Advocates and Autocrats: Week 5 Reading

The position of caudillo, as Dawson describes, fills in the role traditionally occupied by the King of Spain as an intermediary between local elites and the marginalized groups of country and city. My impression is that a lot of the vitriol against the Unitarians in Esteban Echeverria's story, El Matadero is traditional Spanish colonial class tensions given an ideological paint job. The revolution transitioned Latin America from a dependent colonial society to an independent republic, but failed to address some of the basic inequities that led to revolution in the first place. One major bone of contention in the struggle between the merchant classes and the working class was when the urban intelligentsia attacked the Catholic Church, which is considered by many peasants to be a vital institution of philanthropy in their remote areas without the tax base or government initiative to provide secular public works. The role of the caudillo was to act as an advocate for the disenfranchised masses of the hinterland against the machinations of the perceived power-mongers that lived in the capitals. Unfortunately, demagoguery tends to create corrupt short-run despotisms that pay mere lip service to democratic ideals and, when a demagogue senses his end, he frequently resorts to violent scapegoating and confiscating the property of newly invented "enemies of the state" to salvage the loyalty of his followers. While the caudillo can be a vital bulwark against the exploitation of the peasantry, historical example demonstrates that it is in practice a role dedicated to repressing the natural tendencies of liberal democracy, and thus caudillo governments consistently have a benevolently autocratic flavour.

Echeverria's story contains a myriad of metaphors and allegories that I find satisfactory to demonstrate the biases of the literate intelligentsia of the United Provinces of La Plata during the reign of Juan Manuel Rosas towards him and his Federalist faction. The author clearly has disdain for the role of the caudillo, drawing a not-so-subtle comparison between caudillos and the cattle yard judge. He describes the judge as "an important personage, the caudillo of the butchers, who wields supreme power over this small republic" and describes of his office as, "such a small and shabby building that no one in the corrals would give it any importance but for the association of its name with that of the feared judge." This is meant to assert that that the influence of the caudillo has no legitimacy except through the use of emotional leverage, whether joyful, fearful or wrathful, over the dissatisfied rural population. Echeverria also speaks with disdain for the "hideous, filthy, malodorous, and deformed" urban proletariat, and as the chapter mentions earlier, he belonged to a class of people that found the idea of racial equality abhorrent. His insistent mockery of the Catholic Church is meant to offer a criticism of their complicity with the regime, using superstition to stoke anti-Unitarian sentiment.  It is a well-written and highly symbolic work that is valuable both as art and artifact of the Latin American past.

Liberals and Liberation: Week 4 Reading

In the opening statements of his book, Dawson discusses the public perception of America's unity during and after the Revolutionary War and then asserts that Latin America is too diverse for such a monolithic interpretation of its revolutionary period. One enduring modern bias of the Latin American postcolonial nations is their bias against the legacy of the Spanish and their system of privileges that placed European aristocrats above the rest of society. This system had many obvious faults (slavery, gender repression, racial discrimination), but within that system there were, in theory, provisions to allow certain indigenous tribes to continue to hold communal land, a privilege under threat from the land privatization campaign that the urban criollo population was in favour of. Similarly, the enslaved Africans were not always in favour of an overthrow of the Spanish monarchy unless there was the promise of being freed by the revolution. While these smaller sectional agendas are important elements of the region's revolutionary spirit, but the liberal democratic revolutions of Simon Bolivar came to define the character of the entire liberation of Latin America. The other liberal regimes of the emerging global economic order in the 19th century supported the liberal revolutionaries if for no other reason than to remove Spain's imperial trade restrictions and afterwards helped cement the new nations' sovereignty with increased commerce.

The disunity associated with Latin American states is a result of historical pressures rather than any reflection on the character or quality of their political spirit. The battle to overcome direct Spanish imperial dominance would not nearly be so hard as the battle to become unentangled from the new colonialism of liberal free trade. How can true independence exist for a modern Latin nation with the United States as a predatory power looming above them? This policy of menacing neighbouring Western Hemispheric nations began with wars of territorial acquisition in Mexico, the Caribbean and Colombia and continues with the modern system of regime change to prohibit nationalization of resources that are harvested by American business interests. In my opinion, this current system of extortion is only possible through the existence of a liberal, dictatorial status quo that were the legacies of the first wave of liberatory struggles. While Simon Bolivar deserves credit and adoration for his defeat of the Spanish Empire, his legacy of economic liberalization and dictatorial republicanism established a paradigm that the revolutionaries of future generations would die opposing.

Heroism and Hierarchy: Week 3 Reading

The shallow, simplistic nature of modern racialism is highlighted by the many-layered racial caste system in colonial Spain. This isn't to say either mindset is justifiable or rational, but while modern notions of race are the product of lazy generalization, the Spanish caste system was an actual attempt to codify and stratify the subtle perceived differences between people with various racial mixes. The paintings do much more to illustrate these perceived traits than any textual description, because the scenes the characters meant to represent the parents are in speak volumes of the artist's personal biases and/or the biases of the society being solicited to buy the paintings. The scenes of 'lower' castes involved domestic dissatisfaction and drunkenness while 'higher' castes were seen in luxurious clothing and with happy, smiling families. All of these attempts to degrade the image of non-European descent are merely insecure colonizers seeking to satisfy their threatened sense of self-worth by establishing an artificial standard of 'civilized nature', which their perceived inferiors inevitably fall short of. The nomenclature used by the Casta paintings to describe certain mixes as "wolves", "incomprehensible", and other derogatory names. The ending anecdote about such a painting appearing in the parlour of an English sea captain suggests that representations of this colonial hierarchy had certain novelty value to those not engaged in colonial administration.

The story of the escaped nun who disguised herself as a man sounds like the beginning of a heroic story of a woman overcoming the gender divide and becoming an officer in the Spanish military as they conquer South America. While she fought many battles and had other exploits, I will focus on Potosi because it is the area where the heroism of Antonio/Alfonso Diaz, born Catalina de Erauso, comes into serious question. While it is tempting to interpret this through modern retrospection as a tale of transgendered agency that erodes the illusions of rigid Catholic gender repression, Erauso's role in both the violent subjugation of the Aruacanian and other indigenous peoples and the conquest for the Spanish Empire of 41,000 metric tons of silver that would be extracted from Potosi between 1556 and 1783 negate any possibility of my calling her a hero. While escaping a life of repression and solitude as a nun and dressing as a man to give yourself a new life is a fabulous act of personal rebellion, using that new identity to become a conquistador whose personal contributions help a brutal empire finance their colonial enterprises for centuries onward is wholly unacceptable in my opinion.

Myth and Massacre: Week 2 Reading

Reading the first source was a rehash of some research I had done in the past on my own. Growing up in the United States, Columbus Day was a holiday more important for its long weekend potential than its historical significance, but it nonetheless has always disturbed me how casually my friends and family accepted the whitewashed mythology surrounding the notorious Genoese navigator. Reading his account, which contains numerous falsehoods regarding the mineral wealth of Hispaniola and how open the native population was to "conversion to the Holy Faith", I was reminded how his misrepresentations led to a mad rush of would-be conquistadors to begin searching for riches whose brutality would characterize the Spanish colonial regime in Latin America. Also, in the statement regarding the Arawak's willingness to convert, he mentions how that would be better accomplished "by love than by coercion", which is ironic in light of how he almost immediately enslaved the natives upon his return in order to search for the fabled goldfields. Beyond the immediate particulars of Columbus' brutal governorship of Hispaniola, ending when a ship arrived with orders to bring him back to Spain in chains, his exaggerations and promises of easily claimed gold inspired the massive population of fighting men in the newly formed Spanish kingdom to carve a bloody swathe through the islands of the Caribbean and ultimately the mainland of the Americas.

The second source, the account by Guaman Poma, was interesting from the beginning with its system of dating by the reigns of European monarchs and popes. To me this undermines the early colonial notion of indigenous people being incapable of engaging with Western society because he clearly understands the concept of kingship and being the top of a religious hierarchy. Within his own Inca cultural context, they have a rich state tradition with a sovereign who leads both the religious hierarchy and the secular government. Towards the end, he describes an important historical scene: the meeting of two well-established social traditions, both attempting to be diplomatic and cordial, with each party beginning by flattering the other's apparent power. But once the Spanish issue an ultimatum to worship no god but theirs, Atagualpa must refuse. Incan emperors were said to be descendants of the sun gods, so to renounce those gods would be political suicide. It's tantamount in absurdity to insisting that the Pope convert and being affronted when he refuses. The ensuing battle at Cajamarca is used alongside the conquest of the Aztec Empire in many historical narratives as a demonstration of European superiority in martial encounters even with large, settled Mesoamerican states. I see both more as demonstrations of the shortsighted barbarism that undergirds the conquistador mindset, making unreasonable demands for submission and reacting with righteous indignation to the respectful dismissal of their own presumptuous behaviour. This is a constant through-line in the story of European encounters across the New World, an inflated sense of European self-importance met with graciousness and generosity on the part of their indigenous hosts that ultimately led to the latter's undoing.

1st source: http://last100.arts.ubc.ca/files/2014/09/cummins_columbus2.pdf
2nd source: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dfrye/guaman.htm

Greetings

Hello everyone! My name is Ryan Heazel and I'm from Atlanta, GA in the United States. I am majoring in History and I am eager to learn more about the rich cultural and political heritage of Latin America. I have been there twice, once to a small town on the Pacific coast of the Oaxaca province in Mexico and then to Panama years later. I can't wait to meet others who are interested in this fascinating region of the world.