Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (34 page)

War, though, always threatens the preexisting social order.
Men of mixed origins like José María Morelos and Vicente Guerrero soon emerged
to replace Hidalgo at the head of the anti-Spanish struggle. Morelos, a rural
priest like Hidalgo, raised the quality of the rebels’ military leadership and
promulgated a revolutionary constitution declaring the equality of all Mexicans
regardless of ancestry before he was captured and executed by royalist forces
in 1815. And Guerrero, guerrilla leader and former muleteer, forged an alliance
between his own rebel forces and conservative creoles just long enough to win
independence at last in 1821. He went on to oppose Iturbide’s short-lived rule
as emperor of Mexico and eventually served briefly as president of the new
nation himself during the turbulent years of Liberal-Conservative conflict that
followed. Much of that conflict would result from ongoing elite efforts to
suppress the ambitions of Guerrero and others of similarly modest social
origins.

Revolt in South America

Further south, the creole leader Simón Bolívar used a
period of Caribbean exile following his initial defeat at the hands of royalist
forces and their
llanero
allies to rethink his strategy for winning
independence. On his return to the South American mainland, he regained the
upper hand after opening up his patriot armies, including his officer corps, to
both free and enslaved men of African origins. This crucial shift in policy
sprang in part from military necessity and in part from Bolívar’s promise to
the Haitian president, Alexandre Petión, to abolish slavery in return for
Petión’s help in renewing the stalled struggle against Spain. When Bolívar
offered enslaved men freedom for enlisting, some 5,000 rushed to take up arms
under his command in Colombia alone between 1819 and 1821.

Free men of color also began placing their military
experience at the service of the independence cause, encouraged by Bolívar’s
newfound willingness to ignore distinctions based on color. Some of these men
ended up rising to the highest levels of the officer corps in the patriot
armies. However, Bolívar was never entirely able to overcome his deep distrust
of the non-creole majority, a distrust shared by most creoles, and he felt
particularly threatened by potential rivals from among the racially mixed
groups. In a famous incident, he ordered the execution of one of his army’s
most prominent officers of color, the pardo general Manuel Píar, for allegedly
favoring
pardocracy,
or rule by nonwhites. Of course, in places where
the latter were in the majority, as in most of Latin America,
pardocracy
was
merely democracy by another name.

The other great leader of South American independence,
General José de San Martín, began recruiting slaves in return for the offer of
freedom in and around Buenos Aires as early as 1813. At least half of the
soldiers who accompanied him on a grueling expedition across the Andes to
attack royalist forces in Chile in 1817 are known to have been
libertos,
or
ex-slaves. The impact on Buenos Aires’ black population of this campaign and a
subsequent one to Peru are suggested in census data from the independence era,
which reveal a dramatic decline in the ratio of men to women in that population
from roughly even in 1810 to just 6 males for every 10 females in 1827. Among
whites, the corresponding ratio at the end of the independence era was
approximately 9 males for every 10 females. These figures help explain the
decreasing demographic weight in subsequent decades of the city’s black
population, which had represented some 30 percent of all inhabitants at the
beginning of the century.

Life During Wartime

The siege of Lima by patriot forces seeking to retake the
city from royalist troops in 1823 provides one example of the disastrous impact
of the fighting on civilian populations in areas directly affected by the war.
In the wake of the royalist victory over San Martín’s Peruvian allies, some
10,000 patriot sympathizers fled the city, or were forced from it, into the
surrounding countryside. Unfortunately, the independence army they supported
had little to offer them and was itself so desperate for supplies that it was
in the process of bankrupting nearby landholdings by requisitioning oxen and other
supplies. Elite observers made few distinctions between patriot fighters and
common criminals in viewing these developments. Those observers, of course, had
been on edge over the rebellious potential of the lower orders ever since Túpac
Amaru’s revolt 40 years before.

Throughout Latin America, troops on both sides, and
particularly those from marginalized social sectors, were often motivated by
objectives other than those stressed by their leaders. Their violent acts
frequently exhibited a clear logic that was not so much criminal in nature (a
regular accusation by elites) as deeply threatening to the entire social order,
what elites most feared. A contemporary French traveler in what is now Uruguay
commented that the slaves who contributed to José Artigas’s unsuccessful
independence struggle “were fighting for their own freedom,” a conclusion that
might have been obvious to any intelligent observer. Unlike many other
independence leaders, Artigas had in fact made the radical vow that “the most
downtrodden shall be the most privileged” in a bid for the support of the less
favored members of local society. The “most downtrodden” evidently took him at
his word. The same French visitor mentioned above observed that “the rebel
soldiers would enter the [ranches] and take whatever they liked. . . . Often a
black, a mulatto, [or] an Indian would appoint himself an officer and, together
with his band of followers, would rob the landowners.” 

THE COLONIAL LEGACY

In the short term, formal independence brought little
beyond symbolic change to the everyday lives of most Latin Americans. Although
laws upholding discrimination based on ancestry were eliminated in Spanish
American republics that on paper were constituted of free and equal citizens, a
remarkable achievement in comparison with the rest of the world, such
discrimination did not end in practice. The struggle for daily survival
continued much as before for the impoverished majority, and often in economic
circumstances made worse by long years of conflict. In many places, though,
governments now came and went seemingly overnight. For good or ill, other than
in imperial Brazil, the political stability associated with the long era of
colonial administration was a thing of the past.

The sacrifices of slaves and other members of the popular
sectors who had fought on the side of independence were generally not well
rewarded. For example, even though pressure from ex-slave soldiers helped bring
about the establishment of Free Womb laws in many places during the 1820s,
granting free birth to the children of enslaved women, the final abolition of
slavery did not occur in most of Spanish South America before the mid-1850s.
Meanwhile, daily life went on much as before with people carrying on their
long-established practices at home, at work, at worship, at play, and in bed.
And the common people continued to resist the political structures imposed on
them by their social “betters” who hoped to harness their labor to the new
national wagon.

DAILY LIFE AFTER INDEPENDENCE

Having arrived at the end of the colonial period, our task
now is to sum up daily life in its various manifestations in order to
understand the legacy bequeathed to the new independent nations by the
societies constructed during the previous 300 years. Politically, all of South
and Central America had severed its relationship with Spain and Portugal, but
that is not to say these people had a clean slate on which to build their new
societies and economies. What they would build was based on what they knew, as
well as on which social groups had the skills and the power to design and
construct the building.

Independence brought no change at all to gender systems, so
life at home in the patriarchal extended family went on undisturbed. Many
families were touched by the ravages of war, certainly, and some found their
status changed by losses of men and property due to the war effort. The basic
institutional structures of marriage and the family survived the independence
war intact, however, and would not suffer serious fissures for more than a
hundred years. During the Bourbon reforms of the 18th century, the secular
state had granted parents more power over their children’s choice of a marriage
partner, and parents kept a firm grip on this power after independence. Among
elite families, marriage continued to be a contract and a tool for maintaining
honor and social status, while the common people of the middle sectors of
society went on ignoring the authorities, as long as they could get away with
it, and practiced cohabitation. The family emerged from the colonial period as
an ambivalent institution. On one hand, it functioned as a repressive
structure, severely limiting the options of elite women—many of whom were
virtually imprisoned in their own homes—and exposing women of all classes to
the sometimes violent discipline of fathers and husbands. On the other hand,
the family provided almost the only emotional refuge for most people.

Regarding people’s work lives, not much changed because of
independence. If anything, working people lost what little protection the
Iberian crowns provided and found themselves at the mercy of creole landowners
and businessmen. Work was an area in which the common people very much needed,
indeed demanded, change. The slaves who flocked to join Simón Bolívar’s army
did so in exchange for a life of freedom that remained elusive in many cases.
Workers who had been exploited by the colonial system became the labor force
that American elites hoped would build new nations. At times, enslaved workers
found themselves freed into a work life that closely imitated their previous
status as slaves, except now they competed in a job market that provided no
protection against layoffs, unemployment, injury, and old age. And, of course,
enslaved workers in Brazil would not be freed for another six decades. Since the
independence wars were won with elite leadership, the socioeconomic structure
was not overturned, and elites managed to hold onto their position at the top
of the social ladder. In most cases, they were able to keep the electorate
small and defeat any moves toward suffrage for working people, thereby
retaining the political power to pass legislation designed to protect their
economic position. They did what they could to perpetuate the labor systems
that had characterized the past, relying on institutions of the colonial period
like debt peonage, slavery, and the mita to provide the basic framework of
labor after independence.

The Roman Catholic Church also retained much of its power
after independence, although its proper role in society emerged as a major
source of political controversy. Advocates of ideas of political and economic
liberalism associated with Enlightenment thinking sought to reduce the
political and social influence of the church drastically and to convert its
property to private use for purposes of economic development. Conservative
traditionalists, meanwhile, defended the church’s monopoly over both religious
practice and education as a key plank in their larger campaign to resist social
change.

Conservative leaders often succeeded in rallying support
for their program from native peoples and other marginalized members of society
because liberal advocates of “progress,” much like Spain’s “enlightened”
Bourbon reformers in the late 18th century, generally made clear their disdain
for the supposedly backward aspects of popular culture. Indeed, liberals found
their models for independent Latin American societies in England and France,
believing ardently in the necessity of ridding their own countries of
embarrassing Spanish and Portuguese cultural influences, not to mention
anything associated with indigenous or African roots. Moreover, liberal
economic doctrine viewed individual property holding as inherently superior,
and liberal-oriented administrations produced legislation that threatened not
only church wealth but also communal ownership of village land in native
communities. What conservative elites wanted to preserve, of course, was
hierarchical social and racial organization in the colonial style, all the
while protecting their position at the top. Nevertheless, native peoples and
other members of a still-excluded majority often preferred the conservative
vision to an alternative that appeared to involve massive disruption of their
social and cultural lives.

To the despair of reformers, religious organizations like
the
cofradía
retained their central importance in the cultural life of
many native communities after independence. Moreover, key symbols of popular
religion became intimately entwined with the imagery of modern, independent
nationhood, notably in Mexico, where the dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe,
around whose standard Hidalgo’s indigenous and mestizo troops had rallied,
emerged as an iconic representation of Mexican unity. Nevertheless, church
authorities found themselves ever more on the defensive against secularizing
tendencies in society. As we have seen, those authorities had never been fully
able to control the religious practices of common people even at the height of
their power during the colonial era. Now, though, the church was confronted not
only with heterodox influences derived in part from competing indigenous and
African religious traditions, but also an anticlerical backlash from urban
popular sectors in places like Mexico City and Lima, where priests had long
been closely identified with the repressive colonial institutions headquartered
in those cities.