were the latin american revolution revolutionary essay

The Latin American Revolutions

This essay about the Latin American Revolutions highlights the diverse tapestry of peoples and ideologies that fueled the quest for freedom and sovereignty. It explores the rejection of colonial oppression, the emergence of cultural identity as a unifying force, and the transformative impact of grassroots resistance, exemplified by the Haitian Revolution. Despite post-revolutionary challenges, the enduring legacy of these revolutions continues to shape the political, social, and cultural landscape of Latin America, inspiring hope for a more just and equitable future.

How it works

Embedded within the annals of history lies the saga of the Latin American Revolutions—a narrative intricately woven with threads of liberation and identity, distinct yet intertwined with the echoes of the American and French Revolutions. These revolutions, born from the embers of colonial subjugation, bore witness to a complex interplay of historical, economic, and cultural forces, reshaping the destiny of an entire continent.

Unlike the relatively homogeneous backdrop of the American Revolution, the Latin American revolutions were characterized by a diverse mosaic of peoples, ideologies, and aspirations.

Indigenous communities, mestizos, criollos, and enslaved Africans—all stakeholders in the struggle for freedom—converged on the stage of history, propelled by a shared yearning for autonomy and dignity.

At the heart of the Latin American revolutions lay a resolute rejection of colonial oppression, perpetrated by European powers such as Spain and Portugal. Generations of exploitation, discrimination, and economic exploitation had festered resentment among the colonized peoples, igniting the flames of resistance that would engulf the continent in a fervent quest for sovereignty.

Cultural identity emerged as a powerful catalyst for the Latin American revolutions, serving as both a shield against assimilation and a rallying cry for unity. Despite centuries of cultural erasure, indigenous communities maintained a steadfast connection to their ancestral heritage, infusing the revolutionary struggle with a sense of resilience and collective purpose.

The Haitian Revolution, often overlooked in narratives of Latin American independence, stands as a testament to the transformative power of grassroots resistance. Emerging from the crucible of slavery and oppression in Saint-Domingue, this revolution shattered the shackles of bondage and established the first independent black republic in the Western Hemisphere, inspiring enslaved peoples throughout the region to rise up against their oppressors.

The legacy of the Latin American revolutions endures, shaping the contours of political, social, and cultural life in the region to this day. While the attainment of independence marked a significant milestone in the struggle for self-determination, the post-revolutionary era was fraught with challenges as nascent nations grappled with the legacies of colonialism and inequality.

Yet, amidst the trials and tribulations, the spirit of liberation perseveres, serving as a beacon of hope for future generations. As Latin America continues its journey towards progress and prosperity, let us honor the sacrifices of those who came before us and reaffirm our commitment to the ongoing struggle for a more just and equitable world.

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12.4: Latin America Revolutions

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Simon Bolivar Central Park NYC Source: Wikipedia

The Independence of Latin America

The American and French Revolutions stirred independence movements in other parts of the world. A growing spirit of nationalism and the French ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity inspired many Latin Americans to rise up against their French, Spanish, and Portuguese masters. Though mostly successful, these movements would also bring an increase in poverty, and the dream of a united Latin America would quickly fall apart.

Social Structure in Latin America Source: Moore Public Schools

Latin American Society

The term Latin America applies to the lands south of the United States where Spanish, Portuguese, and French are spoken. All these languages developed from Latin. Generally, the region includes Mexico, Central America, South America, and islands of the Caribbean. On the surface, the Latin American revolutions of the early 1800s appear similar to the American Revolution. In every case, revolutionaries overthrew a government controlled by a European country. Then, the leaders of the revolution set up a new national government.

However, there were important differences between conditions in Latin America and in the United States. In Latin America, colonial society was sharply divided into classes based on birth. Struggles among these classes played an important part in the revolutions.

• At the top of Latin American society were the peninsulares , people who had been born in Spain or Portugal. They held the most important positions in colonial government and in the Roman Catholic Church.
• Creoles ranked next, and were born in Latin America but whose ancestors came from Europe. This class included many wealthy landowners and lesser government officials. The peninsulares and the creoles formed an aristocracy in Latin American society. Together, they made up less than one-fifth of the population.
• The common people had few political rights and little share in the region’s wealth. This group included mestizos, mulattoes, blacks, and Indians. Mestizos were people of mixed European and Indian ancestry. Mulattoes were of European and African ancestry. Some mestizos and mulattoes owned small farms or businesses, others rented small farms from landlords. Most blacks worked as slaves on large plantations, although there were free blacks in many towns. Millions of Indians were legally free, but they were usually treated no better than slaves.

A Revolution in Haiti

The first colony to free itself from European rule was the French colony of Saint Domingue on the island of Hispaniola. Almost all of the people who lived in the colony were slaves of African origin. In 1791, about 100,000 rose in revolt. Toussaint L’Ouverture , an ex-slave, soon emerged as a leader. By 1801, he had moved to the eastern part of the island and freed the slaves there. In 1804, the former colony declared itself the independent country of Haiti .

South American Independence

Elsewhere in Latin America, creoles took the lead in the battle for independence. Peninsulares held almost all the high government offices in Spain’s Latin American lands and kept tight control over the economy of its colonies. Merchants in Spanish colonies could trade only with Spain. Likewise, all their goods could only be sent on Spanish ships. In addition, the valuable mines of Mexico and Peru were under direct Spanish control, which the creoles resented.

However, the direct cause of the Latin American revolts was Napoleon’s conquest of Spain in 1808, and placing his brother, Joseph, as the king of Spain. Many creoles might have remained loyal to a Spanish king, but they felt no loyalty at all to a Frenchman placed on the Spanish throne by force.

Fighting broke out in 1810 in several parts of Latin America. Loyalties were divided. The viceroys and their armies remained loyal to Spain, as did some creoles. Indians and mestizos fought on both sides, often forced into armies against their will.

Two leaders emerged. Simon Bolivar was a writer, fighter, and political thinker. He survived defeats and exile to win independence for Venezuela in 1821. Jose de San Martin helped win independence for Argentina in 1816 and Chile in 1818. Bolivar led their combined armies to a great victory in 1824 that gave independence to all the former Spanish colonies.

Bolivar declared Venezuela’s independence from Spain in 1811, but the struggle seesawed back and forth. Bolivar built up an army from many sources. He promised to end slavery, winning many black volunteers. He also recruited Europeans. In January 1819, Bolivar led his 2,500 soldiers on a daring march through the towering Andes into what is now Columbia. Coming from this unexpected direction, he took the Spanish army completely by surprise in Bogota and defeated them. Bolivar went on to free Venezuela in 1821. Next, he marched into Ecuador.

Meanwhile the other great hero of the independence movement, Jose de San Martin was freeing the south. After declaring Argentina’s independence in 1816, his army freed Chile in 1817 after a grueling march across the Andes. Next, San Martin took his soldiers north by sea to Lima, Peru, in 1821. The Spanish army retreated into the mountains of Peru. To drive them out, San Martin needed a much larger force. Otherwise, the Spaniards would remain a threat to all of independent South America. Thus, the need for San Martin and Bolivar to meet at Guayaquil, Ecuador.

No one knows how the two men reached an agreement. But San Martin left his army for Bolivar to command. Soon after, San Martin sailed for Europe, dying almost forgotten on French soil in 1850. Bolivar followed the Spaniards into the heights of the Andes. His forces defeated the Spanish army at the Battle of Ayacucho in 1824, which was the last major battle of the war for independence.

In Brazil, independence took a different turn. When Napoleon’s armies entered Portugal in 1807, the royal family escaped to Brazil, its largest colony. For the next 14 years, it would be the center of the Portuguese empire. By the time Napoleon was defeated, the people of Brazil wanted their independence. In 1822, 8,000 creoles signed a paper asking the son of Portugal’s king to rule an independent Brazil. He agreed, and Brazil became free through a bloodless revolt.

Mexican Independence

In Mexico, ethnic and racial groups mixed more freely. Unlike the other Latin American revolutionary movements, Indians and mestizos played the leading role. Also, whereas in most countries the revolution began in the cities, in Mexico it began in the countryside.

On September 16, 1810, Father Miguel Hidalgo , a priest from the mountain village of Dolores, called on Indian peasants of his parish to rebel against their Spanish masters. Today, that call is known as the grito de Dolores (the cry of Dolores). This group began a 200 mile march toward Mexico City, armed with sickles, stones, and clubs, picking up thousands of new recruits and weapons along the way. Creole landlords fled for their lives. Soon, Hidalgo had a force of 60,000 men behind him. He declared an end to slavery and called for other reforms.

In Mexico City, the main Spanish army and the creoles joined forces against Hidalgo’s army. Hidalgo was betrayed by one of his officers, captured, and executed by a firing squad.

The rebels found another strong leader in Jose Maria Morelos, who proved to be a far better general than Hidalgo had been. His goals were to set up a democratic government, tax the wealthy, and distribute lands to the peasants. By 1813, his army controlled all of Mexico except for the largest cities. In that same year, Mexico was declared an independent republic by its congress.

Many creoles supported the idea of independence, but they were not willing to accept Morelos’ social reforms. A creole officer, Augustin de Iturbide, captured and executed Morelos in 1815. A few scattered groups of rebels fought on as guerrillas.

Suddenly, events took a new turn. In 1820, a revolution in Spain put a new group in power. Mexico’s creoles feared that this Spanish government would take away their privileges. At once, the creoles united in support of independence. Iturbide made peace with the last guerrilla leader, proclaimed Mexico independent in 1821, and eventually made himself emperor. Not long afterward, he was ousted from power. When he tried to return to power in 1824, he was shot.

Caudillos Dominate Governments

By 1830, Latin America was home to 16 independent countries, but many citizens had few political freedoms. All the countries were dominated by a small group of wealthy Creole aristocrats. Army leaders had come to power during the long struggle with Spain, and they continued to control Latin America after independence. Indeed, nearly all the countries of Latin America were run by caudillos . (Caudillos were political strongmen, usually army officers, who ruled as dictators.) Many caudillos cared only for their own power and wealth, and did little to improve the lives of the common people. Changes of government most often took place at bayonet-point, as one caudillo was forced to give way to another.

Throughout Latin America, independence actually brought an increase in poverty, as turmoil continued in the region. The wars had disrupted trade and devastated cities and the countryside. After all the destruction, the dream of a united Latin America quickly fell apart. In South America, Bolivar’s united Gran Colombia divided into Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela in early 1830. And by 1841, the United Provinces of Central America had split into the republics of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Honduras.

The Monroe Doctrine

In one way, Lain America was luckier than other nonindustrial parts of the world. Despite the political confusion, Latin America was never again carved into colonies as Africa and Asia were in the late 1800s. Having won independence, Latin America succeeded in keeping it.

Spain had not given up hope of winning back its colonies. In addition, France saw a chance to take over land in Latin America. However, both Britain and the United States were determined not to allow such a development.

In 1823, U.S. President James Monroe announced “the American continents …. Are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” This statement is known as the Monroe Doctrine . Some questioned if the United States was strong enough to enforce the Monroe Doctrine.

Great Britain wanted to protect Latin American independence for economic reasons. During the wars for independence, many Latin American countries began trading with Britain rather than with Spain. British banks and businesses invested heavily in South America, especially in Argentina and Brazil.

In the end, both countries were happy with the economic advantages they gained from Latin American independence.

Attribution: Material taken and modified from CK-12 7.3 Latin American Independence

Causes of the Latin American Revolution

• History Before Columbus
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Caribbean History
• Central American History
• South American History
• Mexican History
• American History
• African American History
• African History
• Ancient History and Culture
• Asian History
• European History
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• Ph.D., Spanish, Ohio State University
• M.A., Spanish, University of Montana
• B.A., Spanish, Penn State University

As late as 1808, Spain's New World Empire stretched from parts of the present-day western U.S. to Tierra del Fuego in South America, from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean. By 1825, it was all gone, except for a handful of islands in the Caribbean—broken into several independent states. How could Spain's New World Empire fall apart so quickly and completely? The answer is long and complicated, but here are some of the essential causes of the Latin American Revolution.

Lack of Respect for the Creoles

By the late eighteenth century, the Spanish colonies had a thriving class of Creoles (Criollo in Spanish), wealthy men and women of European ancestry born in the New World. The revolutionary hero Simon Bolivar is a good example, as he was born in Caracas to a well-to-do Creole family that had lived in Venezuela for four generations, but as a rule, did not intermarry with the locals.

Spain discriminated against the Creoles, appointing mostly new Spanish immigrants to important positions in the colonial administration. In the audiencia (court) of Caracas, for example, no native Venezuelans were appointed from 1786 to 1810. During that time, ten Spaniards and four Creoles from other areas did serve. This irritated the influential Creoles who correctly felt that they were being ignored.

No Free Trade

The vast Spanish New World Empire produced many goods, including coffee, cacao, textiles, wine, minerals, and more. But the colonies were only allowed to trade with Spain, and at rates advantageous for Spanish merchants. Many Latin Americans began selling their goods illegally to the British colonies and, after 1783, U.S. merchants. By the late 18th century, Spain was forced to loosen some trade restrictions, but the move was too little, too late, as those who produced these goods now demanded a fair price for them.

Other Revolutions

By 1810, Spanish America could look to other nations to see revolutions and their results. Some were a positive influence: The American Revolution (1765–1783) was seen by many in South America as a good example of elite leaders of colonies throwing off European rule and replacing it with a more fair and democratic society—later, some constitutions of new republics borrowed heavily from the U.S. Constitution. Other revolutions were not as positive. The Haitian Revolution, a bloody but successful uprising of enslaved people against their French colonial enslavers (1791–1804), terrified landowners in the Caribbean and northern South America, and as the situation worsened in Spain, many feared that Spain could not protect them from a similar uprising.

A Weakened Spain

In 1788, Charles III of Spain, a competent ruler, died, and his son Charles IV took over. Charles IV was weak and indecisive and mostly occupied himself with hunting, allowing his ministers to run the Empire. As an ally of Napoleon's First French Empire, Spain willingly joined with Napoleonic France and began fighting the British. With a weak ruler and the Spanish military tied up, Spain's presence in the New World decreased markedly and the Creoles felt more ignored than ever.

After Spanish and French naval forces were crushed at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, Spain's ability to control the colonies lessened even more. When Great Britain attacked Buenos Aires in 1806–1807, Spain could not defend the city and a local militia had to suffice.

American Identities

There was a growing sense in the colonies of being separate from Spain. These differences were cultural and often a source of great pride among Creole families and regions. By the end of the eighteenth century, the visiting Prussian scientist Alexander Von Humboldt (1769–1859) noted that the locals preferred to be called Americans rather than Spaniards. Meanwhile, Spanish officials and newcomers consistently treated Creoles with disdain, maintaining and further widening the social gap between them.

While Spain was racially "pure" in the sense that the Moors, Jews, Romani people, and other ethnic groups had been kicked out centuries before, the New World populations were a diverse mixture of Europeans, Indigenous people (some of whom were enslaved), and enslaved Black people. The highly racist colonial society was extremely sensitive to minute percentages of Black or Indigenous blood. A person's status in society could be determined by how many 64ths of Spanish heritage one had.

To further muddle things up, Spanish law allowed wealthy people of mixed heritage to "buy" whiteness and thus rise in a society that did not want to see their status change. This caused resentment within the privileged classes. The "dark side" of the revolutions was that they were fought, in part, to maintain a racist status quo in the colonies freed of Spanish liberalism.

Final Straw: Napoleon Invades Spain 1808

Tired of the waffling of Charles IV and Spain's inconsistency as an ally, Napoleon invaded in 1808 and quickly conquered not only Spain but Portugal as well. He replaced Charles IV with his own brother,  Joseph Bonaparte . A Spain ruled by France was an outrage even for New World loyalists. Many men and women who would have otherwise supported the royalist side now joined the insurgents. Those who resisted Napoleon in Spain begged the colonials for help but refused to promise to reduce trade restrictions if they won.

The chaos in Spain provided a perfect excuse to rebel without committing treason. Many Creoles said they were loyal to Spain, not Napoleon. In places like Argentina, colonies "sort of" declared independence, claiming they would only rule themselves until such time as Charles IV or his son Ferdinand was put back on the Spanish throne. This half-measure was much more palatable to those who did not want to declare independence outright. But in the end, there was no real going back from such a step. Argentina was the first to formally declare independence on July 9, 1816.

The independence of Latin America from Spain was a foregone conclusion as soon as the creoles began thinking of themselves as Americans and the Spaniards as something different from them. By that time, Spain was between a rock and a hard place: The creoles clamored for positions of influence in the colonial bureaucracy and for freer trade. Spain granted neither, which caused great resentment and helped lead to independence. Even if Spain had agreed to these changes, they would have created a more powerful, wealthy colonial elite with experience in administering their home regions—a road that also would have led directly to independence. Some Spanish officials must have realized this and so the decision was taken to squeeze the utmost out of the colonial system before it collapsed.

Of all of the factors listed above, the most important is probably  Napoleon 's invasion of Spain. Not only did it provide a massive distraction and tie up Spanish troops and ships, it pushed many undecided Creoles over the edge in favor of independence. By the time Spain was beginning to stabilize—Ferdinand reclaimed the throne in 1813—colonies in Mexico, Argentina, and northern South America were in revolt.

• Lockhart, James, and Stuart B. Schwartz. "Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
• Lynch, John.  Simón Bolívar: A Life.  2006: Yale University Press.
• Scheina, Robert L. " Latin America's Wars: The Age of the Caudillo, 1791–1899."  Washington: Brassey's, 2003.
• Selbin, Eric. "Modern Latin American Revolutions," 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2018. 
• Venezuela’s Declaration of Independence in 1810
• Chile's Independence Day: September 18, 1810
• How Latin America Gained Independence from Spain
• Biography of Simon Bolivar, 'Liberator of South America'
• The Complete Story of Venezuela's Revolution for Independence
• The May Revolution in Argentina
• The Liberators of South America
• Biography of Francisco de Miranda, Venezuelan Leader
• The History of Venezuela
• Colombia's Independence Day
• The 10 Most Important Events in the History of Latin America
• Independence Days in Latin America
• The Top 6 Liberators of South America
• What Is Latin America? Definition and List of Countries
• Mexico's Independence Day: September 16
• The Federal Republic of Central America (1823-1840)

Latin American Revolutions: Revolutionary Faces Essay 2: Home

Suggested Databases:

• Encyclopedia Britannica A great place to start your research! Learn more here to help with your timeline.
• Gale EBooks Latin is trying out this ebook collection, so please try it out and let us know how you like it. Since we do not yet own this product, please download all articles that look interesting to you so that you don't lose access when the trial expires.
• Chelsea House Biographies Some of you will find long biographical information on your revolutionary leader in this database. Others will not have much success here, but its still worth a check!
• Global Issues in Context Search for biographical and general articles in this database. Results include book articles, magazine/journal articles and radio/video results.
• JSTOR Find journal articles and books on your specific person, event or idea in this robust academic database.
• ProQuest Research Library Prep Search for magazine, journal, and newspaper articles here. For academic journals click the "peer reviewed" button in the Advanced Search page.
• Modern World History Find articles and primary sources related to specific people, battles or places.
• Student Resources in Context Search for biographical and general articles in this database. Results include book articles, magazine/journal articles and radio/video results.
• 19th Century US Newspaper Digital Archives See what the U.S. foreign press said about a specific person or event in this database of old 19th century newspapers.
• Digital National Security Archive Page down to the Latin American Section

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Click on the title to open any of the following eBooks. Remember, usernames and passwords are required off campus. In most cases you will log-in with your RN credentials. If that does not work, log-on to RomanNet and head to Library>US Library group page to find password information. 

Websites to Consider:

• 19th Century Latin America - Internet History Sourcebook - Fordham University The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted texts for student use. Browse general sources listed at the top, or country specific in alphabetical order.
• 19th Century Documents - The Avalon Project - Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy - Yale Law School Find documents related to U.S. relations with specific Latin American countries in this collection. Browse alphabetically.
• Latin American Network Information Center - University of Texas LANIC's mission is to facilitate access to Internet-based information to, from, or on Latin America. Search by region or by subject.
• Latin American Projects - National Security Archive - The George Washington University Find de-classified information retrieved through Freedom of Information Act requests on more recent Latin American revolutions.
• CIA World Factbook The World Factbook provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 267 world entities
• New York Times World Coverage - The Americas Browse for articles on your chosen country or use the search bar to execute a keyword search.
• Homeland Security Digital Library The Homeland Security Digital Library (HSDL) is the nation’s premier collection of documents related to homeland security policy, strategy, and organizational management. The HSDL is part of the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security and is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s National Preparedness Directorate, FEMA.

Assignment Sheet

Latin American Revolutions -  Research Essay #2: Revolutionary Faces - Spring 202 4

Researching and Learning

This essay will examine one of the key driving forces behind any revolutionary movement: the people. Your job is to select one key Latin American revolutionary to examine. See last page for subject suggestions.

Once you have made your selection you will need to gain as much knowledge as possible about the person and the context under which they worked. Thus, you will not only be researching biographical information but more general information about the time period your subject was (or perhaps still is) active, the countries they worked in, their ideologies and goals, and what they accomplished or failed to accomplish. 

Thesis Development and Outlining

This essay is NOT a biography of the subject! Your introductory paragraph is a good place to include key context or basic biographical details, but your body paragraphs should be dedicated to forwarding an argument about your subject. The examples you provide in your body paragraphs might indeed be biographical, but your analysis should reveal how the biographical details support the essay’s argument. Some ideas to get you started in your thesis development: 

Why was this person a successful revolutionary and why? 

Where did this person fall short as a revolutionary leader and why? 

Why was this person and their ideology appealing to people? 

What is your critique of this person’s leadership style? 

What is the lasting impact or legacy of this person/ideology on a specific country or the region of Latin America? 

Other lenses through which to analyze your subject are welcome! 

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• MLA Citation Guide An updated MLA style citation guide created by Latin's History Department
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• Last Updated: May 16, 2024 11:27 AM
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5 Independence in Latin America

Jeremy Adelman is the Walter Samuel Carpenter III Professor in Spanish Civilization and Culture at Princeton University, where he is also the Director of the Council for International Teaching and Research. The author of several books and articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American history, his most recent study is Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton University Press, 2006). Also, he has coauthored a textbook in world history, Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World from the Origins of Humankind to the Present (W.W. Norton, 2008).

• Published: 18 September 2012
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This article bridges the colonial and the national period in a discussion of the independence movements. This topic, part of foundational narratives in the region, once represented the core of Latin American history. The shift to structural and socioeconomic analysis after the 1960s led to a period neglect of a topic that came to be considered too Whiggish and celebratory or, at best, not particularly consequential. But a renewed interest in political history and, more recently, the expectation of several bicentenaries in 2010, have brought a new crop of studies of the emancipation process. By following historians' changing attitudes on the theme, the article also tells us much about the intellectual climate in Latin America during the last half century.

L atin America's secession from Spain and Portugal occupies an important yet enigmatic place in the region's historiography. Like many epochal struggles, it has been the source of endless romanticizing and heroic storytelling. But it has also been singled out as a period in which things that might have happened, often presuming that these would have been for the good, did not. The result is a distinctive blend of worshiping and bashing of the principal figures of the age, and conclusions that the struggles for sovereignty were redeeming, lamentable, or simply inconsequential. Simon Bolívar, who more than any other founder shouldered this polarized view of the independence period, pronounced to the Colombian assemblymen in 1830: “Fellow citizens! I blush to say this: Independence is the only benefit we have acquired, to the detriment of all the rest.” As if to ensure that his handiwork could cut both ways, he also added: “But independence opens the door to us to win back the others under your sovereign authority, in all the splendor of glory and freedom.” 1 It is easy to let the stirring invocations of glory dominate the final sentence of what was one of Bolívar's adieus to Colombians. But from the historian's vantage point, the notion of recovering what was lost evokes what has been so thorny about this period. After all, wasn't independence about realizing something new, not retrieving what was gone?

The writing of modern history has been tied up with the fortunes and visions of the nation-state. For colonial societies especially, decolonization or independence is the epochal moment in which nations come into being; at the hands of historians, it is the quintessential subject for epic nationalist tales. What has been distinctive about Latin America, however, is that the rather unsettled (some might say dismal) view of the “national question” has translated into an unresolved debate over how to write the history of the moment that gave birth to Latin American nations. While other countries and regions created triumphal narratives of the struggle for sovereignty, such a formulation was never easily accepted or universalized in Latin America. National creation myths, even the best ones, condense potential narratives into one or a few privileged stories with an eye to assimilating a national people with and into their history. The task of integrating histories, like integrating peoples, has not fared as well as Latin American nationalists of all shapes and sizes would have liked. Instead of a historical consensus, there has been a contest—at times more explicit than others—over the significance of independence to Latin America. Indeed, Latin America's historiography of the making of its sovereignty is the history of a debate over the region's somewhat complicated experience of modern life.

What this means is that the founding epics of national history in Latin America were less constrained but more confused than narratives of national purpose and realization in other corners of the Atlantic world. Thomas Bender has recently noted of the United States that the bounded unity of the nation inspired, while limiting, history writing in the “other” America. Quite the opposite has been true, as this essay will illustrate, of Latin American historiography. The disunity of nationhood was more often the departure point for narratives of Latin American independence. Even recent historians' efforts to transcend nation-centric stories are less discontinuous with a heritage of almost two centuries of Latin American history writing premised on—and often vexed by—the unbounded sovereignty of the Latin American nation-states. 2

Nation Building and National Histories

By definition, there was no history of independence until it happened. Accordingly, the writing of Latin America's secession from Spain and Portugal emerged just as a particular brand of history was coming into vogue in the 1820s and 1830s: grand narratives written in the idiom of the nation. Thomas Macaulay, Jules Michelet, and George Bancroft were more than great epic writers—with the revolutions in England, France, and the United States being the charmed sujets du jour —they were great national synthesizers; revolutions were epochal moments of nations coming into being. Nations had a collective past, shared a cathartic and bonding experience in toppling an old order, and were thus poised for a common future.

Much the same spirit inspired the first generation of Latin American historians, but they had quite different views of their subject. On the heels of the declarations of independence, letrados rushed to pen their epics of “Colombian,” “Mexican,” or “Brazilian” histories. The stories they told were never divorced from the ideological or partisan struggles that endured after independence. Indeed many of these letrados were combatants in these brawls, and their histories were scarcely disguised tomes to lend legitimacy to one side or the other. But they did conform to some common models of what “history” was supposed to look like. First and foremost, the language of the nation was hard to disentangle from the language of history—few details were spared for stories that did not fit the nation-building enterprise. Secondly, the history of independence was associated with models of constitutionalism, so that narratives of independence dwelled on the fortunes of centralism, federalism, and democracy as the legal principles needed in order to attach civil society to its nation-state.

Epic-writing about Latin American nationhood lent itself to a plurality of narratives because so many of the first great accounts began from the premise that the nations were themselves still works in progress. This was as true for liberal pessimists like José Manuel Restrepo and liberal optimists like Bartolomé Mitre as it was for conservative authors like Lucás Alamán. While fixating on the great men of the era of Colombian, Argentine, or Mexican independence, they also had to contend with the flawed characters of the liberators and the liberated in order to point to the unfinished business of the struggles they unleashed. 3 The nineteenth century was the classic age for writing about independence as a national saga through the martyred efforts of great men: Bolívar, San Martín, Hidalgo, and even Iturbide. This vision has echoed to the present in the cultish views of many of these leaders, as Germán Carrera Damas has shown provocatively in the case of Bolívar. 4 It may well be that images of sacrifice, and the notion that the revolutions remained unfulfilled, gave these leaders a significance that could be easily adapted to contemporary valences (so Peronists could trace a genealogy from San Martín to Perón; and of course Hugo Chávez is distinctly unabashed in his self-portraits as a reincarnation of Bolívar). Brazilian independence was more difficult to fit into this personalized mold of national history, but there were nonetheless efforts to portray Pedro I, for instance, as a national hero, guided by the pragmatic visionary, José Bonifacio, in making the decisive break with Lisbon. And if the continued popularity of Oliveira Lima's 1922 study, published on the centenary of Brazilian independence, is any gauge, the preeminent role of sagacious men who personified a national spirit resonated in Brazil too. 5

While flawed leaders dominated the foreground, there had to be something to personify. The nation that was born with independence took the stage along with its heroic “fathers.” While there was not much examination of the history of this “nation,” it was assumed that a popular consensus and spirit were coherent enough to reject colonialism and follow a prophet to a new land. For the uplifting national historians, this was the formulation. But it was never wholly accepted; it never yielded to a bounded unity to the region's historiography, one which mapped itself onto the visions of the nation it was supposed to serve. Thus, while there was a celebratory streak in the classical historiography, there was also much more discord and disunity regarding the properties of the nation that came into being with independence. Not even the pomp and ceremony of the centenaries of independence could drown out the uneasy feelings that writing the history of independence was not the same thing as celebrating it. It did not help that 1910 was a climactic year in Latin America as social revolution, anarchism, and millenarianism swept the region.

Personalizing history did not mean simplifying it; whereas American history continues to be bogged down in the celebration of the “character” of the founding fathers, historians of Latin America have not been given to the euphoric (or distempered) style. If Karen Racine's wonderful biography of Francisco de Miranda, David Bushnell's of Bolívar, Iván Jaksic's on Andrés Bello, Timothy Anna's of Iturbide, and Neill Macaulay's on Dom Pedro I are any gauge, this genre enabled historians to take a close look at the internal contradictions and agonies of movements that did anything but move in a straight, cohesive line. Perhaps this also explains why the saga of Latin American revolutions has also provided material for novelistic renditions by Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and others. For Jorge Luis Borges, the political upheaval was the setting for a drama of the mind. In Borges's “A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suárez, Victor at Junín,” his subject reflects thus:

What does my battle at Junín matter if it is only a glorious memory, or a date learned by rote for an examination, or a place in the atlas? The battle is everlasting and can do without the pomp of actual armies and of trumpets. Junín is two civilians cursing a tyrant on a street corner, or an unknown man somewhere, dying in prison. 9

The Structuralist Moment

If the epics of the classic age stressed the agency of great—and not so great—men as flawed prophets of imperfect nations, it was not very clear why Portuguese and Spanish colonies should give way to nations without recourse to explanations that relied on a natural, almost preordained logic. It was, ironically, the turn in Latin American nationalism during the 1930s that compelled historians to query some of the precepts of the classic age without dislodging the centrality of the national question. What emerged was a much more structuralist style of history that distanced itself from many of the earlier narratives that had emphasized the voluntarism of its great actors. The revisionist work took place against the backdrop of a world economic crisis, rising anticolonial sentiment around the world, and increasing awareness across the political spectrum that the liberal ideas, intellectual styles, and accompanying political and social regimes of the previous century were more than simply exhausted. Liberalism was, in a sense, the ideology that perpetuated fragmentation of national communities rather than transcending it.

The 1930s was the heyday of revisionism and a self-conscious effort to reject much of the official, “centenary”-style history. In Argentina, revisionistas went to work to debunk the illusory world that Mitre, as President and as historian, had concocted. Not only did the revolutions fail, their progeny, and especially the landowning classes and merchants of Buenos Aires, delivered the vital interests of the patria to foreign, imperialist interlopers waving the Union Jack. “Independence” was thus a formal sham covering up an underlying informal process of reconquest by industrial powers. Peruvian historians echoed José Carlos Mariátegui and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and denounced the oligarchic republics for having betrayed the national and popular interests. In Mexico, after the Revolution of 1910, nationalists decried liberals and conservatives alike; as elsewhere, they began to examine the “nation” in a distinctly indigenous and autochthonous idiom.

By the 1940s and 1950s, independence began to look less like a national climacteric than one, albeit dramatic, point in a series of clashing tendencies nested within colonial and postcolonial societies. Indeed, many were beginning to wonder whether “independence” had a seismic logic at all. For Marxists like Mariátegui and many of his readers, capitalism was still locking horns with persistent feudalism; for writers influenced by Max Weber and what later became called “modernization theory,” the basic contradiction was between traditional, ascriptive, personalizing forces and the forces of modernity—rational, impersonal, and prescriptive. Both views found themselves combined into, or adapted to, the third-worldist vocabulary of “underdevelopment.”

Elite Crisis of the Ancien Régime

With the maturing of a more structuralist view of history and the shift away from nation-centric approaches to independence, a generation of historians began to look closely at the crisis of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the breakdown of long-lasting colonial pacts—an elite crisis that induced some creoles to devise national frameworks to supplant old imperial ones once the ancien régime was on its last legs. The corrosion of elite fealty and integration set the stage for the implosion of the state. Yet even here there was a basic enigma. Doris Ladd's important study of the Mexican high elite illustrated the degree of elite integration through extended Active and real kin networks, as well as the sharp creolization of the aristocracy (in contrast to the view that creoles were marginalized by the Bourbon reforms) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Other works on late colonial elites in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, for example, concurred. Indeed, as the political scientist Jorge Domínguez noted in his study of the crisis of a “patrimonial” Spanish empire, elite competition was accommodated within ancien régime rules—except where emergent elites displayed “incipiently modernizing” orientations. But this was, he concluded, rare. 14 So, given the integration of elites and unprecedented incorporation of American fractions, how did the elite crisis transpire?

For some, ideology and the effects of the Enlightenment fractured an elite whose cohesion could not rest only on common interests or fears. Simon Collier, for instance, wrote a peerless study of the breakdown of consensus among Chilean elites (who ranked among the most tightly knit and stable of the colonial outposts) and the struggle to forge a new alliance, emboldened perhaps more by political conviction than by economic interests—a book which would inaugurate an important series of monographs published by Cambridge University Press (and which Collier himself edited). At the same time, Carlos Guilherme Mota looked at the mentalités of Brazilian plutocrats to show the uneven and partial local consumption and adaptation of European ideas, which confirmed Brazilians' sense of prospective modernization while fueling an anxiety that they were falling short of some universal (read: Europeanized) norm. The result was a simultaneous fascination with and revulsion against the idea of revolution. On the whole, however, the intellectual history of the period was surprisingly scant, in contrast to the current of idealism that so decisively shaped North American historiography. 15 There is one important exception: Renán Silva's recent study of education, libraries, books, and reading in the half century before 1808 follows the recent turn in the history of learned cultures to take a fresh look at figures of the New Granadan Enlightement without assuming that an interpretive community synthesized into a nationalist elite bursting to topple the ancien régime. 16

Closer examinations of colonial elites did suggest that the story of independence required a prior account of the breakdown of colonialism and elite fealty to the Iberian systems. Conflict over ideas paled beside a more “realist” conflict over power, accentuated once its central bastion, the monarchy, collapsed. Timothy Anna, Brian Hamnett, and John Fisher contributed important accounts of the administrative, social, and economic decomposition of elite unity in Mexico and Lima—but while they looked closely at the capitals of the two major viceroyalties, the struggles they charted operated within the imperial frameworks that held local elites together. Writing in the wake of the sesquicentennials of Mexican and Peruvian independence, and in response to what was then becoming a more open debate about whether revolutions were national or not, the issue was not the rise of a new elite to challenge the old order but rather the collapse of the old order, which drove wedges into colonial alliances and thus yielded new elites. For Hamnett and Anna, independence could not be separated from the larger effects of the French Revolution and the hammer blows to the Spanish monarchy. These were crises caused by Napoleon's invasion, which occasioned elite defection and then provoked a failure of governmental structures. Both historians also opened up peninsular archives for systematic reference (something earlier nationalists had not done, because they were looking for the autochthonous aspects of independence). Fisher examined the ways in which regional forces, while still loyal to the crown, fought for autonomy within Peru. Later, Anna, joined by Michael Costeloe, argued that “independence” put the historical cart before the horse—for far from bringing new nations into being, Spain's crisis or mismanagement (depending on how you look at it) “lost” American possessions; nations were the aftereffects of an imperial crisis. This was a perspective shared by Kenneth Maxwell in what has become a classic study of Brazil, with the rather obvious point that the “loss” of Brazil was much more anticipated, as Maxwell noted in the failure of the Braganza monarchy to hang on to the metropolis. More recently, Roderick Barman synthesized a much broader period, going back to the 1790s and reaching forward to the 1850s, to chart the more extended breakdown of elite pacts, whose ultimate effects were to yield something new, the nation. What all these historians argued was that the birth of the “nation” per se did not anticipate or cause a change in ruling systems, but the other way around. 17

It is tempting to see this counter-national history of independence as a vision that could be most easily grasped by non-Latin Americans, especially in the high tide of revolutionary nationalism among intellectual circles in the 1960s and 1970s. But this would be too simple. For the Brazilian economic historian Fernando Novais, independence was not a story about decolonization; it was the effect of a crisis of the ancien régime and its elites, social regimes that could no longer sustain mercantilist colonialism and absolutism and whose colonial elites had already began making the transition to something more than just primitive accumulation, so that independence was a de jure conclusion to de facto developments. Indeed, the edited volume in which Novais's influential essay appeared, edited by Carlos Guilherme Mota, was an important touchstone among Brazilian historians who wanted to advance accounts of independence that marginalized or at least contextualized the national question. 18 Peruvians began to argue that independence was less a conquest than a concession, something motivated from without by industrial powers dueling with a moribund Spain or by San Martín's and Bolívar's “foreign” armies. Peruvian elites, driven more by fear, simply switched allegiance. Heraclio Bonilla and Karen Spalding, in part reacting to the hoopla of the sesquicentennial, published a polemical and influential 1972 essay, “La Independencia en el Perú: Las palabras y los hechos,” which argued that the large structures of the world economy, and not national aspirations, caused independence. Notable was the rising sense among historians that the classical framework confused a postdictive rhetoric of nation builders with the causes and course of the breakdown of Iberian empires. 19

Perhaps the most influential study of the elite crisis that led to independence came from the pen of the Argentine historian Tulio Halperín Donghi. In a series of important articles, and subsequently in his majestic monograph Revolutión y guerra: Formatión de una élite dirigente en la Argentina criolla , he detailed the complex unwinding of systems of rulership, the opening of the centrifugal forces contained by elite unity, and the cascade into revolutionary militarization and civil war. In the dense political narrative, it is sometimes easy to forget that Halperín Donghi was attentive to the underlying social and economic shifts in trade and production that made it harder and harder to keep old mercantilists and new commercial interests within the same bloc. Halperín Donghi later expanded to a general level the notion of elite crisis in response to the schisms unleashed by empires struggling to cope with war and commercial competition; in Reforma y disolución de los imperios ibéricos, 1750–1850 he argued, along with Anna and others, that independence was intricately linked with, if not caused by, imperial dissolution. 20 Fernando Novais and other Brazilian historians were even more insistent that independence was driven by underlying structural forces and had little to do with national aspirations, and using an approach like Halperín Donghi's they argued that Brazil's secession was a response to a broader crisis of the Portuguese empire, a crisis that had sundered the consensus among ruling elites and propelled them to secede, albeit with far less friction and discord than in Spanish America.

Structural models of history transcended personalized narratives and national teleologies; they did not dismiss them, but contextualized people and movements within more sociological frames. The focus tended to be on political and economic elites, and how their collaboration extracted revenues and rents from colonial societies. It was when the institutional conditions that supported these alliances broke down, either under the weight of the fiscal and commercial pressures of Atlantic warfare or faced with changing ideological precepts of rulership and rights, that revolutions erupted. And when colonial agents could no longer see their interests upheld within a framework of empire, they broke loose. Thus it was that the idyll of a coherent “nation” pursuing liberation stepped aside in favor of a more instrumental approach to history, one which conformed to a more general turn in history and the social sciences towards “realist” approaches that accentuated the struggle for political power in the absence of a dominant legitimating system, or Marxian approaches that dwelled on the conflict of material interests between old mercantilist peninsular concerns and a rising, possibly even “bourgeois,” class in the colonies. As one suggestive synthesis recently argued, independence was simply one dimension of a more general crisis of the Spanish state which broke the institutional fetters on capitalist development. As such, Peter Guardino and Charles Walker argued, the period qualifies as a bourgeois revolution (albeit without a thoroughbred bourgeoisie to lead it). 21

The Failed Revolution?

The view of a revolution that failed, or that never was, found the most currency in a series of important monographs about popular insurrections for a different, more inclusive new order that were crushed by peninsular reactionaries and scared creole elites whose visions of a new order stopped short of spreading the social dividends of change more broadly. For Marxists looking for a bourgeoisie to topple a feudal system, as well as for liberals looking for enlightened penseurs determined to bring reason to a backward regime of estates, there may have been a break with independence, but not a social revolution. For Bonilla and Spalding, the rupture of independence was decisive because it enabled a fundamentally colonial society to subsist precisely because it declared independence. What limeño elites did was to cash in the formal rule of Spain for the informal domain of Great Britain. For Indians, rural folk, and the great majority, “independence” was a word, little more—Túpac Amaru's rebellion, far from being one of the protonational precursors, represented a terminal defeat (that is, until the specter of a socialist revolution came along) for aspirants of a new order, whose spectral presence frightened elites into clinging onto old systems. 23

It may be argued that Peruvians were especially inclined to view independence as less than a triumphal moment because of the lateness of secession and the prevalence of outside armies. But they were not. The shift can best be seen in the emergence of important studies of rural folk who seized upon the political rupture to effect a different social order. In 1966, Hugh Hamill published a pioneering study of Father Hidalgo, recasting him less as a national (or protonational) hero or misguided lunatic than as a prophetic leader of a people who were fed up with the violations of their moral economy—and who carried an anti-Spanish flag not because they were “Mexicans” but because they objected to their colonial status and its burdens. Hidalgo therefore helped inaugurate the regime's legitimacy crisis and thus usher in independence, even though the social order that eventuated bore little resemblance to the one he and his followers would have wanted. 24 Another example of a failed, or foiled, movement that articulated something different was Carlos Guilherme Mota's study of the 1817 uprising in Pernambuco. While Mota put greater stress on the interethnic and cross-class alliances that challenged the old order than did Hamill, what was important was the opposition to rulers in Rio de Janeiro and not Lisbon. Mota argued that the movement was less successful at realizing its own affirmative goals than at crippling an already wobbly Braganza dynasty. Yet what the federalist spirit of 1817 expressed was a localized, and not national, concept of sovereignty. Indeed, one of the running concerns for the rebels was a struggle against “monopoly” of all sorts. 25 Like Hamill's study, Mota's explored a failed revolution, but one that ensured that there was no return to the status quo ante.

It should be stressed that failure did not mean permanent defeat. What these case studies showed was that there was a latent meaning to independence that had been crushed, but whose legacies survived. For Mota, the Pernambucan rebels, especially the more populist elements, lived on to rally behind the 1824 creation of the Confederation of the Equator; for Hamill, there endured an Indian and mestizo resistance to any restoration, which informed liberals across the nineteenth-century Mexican political landscape; and for Sala de Touron and her coauthors, Artigas lived on in the spirit of federalist insurgents, which could be read, not unreasonably, as a genealogical founding of the Tupamaro guerrillas fighting for a cause that had not been won in 1810.

After the Revolution

By the early 1980s there existed a plenitude of narratives about the significance and meaning of independence in Latin American history. In a sense, this was already implicit in the classical formulation, which had never managed to stabilize a bounded unity to national histories. What changed was how historians were choosing to see the disunity within the national framework, or giving bounded structures to struggles that decentered national aspirations. But as the 1980s unfolded, in a context in which the region emerged from years of dictatorship and civil war, historians returned to the political content of independence. They were now less dismissive of some of the formal changes that accompanied it. After all the traumas of the repression, the formalities of citizenship acquired new, and vital, significance. What is more, as intellectual life became less radical, the urge to find hidden transformative possibilities within the upheavals of the early nineteenth century lost its charm. Indeed, a historiographical preference once so resolutely dismissed, military history, showed signs of some recovery. Clément Thibaud, for instance, shows—at some length—how the military played a central role in nation making, not as a result of its triumphant feats but out of the sociability within colonial militias that evolved into standing armies. 28

And yet, despite the historiographical turns of the 1980s, the “national question” remained as fractured and unresolved as ever. This change within continuity is expressed in two major directions in which historians pursued their research on independence. The first was a return to the study of the formal political arena cast across a broad “Atlantic” framework. The second involved a closer examination of some of the social and cultural developments that were associated with independence but had very little to do with any process of nation building.

It could be argued that the restorations (or, in some cases, the first instantiations) of democracy in the 1980s motivated historians to look at formal politics in the early nineteenth century. But this, as with so many other historiographical shifts, had its pioneering anticipators. To begin with, the classical histories, anthologies of documents, and constitutional collections had explored state formation, albeit from a somewhat rigid perspective. But there were many historians who defied the simplifying nationalist mold. Among them was the Texas-based scholar Nettie Lee Benson, who authored several important articles and compiled a formative group of essays written by a group of graduate students that centered on the effects that the convocation of deputies to the Spanish Cortes, with the Junta reeling from the pressures of Napoleon's armies. Mexico and the Spanish Cortes, 1810–1822 was published in 1966, and in a sense looked back to an earlier constitutional history. However, it also anticipated by several decades a fascination with the sudden intervention of electoral and representative activity in Spain and the empire. To be sure, as Benson argued, the Cortes for the first time claimed to represent the parts of the empire (provinces, colonies, estates) as a single “Spanish” nation, thereby forcing the national question into the political arena, but it also charted a new course for resolving the regime's legitimacy, elections. For all the studies of political leadership, Benson struck a nerve when she wrote that “few developments in the history of the Spanish colonial system have been more carelessly treated or more misinterpreted than the attempt to establish constitutional government under the Spanish monarchy …” What emerged from the essays, and in her later monograph The Provincial Deputation in Mexico (originally published in Mexico in 1955), was how the rupture in the fundaments of political rule sent riptides across the Spanish dominions that altered the practice of politics and gave rise to understandings of political identity that could not be reduced to social class, economic interest, or location in the world economy. 29 And if the efforts to create new foundations for political legitimacy within the Spanish empire had been overlooked, the situation was even more obscure in the Portuguese empire.

There was a reason why constitutionalism under the Spanish monarchy had been so ill treated: in the rush to establish a narrative of a colony becoming a nation and repudiating its overlords, there was little room for examining how the empires broke up, since the result was so foreordained. The structural emphasis on inevitable decay was no more illuminating than the classical approach it sought to replace. With relatively few exceptions, most historians were willing to accept at face value the language of rebels who believed that nothing Spanish or Portuguese could ever accommodate itself to a more reasoned and representative system. It did not help that this often dovetailed with an Anglo-American propensity to think of constitutionalism as a uniquely Anglo-Saxon art. What Benson called for, and what historians began to pick up in the 1980s, was thus the long history of imperial crisis which presaged independence. Accordingly, there proliferated a great many case studies of elections.

One important collection of essays, edited by Antonio Annino, explored the effects of electoral life in a wide array of settings, from Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro to the Yucatan peninsula. One of the goals of this work is to dispense with the bacilli of the Black Legend which presumed that the experience of modern political representation in Latin America had (and has) been a failure, a view reinforced by the overwhelming echo of nineteenth-century elite voices that decried the disorder and anarchy of voting. Greater attention to suffrage dislodged the more familiar story about caudillos and caciques as the political inheritors of the Liberators' efforts. This direction of research, it is worth saying, paid less attention to “parties” and electoral outcomes (whose polls were, in any event, very uneven predictors of who actually won these contests) and more on electoral practices as “inputs” contributing to political cultures in formation, and this being a conditioning force for state formation. The result is that political citizenship conditioned states as much as the other way around. What this meant for how historians understand independence is clear enough: it was one of a series of larger unresolved questions about sovereignty, and making sense of independence requires a prior analysis of some of the ways in which political life changed in the wake of an imperial crisis in the metropolis. In the case of Mexico, for instance, Virginia Guedea has charted the manifold ways in which insurgents and loyalists alike turned to elections to rally support and popular practices of suffrage coexisted with military activity to sort out allegiances and alignments across New Spain between 1810 and 1821. And as Karen Caplan has observed, it was not just Spaniards and creoles who turned to elections; Indians in Oaxaca and Yucatán also embraced voting as a means to resolve disputes over municipal leadership. If Mexicans developed a national consciousness, they did so during, or perhaps because of, a fundamental rupture in the practice of politics. 30

There have also been a series of very important studies of the deliberative work of the Cortes itself, showing how the parliament wrestled with reintegrating the components of an empire or monarchy into a single, multicontinental, and multiethnic “nation.” Márcia Regina Berbel, for instance, has published an account of how the elected deputies to the Cortes in Lisbon went to the metropolis to defend the unity of the Portuguese nation and the consequential equality of subjects within it. Almost two years of deliberation yielded to divergent notions of what it meant to belong to a single nation. As Berbel's book shows, the justifications for “Brazilian” secession did not mean that “Brazilians” subscribed to a common framework of national membership; some of the very same fissures that opened in Lisbon remained open when sovereignty was repatriated to Rio de Janeiro. 31 Other historians have taken seriously the political theory, or theories, that informed what became an increasingly polarized set of positions over the statehood that was supposed to sustain nationhood within empire or monarchy. To José Carlos Chiaramonte, for instance, rebellious and reactionary proponents of sovereignty operated within a doctrinal framework of natural rights and a cult of civic virtue, not national rights, equally defensible at subnational (municipal or provincial) levels and at supranational ones (like a “monarchy”). In this way, ancient norms could give way to new political forms. Brazil's constitutional break was therefore with Lisbon, not with monarchy, and was not a mere outlier, simply one expression of a new combination of political sentiments, which relocated the spatial boundaries of the political community with independence without repudiating empire or monarchy as the means to bond a political regime to its social composition. Nationhood was therefore but one of the progeny of a shift in models of citizenship; Chiaramonte made explicit what was becoming an implicit recognition: it was the state that created the conditions for the nation, and not a maturing national esprit that created new states. 32

In the 1980s, therefore, historians were turning full circle to the analysis of the institutional structures of rulership, restoring the autonomy of the political field but sidelining the heroes of the nations they were supposed to personify. There was also another important departure from the classical legacies: greater attention was paid to the contingencies of political decomposition and recomposition of empire before the independence of its colonies, thus sparing the analysis of its predestined, nationalizing outcome. Independence was becoming a political effect, not a cause of political change. For María de Lourdes Viana Lyra, Brazilian secession came after several decades of imperial tinkering and efforts on the part of colonists and metropolitans alike to reimagine the empire before ditching it in favor of something else, like the nation-state—or, to be more accurate, to reinvent the empire as a nation-state. Roberto Breña's important recent study of Mexico goes a step further: it argues that the crisis within the Spanish empire evolved within the understandings of liberalism in all corners of Madrid's dominion, which had itself evolved from Bourbon Enlightenment trends; the crisis was internal to the ideological makeup of the system itself. 33

Indeed, there has been a full reevaluation of loyalism and the stresses and strains of the ancien régime before its final collapse as conditions of rebellion. John Fisher for Peru and Christon Archer for Mexico, for instance, have shown how much loyalists feuded and wrangled over what to do after 1808—a dimension of the conflict which had been completely occluded by the nationalist accounts, which preferred to leave loyalists as an undifferentiated mass of reactionaries. Scarlett OʼPhelan Godoy has compiled an important collection of essays specifically dealing with life in Peru from 1808 to the 1820s, that is, the years between the monarchy's collapse and the final defeat of peninsular armies. What becomes clear is that Peru did not conform to the image of unflinching loyalty and stasis. Indeed, as OʼPhelan Godoy remarked in a critique of Bonilla and Spalding's view that independence was simply “conceded” rather than achieved, there was a great deal more unrest and discontinuity even within the most “loyal” of Iberian viceroyalties than historians have admitted—in large part because they have been so obsessed with locating the origins of a national quest for sovereign redemption rather than conflict and violence over what it meant to persist in empire and monarchy. In a nuanced study by Víctor Peralta of José Fernández de Abascal, the formidable viceroy in Lima from 1806 to 1816, it is clear that for all the Spaniard's cunning, he was running a tough gauntlet between subjects itching to try on new liberties and loyalists who despised the change but were reluctant to fund the suppression of its more radical proponents. Gustavo Montoya, in a fine-grained essay, explored the waverings of limeño dominant classes during San Martín's occupation of the city, with royalist armies camped just outside. In these circumstances, it was not at all clear what to do—and to slap simplified causal models onto complex contingencies seems increasingly ahistorical (though perhaps no less tempting just because the scenarios of collapsing systems are so complex). 34

There is now a welter of very good studies of what it meant to be on the “other,” loyalist, side of the political line to complement the increasingly complex view of the divisions and changes within the patriot cause. In a sense, Germán Carrera Damas's study of the Venezuelan loyalist Boves, while still a blood-curdling read, no longer stands alone in urging readers to take the defenders of empire seriously as historical subjects. Valentim Alexandre charted the step-by-step ways in which the “colonial question” was magnified into the powder keg of the Portuguese regime. Maria de Lourdes Viana Lyra has shown how conservative reformers struggled from the 1790s to shore up the Portuguese empire by recasting it as a grand trans-Atlantic utopia whose inheritors were José Bonfacio and the Brazilian Empire born in 1822. Kirsten Schultz's close study of urban political culture in Rio de Janeiro between 1808 and 1821 shows just how much potentates of all inclinations labored to recombine traditional notions of monarchy and empire with newer principles of representation and newer realities of the Americanization of power. 35

The most important and provocative intervention has come from Jaime E. Rodríguez O., who in a series of essays and edited books, and finally in The Independence of Spanish America , has recast the breakup of the Spanish empire as a civil war among Spaniards, many of whom happened to live in the Americas. The 1998 edition of The Independence of Spanish America winnows out references to colony and empire to make way for an image of a “heterogeneous confederation” of more or less equal parts bound by a “Spanish Monarchy.” There was friction but no colonial identity brewing in the peripheries, waiting, as the classical historians had argued, for the apposite moment for their birth into a national form. The problem came when Spanish subjects were forced to deal with the absence of their monarch. Spanish Americans and Spaniards could not agree on what kind of structure to put in his stead. As a result, independence was not only the end of a long political process, nation-states were the “fragments and survivals of a shattered whole” (in Octavio Paz's words) of a multicontinental cosmopolitan kingdom.

What is important to underscore about Rodríguez's argument is that colonies did not secede from an empire; it was the protracted metropolitan crisis of the ancien régime that eventuated in nations. Rodriguez crystallized a growing historical view of independence as anything but inevitable, the old regime as anything but a brittle framework incapable of adapting old practices to new ways, the nation being “Hispanic” before labels like “Colombian” or “Argentine” were assigned to the post-Hispanic shards. If the national teleology is gone, Rodríguez fills the narrative vacuum with the idea of an enduring “Spanish” and “monarchical” imagined community of preference. Here, the revisionism runs into some problems. It downplays the multiple legal principles and practices involved in being a Spanish subject on the peripheries that membership in the Monarchy did not resolve, or at least explains conflict as a contingent clash and not a structural dilemma. Sidelining the words “empire” and “colony” certainly creates more room to think about the ancien régime without presuming its demise. But dispensing with structured notions of asymmetry and inequity makes it hard to explain the violence and discord that followed the crisis of 1808. While Rodríguez challenges both the view that creoles were bound to defy imperial authority and the structuralist assumption that the old regime could not adapt to modern mores, he is forced to restore the Liberators back to the center of the political stage, albeit shorn of their heroic vestments, as the saboteurs of the system. 36

Rodríguez's works comprise a landmark in the making of modern Latin American history, having crystallized a growing view that there was a political logic to imperial change that was not reducible to underlying structural drives and their inevitability. He, and others, located the emergence of nationhood as a more truly revolutionary outcome precisely because it was so unforeseen, and not the result of a preexisting propensity.

The Unbounded Unity of Independence

Is there a position between viewing independence as a contingent event with structural consequences and treating it as a structural manifestation that unleashed contingent disorders? This last section will explore several ways in which historians have sought to locate the struggle for sovereignty within several sets of conflicts, only one of which has to do with abrasive concepts of nationhood. They fall within quite a different model of politics than the one described above. If some historians in the 1980s began to take seriously the domain of an autonomous political sphere, others reframed politics not so much as the space in which political subjects grappled with the challenge of choosing and acknowledging state authority but as an activity which defines the boundaries and limits of citizenship. This shift owed its inspiration to the works of Alexis de Tocqueville and Jürgen Habermas, who observed a more general structural disjuncture between eighteenth-century efforts to centralize state authority in absolutist and interventionist hands and ideas of the Enlightenment and the republic of letters, according to which political subjects possessed abilities to reason and consequential rights. What was vital was not just shifting formal political rules but, as Habermas put it, a “structural transformation” of the public sphere that constituted the citizenry. As social scientists were arguing during the 1980s “transitions” to democracy, what was at stake for the system was not just elections and formal rules of the game, but also the freedom and energy of an autonomous civil society to buttress them.

This sphere, comprised of public spaces, parks, cafés, newspapers, and salons, was no less important to the shaping of politics than its coeval political sphere. One of the presumptions, however, about the emergence of a public “sphere” lies in its singular rather than plural origins and development. Indeed, what is so important about Latin American historical scholarship is that is demonstrates how the fracturing of political systems can be traced to the fragmentation and polarization of publics themselves, driven above all by transformations in the principles and practices of representation within empires. Isabel Lustosa's in-depth study of how Luso-Brazilian journalists exchanged a war of printed words—printed insults, in her words—set the stage for Brazilian secession in spite of elite and royalist efforts to keep the two sides of the Luso-Atlantic worlds together. In this sense, the emergent public activity associated with new patterns of sociability and exchange did more than alter political rules and norms; it could fragment and reaggregate them in novel ways. 37

The most important work in this vein has come from the Paris-based historian François-Xavier Guerra and his many students. For Guerra, the revolutions were not disruptive moments in an otherwise integrated system but an acceleration of processes that had begun under the ancien régime and were carried forward, vertiginously, with secession. There was therefore a deeply discontinuous aspect to independence, but its novelty can be ascribed to a more global transformation in a system of references, ideas, social imaginations, and values that amounts to nothing less than the eruption of modernity within old regime monarchies. What is important about the transformation within the old political vessel is that what was novel did not necessarily imply or require a new order to realize it. In this sense, the “filiation” or likening of the Latin American revolutions to the French Revolution needs some serious qualification (since in any event French revisionists were busy dismantling old verities about their revolution as well). Rather than a sharp new order, what emerged were much more hybrid systems and experiments in empires (like Brazil and Mexico), monarchies (like Belgrano's Incan restoration), or even triumvirates, protectorates, and directorates that amalgamated new principles with old absolutist ones.

What is more, revolutionary syncretisms tried to resolve the problems of state legitimacy against the backdrop of new practices of sociability, symbolic activity, and media for determining what did quickly acquire an undeniable force: public opinion. In a study of Mexico around independence, Rafael Rojas has shown how reading, writing, and the circulation of books and other media kindled an incipient public opinion as old imperial structures waned—though the causal ties between the two developments remain, perhaps necessarily so, unclear. Guerra and Annick Lempérière edited an important volume that tackled these ambiguities head-on and explored the fascinating variations with which increasingly localized combinations of new and old practices tried to resolve what historians had traditionally treated in binary ways: tradition and modernity. And yet, Latin America's independence process still acquired an important determining power. Unlike other societies of the Latinate world (including Portugal and Spain) after the revolutions, there was no restorationist undertow that swept countries back into monarchical or neoabsolutist regimes. Latin Americans had constitutions that checked the powers of rulers; legitimacy was predicated on popular sovereignty. Such principles, honored perhaps only in the breach, nonetheless altered the fundamental course of state formation in Latin America. 38

We are, therefore, some distance from the idealized images of heroes delivering their societies to the promised land of the nation's bounded unity and the state's universalized identification with the rule of law. Free of the view that tarred Latin American revolutions as somehow manqué, historians have turned away from post-dictive narratives in which the “failure” or “success” of the outcome guided the story of social and political change in favor of accounts of how old and new forces combined, clashed, and compromised. Of late, historians have been looking more closely at the many manifestations of the shifting hybrid systems in which declarations of independence were embedded. New formal rules may have been inscribed in charters, public opinion may have begun to enjoy an influence over state affairs that no one imagined before 1810, but the values, norms, and behavior of societies and households did not necessarily calibrate themselves to the same rhythm of change. Indeed, in many ways, they continued to be “traditional” precisely because state sovereignty was so shaky.

To get at how public norms and institutions intersected, historians have looked closely at how the vocabulary of “honor” persisted in distinguishing permissible and legitimate activity from that which was impermissible and stigmatized by public norms. Margarita Garrido's study of appeals and petitions to colonial and revolutionary authorities describes the enduring appeal—and effectiveness—of a particular supplicative style of collective representation before authorities. She shows that the diminishing returns on this traditional convention of the ancien régime taxed its legitimacy, as well as its successor's. Victor Uribe's study of the legal letrado elite of Nueva Granada explores the ways in which attorneys and magistrates—and their families—shared a familiar world, replete with strong behavioral customs that gave ballast to a highly litigious society, and an increasingly polarized one as the revolution unfolded. Within a profession and its reproductive networks devoted to upholding legality and honorable conduct, there was hatched a series of subversive ideas and proposals which ensured that lawyers would be at the center, and on both sides of the line, of the revolution. Throughout, however, “honor” was a way to gauge private citizens' compliance with law, as well as a public language with which to vilify opponents. The world had changed, while redoubling the force of its heritages. Flux and reflux.

Living an honorable life, indeed elevating “honor” as a means to distinguish between active rights-bearing citizens and passive subjects, is the theme of Sarah Chambers' study of Arequipa. “Honorable citizens” were those endowed with the ability to contribute to public affairs. In courts, the streets, and newspapers, public authorities from colonial officials to rival caudillos were celebrated or decried for their compliance with accepted notions of honor (though, it is worth noting, this was hardly a transparent ideal and was itself the source of much feuding). What independence did was to democratize honor; the republic had to accept that all citizens could in theory be honorable, and thus active members of the political community. The ultimate custodian of honor shifted from the king to the constitution without dispensing with traditional understandings of labor discipline, Indian subservience, and patriarchal mores that reproduced social inequalities through the nineteenth century. Flux and reflux.

José Murilo de Carvalho's study of the Braganza court shows how Brazil's dominant classes handled the disruptions of secession and constitutional change without letting the former colony splinter by hanging on to Portuguese colonial habits, which had been the source of a great deal of ideological homogeneity. This was only in part a doctrinal matter; it also depended on forms of elite socialization, training, and courtly rituals that distinguished civil rulers from the rest while blurring the lines that had been so divisive within Spanish American elites. At the same time, Brazilian elites acknowledged that their hold on power depended on their ability to accommodate new groups (especially from the provinces) and aspirants into the charmed circle of potentates lest they be accused (and they often were) of being as despotic as Portuguese rulers. Flux and reflux. 39

To say that older concepts survived the break of independence while acquiring new meaning or significance need not diminish the violence that accompanied the friction between flux and reflux. Indeed, the flux-reflux that Octavio Paz invoked need not imply lack of motion. If political historians have looked at how citizenship changed, and thus challenged the view that independence achieved little, social historians have been even more probing of the stubborn view that change stopped at the doorstep of formality and did not enter the private world of domesticity or social power. For instance, historians have examined how the wars shaped the lives of slaves—and how, in turn, slaves seized upon mass violence to expand the boundaries of their freedom. In Lima, as Alberto Flores Galindo and Christine Hunefeldt have shown in their works, the public tumult of Spain's invasion, and eventually San Martín's occupation of the viceregal capital, shook up without militarizing the most dichotomous relations between wealthy potentates and slaves. Disturbances may have spiked, but elites nonetheless (or in response to the social instability) remained unified and able to preserve social hierarchies—but barely. Gustavo Montoya, for instance, shows how the popular cuerpos cívicos mobilized during the Protectorate years in Lima (1821–22), rearranging fundamental social relations. 40

If social upheavals convulsed even the most stable of colonial outposts, they had the capability of transforming plantation belts into battlefields. Centuries of slaveholding practices went up in flames, even though, on the books, slavery was only annulled in most societies in the 1850s. Peter Blanchard has followed the trails of slaves who became foot soldiers in patriot armies and who forced their claims upon the Liberators, so that the new states soon passed laws ending the slave trade before cutting their ties with Spain. Some legislators freed all the children born thereafter; meanwhile, slaves, as Camilla Townsend has shown for the area around Guayaquil, did not sit around waiting to be freed but took the language of liberty to heart, fleeing, litigating, and manumitting themselves in unprecedented numbers. Marixa Lasso has shown how the image of Haiti functioned as a double-edged sword, simultaneously as a potent threat from slaves who wanted freedom from republicans and royalists alike and as a menace to be avoided. Haiti inspired a radical republican tradition among free people of color, and thus added to polarized social relations that cut across rebellious and royal armies. This compelled both sides to free slaves as recruits to armies while struggling to keep black troops from radicalizing their commanders' cause. And in some cases, racial lines were drawn across the commanders themselves. Aline Helg has argued that Black and mulatto commanders ran headlong into white leaders like Bolívar and Francisco de Paula Santander's fears that Colombian republicanism would cascade into a anarchic pardocracia . Not a few found themselves executed in the panic to avoid radicalization of independent countries. Helg's analysis suggests that the revolution for independence was a lost opportunity for creating a different, more egalitarian racial order. But the effect of the struggles on slavery's role in basic productive relations cannot be ignored: from the sugar estates in New Spain to the cacao plantations of Venezuela and the estancias of the Banda Oriental, property owners had to look beyond slaves as the cornerstones for capital accumulation. Even in Brazil, where social stasis has been a running theme, an anthology of excellent essays about runaways and their fugitive communities, edited by João José Reis, illustrates how the political convulsions and provincial uprisings shook the ability of planters to enforce labor discipline and led to spasms of slave flight. 41

Where the dynamic between flux and reflux, accelerated by independence, is most evident is in recent scholarship on the shifting social geography of ethnicity. Not surprisingly, the historiographical activity is concentrated on the Andes and, especially, Mexico. In the Andes, of course, there was a longstanding view that the lingering fears of Túpac Amaru ensured that elites recoiled at the thought of opening the political domain to new, subaltern actors. Flores Galindo's elegant Aristocracia y plebe certainly evokes this sense, albeit in the neurological core of the Peruvian viceroyalty. At best, historians invoke the unrest in Huánuco and Cuzco (1811–12 and 1814) as spasmodic echoes of the past rather than part of a syncopated, and still incomplete, process of integrating Indian villagers into a new order. Jorge Cornejo Bouroncle's classic study of Mateo García Pumacahua's insurgency was an important exception to this rule—though he cast his narrative as a heroic nationalist alliance against Spanish despots. 42 In Mexico, Hidalgo's and Father Morelos's insurrections got a similar treatment. They helped spark the beginnings of independence and struck fear in the hearts of magnates (and thus stifled whatever enthusiasm they might have for the “Mexican” cause), but once the old regime began to forfeit the loyalty of elites, the political action shifted to the capital and subaltern actors faded into the background.

It would be hard to exaggerate how much historians have toppled this view of spasmodic popular insurgency. Charles Walker, for instance, carries his story of cuzqueño politics from Túpac Amaru to Pumacahua and on into the postcolonial decades. What is clear is that there were certainly waves of insurgency. Yet conflict, and not the passivity of a “ grand peur ” marked the highlands throughout the revolutionary era. This was why Cuzco's colonial intendant referred to “smoldering ashes” that threatened to flare up at any time. While it is true that liberals had a tough time dealing with the “Indian question” and in many ways preferred to let the status quo ante endure rather than shower the highlands with the liberties they advocated in urban salons, Cuzco's Indians remained a force to be reckoned with—an insight that the caudillo Agustín Gamarra took to heart, much to the chagrin of his liberal detractors. 43

The effect of popular insurgency on the course and outcome of independence and on the remapping of the social landscape is most developed in the work on Mexico. Brian Hamnett, whose studies of infraelite struggles in the capital were so important in putting “independence” into a larger imperial setting, shifted his attention to the provinces, arguing that the insurgency had vital popular taproots and thus succeeded in compromising the legitimacy of royalist power in Mexico City. Insurgent bands, led by chieftains and their clans, hammered away at viceregal power until, in many regions, it was they and not Spanish officers who governed, well before Iturbide carried the military over to the Mexican side. Peter Guardino looked at one region in particular, Guerrero, where peasants fought for a new model of state sovereignty and citizenship. Mulatto sharecroppers and Indian villagers who grew cotton on the Costa Grande kept up a fight against Spanish power and eventually proved to be critical popular constituents in Vicente Guerrero's guerrilla war from 1815 to 1821—and eventually a bastion of his brand of popular liberalism, which continued to echo through the nineteenth century. Finally, Eric Van Young's in-depth and sprawling epic makes it all but impossible to envision “independence” as a process of national liberation involving elite bargaining and feuding over principles of state sovereignty without accounting for subaltern agency. As much as Hidalgo sparked Mexican nationalism, his insurgency also unleashed an internal war between classes and ethnic formations that sapped the colonial administration of its dominion over the viceroyalty while transforming the ways of life of villagers. These were the conditions that set the stage for secession, not its products. And with this sequence in mind, what Van Young insists is that the complex alliances of Indians, slaves, mixed folk, and creole ideologues should not let the image of a national synthesis against Spain overshadow very important and unresolved struggles for local resources, power, and communal identities. The anticolonial struggle therefore often blurred into an internecine one. It may be that Van Young has captured why it has been so hard for historians to settle the issue of which revolution was more important and how to bring some closure to either. Seeing the revolution as a convergence of cultural, social, and political struggles occasioned by the crisis of a regime that had legitimated centuries of a colonial social order has become a way to unbind the unrealized unity that been so elusive for the classical raconteurs of independence. 44

In spite of the shifting views of Latin American independence there is a persistent undertow, and it is the way in which independence was simultaneously a moment of promise and frustration for historians who were trying to tell stories about political subjects struggling to fix new models of sovereignty out of colonial parts—and thus trying to answer the entwined questions of independence of what, and for whom. Such a tension ensured that independence never achieved the status of a culminating or redemptive moment in Latin American nation building. This does not mean that many historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not try to give a bounded unity to this moment as one of national birth; they did. But even in the classic narratives of independence, heroic national founders were as famous for their flaws as for their achievements; for all their daring selfless acts, they imprinted their imperfections on the fissiparous communities they “liberated.”

Paradoxically, the unbounded unity of independence has had some liberating effects for Latin American historians, who have not had to labor under the burdens of quite such a triumphalist and exceptionalist mold as have Americans when it comes to their revolution. Historians have been able to be much more open about its ambiguities, incompletions, and imperfections. There has been, to be sure, a strong sense among many that independence was a failed moment in which nations struggled but failed to cohere, and more recently in which political liberties never had the leveling social effects that many, especially more radical, historians inscribed into the very meaning of the term “revolution.” But increasingly, especially since the 1980s, seeing that the revolution was not an announcement of a new order but rather a structured transition between orders which remains unresolved, historians have been able to recapture some of the very discontinuous dimensions of the period precisely because creating nations was simply one of many potential stories and significances of the period. In such a fashion, the organized violence that accompanied the breakup of empires could reflect the diversity of colonial societies and the pluralism of their causes. The combination of improvising a new public stage while polarizing and militarizing the discord between its actors has reinforced the indefinite or unbounded view of the independence era, where so much could happen while remaining so unresolved.

1. “Address to the ‘Congreso Admirable’: Message to the Constituent Congress of the Republic of Colombia,” in El Libertador: Writings of Simón Bolívar , ed. David Bushnell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 108 .

2. Thomas Bender, “Introduction: Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives,” in Rethinking American History in the Global Age , ed. Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 2 .

3. José Manuel Restrepo, Historia de la revolutión de Colombia (Medellín: Bedout, 1969), 6 vols. ; Bartolomé Mitre, Historia de Belgranoy de la independencia argentina (Buenos Aires: Angel Estrada, 1947), 4 vols. ; Lucas Alamán, Historia de Méjico , 5 vols. (Mexico City: Editorial Jus, 1942) . For background reviews of these historiographical founders, see Germán Colmenares, Las convenciones contra la cultura: Ensayos sobre la historiografía hispanoamericana del siglo XIX (Bogotá: TM Editores, 1986), 87–90 .

4. Germán Carrera Damas, El culto a Bolívar: Esbozo para un studio de la historia de las ideas en Venezuela (Caracas: Instituto de Antropología e Historia, 1969) .

5. Oliveira Lima, O Movimento da Independência, 1821–1822 (5th ed., Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 1997) .

Issued by the Comisión Nacional del Sesquicentenario de la Independencia del Perú between 1971 and 1974.

7. John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973, 2nd ed. 1986) .

8. John Lynch, Caudillos in Spanish America, 1800–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) ; John Charles Chasteen, Americanos: Latin America's Struggle for Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) .

9. From Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 171 ; Karen Racine, Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2003) ; David Bushnell, Simón Bolívar: Liberation and Disappointment (New York: Longman, 2004) ; Timothy E. Anna, The Mexican Empire of Iturbide (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990) ; Iván Jaksic, Andrés Bello: Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) ; Neill Macaulay, Dom Pedro: The Struggle for Liberty in Brazil and Portugal, 1798–1834 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986) ; see also Robert Harvey, The Liberators: Latin America's Struggle for Independence (London: Overlook Press, 2000) .

10. See Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Raízes do Brasil [1936] (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998 ), with fascinating reflections by Antonio Candido in an introduction and postscript on the reception of this work among writers and historians in Brazil.

11. Hernán Ramírez Necochea, Antecedentes económicos de la independencia de Chile (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1959) ; Sergio Bagú, El plan económico del grupo rivadaviano, 1811–1827: Su sentido y sus contradicciones, sus proyecciones socials, sus enemigos (Rosario: Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas, 1966) .

12. Richard Graham, Independence in Latin America: A Comparative Approach (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972, updated in 1994) .

13. Jay Kinsbruner, Independence in Spanish America: Civil Wars, Revolutions, and Underdevelopment , 2nd ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994) .

14. Doris M. Ladd, The Mexican Nobility at Independence, 1780–1826 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976) ; Susan M. Socolow, The Merchants of Buenos Aires, 1778–1810: Family and Commerce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) ; João Luis Ribeiro Fragoso, Homens de grossa aventura: Acumulação e hierarquia na praça mercantil do Rio de Janeiro ( 1790–1830 ) (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 1992) ; Jorge I. Domínguez, Insurrection or Loyalty: The Breakdown of the Spanish American Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980) . For Domínguez, the cause of independence lay more at the feet of international great power competition rather than infraimperial elite competition.

15. Simon Collier, Ideas and Politics of Chilean Independence, 1808–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967) ; Carlos Guilherme Mota, Idéia de revolução no Brasil (1789–1801) , 4th ed. (São Paulo: Atica, 1996) .

16. Renán Silva, Los ilustrados de Nueva Granada, 1760–1808: Genealogía de una comunidad de interpretatión (Medellin: Banco de la República, 2002) .

17. Brian Hamnett, Revolutión y contrarrevolución en México y el Péru (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1978) ; Timothy Anna, The Fall of Royal Government in Mexico City (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978) , The Fall of Royal Government in Peru (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979) , and Spain and the Loss of America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983) ; John Fisher, “Royalism, Regionalism and Rebellion in Colonial Peru, 1808–1815,” Hispanic American Historical Review 59:1 (1979): 232–57 ; Michael P. Costeloe, Response to Revolution: Imperial Spain and Spanish American Revolutions, 1810–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) ; Rebecca A. Earle, Spain and the Independence of Colombia, 1810–1825 (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000) ; Kenneth R. Maxwell, Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and Portugal, 1750–1808 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) ; Roderick J. Barman, Brazil: The Forging of a Nation, 1798–1852 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988) .

18. Fernando A. Novais, “As Dimensões da Independencia,” in 1822: Dimensões , ed. Carlos Guilherme Mota (São Paulo: Perspective, 1972), 15–26 , and his later Portugal e Brasil na crise do antigo sistema colonial (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1979) .

19. Heraclio Bonilla and Karen Spalding, “La Independencia en el Perú: Las palabras y los hechos,” in Bonilla et al., La Independencia en el Perú (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1972), 15–64 .

20. Tulio Halperín Donghi, “La Revolutión y la crisis de la estructura mercantil colonial en el Río de la Plata,” Estudios de Historia Social 2:2 (1966): 78–125 , “Revolutionary Militarization in Buenos Aires, 1806–1815,” Past and Present 40 (1968): 84–107 , Politics , Economics and Society in Argentina in the Revolutionary Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) , and Reforma y disolución de los imperios ibéricos, 1750–1850 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1985) .

21. Peter Guardino and Charles Walker, “The States, Society and Politics in Peru and Mexico in the Late Colonial and Early Republican Periods,” Latin American Perspectives 19:2 (1992): 10–43 . For a more Weberian approach, see George Reid Andrews, “Spanish American Independence: A Structural Analysis,” Latin American Perspectives 12:1 (1985): 105–32 .

22. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 121 ; John J. Johnson, The Military and Society in Latin America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964), 13–34 .

23. Bonilla and Spalding, “La Independencia en el Perú: Las palabras y los hechos,” 44–48 .

24. Hugh Hamill, The Hidalgo Revolt: Prelude to Mexican Independence (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1966) .

25. Carlos Guilherme Mota, Nordeste 1817 (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1972) .

26. John Street, Artigas and the Emancipation of Uruguay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959) .

27. Lucía Sala de Touron, Nelson de la Torre, and Julio C. Rodríguez, Artigas y su revolutión agraria, 1811–1820 (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1978) .

28. Clément Thibaud, Repúblicas en armas: Los ejércitos bolivarianos en la Guerra de Independencia en Colombia y Venezuela (Bogotá: Planeta, 2003) .

29. Nettie Lee Benson, ed., Mexico and the Spanish Cortes, 1810–1822: Eight Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966), 5 , and Benson, The Provincial Deputation in Mexico: Harbinger of Provincial Autonomy, Independence, and Federalism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992) . See her own harbinger, “The Contested Mexican Election of 1812,” Hispanic American Historical Review 26:3 (1946): 336–50 .

30. Antonio Annino (coord.), Historia de las elecciones en Iberoamérica, siglo XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995) ; Virginia Guedea, “La primeras elecciones populares en la ciudad de México, 1812–1813,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 7:1 (1991): 1–28 , “Los procesos electorales insurgents,” Estudios de Historia Novohispana 11 (1991): 201–49 , and “The Process of Mexican Independence,” American Historical Review 105:1 (2000): 116–30 ; Karen Caplan, “The Legal Revolution in Town Politics: Oaxaca and Yucatán, 1812–1825,” Hispanic American Historical Review 83:2 (2003): 255–93 ; Guillermo Sosa Abella, Representación e independencia, 1810–1816 (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, 2006) .

31. For an important early view, see James F. King, “The Colored Castes and American Representation in the Cotres of Cádiz,” Hispanic American Historical Review 33:1 (1953): 33–64 , and more recently Joaquín Varela Suances-Carpegna, La teoría del estado en los orígenes del constitucionalismo hispanico (Las Cortes de Cádiz ) (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, 1983) ; Marie Laure Rieu-Millan, Los diputados americanos en las Cortes de Cádiz (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1990) ; Manuel Chust, La cuestión national Americana en las Cortes de Cádiz (1810–1814) (Valencia: Centro Francisco Tomás y Valiente/UNED, 1999) . See Márcia Regina Berbel, A nação como artefato: Deputados do Brasil nas Cortes Portugesas, 1821–1822 (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1999) .

32. Two good examples are Brian Hamnett, “Constitutional Theory and Political Reality: Liberalism, Traditionalism and the Spanish Cortes, 1810–1814,” Journal of Modern History 49:1 (1977): 1071–109 , and José Carlos Chiaramonte's suggestive “Fundamentos iusnaturalistas de los movimientos de independencia,” Boletín del Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana Dr. Emilio Ravignani 22:2 (2000): 33–71 . For an exploration of how political cultures and theories changed in Argentina, see his more developed essays in Ciudades, provincias, estados: Orígenes de la nación Argentina, 1800–1846 (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1997) .

33. María de Lourdes Viana Lyra, A utopia do poderoso império: Portugal e Brasil, bastidores da política, 1798–1822 (Rio de Janeiro: Sette Letras, 1994) ; Roberto Breña, El primer liberalismo español y los procesos de emancipación de América, 1808–1824 (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 2006) .

34. See the essays in Christon Archer, ed., The Wars of Independence in Spanish America (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2000) and his important studies of the Spanish military in “The Army of New Spain and the Wars of Independence, 1790–1821,” Hispanic American Historical Review 64:4 (1981): 705–14 and “Insurrection—Reaction—Revolution—Fragmentation: Reconstructing the Choreography of Meltdown in New Spain During the Independence Era,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 10:1 (1994): 63–98 ; John R. Fisher, “The Royalist Regime in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1820–1824,” Journal of Latin American Studies 32:1 (2000): 55–84 . It should be noted that Anna and Hamnett have also added to our understanding of the loyalist cause and its internal conflicts. For good military histories of the loyalist side, see Stephen K. Stoan, Pablo Morillo and Venezuela, 1815–1820 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974) . Scarlett OʼPhelan Godoy (comp.), La independencia del Perú: De los Borbones a Bolívar (Lima: Instituto Riva-Agüero, 2001) and “El mito del la ʼindependencia concedida”: Los programas politicos del siglo XVIII y del temprano XIX en el Perú y Alto Perú, 1730–1814," Historica , 9:2 (1985): 155–91 ; Gustavo Montoya, La independencia del Peru y el fantasma de la revolutión (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2002) .

35. Victor Peralta Ruíz, En defense de la autoridad: Política y cultura bajo el gobierno del Virrey Abascal, Peru, 1806–1816 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2002) ; Valentim Alexandre, Os sentidos do império: Questão national e questão colonial na crise do antigo regime português (Lisboa: Biblioteca das Ciências do Homem, 1993) ; Maria de Lourdes Viana Lyra, A utopia do poderoso império: Portugal e Brasil, bastidores da política, 1798–1822 (Rio de Janeiro: Sette Letras, 1994) ; Kirsten Schultz, Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy and the Portuguese Royal Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821 (New York: Routledge, 2001) .

36. Jaime E. Rodríguez O., “The Emancipation of America,” American Historical Review 105:1 (2000): 147 ; “From Royal Subject to Republican Citizen: The Role of the Autonomists in the Independence of Mexico,” in his The Independence of Mexico and the Creation of the New Nation (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 1989), 19–44 ; and The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 131–52 .

37. Isabel Lustosa, Insultos impressos: A guerra dos jornalistas na independência, 1821–1822 (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000) .

38. Rafael Rojas, La escritura de la independencia: El surgimiento de la opinion pública en México (Mexico City: Taurus, 2003) ; François-Xavier Guerra, Modernidad e independencias: Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993) ; Guerra and Annick Lempérière et al., Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica: Ambigüedades y problemas, Siglos XVIII–XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998) ; Véronique Hebrard, Le Venezuela indépendant: Une nation par le discours, 1808–1830 (Paris: LʼHarmattan, 1996) . A very good survey of the evidence on the public sphere is Victor M. Uribe-Uran, “The Birth of a Public Sphere in Latin America During the Age of Revolution,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42:2 (2000): 425–57 . A useful anthology on the press on the heels of independence is Paula Alonso, Construcciones impresas: Panfletos, diarios y revistas en la formación de los estados nacionales en América Latina, 1820–1920 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004) .

39. Margarita Garrido, Reclamos y representaciones: Variaciones sobre la política en el Nuevo Reino de Granada, 1770–1815 (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1993) ; Victor M. Uribe-Uran, Honorable Lives: Lawyers, Family, and Politics in Colombia, 1780–1850 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000) ; Sarah C. Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780–1854 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999) ; José Murilo de Carvalho, A Construção da Ordem: A Elite Política Imperial (Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ, 1996) . In my own work I have sought to connect longer-term changes in understandings of possession to political development. Independence mattered because it sealed the fate of restrictive mercantilist policies that were already crumbling before 1807, thus shaking the commercial orders that upheld imperial regimes. See Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) . This is a subtheme of a much broader study, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) .

40. Alberto Flores Galindo, Aristocracia y plebe: Lima, 1760–1830 (Lima: Mosca Azul, 1984) ; Christine Hunefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima's Slaves, 1800–1854 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) ; Montoya, La independencia del Perú , chap. 3 .

41. Peter Blanchard, “The Language of Liberation: Slave Voices in the Wars of Independence,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82:3 (2002): 499–523 and “Black Soldiers Between Independence and Abolition in Spanish South America,” in The Arming of Slaves in World History , ed. Christopher Brown and Philip Morgan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) ; Camilla Townsend, “‘Half My Body Free, the Other Half Enslaved’: The Politics of the Slaves of Guayaquil at the End of the Colonial Era,” Colonial Latin American Review 7:1 (1998): 105–28 ; Marixa Lasso, “Haiti as an Image of Popular Republicanism in Caribbean Colombia: Cartagena Province (1811–1828),” in The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World , ed. David P. Geggus (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 176–92 , and “A Republican Myth of Racial Harmony: Race and Patriotism in Colombia, 1810–1812,” Historical Reflections 29:1 (2003) ; Aline Helg, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770–1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004) . We still know rather more about slavery and its demise after than during independence. See, for instance, James Ferguson King, “The Latin American Republics and the Suppression of the Slave Trade,” Hispanic American Historical Review 24:3 (1944): 387–411 ; John V. Lombardi, The Decline and Abolition of Negro Slavery in Venezuela , 1820–1854 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1971) ; Peter Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1992) .

42. Jorge Cornejo Bouroncle, Pumacahua: La Revolución del Cuzco en 1814 (Cuzco: Editorial Rozas, 1956) .

43. Charles Walker, Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780–1840 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999) .

44. Brian R. Hamnett, Roots of Insurgency: Mexican Regions, 1750–1824 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) ; Peter F. Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State: Guerrero, 1800–1857 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996 ); Eric Van Young, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810–1821 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) .

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Latin America’s Revolutionary Movements Essay

Introduction.

The term Latin America Revolution describes the various revolutions that took place in early 1800’s. The results of the revolutions were creation of many independent countries in the Latin American Region.

These revolutions are considered to be the most influential events in the Western Hemisphere’s history. Several leaders led these revolutions in various countries. They include Jose de San Martin who led revolutions in Chile, Argentina and Peru. Miguel de Hidalgo led revolutions in Mexico while his Colombian counterpart Francisco de Paula Santander led revolution in Colombo.

Other leaders who participated fully in these revolutions included Simon Bolivar,Francisco de Miranda,Toussaint L’Ouverture and Vicente Guerrero who led revolutions inVenezuela,Venezuela,Haiti and Mexico respectively. Countries where major revolutions took place include Haiti (1791-1804), Argentina (1810-1816), Colombia (1810-1819), Chile (1810-1818), Mexico (1810-1821), Paraguay (1811), Venezuela (1811-1822), Peru (1821), Ecuador (1822) and Brazil (1822). In 1800’s most of the Latin American countries were faced with many challenges in developing their economies.

As noted by Daniel (1999) though politically independent from countries such as Portugal and Spain many of these Latin American countries remained economically dependent on Europe. They exported products such as beef, copper, sugar and coffee to Europe in exchange of manufactured goods from Europe. The changes and transformations that were brought about by the global trade contributed greatly to the revolutions in Latin America.

This is because the European countries forced their interest into the Latin American countries through trade dictations. They imposed their own trade regulations and collaborated with some Latin American leaders to further their interest in those countries. As a result, some leaders who became totally dissatisfied with the extent to which the European countries managed to find their way into those countries formed movements that later became revolutionary groups.

Because most of the Latin American countries exported cash crops and raw materials while importing heavy manufacturing machines, imbalance in trade grew. The Latin American countries took out huge loans from Britain,United States and Germany in order to build their infrastructure. Many of these countries failed to pay back the loans and as a result the foreign lenders gained control of large and major industries in Latin America.(Daniel, 1999)

The foreign lenders became masters in the Latin American region. They influenced and controlled major decisions that were made in those countries. Due to this, revolutionary leaders had no option but to stop the foreign nations from furthering their interest through holding revolutionary movements.

The declaration by James Monroe in 1823 that the Latin America was out of bounce from European powers brought a transformation that saw the Latin American countries depending on the United states for trade. (Daniel, 1999) Hence the United states gained both economical and political interest in those countries.

By 1823 on, the Latin America had become United States backyard. It was at this stage revolutionary leaders such as Simon Bolivar embarked on a mission of liberating Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia from the hands of the United States and other European countries.

The revolutionary leaders managed to salvage their territories from being occupied by foreigners who came in the name of global trade partnership.

Daniel C. Revolution and Revolutionaries: Guerrilla Movements in Latin America: New York: New York Press, 1999.

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Twentieth-Century Latin American Revolutions. By Marc Becker. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017. Kindle edition. $85.00 cloth; $30.00 paper. doi:10.1017/tam.2021.20

2021, The Americas, Volume 78, Issue 2, April 2021, pp. 342-344

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Latin American Independence in the Age of Revolutions

• August 25, 2021
• 18th Century , 19th Century , Collection Essays

Introduction

Between 1775 and 1850, most of the colonies in the Western hemisphere declared and successfully won their independence from the European monarchies of Great Britain, Spain, Portugal, and France. This era of European and American history is generally thought to begin with the Revolutionary War to found the United States of America and end with number of European efforts for democratic reforms in 1848, and is often referred to as the “Age of Revolutions or “Age of Revolution.”

In the American colonies formerly held by Spain and Portugal—what we now refer to as Latin America—colonists claimed independence in a series of military and political struggles between 1808 and 1825, capitalizing on a particularly tumultuous period on the Iberian Peninsula and in Europe more broadly. White elites of Spanish descent in the colonies, particularly those born in the Americas (known as criollos or creoles), protested the demands and constraints of the imperial states, particularly the taxes and other economic burdens imposed by the colonial powers on their colonies, and the lack of opportunities for creoles in colonial administration. These complaints converged with ideas of Enlightenment thinkers about freedom, progress, and representative government, and the examples of the revolutions in the United States, France, and Haiti, to form independence movements. These ideas also resonated with many members of oppressed and marginalized populations, including enslaved people, people of color, the Indigenous, the poor, and almost all women—many of whom joined the struggles for independence in hopes of winning greater measures of equality and freedom for themselves under new regimes.

By 1836, the former Latin American colonies of Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Paraguay, Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia had gained independence from Spain; Brazil from Portugal; and Uruguay from Brazil. That year, Spain formally renounced all claims to these lands. Cuba and Puerto Rico would remain Spanish colonies until the Spanish-American War of 1898; in the Dominican Republic, the fight for independence from Spain and from Haiti continued into the 1860s.

Essential Questions:

• What were some of the contextual issues in the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires that are important for understanding why an independence movement evolved?
• How did the American (United States), Haitian, and French Revolutions influence and differ from the Latin American independence struggles?
• How did people of different races, ethnic groups, and genders contribute to Latin American independence?
• What challenges faced newly independent Latin American nations in deciding how they would be governed? Who was involved in those decisions?

Colonial Contexts

Over three centuries of colonial rule, Spain and Portugal enforced a racial caste system. While complex and fluid, the system placed European-born whites at the top and people of color at the bottom.

Many Indigenous people insisted on their human and land rights, even as colonial governments sought to extract work and wealth from them. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Spanish were imposing their own system of haciendas (large land estates, often plantations), ranches, and other mechanisms to regulate land in their colony of New Spain (which stretched from Central America to the Pacific Northwest). In response to policies threatening Indigenous communities’ land, water, and autonomy, communities developed Techialoyan documents, often called “village land books.” These manuscript documents aimed to support Indigenous land claims in Mexico by documenting the founding and history of a town, illustrating long-established boundaries predating the arrival of Spanish colonists. Indigenous people used the documents to prove to Spanish administrators that their towns’ autonomy should be respected as cabeceras (judicial districts). This example, known as the Codex Zempoala from the town of Zempoala in central Mexico, is composed of bound sheets of amatl paper, made in Mexico from pounded fig tree bark. It combines short written phrases describing the land in the Nahuatl language with illustrations of people, plants, buildings, and other features found there.

Enslavement of African-born people was central to the Spanish and Portuguese colonial enterprises in the Americas, particularly after Indigenous people were granted some rights and their slavery was abolished by the Spanish in the sixteenth century. Resources mined and harvested by enslaved Africans and their descendants provided wealth for European and American-born enslavers. A German artist, Johann Moritz Rugendas, visited Brazil as part of an exploratory and scientific mission in the 1820s. He depicted enslaved people working in a variety of capacities, including clearing forests for plantations; preparing cassava root, a food crop; harvesting coffee; operating a sugar mill; carrying water from a well; and gold mining.

Selection: Johann Mortiz Rugendas, Voyage pittoresque dans le Brésil, plates 6, 8, 9, 22 (1835).

By the middle of the eighteenth century, Spanish monarchs instituted sweeping reforms of the administration of their colonies, known as the Bourbon Reforms (after the House of Bourbon, the noble family of the new Spanish royalty). Led particularly by José de Gálvez, Minister of the Indies, the reforms included transfers of power to Spanish-born administrators appointed by the crown from local American-born authorities (both creole and Indigenous) and a focus on improving revenue sent to Spain, including emphasizing mining of precious metals, improving tax collection, and restricting trade. Similar reforms were put into effect by the Portuguese in Brazil. American-born creole elites resented and protested these reforms, which reduced their autonomy and reinforced caste hierarchies. In a report to Gálvez from around 1766 about the Yucatán province in present-day southern Mexico, Spanish administrators explain their chronic problems with smugglers importing contraband goods on which Spain held a trade monopoly:

Selection: Descripcion de la Provincia de Jucatan con informe de su govierno secular y eclesiastico, comercio, cultivo, amenidad, situacion financiera (Description of the Yucatan Province, with a Report on Its Secular and Ecclesiastical Government, Commerce, Cultivation, Amenities, Financial Situation) , 42r and 42v (c. 1766).

Translation of the above excerpt: With the skimpy investment in trade here, and its few branches and profits, everyone, fleeing from the taxes and formalities suffered in Campeche and considering the new fees in Veracruz and Havana, thinks to accommodate himself without expense, to provide for himself more cheaply than by paying your taxes and fees, and with more certain profit–at the expense of some risk. These profits that smuggling offers make them look abroad and apart from their own homeland; they get cash in hand, and save the excess that had been asked of them by the European-born Spanish (who is cashier or buyer for foreigners), and it is here that the temptation of smuggling is born, in which they make their profits to the ruin of the state …

Questions to consider:

• Why do you think the Codex Zempoala includes a combination of drawings and written language? What different purposes and audiences might these types of communication (and the combination of the two) serve?
• Most official documents in the Latin American colonies were written on paper made in Europe and shipped across the Atlantic Ocean. What is the significance of the Codex Zempoala being made on Mexican amatl?
• Looking at Rugendas’s images of the work of enslaved people, what do you think the artist was most interested in? The work operations? The different classes of racial types of people involved? The relationships among enslaved people or between the enslavers and the enslaved? The context of rural or urban setting? Why do you think so?
• What motivations for independence do you find in the administrative report from the Yucatán? Consider motivations for consumers in the colonies, businesspeople involved in selling goods, and even the administrators writing the report.

Revolutionary Rumblings

Many uprisings of Indigenous peoples, the enslaved, and mixed-race creole coalitions dissatisfied with European colonial governance preceded the wars of independence of the early nineteenth century. The Túpac Amaru rebellion in Peru from 1780-82 was the largest and bloodiest of these. The rebellion was originally led by the Indigenous kuraka (or clan leader) Túpac Amaru and his wife, Micaela Bastidas, and grew into a conflict that claimed tens of thousands of lives across present-day Peru and Bolivia. Túpac Amaru was motivated at least in part by a prophecy of the return of the Inca empire; the Spanish banned a popular account of the empire, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries of the Incas , in response.

Selection: Garcilaso de la Vega, The Royal Commentaries of Peru , “The City of Cuzco,” 13-14 (1688).

Tight control of the press by Spanish and Portuguese powers could not stop news of the revolutions in the United States, Haiti, and France from spreading in the colonies. Expatriates from Latin America who witnessed these changes and their aftermath firsthand brought radical ideas back with them to Latin America. The founding documents and republican structure of the government of the young United States were particularly influential. Vicente Rocafuerte, born into an aristocratic creole family in Ecuador, was based in the United States in the early 1820s, and in 1821 published Spanish translations of the United States’ founding documents as well as important speeches about its governmental structure, titled Ideas Necesarias á Todo Pueblo Americano Independiente, Que Quiera Ser Libre ( Ideas Necessary for All Independent American People Who Want to Be Free ).

Selection: Rocafuerte, Ideas Necesarias á Todo Pueblo Americano Independiente ( Ideas Necessary for All Independent American People Who Want to Be Free ) , title page, 5-7 (1821).

Translation of the above selection: These ideas [of constitutional government] so pleasing to rational man have gradually developed over time and prepared the current era of constitutional systems. This is now the general vote of Europe, and no matter how much those same impostors and vile tyrants who have replaced the great Napoleon try to oppose it, the august cause of constitutional freedom will triumph. There is no doubt, the victory is certain, despite the continuous and daily struggle that exists between ignorance and knowledge, superstition and religion, darkness and light, arbitrariness and law, caprice and justice. The constitutional laws are the true bases of grand and respectable freedom: the peoples of the world accustomed to the representative system will take giant steps in the race for their happiness…. In general, men are ready to use their reason… wanting to save as much as possible the fruits of their efforts and hard work, they will come to understand that it is absurd for people who live in deprivation, to give an income of 2, 3, or 4 million dollars to the so-called legitimate constitutional kings, such as those of France, England and Spain. They will compare the excessive expenses of these constitutional monarchies with the admirable economy of the American government; they will see the practicality that to govern great nations neither privileged families, nor crowns, nor crosses, nor titles, nor plagues of courtiers are needed; that only one head of the executive branch is enough, a president like that of the United States with $25,000 salary. Finally, they will understand that the most perfect government is the American one, the only one where man enjoys the greatest advantages of society, with the least possible tax; and as the human species has a natural tendency towards its perfection, the time will come when all aspire to change their constitutional monarchies into American governments; as today they are aspiring to change their despotic thrones into constitutional monarchies.

The impact of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) on its mainland neighbors, both northern and southern, can hardly be overestimated. In the United States, news reports and the accounts of exiles from the former French colony of Saint-Domingue provoked discussion of abolition and Black capability, stoked fears of violent insurrections by the enslaved, and caused a reexamination of the country’s own revolution and founding documents. Early South American revolutionaries of African descent visited Haiti or were inspired by its example, including José Chirino (Venezuela, 1795), instigators of the “Revolt of the Tailors” (Brazil, 1798), and Francisco Xavier Pirela (Venezuela, 1799). The specter of “another Haiti” also was raised as the justification for merciless suppression of conflicts, and news about the conflict was suppressed as much as possible by administrators in colonial Latin America.

Selection: “Proclamation for a solemn Abjuration of the French Nation” [Haitian Declaration of Independence], in Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti , 442-446 (1805).

Questions to Consider:

• Consider the visual depiction of Cuzco and the description of its founding in the Royal Commentaries of Peru. Why might the Spanish have felt threatened by this depiction?
• Examine the title page for Ideas Necesarias á Todo Pueblo Americano Independiente and think about the excerpt from Rocafuerte’s prologue. Who do you think his intended audience was for this book?
• Reading the Haitian Declaration of Independence, why do you think Spanish and Portuguese administrators found this document much more dangerous than the American Declaration of Independence? How does its rhetoric differ from the American Declaration?

Selection: Powers of the Peoples

Napoleon Bonaparte’s French army invaded and occupied Portugal in 1807 and then Spain in 1808. The Portuguese royal family fled across the Atlantic Ocean to Brazil, making Rio de Janeiro the new capital of the empire. In Spain, Napoleon forced the Spanish monarchs Charles IV and Ferdinand VII to relinquish the crown and placed them in exile. He installed his brother Joseph as king; Spanish subjects immediately rejected his rule, leading to six years of war to free the Iberian Peninsula. This conflict allowed movements toward independence to flourish in Latin America. Throughout the Spanish American colonies, in the absence of a leader acknowledged as an authentic monarch, groups of local civic leaders, or juntas , claimed power previously held by Spanish officials. From Mexico to Argentina, these new self-governing bodies first ostensibly ruled in the name of the true Spanish king, but long-held resentments by the American-born, mostly creole, leaders sparked movements toward true independence—which, in turn, sparked military conflicts.

In 1813, the Argentinian General Assembly ratified the 1811 decree of the provisional Buenos Aires junta that abolished obligations for forced labor—the mita, encomienda, and yanaconazgo —and tributes to the church that had been expected of Indigenous people for centuries. Though many of these obligations had also been abolished under Spanish law earlier, the practice continued particularly in Andean regions. The government in Argentina printed the decree in the three most prevalent Indigenous languages of the region—Aymara, Quechua, and Guarani—in addition to Spanish.

Translation of selection from Decreto on the right: The General Assembly sanctions the decree issued by the Provisional Government Junta of these provinces on September 1, 1811, regarding the extinction of the tribute, and also repealing the mita , the encomiendas , the yanaconazgo , and personal services of the Indians under all respects, and without excepting even that which they render to the churches, and their parish priests, or ministers; being the will of this Sovereign Corporation, that, in the same way, the aforementioned Indians of all the United Provinces are held as perfectly free men, and with rights equal to all the other citizens who populate them …

Creole leaders such as Simón Bolívar in Venezuela, José de San Martín in Argentina, Miguel Hidalgo in Mexico, Antonio José de Sucre in Peru and Bolivia, and Bernardo O’Higgins in Chile were the political and military leaders of these conflicts. Compared to other conflicts such as the revolutionary wars in the United States and Haiti, the armies fighting for independence in Latin America were thoroughly multiracial. Thousands of Indigenous people, free Black men, and others of mixed race served as soldiers. They included many non-white and mixed-race leaders such as Vicente Guerrero in Mexico and José Antonio Páez in Venezuela.

Páez led Venezuelan llaneros , herders of the grassy plains who acted as cavalry units as a result of to their skill with lances on horseback. The llaneros would become legendary and romanticized for their bravery and importance in Bolívar’s army. Páez’s son Ramón provided an account of the most celebrated victory of the llaneros , the Battle of Las Queseras del Medio, in his book Wild Scenes in South America; or Life in the Venezuelan Llanos:

Selection: Ramón Páez, Wild Scenes in South America, or, Life in the Llanos of Venezuela , 328-330 (1862).

• Why do you think the decision was made to abolish Indigenous peoples’ monetary tribute and labor requirements in Buenos Aires in 1811, and ratified in 1813? What is the significance of it being printed in three Indigenous languages?
• What advantages of the South American rebels against the Spanish forces do you notice in the account from Wild Scenes in South America ? What disadvantages?
• What arguments would you use to argue that Ramon Paez’s account of the Battle of Las Queseras del Medio is a trustworthy primary source? What arguments would you use to argue against that?

Liberty’s Promise, Liberty’s Problems

Independence in Latin America came at a massive cost—hundreds of thousands of lives and incalculable resources. Even before the wars with the Spanish forces (and Americano loyalists) were officially won, debates raged over the forms and principles of government for the new nations being formed. Bolívar and other framers of foundational documents in this period—primarily, but not exclusively, creoles—were profoundly influenced by ideas drawn from the writings of the French philosopher Montesquieu. In 1819, Bolívar convened the Second National Congress of Venezuela at Angostura (commonly referred to as the Congress of Angostura) to form the new nation of Colombia (later referred to as Gran Colombia, including present-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama, along with parts of other nations). In his Inaugural Address to the Congress, Bolívar proposed his understanding of the Montesquieu’s guidance, rather than the US Constitution, as a guiding light for the Congress’s deliberations:

Does not L’esprit de lois [Montesquieu’s treatise The Spirit of the Laws] state that laws should be suited to the people for whom they are made; that it would be a major coincidence if those of one nation could be adapted to another; that laws must take into account the physical conditions of the country, climate, character of the land, location, size, and mode of living of the people; that they should be in keeping with the degree of liberty that the Constitution can sanction respecting the religion of the inhabitants, their inclinations, resources, number, commerce, habits, and customs? This is the code we must consult, not the code of Washington!

Selection: Simón Bolívar, Selected Writings , 179-180 (1951).

The tension between democratic ideals and republican constitutions on the one hand, and the belief of many creole leaders that Spanish tyranny had left the peoples of Latin America unprepared for full democracy on the other, led many nations to centralize power in the hands of a strong executive such as a President or Emperor. In many cases, this was ostensiblya temporary measure as the population acclimated to the participation required of citizens in a republic. In Mexico, for example, the military leader Agustín de Iturbide switched sides from the Spanish to the Mexican independence movement and led the Mexican forces in claiming victory in 1821. He was proclaimed constitutional Emperor of Mexico in 1822, but was resisted by the national congress, was forced into exile in 1823, and tried and executed upon his return in 1824. A new republican constitution was passed in 1824. The printing of the constitution was accompanied by an engraving symbolizing the new Estados Unidos Mexicanos (United Mexican States).

• Compare the text from Bolívar’s address to the Congress of Angostura to the text from Vicente Rocafuerte’s prologue to Ideas Necesarias á Todo Pueblo Americano Independiente. What factors might explain the different rhetoric toward the United States’ system of government in these two works?
• Compare the image of Agustín de Iturbide as first emperor of Mexico and the engraved emblem of Mexico that accompanied the republican constitution of 1824. How do these images illustrate the transition from an authoritarian to a republican government?

For more information on castes in the Spanish colonies (and especially New Spain), see the Digital Collection “ Caste and Politics in the Struggles for Mexican Independence .”

Ávila, Alfredo and Jordana Dym, eds. Los Declaraciones de Independencia: Los Textos Fundamentales de las Independencias Americanas . México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, El Colegio de México, 2013.

Bolívar, Simón; Harold A. Bierck, trans. Selected Writings of Bolivar. New York: Colonial Press, 1951.

Chambers, Sarah C. and John Charles Chasteen, eds. and transl. Latin American Independence: An Anthology of Sources . Indianapolis IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2010.

Chasteen, John Charles. Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution . Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Fitz, Caitlin. Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions . New York: Liveright, 2016.

Langley, Lester D. The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Lynch, John. The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808-1826. New York: Norton, 1986.

Klooster, Wim. Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History , New Edition. New York: New York University Press, 2018.

Ricketts, Mónica, Who Should Rule? Men of Arms, the Republic of Letters, and the Fall of the Spanish Empire . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Soriano, Cristina. Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018.

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Crime Fiction and Communism

In 1971, when the Cuban government launched the Anniversary of the Triumph of the Revolution Crime Fiction award, local literary critics were acutely aware of the genre’s roots in a capitalist setting. Yet, José Antonio Portuondo considered that crime fiction could serve a purpose within a Communist framework of life, provided it underwent adaptation to suit the new context. Over the following years, Cuban journals published numerous programmatic texts aimed at guiding writers willing to produce what would be termed Revolutionary crime fiction. Similar adjustments took place in other Soviet bloc countries, albeit with varying degrees of success and popularity. While crime fiction from the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Hungary are perhaps the most well-known cases, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia also produced significant crime narratives. At the same, however, some Communist leaders loathed the genre: Stalin deemed it “the most naked expression of bourgeois society’s fundamental ideas on property” and Mao banned crime fiction.

Simultaneously, several prominent crime fiction writers from Capitalist backgrounds have identified themselves as Communists at various points in their lives, including Dashiell Hammett, Ed Lacy, Andrea Camilleri, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö, Henning Mankell, Frédéric Fajardie, Thierry Jonquet, among others.

Likewise, a number of Marxist thinkers have analysed the genre. Antonio Gramsci, for instance, included some reflections on detective fiction in his Prison Notebooks, while Trotskyite author Ernest Mandel extensively explored the genre in his Delightful Murder. A Social History of the Crime Story (curiously omitting any mention of crime fiction from the Soviet Bloc). More recently, Stephen Knight has established the relationship between social ideology and genre conventions and Slavoj Žižek has discussed Swedish crime fiction.

Despite all of this, the relationship between crime fiction and Communism remains largely understudied and lacks comprehensive analysis.We are compiling a collection of essays that seek to address the intersection of Communism and crime fiction narratives. Essays with a multinational approach, and dealing with crime fiction generated outside Anglo-American areas are encouraged. Survey essays are discouraged. Possible areas of research may include, but are not limited, to:

Crime fiction written in communist areas

Crime fiction by communist authors living in capitalist areas

Crime fiction set in communist areas

Crime fiction dealing with communist to-post communist transition

Approaches to crime fiction by Marxist thinkers

International circulation of communist crime fiction

Crime television series in communist countries 

Crime fiction that deals with the idea of youth and communism

Youth literature, crime fiction and communism

Advice for contributors

If you are interested in contributing to this collection, we ask that you submit an abstract of up to 300 words explaining the focus and approach to your proposed essay. Include an author bio of 200 words listing your current professional affiliation as well any relevant previous publications and other qualifications. Each final contribution should be around 7000 words, including bibliography. 

Abstracts should be emailed to  [email protected] or [email protected]  

Abstract submission deadline: 15 September 2024.

Authors notified of acceptance: 29 November 2024. 

Full paper submission deadline: 1 April 2025.

About the editors

Dr Carlos Uxo is Senior Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies at Monash University, Australia. He is the author of El género policial en Cuba: Novela policial revolucionaria, neopolicial y teleseries (Peter Lang: 2021), and editor of The Detective Fiction of Leonardo Padura Fuentes (Manchester Metropolitan University: 2006). He has also published close to fifty academic articles and book chapters, including “Cuban Crime Fiction: A Literature for the (Communist) Masses” (Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 2019) and “Crime Fiction and Authoritarianism” (Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction, 2020).

Dr Isabel Story is Senior Lecturer in Visual Communications at Nottingham Trent University, UK. She is the author of Soviet Influence on Cuban Cultural Institutions 1961-1987 (Lexington 2019) and has edited books on Cuban disaster preparedness (Disaster Preparedness and Climate Change in Cuba, 2021) and social politics (Cuba’s Forgotten Decade, 2018). She specialises in the international projection of Cuban culture and in particular in cultural relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union and East Germany, the role of cultural heritage, and international collaboration.