A New History of Modern Latin America / Edition 3

by Lawrence A. Clayton, Michael L. Conniff, Susan M. Gauss

Overview

A New History of Modern Latin America provides an engaging and readable narrative history of the nations of Latin America from the Wars of Independence in the nineteenth century to the democratic turn in the twenty-first. This new edition of a well-known text has been revised and updated to include the most recent interpretations of major themes in the economic, social, and cultural history of the region to show the unity of the Latin America experience while exploring the diversity of the region’s geography, peoples, and cultures. It also presents substantial new material on women, gender, and race in the region.  Each chapter begins with primary documents, offering glimpses into moments in history and setting the scene for the chapter, and concludes with timelines and key words to reinforce content. Discussion questions are included to help students with research assignments and papers.

Both professors and students will find its narrative, chronological approach a useful guide to the history of this important area of the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520289024
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	08/01/2017
Edition description:	Third Edition, New edition
Pages:	712
Product dimensions:	7.40(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Lawrence Clayton is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Alabama. He is the author of Bartolomé de las Casas and the Conquest of the Americas and Peru and the United States: The Condor and the Eagle, among other titles.
 
Michael L. Conniff is Professor Emeritus of History at San José State University, where he directed the Global Studies Initiative. His books include Africans in the Americas, Panama and the United States, and Populism in Latin America, among others.
 
Susan Gauss is Associate Professor of Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is the author of Made in Mexico: Regions, Nation, and the State in the Rise of Mexican Industrialism, 1920s–1940s.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Background to Independence

The "Grito de Dolores"

Father Miguel Hidalgo sought to define the coming insurrection and rally his parishioners and followers with a clarion call to independence that still resounds in Mexico. Father Hidalgo spoke to his congregation early on the morning of September 16, 1810. To this day, the Mexican president reenacts the "Grito" from the balcony of the National Palace in the heart of Mexico City, every September 16. Read the "Grito" — literally a "cry," or proclamation — as if you were a man, woman, or child in the small crowd, excited, listening to the voice of your priest call you to action:

My friends and countrymen: neither the king nor tributes exist for us any longer. We have borne this shameful tax, which only suits slaves, for three centuries as a sign of tyranny and servitude; [a] terrible stain which we shall know how to wash away with our efforts. The moment of our freedom has arrived; the hour of our liberty has struck; and if you recognized its great value, you will help me defend it from the ambitious grasp of the tyrants. Only a few hours remain before you see me at the head of the men who take pride in being free. I invite you to fulfill this obligation. And so without a patria nor liberty we shall always be at a great distance from true happiness. It has been imperative to take this step as now you know, and to begin this has been necessary. The cause is holy and God will protect it. The arrangements are hastily being made and for that reason I will not have the satisfaction of talking to you any longer. Long live, then, the Virgin of Guadalupe! Long live America for which we are going to fight!

The "Grito de Dolores" (Cry of Dolores) had been proclaimed. Mexico was on the road to revolution.

But people rarely break easily with the past. The forces of wealth, power, and tradition, the security and comfort of timeworn ways, and the fear of reprisal and loss restrain radical thinking, preserve old institutions, and discourage exploration of unfamiliar paths to new relationships, be they political, economic, or social. Thus, for over three hundred years, Spain's colonies in America evolved slowly, with little dramatic change, at least to the eye of the contemporary observer. Life was predictable. Born an Indian peasant, one expected to die tilling the same soil as one's ancestors. Born a Creole, one expected more privileges, perhaps an education and marriage within one's own caste and rank, and, if a man, a comfortable job in the government bureaucracy. There was constancy to life.

From the late eighteenth century through the early nineteenth century, new forces buffeted this stable world of colonial Spanish America. These forces erupted between 1810 and 1825 in a series of wars and revolutions that shattered Spain's colonial world into pieces and then put the pieces together again as new nations. One of the greatest empires in modern history ended, and a new era of political independence began for the peoples of Latin America — peoples who were hardly homogeneous but rather a constellation of different societies.

CAUSES OF THE WARS OF INDEPENDENCE

Ideas and the Enlightenment

One of the greatest students of revolutions, the historian Crane Brinton, in referring to the French Revolution, wrote: "no ideas, no revolution." In other words, to break with the past, to make a revolution, a people must have an ideology with goals that cannot be fulfilled unless society first changes radically. The desire to achieve these goals must outweigh the risk and trauma of radical change. However, the ideas behind the goals may be largely unarticulated during the early stages of a revolution. When finally formalized, the ideology that emerges may be an ex post facto ("after the fact") justification of what has already happened. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, he, in many ways, was justifying what already had happened. By then the American colonists had broken with the king and Parliament, the Minutemen had engaged the Redcoats in Massachusetts; the Declaration was but the final, legalistic break.

In truth, most revolutions — as in the case of the French and the American revolutions, both of which inspired Latin Americans of the era — embody concepts and ideas already articulated by middle-class thinkers and then gain momentum through spontaneous acts by the masses that are not necessarily tied to those ideas. The Latin American Wars of Independence were no different.

Ideologically, the Wars of Independence were born in the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment, also sometimes called the Age of Reason or the Age of Democratic Revolution. New ideas challenged old truths and institutions accepted for centuries in Europe. Some ideas were profoundly subversive, like the notion that the ultimate authority in society resides in the people, not with king or emperor. This idea, called popular sovereignty, denied the divine right of monarchs to rule absolutely.

The idea that all people are created equal in nature and possess equal rights furthermore subverted the privileged nobility, whose rank and power derived from birth. The church as the guardian of morality and the enforcer of social order came under attack by enlightened philosophers who favored reason and rejected religious wisdom found in ancient ecclesiastical manuscripts. Instead of an omnipotent god, the Deists, as they were called, envisioned a benign divine presence who had set things in motion but who allowed people freedom to follow their own destinies. This secular trend undermined traditional authority in society.

In science, the new thinkers challenged old knowledge even more decisively. Prior to the Enlightenment, scientific knowledge had been thought to be complete, immutable, and unchanging; it was usually acquired through study of the teachings of Aristotle and his followers. The enlightened scientists, in contrast, studied nature itself for answers to their questions. For example, Aristotelian thinkers "knew" that the earth was the center of the universe. As this was not borne out by scientific observation, it was cast out by enlightened thinkers. They taught inquiring modern society to observe, to classify, to search for rules in nature rather than blindly to accept hand-me-down "knowledge."

In sum, new ways of thinking produced new points of view, new frames of reference, and new forms of behavior that challenged the old order.

The Enlightenment in the New World

The Enlightenment had considerable impact in the Spanish colonies, although at first it was more evident in philosophical and scientific thinking than in politics. People like the Mexican Antonio Alzate and the Peruvian Hipólito Unanue were committed to reason and progress as the passwords of a new age. They and others like them fostered scientific investigation in medicine, botany, and agriculture, for example. They saw these as useful tools for building a better society. Universities such as San Carlos of Guatemala became relatively open forums for the discussion and dissemination of the new ways, as did societies of civic-minded citizens, most often called Amigos del País (Friends of the Country).

The Spanish crown itself, especially under the enlightened monarch Charles III (1759–1788), encouraged efficiency and the application of enlightened principles in the management of its vast American empire. This had unforeseen consequences for the Spanish empire. Over the years, Creoles had been given, or had bought, access to governmental offices in the colonies from the lowest municipal posts to offices as high as judgeships on the prestigious audiencias (high courts with judicial and legislative powers). In the middle and late eighteenth century, the Spanish crown deliberately began to replace Creoles with native-born Spaniards, known as peninsulares, in many offices to help centralize and streamline the imperial administration. However wise and enlightened this was from the perspective of the Spanish crown, Creoles saw only an insensitive and offensive monarchy depriving them of their legitimate and hard-earned rights to be leaders in the colonies in favor of the foreign-born.

In this unsettled environment, it was not surprising that headier, more politically volatile facets of the Age of Reason fueled the imaginations of a few Creoles. Activists like Francisco de Miranda of Venezuela, Antonio Nariño of Colombia, Claudio Manuel da Costa of Brazil, and Francisco Javier Espejo of Ecuador immersed themselves in the ideas of the political Enlightenment and, many years before the eruption of the wars, began to champion the cause of independence and liberty for their homelands. They are called precursors (forerunners) of the independence movement. Although few in number, they exercised a disproportionate influence. They forced their fellow Creoles to think in terms defined by the political Enlightenment, to look to the examples of the American and French revolutions. To them, the writings of the Baron de Montesquieu on the sovereignty of the people and of Jean Jacques Rousseau on the social contract were clarion calls to action.

Wealthy Creoles were not the only ones dissatisfied with the colonial systems of Spain and Portugal. Across the Caribbean and along the coast of Brazil, Afro-descended leaders, some slave but many free, accelerated plans for uprisings against planters and officials. They sought independence and self-government in order to create societies like those of Africa. The vast new arrival of Africans in the late eighteenth century meant that conspirators could recruit veteran soldiers, religious leaders, chieftains, and merchant-kings who enjoyed great prestige among the slave masses. Their uprisings were widespread, and in 1791 the greatest of all the slave revolts, that of Haiti, broke out and forever altered the fate of black people in the Americas. The man who ultimately commanded the victorious Haitian Revolution, former slave Toussaint L'Ouverture, became the most famous black man in the world, both feared and loved by millions and remembered for his fight — a fight that made Haiti the first independent nation-state in Latin America in 1804.

In the Andean highlands, as well, Indian and mestizo laborers and peasants chafed under the oppression of Spanish officials and priests. José Gabriel Condorcanqui, a mestizo descendant of the last Inca king, attempted to redress grievances peacefully through the judicial system. But, pushed by a long series of abuses of power by Spanish and Creole officials of his people, including labor demands and the loss of community lands, he took the ancestral name of Túpac Amaru II and launched the Great Andean Rebellion in 1780. Accompanying him in leading the rebellion was his wife, Micaela Bastidas. Bastidas married Condorcanqui in 1760. Identified in her marriage documents as the illegitimate daughter of Spanish parents, she nevertheless became a respected and capable leader in the rebellion. She played a central role in coordinating and commanding various aspects of the revolt itself, from communications and provisioning to troop movements and recruitment. She and other leaders, some of whom were also women, were caught between trying to motivate Indians to join their cause while also struggling to stop the movement from turning into a caste war targeting the Spanish, not the least because they wanted to attract mestizo and Creole support. Condorcanqui and his family, including Bastidas and a son, were captured and brutally executed in 1781. The rebellion was finally put down in 1783, at a loss of eighty thousand lives, and thereafter Spaniards in the Andes remained wary of further rebellions and bloodshed. Besides leaders such as L'Ouverture and Condorcanqui, dozens of others struggled to organize liberation movements. In the end, all of these early conspirators failed individually — most were executed or died in prison — yet they paved the way for victory by the next generation of leaders. These precursors are much revered in their countries today. Among the most famous were Hidalgo and José María Morelos of Mexico, Francisco Miranda of Venezuela, Claudio Manuel da Costa and Joaquim José da Silva Xavier (the famed Tiradentes) of Brazil, and Antonio Nariño of Colombia.

Creoles and Peninsulares

In the end, wealthy white Creoles led the movements to separate their lands from Spain during the Wars of Independence. Besides the ideology of the Enlightenment, other, more immediate considerations propelled them to action. A diverse set of economic, ethnic, and nationalistic circumstances added to the general level of discontent and frustration among the Latin American population.

Although no one element was more important than another in bringing about the wars, the antagonism and bitter feelings between American Creoles and those Spaniards born in the Iberian Peninsula (peninsulares) who came to Latin America either as government administrators or in private enterprise helped ignite the emotional tinderbox that flared in 1810. Creoles felt abused and offended by peninsulares, whom they increasingly viewed as foreigners in the Americas. Peninsulares, in turn, tended to be contemptuous of Creoles, who, in a world dominated by an obsession with purity of blood, they viewed as tainted by virtue of their American birth. This sense of racial and social difference hardened over the years. Creoles claimed that their legitimate aspirations, not only to hold office, as discussed previously, but also to trade freely and to be full citizens within the Spanish empire, were circumscribed and frustrated by an imperial bureaucracy that invariably favored Spaniards over Creoles. Out of this discontent, a sense of Latin American nationalism evolved, a feeling of distinctiveness that the Peruvian historian Jorge Basadre labeled the "conciencia de sí," or national self-awareness.

Issues of Trade and Commerce

Creole aspirations to independence were also fed by bread-and-butter issues — issues that added to the already smoldering jealousy and antagonisms marking social and political relations between Creoles and peninsulares. Creoles believed that the Spanish crown and peninsulares unjustifiably favored Spain at the expense of the colonies in matters of trade and commerce. Their dissatisfaction took many forms. In some regions, like those that produced agricultural products for export, Creole landowners wanted free trade and an end to the system of Spanish monopoly and controls. In other regions, the interior provinces of Ecuador and Peru, for example, where local manufacturers had to compete with imported products, Creoles wanted more protection. And in regions like Argentina, there were both factions wanting free trade and factions wanting protection. Argentines in the coastal provinces, especially Buenos Aires, produced many cattle products for export and desired free trade; their brethren in the interior produced wines and other products marketed internally and wished to be protected from cheap European imports that undermined their livelihood. Whatever the Spanish crown did was bound to rub someone the wrong way, further eroding loyalties to the monarchy. The friction caused by these commercial differences was increased by the other circumstances that estranged Creoles from peninsulares.

The Invasion of Spain

Creole exasperation with overbearing peninsular officials was all the greater because Creoles did not see the geopolitical units of the New World as lesser lands subject to Spain. Just as Spain itself was a group of ancient kingdoms (like Valencia, Castile, Aragon, Granada) united dynastically by their allegiance to the same crown, so the New World with its various administrative divisions (Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, and so on) was conceived of theoretically as a roster of new kingdoms, equal with one another and with their fellow kingdoms in Spain. Each owed allegiance to the crown, and none was subordinate to any other kingdom. Their allegiance to the crown, moreover, was highly personal. That is, it ran from the kingdom to the person of the king, and not to Spain itself. As the nineteenth century dawned, King Charles IV sat on the Spanish throne. His son Ferdinand was his heir apparent. In Europe, by 1800 the armies of the brilliant and ambitious Napoleon Bonaparte were on the march, building an empire across the continent.

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "A New History of Modern Latin America"
by .
Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of California.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Preface
Colonial Prologue

Part I: Independence and Turmoil

1. Background to Independence
2. The Coming of Independence to South America
3. The Independence Movements: On to Victory
4. The Aftermath of Independence
5. The Search for Political Order: 1830s-1850s

Part II: Nation-Building

6. Order and Progress
7. Citizen and Nation on the Road to Progress
8. The Development of Nations: Mexico and Central America
9. The Development of Nations: South America
10. Inventing Latin America
11. Changing Worlds and New Empires

Part III: Reform and Revolution

12. Early Populism in South America
13. Dictators of the Caribbean Basin
14. Divergent Paths to Modern Nationhood: Panama, Brazil, and Peru
15. Early Revolutionaries: Mexico, Brazil, and Nicaragua

Part IV: Confronting Global Challenges

16. The 1930s: Years of Depression and Upheaval
17. Latin America in World War II
18. The Classic Populists

Part V: Dictatorship, Development, and Democracy

19. Mexico since World War II
20. Colombian Conundrum
21. Caribbean Basin Countercurrents
22. The Cuban Revolution and its Aftermath
23. The National Security States
24. Democratization and Conflict in the Late Twentieth Century
25. Latin America in the Twenty-First Century

Notes
Bibliography
Glossary
Index