Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (33 page)

Native Uprisings

Despite high levels of dissatisfaction with the Bourbon and
Pombaline reforms, the prospect of independence was far less attractive to
American-born whites living amidst indigenous or racially mixed majorities in
Latin America than it was to the slaveholders of British North America, where
whites far outnumbered minorities of African or native ancestry. In fact, the
Haitian Revolution and its contribution to unrest among both slaves and free
people of color in Latin America’s plantation regions ended up dampening the
enthusiasm of creole elites for a break with the mother country. Meanwhile, one
of the major Spanish American centers of native population, the Peruvian Andes,
was just recovering from a different version of the sort of social upheaval
that created panic among creoles. In 1780, a colonial system that had long
succeeded in deflecting or dispersing native resistance was shaken to its roots
by an insurrection initiated by a local kuraka, José Gabriel Condorcanqui, who
styled himself a new Inca under the name Túpac Amaru II. Terrified creoles saw themselves
transformed into the targets of native insurgents’ rage as a massive rebellion
swept through large portions of Peru and Bolivia, leaving thousands dead in its
wake. The scope of the violence was unprecedented, as we shall see below,
although not the act of rebellion itself.

Village Revolts in Mexico

As on sugar plantations, armed revolt was always a last
resort in native villages owing to the repressive response it was likely to
encourage. Nevertheless, it occurred with surprising frequency. One historian
has counted 142 instances of village revolt in central and southern Mexico
alone between 1680 and 1811, with at least one-quarter of the revolts led by
women. Crucially, though, nearly all of these uprisings broke out more or less
spontaneously with the aim of resolving a specific local grievance, whether a
boundary dispute or the arrogant and heavy-handed administration of a hated
priest or other outside authority. In 1720, for example, local Indians
concerned about encroachment on their lands attacked surveyors with rocks not
far from the city of Oaxaca, while in 1773 the villagers of Zimatlán revolted
against a priest who was trying to keep them from speaking their native tongue,
Zapotec. Such unrest often ended with the replacement of an unpopular official
along with relatively mild punishment for the rebel leaders. In this manner,
through a “calculated blend of punishment and mercy.”  Spanish officials
managed to prevent most such rebellions from spreading beyond the village level
or taking on a larger social agenda. And as long as the focus of these revolts
remained local, they posed little threat to the overall colonial order.

Túpac Amaru II and Andean Rebellion

In the Andes, the Spanish crown’s determination to impose
new, revenue-enhancing measures intensified pressures on native communities
that were already experiencing difficulties associated with renewed population
growth in the 18th century. Under the Bourbons, the
alcabala,
or sales
tax, was raised from two to six percent, applied to an expanded range of
products including cheap alcohol and coca, and collected more systematically by
a larger number of officials appointed explicitly for that purpose. Moreover,
the corregidores charged with putting new and unpopular crown policies into
effect were compensated with the right to force native communities to purchase
bulk quantities of unwanted goods at inflated prices, a process of unequal
exchange known as the
reparto de mercancías.
In the 1770s, Antonio de
Arriaga, corregidor of the district of Canas y Canchis near Cuzco, imposed
three of these
repartos
on the local people. The popular consensus was
that he was allowed to do this only once. For these and other perceived abuses,
Arriaga was executed in the village square of Tungasuca on November 10, 1780,
on the orders of the kuraka who would become known to history as Túpac Amaru
II. It was the first act in a grand rebellion that nearly ended Spanish rule in
the Andes 40 years before independence finally came.

The name chosen by the rebel leader was highly symbolic. It
had belonged to the last ruler of an independent Inca kingdom, a mountain
refuge that survived the initial Spanish invasion of the Andes and resisted
conquest until 1572. Despite this association, Túpac Amaru II initially
proclaimed rebellion against corrupt Spanish colonial officials in the name of
the king of Spain. In doing so, he echoed a common theme of popular uprisings
in monarchical societies by appealing to a ruler who surely would not approve of
his underlings’ abusive behavior if he were aware of it. Túpac Amaru also
sought support from all social sectors except for Iberian-born Spaniards,
including creoles. But most of the latter soon threw themselves into the arms
of Spanish troops, shaken by the massive response to the call to arms on the
part of an indigenous population that often seemed unable, or unwilling, to
distinguish among people of European ancestry. Large creole landowners, after
all, were often the most obvious face of an oppressive colonial order. Creole
fears were intensified when a nearly simultaneous revolt by Aymara-speaking
peoples to the south, in the Chayanta region of what is now Bolivia, made the
entire nonnative population the target of its wrath from the outset.

The early elimination of the key rebel leaders did little
to stem the tide of insurrection. Túpac Amaru himself was captured six months
after his rebellion began and executed in Cuzco’s main square along with his
wife, Micaela Bastidas, a commander in her own right. The original leaders of
the Aymara revolt, the Katari brothers, were dead by then as well. But the
massive revolt swept on, its supporters apparently undaunted by the dispersal
throughout the viceroyalty of the body parts of their executed leaders for
public display, a vivid reminder of royal justice. Not until 1783 were the
Spanish troops who had been rushed to the highlands able to suppress the
uprising for good.

CONCLUSION: TOWARD OR AWAY FROM
INDEPENDENCE?

Appeals to an Inca or African past, or to a future of
liberty and fraternal solidarity, clearly contributed a sense of purpose to
many outbreaks of armed resistance against repressive colonial regimes. Bahian
planters complained in 1816 that “the spirit of insurrection is seen among all
types of slaves, and is fomented principally by the slaves of the city [of
Salvador], where the ideas of liberty have been communicated by black sailors
coming from Saint Domingue.”  But demographic and economic pressures, like
those building up in the Andes prior to the Túpac Amaru rebellion, often played
a vital role in stirring up discontent in the first place. Rising consumer
prices and new fiscal demands helped spark opposition to the Bourbon reforms in
New Granada (Colombia), where the multiclass Comunero Revolt of 1781 coincided
with Túpac Amaru’s farther south. The participants in Bahia’s “Tailors’
Conspiracy” sought pay raises for militiamen and a rollback of manioc prices
that had recently climbed by 25 percent. The dangers of urban food shortages
had long been evident to colonial officials. A major riot in Mexico City in
1692 was preceded by disastrous crop failures that drove the price of the chief
local staple, corn, to its highest level in a century. A hundred years later,
distressed residents of Latin America were even more likely to blame a similar
worsening in the circumstances of daily life on royal governments whose reforms
were correctly suspected of benefiting the economies of Spain and Portugal
rather than their own.

Creoles, the sector of the colonial population with the
greatest access by far to education and other useful tools of organization,
remained ambivalent about the idea of independence in spite of their increasing
unhappiness with what they experienced as second-class status. In a world
shaken by events like Túpac Amaru’s revolt and the Haitian Revolution, what
might the true costs of a struggle for independence be? Hearing of the Peruvian
events, Venezuelan creoles like don Juan Vicente Bolívar y Ponte, a
slaveholding member of the cacao-planting elite of Caracas, expressed their
opposition to any movement that might end in the destruction of the social
hierarchy in their own region, where free
pardos
made up half the
population. During the 1790s, the Caracas city council opposed the creation of
new militia units of color for fear such a development would “increase the
arrogance of the pardos, and give them organization, chiefs, and arms to
facilitate a revolution.”  Years later, during an initial bid for independence,
Simón Bolívar, son of Juan Vicente, encountered Venezuela’s mostly nonwhite
llaneros,
horsemen from the cattle-ranching interior, allied with royalist forces
against
him. He only won their support, and became South America’s Great Liberator,
after he abandoned the creole exclusiveness that marked a first, failed
independent government in Venezuela and incorporated soldiers of color on terms
of reasonable equality into his own rebel forces.

But the initial spark for the Latin American wars of
independence, which finally broke out during the second decade of the 19th
century, was not provided by unrest on the part of creoles or anyone else in
the Americas. Instead, royal government and the colonial system over which it
presided began to collapse in Spanish America as a result of Napoleon’s 1807
invasion of the Iberian Peninsula and dethronement of the legitimate monarch of
Spain, Ferdinand VII. The same invasion sent the Portuguese ruler to Brazil,
preserving monarchy there, although not Portugal’s dominance, for most of the
19th century. From Mexico to Chile, the following two decades of independence
struggles saw momentous political changes. But the conditions of daily life
were to remain harsh for the majority of people in independent Latin America
despite a long history of persistent and sometimes violent efforts to improve
them.

8 - CONCLUSION:

INDEPENDENCE AND BEYOND

INDEPENDENCE: CHANGE OR CONTINUITY?

The
years from 1808 to 1825 constitute the independence era in Latin American history,
when all of mainland Spanish America, along with Brazil, threw off Iberian
rule, although the Caribbean islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico remained Spanish
possessions until 1898. Thousands of people died in bloody, prolonged fighting
in Mexico and Spanish South America, while the lives of tens of thousands of
others were disrupted by the more general economic and social chaos that
accompanies sustained armed conflict. Grand movements of large numbers of
soldiers and just as many camp followers, spouses or other women who
accompanied the troops providing both domestic and sexual comforts, swept
across vast territories in a manner unlike anything seen in three centuries.
Royalist forces looted and burned indiscriminately, and insurgents fought back
with equal savagery. Disease, as in most wars, ran rampant. Some of Spain’s
territories, notably in Central America, managed to escape the horrors of war
almost entirely, while Brazil made a relatively peaceful transition to
independence under the rule of an emperor, Dom Pedro I, who was the son of
Portugal’s king. But throughout Latin America, a new political atmosphere
raised new questions regarding the nature and practice of self-government. The
manner in which “the people” should participate in governing newly independent
nations was perhaps the thorniest question of all and one that remains far from
clearly resolved even today.

As noted in the preceding chapter, the colonial-era
cabildo,
or municipal council, turned out to be a key institution of political organization
in Spanish America after Napoleon deposed Spain’s King Ferdinand in 1807. In
the absence of a recognized, legitimate monarch, cabildo members, mostly
creoles, assumed the right in many places to exercise political power until
such time as the king was restored to his throne. This assumption of power by
creole cabildo members did not go uncontested by other claimants to royal
authority. Nevertheless, cabildo politics provided leading creoles with a key
forum in which to debate the possibility of severing ties with Spain.
Meanwhile, as they had during the preceding centuries of colonial rule, various
sectors of the marginalized, mostly nonwhite majority made their presence felt
in other ways.

Revolt in Mexico

In the fall of 1810, a widespread uprising by thousands of
natives and
mestizos
under the leadership of a rural creole priest,
Miguel Hidalgo, interrupted the political maneuverings of creoles and
gachupines
(a derogatory term for peninsular Spaniards) in Mexico City. Hidalgo’s poor
and ragged troops declared loyalty to the Virgin of Guadalupe and the deposed
Spanish monarch, but death to any gachupines in Mexico. They proceeded to lay
waste to the countryside northwest of the capital. In the wealthy mining town
of Guanajuato, Hidalgo’s forces massacred elite whites whom they held
responsible for colonial oppression, terrifying gachupín and creole alike.
These two groups, like Andean elites faced with Túpac Amaru’s rebellion in the
Peruvian highlands three decades earlier, closed ranks to put down the unrest.
Creole military officers, including the man who became the first ruler of an
independent Mexico a decade later, Agustín de Iturbide, fought alongside
Spanish troops to crush the revolt. In an effort to dissuade others from
similar actions, royalist forces executed Hidalgo and sent his head to be
impaled on a pike outside Guanajuato. Mexican creoles, like their counterparts
in the Andes, chose the maintenance of their privileged position within the
existing social order over participation in an independence movement involving
the lower social elements.