511

66. Article 4, 1830 Constitution. Article 2 of the 1821 Constitution has similar language.

67. Gaceta de Colombia, 26 Sept. 1821, p. 1a.68. One editor explained that if he did not publish accounts of corruption, “public

functionaries repeat such crimes because of this silence.” He hoped that his journalism would help administrators “so that they always proceed with regularity and purity.” El Argos, 8 Apr. 1825, pp. 3 – 4.

69. “. . . ya por no haberse formado proceso, ya por no haber manifestado orden de Magistrado para la captura . . .” AGN, CC, 1822, C-19.

goals: it restored Iturbe’s honor by agreeing that the expressions were entirely false; it allowed the council to avoid punishing two prominent officials, Boggi-ero and Anza; and it allowed all three men to remain active in government.

Though the practice of hiding or destroying inflammatory documents had obvious utility, it appears to have disappeared after independence. Of the 76 republican court cases read in this study, none makes any mention of hiding documents or testimony. This change probably stemmed from republican eth-ics, which sought greater transparency in government. The 1830 Constitution asserted, “Magistrates, judges, and other functionaries invested with whatever form of authority are agents of the nation, and as such are responsible for their public conduct.”66 To this end, the Gran Colombian government launched its official periodical, Gaceta de Colombia, to “complete one of its most important obligations, putting itself in immediate communication from the center to all the people, through means of print.”67 Through their official press, the gov-ernments of Gran Colombia and Venezuela published the state budget, new legislation, and government activities. The civilian press picked up this spirit of transparency and published accounts of official misconduct in order to combat corruption.68 In turn, the type of formal, legitimate cover-up found in the colo-nial courts appears not to have occurred after independence.

Due Process

In 1822, a Caracas constable arrested José Castellano and Manuel Gonzalez, two Spanish shopkeepers, for ordering their slave to dump the household toi-let bucket into a public well. From jail, Castellano and Gonzalez demanded an immediate acquittal because the arresting constable “proceeded in an uproari-ous manner, arbitrarily [trampling] the very laws of our sacred Constitution. . . . He did not comply with process, he did not present a warrant from the mag-istrate for our arrest.”69 The constable, however, insisted that each step taken had been appropriate and maintained that “the event [the arrest] that began this


process had no origin other than the faithful discharge of my duties.” The pre-siding judge agreed and ordered the defendants to pay a fine. The fact that this case occurred just one year after republicans had retaken Caracas and while they still fought royalist forces on the coast may have affected the judge’s decision against the two Spaniards. Nonetheless, what is significant to this study is the fact that so soon after independence defendants used constitutional precepts to formulate a defense based on a right to certain legal procedures. The very basis of their defense marked a significant change from colonial standards.

The premise of these legal arguments relied on what today we would call “due process” (debido proceso), which refers to a criminal defendant’s rights to spe-cific legal processes that must be upheld for judicial action to be taken against him.70 The history of due process in Latin America remains largely unwritten, perhaps because it has not become a force until fairly recently. Such rights existed in the Common Law tradition of the Anglo world since the Middle Ages and entered Latin American constitutions and jurisprudence after independence.71 Despite these early constitutional experiments, scholars typically assume that due process did not gain strength as a functional part of Latin American legal practice until the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, court documents from Venezuela show that defendants successfully used due process as a viable defense through the 1820s – 40s. Defendants did not use the term “debido proceso” but instead referred to violations of their “derechos constitucionales” (constitutional rights) in defense arguments that were strikingly similar to a contemporary understanding of due process.

Colonial courts went through typical routines and practices in their pursuit of justice but did not have a notion of due process as found in the Common Law tradition.72 Early modern Hispanic courts had regular stages of a court case: the complaint, the testimony of the plaintiff and witnesses, arresting the defendant, taking new testimony, and so forth. However, the courts were not legally bound

70. “Procedural due process” is “the insistence on predetermined rules to try cases.” David J. Bodenhamer, Fair Trial: Rights of the Accused in American History (New York City: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), 4. The literature on due process in the Common Law tradition is vast and its meaning complex. This article focuses on procedural due process, particularly in criminal cases. For a history of due process, see John V. Orth, Due Process of Law: A Brief History (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 2003). See also Joel M. Gora, Due Process of Law (Skokie, IL: National Textbook Company, 1977).

71. The concept of judicial due process has existed in England at least since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. Orth, Due Process of Law, 7.

72. “The municipal court system adhered to due process not so much as a legal right in the Anglo-American sense, but, emerging from medieval codes and centuries of practice, as

Liberal Justice 513

to adhere to those routines and the defendant had no right to them. The auxil-iary staff (clerks, notaries, procurators), not the judges, managed these stages. The courts did not regard the technical rules of procedure as a legal issue but rather as an administrative concern; they were a secondary matter, not funda-mental to a defendant’s rights. Irregular procedure by authorities, therefore, would not be justification to release a defendant guilty of a crime. Indeed, colo-nial judges had wide authority in determining the process and outcome of a case because their principle concern was justice, not legislated rules. “Justice was thus separated from its actual application. Judicial process was one thing. A just solution was another.”73

With independence, the Spanish American republics considered a num-ber of options for altering procedural codes. As mentioned previously, Spanish Americans continued the Bourbon process of codifying legislation and also took great inspiration from the Napoleonic Code of 1804, with its rational order and clear procedures.74 They also considered adopting some traits from the Com-mon Law tradition, including due process, juries, and the “adversarial,” public trial.75 However, due to the political instability of the early republican period, elites abandoned these Common Law innovations as they seemed ill suited to local culture.76 Further, Latin American republics did not fully revise their civil and penal codes until the 1860s – 80s. Thus the innovations of the early con-

a concession from the state to maintain allegiance and authority.” Scardaville, “(Hapsburg) Law and (Bourbon) Order,” 8. On procedures, see also Arnold, “Professionalization of the Bureaucracy in Late Colonial Mexico City.”

73. Herzog, Upholding Justice, 24. See also Scardaville, “Justice by Paperwork,” 989 – 90.74. Across the long nineteenth century, upholding consistent legal procedure became

a key ingredient in strengthening the state in Europe’s colonies and in the Latin American republics. Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400 – 1900 (New York City: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 260.

75. Peru’s 1826 Constitution, Articles 117 – 23, stipulated due process protections. On the evolution of Peruvian criminal procedure, see H. H. A. Cooper, “A Short History of Peruvian Criminal Procedure and Institutions,” Revista de Derecho y Ciencias Politicas 32, no. 1 – 3 (1968), 215 – 68. On the differences between the Common Law “adversarial” trial and the Civil Law “inquisitorial” trial, see Máximo Langer, “Revolution in Latin American Criminal Procedure: Diffusion of Legal Ideas from the Periphery,” American Journal of Comparative Law 55 (2007): 627 – 30.

76. See Uribe, “Colonial Lawyers and the Administration of Justice,” 42 – 44; Barreneche, Crime and the Administration of Justice, introduction. Máximo Langer notes that the one significant change from the colonial process that the early republics achieved was the prohibition of torture. Langer, “Revolution in Latin American Criminal Procedure,” 627.


stitutions were often out of synch with the codebooks, which relied in large part on colonial legislation. Scholars have therefore assumed that due process remained in embryonic form throughout the nineteenth century and did not become the basis of a powerful legal defense until the late twentieth century.77

While the Venezuelan republic remained squarely within the Civil Law tra-dition, it also adopted the Common Law feature of due process. Both the 1821 Gran Colombian Constitution (Articles 157 – 75) and the 1830 Venezuelan Con-stitution (Articles 195 – 208) laid out a defendant’s rights and the steps required of the judiciary. Perhaps the most basic of these rights read, “No Venezuelan can be judged, much less punished, except in virtue of a law that existed before the crime, or action, and after having been legally cited, heard, and convicted.”78 Furthermore, officers needed to have a warrant to arrest a person unless he was in the midst of the crime; authorities had to inform a prisoner of the charges and the evidence against him within two to three days of his arrest; the defen-dant could communicate with people outside the jail; torture, cruel punishment, and confiscation of property were all forbidden; and neither suspects nor wit-nesses could be forced to give testimony against themselves or family members. Law codes laid out numerous, precise procedural guidelines on such subjects as when evidence should be gathered and under what circumstances a witness’s evidence could be rejected, and also established that judges had to uphold “the laws that regulate process in civil and criminal cases.”79

These guidelines were not merely superficial pronouncements. Venezu-elans promptly used these rights in legal defenses, and the courts reduced pun-ishment if the authorities had committed technical errors. In 1826 in Cara-cas, Pablo Minalla protested his arrest by an alcalde on procedural grounds. Minalla claimed that the alcalde violated Articles 161, 162, and 166 of the Constitution: “I was brought to the jail without having seen a warrant from the authorities . . . [or] given a copy.” Further, the jail warden also never saw a warrant for arrest but still put Minalla into prison for six days, though legally he could do so in the absence of a warrant for only three days.80 The presiding judge passed the case to a juez letrado because the law gave “jueces letrados the authority to investigate . . . bad conduct in the exercise of judicial functions by

77. Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo and Máximo Langer, personal communication, September 2008.

78. 1830 Constitution, Article 196.79. Ley de 12 de octubre de 1821, título 5, artículo 52; 1836 Código, título 1, ley 4,

artículos 1, 33.80. AGN, CC, 1826, M-05, ff. 1 – 1b.

Liberal Justice 515

81. Ibid., f. 4.82. Archivo Histórico de Coro (AHC), Causas Criminales, #171 (1832), ff. 1 – 1b. Agua

Larga is located in the contemporary state of Falcón.

municipal alcaldes,” and he enjoined the juez letrado to “ensure that [Minalla] gets full use of his rights.”81

We see a similar situation in 1832 in the town of Agua Larga, when José Gomez complained about the “arbitrary procedure [procedimiento arbitrario ]” of the juez primera de paz. Gomez admitted that he had committed a crime; he had argued in public with a married woman, so he could be charged with lack of public decency or with public excess. However, the judge had him imprisoned for five days, then ordered him to leave the town and never to return, which well exceeded the punishment for a charge of public indecency. The heart of his complaint, however, focused not on the appropriateness of the charge but rather on the failure of proper procedure. Citing several articles from the Constitution and Ley orgánica, Gomez protested that the judge had arbitrarily imprisoned him for six days, did not let him defend himself, and did not let him see the warrant for his arrest.82 Unfortunately, both Gomez’s and Minalla’s expedientes end before we see the final decision. Nonetheless, they both pre-sent a defense that had legal traction based on a very technical notion of justice. The measure of justice in these cases did not stem from broadly construed or unwritten social values, nor was it based solely on whether the defendant was guilty of the crime. Rather, justice in part required that authorities follow pre-cise written procedures.

While some expedientes end without recording the judge’s concluding decision, among complete expedientes we see that such defense arguments could affect a final judgment. For example, in 1834, a judge confiscated a defen-dant’s property, and the defendant successfully challenged this action based on procedure. Bacilio Requena, who lived in the southern province of Apure, faced charges of libel for a pamphlet he had distributed in Caracas. When Requena failed to pay a bond as a surety that he would go to Caracas to stand trial, a judge in Apure impounded all of his property. Requena went to Caracas, lost the case, and had to publish a retraction and apology for his libelous pamphlet. However, the judge in Apure still refused to release his property, so Requena requested assistance from the alcalde primera municipal from Caracas who had overseen the case. Requena asserted, “This action was not legal because the law does not pro-vide for sequestering property in such a case. In these matters, [the law] allows either for a warning or jail.” The alcalde agreed with Requena and declared, “this seizure has been illegal”; he ordered the Apure judge “to undo this situ-


83. AGN, CC, 1844, C-28.84. Título 8, ley 6, artículo 1.85. AGN, CC, 1844, C-28, f. 1b.

ation and restore to Requena all of his possessions.” The alcalde also recom-mended that Requena go to the superior court if he had any further trouble.

In 1844, the Corte Superior heard an accusation against a judge for miscon-duct.83 A professor of the Central University of Caracas, Dr. José Garcia, served as a witness in a trial before a juez de primera instancia, Dr. Isidro Osio. Garcia refused to say the standard oath for witnesses and instead attempted to swear a somewhat altered oath, which drew a stern warning from Osio. When Garcia remained obstinate, Osio fined him 50 pesos. Garcia later charged Judge Osio with misconduct for compelling him to swear the oath, and the matter came before the Superior Court. The Superior Court found that, in general, Osio was correct to attempt to compel Garcia to swear the oath because a witness “should not resist with such tenacity to swear the oath that the law requires.” However, some problems in procedure had occurred during the confrontation. The Superior Court noted that the Código de procedimiento judicial required that two witnesses testify to a person’s disobedience or disrespect in the courtroom before a judge could fine somebody more than 10 pesos.84 Garcia had pointed out that the court secretaría had not been in the courtroom at the time in ques-tion but rather was teaching classes at the university. The Superior Court found that, without the secretaría to serve as a witness, Osio could not impose a fine of 50 pesos, “and for this disservice the judge is undoubtedly responsible.” Because of this failure in proper procedure, the Superior Court ordered Osio to return the fine to Garcia, and for the two of them to split the court costs.

Notably the Superior Court judge did not base his decision on an abstract sense of justice or on the question of Garcia’s guilt. He believed that Garcia had behaved poorly and disrespectfully when he refused to swear the oath, and that Osio was justified to fine Garcia for creating a “disagreeable and scandal-ous situation. But, if this is the position of the Corte with respect to the justice of compulsion in general, it does not form the same opinion with regard to a special fine of fifty pesos that [Osio] imposed when for the third time [Garcia] refused to comply with the Tribunal’s order.”85 Though Garcia had been wrong, and Osio had been right, Osio had failed in a matter of proper procedure — the law required that he have two witnesses to the event — and legal procedure had to be followed.

Already in the early 1820s, defendants argued that the officers of the legal system had to follow specific legal processes. Judicial decisions validated this

Liberal Justice 517

86. AANH, CC, 16 – 6170 – 5. San Agustín de Guacara is located in the contemporary state of Carabobo.

87. Siete partidas, parte 3, título 16, ley 8, and parte 7, título 1, ley 2.88. If the proof against a defendant was inconclusive and he was of good reputation

(buena fama), the judge should free him. If, on the other hand, he had mala fama, the authorities could torture him to learn the truth. Siete partidas, parte 7, título 1, ley 26.

defense and treated proper legal process as an integral part of the justice system. The proper procedures, spelled out in legislation, now formed an integral part of a defendant’s rights and therefore were essential to the execution of justice.

New Standards of Juridical Evidence

In 1805, the teniente justicia of San Agustín de Guacara, Miguel Villavicen-cio, charged Nicolás Parra with disrespect for authority. Parra, a shopkeeper, allegedly told a crowd of people in his store that Villavicencio had cheated him and conducted his job poorly. Further, Parra allegedly uttered insulting words against the local tribunal and claimed that there was a lack of real justice in the town. The teniente justicia opened an investigation into these offenses in order “to contain this man’s unruliness and manner of speaking.”86 Villavicen-cio gathered testimony from two witnesses who had heard Parra speak ill of the town and the teniente, and from another witness who asserted he had heard that Parra was a rebellious and ungovernable person. Villavicencio then gathered statements from other storeowners who testified that Parra had not cooper-ated with a system of señas (chits, used in place of cash) that Villavicencio had introduced. Through this testimony, Villavicencio presented Parra as having a reputation for being unruly and contradicting the will of the town. In light of the evidence provided, Parra was sentenced to spend eight days in jail and to pay court costs plus four pesos. His reputation for disruptive behavior served to augment the weak direct testimony that he had criticized the town’s officials and to secure his conviction in a criminal case.

This case exemplifies one of the key elements of judicial evidence in colo-nial courts, a person’s reputation. The Siete partidas codified reputation as fun-damentally important to a person’s legal standing. Men with a bad reputation (mala fama) could not serve as witnesses in a trial and could not make accusations against others in court.87 In the absence of conclusive proof, a judge could use reputation to determine the guilt or innocence of a defendant.88 Court witnesses or litigants typically presented matters of reputation as “public and notorious [publico y notorio],” which “was the strongest category of proof.” A reputation was


“a general public opinion because it included information that theoretically was held by the community as a whole and was therefore true by definition.”89

This is not to say that colonial court cases relied entirely on reputation or that they eschewed empirical evidence (evidence based on experience rather than assumptions, theory, or pure logic). When Villavicencio wanted to prove that Parra was a disruptive character, he combined the testimony of witnesses who had heard Parra utter offensive words with witnesses who attested to his poor reputation. As another example, in 1798 a scribe and a notary from the Audiencia got into a struggle over seniority, and the scribe accused the regente of unfairly favoring the notary. The scribe declared, “the protection that Merida [the notary] enjoys from the Señor Regente . . . is publicly known in the Prov-ince: everybody knows it. . . . [This protective relationship is] notorious and certain and therefore serves as indubitable proof of the grievances I have suf-fered.” The regente, however, responded that the scribe’s allegation was based upon “obscure and mysterious expressions” and demanded that the scribe spec-ify “all, and each one of the acts, that he is referring to” before any judgment could be made.90 As both of these cases demonstrate, compelling courtroom evidence could be both a direct account of a crime or a description of a person’s reputation.

With independence and the attempt to construct a more formalist political-legal system, evidence became increasingly empirical and thus removed from notions of reputation. The 1836 Código reflected this formalist bent with regard to the questions to ask a witness: “Questions . . . will be pertinent to the points that need to be proven and have been argued: do not admit questions that do not relate directly or indirectly to the proceedings of the plaintiff or the plea of the defendant.”91 The provisions in the Siete partidas invited a judge to make inqui-ries into reputations, and therefore into subjects apart from a specific crime in question. According to the 1836 statute, however, witnesses should now confine their testimony to what they had personally observed in direct relation to the crime. This change did not transpire abruptly, but rather we find cases directly after independence in which litigants still used reputation as a form of evidence. Fairly rapidly, however, reputation became less prevalent.92 Notably, we see

89. In contrast, “simple gossip [labios que corrían] and rumor” were considered subjective, unsubstantiated, and less reliable than reputation. Herzog, Upholding Justice, 213 – 14.

90. AANH, CC, 13 – 5078 – 5, ff. 86 – 86b and 88b–89.91. Título 1, ley 4, artículo 37.92. The Common Law tradition rejected reputation as acceptable evidence earlier

than did the Civil Law tradition, though this change in the Common Law took several

Liberal Justice 519

decades to solidify. English courts began to disallow the use of character as evidence against defendants in the 1680s. The practice had become quite uncommon by 1714, but still appeared occasionally in court records until it entirely disappeared by the 1780s. The one exception would be if defense used character as evidence, in which case the prosecution could discuss character as a part of rebuttal. John H. Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), 179, 190 – 95.

93. AGN, CC, L-06. In the first years after independence, litigants often buttressed their case by accusing their rival of having a reputation as a godo.

94. Ibid., f. 12b.

changes in the standards of evidence and witness testimony well before 1836, so that this code appears to reflect changes already under way.

As an example, let us return to the 1823 case from the beginning of this article, in which Policarpo Mendo and Lameda Cipriana charged each other with verbal and physical injuries. Both parties had witnesses that blamed the other for injuria, for which charge Mendo soon found himself in jail. In addi-tion, Cipriana attempted to bolster her case as her witnesses asserted that Mendo had a reputation as a “notorious” royalist who had served in the Spanish army. However, when questioned further, Cipriana and her witnesses admitted that they had never actually seen Mendo say or do anything to support these charges of royalism.93 The judge in this case, therefore, promptly rejected this argument. He derisively commented that this was “one of those cases that serve only to produce paperwork and waste the time of the Tribunals.” He rebuffed the testimony against Mendo: “The witnesses . . . have not known, heard, nor understood Mendo to do anything in support of or opposition to our troops entering the city. . . . nonetheless, some add their opinion about support for our current system, which carries no weight before the law.”94 The judge dismissed both the charges and countercharges because both parties had provoked the other, and he ordered them to split the court costs.

At this time, some citizens still clearly saw reputation as holding legal weight, though judges did not necessarily share this view. Within just a few years, however, reputation entered into evidence less often and witnesses increasingly confined their testimony to what they had personally seen and heard. In 1826, the jefe político in Caracas charged José Mareno with offensive words (palabras ofensivas) based on the testimony of another man’s slave, named Pio. According to Pio, Mareno told him that the jefe político was disloyal to the current sys-tem. When Pio contradicted Mareno, he hit Pio with the broadside of a sword. Mareno, however, denied Pio’s account and insisted that the altercation began when Pio insulted the current government. After both men had testified, the


alcalde called forth the only other witness to the event, Mareno’s wife.95 She corroborated Mareno’s testimony: the altercation started when Pio said that the patria was in danger. She declared that she saw no more and that there were no other witnesses. Like the testimony of Mareno and Pio, her testimony included no statements about character or more general political sentiments.96

Even in cases of insulting another’s honor (injuria verbal), which concerned damage to a person’s reputation, testimony would be restricted to the event in question rather than reputation. In 1833 in Coro, Debora Maduro charged Laura Müller with publicly insulting her. According to Maduro, as she walked down the street with two slaves, Müller called her a prostitute. Müller denied the accusation, but Maduro had three separate witnesses who reported that Müller had said Maduro was “una puta” or “esta grandísima puta.”97 Again, the testimony on both sides abstained from any discussion of the defendant’s gen-eral behavior or reputation but instead focused solely on eyewitness accounts of specific events. Given the weight of these eyewitness accounts, Müller eventu-ally acquiesced and agreed to an arbitrated settlement; she admitted what she had done, apologized, swore she had nothing but respect for Maduro, and cov-ered the court costs. Similarly, in 1838 in Coro, Antonio Rodríguez charged Marcelina, the servant of another man, with verbal injury (injuria de palabra). According to Rodríguez, Marcelina came to his house, threatened his wife with a knife, tried to force her way into the house, and uttered “highly injurious words” against the entire family.98 Witness testimony supported this account but did not discuss Marcelina’s reputation.

For some types of crimes, however, reputation remained an important fea-ture of court testimony. A defendant charged with vagabondage (ser vago) could face evidence concerning his reputation as witnesses discussed how he talked to neighbors, his predilection toward drink and gambling, how he treated his woman, and so on.99 It is important to note, however, that vagabondage was a particular type of charge that stemmed from the somewhat vague crime of being a public nuisance and offending public morality. Therefore, the less-than-specific testimony fit better with a crime that may not have a specific incident.

95. Calling Mareno’s wife as a witness was somewhat irregular, as the law viewed the testimony from a defendant’s relatives as unreliable. The 1821 Constitution, Article 167 and the 1836 Código, título 1, ley 4, artículo 31.

96. AGN, CC, 1826, M-20, ff. 3b – 4.97. AHC, CC, #207, 1833, ff. 3 – 7.98. AHC, CC, #459, 1838, f. 1.99. See AGN, CC, 1835, C-02; 1835, C-14; 1846, P-5; 1846, S-6.

Liberal Justice 521

Far more typical was an 1845 case of homicide. In the streets of La Guaira, Manuel Quintana and Federico Maitin exchanged insults, then threats, then blows, and in the end Maitin lay dead in the street. The judge, in order to deter-mine whether the death was a homicide, reviewed the testimony of several wit-nesses who described the lead-up to the fight and the fight itself. The judge noted that the witnesses agreed that the two men had been in each other’s com-pany throughout the evening and that Maitin had started the insults. No wit-ness reported that Quintana ever voiced any intention against the life of Maitin. One witness said that Quintana carried a short whip, but the judge did not con-sider this a weapon for killing. Given the evidence, the judge determined that “there is no way in which to classify this altercation as an effort at homicide . . . and in consequence the order to hold Quintana in prison is revoked.”100 Notably absent from the witness testimony and the judge’s decision was any discussion of the reputation of either Quintana or Maitin; the judge released the defendant based solely on the accounts of the event in question.101

Clearly reputation still mattered a great deal in the republic, as honor still commanded vital importance in business, politics, and society. Indeed, Article 189 of the 1830 Constitution formally protected a citizen’s honor. In court cases or complaints to the government, people referred to themselves as padres de familia (heads of honorable families) and vecinos honrados (honorable neighbors). Such titles established a litigant’s importance in the community as a person who served a greater good by protecting public morality. These titles, however, did not ensure a legal victory over empirical evidence. In the early 1820s, witnesses still discussed reputation, even if judges had begun to reject such testimony. By the 1830s, for the most part, neither judges nor witnesses discussed reputation at all. Legal procedure began to make a manifest distinction between witness’s general opinion of a person and what happened in a particular incident. While we do find some exceptions, cases that involved a specific incident reflected a clear bias for empirical evidence.

100. AGN, CC, 1845, Q-1, f. 25.101. This lack of attention to reputation contrasts with procedural codes in Bolivia,

where “lower-class men and women faced constant questioning of the validity of their legal testimony. To begin with, they had to justify their presence in court by declaring a socially legitimate trade or occupation.” Barragán, “The ‘Spirit’ of the Bolivian Laws,” 75 – 76. The Venezuelan procedural code also prohibited certain people from serving as witnesses – including criminals, the insane, minors, drunks, vagrants, and fraudulent debtors — but the criteria did not include occupation or economic status. 1836 Código, título 1, ley 4, artículo 29.


Conclusion

The evolution of Venezuela’s court system across the middle period demon-strates that independence catalyzed significant change in the republic’s political and legal culture.102 While Venezuela did not immediately become the paradig-matic republic that her leaders envisioned, her courts underwent note worthy adjustments that expressed central pillars of liberal ideology. The changes described here do not suggest that all of Venezuelan society underwent a rapid, radical transformation with independence. Rather, these shifts took place over the bedrock of cultural and social continuity, and many of these changes reflect efforts already in place by Bourbon reformers that became accelerated under republican government.

The effort to adjust courtroom standards had begun in the eighteenth cen-tury, as Bourbon reformers attempted to increase the power of state legislation in the practices of administration and justice. Pushing this effort further, the republic’s leaders followed liberal ideals to transform law into a rational collec-tion of rules separate from and superior to customs, social relations, opinions, religion, and moral sentiments. While this effort by no means met every goal, court documents from the 1820s to the 1840s show that it succeeded in some key areas. The republican judicial system established a clearer hierarchy among courts and court officers so that fights over jurisdiction all but disappeared. The courts implemented greater transparency in that they abandoned the practice of legally hiding court documents or testimony. Due process, even if not referred to in name, became a solid right of defendants, and the violation of this right could serve as a viable defense. Finally, courtroom evidence became far more based on empiricism rather than reputation.

Additionally, despite assumptions to the contrary, Venezuelan courts remained in considerable use throughout the independence war and the early republic. Though use of the courts dropped during years of intense violence or instability, the quantitative evidence shows that republicans continued to use the courts as their colonial forebears had. This fact alone suggests that the judi-cial system retained legitimacy in the eyes of the populace across this period, even as the government underwent dramatic transformations toward liberal republicanism.

102. At the legislative level, Venezuela was not unique in these reforms. For instance, Mexico’s 1837 judicial administration law also “required all judges to cite jurisprudence rather than simply state findings” and “forbade the courts from prohibiting the publication of” court documents. Arnold, “Privileged Justice,” 54. The degree to which Mexican judges complied with these rules will require further research.


Book Reviews

General and Sources

Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. Edited by david eltis and david richardson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Maps. Figures. Tables. Index. xiii, 377 pp. Cloth, $90.00.

Research inspired by Philip D. Curtin’s pioneering The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969) has made the African slave trade to the Americas the best-documented migration before the mid-1800s. A tremendous contribution to the understanding of the trade’s overall importance and of its temporal and geographical variations has come from the compilation of a massive database of slaving voyages, the first version of which was pub-lished by Cambridge University Press on CD-ROM in 1999. This volume of essays interprets the greatly expanded second edition (or TSTD2 ), which is now freely acces-sible on the Internet at www.slavevoyages.org. As the essays demonstrate, the nearly 35,000 slaving voyages in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database shed new light on almost every aspect of the trade.

Readers of this journal will find the TSTD2 and this guide of special interest because, as the editors point out, because 60 percent of the new data concerns the trade to Brazil and Spanish America, which were the greatest importing regions. Of the 10.7 million slaves who reached overseas destinations, 45 percent landed in Brazil and 12 per-cent in Spanish colonies. Moreover, it is now clear that more slaving voyages originated in Brazil than in Europe.

As the editors point out, the value of the database is not just in estimating with great accuracy the overall dimensions of the trade but also in understanding changes over time and the connections between particular regions in Africa and the Americas. Besides David Eltis and David Richardson’s masterful introduction, the volume includes focused chapters, many by younger scholars, exploring these aspects of the slave trade. The essays and accompanying tables are especially useful in explaining how the data-base is able to estimate the total volume of the trade on various routes from the known voyages.

Several of the essays are devoted to Brazil. Daniel Barros Domingues da Silva and David Eltis provide the first overall estimate of the dimensions of the slave trade to Pernambuco and its African sources, demonstrating that this region was Brazil’s sec-ond most important receiver of slaves from West Central Africa (after Rio de Janeiro), and that the port of Recife originated more slaving voyages than all French ports com-

524 HAHR / August

bined. In a parallel essay, Alexandre Vieira Ribeiro explores the trade to Bahia, “one of the most important branches of the transatlantic slave trade” ( p. 148), which is now the best-documented Brazilian destination during the peak centuries of the trade. Focusing on slave voyages that ended at Rio de Janeiro between 1790 and 1830, Manolo Floren-tino sketches a broad transatlantic picture linking the forms of enslavement in Africa, the goods Africans received from the Atlantic, European profits, and family life among slaves in the Rio hinterlands, the latter based on marriage and birth statistics.

Another group of essays studies the slave trade in Latin America. Using archi-val sources to supplement the TSTD2, António de Almeida Mendes reassesses the understudied early trade to Iberia and the Spanish Americas. In another chapter Oscar Grandío Moráguez uses the database to reassess the African origins of the more massive and better documented trade to Cuba after 1789. A complementary chapter by Philip Misevich details ethnic origins of slaves sent to Cuba from the Upper Guinea Coast in the early nineteenth century.

Other studies profile the national carriers and African sources of slaves. The editors join James Pritchard in describing how the French (like the Spanish) failed to expand their involvement in the transatlantic slave trade as fast as the demand for slaves in their Caribbean colonies increased. In contrast, Jelmer Vos, Eltis, and Richardson examine the Dutch slave trade, which considerably exceeded the needs of Dutch colonies, though the focus of the chapter is on subtler and lesser known aspects of the Dutch roles. An essay on northern German participation by Andrea Weindl illuminates how even small states without American colonies successfully participated in the slave trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Roquinaldo Ferreira surveys the suppression of the slave trade from Angola, showing the importance of local factors in retarding the trade’s end.

In a very interesting final chapter, Eltis and Paul Lachance use the database and other evidence to reexamine the negative rate of population growth in the West Indies, a topic raised by Curtin in his 1969 volume. Using the much improved import statis-tics from the TSTD2 and enhanced information on subsequent slave movements among colonies, the essay is able to demonstrate that depletion rates in the 1700s were nearer 1.5 to 2.0 percent per year rather than the 3 percent Curtin had proposed. However, the essay is unable to remove the anomalously higher rate in British colonies, which the authors suggest may partially be due to more unregistered reexports. Although the authors’ urging of additional research echoes Curtin’s earlier injunction, this volume amply demonstrates how far slave trade studies have advanced.

david northrup, Boston Collegedoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-005

Book Reviews / General and Sources 525

Siervos libres: Una propuesta antiesclavista a finales del siglo XVII. By epifanio de moirans. Edited by miguel anxo pena gonzález. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2007. Notes. Appendixes. lxxv, 246 pp. Paper.

In 1681, civil authorities deported two Capuchin missionaries from Cartagena and Cumaná to Cuba for causing trouble. In Havana, Francisco José de Jaca and Epifanio de Moirans met and together undertook a campaign against slavery. They preached against it, denied sacramental absolution to slave owners and their wives, and produced two major abolitionist manuscripts. Relegated for three centuries to Seville’s Archivo General de Indias and short footnotes in books on colonial slavery, these works are finally receiving the attention they deserve. In 1982, José Tomás López García pub-lished Jaca’s Spanish text and translated Moirans’s Latin manuscript in Dos defensores de los esclavos negros en el siglo XVII (Caracas: Universidad Cátolica Andrés Bello). Two decades later, Miguel Anxo Pena González edited Jaca’s Spanish text in Resolución sobre la libertad de los negros, en estado de paganos y despues ya cristianos: la primera condena de la esclavitud en el pensamiento hispano (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas); and two years ago, he edited Moirans’s Latin text with a Spanish translation in the book under review. In 2007, I published a critical edition of Moirans’s Latin text with an English translation in A Just Defense of the Natural Freedom of Slaves: All Slaves Should Be Free (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press).

Why so much activity concerning these documents in the past 25 years after cen-turies of neglect? The answer is twofold: an increasing recognition of their significance in the documentary history of colonial slavery, and their relevance to our situation today with the resurgence of slavery in human trafficking. They are the only examples of extended theological arguments against slavery in the Spanish colonies between the 1570s and the 1790s. They exemplify important intellectual trends in the Roman Catho-lic Church of the seventeenth century: moral argument from scripture, neoscholastic thinking, probabilism’s method of development, and casuistry’s emphasis on the practi-cal and the use of analogy. Finally, they tell us of churchmen who used contemporary resources for a good cause in a nonviolent way, fought for human rights against empire and church, sacrificed their ministries to do what was right, and bore the contempt of authorities for their efforts. We would do well to imitate them.

But do we need more books, editions, and translations to do this? Yes, because it is important to get the history and the texts right. Each book adds to our knowledge of the events and contributes to our understanding and interpretation of the texts. López García gave a general overview of Moirans’s work but did not provide the original Latin text. Pena González recounts in much more detail the events that led to Moirans’s arrest; his subsequent trial, deportation to Spain, and house arrest there; his trip to Rome to press the case against slavery; and the positive reaction of the Vatican bureaucracy to his and Jaca’s efforts. He places the Latin text side by side with a Spanish translation for those who want to check its accuracy. He makes it possible to take the document seriously.

526 HAHR / August

My overall evaluation of the book is positive: it is competent and well done. The transcription from the original is generally good, though I would differ on certain read-ings. The Spanish translation’s stated goal is readability, and in this it succeeds, at least in my judgment as a nonnative student of the language. The more than three hundred foot-notes give bibliographic references, cite similarities with Jaca’s work, reproduce the mar-ginal notes, and offer short biographies of major authors discussed in the text. The book ends with a “Document Appendix,” a “Source Index,” and a “Subject Index.”

My criticisms of the book are minimal. I prefer a critical edition that presents the original in as exact a manner as possible; this book corrects and interprets Moirans’s Latin somewhat freely. The translators don’t distinguish between two concepts, ius natu-rae and lex natural, the “order of nature” and “natural law”; this distinction isn’t used consistently, but it is important for understanding natural law and what Moirans is trying to do. Some typographical errors mar the Spanish text, and five lines of the Latin text are missing at the end of chapter 2. Some marginal notes are not reproduced, and sections crossed out in the original text are included without notation or explanation. But these matters don’t affect the substance of the book.

This work is a major contribution to the understanding of an important period in the history of Spanish colonial slavery and the church’s relation to it. As such, it is worthy of consideration by any serious scholar or student of the period.

edward r. sunshine, Barry Universitydoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-006

The History of the Conquest of New Spain. By bernal díaz del castillo. Edited and with an introduction by davíd carrasco. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. xxviii, 473 pp. Paper, $27.95.

For a work that is so widely read, cited, and used in the classroom — arguably canonical to Latin American history — it is perhaps surprising that there are not more English-language editions in print of The True History of the Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo. One reason may be that the Penguin edition, first published in 1963, is so well known and there are so many copies available for just a few dollars. Another may be that the 1908 translation by Alfred P. Maudslay has stood the test of time; it is elegant and accurate, hardly in need of a replacement. A third reason may be that most scholars tempted by the challenge to create a new edition of Díaz’s book surely realize that what is needed is a comprehensive edition, not an abridged edition but a translation of the entire manuscript, complete with introductory essays and notes reflecting the century of Span-ish conquest scholarship published since Maudslay.

Davíd Carrasco clearly understands all this and responds in this excellent new edi-tion: it costs a little more than a used Penguin but is nonetheless an affordable, attractive paperback. Rather than attempting to replace Maudslay’s translation, Carrasco has sim-ply used it, adding new introductory material. Recognizing the problems built into prior


abridgements, Carrasco has made his own well-considered selection from the larger Díaz text.

Four features of this edition recommend it for the classroom; I recently used it as a required reading in class and found that all four of these features contributed to its success. The first is Maudslay’s translation, already praised. The second is Carrasco’s 15-page introduction that succinctly, provocatively, and rather brilliantly places The True History into its historiographical context. Carrasco explains the problems that have stemmed from previous abridgements. By cutting Díaz’s narrative off at the fall of Tenochtitlán in 1521 (the original book covers events from 1514 to 1568), prior editions have misled a half-century of readers into seeing the Spanish conquest as over sooner than it really was and Díaz’s account as more triumphalist than it really was. Carrasco cannot take his edition beyond the 1520s and still keep it short enough for classroom usage, but the post-1521 material that he includes amounts to almost a fifth of his whole edition.

Third, eight brief essays following the text are designed to guide and stimulate classroom discussion and aid students in crafting book reports or course papers. Rolena Adorno’s essay complements Carrasco’s introduction effectively, providing an intelligent and accessible summary of who Díaz was and how his book is not a “true history” (as Díaz titled it) but an artful work of “polemical argumentation” ( p. 394). Adorno’s essay is adapted from her recent book The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narra-tive; similarly Sandra Messinger Cypess here adapts a chapter from her 1991 book La Malinche in Mexican Literature from History to Myth. Five of the essays are by Carrasco, each deftly analyzing a moment or theme in Díaz’s text — from the issues surrounding “human sacrifice” to Cortés cutting a cross into a ceiba tree. There is also an essay by Karen Vieira Powers.

Fourth, a relatively minor feature, but one that students in my class much appreci-ated, is the inclusion of five maps from Maudslay’s original edition with new captions by Carrasco. The editor is to be commended on the thought that has gone into this volume, as is the press for its care in production. All instructors who would use Bernal Díaz in the classroom should seriously consider adopting this fine new edition.

matthew restall, Pennsylvania State Universitydoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-007

Bonds of Blood: Gender, Lifecycle, and Sacrifice in Aztec Culture. By caroline dodds pennock. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Photographs. Illustrations. Map. Tables. Notes. Glossary. Index. xvi, 225 pp. Cloth.

Caroline Dodds Pennock’s book explores the theme of gender complementarity in the context of the life cycle and the practice of human sacrifice in Aztec culture. She uses often-relied-upon sources, especially the Florentine Codex, to examine these themes in an ethnographic way, that is, to show how Aztecs themselves thought about and expe-

528 HAHR / August

rienced their culture. She aims to return both humanity and individuality to a people often treated as brutal automatons who are of interest today primarily for their exoticism and because they endured a horribly violent, destructive conquest.

As a work of description, the treatment of the life cycle is informative. An introduc-tory chapter lays out an interpretation of Aztec gender roles, emphasizing what Pennock calls a “binary model” according to which “men and women possess distinctly differ-ent, complementary, roles” ( p. 10). The next chapter, “Living with Death,” underscores the prominence of blood, violence, and human sacrifice in ideology and daily life. The author details men’s and women’s participation as deities, religious practitioners, and the sacrificed. I found this to be the most informative and interesting chapter.

The next chapters cover the life cycle from birth through death. As noted, the author relies heavily on the Florentine Codex, though other relevant sources such as the Codex Mendoza and the Codex Chimalpahin are also used. Where possible she reads her sources for evidence of the individual and affective as in, for example, her discussion of the naming of two children of a Texcocan ruler and one of his wives ( pp. 59 – 60). Because these sources, rich in detail though they may be, so rarely speak of individuals and their feelings, Pennock can only reconstruct these to a limited degree. Her effort, however, reminds readers that, for all the violence and blood, birth, childhood, marriage, and fam-ily life were meaningful events in peoples’ lives, marked by public and domestic ritual.

This idea underlies the central argument of the book that to understand the Aztecs, we must balance the central place of the ideology and practice of human sacrifice in Aztec culture and history with the culture’s more life-enhancing aspects. She observes that “ritual bloodshed was far more widely practiced by the Aztecs than by any of the other indigenous peoples of the New World, and their brutal religious zeal was apparent in the awe-inspiring displays of violence which shaped the lives of the men and women of Tenochtitlan” ( p. 2). Yet these were also a “passionately religious” people who found great meaning in the events and rituals connected to daily life and the life cycle. But describing the conjunction of sacrifice and more positive emotion is not the same as explaining how individuals accommodated themselves to the extremes of belief and behavior that were part of the culture. I am not convinced that historians can provide such explanations, which helps explain the book’s largely descriptive nature.

Even description relies on terminology, thus a consideration of the way Pennock uses important concepts is also in order. Most important is her use of “Aztec.” While archaeologists still use the term for both the residents of Tenochtitlán and the Nahuatl-speaking people of surrounding areas, historians prefer to use ethnically specific terms such as Mexica, Culhua Mexica, or Tenochca Mexica for the people of Tenochtitlán (and its sister city Tlatelolco) and Nahua for Nahuatl-speaking peoples more broadly. Pennock acknowledges some of the difficulties of her use of “Aztec,” but she says her motivation comes from the need “to confront directly preconceptions previously associ-ated with the term” ( p. xiii). But using “Aztec” in this fashion leads Pennock to conflate urban and rural peoples of the Valley of Mexico whom archaeologists have found to be more variable in economic orientation and cultural practices than written sources show.


The work of Elizabeth Brumfield and Michael E. Smith, to name just two, has been of particular importance in this regard. Pennock’s discussion of the calpulli as a landhold-ing, territorial, and organization unit within Tenochtitlán is particularly problematic.

Another concept of importance to the book is that of “complementarity,” a term the author uses with some frequency but does not really define; her explanation of it as a “balanced, productive pairing” comes closest ( p. 115). Complementarity can have a variety of meanings and take multiple forms. It can imply gender symmetry as an ideal and/or a practice, but a discourse of complementarity can disguise deeply asymmetric practices. Because the notion of patriarchy is often uncritically applied to the Mexica and to Nahuas more broadly, a counteranalysis emphasizing complementarity offers insight. The Mexica warrior discourse demeaned women, yet a practical consequence of warfare was that women played important social and economic roles within and beyond the household. This contradiction, like that of the violence of human sacrifice and the tenderness of life-cycle emotional expression, makes study of pre-Hispanic and colonial Nahua peoples compelling. While Pennock does not fully answer the questions her book raises, gender specialists and students of all levels will find worthwhile her search for the intimate as revealed by sources that downplay the personal and affective, rendered as it is in graceful, accessible prose.

susan kellogg, University of Houstondoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-008

De protagonistas a desaparecidos: Las sociedades indígenas de la Gran Nicoya siglos XIV a XVII. By meritxell tous mata. Managua, Nicaragua: Lea Grupo Editorial, 2008. Illustrations, Maps, Bibliography. 608 pp.

This book is mainly a description of la Gran Nicoya and its people during the Spanish conquest. Its main objective is to demonstrate that change and destruction occurred with the conquest and colonization of Gran Nicoya. Some cultural elements were destroyed but were reelaborated through syncretism and passed to later generations, but this is not clearly shown in the book. More time and space are devoted to the description of other problems than to the search for the protagonistas, as the author calls them in the title. There seems to be a contradiction between the title and the author’s goals. If she wants to demonstrate how cultural elements were strengthened and transmitted from the surviving indigenous peoples themselves, then why does the word desaparecidos appear? Who or what disappeared?

In part 1, on the pre-Columbian period, three chapters reconstruct the ecology, the ethnic groups, and subsistence practices. Chapter 2 describes the system of power and beliefs, kinship, and material representations of the system described. In chapter 3 the author refers to trade and exchange and, very briefly, to warfare.

The second part focuses on the province of Nicaragua during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chapter 4 deals with the conquest of the area and its immediate consequences, such as the depopulation caused by the spread of diseases, the violence of

530 HAHR / August

the process of conquest, and the socioeconomic abuses that the conquistadors imposed on the Indian population. The author also mentions indigenous resistance, which she categorizes into active and passive. In chapter 5 she moves to describe the new system of power and beliefs and unfolds the formation of colonial government and the foundation of Spanish cities. She also writes about the changes that affected the sociopolitical and socioeconomic indigenous organizations, including the encomiendas, pueblos de indios, and the sistemas tributarios. She immediately follows with the topic of the new religion and the process of Christianization, and what she calls an equilibrium in the religious realm between resistance and syncretism. She states that the representation of El Güegüence (a popular, anonymous traditional play) is an example of resistance as well as of the preser-vation and transmission of indigenous traditions. Finally, chapter 6 covers the new econ-omy, cycles, cattle and agricultural productivity, with information on trading routes; transoceanic, maritime, and land routes; and a mention of ports. The chapter ends with the theme of indigenous commerce, treated very briefly.

To elaborate this bibliographical compendium, the author visited archives in Spain and used other documentary collections, such as the Colección Somoza and the Colec-ción de Documentos para la Historia de Costa Rica. She reviews the results of research done by Central Americanists of different nationalities who have done extensive and profound research on various problems in pre-Columbian and colonial times.

The book does not contribute precisely to contemporary debates because it lacks a research problem. What Tous Mata does is a bibliographical compilation of what has been done. For example, the cultural area of Gran Nicoya is strongly questioned today. She mentions that fact, offers a few existing considerations about it, includes other cul-tural divisions on the Costa Rican side, but does not position herself within the discus-sion. The idea of working with and within a cultural area nowadays offers serious inter-pretative problems to the researcher. Also, research done within the limits of a cultural area will tend to produce descriptive results, and that is what Tous Mata achieves. When in a cultural area everything is generalized, no particularities can be depicted. Even while she mentions that she is aware of heterogeneity, the entire area is treated as a whole. This minimizes explanatory opportunities.

Some maps do not make sources explicit, like figure 20 on page 136. Also, the book could have been organized in a more logical way; for example, the chapter that describes the indigenous plants used by the Indians could be merged with the description of the geography and ecology of the area in the first chapters. Certain authors, such as Silvia Salgado, Robert M. Carmack, and Mario Rizo, who have done important recent research on archaeology, identities, continuities, and resistance, are absent from the book.

In sum, the book represents an effort of bibliographical synthesis, and students and the general public will find it rewarding.

eugenia ibarra, Universidad de Costa Ricadoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-009

De Guancane a Macondo: Estudios de literatura hispanoamericana. By rolena adorno. Colección Iluminaciones, 38. Seville: Renacimiento, 2008. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. 503 pp. Paper.

De Guancane a Macondo is comprised of 16 essays written in Spanish by Rolena Adorno between 1992 and 2005. Several of them derive from talks the author gave at Spanish and Latin American universities. Of the essays, 14 were previously published in journals and edited volumes; only “Don Quijote en la América de los Austrias” and “La historia de los Incas narrada desde el norte” are original to this volume. The essays are grouped into four sections. Section 1 deals with sixteenth-century texts, addressing topics as diverse as Cervantes’s influence in America, the debate on the nature of Indians and Spain’s conquest rights, and Mala Cosa and inquisitional censorship. Section 2 focuses on con-temporary recreations of sixteenth-century texts, giving particular attention to allegedly recently discovered colonial originals that Adorno argues are forgeries. Section 3 traces connections between sixteenth-century texts and contemporary fiction writing, while the fourth and final section centers on Hispanic and Latino studies in the U.S. academy, with an emphasis on historical writing in the nineteenth century and the emergence and contradictions of area studies. The appendix is a short obituary of Irving A. Leonard, who passed away in 1996, and whose intellectual legacy the author examines at length in chapter 4.

Like most books that put together a 13-year span of intellectual production, De Guancane a Macondo follows the author’s many interests. However, a cluster of names and themes surface once and again. If the book had an analytical index (which would be a great addition in a future reprint) it is clear that names like Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Bartolomé de Las Casas and questions of censorship, genre, intertextual relations, and literary and historical validity would stand out. The tone of the book is conversational rather than argumentative, with the exception of three essays in which Adorno disputes the reliability of a previously unknown textual corpus dealing with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Peru that was first presented to the academic public in Lima in 1996 (the corpus known to scholars of Andean colonial culture and society as the Miccinelli documents). Most often, the essays are built around details that previous scholarship had missed and which point, for example, to heretofore unknown and reveal-ing connections between texts, or to problems in the way in which certain texts had been understood or to the way in which they have been classified in terms of literary genre.

While the new elements that Adorno highlights, and their interpretations, are always grounded with extensive quotes, detailed footnotes, and an abundant bibliogra-phy, their larger relevance is not always fully addressed, at least not in an explicit manner. The essays are, at times, examples of hidden polemics. This notion, coined by Russian literary critique Mikhail Bakhtin, describes a text that, while studying its referential object (e.g., a given text), actually dialogues with other authors, but the dialogue is hid-den, therefore intelligible only to knowledgeable readers. An interesting example of this kind of narrative in De Guancane a Macondo is “Don Quijote en la América de los


532 HAHR / August

Austrias.” The essay offers a brilliant rereading of Juan Rodríguez Freyle’s El carnero. Adorno argues in a convincing manner that Rodríguez Freyle (1566 – ca. 1639) was one of the first readers of Miguel de Cervantes’s masterwork on either side of the Atlantic, and that he not only found inspiration in El ingenioso hidalgo but also crafted his text’s enigmas so that only an expert reader of Cervantes could solve them. While seemingly focusing mainly on matters of literary canon — Adorno disputes the most common characteriza-tions of El carnero — the essay in fact makes an unstated claim; scholars have previously discussed whether Rodríguez Freyle’s writing was or was not informed by Cervantes and have tended to refute the hypothesis.

“Don Quijote en la América de los Austrias,” with its tracking of book shipments from Spain to America and its simultaneous, very close rereading of El carnero and El ingenioso hidalgo, is also an example of the range of materials and traditions of inquiry that Adorno weaves together. The author’s erudition and nuanced, extensive knowledge of the texts grounds the present collection of essays. At the same time, the book is not pretentious or obscure at any point. The possibility of reading the essays at two levels will certainly make the book appealing to both lay readers who want to gain a sense of the complexities of the canon of Spanish colonial literature and some of its contempo-rary repercussions, and expert readers with a keen eye for detail, intertextuality, and documentation.

gonzalo lamana, University of Pittsburghdoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-010

Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities. Edited by ralph bauer and josé antonio mazzotti. Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Index. xi, 503 pp. Cloth, $75.00. Paper, $27.50.

Creole identity in Latin America has long attracted scholarly attention, while creoliza-tion in the British North American colonies has been far less studied. Influenced in part by Atlantic history, this volume of 17 essays authored by literary scholars seeks to address the neglected “wider Atlantic phenomenon” of creolization ( p. 2). The essays grew out of discussions at the First Early Ibero/Anglo Americanist Summit held in Tucson in 2002, sponsored by the Society for Early Americanists. (For the conference mission statement see Early American Literature, vol. 38, no. 1, 2003.)

A fine introduction by Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti includes brief ety-mological and bibliographic essays. From the Portuguese, crioulo was first used to distin-guish slaves born in Brazil from those brought from Africa (and continued to be used in this sense until the end of the colonial period in slave regions such as Haiti). Picked up in Spanish America as a derogatory term, criollo was eventually embraced with pride by the American-born elites who sought to differentiate themselves from peninsulares. As the term moved north, however, negative connotations remained: in describing what he

viewed as the bad behavior of his early eighteenth-century compatriots, Cotton Mather contended that he was besieged with “Criolian degeneracies” ( p. 5). Europeans agreed with Mather and believed that their American-born cousins had degenerated because of inferior climate or food, or because they had indigenous or African wet nurses. The essays here delve into European-descended elite creoles’ published responses to that negative ideology and specifically the ties between creole and national identities; they do not address creole Africans (or creole Indians).

The most successful chapters are those that take a comparative approach. David S. Shields’s essay illuminating the links between Britain’s narratives of empire, the Black Legend, and North American creole identity — which all meet in the person of Fran-cis Drake — is convincing and would work well as classroom reading. Two narratives of the British Empire competed in the early colonial period: the benevolent and peace-ful trading partner versus swashbuckling individualism. Both narratives turned on the Black Legend, as Britain defined itself as Spain’s obverse. Radical Protestant (and pirate) Francis Drake personified the individualist image that prevailed in the English colonies, while the British themselves eventually embraced the shopkeeper/merchant image. As Shields, citing Ralph Bauer, points out, “the entire English literature of empire must be read as a gloss on the Spanish imperial literature” ( p. 108). Bauer’s own essay fol-lows this maxim, comparing “creole rewriting of history” in the poetry of Ecuadorian José Joaquín Olmedo (1780 – 1847) with New Englander Joel Barlow (1754 – 1812). Bauer concludes that by holding Africans in slavery and either exterminating or removing the indigenous population, the United States could agree that all men were equal, while the South American republics could not do the same “for they had failed to disqualify their nonequals as men” ( p. 464). Luis Fernando Restrepo’s essay on seventeenth-century Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita efforts to recast Muisca (also known as Chibcha) history also takes a comparative turn: Restrepo demonstrates that Piedrahita put the Muisca on par with the much larger Inca empire to redeem Muisca history. A mestizo, Piedrahita “integrated Muisca past with a universal Christian narrative” ( p. 339), much as writers such as Garcilaso de la Vega did for the Inca. In equating the Muisca with the Inca, Piedrahita “elaborated a local history that made sense only from a point of view of an emerging sector in colonial society, the criollos” ( p. 350). Restrepo is the only author in this volume who takes a reflexive turn; his study of seventeenth-century creole identity aims also to shed light on modern Colombia.

As literary scholars, the authors are concerned exclusively with published texts, not with the messy archives and documents that historians attend to. Perhaps this partly explains why sixteenth- through eighteenth-century Spanish words are sometimes used anachronistically (raza, nación), and contemporary racial terminology (“white”) is used to label people of the colonial era who did not themselves use this term to categorize persons. Even so, some of the clearest writing on “race” in colonial Latin America comes from a literary scholar, Ruth Hill, whose work is cited frequently in the volume. (See for example her Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America, Vanderbilt University Press, 2006.) The reliance on published texts also tends to blur intentions


534 HAHR / August

with reality. From these essays we learn what elite creoles wrote about, but we don’t learn about their daily lives and concerns — the kinds of matters gleaned in legal cases, letters, diaries, notarial records, and other materials not written with publication in mind.

The essays here will appeal to Atlantic world scholars from many disciplines. Many of the essays are suitable for undergraduate courses and could be paired profitably with historical studies.

s. elizabeth penry, Fordham Universitydoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-011

Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics. By peter burke and maria lúcia g. pallares-burke. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 261 pp. Paper, $25.00.

Gilberto Freyre (1900 – 87), a Brazilian author whose works have been widely translated, disseminated, and debated, is unquestionably a global academic. Born and raised in Per-nambuco, Freyre wrote the classic and pioneering work Casa-grande & senzala (1933), which has shaped research priorities in Portuguese Atlantic studies for decades. His works have contributed greatly to the study and understanding of new research fields such as Black Atlantic rebels, slavery in the New World, and cultural hybridity. Consid-ered by many to be a man ahead of his time, he was and still is a controversial figure. His most famous thesis, that in Brazil racial harmony prevailed, figured prominently in the creation of the so called “myth of racial democracy.” Accused of being a conservative, Freyre’s works were later spurned by the left in Brazil. This situation changed in the 1990s when the author was rediscovered and the saliency of his ideas was, once again, recognized and applauded. In Brazil, books about Freyre and a new edition of Casa-grande & senzala were launched in order to commemorate the centennial of the author’s birth. Peter Burke and Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke are to be applauded for providing English-speaking audiences with a richly detailed account of Freyre and his vast work.

The book begins ( p. 15) by asking, “What was or is the importance of Gilberto Freyre?” One of the authors’ central arguments is that Freyre is still relevant to readers today and that the “histories of historical writing,” which tend to emphasize works from the “centre,” need to take cognizance of this masterfully creative and “gifted sociologist-historian from the periphery” ( p. 17). The authors’ goal is to provide the English-speaking reader with an “intellectual portrait” of Freyre and to illustrate the contemporary rel-evance of his social theory in today’s postmodern world.

A brief chapter outlines Freyre’s early intellectual experiences in Brazil, the United States, and as a “scholar gypsy” in Europe. Freyre’s experience of “self-exile” helped him to see Brazil “from the viewpoint of an outsider as well as an insider” ( p. 13), a quality which, as the authors illustrate throughout the book, contributes to the cogency of his arguments. Freyre’s erudition (he was a voracious reader) is amply documented through an analysis of his personal library and the annotations he left behind in his collection of

books. The authors delight in illustrating how “Freyre read many writers with Brazilian spectacles, one might even say Pernambucan spectacles” ( p. 48).

The central chapter of the monograph is dedicated to Freyre’s most famous book, Casa-grande & senzala. In this first work, Freyre engaged in a lively dialogue with the colonial past and employed a pioneering methodology that historians today would clas-sify as cultural history. His poetically Proustian style of writing captivated his audiences. He banished the somnolent, negative accounts of the past and, instead recreated the multifaceted world of the Portuguese in the tropics (Freyre later invented the expression Luso-Tropicalism). In the process, he forged a solution for the more urgent problem of the moment: the construction of a Brazilian identity. Freyre’s account of Brazil avoids the melancholic tone of his contemporaries (for example, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda in Raizes do Brasil, also published in 1933). Miscegenation is presented as a vibrant, creative force which harmonized racial relations, although he makes it clear that antagonisms were still tangibly present.

Freyre had a wonderful capacity to imagine otherness. In Casa-grande he examines the agency of Africans in Brazil and highlights their many contributions. Accused of writing history from the perspective of the “big house,” Freyre was not, according to the authors, an elitist, nor was he as conservative as his opponents branded him. Also Freyre did not argue that Brazil was a racial democracy; as noted by the authors ( p. 182), he wrote, “No one should understand me as implying that Brazil is a perfect ethnic democracy. It is not.”

The book is targeted for the nonspecialist and is well suited for an upper-level undergraduate college course. There are times, however, when Freyre is lost in the myr-iad of details; undergraduates might have trouble navigating through the vast number of cultural references. Also the narrative style is, at times, a bit dry, which contrasts sharply with Freyre’s florid rhetorical style. One would have hoped that a biography of the man would, like his histories, have been full of life and more “intimate.”

In conclusion, the authors make a compelling argument for the relevance of Freyre in today’s postmodern world. The authors remind the reader in the last chapter, “Gil-berto Our Contemporary,” of Freyre’s relevance to global social theory in the twenty-first century, noting that he “offered a critique of European reason and modernity from a tropical point of view” ( p. 191).

amy caldwell de farias, Monmouth Collegedoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-012


536 HAHR / August

Feeding Chilapa: The Birth, Life, and Death of a Mexican Region. By chris kyle. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. Photographs. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xvi, 269 pp. Cloth, $45.00. Paper, $24.95.

Chris Kyle has composed a fine book on the history of an economic region in southern Mexico from the pre-Columbian era down to the present. A cultural anthropologist rather than an historian, the author used both ethnological investigation and archival research in assembling this study. Kyle divides his work into six chapters that deal sub-stantially with different historical periods, plus an introduction and conclusion. Since 1990, he has spent about three years in Chilapa and the greater Atemba River basin for which the town has served as a primary market.

Chilapa served as a regional market throughout the colonial period. Its local economy relied on cacao beans as a standard of exchange into the early national era. In the 1790s, Chilapa’s population numbered around 10,000. In the 1840s, it had risen to 14,000, but by 1860 the population had fallen to 6,500 and would stay at that figure for 90 years. During most of the colonial period, the Atemba basin did not constitute a regional economy, for the few small communities in the region were primarily agricul-tural. Finally in the 1790s, with the emergence of the cotton cloth industry in Puebla, Chilapa emerged as a transit center along the route from the cotton-growing areas near the Pacific coast. This trade attracted a non-Indian population to the community to work as long-distance merchants, administrators, and muleteers. The existing popula-tion, mostly Indian, did not engage in the business.

In the early 1800s, Chilapa developed its own minor textile industry. This domi-nated its economy into the 1850s, as the town’s transport sector faded during this period. In 1842, a large-scale local uprising by agrarian renters against their landlords destroyed the regional government and militia and threw open the countryside to squatters. From the 1850s through the 1950s, the economy stagnated, showing no impact from either the Porfiriato or the Mexican Revolution.

By the late 1970s, the region could no longer feed itself. With no local options avail-able, government planners assumed control over the shortage and brought in large quan-tities of imported grain to Chilapa, where it was distributed to urban consumers free of charge. This was just one dramatic way in which the government intervened in the local economy. Its increased activities entailed the destruction of the regional economy. Gov-ernment bureaucrats became located in Chilapa. Electricity was brought into the region, to be followed by telecommunications and modern transportation systems. The number of day workers plummeted while numbers of salaried employees skyrocketed. Increased numbers of people identified themselves as physicians, engineers, teachers, nurses, sec-retaries, and government officials.

With the national government’s emphasis on economic liberalism in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the region found itself increasingly integrated into the interna-tional economy. But this transformation did the region’s population little good. While some availed themselves of government-funded make-work projects, others migrated to

major Mexican cities or the United States. Chilapa has not been able to find a new export industry and is a service center that depends on remittances from migrants.

While the history of the Atemba region is distinctive, as all regions are, in broader terms it represents some dozens of remote valleys outside of central Mexico. Such pre-industrial areas tended to be fragile economic units that survived only by adjusting themselves to changing patterns in interregional trade.

Kyle has composed a model study of an economic region across time. As he notes, economics is always intertwined with politics. He makes his book even more useful by commenting on the larger themes of migration and development schemes. Although his region is remote, Kyle’s analysis shows how much it has to tell.

john e. kicza, Emeritus, Washington State University doi 10.1215/00182168-2010-013

Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. By marcy norton. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Notes. Glossary. Index. xiv, 339 pp. Cloth, $35.00.

To examine the significance and complexity of cross-cultural currents between Europe, in particular Spain, and the Americas, Marcy Norton probes the history of tobacco and chocolate, two now ubiquitous products that continue to captivate consumers. Norton takes readers back to Mesoamerican civilizations and the years prior to the arrival of the imperialist Spanish at the beginning of the sixteenth century to trace the evolu-tion of social and sacred practices associated with tobacco and chocolate over the course of two centuries. She poses the following question: “What, exactly, did it mean for Europeans — bound as they were to an ideology that insisted on their religious and cul-tural supremacy — to become consumers of goods that they know were so enmeshed in the religious practices of the pagan ‘savages’ whom they had conquered” ( p. 3)? Norton convincingly defends her “revisionist account” ( p. 7) of the European encounter with tobacco and chocolate. The appropriation of these two goods by the Spanish and other Europeans was not primarily based on tobacco’s addictive qualities or chocolate’s intrin-sic appeal. Nor was the attraction the straightforward result of a cultural constructivism or complete “Europeanizing” of these New World products. Rather, as Norton illus-trates in this well-documented and engaging study, the assimilation of chocolate and tobacco by Europeans reflects the power of cross-cultural influence and syncretic blend-ing of beliefs and practices from both sides of the Atlantic.

Norton has constructed a navigable labyrinth of references to codices, chronicles, medical treatises, and other historical sources to tell the story of discovery, colonization, resistance, exchange, adaptation, and the bridging of cultures. The early chapters intro-duce the social and sacred features of tobacco and chocolate as seen through accounts by clerics and soldiers, both lesser known and well known, for example, Franciscan friar and early ethnographer Bernadino de Sahagún, missionary Diego Durán, Jesuit Juan de


538 HAHR / August

Tovar, conquistador Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, priest Baltasar de Herrera, soldier Bernal Díaz de Castillo, and the writings of Columbus and Cortés. Norton underscores the ambivalent European views of chocolate and tobacco as repugnant, diabolical instru-ments but luxurious indulgences, and she provides rich detail about ritual consumption through the chroniclers’ early connections with the novel products. Colorful examples illustrate competing tendencies toward rejection and acceptance. Oviedo, for instance, describes the use of cacao in blood rituals and his own use of cacao butter to cure a deep foot wound ( p. 59). He also recounts the transformation of enslaved soldier Fran-cisco Martín into a tobacco-using shaman healer among the Pemeno of Venezuela; he was later rescued by his Christian compatriots, escaped to return to Indian life, and was again recaptured and sent to Spain for sentencing ( pp. 95 – 98). Herrera records the appropriation of Mayan rites of cacao drinking in sacrificial ceremonies by creole noble-man Francisco Pech and his family ( pp. 73 – 74). Norton paints a vivid picture of the complex transmission of indigenous practices.

The middle chapters focus on the Europeans’ view of the medicinal properties of tobacco and chocolate, the products’ place in ecclesiastical polemic, and their increas-ing commodification. Norton extracts from the sixteenth-century medical literature key information from the discourses of numerous Spanish and creole physicians and supports well her thesis that Europeans adapted the new goods as they adopted them. Noteworthy among the myriad particulars are Norton’s descriptions of the contribu-tions of physicians Oliva Sabuco de Nantes Barrera, Nicolás Monarde, and Bartolomé Marradón, who sparked interest and debate about the curative and/or diabolical powers of chocolate and tobacco in their pioneer works for European audiences. Also, Norton traces clearly the impact of different governmental policies on tobacco and chocolate as commodities and shows that ultimately, with or without official encouragement, Euro-peans acquired “American” tastes, demand grew, and both products ultimately flour-ished in robust markets.

The final chapters demonstrate tobacco’s and chocolate’s ever complex and inte-grated usage in Spain and beyond, consumed now by all classes, having by the seventeenth century royal Spanish imprimatur and a powerful monopolistic trading framework flow-ing through Europe and the Americas. The epilogue offers a fast-forward look at the diffusion of these products and invites further in-depth study of the routes of tobacco and chocolate beyond Spain through Europe.

Full of specifics supported by scholarly documentation, Norton’s work is a lively, readable narrative. Informative explanatory captions accompanying the book’s attrac-tive graphics supply pertinent historical context and guide the reader through the details of the illustrations. Ideally, the endnotes would have been more accessible as footnotes, and the volume would have included a bibliography. A map of the entire Atlantic world would also have been useful. Norton’s fine contribution to the growing body of work on the history and significance of tobacco and chocolate should be of interest not only to scholars of the Mesoamerican conquest period and of the evolution of cross-cultural

transmission of commodities but also to general readers interested in these ever-popular commodities.

susan g. polansky, Carnegie Mellon Universitydoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-014

Colonial Period

Invaders as Ancestors: On the Intercultural Making and Unmaking of Spanish Colonialism in the Andes. By peter gose. Anthropological Horizons. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Illustrations. Map. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xvii, 380 pp. Cloth, $80.00. Paper, $35.00.

Invaders as Ancestors is a substantial, ambitious work that plots the transformation of preconquest (and pre-Inca) Andean ancestor worship into the mountain spirit worship that has characterized Andean religion over the past two or more centuries. With the daring and originality that he has brought to the study of preconquest society, Peter Gose explains this transformation as the result of ongoing responses to colonial chal-lenges that themselves changed over the course of two centuries. In the process, he elucidates the politico-cosmological world of indigenous societies as they experienced Spanish conquest and colonial rule. In a sense, this work stands in counterpoint to the superb intellectual history of the past three decades that has explored the impact of the conquest on Spanish and European thought: here the topic is the impact of the conquest and the centuries of ensuing colonial rule on Andean cosmology and belief. Focusing on Andean mortuary practices and the ancestors cults that stood at the heart of precon-quest society, Gose offers a compelling model of how these manifestations of indigenous cosmology co-opted and coexisted with Spanish customs and rule in the first century of the viceroyalty. However, he argues, the seventeenth-century extirpation campaigns and the widespread crises of the eighteenth century rendered maintenance of ancestor cults impossible and produced a reorientation of religious practice toward a veneration of mountain spirits.

This book operates on several scholarly levels with varying degrees of success. Gose offers sophisticated and detailed discussion of how the Spanish and the conquest were absorbed into an Andean worldview that had a long tradition of negotiating conquest through narratives of kinship. This work is essential for understanding how the hierar-chical relations of colonial rule were constructed at the very heart of the societies of the república de indios. Grounding his argument and analysis in contemporary texts and archi-val sources ( particularly of the Lima archbishopric), Gose makes a compelling case for using incorporation, rather than rejection, as the model for Andean responses to Spanish demands. Ultimately, though, coexistence and incorporation proved insufficient for the maintenance of ancestor cults, as the disruptive forces of the colonial economy and colo-nial law and the open assaults of the extirpation campaigns of the seventeenth century

Book Reviews / Colonial Period 539

540 HAHR / August

provoked a collapse of the kin-based ayllu and of the elite authority on which ancestor veneration depended. Here Gose relies on a set narrative from Andean social history: his descriptions of the decline of the ayllu as anything but a tributary, administrative association and of the universal crisis of kuraka legitimacy in the eighteenth century will strike many colonial historians as overly broad and simplistic. The later sections of the work also tend to reduce the Andes to a single space, sacrificing attention to regional variations in social and economic structure, history, and cultural practice to the larger narrative of religious and cosmological change.

Gose engages in great detail with numerous significant but narrow debates in colo-nial Andean history — most importantly those of the sixteenth century on the origins of attributions of the deifying term viracocha to Spanish invaders, and on the scope and significance of the anticolonial Taqi Onqoy movement of the 1560s. The detail of his interventions and the tone and certainty with which the author presents his conclusions are sure to excite debate, although in places the discussion neglects recent, important works. (The absence of Catherine Julien’s work from the discussion is particularly unfor-tunate.) The book makes further contributions to the scholarship on colonial Andean culture through thoughtful and detailed engagements in the academic debate surround-ing the extirpation campaigns and the genealogy of the mountain spirits and their place in Andean religion generally.

Gose marshals this study toward a critique of the simplistic “resistance” model of colonial Andean social history with its implicit essentialization of indigenous culture, arguing that such analysis — still dominant (although by no means hegemonic) in the academic study of colonial Andean history and anthropology — denies the Andean strat-egies of “mediation, inclusion and assimilation” that have so characterized Andean soci-eties and enabled their reproduction over five centuries. In a valuable corrective, Gose emphasizes Andean religious beliefs and practices as vital and dynamic in their response to Spanish rule and Catholic evangelization. Far less successful are the work’s claims of sweeping theoretical significance in colonial and postcolonial studies. The introduction offers a broad challenge to the postcolonial critique put forward by Edward Said, Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and others in the 1980s, without paying attention either to the elaboration and refining of theorizations of colonial power relations over the past two decades, or to their formulation in response to Enlightenment and modern European colonial regimes and their residues rather than to the colonial empire of a corporatist, absolutist early modern state.

david t. garrett, Reed Collegedoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-015

The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750 – 1830. By hal langfur. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Illustrations. Map. Figures. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xv, 408 pp. Paper, $27.95.

Hal Langfur has written a powerful, groundbreaking study (new in paperback in 2009) of a region, the Eastern Sertão of Minas Gerais, and a process of violent and incom-plete conquest that will transform our understanding of the frontier in Brazilian history. Rejecting the predominant view in the historiography that interprets this history of vio-lence and conquest as both inevitable and largely inconsequential, Langfur marshals an impressive array of documentary evidence and yokes this to a sophisticated theoretical conception of the overlapping and sometimes contradictory forces underpinning fron-tier occupation. The book takes aim at two myths of frontier history in particular: the myth of the “Forbidden Lands” as a space devoid of Lusophone settlers that functioned as an effective buffer between the rich mining zones in central Minas Gerais and the coast; and the myth of uncoordinated, if not irrational, native resistance to incursions into this zone. Revising our understanding of these two commonplace assumptions yields substantial results and provides the book with its conceptual spine. Rethinking the so-called Forbidden Lands policy entails a thorough reappraisal of the complex relations between crown and captaincy authorities, as well as between the latter and the constantly shifting population of settlers in the region. Revising the history of native resistance underscores the contingent and incomplete nature of the conquest of these lands and highlights the transculturative experience of this process lived over an extended period of time by common people as well as by the more commonly documented political and military leaders. In short, this book represents a major contribution in political, social, and cultural history.

The book is divided in two parts, the first concentrating on peeling back the layers of myth and half-truth surrounding the politics and political economy of the Forbid-den Lands policy. The second section focuses close attention on the history of violent conflict and the experiences of settlers, military men, and indigenous peoples in the Eastern Sertão. Throughout both sections, careful readings of the documentary record, often derived from seldom visited corners of the archives, are combined with a solid theoretical framework that will appeal to the majority of social and cultural historians. We learn, in the first section, that the aims of the crown — to suppress contraband and control the spatial distribution of settlement in the colony by maintaining a “wilderness” buffer peopled by “savages” — came into increasing conflict with the aims of regional administrators, who saw the Eastern Sertão as a space of mineral and agricultural wealth and its indigenous population as more of a threat to prosperity than a useful adjunct to colonial policy. These captaincy officials, in turn, found themselves responding to the demands of settlers, many of whom were moving into the supposed Forbidden Lands in search of economic opportunities in response to the decline in the mining economy after the 1750s. The combined forces of captaincy officials and settlers thereby inaugurated


542 HAHR / August

the violent occupation of the Eastern Sertão in earnest from the 1760s onward. Thus, Langfur demonstrates, the conquest and war that engulfed the region began not in 1808, with the formal declaration of war against the Botocudo, but decades earlier, in at least 86 documented instances of major conflict and, presumably, many more cases that went unnoted in the record.

Pivoting from the knowledge that conflict was constant and largely derived from local or regional causes, Langfur explores the sources of violence, the strategies of the parties involved, and the evolution of occupation in the Eastern Sertão. Part of the explanation for violence stemmed from the conflicting desires of the state, settlers, and indigenous peoples to control space. The book makes clear that the racial geographies and hierarchies of the Portuguese colonial world provided both ground and pattern for violent conquest as well as sites of weakness that native peoples could exploit with adroit planning and an increasing store of cultural knowledge with respect to the motives and fears of settlers and colonial officials. Indigenous resistance tended to avoid direct confrontations with armed opponents and focused instead on ambush techniques and attacks on vulnerable settlers. These attacks were not merely defensive in nature. Lang-fur’s reading of the sources allows him to show how natives sought to capture territory as well as defend it. The four main protagonists of his story — the crown, the captaincy officials, settlers, and indigenous peoples — found themselves locked in an increasingly intense cycle of violence. In the long run, to be sure, the outcome was all but certain: the lands would be settled and the indigenous population subdued or exterminated. What makes this such an important book is the way Langfur recaptures the texture and con-tingency of the long struggle leading up to this dénouement.

zephyr frank, Stanford Universitydoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-016

Imaginarios ambiguos, realidades contradictorias: Conductas y representaciones de los negros y mulatos novohispanos: Siglos XVI y XVII. By úrsula camba ludlow. Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2008. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. 227 pp. Paper.

Imaginarios ambiguos, realidades contradictorias must be lauded as one of the first publica-tions by the Centro de Estudios Históricos of El Colegio de México regarding Africans and Afro-descendants in Mexico. This in itself is a historical event in a realm where until 1946 the African presence and persistence was largely negated and thereafter minimized through the mestizaje (miscegenation) fallacy. In Mexico, the official story states that the African presence in Mexico was insignificant and that African genes and cultural endow-ments disappeared through mixing.

The work, based on the author’s doctoral dissertation, seeks to analyze the rep-resentations of the “black and mulatto group” in the imaginary of New Spain, a colo-nial Spanish region in the Americas that included present-day Mexico. The thesis of the study is that “at times [blacks and mulattos] appear loyal to their masters, always cun-

ning, violent, rebellious and even comic and vivacious. They form a prism where differ-ent realities, often ambiguous and even contradictory, are reflected” ( p. 17). The author points out that she is not concerned with “the ‘real’ condition of blacks, but the ideas and prejudices relative to them” ( p. 22). Her work aims to “uncover the manner in which different cultural figures cross and overlap in practices, representations, or productions” to show that “there is no practice or structure that is not produced by the contradictory and clashing representations by which individuals and groups make sense of their own world” ( p. 22).

The analysis is divided into five chapters. The first is “a review of the origins, modalities and changes of slavery from antiquity to modern Europe” ( p. 24). Chapters 2 and 3 consider the legal realm: “legislation, particularly on the prohibitions imposed on blacks and mulattos during the XVI and XVII centuries,” and “the diverse postures witnesses and those who reported a crime had toward a committed offense or a fight pro-voked by blacks and mulattos” ( p. 24). Chapter 4 looks into “the sphere of the symbolic and emotional beyond ‘institutional’ postures,” while chapter 5 deals with the literary and iconographic black and mulatto image ( p. 25).

The work, like an important portion of domestic and international academic works about Africans and Afro-descendants in Mexico, rests on a Eurocentric framework. The history of thinking, the sources and critical tools for analysis utilized in Imaginarios ambiguos disregard Afrocentric theory, such as that proposed by Cheikh Anta Diop and Molefi Kete Asante. The Afrocentric idea introduces Africans and Afro-descendants as cultural agents and not as mere subjects. This is of particular importance to a work that deals with Africans and Afro-descendants as its central topic of study. Imaginarios ambiguos produces an artificial group of “negros and mulattos” for the sake of studying a random number of colonial documents, isolating a portion of Afro-descendants from other Africans and Afro-descendants in New Spain and the rest of the Americas. This runs contrary to current tendencies in Africana studies.

Úrsula Camba Ludlow states that there are no previous systematic studies regard-ing the representations that the viceregal society made of blacks and mulattos as natu-rally strong, inclined to excesses, but also arrogant, audacious, and ordinary ( pp. 17 – 18). While this may be so in the case of the particular New Spain documents studied from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Richard L. Jackson has carried out a systematic study of the black image in Latin American literature from Lope de Rueda’s Eufemia in 1576 to the 1970s. Imaginarios ambiguos would have gained a deeper insight by consider-ing the additional points of view of Jackson and the current Africana approaches to the study of African diaspora issues.

Imaginarios ambiguos mistakenly identifies as “black and mulatto” some of the decla-rations that appear in the Spanish documents studied. It fails to recognize that the Span-ish legal profession utilized standardized arguments and many of those were the prod-uct of Eurocentric prejudices regarding Africans and Afro-descendants. The nonwhite voices in the Spanish colonial legal and literary documents at best were the product of


544 HAHR / August

Spanish ventriloquism. The Spanish stories regarding Afro behavior need to be analyzed with a lens capable of looking beyond their face value.

Pages 82, 86, 87, 90, 91, 94, and 95 are mistakenly blank where print is missing; also, the cover began to unglue during the first reading.

marco polo hernández cuevas, North Carolina Central Universitydoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-017

Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500 – 1800. Edited by daniela bleichmar, paula de vos, kristin huffine, and kevin sheehan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Notes. Index. xxii, 427 pp. Cloth.

“Let others do the inventing!” said Miguel de Unamuno and launched the notion, much affected by historians for most of the twentieth century, that Spaniards were uninter-ested in participating in modern science. Portuguese historians, by contrast, in the same period, tended to insist that science was their compatriots’ invention, at least in the fields of cartography and navigation, and that their nation contributed enormously to the sci-entific aspects of the Renaissance and to the scientific revolution. On both counts, revi-sion is well under way. Portugal and Spain both now seem unexceptional cases, consis-tent with the history of western European science in general.

It is no longer possible to assert, with any confidence, that Portuguese navigation was peculiarly scientific at an exceptionally early date. Historians do not now represent the Portuguese prince known as Henry the Navigator as an organizer of scientific semi-nars or even as a navigator. Scholarship has exploded the belief that anyone, in Portugal or elsewhere, navigated by means of scientific instruments in the fifteenth century. Por-tuguese explorers seem rarely to have made or used charts. In any case, breakthroughs in realistic cartography now appear to owe at least as much to war, statecraft, and chang-ing tastes as to the needs of seafaring. Spain, meanwhile, appears from recent and cur-rent research to have been the homeland of a great deal of formerly overlooked practical technological innovation under the Habsburg dynasty, especially in civil and military engineering. The country was a beacon of state investment in science under the Bour-bons and an arena of geographical and ethnographical inquiry and debate throughout the early modern period. Spain and Portugal, in consequence, have been restored to the scientific mainstream. The former no longer seems especially laggard or nonparticipa-tory, the latter no longer a herald or pioneer.

Part of the initiative underlying these shifts has come from historians of early modern science, who have concentrated on the influence of hermetic intellectual tradi-tions and social and cultural change. Part has come from revisionism in Iberian histo-riography, with practitioners striving to reject old orthodoxies. Study of Spanish and Portuguese overseas expansion adds a further dimension, showing how much the New World and other frontiers of settlement and trade contributed to the development of

early modern European science: the accumulation of scientific specimens for European Wunderkammer; the stimulus exploration provided for cartography and navigation, with implicit effects on astronomy and geodesy; the opportunities of cultural exchange with oriental and other indigenous scientific traditions; the way colonies functioned as forums of discussion about geographic and ethnographic subjects; and above all, perhaps, the sheer challenge to existing mentalities posed by the discovery and observation of previ-ously unexperienced environments.

The studies collected by Daniela Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan include some useful contributions to the field. David Goodman (Spanish America) and Palmira Fontes and Henrique Leitão ( Portugal) launch the volume with well-informed summaries of the historiography, though Goodman spends a surprising amount of time on what he represents as the influence of postmodernism. His charge that J. B. Harley warped the history of cartography in a postmodern direction seems ill conceived, for while Harley severed many constraints traditional in the study of the subject, he did not share any of the defining tics of postmodernism or sacrifice commit-ment to a search for objectively verifiable accounts of the past. The introductory essays stress themes repeated at intervals throughout the volume: the imperfections of current research and the paramount influence of the technical needs of imperial exploration, agronomy, health, and defense. Antonio Barrera-Osorio, for instance, takes us on a trip among bilge pumps and ethnobotanical enquiries in the sixteenth century, and Timo-thy Walker provides a fascinating study of Portuguese enquirers’ search for remedies for unfamiliar diseases. Outstanding contributions include that on Nieremberg by Juan Pimentel, who shows the compatibility of his subject’s religious and scientific thinking; Paula De Vos’s entertaining account of an eighteenth-century bishop’s cabinet of curi-osities; and Anna More’s demonstration of how personal circumstances affected the sci-entific vision of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. Fiona Clark and Júnia Ferreira Furtado provide interesting instances of how creole political and economic agendas influenced scientific projects in the eighteenth century.

The book’s big deficiencies are in coherence — always a problem for collections of this kind, in which broad-brush impasto and speckly pointillism combine, without evoking an overall shape or covering the canvas — and a frustrating lack of global and comparative reference. If the authors or editors had taken into account the huge amount of parallel work available on the British, Dutch, French, Russian, Swedish, and Dan-ish empires, they might have been able to transcend the rather parochial conclusion (expressed in the afterword by Noble David Cook and Alexandra Parma Cook) that “probings . . . moving most markedly in the Iberian peninsula” contributed alongside those of northern Europeans to “the rise of European science” ( p. 310). A more interest-ing hypothesis might then arise: that without feedback from European powers’ imperial outreach a “scientific revolution” would have been impossible.

felipe fernández-armesto, University of Notre Damedoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-018


546 HAHR / August

Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico. By sherry fields. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. xxi, 188 pp. Cloth, $60.00.

Unlike many first books that have a very narrow focus, this prizewinning history mono-graph (available on the Gutenberg.e open access Web site) is constructed broadly enough to attract readers of various backgrounds and interests. At the outset the author apolo-gizes for subjects not covered. For example, gender, class, and ethnicity are left for future in-depth study. She warns that her colonial periodization is largely unitary, with little exploration of the nature of changes occurring between 1521 and 1808. In spite of the warnings, she covers these and much more.

The author points out that the work “explains the cultures of health and illness that were formed amid the high mortality and morbidity rates during the colonial years of Mexico’s history” ( p. xi). The general order is geographical and chronological. In chap-ter 1 the author focuses on the nature of health and sickness in Mexico, when possible using the words of those experiencing it. She begins in the centuries prior to Spanish contact then moves to the colonial era, starting with the newly introduced acute com-municable diseases, moving on to endemic diseases, and ending with everyday ailments. Her sources here and elsewhere are varied: codices, biographies of doctors and medi-cal institutions, personal letters, traveler’s accounts, the rich results of the government ordered relaciones geográficas of the 1570s – 80s, and texts written by health care givers of one kind or another; all these sources are exceptionally rich for colonial Mexico. And she mines the less-used ex-votos, small votive paintings that were often contracted and placed as gifts in shrines dedicated to one of the “saints of the church” most often associ-ated with miraculous cures.

In the second chapter the author deftly surveys the range of medical providers, beginning with the “educated,” the nature of training dependent on the cultural com-plex. For Mesoamerica the emphasis is on the Nahua, and the sources are surprisingly good. For the healers in New Spain she devotes sections to the licensed physicians, bar-ber surgeons, midwives, and the unlicensed lay healers from curanderos to simple peddlers of false cures. She concludes the chapter with a fine analysis of the role of the church in treating the ill, and the nature and effectiveness of hospitals. The subsequent chapter deals with Nahua concepts of the body and the causes of disease, and the richly detailed fourth chapter shifts back to the Europeans. In it she traces the continued impact of humoralism on medicine and the ideas concerning the spread of disease. Her discus-sion of the supposed impact of noxious airs, as well as lack of moderation in lifestyle (including sin) are well peppered with revealing first-hand accounts. In the last chapter she explores the nature of a “culture of sickness” in which death was never far away. The church’s role in possible miraculous cures is also examined.

Caution must be exercised at some points. For example, Fields falls into the common assumption that the catastrophic impact of the 1520 – 21 smallpox epidemic is explained

by the long isolation of Amerindians peoples from the Old World pathogens (true) that had “forced the immunological systems of Old World peoples to erect defenses” (false) ( p. 9). Although she characterizes some Europeans as “immunological supermen,” they did not, contrary to what she reports, possess “one of the most evolved immunological systems in the world at that time” ( p. 10). Instead it was the almost constant exposure to Old World pathogens that helped protect the Europeans from the massive mortality confronting Amerindians in their initial experience with new epidemics. Europeans who lived in isolated communities for three generations without exposure to smallpox, for example, faced the same massive morbidity and mortality that Amerindians experienced. And, for a variety of reasons, the first Europeans reaching American soil lost one-third to two-thirds of their companions within two or three years. The statement that guinea pigs “may have been the source of Chagas’s disease or leishmaniasis” ( p. 11) is mislead-ing at best, and the assumption that humans did not live in close contact with llamas and alpacas, and that their herds were never as large as European herds, both arguments made by Jared Diamond, are unfounded. As Jorge Flores Ochoa has pointed out, herds of llamas and alpacas reached 50,000 head and remained numerous even following their destruction by the Spanish conquest and civil wars in the central Andes. Although Fields analyzed numerous descriptions of the symptoms and devastation of the epidemics of 1545 – 48 and 1576 – 80, she did not question the recent thesis of Rodolfo Acuña-Soto and others that the cause was native American hemorrhagic fevers, likely carried by rodent vectors, rather than the commonly assumed Old World typhus.

The advantage of the e-book venue is immediately apparent in comparing the stan-dard book format published by Columbia University Press with the online version. Due to cost, publishers are increasingly reluctant to include color illustrations, maps, and sometimes complex tables. While the print volume contains no illustrations, the open access version (http://www.gutenberg-e.org) is filled with full-color illustrations, some from Nahua codices, as well as colonial ex-votos, which would not be feasible to include in a standard book. The quality and accessibility of both illustrations and text makes the book convenient for advanced surveys as well as seminars, and suitable for the under-graduate as well as the advanced student. In sum, Fields provides one of the best broad introductions available on medical theory and practice in colonial Mexico.

noble david cook, Florida International University doi 10.1215/00182168-2010-019


548 HAHR / August

Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues: The Court Society of Colonial Mexico, 1702 – 1710. By christoph rosenmüller. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2008. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. x, 278 pp. Paper, $34.95.

This book is an interesting story of greed, corruption, and the clash of local Mexican interests versus those of the newly formed Spanish Bourbon monarchy under Philip V. It is one of the few studies in English concerning a viceregal tenure, and certainly the only in print concerning a Mexican viceroy during the early eighteenth century. For that alone, author Christoph Rosenmüller should be commended. In addition, the book sheds some light on the turmoil caused both in Spain and Mexico by the War of the Spanish Succession. Within Spain a large number of the elites saw the assumption to the throne by a Bourbon as the first step to a total French takeover of the Spanish state, and hence a challenge to their influence and prestige. Many abandoned Philip V and joined the forces of the Austrian claimant. Meanwhile, within Mexico, many, especially among the elites, pondered as to which claimant they should support. There were rumors of conspiracies against the new king. However, in the end local interests generally were of paramount concern to most Mexicans. Yet they did wonder what would transpire and what was the character of the new viceroy destined for their shores.

Francisco Férnandez de la Cueva Enríquez (the tenth Duke of Albuquerque) was greeted with a lot of fanfare: gilded carriages, bullfights, and public ceremonies and festivals. Few, though, could have envisioned what his viceregal tenure might be at its outset. One of the themes that Rosenmüller emphasizes is the patron and client rela-tionship, which has both engendered acceptance and controversy among scholars with regard to its role in Latin American history (and more specifically Mexico). Here, this reviewer believes an omission of some significance exists in that Magali Sarfatti’s Spanish Bureaucratic-Patrimonialism in America is not listed in the bibliography or discussed.

Rosenmüller certainly demonstrates that the Duke of Albuquerque acted more like a Hapsburg viceroy than a Bourbon viceroy so characteristic of the reformist viceroys, such as, in particular, Antonio María Bucareli and the second Conde de Revillagigedo, who undertook a number of reforms linked to the late eighteenth century. This viceroy marched to his own beat. Viceroy Albuquerque arrived with an entourage that helped him to occupy the viceregal palace; he then had to dispense patronage to them in the form of various colonial positions. The viceroy moreover had to appoint many of the Mexican elite, who became his cohorts in the administration of New Spain during his tenure.

Probably one of more interesting parts of Rosenmüller’s study is the saga of the struggle between the Duke of Albuquerque and the Sánchez de Tagle family. What this story reveals is that Albuquerque was an opportunist seeking to enrich himself ( primar-ily through the contraband trade), which resulted in his supporting one group of elites over the other. He expected their loyalty, and they in turn expected special consideration from the viceroy, including appointments to colonial positions. The author, through analysis of the behavior of this viceroy and his association with various opposing Mexi-

can elites, reinforces the patron and client relationship, which is a persistent theme of this book. Albuquerque supported the group opposing the oligopoly in trade dominated by the Sevillian Consulado. This group heartily complained about the high prices paid for the goods coming by way of Spain. It was because of this commercial oppression, at least in their minds, that they involved themselves in the contraband trade. We find through Rosenmüller’s thorough investigation that Albuquerque decided not to enforce the royal laws against contraband trade and instead to profit from it. On the other side was the oligopoly faction championed by the Sánchez de Tagle family. We must surmise in part that Albuquerque’s conflict with them was due to their status within the opposing commercial faction. In the end the viceroy’s involvement in the contraband trade and his apparent disloyalty in not carrying out royal reforms cost him a tidy sum after his viceregency and his return to Spain. Through a junta, after taking extensive testimony concerning his malfeasance, he was assessed a fine of 700,000 pesos, and in return the crown decided not to seek a harsher remedy, which might have resulted from a juicio de residencia.

All in all this is very good study of a viceregal tenure, albeit a very corrupt one, as the author demonstrates. All scholars and students of Mexican and colonial Latin Ameri-can history could profit from reading this work.

john s. leiby, Paradise Valley Community College doi 10.1215/00182168-2010-020

Redes sociales e instituciones comerciales en el imperio español, siglos XVII al XIX. By antonio ibarra and guillermina del valle pavón. Mexico City: Instituto Mora / UNAM, Facultad de Economía, 2007. Illustrations. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Bibliographies. Index. 340 p. Paper.

According to Guillermina del Valle Pavón and Antonio Ibarra’s introduction, this book includes 11 works that were “written, inspired and discussed” by those who participated in a research project titled De Sevilla a Manila: Redes sociales y corporaciones comerciales en el mundo iberoamericano, siglos XVI – XIX, financed by the Fundación Carolina and directed by Ibarra. The editors’ stated goal is to give a broad view of Latin American economic dynamics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and to illustrate the importance that family and paisanaje (common geographical origin) links had in the eco-nomic organization of the Spanish Empire. Nevertheless, while the individual articles are valuable, as a collection of essays the book is weak. Its geographical and chrono-logical approach is unbalanced: most of the essays focus on New Spain or the eighteenth century, above all the last decades, losing in this way the intended imperial view as well as the potential of a genuinely comparative perspective. Furthermore, not all the authors define the “social networks perspective” as the theoretical basis of their essays. Finally, it lacks a final section that could help to compare the main ideas proposed by the collaborators.


550 HAHR / August

Five of the 11 essays are case studies that focus on one commercial business or merchant active during the second half of the eighteenth century. That is the case of the works written by del Valle on the Conde de San Bartolomé de Xala, a very power-ful Mexican merchant; Clara Elena Suárez Argüello on Pedro de Vértiz, a rich Mexi-can arriero; María Concepción Gavira Márquezon on the commercial enterprise of the Gutiérrez brothers in Cádiz; and Álvaro Alcántara Lópezon on Joseph Quintero, a mem-ber by marriage of the Fanyutti family from the province of Acayucan in Veracruz. Valle illustrates the most important features of the social and commercial networks created by and around the most powerful Mexican merchants during this period. Nevertheless, she does not address paisanaje as deeply as she could, given how crucial a bond it was in this kind of web. Suárez studies the economic activities of Vértiz, though the social organi-zation and administration of his business is secondary in her analysis. Alcántara argues that the main subject of his essay, Joseph Quintero, worked to reinforce his own social status and not that of his family by marriage. This idea is at least surprising. It would be interesting to investigate whether this unusual attitude can be explained according to his characteristics as an arriviste. The best work of these five is Gavira’s on the Gutiérrez brothers. Her sources, above all the private and commercial correspondence so uncom-mon in this kind of work, make this essay especially valuable. She studies the career of the two brothers after their departure from their homeland. She also includes a very unusual analysis of their situation as immigrants living in an alien environment.

Three of the essays delimit and analyze commercial circuits in different geographi-cal and chronological contexts. Renate Pieper and Philipp Lesiak study the circulation of azogue (mercury) and wool through the commercial centers of Seville and Antwerp dur-ing the first decades of the seventeenth century. Luis Alonso Álvarez describes the com-mercial relations between the Philippines and New Spain and how they were affected by the Bourbon Reforms. Ibarra examines what he calls redes de negociación (business networks) created by the most powerful merchants from Guadalajara during the last years of the seventeenth century. This is the most interesting work of these three. Ibarra draws the networks using the documentation related to the Consulado de Guadalajara’s administration of the taxation of Atlantic trade (avería). Unfortunately, at seven pages, his work is too short to fully explore this topic.

Finally, four of the essays analyze different aspects of commercial corporations or collectives. María Teresa Huerta studies the economic strategies developed by the Mexi-can merchants who were involved in the production of silver in the north of the vice-royalty of New Spain during the second half of the seventeenth century. Javier Kraselsky writes on the origin of the Consulado de Comerciantes de Buenos Aires, describing its Juntas de Comercio and stressing the goals and strategies, both political and economic, of those who traded from that city at the end of the eighteenth century. Oscar Cruz Bar-ney examines the origin of the diputaciones foráneas or the appointment of representatives by the Consulado de México in other markets of New Spain during the first years of the nineteenth century. Antonio García de León’s essay is the most remarkable of these four. He studies the Portuguese mercantile community in seventeenth-century Veracruz. He

concludes by stressing the economic importance of the persecution of the Portuguese merchants of that New Spanish port, considering this to be one of the factors that deter-mined the crisis of the Atlantic trade.

juan carlos sola-corbacho, Texas Christian Universitydoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-021

Castigar y perdonar cuando conviene a la república: La justicia penal de Córdoba del Tucumán, siglos XVII y XVIII. By alejandro agüero. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2008. 488 pp. Paper.

Como su título lo indica, este libro aborda el desarrollo de la justicia penal municipal (siglos XVII y XVIII) en Córdoba, ciudad de la gobernación del Tucumán ( parte del Virreinato del Perú hasta 1776 y con posterioridad a esta fecha, del Virreinato del Río de la Plata).

El trabajo se introduce con unas consideraciones teóricas sobre el “paradigma estatalista” ( p. 16) que ha primado en los estudios sobre la justicia penal durante el Anti-guo Régimen. Conforme a este modelo historiográfico, basado en la estrecha vinculación entre derecho penal y absolutismo en la modernidad, los municipios americanos peri-féricos sólo gozaron de autonomía en los primeros tiempos coloniales, imponiéndose la hegemonía de la justicia penal real con el reinado de Felipe II, a través del nombramiento de regidores y venta de regidurías.

Frente a tales postulados, Agüero ofrece el análisis de una judicatura local y peri-férica ejercida por los jueces municipales, con el fin de demostrar las “desviaciones” del modelo de una justicia real y hegemónica de la monarquía absoluta. En lugar de la preva-lencia de unas magistraturas sobre otras, el autor habla de un “cuerpo indiviso” ( p. 41) en el que se integran las justicias regias (o justicias mayores: gobernador, corregidor, alcalde mayor) y las locales o corporativas (alcaldes ordinarios del Cabildo). Una de las claves interpretativas para comprender esa “legitimación dual del poder” (state law y community law) en Indias se encuentra en la tradición medieval castellana, que consolidó el poder de los municipios en virtud de los privilegios otorgados por el Príncipe, fuente de toda potestad.

Durante la mayor parte del periodo estudiado primó en Córdoba una justicia crimi-nal estrechamente ligada al poder municipal y ejercida por jueces legos elegidos por los vecinos, a su vez miembros de la elite local. Esas “desviaciones” con respecto al mod-elo institucional regio, que prescribía un sistema judicial letrado e independiente de los poderes locales, obedecieron a circunstancias tales como la distancia de la metrópoli y lejanía de las instancias judiciales superiores, la falta de letrados y la no exigencia de desar-raigo de los jueces inferiores en la jurisdicción de su competencia. A ello debe sumarse la presencia de una sólida aristocracia local (vecinos encomenderos) que monopolizaba los cargos judiciales, el juego de las redes sociales (lazos familiares, de amistad y com-padrazgo) que comprendían tanto a los jueces reales como a los locales, la ausencia del


552 HAHR / August

concepto de derecho como ley y la “creencia en un orden natural trascendente” ( p. 133), bajo cuyos preceptos se confundían delito y pecado.

A lo largo de las tres partes que componen el libro, se analizan las magistraturas que desempeñaron la justicia criminal ordinaria en Córdoba del Tucumán, la cultura penal castellano-indiana ( por ejemplo, en lo que atañe a los criterios de minoridad, rusticidad y miserabilidad aplicados a los indígenas, induciendo a atenuar las penas salvo cuando afectaba a la integridad de las encomiendas) y el desarrollo de los procesos judiciales. Particularmente, resulta de interés el estudio de las causas criminales, enfatizando en el lenguaje discursivo relativo a delitos y penas y otros aspectos procesales; todo ello condu-cente a demostrar el cumplimiento de lo que Agüero denomina “determinación cultural del derecho”, una praxis sujeta a las costumbres locales. Los procesos seleccionados como muestra permiten delimitar una tipología de delitos y castigos más frecuentes, como resultado de una justicia lega (aunque no desprovista de cierta cultura jurídica), amparada en la doctrina del arbitrio judicial y defensora de lo que convenía a la paz y orden de la república: un orden basado en la primacía de los valores religiosos (la ley divina) y en los intereses de la aristocracia local (encomenderos y hacendados) en un espacio autónomo de poder.

Con relación al impacto de las reformas borbónicas en la justicia municipal de Cór-doba ( pp. 118 – 124), aunque sin obviar los indicios de cambio, Agüero discute algunas posiciones historiográficas que sostienen el reforzamiento del poder central de la monar-quía absoluta, exponiendo argumentos que confirman la continuidad del control insti-tucional por parte de las familias principales de la ciudad, a través de las nuevas figuras jurídicas de ámbito local.

El autor se basa principalmente en documentación del Archivo Histórico de Cór-doba, Argentina: fondos de Protocolos de las Escribanías de número y de Libros del Crimen, 1664 – 1810, y serie de Gobierno. A ello se suma una importante colección de fuentes impresas y bibliografía referida a la historia jurídica y al gobierno y sociedad colonial.

En síntesis, un libro interesante y útil para los especialistas en derecho indiano y sus relaciones con la judicatura peninsular y regia, así como para el estudio de las elites coloniales.

beatriz vitar, Universidad de Sevilladoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-022

National Period

The Mexican Wars for Independence. By timothy j. henderson. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009. Map. Notes. Bibliographic Essay. Index. xxiii, 246 pp. Cloth, $25.00.

In The Mexican Wars for Independence Timothy J. Henderson generously seasons his retelling of this familiar tale with interesting, often enlightening anecdotes that reflect the influence of the new cultural history. Take for example his depiction of Father Miguel Hidalgo’s revolt as a Keystone Cops comedy of errors, or his characterization of the massacre of the Spanish and creole defenders of the Alhóndiga as “an impromptu religious fiesta . . . of blood, fire, liquor and plunder” ( p. 80). His supple exposition of the conflict between Hidalgo’s successors, Ignacio López Rayón (who saw the move-ment as one to restore Ferdinand VII) and José María Morelos (who sought a definitive break with Spain) illuminates differences among the patriots that have often been mini-mized in favor of the nationalist myth set in stone during the 1910 centennial by Porfirio Díaz’s erection of the “great monument to independence on . . . the Paseo de la Reforma” ( p. 214). Particularly praiseworthy is Henderson’s epilogue, in which he rehabilitates Agustin Iturbide’s reputation by sympathetically reexamining his crucial role in bring-ing about independence and by calling attention to the injustice of his exclusion from Mexico’s pantheon of national heroes.

But while Henderson’s strong narrative is his work’s strength, his reliance on nar-rative to the virtual exclusion of analysis is its weakness. Apart from his epilogue, the closest he comes is his observation that, while independence “was but one war spanning the decade [1810 – 21] . . . in a more profound sense . . . Mexico witnessed many wars during the independence era” ( p. xxi). Mexican independence consisted of “many small wars” fought by “the rank and file of the movement, mostly impoverished Indians and castes . . . [to improve] their lot in life,” which became interwoven with the larger “civil war” waged by creoles “against the Spanish armies . . . to achieve autonomy or indepen-dence” ( pp. xxi – xxii). This combination of a lack of analysis and welter of detail (though fascinating) overwhelms by putting the reader too close to the historical canvas. Just as distance is necessary to appreciate the work of pointillist painter Georges Seurat, one needs distance to see the larger picture of Mexico’s independence struggle. Moreover, Henderson’s intended audience is unclear. Is his work meant for university students or for a broader popular audience? If he seeks a popular audience unfamiliar with the basic outline of events, then his political narrative is too detailed, too complex. If university students are his intended audience, then his failure to address the sophisticated historiog-raphy of Mexican independence presents a significant shortcoming. Although he thanks Eric Van Young, Jaime Rodríquez O., and a host of others in his acknowledgements and suggestions for further reading, he makes little or no use of their work.

Henderson also overlooks the “distinct tradition” literature which offers a ready-made explanation for the preference for monarchy expressed by most patriots, a pref-erence that readers might otherwise find mystifying. I believe Henderson’s pointed

Book Reviews / National Period 553

554 HAHR / August

dismissal of Hidalgo’s expression of monarchical sympathies as “a calculated lie” is a fun-damental misreading of the goals pursued by the majority of Mexican patriots ( p. 106). Only in Morelos’s “Sentiments of the Nation” of 1813 and in the Constitution of Apat-zingán do we find unequivocal calls for a republic. Preference for monarchy is clearly revealed in the language of the Plan de Iguala. As Henderson notes, when Iturbide and the national junta set aside the Spanish Constitution of 1812 in favor of a new document, opposition arose at once and the “provisional constitution was never actually enacted” ( p. 190). When a republic finally was brought about it was by the personal political ambi-tions of Antonio López de Santa Anna, who “only a few months earlier . . . had been as enthusiastic a champion of monarchy . . . as anyone in Mexico” ( p. 200).

My criticisms notwithstanding, there is much to recommend Henderson’s work and I expect most readers will agree with William Beezley’s evaluation that Henderson “has written the best short history [of independence] available” (cover notes).

william schell jr., Murray State University doi 10.1215/00182168-2010-023

San Martín: Argentine Soldier, American Hero. By john lynch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Maps. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 265 pp. Cloth, $35.00.

At first glance one might perceive this work by the distinguished historian John Lynch as a mere biography. However, this is not case. Once you begin to read you find a highly nuanced study that sheds serious new light on both the life and times of one of the great-est figures of the Latin American wars of independence, José de San Martín. Lynch brings to life the inner man and his psyche as it influenced his actions, which had a decided impact upon the course of Latin American history. Lynch purposely leads us to contemplate the question, without explicitly stating it, of what would have been the his-torical evolution of Latin American and South America if there had been no San Martín. In this regard this book will be pondered for a long time to come.

For more than two decades before deciding to return to his native Argentina, San Martín was a loyal soldier and servant of the Spanish monarchy, despite his American birth. Yet beneath the surface, the future Liberator was always contemplating his Ameri-can origins and also what he saw as the foundering of the Spanish Empire. He eventually came to the view, displayed by his actions and written words, that the yoke of Spanish rule within Latin America (and especially South America) must end if he and his native land were to reach their destiny. For San Martín the end of Spanish rule was not just the end of Spanish oppression but the fulfillment of a destiny, independence, so that all of the Latin American nations could seek out their destined economic and political futures. As Lynch demonstrates, the reforms (if we choose to use this word) that occurred during the latter stages of the colonial period unleashed a desire for freedom ( particularly in the realm of trade and economics). San Martín fervently subscribed to what was becoming

the liberal doctrine of classical economics — Latin Americans needed to be in control of their economic and financial destiny. San Martín made the excuse of needing to attend to his family’s financial affairs to gain the requisite authority to leave his military position and made his way back to his beloved homeland of Argentina, in the midst of the revolu-tionary turmoil of the era. During this period and thereafter he continuously clamored for British aide for the cause of Latin American independence, yet the interests of Great Britain did not coincide with the interests of Latin America, as Lynch so successfully demonstrates here and in his previous overviews of the independence movements in Spanish America.

San Martín eventually gained the governorship of Cuyo, from whence he fashioned an army that began in January 1817 to move out to seize Chile, and which accomplished a great feat in military historical annals by traversing the mighty Andes. His forces marched into the capital of Santiago on February 12, 1817. However, royalist forces con-tinued to contest the Liberator’s forces until their truly decisive defeat on the plains of Maipo on April 3, 1818. San Martín’s victory made him a true icon in the struggle for Latin American independence. Yet for him and others, the true jewel that needed to be conquered was that of the viceroyalty of Peru; a vanguard of royalist hegemony within South America. With aid from many in Argentina and elsewhere, San Martín put together an elaborate force destined to conquer Peru, although his English counterpart Thomas Cochrane questioned the strategies employed to take possession of Peru and end Spanish sway over the land. San Martín believed that the right path to acquiring Peru was by gaining the hearts of the populace, not a direct invasion and bloody con-quest as advocated by Cochrane. The Liberator decided upon a course of negotiation with the Peruvian viceroy, yet when no real compromise could be found, he sought a solution on the field of battle in early August 1821. San Martín’s forces entered Lima on July 28, whereupon he declared Peruvian independence from Spain.

Much of Peru remained in royalist hands until Simón Bolívar and Antonio José de Sucre finally drove out the final vestiges of Spanish rule by January 1826. Lynch clearly shows, despite his detractors, that without San Martín, South American independence (especially in Peru) would have been a much more formidable task and perhaps impos-sible. It was indeed San Martín’s fortitude that allowed for the maturation of the Latin American wars of independence. This work should be on the shelf of any historian. It tells the tale of one of the enduring icons in Latin American and, by extension, world history.

john s. leiby, Paradise Valley Community Collegedoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-024


556 HAHR / August

The Emperor’s Last Campaign: A Napoleonic Empire in America. By emilio ocampo. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliographic Essay. Index. Cloth, $39.95.

The first few chapters of this volume appear to promise a fast-moving, multifacted adventure story, combining Napoleonic history with that of Spanish American inde-pendence and thus having potential appeal to two different sets of specialists. For Latin American studies it has the merit of doing justice to the contributions of a large contin-gent of French military veterans and adventurers who took part in the independence struggle even if, as sometimes happened, it was for them a sideshow or stepping-stone in (they hoped) a larger project to rescue Napoleon from his imprisonment on St. Hel-ena. Some of these men are familiar names, but as a group they tend to be overlooked amid the attention devoted to Simón Bolívar’s “British Legion,” which of course was far from strictly British. Unfortunately, the story soon bogs down in an almost excruciat-ing mass of detail, much of it repetitious, concerning ambitious plans and conspiracies, most of which never came to fruition and in fact may have been quite imaginary in the first place — as the author himself occasionally, but perhaps not often enough, frankly recognizes.

Emilio Ocampo is an Argentine “financial adviser” and professor of banking, not of history, and he takes a very traditional narrative approach to his topic. Year by year up to Napoleon’s death in 1821, and jumping back and forth from continent to continent or island to island, he chronicles the life of Napoleon and his jailers and the involvement of his sympathizers (of whom a surprising number turn out to be British) in plans to spring him loose from his prison and/or to work for the independence of Spanish America. It was naturally assumed that Napoleon himself, if released, would somehow aid the latter struggle. Naturally, any reader will lose the thread from time to time. But Ocampo must be given credit for a truly impressive amount of research, combing archives on both sides of the Atlantic and reading widely in often obscure secondary sources. To be sure, there is no bibliography of books and articles, only 80 pages of endnotes giving both published and manuscript sources. For a “detailed bibliography” one is referred to the Spanish ver-sion published in Buenos Aires in 2007, which is described as “expanded,” though it has an only slightly greater page count (I confess I have not actually seen it).

Anyone who has studied the independence period will probably conclude that the author tends, understandably, to exaggerate the role of the Napoleonic veterans. For example, in his treatment of the abortive República de las Floridas of 1817 he greatly overplays Napoleonic at the expense of Bolivarian connections (not that Bolívar himself accepted responsibility for the project). The treatment is also Plata-centric, as might be expected from an Argentine author: thus the greatest patriot success during the first five years of revolution is not Bolívar’s Campaña Admirable in 1813 but the taking of Mon-tevideo by Buenos Aires forces in 1815. Ocampo’s grasp of northern South American geography is shaky too, for he places Cartagena and Ríohacha in Venezuela rather than Colombia. Yet he portrays the Argentine Liberator José de San Martín in quite unfavor-

able light: too much of an Anglophile, his relations with the Napoleonic diaspora and its creole collaborators were cool at best. Ocampo decidedly prefers Martín’s rivals Carlos de Alvear and José Miguel Carrera. For the Latin Americanist the concurrent story of goings-on at St. Helena and the constant stream of real or alleged projects to rescue or release the famous prisoner has the particular attraction of sheer novelty: most of us surely have given little thought to anything that may have happened to the ex-emperor after Waterloo. And apparently not much that was substantial did happen, despite the obsessive fears of his principal British keeper. But St. Helena was an ideal breeding ground for paranoia all around, and most readers will surely end up sharing some of Ocampo’s sympathy for the great man.

Of course not many readers can be expected to plow through the entire book, but a sense of what was going on can easily be gained by browsing, and in the long run Ocampo has provided all students of the period with an invaluable reference tool. Most index entries consist simply of page numbers, without topical subheadings, but still all the Napoleonic veterans are there, as are scores of participants not just in the St. Helena story but in Spanish American independence, including quite a few whose involvement, however marginal, in schemes of the Napoleonists will come as a surprise. Or at least it was a surprise to me.

david bushnell, University of Floridadoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-025

Las otras ideas: Estudio sobre el primer socialismo en México, 1850 – 1935. By carlos illades. Mexico City: Ediciones Era / Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Cuajimalpa, 2008, Notes. Bibliography. 327 pp. Paper.

El socialismo mexicano en el siglo XIX no ha sido un campo muy visitado por los histo-riadores. En 1969, Gastón García Cantú dedicó un libro a ese asunto; una década antes, Silvio Zavala se interesó en las reflexiones de Víctor Considerant al problema social mexicano. Y antes que ellos, José C. Valadés incursionó en la historia y los documentos del socialismo libertario en México. Tampoco son abundantes los estudios dedicados a la historia de los trabajadores y sobre todo al universo de sus acciones y representaciones en el siglo XIX. Uno de ellos es un libro que Carlos Illades publicó en 1993 dedicado al artesano urbano en la ciudad de México. Desde entonces este historiador no ha dejado de incursionar en el mundo del trabajo, aunque ensanchando sus intereses y perspectivas. Es el caso de Las otras ideas, obra en la que cristaliza una larga investigación jalonada por diversas publicaciones de ensayos y artículos en los que Illades fue exhumando docu-mentos, personajes e ideas de un primer socialismo sobre el que se tenían nociones en muchos casos imprecisas. Es por ello que este libro conjuga un denso saber acumulado y lo hace desde el doble mirador de la historia social y de la historia de las ideas, tratando de articular una exploración sobre la génesis doctrinal del socialismo utópico y romántico, con sus manifestaciones en el campo de la acción política.


558 HAHR / August

En momentos en que el liberalismo en ascenso centraba sus preocupaciones en la construcción de una ciudadanía como garante del ejercicio de deberes y obligaciones políticas, en México se escucharon voces que llamaron la atención sobre lo inacabado de este proyecto. Se objetaba que la libertad, la igualdad y la fraternidad no serían posibles en regímenes que dejaran de atender el problema de la injusta distribución de la riqueza. Deslindar lo político de lo social lejos de armonizar las relaciones humanas, no hacía más que atentar contra un deseado orden en el que fuera posible regenerar a la humanidad entera. La diferencia entre los liberales y el socialismo no radica en haber reparado en la cuestión social para la elaboración del diagnóstico sobre los males de México; sino en haber convertido esa cuestión en el núcleo de las preocupaciones. “A esto se avocó el pensamiento socialista al situar la médula del conflicto en las relaciones de propiedad” ( p. 302).

El libro estudia las ideas, proyectos y alcances del pensamiento de cinco personajes: los mexicanos Juan Nepomuceno Adorno y Nicolás Pizarro, el francés Víctor P. Consid-erant, el griego Plotino C. Rhodakanaty y el estadounidense Albert K. Owen. Se trata de un elenco muy heterogéneo en itinerarios político-intelectuales y en las propias expe-riencias vitales. Visto en su conjunto, no hay dudas de que Rhodakanaty fue el personaje más importante del primer socialismo, cuya obra se revela como la más compleja en su formulación política y filosófica, y la más rica por su impacto en la política obrera. Sin embargo, estas circunstancias no demeritan sino que permiten calibrar mejor las aporta-ciones de los otros autores estudiados; tal es el caso de Considerant y su contribución al entendimiento del peonaje como un sistema que esterilizaba el esfuerzo liberal por construir una ciudadanía moderna; o de Pizarro y su implacable denuncia de la voracidad terrateniente al apropiarse de las tierras en manos de los indígenas.

Resulta encomiable la labor por desentrañar el marcado eclecticismo sobre el que se fundaron las propuestas y formulaciones políticas y filosóficas de los autores estudia-dos. Illades traza una genealogía de influencias y referencias ideológicas y programáti-cas, demostrando el peso del socialismo francés, centralmente de Fourier y en menor escala de Saint Simón, Lamennais, Cabet y Proudhon; y la manera en que esos influjos se combinaron con posturas de filosofía moral extraídas del racionalismo ilustrado, junto a concepciones románticas, panteístas y en algunos casos espiritistas. Mientras que el terreno de la política, si bien el credo liberal con su apuesta democratizadora ejerció una influencia capital, existieron casos como el de Adorno, en donde se simpatizó con el conservadurismo.

El libro cierra con el encuentro de la utopía socialista primero con el anarquismo de cuño kropotkiano, y después con el marxismo, para concluir con el rescate de una polémica que tuvo lugar a mediados de los años treinta del siglo pasado, cuando Vicente Lombardo Toledano se distanció de su mentor el filósofo Antonio Caso. Este último capítulo, a manera de metáfora ilustra el entronizamiento del materialismo dialéctico en el pensamiento de la izquierda mexicana y su definitiva ruptura con posiciones metafísi-cas presentes en los planteamientos de los primeros socialistas.

En síntesis, Las otras ideas rescata un tema olvidado en la historiografía, y con ello abre un campo de estudio que merece ser visitado con mayor frecuencia por los historia-dores de las ideas, de la política y de la cultura del siglo XIX mexicano.

pablo yankelevich, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Méxicodoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-026

Hijos del Pueblo: Gender, Family, and Community in Rural Mexico, 1730 – 1850. By deborah e. kanter. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Maps. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. xii, 151 pp. Cloth, $55.00.

Hijos del Pueblo is a redo with nearly the same title as Deborah Kanter’s 1993 doctoral dis-sertation. For the book, she has added some 20 years to her study, through the Mexican-American War. Her purpose is to study women and how their lives changed during the post-independence era. She selected Toluca, a sizable region west of Mexico City, which was always too close to the capital to become a distinct, independent entity yet main-tained its rural character. It was a district of maize and maguey that shifted somewhat to livestock ranching and then in the nineteenth century to intensive agricultural produc-tion. By the Porfiriato, one town in the Toluca basin, Tenango del Valle, was the most populous in the state of Mexico.

As expected, Kanter finds great continuity of colonial practices over the period studied, but she also observes increasing disadvantage for some sectors of society. She depends largely on Spanish-language court cases to furnish the most comprehensive account possible of “gender, family, and mentalités” ( p. 3). Villages comprised Toluca, and the great majority of their inhabitants were natives, most of whom were Nahuatl speak-ers who had inhabited the region for centuries. Two recent publications have brought to light information about Toluca’s Nahuas through translation and analysis of a treasure trove of last wills and testaments (Caterina Pizzigoni, Testaments of Toluca, 2007; and Miriam Melton-Villanueva and Caterina Pizzigoni, “Late Nahuatl Testaments from the Toluca Valley: Indigenous-Language Ethnohistory in the Mexican Independence Period,” Ethnohistory 55, no. 3 [2008]: 361 – 91). These documents are exemplary for their insights into community, ethnicity, family, religion, women, and change well into the 1820s, yet Kanter inexplicably and unfortunately omits any reference to these important works.

As native populations recovered and the number of Hispanics also grew during the last century of the colonial period, the need for land for subsistence, to say noth-ing of a market surplus, increased exponentially. Expansive Spanish-owned haciendas tended to control water and grazing rights, and their majordomos not infrequently abused any villagers who protested. But rather than take up arms, individuals and town officials depended on the courts for redress, as they had for centuries. Even when the Indian Court was abolished in the 1820s and political ideology and practice shifted away


560 HAHR / August

from the ancient traditions of paternalism and indigenous corporatism, native peoples expected, sought, and often received justice from the local courts.

Patriarchy is a prevailing leitmotiv in this work, and Kanter finds it generally to have served Toluca’s community well over the longue durée. The supreme patriarchs, the king and the pope, represented age-old institutions whose reach extended all the way to local cabildo magistrates and parish priests, who influenced the goings-on in the village and beyond. But patriarchy was subject to the vagaries of time, and where once the par-ish priest used the Spanish institution of depósito, for example, to sequester and protect a woman from abusive relatives, another priest, a willful one, or local official, might lock a women up to punish her, even though she had committed no crime, and most women had a difficult time challenging authorities. The lot of many Toluca women was hard, and especially hard for poor women (and poor men) and widows in general. A Castro and Campillo lithograph on the book jacket makes this point, depicting women on a road to market carrying heavy burdens. But the men in their company are also loaded down, and all are in traditional dress and out and about.

Was life really worse for women in Toluca’s countryside? The extended family as household was a sanctuary of sorts, and if women tended to their duties and violated no norms, by and large they managed. Ethnicity, lineage, and legitimacy continued to define the community, and that same community could be inclusive of the disenfran-chised as long as there were resources for all. But with a shortage of land and radical political innovations, it may be that poor individuals, and widows in particular, lost all entitlement.

This book furnishes important new information about community life in transition in Toluca. It would have benefited greatly, however, from careful copyediting (“being hung nude,” p. 86) and support of assertions such as “Indian men likely felt more impo-tent than other men” ( p. 51), and “The new state . . . became increasingly liberal and less inclined to protect rural women” ( p. 108). The appendix fails to list any sources and the index is sorely deficient. That said, Hijos del Pueblo nevertheless contributes significantly to the field of gender studies and Mexican history and will be useful in classrooms and as a research tool.

susan schroeder, Tulane Universitydoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-027

Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax Priísta, 1940 – 1962. By tanalís padilla. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Photographs. Map. Notes. Bibliography. Index. x, 285 pp. Paper, $22.95. Cloth, $79.95.

This important book shows how a regional study can change our understanding of a larger national story. It opens when scores of Mexican soldiers pulled up to the house of 62-year-old agrarian leader, social activist, previous gubernatorial candidate, and for-mer Zapatista Rubén Jaramillo. They abducted him, his wife, and three of their sons in broad daylight on May 23, 1962, and drove them to the outskirts of the Aztec ruins of Xochicalco, Morelos. They machine-gunned them all, leaving their bullet-riddled bod-ies behind, not even bothering to conceal their crime. The assassinations were meant to silence Jaramillo, crush the larger Jaramillista movement, and send a message to others who would challenge the government. This history of the Jaramillistas tells us a lot about mid-twentieth-century Mexico, shattering images of the “Pax-Priísta” and providing a sobering view of society during the “Mexican Miracle.”

Shaped by the revolution in Morelos, Jaramillo carried forward the age-old demands of Zapatismo for land, local political autonomy, and community control of resources. During a period of intense consolidation of state control under President Lázaro Cárde-nas (1936 – 40) Jaramillo blended revolutionary Zapatismo with Cardenismo, which was “an institutionalized agrarian ideology that encouraged peaceful reformist demands for change.” Jaramillo supported Cárdenas, who sought to institutionalize the revolution by including workers and peasants in a revamped ruling party, the Partido Revolucio-nario Mexicano ( PRM), known as the Partido Revolucionario Institucional ( PRI) since 1946. That was intended to provide them a voice in government. Ultimately, though, they were controlled by the state through official labor unions, peasant confederations, and dependence on government patronage of various forms. The Emiliano Zapata sugar refinery at Zacatepec, Morelos, reflected the trajectory of the Cardenista effort. Intended as a worker-run cooperative benefiting both ejidatarios in the fields and workers in the mill, the arrangement quickly deteriorated once Cárdenas left office. Less enthusiastic social reformers took power after 1940, while federally appointed bureaucrats at Zacate-pec corrupted the co-op. Administrators began lining their own pockets, ripping off the cane growers at the cane weighing stations, and alienating the refinery workers by denying shared control over the shop floor, rigging union votes, and hiring company thugs to intimidate people. The story is convincingly told, and reads as if the Mob ran Zacatepec.

Jaramillo worked at Zacatepec. He first challenged the situation by appealing to local, then regional, and finally national authorities. As he moved further along he liked what he found less and less. What started off looking like local corruption permeated the state and federal bureaucracy. At that point, Jaramillo, a believer in the Constitution of 1917, moved from petitioning the state government to trying to take it over. He never called for an overthrow of the federal government though, insisting instead that it live


562 HAHR / August

up to its constitutional obligations. Jaramillo’s initial labor organizing at the mill grew to include broader efforts for political change that would favor peasants and rural work-ers in general. When he could find no official candidate with the same platform, he ran for governor himself. His activism resulted in several attempts on his life. He got into shoot-outs with hired assassins, killing a couple of them who tried to assassinate him when he was in the middle of a speech. After suffering electoral defeat marred by fraud, he resorted to armed rebellion. The government hunted, and then eventually pardoned, him. He did not go away. His last effort was to create a model rural community that would reflect what he and his supporters thought Zacatepec should have been. The effort got him killed.

Padilla’s work advances the study of post – World War II Mexico considerably. It introduces new archival sources for others to investigate, including recently declassified documents, as well as the author’s own interviews with people who would otherwise be lost to history. Conceptually, it redirects the existing conversation about the negotiated processes of identity and state formation toward Mexico’s remarkable postrevolutionary history of sustained social struggle. The process of crushing opposition that the author cites (students, railway workers, peasants, teachers’ unions, Jaramillistas, etc.) allowed for the imposition of unpopular reforms that have resulted in the deterioration of the stan-dard of living of the Mexican working class. Viewed from this angle, the period under study looks like modernization built on the rollback of revolutionary social reforms, the defeat of popular groups pushing for them, and the creation of an increasingly repressive political regime to carry it out. That is not the end of the story, however, because popular groups of all sorts refuse to disappear. Well written and well researched, this book is a model of how to approach recent history. Reading it will benefit anyone interested in the making of modern Mexico.

paul hart, Texas State Universitydoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-028

Immigration and Xenophobia: Portuguese Immigrants in Early 19th Century Rio de Janeiro. By rosana barbosa. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ix, 135 pp. Paper, $28.00.

The prolific growth of ethnic and racial studies has been one of the more remarkable developments in Latin American historiography in recent decades. Volumes examin-ing the numerous ethnic groups who migrated to the region from around the world during the past two centuries have joined an already sprawling literature that has con-sidered the role of Afro-descendants and indigenous groups in the postcolonial state formation process. The narrative of the modern period has truly been remodeled from the ground up.

Yet, for all of the achievements of these pioneering works, they have often focused their lens on outlying communities. Scholars have tended to overlook certain groups

who were not “other” enough to challenge long-standing preconceptions about the structure of postcolonial society. The most obvious of these lacunae has been those Iberian migrants who settled in Latin America after independence. Representing a dis-carded sociopolitical tradition and an identity that was no longer desired, these foreign-ers occupied an awkward space in their adopted homelands, embodying an ambiguous link between past and present. Understanding the dialectical relationship between how their host society received them and how they adapted to their new surroundings would reveal a great deal about the making of national identity during the postcolonial era. However, besides Jose Moya’s classic study of Spanish immigrants in Buenos Aires (Cous-ins and Strangers), there have been few serious attempts in the United States to analyze this process.

Rosana Barbosa’s Immigration and Xenophobia adds to this narrow historiography by examining the settlement of Portuguese immigrants in Brazil between 1822 and 1850. Though specialists are familiar with the 15,000 or so noblemen, intellectuals, artists, and other elite who migrated from Portugal to Rio de Janeiro with Dom João in 1808 during the Napoleonic Wars, they are perhaps less aware of the broader settlement of Portu-guese in the Brazilian colonial capital city during the first half of that century, especially after independence was declared in 1822. Barbosa argues that an emerging Brazilian nationalism merged with an anticolonial fervor that was manifested in widespread xeno-phobia throughout the period. This Lusophobia derived mainly from discontent with Dom Pedro over several issues: a treaty he had signed with Great Britain promising the country low import tariffs; his succumbing to British abolitionist fervor by agreeing to end the slave trade; and, most importantly, his increasing involvement in Portuguese affairs following the death of his father in 1826. While the Brazilian elite supported the introduction of Portuguese immigrants into their society, the author argues that it was the lower classes that were vociferously xenophobic, in part because of the increased competition for work in Rio.

Still, Barbosa contends that the Portuguese managed to carve out a successful niche in the retail sector. Through an analysis of passport registers, she estimates that 26,785 Portuguese settled in Rio between 1826 and 1850, with the peak inflow coming after 1842. Almost all of them were poor, single men who relied on familial ties and regional links to enter middle-status occupations in Rio. They came to dominate the occupation of “sales clerk” in the city, to the point that over half of those whom she has records for worked in that sector. This classification seemingly encompassed a variety of roles, such as a salesperson in a retail store, a collecting agent for a business, a bookkeeper, secretary, or even a servant. One in five Portuguese worked as storeowners (comerciantes), typically managing small grocery shops, fabric stores, or cafés. Others were commercial agents, tavern owners, and slave traders. Most lived in Candelária, which was the commercial zone, and the vast majority married Brazilian women, in large part because of the scar-city of Portuguese immigrants. According to the author, this facilitated the erosion of cultural and political links to their homeland.

This study will be of particular interest to those who have enjoyed the social his-


564 HAHR / August

tories of Zephyr Frank and Mary Karasch on the same era in Rio de Janeiro. Barbosa’s work is especially in dialogue with Frank’s seminal Dutra’s World, though unfortunately, she fails to raise this point or even cite the book. While Frank found that many free men of color were able to become successful entrepreneurs in the first half of the nineteenth century in Rio precisely because there was a lack of economic competition from immi-grants, Barbosa argues that there was a strong Portuguese presence in the city that was met with rampant xenophobia from the working class. Perhaps the two positions can be reconciled, however. Barbosa notes that Portuguese immigrants preferred to enter retail precisely because the expanding middle-class and elite population in Rio demanded improvement in that underserviced sector.

There are several problems with the work that limit its overall success. Barbosa relies on a scant source base and fails to demonstrate a proper grasp of the broader his-toriography. Aside from missing key studies on the region and time period, she fails to engage in a discussion of identity studies, which would have been useful given her inter-est in immigration and adaptation. Furthermore, her main contention — that Portuguese immigrants were met with rampant xenophobia from working class cariocas — is largely unsubstantiated. Most of the evidence that she cites as proof of this nativism in Rio has to do with one event, the so-called Noite das Garrafadas. This was a single night of fighting in the streets of Rio in 1831 between supporters and opponents of Dom Pedro. Yet, beyond this event and a discussion of general Brazilian discontent with the emperor, there is little evidence for the xenophobia that is suggested in the title of the book. What remains then is a basic and preliminary social history of Portuguese immigrants in Rio de Janeiro in the decades that followed independence.

brad lange, Emory University doi 10.1215/00182168-2010-029

The Financial Crisis of Abolition. By john schulz. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 193 pp. Cloth, $55.00.

John Schulz’s study of the financial upheaval taking place during the final months of the Brazilian Empire and the early years of the republic has been published in English after considerable delay. As the title suggests, the author’s principal argument is that the crisis known as the Encilhamento was caused by ill-advised government reactions to the abolition of Brazilian slavery in 1888. It is argued that by expanding monetary circula-tion in reckless fashion and thus fueling diverse forms of speculation, successive financial authorities were almost exclusively concerned with appeasing powerful planter groups, most especially coffee growers from the southeast, who had been denied indemnifica-tion for their loss of slave property. Schulz also insists that the Encilhamento period represents a sharp break with the long-standing tradition of financial responsibility and caution that characterized the Empire and would resume as republican administrations

implemented largely orthodox policies of stabilization. The implication here is that Bra-zilian authorities were generally knowledgeable about the workings of both the interna-tional and domestic financial systems and therefore cannot be considered as mere lackeys of foreign banking and investment interests, as proponents of dependency theory would have it.

Overall, The Financial Crisis of Abolition is a lively and well-structured narrative of Brazilian financial history during the Empire and the first decade of the republican regime. It should be of interest to general readers and students and, thanks to its detailed sequencing of events, will serve as a reference for those more familiar with Brazilian history. The study is based on solid research of a traditional nature. Official ministe-rial records, correspondence, and published documents are examined, along with the writings of politicians and entrepreneurs involved in the Encilhamento, and newspapers from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Schulz did fieldwork at the Rothschild Archive where he turned up little-known sources of importance for his theme and for the development of Brazilian financial history in general. He also quotes extensively from the Rio News, an English-language newspaper edited by a U.S. citizen who often voiced the views of the city’s merchant community and was an outspoken reformist. These latter sources have seldom been used by historians in Brazil, and the fact that Schulz showcases them is commendable.

The author is perhaps at his best when giving a blow-by-blow account of events leading up to and comprising the crisis and carefully examining the complex, decade-long process which would finally restore stability. In focusing on the Encilhamento itself, which lasted from June of 1889 to November of 1891, the policies and actions of three successive finance ministers are fully recounted. Their tripling of the money sup-ply, stimulation of stock market speculation, and attempts at otherwise purchasing the support of planters fueled the bubble and left the financial system in ruins. Moreover, these ministers — in particular the abolitionist Rui Barbosa, a revered figure in Brazilian history — did not hesitate to favor banker friends, thus creating an atmosphere in which corruption was rife. It would take ten years of orthodox policies tempered by occasional state intervention to restore financial order.

It is when looking at the larger picture that Schulz sometimes misses the mark and fails to engage in meaningful historiographical debate. Although recent contributions of U.S. scholars of Brazilian economic history are listed in the bibliography, their findings are hardly discussed. It has been suggested that the Encilhamento must be seen in light of an unfavorable international conjuncture in which crisis was contagious. The implica-tion is that Brazilian authorities were unable to control certain aspects of the crisis, which the author steadfastly insists was a purely domestic affair. Furthermore, the arguments of nearly two decades of historical and economic studies produced in Brazil have not been incorporated. The so-called Rio school has challenged interpretations based on the colo-nial system, affecting how historians approach nineteenth-century economic history. It is clear that as of the mid-eighteenth century the slave trade to Brazil was controlled by merchants established in Rio and Salvador. The long-held notion that the ending of


566 HAHR / August

that trade somehow liberated capital for more useful purposes now rings rather hollow. In the same vein, recent scholarship has built upon Robert Conrad’s pioneering work to demonstrate that the abolitionist movement enjoyed broad popular support and was not nearly as peaceful or orderly as previously imagined. Indeed, the growing participa-tion of slaves in the emancipation process made life extremely difficult for slaveholders, and by 1886 the institution of slavery began its inevitable collapse. That inevitability, together with the widespread conditional freeing of slaves, rendered formal abolition a mere admission of the fait accompli. Why were authorities not better prepared to deal with the aftermath?

douglas c. libby, Universidade Federal de Minas Geraisdoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-030

Historia del capitalismo agrario pampeano: Tomo 4: La agricultura pampeana en la primera mitad del siglo XIX. By julio djenderedjian. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores Argentina, 2008. Photographs. Illustrations. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Indexes. 399 pp. Paper.

Cereal agriculture in the Argentine pampas experienced a very slow rate of growth dur-ing the first half of the nineteenth century, in particular when compared to the expan-sion of cattle ranching in the area. However, during those years the agricultural sector underwent changes that created the preconditions for its impressive expansion during the second half of the nineteenth century. In this fine study, Julio Djenderedjian traces the agricultural development of wheat in Buenos Aires, Entre Ríos, Santa Fe, and Córdoba between the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. The subject is significant, and the book makes a valuable contribution toward rounding out the historical picture of the pampean region. It is divided into six chapters that can be read as self-contained units or as part of the larger narrative. The main themes addressed are colonial and postcolonial cereal production, the evolution of wheat agriculture’s technology from the late eighteenth century to the 1850s, and early colo-nization attempts in the pampas. There is a wealth of information in the text and some repetition, although most of it is effective. The author has merged research in a wide array of quantitative and qualitative sources with important references to the secondary literature, thus providing a good synthesis of the old and the new that will be appealing to both expert and inexpert readers. Two appendices provide valuable information that complements the data included in pertinent tables and graphs throughout the book.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Argentina relied on imported cere-als to supply the demands of its domestic market. In order to identify the reasons that accounted for the slow growth of the agricultural sector during those years, the study traces the evolution of cereal agriculture and its commercialization from the late colonial years until the 1850s. Political instability, difficulties to access labor and capital, price instability, and competition from foreign wheat explain producers’ choice of cattle ranch-

ing over agriculture. This situation started to change during the 1840s, when a decline in the level of political conflict, the emergence of new markets, and higher prices created more favorable conditions for the slow expansion of wheat agriculture in the region. The period witnessed the adoption of new agricultural technology as well. Djendered-jian examines exhaustively the introduction of new tools, machinery, and seeds as well as attempts to spread and systematize innovations through manuals and publications. Changes in agricultural methods took place in direct response to the incorporation into cereal agriculture of new lands that were located farther away from coastal markets and presented different soil requirements. Initially, agricultural producers were slow to adapt old techniques to the requirements of these new areas. During the 1840s the process of innovation hastened, thus creating more appropriate conditions for the developments that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The analysis of early colonization attempts in the region constitutes another remarkable part of this study. Djenderedjian focuses on the different strategies imple-mented by both colonial and independent authorities to populate the region. While geo-political needs guided the establishment of towns in frontier areas during colonial times, provincial authorities promoted colonization as a means to reorganize the space along more rational lines during the decades that followed independence. Despite their failure, these early efforts paved the way for the agricultural colonies created during the second half of the nineteenth century. The last chapter shifts the focus from a regional approach to a comparative analysis of wheat agriculture in Buenos Aires, Entre Ríos, Santa Fe, and Córdoba. The chapter provides a valuable, albeit short and slightly unbalanced analysis that identifies the peculiarities of wheat agriculture in the four provinces examined. The case-by-case overview uncovers the importance of local circumstances and the hetero-geneity that characterized wheat production in the region.

Argentine cereal expansion during the last decades of the 1800s resulted from pro-cesses that took shape gradually and progressively during the first half of the century. In this book, Julio Djenderedjian has done a superb job by examining both the challenges facing wheat agriculture and the changes experienced by the sector until the 1850s. This reviewer misses a deeper analysis of the actors themselves and the agricultural soci-ety that took shape as a result of the processes analyzed in the book. In any case, this insightful study sheds light on the preconditions that enabled the impressive growth of pampean agriculture, and represents a valuable addition to the scholarship on Argentine economic development.

patricia juarez-dappe, California State University, Northridge doi 10.1215/00182168-2010-031


568 HAHR / August

La matanza del Seguro Obrero (5 de septiembre de 1938). By marcus klein. Santiago: Editorial Globo, 2008. Photographs. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. 199 pp. Paper.

This brief yet informative book analyzes the critical conjuncture that led to the his-toric triumph of the Frente Popular in Chile in 1938. Marcus Klein focuses on the coup orchestrated by Jorge González von Marées, the jefe of the Movimiento Nacio-nal Socialista (MNS), and then examines the impact of the subsequent massacre of the young nacistas, a small group of Chilean nazis that failed to provoke a military uprising to overthrow Arturo Alessandri. The author explains why those tragic events had a deci-sive impact in Chilean politics. They exposed the repressive character of the Alessandri administration, left former dictator Carlos Ibáñez out of the presidential race, and, more importantly, facilitated the political compromises that allowed Pedro Aguirre Cerda to defeat right-wing candidate Gustavo Ross in one of the most contested elections in Chile. Although this interpretation is certainly not new, Klein’s well-researched work provides a vivid picture of the political forces and characters in conflict, tracing their changing strategies to reach La Moneda.

Correcting previous treatments by other authors that characterized the MNS as one of the new voices of Chilean nationalism, Klein shows that, just like latter-day nacio-nalistas in Chile, the jefe’s followers were fascists who easily traded their ideology for immediate political benefits. Thus they soon directed their rhetoric toward the popular sectors in search of votes. Moreover, the author argues that while the communists and socialists vehemently rejected the MNS’s efforts to attract working-class voters, Chil-ean nacistas enjoyed considerable freedom to maneuver because of President Arturo Alessandri’s obsession with fighting the threat of communism. Yet this fear was totally unfounded, as the Communist Party had already adopted the Popular Front strategy, a “marriage of convenience that ultimately Alessandri hoped to destroy” ( p. 52).

Klein also examines the presidential candidates’ profiles and actions with a keen eye, showing their merits and, especially, their limitations. The author leaves no doubt that Gustavo Ross needed little effort to disappoint voters with his brusque personality, “contempt for other classes except his own” ( p. 64), and certainly his policies as a cabinet member, which granted him the unflattering moniker “minister of hunger.” No less a problematic alternative, the “wealthy landowner and veteran politician” Pedro Aguirre Cerda was the only candidate who would give frentistas a real chance to win the elec-tion, in spite of his “lack of magnetism and personal charisma” ( pp. 70 – 72). For his part, Carlos Ibáñez, who upon returning from exile stated that he had no ambitions other than living peacefully with his family, would not hesitate to reject the rather embarrass-ing nacistas. Instead, he hoped to garner the support of the Frente Popular; in the end, however, Ibáñez was incapable of securing the backing of the political forces that really mattered. In short, Klein suggests, Chilean voters would have trouble deciding which candidate was less unappealing.

The study of the massacre’s immediate consequences is one of the book’s most sig-

nificant contributions. Klein shows the intricacies of the government’s harsh response, Alessandri’s readiness to take advantage of the situation to request extraordinary powers, and, as customary in Chile, the distorting role of right-wing newspapers El Diario Ilus-trado and El Mercurio, which were both “ready to disseminate lies and misinformation” about the massacre ( p. 93). The author also establishes that, although the young nacistas posed no real threat to the government, an upset Alessandri was not only determined to humiliate and execute them but also lied “with an amazing lack of shame” ( p. 89) when he affirmed that some had been murdered by their own comrades. Klein explains this deter-mination as motivated by Alessandri’s resolve to avoid by all means being ousted again, which is a plausible argument, since the coup took place on the anniversary of the mili-tary intervention that forced him to resign in 1925. However, it would also be necessary to consider Alessandri’s growing authoritarianism and his infamous record at repressing the labor movement, which included the massacres in San Gregorio and La Coruña.

Finally, another strength of this book is its rich bibliography, which the author reads selectively and critically, based on his exhaustive research on Chilean right-wing political actors, both fascist and otherwise. Klein is also to be commended for using a variety of sources, including an extensive list of Chilean newspapers and magazines, reports by foreign diplomats, and a selection of key documents as appendixes. Last but not least, readers will enjoy Klein’s concise style and clarity. All of this makes the book an excellent resource for readers seeking an engaging discussion of Chilean politics in an era, as Enrique Lafourcade puts it, “cuando los políticos eran inteligentes.”

claudio robles-ortiz, Universidad Austral de Chile doi 10.1215/00182168-2010-032

Ese gol existe: Una mirada al Perú a través del fútbol. Edited by aldo panfichi. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2008. Illustrations. Notes. Paper.

Peruvian soccer has seen better days. Peru ended up in last place in the South American qualifying group for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, and its club teams have floun-dered in the major cups in recent years. While a few players star in Europe, more make headlines in Lima for their late-night antics before games. Peruvians look back to the 1970s, when Peru had a remarkable showing in the 1970 Mexico City World Cup and its club teams did well in international tournaments, and wonder what happened.

Interest in fútbol, however, has not waned. The major teams still attract large crowds and young players dream of making it big, that is, playing in Europe. This book not only seeks to confirm soccer as a relevant topic of study but also to demonstrate the strong state of such studies. In the introduction, Aldo Panfichi challenges the once pervasive belief that soccer was the opium of the masses, part of a regime’s bread and circus pro-vided to distract. To show how these views have been overcome, he keenly links studies in Peru with international trends in the understanding of sports and society. Some read-


570 HAHR / August

ers might still question the role of soccer in society and even express their disdain for the sport, but few if any upon reading this book will question its importance in Peru or the quality of these studies.

The first four essays deal with the game’s emergence in Peru in the early twentieth century, particularly the creation of the two major teams, Alianza Lima and Universi-tario (or la U). Collectively, these essays provide a more sophisticated picture of what had been a simplified dichotomy that served to mark each team’s mystique and fan base. Alianza was and is seen as the working-class and black team, while Universitario was linked to middle-class university students. These foundational myths mark both teams today, as Alianza has its stadium in working-class La Victoria, while la U has built a large new stadium to the east of Lima where the upper classes have relocated. Alianza is seen as playing prettier soccer while la U is more efficient. I’ve heard dozens of times that Alianza is Brazil while Universitario is Germany, just not as good. The excellent essays by Gerardo Álvarez, Martín Benavides, and Jaime Pulgar-Vidal Otálora on the early years of both teams complicate but in no way debunk this contrast. Some non-fans might consider these texts too detailed, but most readers will find them fascinating reading, as well as an older article by José Deustua, Steve Stein, and Susan Stokes. Aldo Panfichi and Jorge Thieroldt Llanos delve into the differing fan base of these two teams, explor-ing their symbolism and their most fanatical followers, the Comando Sur (Alianza) and Trinchera Norte (la U). Moving the analysis away from famous teams and their stadi-ums, Carlos Aguirre examines soccer in Lima’s prisons in the first four decades of the twentieth century.

Luis Carlos Arias Schreiber punctures another myth: that Adolf Hitler single-hand-edly prevented Peru’s 1936 Olympic team from advancing after it humiliated Austria, by forcing a new match, which Peru refused. He shows that while Peru had a strong show-ing, fans did enter the field at the end of the game, the Austrian team was actually ama-teur, and Hitler had nothing to do with the decision to force a rematch. Arias Schreiber has done wonderful research, although I was sorry to have that myth punctured; I loved the Jesse Owens−like story of a multiracial team whomping the fascists.

The remaining articles explore different aspects of Peruvian soccer in recent decades. Aldo Panfichi and Víctor Vich examine the mourning and anger after the tragic loss of almost the entire Alianza squad in a November 1987 plane accident. Family mem-bers continue to believe that their children will return, while fans question why the Peruvian state was so slow to send help when the Fokker crashed in the ocean just outside of Lima. The authors do a magisterial job of exploring pain and memory, incorporating different theoretical debates while never losing focus on the players and their thousands of loved ones. Jorge Thieroldt Llanos examines the barras bravas (Ultras in Europe) and gangs, essentially the lumpen poor kids who live and fight for their teams. David Wood provides an overview of soccer and identity in modern Peru, while two essays capture the lives and careers of major figures in the sport press. Finally, Richard Witzig discusses Peru’s lone success story in the last decade or so, Cienciano of Cuzco, which won the Copa Sudamericana in 2003, eliminating Santos and defeating River Plate in the finals, and then beating Boca Juniors in the Recopa. Witzig argues that altitude

(Cienciano’s stadium stands at 3,300 meters above sea level) is not the key to Cienciano’s success — their victories against the two Argentine teams did not come in Cuzco. None-theless, anyone who has witnessed a game in Cuzco — and I’ve been to dozens — must recognize the advantage that the altitude offers. Of course, it’s not the key reason for their great run, Peru’s last moment of soccer glory.

In what was clearly a labor of love, Ese gol existe is carefully edited and includes lovely photographs. Aldo Panfichi and his collaborators succeed via goleada in demonstrating the richness and relevance of studies on Peruvian soccer. The texts on origins and myths, youth violence, and prisoners contribute greatly to the social sciences and soccer fans and non-fans have much to enjoy in this fine edited volume.

charles f. walker, University of California, Davisdoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-033

International and Comparative

Guerrillas: War and Peace in Central America. By dirk kruijt. New York: Zed Books, 2008. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xxiv, 248 pp. Cloth, $99.95. Paper, $32.95.

In this accessible study, Dutch development scholar, diplomat, and policy adviser Dirk Kruijt provides a focused, analytical introduction to the leaders of the three insurgen-cies in Central America that commanded worldwide attention from the 1970s through the mid-1990s. Informed by several years of serving as a policy advisor and engaging in collaborative academic research on the isthmus, more than 90 interviews with political and military leaders, and access to social scientists and intellectuals as well as literary and archival sources, Kruijt provides an instructive account of the guerrillas’ motivations, organizational structures, strategies, and tactics amid their shared historical contexts of oligarchic oppression, deep social inequality, and unhelpful U.S. influence. This his-torical analysis is complemented by an unvarnished assessment of the revolutionaries’ successes and failures, their legacies, and the as-yet-unmet challenges and unresolved tensions that remain in the region today.

Using land, unemployment, and demographic data portraying growing social exclusion and displacement rooted in already highly inequitable societies, Kruijt points to the cognitive dissonance experienced by university students and other members of the emerging middle sectors as they navigated the sharply contrasting realities character-izing Central America’s urban centers crowded by poor rural immigrants. Chief among the reasons for the guerrilla insurgencies was the military oligarchic regimes’ inability or unwillingness to reform themselves. General Héctor Alejandro Gramajo, for example, recalled that even the hint of reform was entirely unwelcome, as when he attempted “to talk about Guatemala being a society that was stratified, fragmented, etc., and that we needed to have a more tolerant culture, a professional army, greater political participa-tion, and so on” ( p. 22).

Book Reviews / International and Comparative 571

572 HAHR / August

Kruijt emphasizes the importance of universities and Christian Base Communities for guerrilla recruitment efforts, albeit supplemented by trade unions, neighborhood organizations, peasant associations, left-wing political parties and some young military officers. For Francisco Jovel, who became secretary general of the Central American Workers’ Revolutionary Party ( Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores Centro-americanos) in El Salvador, involvement as a student began with “the idea of serving others” ( p. 41). Monica Baltodano had participated in a high school group in which stu-dents “questioned their Christian faith in such an unjust and unequal society” ( p. 42) before deepening her involvement and becoming a guerrilla commander of the Sandini-sta National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional) in Nicaragua. Guerrillas improvised what Sandinista Commander Jaime Wheelock referred to as a “very practical struggle” by combining liberation theology, dependency analysis, a vari-ety of texts on revolution and military strategy, the guiding myths of popular resistance, and periods of training in Cuba ( p. 56).

Strategies and tactics and their resulting outcomes depended on many factors that Kruijt presents in a crisp narrative that makes effective use of the recollections of par-ticipants in these struggles. Here, as elsewhere, he draws comparisons among the three cases that contribute toward an understanding of the difference outcomes. Key con-siderations in this regard include strategies of rural and urban insurgencies, the role of the U.S. government, the intensity of military and paramilitary counterinsurgency campaigns, levels of popular support, and the guerrillas’ international diplomacy. The daily practice of gender and ethnic relations, sexual intimacy, and morality are similarly examined at the level of guerrilla units and in their relations with the surrounding com-munities. In sum, roughly the first half of the book presents the reader with a demystified yet generally sympathetic portrayal of the guerrillas.

If the first half of the book serves to explain why so many young Central Americans became guerrillas in their countries’ periods of revolutionary struggle and hope, the sec-ond half in some sense seeks to come to terms with the often bitter results they obtained. The final chapters focus on utopia and dystopia in Nicaragua, the peace processes and reintegration, and guerrilla legacies and the enduring ambivalences of hindsight. For those who were present with these struggles, these chapters provide valuable material for reflection. This book should be read in its entirety by anyone interested in understand-ing the choices facing Central Americans and others similarly situated when regimes of political repression and social exclusion are not enough. It should also be required read-ing in Washington and Tegucigalpa as the leaders of the military coup of June 28, 2009, in the guerrillas’ neighboring country of Honduras seek “recklessly” to repeat history.

craig auchter, Butler Universitydoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-034

Fórmula para o caos: A derrubada de Salvador Allende (1970 – 1973). By luiz alberto moniz bandeira. Preface by samuel pinheiro guimarães. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2008. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 640 pp.

Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira’s captivating account of the opposition to the Popular Unity government in Chile (1970 – 73) details the impossibility of the plan for the Chil-ean way to socialism (“la via chilena con vino y empanadas”). The Popular Unity gov-ernment faced challenges from their own supporters who adopted increasingly radical tactics such as tomas (takeovers) and land invasions. Due to the historical context of the early 1970s, Salvador Allende found little material support from the Soviet Union or Cuba. For instance, in December 1972, Allende traveled to the Soviet Union to negotiate a loan for US $500 million but returned with promises for a loan for only US $100 mil-lion. As Moniz Bandeira claims, “ ‘El hermano mayor’ did not have any resources avail-able to support a new member who wanted to enter the family ‘with wine and meat pies’ ” ( p. 392). In addition, Allende faced well-organized and financially strong opposition from the CIA and the Nixon administration, factions of the Chilean Armed Forces, U.S. and Chilean corporations, the Chilean media, right-wing terrorist groups, and even foreign diplomats such as Brazilian ambassador Antônio Cândido da Câmara Canto (1970 – 73). What is most chilling to read in Fórmula para o caos is how detailed and multilayered the plans actually were to create a situation in which a military coup and military gov-ernment seemed like the best solution. While Moniz Bandeira’s evidence is solid, the story seems almost implausible in terms of how effectively the plans were designed and executed, leaving the impression that Allende and the Popular Unity government had no chance to succeed.

As documents on the Cold War in Latin America continue to be released and new archives open, scholars are able to construct historical narratives based on evidence showing the plans and links amongst the military regimes in Latin America. Moniz Bandeira’s Fórmula para o caos is a welcome addition to the historiography on inter-American Cold War relations. Whereas Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop (2006) makes Guatemala the exemplary case to explain Cold War politics in Central America, Moniz Bandeira focuses on Chile as the key example of Cold War politics in the Southern Cone. Similar to other studies on Salvador Allende, the Popular Unity, and the military coup of 1973, Moniz Bandeira uses documents from Peter Kornbluh’s Chile Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, and other U.S. government documents such as Senate hearings and reports on the International Telephone and Telegraph Company in Chile. He also draws from relatively new electronic archives in Chile such as the Centro de Estudios Miguel Enríquez (CEME) Arquivo Chile.

But, what is most interesting about this book is what is missing from its title. Moniz Bandeira’s breadth of knowledge about Brazilian politics during the dictatorship and his use of documents from the Itamaraty, Ministry of Foreign Relations, and Brazilian National Archives illustrate how the Brazilian military government supported and pro-


574 HAHR / August

moted coups and military regimes in Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Argentina. He also provides evidence of how the Brazilian Armed Forces, Brazilian banks, and Brazilian corporations — all with ties to the CIA — provided funding and training to opposition groups in Chile, such as Patria y Libertad. Drawing from the experience of successful tactics used in the Brazilian coup of 1964, such groups orchestrated strikes and women’s protest marches to create the notion of instability and popular opposition to Allende. After the coup, Brazilian ambassador Câmara Canto visited members of the Chilean military junta, Brazil being the first country to extend official recognition to the new government. In the days immediately following the coup, the Brazilian Armed Forces transported 20 tons of food provisions and medical supplies to Santiago, and the Central Bank of Brazil promised Chile a credit of US $200 million. Although Brazilian general Emílio Garrastazu Médici did not want official involvement in the conspiracy to over-throw Allende, Moniz Bandeira claims that the immediate official recognition, support, and aid for the military junta demonstrates Brazil’s complicity in Chilean politics in the early 1970s.

While lengthy, the book is well written and engaging. If it were in English, it would be an excellent text for undergraduate courses on U.S. – Latin American relations. [Edi-tor’s note: The book was published simultaneously in Chile in a Spanish edition.] The book brings to life the extremely politicized atmosphere of the Southern Cone countries in the early 1970s, and Moniz Bandeira makes it seem as though no middle road existed: Public life centered around the divide between being pro- or anti-Communist. In the conclusion, he suggests that Allende’s peaceful way to socialism was a naive dream that lacked historical precedent and was doomed to fail, especially since Allende’s opposition did not hesitate to resort to violence, weapons, and foreign support.

sarah sarzynski, Mount Holyoke Collegedoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-035

The Cuban Connection: Drug Trafficking, Smuggling, and Gambling in Cuba from the 1920s to the Revolution. By eduardo sáenz rovner. Translated by russ davidson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xii, 247 pp. Cloth, $35.00.

This slender volume takes on three interrelated subjects over a tumultuous half-century of Cuban history. The focus is clearly on drugs, as the author acknowledges in stating that the chapters on smuggling and gambling are included as “part of a wider trajectory of vice” ( p. 14). Even so, its coverage of Cuban drug running makes this a unique con-tribution to the fields of Latin American history, U.S. foreign relations, and narcotics studies.

The most engaging aspects of the study are the vivid details it integrates mainly from two sources: the Archivo Nacional de Cuba, and the files of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the forerunner of the Drug Enforcement Agency, contained in Records

Group 170 of the U.S. National Archives. These documents show the complicity of steamship companies from many different nations in transporting drugs to Cuba, and reveal webs of conspiracy involving a wide international array of actors. The names of some of these figures seem to come straight from gangster movies, such as “El Cubano Loco,” and “El Chinito Lima.” The most fitting moniker was that of a drug trafficker as notorious as he was ubiquitous during the heyday of Havana decadence: Santo Traf-ficante. Voluminous secondary sources provide background for the intriguing details drawn from the archival records.

The evidence compiled here reflects the uneven enforcement of drug laws by Cuban authorities, who targeted poor, dark-skinned marijuana users and Chinese opium smokers but spared rich, light-skinned cocaine snorters. That pattern endured despite shifts in power in Havana. Cuban courts were slow and amenable to lenient bail arrange-ments, resulting in a revolving door for traffickers who found Cuba to be a lucrative and convenient market, and frustration for members of the growing U.S. anti-narcotics bureaucracy.

In general, this analysis refutes the pro-revolutionary historiography that blames a neocolonial relationship with the United States for Cuba’s vices. The account corrects the false image of Fidel Castro crusading against all types of vice following his entry into Havana in January 1959, reminding readers that the revolutionary leader invited U.S. tourists to return to their Cuban playground that same month. Even though Carlos Prueba, the “Troubador of the Revolution,” decried gambling in a song claiming that the Batista regime had turned La Habana into a “gambling den” and Castro’s arrival “was the end of the party” ( p. 139), the new Castro government proved willing to work with people who knew how to run hotels and casinos, the infrastructure of the tourism industry, even if they were transparently involved in organized crime. At the outset, the regime prohibited only cockfights and slot machines, which were associated with ram-pant government corruption during the Batista years. The infamous Mob-run casinos, meanwhile, stayed open for more than two years, until September 1961.

There would be no cooperation with the United States in a war on drugs, how-ever, despite the fact that Castro’s government was harsh with marijuana offend-ers, even doling out death sentences for dealers. Although this was a major shift from the lackadaisical approach of previous Cuban governments, the chief of the FBN, the J. Edgar Hoover – like Harry Anslinger, accused Castro of assisting the flow of drugs into the United States. His charges sounded like something out of the screenplay for Reefer Madness: “No one knows yet to what extent Cuba is participating in the efforts to undermine the United States with drugs. But certainly . . . the Communists may be expected to employ narcotics against America” ( p. 138). Castro himself drew suspicion of cocaine addiction, because of his inordinately long and energetic speech making. Ironi-cally, when Castro complied with U.S. requests to arrest the infamous Meyer Lansky and other American mobsters, it turned out there were no drug charges pending against them in the United States, so the Cuban courts released them.

The book addresses the history of Cuban immigration, a phenomenon tied to smug-


576 HAHR / August

gling and drug running, and goes beyond the national boundaries of Cuba to the places of origin for the drugs exported to the island. These may be part of the trans national picture of the drug trade, but at times the attention to these concerns, such as an entire chapter devoted to France, seems somewhat off the subject.

Considering the great value of the FBN documents tapped here, it is surprising that a book like this did not appear sooner. Great credit is due to the author for locating this data and producing such a concise account based upon it. The picture that emerges from the book is one of a simpler, less violent time in the drug culture of the Caribbean region. When compared to the vast scale and savage violence of the Mexican Sinoloa Cartel that currently controls the majority of the North American drug market, the Cuban connec-tions of the mid-twentieth century seem decidedly quaint.

eric paul roorda, Bellarmine Universitydoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-036

Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities. By laura lomas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xvii, 379 pp. Cloth, $89.95. Paper, $24.95.

Laura Lomas’s monograph is a superb contribution to the scholarship on José Martí and the ways in which he and other Latino authors in the late nineteenth-century United States laid the foundations for a critique of a rising United States by viewing its relation-ship to Latin America from their anticolonial perspective as migrants. The book con-nects with a new, critical literature in American Studies about the significance of the rise of the U.S. empire in the works of writers such as Emerson, Whitman, and Helen Hunt Jackson, and new explorations on the origins of modernism.

The author advances the scholarship on Martí beyond canonical works, e.g., “Nues-tra América,” to other lesser known and even recently discovered writing, subjecting both the well-known writings and the recent additions to a more complex interpretation. Lomas’s careful reading moves the scholarship beyond the conventional wisdom that Martí was critical of corruption and the rise of monopolies in the United States but that he remained enamored of American technology and great literary figures.

Lomas examines Martí’s texts in the context of his situation as a political exile and transitory migrant who depended on his journalism for a living, who worked often as a consular officer of Latin American countries, and who worked sometimes openly but often clandestinely to organize the Cuban revolution for independence. Martí’s work cannot be understood, as Lomas shows, except by taking into account the constraints he faced as a needy, politically active, foreign migrant in the United States trying to make sure that his writing was correctly apprehended in the Latin American culture context of his readership. Lomas shows how Martí’s texts of praise for American writers like Whitman and Emerson and his discussions of American technology are immersed in irony, subterfuge, and in a cultural as well as a linguistic translation that was necessary

in order for his readers south of the border to grasp North American culture. Plowing in between the lines of Martí’s prolix prose, she discovers a “critique of Whitman’s rac-ism and expansionism in his close reading of Whitman’s poetic form” ( p. 203). She uses the term “untranslation” to describe the process whereby she renders in English and for American readers Martí’s camouflaged discourse about the involvement of literary fig-ures such as Whitman in the construction of a U.S. idiom of empire. She shows how in Martí’s search for an anti-imperial stance he prefigures ideas advanced by C. L. R. James about the role of Caribbean masses in decolonization, and by Benedict Anderson about the importance of print culture as constitutive of national imaginaries.

Another new and original aspect of the texts by Lomas is how she shows Martí’s writings to be at the foundation of two literary modes, Latin American modernismo and the modernism more well known in the United States. For many decades these two lit-erary styles and approaches were not considered to be at all related. At best they were simply treated as false cognates; at worst they were viewed as standing in stark contradic-tion to each other.

In fact, American critics remained largely ignorant of the existence of modernismo. More recently a number of critics — for example, writers Iván Schulman and Evelyn Picón Garfield and literary critic Fredric Jameson — began to recognize commonalities as both literary modes arose in response to modernity, with modernismo predating mod-ernism by more than two decades. Lomas takes the argument further, arguing convinc-ingly that one can find the first manifestations of both currents in Martí, whose Spanish poetry has long been identified with the beginning of modernismo, when examining his writings on/in the United States.

Lomas’s work complements books by José David Saldívar, Doris Sommer, Jeffrey Belnap and Raúl Fernández, Julio Ramos, Susana Rotker, and Ada Ferrer that have pro-vided a background on the history and society that surrounded Martí. It is a highly original and timely presentation on an exciting and growing field of literary and cul-tural scholarship. For U.S. scholars it provides a welcome warning against too quick an embrace of a perspective centered on the western hemisphere, which “may well repro-duce the imperialist dynamics” ( p. 34) they would criticize. Lomas’s book is also of great interest to an international audience, especially in the fields of Latin American history and literature. It will radically alter the way people study Whitman, Emerson, and Helen Hunt Jackson; how they conceive of the origins of modernism; and the ways in which Martí’s ideas have been understood until now.

raúl fernández, University of California, Irvinedoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-037


578 HAHR / August

Race, Colonialism, and Social Transformation in Latin America and the Caribbean. Edited by jerome branche. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. Photographs. Illustrations. Figures. Maps. Notes. Bibliographies. Index. viii, 301 pp. Cloth, $69.95.

This volume, derived from a conference held at the University of Pittsburgh in 1998, sets itself the ambitious task of advancing new models “not only for reading, but also resolv-ing the ubiquitous interlacing legacies of capital, coloniality, and race” in Latin America ( pp. 5 – 6). Individual chapters offer an array of insights into these legacies in Uruguay, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and the French Antilles, even if, not surprisingly, they are only partially successful in actually resolving the prob-lems provoked by colonialism. As this list of countries indicates, the volume is unusually broad in its geographic scope; the authors are to be congratulated in extending their scholarly focus beyond the familiar territory of Mexico and Peru.

Individual chapters take varying approaches to the aim of reading and resolv-ing colonial legacies. Gustavo Verdesio comments on the Uruguayan state’s alternate attempts to erase and exalt the country’s indigenous heritage. Carolle Charles examines the relative importance of the concepts of race and class within Haitian political discourse from the Haitian Revolution to the early twenty-first century. Kelvin Santiago-Valles offers a critical reexamination of negrista poetry, which he argues helped resolve “colo-nized blanchitude’s crisis of representation” ( p. 60). Gislene Aparecida dos Santos studies the attitudes of Brazilian high school students toward affirmative action to explore the extent to which victims of discrimination often fail to identify themselves as such. Her study also offers clear examples of the slippery nature of racial categories in contempo-rary Brazil, for the students that she interviews often expressed considerable vagueness about how one actually determined anyone’s race. José Rabasa’s chapter juxtaposes con-temporary Zapatismo with early colonial maps of Cholula, in order to propose that in some cases the experience of colonialism produced not mestizaje or even a sense of dou-ble consciousness but rather individuals able to inhabit plural worlds. Denise Y. Arnold offers a detailed analysis of the governmental challenges associated with implement-ing the social visions encoded in a set of departmental maps designed in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Bolivia. Marcia Stephenson charts the controversies stirred up by the writings of Bolivian gadfly Fausto Reinaga, whose work, she argues, “simultaneously reveal how colonialism works both implicitly and explicitly to eradicate any and all manifestations of indigenous identity, and . . . documents the painful battle to affirm indigenous subjectivity” ( p. 205). Laurence Prescott introduces the writings of the Afro-Colombian writer Manuel Zapata Olivella, and Michael Handelsman undertakes a somewhat similar exercise for the Ecuadorian journalist Juan Montaño Escobar, whom he sees as embracing “strategic essentialism.” Finally, H. Adlai Murdoch examines the visions of creole identity expressed in the writings of several contemporary Antillean poets and essayists.

These individual chapters share a number of overlapping themes. Nearly a third

explore the tensions inherent within nationalist visions based on rhetorics of racial democracy, and all reveal an interest in examining recent history through the lens of colonial inequalities, although, with the exception of Rabasa’s chapter, none offers much detailed examination of colonial history itself. As an interdisciplinary exercise the vol-ume is, like so many such ventures, only partially successful. Individual chapters do not so much transcend their author’s disciplinary boundaries as rub shoulders with other chapters based on different methodological frameworks. The introduction, which might have guided the reader through the common themes that unite the chapters, or, more ambitiously, probed the extent to which the contributors share compatible visions of coloniality, instead concentrates on the interesting topic of interactions between people of African and indigenous heritage in the colonial era. Sadly, the introduction’s attractive promise of consistent attention to issues of Afro-indigenous collaboration is left largely unfulfilled in the remainder of the volume. Nor is this book well suited for undergradu-ate use, unless you are confident that your students can decipher terms such as “solidar-ian” ( p. 3), “petit-coloniality” ( p. 58), “Africoid” ( p. 69), and “proparoxytonical” ( p. 250), and are familiar with the Gramscian concept of immanent history and the Jamesonian ideologeme. This is a book aimed at postgraduate readers interested in the continuing impact of the long history of racial (and class) inequalities on contemporary Latin Amer-ica. Such readers will find much of interest.

rebecca earle, University of Warwickdoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-038

La frontera que vino del norte. By carlos gonzález herrera. Mexico City: Santilla Ediciones Generales, S.A. de C.V. / Colegio de Chihuahua, 2008. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 295 pp. Paper.

Translated into English, the title of this book is “The Border That Was Imposed from the North.” This work by Carlos González Herrera, a faculty member of the recently founded Colegio de Chihuahua, focuses on the El Paso – Ciudad Juárez region and exam-ines the construction of an asymmetrical barrier by Anglo-Americans north of the bor-der. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo provided an abstract political division that was apparent only on a map. Within a few short years, railroads, industry, and general economic development constructed a highly identifiable zone on the Anglo-American side, bolstered by political and cultural hegemony. The Mexican Revolution, which significantly affected the border region, brought urgency to further reinforcement of a demarcation between the two countries.

In the most impressive section of his book, González Herrera, relying on hard evi-dence, demonstrates how Anglo-Americans constructed an idea of their border counter-parts by relying on subjective assessments of the attributes of the population dwelling south of the border. In the process, a sharply defined “otherness” was applied to Ciudad Juárez and notably to the Mexican sections of El Paso. Consequently, Anglo-Americans


580 HAHR / August

easily distinguished themselves from the perception of a vastly inferior “Mexicanness” laced by racial differences. Based on this otherness, Anglos with the might of political hegemony on their side constructed lasting legal, cultural, and ethnic divisions between the Anglos and Mexicans.

One of the most unique contributions of this book details how health issues and concerns provided an important rationale for marginalizing the Mexicans within the growing asymmetrical arrangement. In the late nineteenth century, as the U.S. side became more complex and economically viable, medical officials began to identify health threats along the border as originating mainly in Mexico but able to be carried across by human migration. Efforts to contain typhus and other contagious maladies were accompanied by attaching disease to the image of Mexicanness. But since Mexican labor became essential to the rapid economic development in El Paso, immigration across the bridge had to be tolerated as a necessary evil. To ward off health hazards, the humiliating ceremonies of submitting migrants to disinfectant showers and strip searches became the norm. Interestingly, the author acknowledges that officials also applied this procedure to immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, but with less frequency and intensity. The reader is left to assume that a sharper form of racialization affected Mexicans.

Feeling unwelcome and rejected, the subordinated immigrants adopted an intense expatriate nationalism that served as a source of empowerment by providing them with identity and a sense of unity. The mainly nostalgic ideology incorporated Spanish lan-guage preservation, celebration of the fiestas patrias (Mexican patriotic holidays), Cathol-icism, and an ambivalent form of anti-Americanism. Such postures, according to the author, served as a form of defense and resistance.

Readers conversant in Mexico-U.S. border scholarship will find that González Her-rera’s book, even though interesting and tightly organized, often duplicates research and reaches conclusions already proffered in other studies. Although he carefully conceptu-alizes expatriate nationalism, the author does not acknowledge some previous studies on Mexican immigration that registered similar findings (such as my description of a remarkably parallel process that I termed “México Lindo,” and other studies appearing as early as the 1980s).

At times, in an eagerness to display a more energetic racism toward Mexican immi-grants in contrast to European newcomers, the comparisons are weak. For example, in discussing an increasingly restrictive immigration policy in the early twentieth century, the author concludes that Mexicans were more victimized than European immigrants. To be sure, such measures as literacy requirements and the head tax and visa fee imple-mented between 1917 and 1924 made it more difficult for Mexicans to enter the country legally; the undocumented influx of Mexicans soared in the 1920s. González Herrera acknowledges that the quota restrictions that negatively affected eastern and southern European nations did not apply to Mexico. But he then glosses over how immigrants from these nations encountered major difficulties in gaining admittance to the United States in comparison to the relatively easier entry for Mexicans. While racism and hostil-

ity in the United States was probably worse for Mexicans than for the “new immigrants” from Europe, Mexico’s immigrants had a significant structural advantage in entering and avoiding pursuit. Today’s immigrants from Mexico, whether they are undocumented, legal, naturalized, or U.S.-born, do not face the same degree of hostility and racism that Mexicans faced in the era featured in this book. Ironically, even during the well-known repatriation campaigns of the Great Depression, Mexicans found it much, much easier to obtain immigration relief than do undocumented immigrants today.

This book is worth reading and it should be translated. Though the work’s conclu-sions may appear somewhat trite to immigration specialists, other readers will find a nice synthesis of previously done work. Even if it seems as though González Herrera is trying to gain recognition for findings that are not really novel, about half of the book provides unique and original theories, ideas, and findings.

arturo rosales, Arizona State University doi 10.1215/00182168-2010-039

Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: A Reader. Edited by denise a. segura and patricia zavella. Latin America Otherwise. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xii, 595 pp. Cloth, $99.95. Paper, $29.95.

Migration of women from Mexico to the United States has dramatically increased in recent years. The book’s aim is to explore this, while simultaneously addressing how it has been underrepresented in scholarly work. In doing so, a platform is created where these women and the issues that shape their everyday lives are made visible in the acad-emy. It is a worthy and much-needed contribution to debates about women, gender, and migration in the borderlands, which, as the editors point out, remains understudied, displaced, or at times simply ignored. Also notable is the interdisciplinary nature of the compilation, which brings a number of significant contributions into a shared space and thus sets a precedent for further interdisciplinary dialogue. Likewise, the editors’ sensi-tivity to modes of thought from both sides of the border is commendable, with two of the essays having been translated from Spanish.

The sizeable collection of 23 essays truly is diverse and challenging. The essays in the volume find common ground through the theoretical concept of “structural vio-lence” which women in the borderlands are collectively subjected to in various ways. This appears to refer to the institutionalization of unequal power relations in society and government that naturalize the various subordinations of women. The volume sets to work exploring both the processes by which this takes place and the possibilities for resistance or agency that it creates. However, the volume covers such a broad thematic scope that at times it is unclear how the essays connect; this lack of a fit could alienate a “beginner” audience, which is presumably among those it is aimed at captivating.


582 HAHR / August

The essays span a variety of topics, including but not limited to gendered violence at the border (including femicide in Ciudad Juárez); the biopolitics of female re/produc-tion and women’s construction as a biological threat to state and nation; the sexualization of female workers; women’s cross-border/hybrid identities and the challenge they pose to state-defined citizenship; the organization and regulation of sexuality at the border; women’s symbolic relationship to the nation and their inherent instability as cultural anchors; the changing role of women as wives and mothers; and the important role of music in opening public spaces of “in-betweenness” where women’s transnational iden-tities can be celebrated. Unexpectedly, the book does not have a concluding chapter, thereby missing an opportunity to tie together numerous loose ends and flag further possibilities for research into women at the borderlands.

As in any collection so diverse, some criticisms could be levied about the book’s approach. Most problematic for me is the introductory focus on Gloria Anzaldúa. The volume opens with her words, and its subsequent uncritical appropriation of her defini-tion of the borderlands risks reinforcing a number of myths prevalent in border studies. First, it reproduces the myth that border studies began with her influential book Border-lands: The New Mestiza (1987) and thus obscures or devalues studies undertaken before that (see Pablo Vila’s conclusion in Ethnography at the Border, 2003, p. 308). Second, employing her figurative definition of the borderlands as an unspecified zone stretch-ing to the south and north of the physical divide threatens to inadvertently obscure the significance of the physical borderlands themselves and the specificity of the struggles that take place there. Finally, and perhaps most markedly, the editors celebrate Gloria Anzaldúa’s famous metaphor of the border as an “open and bleeding wound” ( p. 4) with-out heeding Patricia Price’s critique that this remark actually reflects the subtle femini-zation of the border. By reproducing what is essentially an image of female genitalia (see Patricia L. Price, Dry Place: Landscapes of Belonging and Exclusion, 2004, p. 55), they unwit-tingly reinstate the binaries that have historically constituted women’s ambiguity within hegemonic discourses of state and society (good/evil, Guadalupe/Malinche, mother/temptress), which arguably maintain their marginal status both at the border and within academic studies of the borderlands. Conversely, many of the individual essays do recog-nize and critically assess these issues; this again creates a certain lack of fit.

Overall, the volume is well suited to those unfamiliar with the topics it discusses owing to its clear and explanatory manner. However, it will also interest established scholars with its seemingly endless directions for more specialized research. The inter-disciplinary mix makes the book attractive to a variety of academic fields such as politi-cal science and international relations, Chicana/o studies, Latin American and Latino studies, border studies, sociology, and human geography (even though the authors are predominantly sociologists). It is certainly a valuable contribution to studies of women and/or the U.S.-Mexican borderlands in each of these disciplines.

marie woodling, Aberystwyth Universitydoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-040


Conflict and Commerce on the Rio Grande: Laredo, 1755 – 1955. By john a. adams jr. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008. Photographs. Maps. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xvi, 286 pp. Cloth, $29.95.

Each year, thousands of trucks and billions of dollars in commerce cross the Rio Grande into the United States at Laredo. The second oldest chartered settlement in Texas has become one of the busiest ports of entry along the southern border, if not the busi-est. The transformation of Laredo from a sleepy town on the far northern frontier of Spanish settlement in the Americas into a vital trade link between two of the principal participants in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is the focus of this detailed study by John A. Adams Jr. The author, who earned a doctoral degree in history, spent many years as the executive director of the Laredo Development Foundation. This shows in his focus on Laredo’s business history, though never to the complete exclusion of the social and political context. The result is a well-written and affectionate look at how international commerce created today’s Laredo.

The villa of Laredo was chartered in 1755 at a well-known ford across the Rio Grande. Spanish Laredo was dominated by ranching because a lack of money, credit, and roads hampered long-distance trade. Development was also hindered by Spanish restrictions on commerce and the absence of banks. The primary change under Mexican rule was the easing of laws against free trade, but the other problems continued and were even exacerbated by the imposition of onerous taxes. Cattle still provided more income than any other product, trade remained local, and smuggling undermined plans to expand legal commerce. Schemes such as the stillborn Republic of the Rio Grande, for which Laredo served briefly as capital, provided little relief, while the Benavides family emerged as the leaders of efforts to keep the community from disappearing.

Real change began with the arrival of the United States Army in 1846, led ironically by Mirabeau B. Lamar, who as president of the Republic of Texas had failed to enforce that short-lived nation’s claims to peripheral areas such as Laredo. New faces and army facilities brought slow growth, which was little affected by Mexican leaders’ declaration of a zona libre along the Rio Grande. What brought an explosion in trade was the Civil War, especially in 1863 when the Confederates were forced to use inland ports such as Laredo to ship cotton to Mexico after Union forces occupied Brownsville. Santos Bena-vides and his brothers repulsed Federal raiders and profited from the border trade, which lapsed after 1865 as commerce returned to more familiar prewar patterns.

As Reconstruction came to an end in Texas, and concerns about raids by Indians and Juan Cortina faded, Laredo embraced the future by welcoming a railroad. By late 1881 the town was linked to the outside world through San Antonio to the north and, soon afterward, Mexico City to the south. Trade between the United States and Mexico exploded under Porfirio Díaz, and the population of Laredo more than tripled in the 1880s. Nearby coal mines opened to supply the rail companies, and onions surpassed cattle in profits as farmers around Laredo became the top producers in the United States. The Mexican Revolution caused some brief disruptions, but by 1915 Laredo had recov-

584 HAHR / August

ered. It continued to grow through the 1920s as oil and gas replaced coal and onions in the local economy. And through it all, commerce across the border continued to increase.

World War II brought new military installations and more millions of dollars in trade to Laredo. The army posts later closed, but oil, gas, and transport remained strong in the city that had become a primary point for transborder shipping. Maquiladoras and eventually NAFTA simply reinforced a pattern that was already well established by 1955, the author’s chronological stopping point.

The text is supported by many illustrations, an extensive bibliography and annota-tions, a glossary, useful appendices on many topics, and charts providing information that ranges from essential to quirky. It is evident that the author is not a military histo-rian or an expert in social history. It is puzzling that he ignores the rebellion led by José María de Jesús Carvajal during the early 1850s on the lower Rio Grande, and certainly other military unrest in the region must have had a greater impact on Laredo. None-theless, anyone interested in commerce along the border, the colorful history of the Rio Grande region, or the impact of the convoluted economic relationship between the United States and Mexico will find much of value in this book. Laredo’s story, properly told, is complex, and the author did a good job of distilling it into a useful narrative from a business perspective.

richard b. mccaslin, University of North Texas doi 10.1215/00182168-2010-041

From Many, One: Indians, Peasants, Borders, and Education in Callista Mexico, 1924 – 1935. By andrae m. marak. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2009. Photographs. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xxviii, 226 pp. Paper, $34.95.

In the last three decades, Mexican postrevolutionary education has received the atten-tion of a good number of Mexican and U.S. historians, turning the once-amateur field of educational history into a professional endeavor and contributing to the already rich cor-pus of postrevolutionary cultural, social, and political historiography. Andrae M. Marak is right in observing that more attention has been paid to José Vasconcelos’s period as secretary of education (1921 – 24) and the educational policies of Lázaro Cárdenas’s gov-ernment (1934 – 40) than to those of the period in between, which he studies. The author is also right in pointing out that the northern frontier has been little researched. There-fore, his work on Sonora’s and Coahuila’s northern borders as well as on the state of Chihuahua during 1924 – 35 is a welcome addition.

The introduction and the first chapter focus on Calles’s educational policies and their role in nation building, while chapter 2 covers the federalization of education in Chihuahua, that is, the takeover of state-managed schools by the federal government as an important feature of an increasingly centralizing nation-state. Unfortunately, the study of politics at the national and regional level in these sections, although it gives a


useful overview, is not fully integrated into the analysis of educational policy implemen-tation at the local level in chapters 3 to 6.

Chapters 3 to 5 study the federal schools opened for three different Indian tribes: the Tarahumara (in the Tarahumara Sierra in Chihuahua), the Seri (on the western coast of Sonora and Tiburón Island) and the Tohono O’odham (on the Sonora-Arizona bor-der). Historiography is more abundant for regions inhabited by Mesoamerican Indians than those populated by northern Indians and has more frequently studied the objects of educational policies as peasants than as Indians. Works specifically concerned with Indians have more often taken a national than a regional, case study perspective. By contrast, Marak provides local studies of the implementation of federal schooling among three groups with distinctive Indian identities. This usefully complements Mary Kay Vaughan’s work on the Yaquis and Alexander Dawson’s on indigenous boarding schools and the crucial role of mediators between state agents and Indian communities. Marak additionally highlights the influence of U.S. Indian policies on Mexican state govern-ments’ dealings with Indians (especially for the case of the Seri), which differed from the Mexican federal government’s assimilationist indigenismo. Finally, chapter 6 covers an interesting and even more neglected subject: the rather unsuccessful frontier schools in Nogales, Sonora; Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua; and Piedras Negras in Coahuila, opened by the federal Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP) especially to compete with schools across the border, which were very popular with parents living on the Mexican side.

On the downside, Marak’s treatment of the years 1924 – 35 is somewhat narrow. Unlike the work published from the 1990s onward on the schools of the 1934 – 40 period, this book does not show a deep understanding of prerevolutionary schools and society, which were key in shaping people’s expectations of education and their relationships with federal schools after the revolution. Instead Marak is content to align himself with the now contentious view that there was hardly any prerevolutionary rural education ( pp. xvi, xxi – xxii), a statement that, to be fair, may hold more true for the north than the center of the country, but that Marak takes for granted rather than demonstrates. The poverty of municipal and state educational policies in certain regions and the fact that the population he studies were often migrants, possibly more focused on their present and future than their past, might have explained the irrelevance or inexistence of past schooling, but Marak does not discuss these issues.

However, Marak’s aim to contribute to the study of the “power of everyday peo-ple to reshape government agendas” ( p. xi) is well achieved through various examples, especially by studying the way the Tohono O’odham and the parents living in frontier cities used U.S. schools to pressure the Mexican SEP for better quality education and a particular curriculum. These communities, for instance, were more interested in getting English lessons for their children than in participating in the civic festivals that helped federal schools integrate more fully into local communities in certain parts of central Mexico. The SEP, nonetheless, did not always have enough resources to please demand-ing parents.

586 HAHR / August

In brief, this work lacks the historical depth that could have been obtained with a more careful temporal, local, and regional contextualization of the cases studied. But this weakness is to some extent compensated by the author’s analysis of the hitherto neglected themes of frontier life, the relationship with the United States, and the specific experiences of the Tarahumara, the Seri, and the Tohono O’odham in relation to the social and political history of schooling.

ariadna acevedo-rodrigo, Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados, Mexico Citydoi 10.1215/00182168-2010-042


Communication

December 1, 2009

To the Editors:In his review (vol. 89, no. 1, pp. 184 – 85) of my book Remembering the Haci-

enda: Religion, Authority, and Social Change in Highland Ecuador (University of Texas Press, 2006), Mark Thurner graciously praises my writing and my ethno-graphic material, but his review distorts or omits some of my major arguments.

Thurner says that the book “leaves history behind” after an early “back-ground” chapter. It is true that the next five chapters take a largely synchronic analytic approach, while arguing for an alternative to the moral economy school’s common focus on historical memory as an ideological source of resis-tance. The book’s last two chapters, which the review ignores entirely, return to a diachronic analysis. Here I show that structures of religious authority and notions of respect that were hegemonic in the hacienda era shaped both the agrarian transformation in the 1960s – 70s and the ethnic resurgence and religious change of the 1980s – 90s, even as those structures and notions were themselves transformed and reinterpreted in the process. These chapters make the case that anthropology’s tools for understanding a sociocultural system synchronically, with its internal coherence and contradictions, can enrich our understanding of that system’s persistence and transformations through time. Indeed, any history that aspires to social depth must in practice alternate between and synthesize synchronic and diachronic analytic moments.

The reviewer misses much of my argument about the so-called “triangle without a base,” the outworn image of hacienda residents as lacking in any hori-zontal solidarities. I do analyze hacienda residents’ web of social relations and the ways it sustained resistance, as he indicates, but my argument goes beyond that point in significant ways. First, I demonstrate that relations among kin and neighbors were shot through with a hierarchical dimension linked to hacienda hegemony. While others have described this hierarchical dimension, I believe my book goes further in analyzing its hegemonic force and explaining how even horizontal relations provided openings for hegemony. Second, I build on one

588 HAHR / August

point that was central to some of the “open triangle” scholarship, namely, that ties to formal organizations could facilitate the flow of information about the broader political environment. I show that hacienda laborers’ lack of such ties and misunderstanding of the broader environment handicapped them in the agrarian reform period.

The main contribution that I would hope historians and others take away from the book concerns what I term the “respect complex,” a topic the review only mentions in a single clause. The book describes rituals of discipline, purifi-cation, and authority that had precolonial and colonial roots and were reinvigo-rated under the late nineteenth-century García Moreno regime. It shows how hacienda landlords, overseers, and religious elders drew on this ritual language as they disciplined laborers, juniors, and quarreling spouses and neighbors, and it analyzes the transformations of this complex in recent decades. Theoreti-cally, my analysis of the respect complex revises common understandings of the relationship between coercion, persuasion, hegemony, and resistance. Despite changes in academic fashions in recent decades, I show that the concept of hege-mony remains a powerful theoretical tool, one that new research continues to refine.

Thurner also faults me for anachronistically “refer[ring] to colonial com-posición titles as ‘property.’ ” This is a misquotation — I did not use the word “property” in connection with composiciones — but I would like to know what in Thurner’s opinion was mistaken in my one-sentence reference to composiciones. I do acknowledge having deviated from “the established practices of historians” by using very abbreviated in-text citations of archival documents, though I pro-vide full information on these sources in my bibliography.

barry lyons, Wayne State University

NEW F ROM P I T T SBURGH

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS 800.621.2736 www.upress.pitt.edu

Electing Chávez The Business of Anti-neoliberal Politics in Venezuela

Leslie C. Gates

Paper $24.95 • 978-0-8229-6064-5 • 216 pp.

“Most explanations of the rise of Hugo Chávez focus on failedinstitutions and policies. Electing Chávez shifts attention tothe private sector. Although other observers have suspectedthat these factors played a role, Leslie Gates is the first to pro-vide comprehensive, systematic evidence.”

—Michael Coppedge, University of Notre Dame

The Politics of Sexuality in Latin America A Reader on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights

Javier Corrales and Mario Pecheny, eds.

Paper $29.95 • 978-0-8229-6062-1 • 472 pp.

“This collection, with its focus on the development of polit-ical rights in Latin America, makes an important contributionto the growing field of LGBT studies in Latin America. A valu-able addition to the classroom for courses dealing with thehistory of gender and sexuality in Latin America.”

—Martin A. Nesvig, University of Miami

Unequal PartnersThe United States and Mexico

Sidney Weintraub

Paper $24.95 • 978-0-8229-6058-4 • 192 pp. Cloth $60.00 • 978-0-8229-4387-7

“Weintraub explores the intricacies of a relationship that isboth intense and asymmetrical. The lessons will be ex-tremely important to scholars and policymakers in bothcountries and to anyone concerned about how developingand developed countries can manage complex but unequalrelationships more effectively.”

—Andrew Selee, Director, Mexico Institute,Woodrow Wilson Center

DreamlanDThe Way Out of JuárezWords by Charles BowdenDrawings by Alice Leora BriggsThis striking work of graphic journalism pairs previously unpublished writing by Charles Bowden with provocative scratchboard drawings by Alice Leora Briggs to create a vignette of daily life in Juárez, Mexico, in all its surreal brutality and beauty.152 b&w drawings, $19.95 paperback, $40.00 hardcover

QuixOTe’s sOlDiersa local History of the Chicano movement, 1966–1981By David MontejanoDavid Montejano, one of the foremost scholars in Chicana/o studies, offers a well-written, authoritative history of the Chicano movement in San Antonio—a movement that provided models for organizing that broke barriers to political participation and power for Latinos across the United States.Jack and Doris Smothers Series in Texas History, Life, and Culture$24.95 paperback, $60.00 hardcover

arCHiTeCTure as revOluTiOnepisodes in the History of modern mexicoBy Luis E. CarranzaForeword by Jorge Francisco LiernurThe period following the Mexican Revolution was characterized by unprecedented artistic experimentation. Richly illustrated, Architecture as Revolution is one of the first books in English to present a social and cultural history of early twentieth-century Mexican architecture.Roger Fullington Series in Architecture129 b& w photos, $60.00 hardcover

Latin American and Latina/o Studies

a BeauTy THaT HurTslife and Death in Guatemalasecond revised editionBy W. George LovellA thoroughly updated and expanded edition of Lovell’s classic account of the violence that has wracked Guatemala, from its roots in the colonial past to its aftermath in the twenty-first century.The Linda Schele Series in Maya and Pre-Columbian Studies26 b&w photos, 1 map, $24.95 paperback

mexiCan WOmen anD THe OTHer siDe Of immiGraTiOnengendering Transnational TiesBy Luz María GordilloMexican Women and the Other Side of Immigration is a fascinating study of the transnational experiences of Mexicans who immigrated from San Ignacio Cerro Gordo, Jalisco, to Detroit, Michigan.Chicana Matters SeriesDeena J. González and Antonia Castañeda, Editors$55.00 hardcover

PerfOrminG mexiCaniDaDvendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational stageBy Laura G. GutiérrezPerforming Mexicanidad is an examination of the intersection of public discourses on sexualities with recent political, economic, and social shifts in the national context of Mexico and the Mexican diaspora in the United States.Chicana Matters SeriesDeena J. González and Antonia Castañeda, Editors21 color and b&w photos, $24.95 paperback $50.00 hardcover

THe liTeraTures Of THe u.s.-mexiCan WarnarraTive, Time, anD iDenTiTyBy Jaime Javier RodríguezThe Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War is a comparative examination of the literature produced in the wake of the U.S.-Mexican War—in both countries and in the borderlands—and the subsequent impact on the formation of lasting, diverse identities.$65.00 hardcover

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS800.252.3206 • www.utexaspress.com

Read more about these books online

Latin American and Latina/o Studiesfrom texas

Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América

Rodolfo KuschLatin America Otherwise

296 pages, 20 illustrations, paper, $23.95

Baroque New WorldsRepresentation, Transculturation, Counterconquest

loIs PARKINsoN ZAmoRA and moNIKA KAuP, editors


houses in a landscapeMemory and Everyday Life in Mesoamerica

JulIA A. heNdoNMaterial Worlds


book three

Reckoning with PinochetThe Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989–2006

Latin America Otherwise584 pages, 31 illustrations, paper, $27.95

book two

Battling for hearts and mindsMemory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile,

1973–1988Latin America Otherwise


book one

Remembering Pinochet’s chileOn the Eve of London 1998

Latin America Otherwise280 pages, 4 illustrations, paper, $21.95

Complete trilogy

now available

www.dukeupress .edu

The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile

By STEvE J . STERn

crossing Borders, claiming a Nation

A History of Argentine Jewish Women, 1880–1955

sANdRA mcGee deuTsch368 pages, 24 illustrations, paper, $23.95

The New cultural history of PeronismPower and Identity in Mid-Twentieth-Century Argentina

mATTheW B. KARush and oscAR chAmosA, editors

320 pages, 17 photographs, paper, $23.95

Who can stop the drums?Urban Social Movements

in Chávez’s venezuelasuJAThA feRNANdes


Violent democracies in latin AmericaeNRIque desmoNd ARIAs and dANIel m. GoldsTeIN, editors

The Cultures and Practice of Violence336 pages, paper, $24.95

strange enemiesIndigenous Agency and Scenes

of Encounters in AmazoniaAPARecIdA VIlAçA

The Cultures and Practice of Violence392 pages, 41 illustrations, paper, $24.95

Transatlantic fascismIdeology, violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919-1945 fedeRIco fINchelsTeIN

344 pages, paper, $24.95

Exciting new books in

Latin American Studies

www.dukeupress .edu

World Wide Web: Visit the editorial office at www.hahr.pitt.edu and Duke University Press Journals at www.dukeupress.edu/journals.

Subscription information: Direct all orders to Duke University Press, Journals Customer Service, 905 W. Main St., Suite 18B, Durham, nC 27701. Annual subscription rates: print-plus-electronic institutions, $372; print-only institutions, $347; e-only institutions, $323; individuals, $44; students, $22. For information on subscriptions to the e-Duke Journals Scholarly Collection through HighWire Press, see www.dukeupress.edu/library/eDuke. Print subscriptions: add $14 postage and 5% GST for Canada; add $18 postage outside the U.S. and Canada. Back volumes (institutions): $347. Single issues: institutions, $87; individuals, $14. For more information, contact Duke University Press Journals at 888-651-0122 (toll-free in the U.S. and Canada) or 919-688-5134; [email protected].

Editorial communications and manuscripts should be sent via e-mail or attachment to [email protected]. HAHR accepts submissions for review in English, Spanish, or Portuguese. Prospective authors may consult the submission guidelines at www.hahr.pitt.edu/submissions .html. Books for review should be sent to the Book Review Editors, Hispanic American Historical Review, University of Pittsburgh, Department of History, 3702 Wesley W. Posvar Hall, 230 Bouquet Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15260-7403, USA. Members of the Board of Editors serve six-year terms. The Senior Editors serve ex officio as members of the Board of Editors.

Permissions: Photocopies for course or research use that are supplied to the end user at no cost may be made without explicit permission or fee. Photocopies provided to end users for a fee may not be made without payment of permissions fees to Duke University Press. Address requests for permission to republish copyrighted material to Permissions Coordinator, [email protected].

Advertisements: Direct inquiries about advertising to Journals Advertising Coordinator, [email protected].

The annual index to this review is included in the november issue. For the indexes in which Hispanic American Historial Review is listed, see www.dukeupress.edu/hahr. The contents of the first 25 volumes have been indexed by Ruth Lapham Butler, Guide to the Hispanic American Historical Review, 1918–1945. For the following decade, see Guide to the Hispanic American Historical Review, 1946–1955 (Duke University Press, 1958), edited by Charles Gibson with the assistance of E. V. niemeyer. For the period 1956–75, see Guide to the Hispanic American Historical Review, 1956–1975 (Duke University Press, 1980), edited by Stanley R. Ross et al. The February 1986 issue of HAHR (66:1) is a comprehensive index to volumes 56–65 (1976–85). The February 1996 issue (76:1) is an index to volumes 66–75 (1986–95).

The Hispanic American Historical Review (issn 0018-2168) is published quarterly, at $372 for (print-plus-electronic) institutions and $44 for individuals, by Duke University Press, 905 W. Main St., Suite 18B, Durham, nC 27701. Periodicals postage paid at Durham, nC, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Hispanic American Historical Review, Box 90660, Duke University Press, Durham, nC 27708-0660.

Vol. 90, no. 3 (August 2010) Copyright © 2010 by Duke University Press issn 0018-2168