Political Consciousness and National Identities in the Latin American Struggle for Independence, 1808-1826
Federico Sor
This paper comprises three parts: a summary of a lecture given by Seth Meisel on nationalist discourse during the Spanish-American independence movements (pages 1-3); an interview to Meisel after the lecture (4-6); and my commentary, which intends to deconstruct nationalist rhetoric and question the way we understand it—an ambitious undertaking indeed (7-13).
I. The Lecture[1]
Spanish-American wars of independence, led by Creoles (Americans of European ascendance) were the first stage of national liberation. The enlightened ideals of democracy and self-determination served as ideological justification for the Creole insurrection against Spain. Napoleon’s 1808 seizure of the Spanish Crown and the subsequent legitimacy crisis of Spanish rule provided the ripe situation for the insurrection.
Creoles had been conscious of the possibility of liberation since before the beginning of the Wars of Independence. For example, in 1806 and 1807 local forces defeated British troops invading the city of Buenos Aires. At this time, Creoles and slaves under the leadership of local leaders such as Santiago de Liniers and Cornelio Saavedra[2] had demonstrated that they could protect their land without Spanish intervention. Moreover, this event signified that, if they could defeat the British invasions on their own, they could well put an end to Spanish colonial rule.
Although the Wars of Independence were primarily a Creole movement, its enlightened ideological legitimation opened spaces of political negotiation previously nonexistent. While
Creoles sought freedom from a Spanish rule which (especially after the mid-eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms implemented by Charles III) virtually excluded them from administrative posts beyond local municipalities (cabildos), Indians and blacks adopted the ideals of independence to broadly challenge colonial hierarchies—including the hegemony of the Creole land-owning class. At this time, slaves sought their freedom through their military service to the patria and by means of legal petitions. Significantly, the latter were largely based on the same ideas of equality promoted by Creoles to justify independence. Thus the ideological rearticulations and political instability of the time provided the context for blacks and Indians to promote their own cause for freedom and equality, and the fact that they adopted the independence rhetoric to their own struggle demonstrates the political consciousness[3] of the oppressed classes.
As Camilla Townsend argues, the shift of power from the Spanish Crown to local Spanish-American governments, contrary to the claims of the revisionist view of independence, actually enhanced the political consciousness of "common people."[4] This author analyzes the case of Angela Batallas, a Guayaquil slave woman, who appealed to independence values and the patriarchal social system to further her legal battle for freedom. In clear reference to the enlightened human equality rhetorically employed by Creoles to legitimize the struggle for independence, Angela Batallas argued that independence was incomplete if it did not abolish slavery, and she pointed out the irony in a struggle to end colonial bondage which, at the same time, perpetuated internal oppression. Referring to her unfulfilled union with a white Creole (and his unfulfilled promise to grant her freedom), she portrayed the emerging republic as a body that was only half free. In addition to the egalitarian discourse, Batallas appealed to the values of a traditionally paternalistic society as she appealed to Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan Libertador, for protection.
Creole leaders promoted a national identity beyond internal divisions, and this discourse opened another space of negotiation for blacks and Indians. Argentine General José de San Martín stated in 1821 that "in the future the aborigines shall not be called Indians or natives; they are children and citizens of Perú and they shall be known as Peruvians."[5] Meisel argued that San Martín’s pronunciation marked a shift in the conception of the social role of ‘Americans’; they had been subjects thus far, and now they were to become citizens. Indians and blacks could now appeal to this common identity in order to assert their equality.
Meisel warned that slaves, in adopting the political discourse of independence, demanded their liberty individually but did not, in general, challenge slavery as an institution. Creoles promoted patriarchal self-representations (later perpetuated in the myth of the "founding fathers") to legitimize their hegemony; slaves adopted these very representations to their own struggle for freedom—like Angela Batallas, they appealed to Creoles as paternalistic figures that could grant them liberty.[6]
II. An Interview with Dr. Meisel[7]
1. If we accept that slaves did not attack slavery as an institution, or institutionalized racism, but rather sought to attain their individual liberty through the adoption of Creole political discourse, is it possible to talk of a ‘political consciousness’?
Meisel argued that racial solidarity was the exception rather than the rule in colonial societies. There was not sufficient cohesion among slaves that would make possible a concerted struggle for the abolition of slavery. It is true, then, that slaves’ military service for the patriotic cause may have been a strategy to gain their freedom. A great level of desertion in the insurgent armies seems to back this claim. In a similar way, slaves’ petitions, which appealed to nationalism and equality, served the slaves’ own cause. But was this just a strategy? Slaves may indeed have used political discourse as a strategy for their own struggle, but their adherence to the universal equality promoted by the independence movement may have surpassed just their struggle for individual liberty. So Meisel asked, "why not believe" that they actually supported the cause of independence beyond immediate objectives? Why not believe, then, that they did develop a political consciousness compatible with the ideological foundations of the wars of independence? Military service led slaves to assert their honor, so important in the Spanish tradition. In a way, the fight for independence provided a space for political ideas to shape the political discourse of the oppressed.
2. Can we understand post-Independence civil wars in most emergent Latin American ‘nations’ as resulting from the contradictions of nationalist rhetoric during the Wars of Independence? During the Wars of Independence there was a revision of stereotypes (especially concerning ‘morality’), exemplified by the image of slaves in uniform; now slaves claimed honor for themselves on behalf of their military service. The internal tensions and contradictions of the independence period led to the chaos that characterized the first fifty years after independence. The ‘fathers of independence’, like San Martín, died in exile, and this signals the crisis of the patriarchal system and the failures of independence. During the fight for independence, individual liberties had comprised the political focus. By the 1860s, ‘order’ became the political priority, and there was a resurgence of authoritarian governments throughout Latin America.
3. Does the Creoles’ self-representation as fathers imply an equation of family and state (the larger family), of private and public spheres? Does their quest for legitimacy, in a way, provide a historical continuity with the Roman republic, specifically the presentation of the pater familias as the legitimate ruler during the Roman Republic and the rise of the Empire? In general terms, can we think of the patriarchal approach to political power in an emergent republic as legitimized by its precedent in antiquity?[8]
The image of a good father as the model for a republican citizen was prevalent in Spanish America during independence. The discourse that presented Creoles as a patriarchal (rather than oppressive) class was both imposed on and accepted by the lower classes. If Creoles were to take the role of fathers, they must then be fathers who respect the rights of slaves as citizens in the new nations. Creoles asserted the legitimacy of their political authority by presenting themselves as the descendants of the Spanish ‘civilizers’ and the inheritors of colonial hierarchy. At the same time, however, the family in the period of independence was in crisis. The independence struggle created divisions within families, as fathers and sons fought in opposite sides--besides more general divisions among Creoles based on fights over ‘honor’. This had consequences in the broader political system. For example, Juan Manuel de Rosas, the caudillo of the Province of Buenos Aires in the post-independence period, was deemed an ‘unnatural father’. This led to a challenge of patriarchal society, based on republican ideas. The traditional hierarchy was subverted by the formation of associations (brotherhoods) with a stress on horizontal rather than vertical relations.[9] The Generation of 1837 in Buenos Aires was an example, from which writers and political thinkers arose in opposition to the patriarchal Rosas. The image of the father as having legitimate republican authority was certainly present in the struggle for independence and its aftermath. However, we cannot talk of a cultural continuity proper, as the idea of fatherly legitimacy is dubious when we take into account familial disruption and broad opposition to figures who, like Rosas, sought legitimacy by projecting the image of fathers of the nation.
4. Is the twentieth-century phenomenon of populism, in a way, a revival of the patriarchal (or paternalistic) society in the form of a corporate state?
Populism arises under totally different circumstances in the 1930s in Brazil and in the 1940s in Argentina. By this time, there had been a very large immigration of Europeans, and the societies in question were in the process of industrialization, so populism was a very different event.
III. The Inclusion of the Excluded: Contradictions in the Creation of the Nation
Meisel’s analysis of Creole rhetoric and its adaptations is extremely useful in understanding the opening of spaces of negotiations in Spanish-American societies during independence.[10] While describing the Creole nationalist rhetoric seeking to legitimize the struggle for independence, however, the speaker simplified the internal tensions that collided with the successful creation of a national identity. In a way, Meisel’s argument did not seek to draw a line between the intentions and beliefs of Creoles and their rhetoric. By simplifying rather than problematizing Creole discourse, the speaker failed to dwell into the principal contradiction of national independence recognized by Creoles themselves: that the struggle against Spanish oppression by no means aimed at the equality of internally oppressed socio-racial groups (most conspicuously, Indians and blacks).
Internal tensions in Spanish-American societies were actually enhanced (while made explicit) by the rhetoric that characterized the struggle for independence, and these tensions have continued to shape Spanish-American history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Therefore, deconstructing Creole nationalist rhetoric, as well as analyzing the adoption of this rhetoric by the oppressed sectors (an analysis that complements rather than opposes Weisel’s argument), is imperative for understanding the conflict in the creation of the Spanish-American ‘nations’.
We should not forget that, as Benedict Anderson has pointed out, "nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind," and that "Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity / genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined."[11] Accordingly, the construction of a national identity based on common history, culture and origins is determined by specific political objectives. The ‘nation’ does not have an inherent essence that defines it; rather, a primordial essence is constructed a posteriori to justify specific political movements seeking to be national.
Nationalist rhetoric was a means by which Creoles sought to legitimize the struggle for independence. By appealing to the ‘nation’ rather than to any particular sector, Creoles could universalize the aims of independence; these objectives thus appeared as the liberation of the whole society rather than as the advancement of Creoles. Creoles did not necessarily believe to be on an equal footing with Indians and blacks; they merely sought the adherence of these groups to the struggle for independence. But by stating that a national identity existed which blurred internal divisions (as Meisel pointed out), Creoles opened the discursive space for Indians and blacks to claim their equality based on that very national identity.
A comment on discourse is due. Rhetoric may be internalized over time, and the continuous assertion of equality and national identity may lead to the belief in these ideas and their materialization.[12] This means that equality may result from egalitarian rhetoric, but not that egalitarian rhetoric necessarily follows from the belief in equality. The fact that Creoles argued for a national identity beyond socio-racial divisions does not mean that they believed in the artificiality of those divisions. In other words, Creoles’ appeal to equality does not imply their belief in it.[13] In turn, while Indians and blacks adopted this rhetoric to reclaim their own liberty and equality, this does not mean that they believed in the rhetorical honesty of Creoles. Rather, by taking Creoles at face value and adopting the very appeals that Creoles used in their rhetoric, Indians and slaves could present their claims as legitimate.[14] While this picture is undoubtedly complex, it describes the tensions inherent to a rhetorical system in which a single discourse becomes a strategy for groups in mutual opposition.
The republican ideas of the Enlightenment shaped the struggle for independence in Latin America--or, more accurately, the leaders of the struggle self-consciously adopted the ideas of the Enlightenment to legitimize their cause. But adopting enlightened ideals such as the equality of men and representative government to validate the quest for independence was not without its contradictions; for example, while Creoles sought independence from Spain (their own freedom), they were reluctant to grant freedom to slaves. In this light, the enlightened discourse that stressed freedom and a common national identity should be understood and analyzed as a means of representation rather than an accurate reflection of actual social relations.
San Martín's appeal to Indians as "Peruvians," implying a recognition of all locals as emergent citizens, was coherent during the independence struggle, as the leaders of the fight sought the enlistment of as many men as possible in military service. But this appeal is especially problematic, as it reacted against an actual lack of unity among "Peruvians" (a point which Meisel failed to stress). A vast number of Indians in Perú sided with (and fought for) Spain and this was the last country in continental Spanish America to attain its independence. More generally, slaves throughout Spanish America were not so supportive of the independence cause. This was partly due to the fact that the Crown had actually issued laws for a more humane treatment of slaves, which Creoles opposed.[15]
Given the lack of cohesion among different socio-racial sectors and the resulting limitations of the independence movement, independence leaders sought to build unity among ‘Americans’, thereby building consensus and physical support for their fight. But some of the leaders saw the contradictions in the struggle, which people like Angela Batallas pointed out. In his famous "Jamaica Letter," Bolívar recognized the ambiguities of the Creole position in the fight against Spain, as he argued that
we [Creoles] are neither Indians nor Europeans, but a species midway between the legitimate proprietors of the country and the Spanish usurpers. In short, Americans by birth, we derive our rights from Europe, and we have to assert these rights against the rights of the natives, and at the same time defend ourselves against the hostility of the invaders.[16]
Creoles were in opposition to both Indians (recognized by Bolívar as rightful owners of the land) and Spain. The Libertador thus understood the internal tensions and enmities that undermined a concerted fight against Spain, as Creoles fought against Spanish oppression of Creoles but not against Creole oppression of Indians and blacks.
In this light, San Martín’s talk of a Peruvian identity should be understood not as a statement of fact (that Indians, Creoles, and blacks indeed thought of themselves as Peruvians) but as part of a political program (that they should think of themselves as Peruvians). That program aimed at conciliating different social sectors under an artificially created identity.[17] This identity, in turn, was based on a national[18] appeal that intended to blur internal divisions (racial, regional, socioeconomic) by identifying an external enemy (Spain) in opposition to which "Peruvians" could unite.
In a sense, while proposing a common identification for Indians, blacks and Creoles as "Peruvians," San Martín’s statement created a space of "false disidentification, of false distance towards the actual co-ordinates of those subjects' social existence." This process calls for a rhetorical abandonment of previous identities, but not for the subversion of the social roles that those identities imply.[19] According to San Martín's discourse, Indians and blacks must cease to recognize themselves as Indians and blacks to become Peruvians--without necessarily implying that Indians and blacks should, for example, cease to be peasants to become land owners or government officials. The ambiguities which Bolívar recognized in the struggle for independence (Creole freedom from Spain without necessarily ending Creole oppression of Indians and blacks) imply that the new identification was a strategy used in building support for the independence cause, but not necessarily a promise of granting internally oppressed social groups the full rights of citizens.