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Which groups of people were at the top in the middle and on the bottom of the social hierarchy in the Spanish colonies?

Las castas. Anonymous, 18th century, oil on canvas, 148×104 cm, Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico.

From the late 15th century onward, three significant cultural entities met on the American continent, each comprised of numerous subcultures, some sovereign in their own right. The Indigenous peoples of the continent, the Spanish, Portuguese, and other Europeans, and the Africans of many nations transformed the future population and civilization of the “New World” through their encounters. Relations, whether consenting or forced, engendered what some call mixed-race people who came to inhabit Latin America, which, up until the middle of the 19th century included much of the Southwestern U.S.

The blended identity is a product of Spanish policies toward Indigenous peoples encountered on their mission of resource acquisition and domination. In contrast to the U.S. policy which focused on policies of forced removal, relocating communities to other regions or reserved lands, the Spanish systems of the encomienda and corregimiento were mechanisms by which to increase the labor force by bringing Indigenous peoples into society, such as in the Missions of California.

Not all Africans who arrived in the New World were brought under duress. Afrodescendant Spanish conquistadores participated in the conquest project. However, over time, the association of Black Africans with enslavement created a subaltern class based on phenotype. Spaniards who asserted that they had arrived from Spain and/or remained “pure” blooded (lacking African or Indigenous parentage in their ancestry), used this status to control everyone else in the colonies. An elaborate system of social stratification based on skin-color and phenotypical characteristics reinforced the political, economic and social power structure that kept the Spaniards at the top even as the indigenous and African groups were exploited.

Placement within the system determined access to education, titles and other rights. Several strategies were imposed to create greater separation among the races including segregating neighborhoods and applying dress codes. In the play, we see Doña Amador and Sra. Lasuén both object to the servants wearing their masters’ garments. A new genre of art-work, which later came to be call casta paintings (above), popularly delineated the nomenclature of racial heritage.

Another categorization made by Spaniards in the New World reflected their investment in the project of converting the Indigenous people, who were often perceived as naïve, childlike, and ready subjects for Christianity. Spaniards and Africans (because of their acculturation to Spanish culture) were known as gente de razón, or people of reason, a distinction made by Sra. Lasuén in the play. Indigenous people, such as Francisca, the neophyte child in the play, were known as gente sin razón, people without reason.

Latin American Social Caste Pyramid (LASCP) (Chavez-Dueñas, Adames, and Organista 7).

In the encounters with the Indigenous inhabitants of Alta California, the Spanish settlers (including their acculturated casta servants) united in a self-identification as one people, gente de razón. The gente sin razón, the Indigenous that the Spanish intended to conquer, were placed at the bottom of the hierarchical system of rights and privileges. As Spain constructed its new presidios (forts), missions, and towns, some Indigenous resisted or simply left the territories, others entered the new constructions for safety, as servants and neophytes/students of the conquering society. There is a similarity of purpose with this Spanish project of indoctrination and the residential schools of the United States and Canada.

Sources cited:

Chavez-Dueñas, N. Y., H. Y. Adames, and K. C. Organista. “Skin-Color Prejudice and Within-Group Racial Discrimination: Historical and Current Impact on Latino/a Populations.” Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 36.1 (2014): 3-26

“Las Castas – Spanish Racial Classifications.” Native Heritage Project: Documenting the Ancestors, 15 June 2013, nativeheritageproject.com/2013/06/15/las-castas-spanish-racial-classifications/

Live Science Staff. “Africans Came with Columbus to New World.” LiveScience, Purch, 20 Mar. 2009, www.livescience.com/3423-africans-columbus-world.html

Restall, Matthew. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. Oxford University Press, 2004.

Restall, Matthew, and Kris E. Lane. Latin America in colonial times. Cambridge University Press, 2011.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the social structure of New Spain using a conceptual framework somewhat different from those commonly employed and one which may be more useful for the explanation of certain historical phenomena. It does not purport to be a piece of “basic research.” It is more properly a theory of social structure. The principal concepts employed are abstracted from infinitely complex historical situations. A number of observations made cannot be precisely documented; they are hypotheses which seem to “make sense” in the light of the author’s reading and research. Hypotheses and substantiated observations, however, appear to fit together and to accommodate the known “facts.” The concept of society is arbitrarily separated from that of the state and the latter treated only incidentally, although Spanish political thinkers did not regard such boundary establishment as either real or desirable, and the political role of estates and corporations is factored out. This procedure can be justified by regarding the state as “nothing more than the organization of all social forces that have a political significance . . . as that part of society which performs the political function.”1 Conceptually, therefore, state and society may be distinguished one from the other and the problem of the relationship between the two, while real and important, is somewhat different from the one to be examined here.2

A word is in order about terminology. Such expressions as social structure, social organization, social system, class, caste, and the like are used rather loosely by historians, so that confusion in terminology often produces confusion in ideas. On the other hand, sociologists and social anthropologists in attempting to define such concepts more rigorously have come up with so many conflicting “scientific” definitions that they have simply created terminological confusion at another level. The term “social structure” is here used in a non-technical sense. It presumes that a society is made up of individuals grouped according to the possession of common interests, attributes, and qualities; that these groups are definable, and that they are related to each other in some definable, non-random order.3 Other terms commonly used in social analysis are either explicitly defined or, it is hoped, their usage is implicit in the context.

On the eve of the conquest of America, the constituent elements of Spanish society were groups and associations identifiable in terms of (1) ascribed functions and/or statuses, (2) systems of shared values, attitudes, and activities associated with the latter, (3) distinct and unequal juridical personalities expressed in general legal codes or special fueros, ordenanzas, and reglamentos, and involving some degree of autonomous jurisdiction. This society was conceived of in organic terms; that is, like the human body, its several parts were structurally and functionally interrelated and interdependent. The health of the body social depended on the vigor and proper functioning of the constituent organs.

The constituent elements of Spanish society fell into two logical categories:4 the vestiges of the medieval estates and functional corporations. The primary estates, noble, clerical, and common, had a functional derivation. Thus, in the High Middle Ages they were identified as defensores, oratores, and laboratores. Leaving aside the church for the moment, as between the two secular estates the function of warrior was assigned a higher social value and initially was completely identified with the nobility. Despite isolated voices upholding the dignity and value of production, it was commonly held that without the defensores, the other estates would fall victim to predatory forces and the social order would disintegrate. Function and its assigned social value conveyed social quality and status and conferred or withheld honor. Thus the bearing of arms was honorable while productive occupations—agriculture, trade, manufacturing—were dishonorable. Quality and honor, moreover, came to be conceived of not as individual attributes which could be acquired but as deriving from lineage. The military function of the nobility and derivative social quality and status were juridically recognized in the fuero de hidalguía whereby the noble was exempted from personal taxes and tributes (pechos); he could not be imprisoned for debt nor could his residence, horse, or arms be attached for debts, and he could not be subjected to judicial torture or to base punishment.5

Within the primary estates, hierarchies of social rank existed. Thus the highest level of the nobility consisted of the grandees who were the social equals of the king. Below them ranked the rest of the titled nobility—marquises, counts, etc.—and at the bottom of the pyramid of nobility was the mass of knights or hidalgos.

Coincidentally with the evolution of a hierarchy of estates and subestates, countertrends were deforming its structural purity. These had their origin in the growth of towns, trade, and a money economy. They assumed the form of increased diversification of function and the modification of the functional base of the secular estates. Within the common estate, an emerging group of merchants, bankers, and legalists (letrados) performed functions so indispensable to society and the state that they could not be denied social honor and status. In the case of mercantile elements, wealth could literally buy many of the attributes of social quality. Moreover, when city dwellers organized urban militia and the Santa Hermandad for their defense, and as the nucleus of a mercenary army developed in the fifteenth century, the nobility lost its monopoly on the role of defensor. At the same time, the pressures of a money economy reduced many of the lower strata of the nobility to indigency or compelled them into money-making activities. Hidalguía, furthermore, acquired an economic value. The hidalgo as distinct from the commoner (in this case identical with the pechero) was exempt from personal taxes or tributes, and pretensions to hidalguía came to be based not so much on aspirations to honor or status but on financial advantage. Conversely, the emergent bourgeoisie were anxious to acquire a social quality and status which could not be validated completely by wealth alone. Juan Huarte de San Juan describes these attitudes in his Examen de ingenios: “To be well born and of famous lineage is a very highly esteemed jewel but it has one very great fault; by itself it has little benefit . . . but linked to wealth there is no point of honor that can equal it. . ..” “Some” he adds, “compare nobility to the zero of the decimal system; by itself it is nothing but joined with a digit it acquires great value.”6

As a consequence of these complementary trends, the traditional hierarchy of estates and subestates became blurred at the point of contact between the lower nobility and the upper strata of the common order and a new sector emerged which combined the values and functions of the nobility and the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless the image of a society ordered on the basis of functionally derived social quality remained virtually unimpaired in the minds of Spaniards. Jurists and theologians might challenge the system on philosophical, religious, or logical grounds, but any popular opposition to it that existed arose from dissatisfaction of individuals and groups with their place in it rather than from a realization of its inequity.

Examined on another plane, the constituent elements of Spanish society were a multitude of functional corporations which included the army, merchant’s guilds (consulados), artisan’s guilds (gremios), municipal organs, the mesta, and the like, each with a special juridical status. The relationship between the estates and the corporations raises a number of conceptual problems, the most fundamental being whether they actually represented two distinct systems of social organization. Beneyto observes that the corporate theory supported the stability of social stratification in that “the status of the corporation has to correspond to the status of the individuals who enter into it,” implying that the corporations were actually suborders within a stratified society of estates.7 However, a case for the coexistence of two social systems can be made on the following grounds: (1) Within the estates, the ordering came to be on the basis of social quality and status divorced from their original functional bases whereas the corporations were specifically functional in fact and by virtue of their formal ordenanzas and reglamentos. (2) The boundaries between corporations in contrast to those separating social classes were sharp and absolutely definable in functional and legal terms. (3) Although there was some general correspondence between the status of corporations and the individuals who composed them, it was often blurred. Thus, as suggested above, within the merchant guilds, the noble-commoner dichotomy tended to disappear, and the standing army which emerged in the fifteenth century contained men from all ranks of society although recognition of social quality was maintained in the wide gap that existed between the statuses of officer and enlisted man. (4) The corporations maintained a higher degree of internal discipline. (5) Among the several functional corporations there was no explicit hierarchical ordering. The social structure deriving from estates was stratified; that based on corporations was conglomerate. Although two systems existed, there was a significant intersection or interpenetration between them.

The church cannot be accommodated in either of the categories established above. Historically it was one of the primary medieval estates. It was also a functional corporation. Its position in the social order, however, transcended both. It was, in fact, a society in itself providing for all the needs of its personnel. It possessed its own social stratification grading downward from the prelates—archbishops, bishops, and abbots who were identifiable with the secular nobility—to the parish priests identifiable with the commoners. It also had a conglomerate structure whose components were “subcorporations” such as the regular and secular clergy, the military orders, the Inquisition and the universities, each enjoying a particular fuero or jurisdiction. Moreover, although in terms of historical experience, self-identification, and certain aspects of its juridical status, it was a Spanish institution, it was also but a branch of the church universal. In view of these difficulties, within the conceptual framework of this paper, the church can be more properly considered in terms of its constituent groups rather than as a social estate or as a unitary corporation.

At a time that was particularly significant for social formation in America, agitation against and eventual expulsion of Moors and Jews from Spain activated a latent element in peninsular social organization. The status-seeking Spaniard became almost pathologically concerned not only with establishing his hidalguía but also his purity of blood (limpieza de sangre). Indeed the two qualities became almost coextensive. The latter is overtly ethnic, but its basic derivation was religious. It signified a lineage of impeccable orthodoxy. Thus Pedro de la Caballería, a member of Ferdinand the Catholic’s entourage and a well-known Jew, forged an expediente supported by testimony from eminent nobles, according to which his progenitors had been “verdaderos cristianos viejos de limpísima sangre.”8 The possession of such qualities or the lack of them influenced not only social status but corporate membership. Purity of blood was a condition of membership in artisan guilds, religious and military orders, municipal consejos, and for the award of university degrees.

The concepts of estate and corps were integral parts of the cultural baggage which Spaniards carried with them to the Indies. Social structure there, however, developed a character that differed from its peninsular prototype. This divergence derived from two powerful influences: first, the deliberate intervention of the crown in the process of social formation, a phenomenon which will be considered later in this paper;9 second, the survival of large portions of the indigenous population, the importation of substantial numbers of Negro slaves, and miscegenation involving the three races. The ethnic factor produced what colonial writers called a system of castes. The latter word, however, should be taken as the equivalent of the Spanish term casta. It did not denote a rigid, closed social system such as that associated with India.10 Various classifications of the castes appeared. In the early nineteenth century amateur anthropologists constructed elaborate taxonomies such as the following:11

Spaniard with an Indian woman, mestizo
Mestiza with a Spaniard, castizo
Castizo with a Spanish woman, Spaniard
Spaniard with a Negro woman, mulato
Mulata with a Spaniard, morisco
Morisco with a Spanish woman, chino
Chino with an Indian woman, salta atrás
Salta atrás with a mulata, lobo
Lobo with a china, gíbaro
Gíbaro with a mulata, alborozado
Alborozado with a Negro woman, cambujo
Cambujo with an Indian woman, zambaigo
Zambaigo with a loba, Colpa mulato
Colpa mulato with a cambuja, tente en el aire
Tente en el aire with a mulata, no te entiendo
No te entiendo with an Indian woman, toma atrás

A simpler classification was commonly used which appears to be the basis of descriptions of “colonial society” in modern textbooks. The elements were:

Spaniard or white (European or American)
mestizo: various mixtures of Indian and Spaniard
mulatto: Various mixtures of Negro and Spaniard
zambo or zambaigo: Indian and Negro
Indian
Negro

For official purposes, particularly the assessment of tribute and military service, three primary groups were identified: Spaniard (European and American); castes (castas), that is, persons of mixed blood; and Indians.12

Although such classifications were overtly ethnic they were strongly influenced by cultural factors. Thus, in fact and in law, “white” or “Spaniard” was practically coextensive with gente de casta limpia, a category which included not only persons of pure Spanish origin but mestizos and castizos who were of legitimate descent, free from the taint of Negro blood, and who “lived like Spaniards.”13 The distinguishing feature of the castes was illegitimate descent or the suspicion of it and the possession of Negro blood or the suspicion of such a taint because of illegitimacy.14 The taint associated with the Negro derived from his supposed physical and psychological characteristics and his juridical status. His pigmentation and features were regarded as repellent; early colonial officials and chroniclers regarded Negroes and mulattos as “viles, traidores, ociosos, borrachos,” etc. They were the people most “rastreros, pérfidos e inmorales de la humanidad.”15 As slaves or the descendants of slaves they were infames por derecho. As such they were forbidden to bear arms or to enter military service, they were excluded from the clergy and public office, and they were forbidden to intermarry with Indians or whites.16 In regard to the Indian group, it was composed of ethnic Indians and mestizos who were culturally Indian. In a curiously reverse sort of way, a Spaniard or white might be most accurately defined as a person who culturally and legally was neither an Indian nor a caste; an Indian was a person who was neither a Spaniard nor a caste; and a caste was an individual who was neither Spaniard nor Indian.

Aguirre Beltrán has developed the following method o classifying castes which explicitly recognizes cultural factors in their formation:17

European: persons of pure European descent
Indians: ethnic Indians
Negroes: ethnic Negroes
Euromestizos: persons of mixed European and Indian origin but with predominantly European ethnic and cultural characteristics
Indomestizos: European-Indian mixtures but ethnically and culturally predominantly Indian
Afromestizos: Mixed bloods with a Negro strain

The several systems of classification described above may be correlated as follows:

The question arises as to whether these ethnic-cultural groups constituted elements in a definable social structure. The system of castes was certainly a contemporary reality and its component elements were identified in the contemporary mind in a loose reputational way. It is a useful framework for descriptive purposes but it has a limited value for structural analysis. In the case of the elaborate constructions of the early nineteenth-century taxonomists, the types are too numerous to be manageable; they are difficult to identify with any degree of precision, and status distinctions among them are by no means clear. The same criticism is true to a lesser extent of simpler traditional systems and the typology of Aguirre Beltrán. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there are not enough data available in a usable form to enable such groups to be identified and ordered in a scientific system. The trichotomy Spaniard—caste—Indian, however, presents fewer problems. It does constitute a social structure. Its elements are identifiable; they possess definable social and juridical statuses, and they exist in an ordered relation to each other. They represent an American system of estates which evolved in an ad hoc fashion out of New World circumstances without the support of any fundamental social theory.

The Spanish sector of the population, although of diverse social and ethnic origin, possessed a certain homogeneity deriving from its position as a conquering race and its assumed superior culture. Its identity was supported, moreover, by the possession of or pretension to limpieza de sangre and descent from cristianos viejos, qualities which were identified with legitimate lineage. Its superior status was also expressed in almost universal claims to nobility or hidalguía. Theoretically, this quality derived from two sources: lineage and royal concession, both subject to documentary substantiation. In fact, many Spanish families could claim hidalguía on one of these grounds. Some of the conquerors, first settlers, and later arrivals came from peninsular families of substantiated nobility. The crown also made concessions of hidalguía to Mexican families, although rather sparingly.18 From the outset, however, the conquerors exhibited a sharp consciousness of nobility deriving not from lineage or royal concession but from a sense of personal excellence, from glory in deeds of valor done during the Conquest, and from a pride in noble action. It was such sentiments that moved Pizarro to claim that the Conquest created a new nobility. These feelings became diffused through the entire Spanish population and led the Council of the Indies to declare: “It is undeniable that in those kingdoms [in America] any Spaniard who comes to them, who acquires some wealth, and who is not engaged in a dishonorable occupation, is regarded as a noble.” Alexander von Humboldt went even farther. “Any white person,” he wrote, “although he rides his horse barefoot, imagines himself to be of the nobility of the country.”19 Nobility, in fact, became largely an officially recognized individual and social state of mind. The concepts of Spanishness, whiteness, limpieza de sangre, vieja cristianidad, and hidalguía tended to become coextensive and together formed a system of values and status determinants clearly identifiable with a major social sector. These qualities were recognized in law, particularly in exemption from tribute, and the hidalgo-pechero dichotomy was thus preserved in the New World.20 The white or Spanish component of society was the American counterpart of the noble estate of Spain.

The place of the castes in the Spanish concept of a hierarchically organized society is rather difficult to define. Their existence was deplored. They really were not supposed to exist. In the eyes of most of the white population they were lazy, vicious, irresponsible, and a threat to social and political stability.21 Yet they formed a large proportion of the artisan and laboring population of the viceroyalty. As infames por derecho and as payers of tribute they possessed a juridical status or personality and a social status universally recognized and defined by reputation.22 They constituted a common estate deformed by New World circumstances.

In regard to the Indian, universally minded jurists and theologians argued for the equality of the Spaniards and the indigenous population, but from the outset of colonization a wide chasm yawned between the two races. The Indians existed as conquered people, the Spanish as conquerors. The Spanish became the employers and exploiters of labor, the Indians the hewers of wood and the drawers of water. Profound cultural differences existed between the two peoples; the Indians refused to live like civilized people, that is, like Spaniards, and were regarded by the latter as rústicas or miserables. Thus, the indigenous population acquired a dependent if not an inferior status which was juridically recognized. In the Laws of the Indies, the Indians were regarded as perpetual minors and wards of the crown and were placed under the tutelage of royal officials in corregimientos, of individuals and corporations in encomiendas, and of the regular ecclesiastical orders in missions. In recognition of their vassalage, they were required to pay tribute; they were forbidden to dress like Spaniards, to ride horses, or to bear arms. On the other hand, they were conceded privileges and immunities which in effect constituted a fuero. Official lay and clerical protectors oversaw their welfare; they had access to special tribunals such as the Juzgado de Indios; they were exempt from the direct jurisdiction of the Holy Office and from various taxes such as the alcabala and diezmos. Although functionally they were commoners, they were juridically distinct from the castes and constituted a peculiarly American estate.23

The three primary estates contained internal stratifications based partly on ascribed status deriving from lineage, degree of whiteness, and nobility, and in part from status acquired through wealth or royal favor. Within the Indian component, the upper stratum consisted of a nobility whose rank was inherited from the preconquest caciques and confirmed by the Spanish crown. This group was juridically identified with the white nobility in that it was exempt from tribute and from legal inhibitions imposed on the general Indian population but it remained culturally Indian.24 At a lower level were the notables who occupied posts of distinction in Indian communities, while the base of the pyramid consisted of the mass of the indigenous population.

Within the white estate there existed a group which might be described as an upper nobility. Initially this was comprised of the conquerors who by virtue of their feats of arms regarded themselves as a new nobility. Immediately below them came the first settlers whose excellence derived not from martial exploits but from merits acquired in the initiation of colonization, the occupation of new territory for the king, and the founding of towns and cities. These two groups were rewarded for their eminent services by encomiendas: that is, grants of Indians from which they were privileged to extract labor and/or tribute. During the seventeenth century they tended to fuse and together were called by jurists, beneméritos de Indios.25 Initially the encomendero class gave indications of evolving into a military nobility along lines reminiscent of the emergence of the Spanish nobility in the Middle Ages. The encomienda initially displayed distinctly feudal features, particularly in its military aspects. In effect the crown and the encomenderos were parties to a feudal contract. The former granted the encomienda as a benefice, while the latter acknowledged vassalage, swore fealty, and were obligated to be ready with arms, horses, and retainers to fight the enemies of their lord. In order to fulfill this obligation, they were required to reside in the province in which they held their encomienda; in ease of absence—for which permission was required—they had to appoint a champion (escudero); if a minor inherited, his guardian or tutor appointed a champion; if an encomienda passed to a woman, she was required to marry within a year so that her husband could fulfill the military obligations entailed.26 The army of encomenderos resembled the feudal host and was the principle reliance of the crown for defense of the viceroyalty up to the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Thus operations against the Chichemecas in New Galicia in 1541-1542 were conducted largely by encomenderos.27 Some ten years later when Viceroy Velasco requested assistance from the crown for operations against rebellious Indians, he was told that the responsibility lay with the encomenderos because “the encomiendas are rents which His Majesty gives to the encomenderos because they defend the land.”28

The emergence of a military nobility from the encomienda system, however, was prevented by several factors. In the first place, the encomienda proved to be unsatisfactory as a military institution. The encomenderos were a restless lot and, despite repeated prohibitions, abandoned their provinces for the lure of new conquests. Moreover, they displayed a marked reluctance to engage in organized campaigns, particularly if these were distant from their city and of long duration.29 As a result, during the last part of the sixteenth century the burden of defense was shifted to regular troops and to a citizen militia drawn from the white population in general.30 The sons and grandsons of the conquerors failed to perpetuate the martial spirit of their ancestors. Although the trappings of military service—titles of rank, uniforms, and military honors—were eagerly sought after, they were honorific in character and were not associated with attraction to a military way of life. At the end of the sixteenth century, old soldier Bernardo de Vargas Machuca lamented that although the military profession was the most honorable and sublime of all the arts, it had fallen into disfavor and there were few citizens who would not smile at the thought of a career of arms.31 A century later, Viceroy the Marquis of Mancera complained about the disinclination of the Mexican nobility for military service.32

A second factor which inhibited the development of a powerful upper nobility in the Indies was the opposition of the crown. The encomenderos, whose mentality was essentially medieval, aspired to combine encomiendas with possession of land and jurisdiction to create seignorial estates, but the crown insisted on keeping grants of land and grants of Indians separate; it refused to grant Indians in perpetuity and, except in rare cases such as the Marquisate of the Valley of Oaxaca and the Dukedom of Atrisco, it denied seignorial jurisdiction to encomenderos. In the reforms of the 1540’s, the latter were prohibited from extracting personal services from their charges and allowed to collect only tribute.33

Thus the beneméritos became pensioners of the crown, a tamed nobility without any real vitality. Essentially they were dilettantes. They adopted the dignified mien and deportment of the noble estate. Among themselves and in their intercourse with other social sectors they insisted on being addressed as hidalgo or caballero. They eagerly sought titles of Castile and habits in the military orders of Spain. Their reading consisted of books of noble deeds and pious works and they displayed an extreme religiosity. They were vain, sensitive, disdainful of the mechanical and commercial arts, and addicted to luxury and ostentation. Perhaps their most distinguishing characteristic was an exaggerated sense of honor, a term not translatable in bourgeois concepts of rectitude, strict accounting for responsibility, moral conduct, and the like, but as self-esteem based on status. The meaning is more precisely conveyed by the Spanish word pundonor.34

The formation of an American structure of estates was accompanied by the transference and florescence of the functional corporation along with its legally defined responsibilities, privileges, and immunities. The church came with the Conquest and during the sixteenth century most of its major subcorporations, the university community, the Holy Office, the secular and regular orders, the cathedral chapters, and the like became constituent parts of Mexican society. The municipal corporations likewise followed the Conquest. A permanent army appeared in the latter part of the century. The consulado of Mexico City was chartered in 1592,35 and most of the artisan guilds made their appearance in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.36

As in Europe the relation between the estates and corporate structure was complex. On the one hand, following the medieval prescription, there was some correspondence between the two. Theoretically, casta limpia was a requirement for admission to all the corporations, and in practice the white element monopolized the consulado, the miner’s guild, the officer corps of the army, the university community, and the higher levels of the ecclesiastical corporations. However, the reluctance of whites to engage in dishonorable occupations complemented by the economic aspirations of the more enterprising castes and Indians led to the admission of large numbers of non-whites into the craft guilds.37 They were also enlisted in the army and found their way into the lower levels of the church, particularly the secular clergy. Following the peninsular pattern there was an interlocking of class and corporate organization.

The preceding analysis of social structure employs a reputational or subjective method. That is, it is based on the way people of the time conceived of and defined their own and others’ role and status. Colonial Mexican society may also be examined objectively; that is by assuming the position of an outside observer and by means of objective criteria dividing a society into groups, classes, or strata. Thus, a modern class system—upper, middle, and lower groups—based on the ownership and use of property may be discerned. The upper class consisted of the owners of haciendas and estancias, mines, textile factories, and mercantile establishments, and the upper levels of the bureaucracy and the clergy. At a point not clearly definable, this sector graded into a middle class composed of retail merchants and shopkeepers, the more substantial artisans, professionals, owners of small and middle-sized ranchos and mines, managers and salaried employees of rural properties, mines, and workshops, and lower ranked ecclesiastics and bureaucrats. The lower class comprised less affluent shopkeepers, peddlers, and artisans operating outside the guilds; servants, laborers, and a mass of landless, propertyless, and jobless idlers and vagabonds.38 Such a classification presents serious difficulties. Given adequate data on distribution of wealth, income, occupation, and the like, it might be practicable to analyze colonial social structure in terms of economic classes. The value systems commonly associated with such sectors, however, were lacking or at best rudimentary. Miners, merchants, and artisans might be functionally bourgeois but their mentality was not. Until the very end of the colonial period at least, they continued to think of social role and status in terms of nobility, titles, honor, and corporate membership, although in the case of the Spanish upper classes wealth reinforced nobility and vice versa.39

The lower classes can be roughly identified with castes and Indians. Functionally they formed a proletariat. No class consciousness, however, existed within either element or linked the two together. A wide gap separated the rural Indian peon and the urban mulatto shoemaker. Their placement in society did not derive ultimately from economic function but from ethnic and cultural qualities recognized in law. Economic classes can probably be best regarded as an incipient situation and as a concept which can best be used for studying social development over a period extending beyond the colonial era rather than for the colonial period itself.

The social organization of New Spain was complicated by a peculiarly American cleavage which cut across the white estate and the corporate structure in general. This was the sharp status distinction between the European-born and American-born Spaniard, between criollo and gachupín. This schism originated within the first generations of Spaniards in the New World. The conquerors, first settlers, and their descendants deeply resented latecomers, both private citizens and crown appointees, who competed for the royal favors which they regarded as rightfully theirs. The new arrivals, on their part, resented the arrogance and privileges of the beneméritos. Original resentments were deepened and elaborated in subsequent generations. The peninsular Spaniard in common with his northern European contemporaries deprecated colonials as culturally and even biologically inferior. They were unenterprising, unreliable, and frivolous. The creole regarded the gachupín as common, pushing and, except for the higher levels of the church, army, and bureaucracy, as socially inferior. He resented the preemption of the choicest benefices in church and state by the European Spaniard despite the strict legal equality of the two groups. But he was embittered above all by the fact that the status conveyed by “born in Spain” was forever beyond his reach. Yet there was a certain ambivalence in the creole attitude. While he maligned and contemned the gachupín, he envied him because his lack of extended contact with Indian or Negro gave him a better claim to limpieza de sangre, and he eagerly sought marriage alliances with the European, even the most common, to reinforce his family lineage.40

Some observations may now be made on the related problems of social cohesion, social control, and social change. The hierarchical society continued to be thought of in organic terms. Its component parts were supposed to be mutually interdependent, interacting, and together forming the functioning body social. In fact, however, the parts exhibited a strong compulsion toward autarchy. Juridically, each to some extent was a separate entity, a state within a state. Each was wrapped up in its own affairs and interested only in its own welfare, its privileges, and its immunities, all of which had to be defended jealously against similar aims of other segments. There existed no common values, interests, or objectives. There were Indians, castes, nobles, soldiers, priests, merchants and lawyers but there were no citizens.41 In the terms of Ortega y Gasset, it was an invertebrate society.42

This society was held together by a combination of a number of circumstances. Among them was inertia. A society of estates and corporations was in the natural order of things and until the latter part of the eighteenth century there was no serious protest against a social system based on juridical and social inequality. Social unrest took the form of drives to improve the status of the individual and the group, not efforts to change the system. The hierarchical order was supported through the virtual monopoly of arms, wealth, prestige, and authority by the white nobility. Until the very end of the colonial period, its existence was encouraged by the crown as a means of social and political control. In an opinion of 1806, the Council of the Indies stated:

It is undeniable that the existence of various hierarchies and classes is of the greatest importance to the existence and stability of a monarchical state, since a graduated system of dependence and subordination sustains and insures the obedience and respect of the last vassal to the authority of the sovereign. With much more reason such a system is necessary in America, not only because of its greater distance from the throne, but also because of the number of that class of people who, because of their vicious origin and nature, are not comparable to the commoners of Spain and constitute a very inferior species.43

The crown contributed to the creation and maintenance of the system in various ways. It was the “head” of the body social. It was the ultimate author of legislation defining the status of each estate and corporation. It had at its disposal the means of compulsion: the bureaucracy, the ordinary courts, the military, and the police. It was also the ultimate source of privileges and favors; it conceded land, monopolies, titles, honors, and offices. It reconciled class and group conflicts; it was the supreme court of appeal. As the final arbiter it checked and balanced the powerful centrifugal forces which were a constant threat to social stability. Perhaps most fundamental was the crown as a mystique and a symbol. Américo Castro observed that the people of Spain and Spanish America were united by a principle external to them, a mystical faith in and loyalty to the symbol of the crown. This faith was “an anchor of salvation, as was religious faith. . ..”44 “The monarchy. . ., especially from Ferdinand and Isabella on, appears surrounded by Messianic prestige.”45 Bad legislation was not the fault of the king; he was inadequately informed. Wrong decisions could not be attributed to him; he was improperly advised. The hostility of creoles was directed against Spaniards, not the crown. Revolts and riots were not against the king but against his servants. The monarch might be a weakling or an imbecile; his servants might be ridiculed or even defied; his laws could be evaded, but the crown as a symbol was sacrosanct.46

The church was an active partner of the crown in maintaining social control. It wholeheartedly supported a society of hierarchies and privileged classes both on doctrinaire grounds and as a beneficiary of the system. It employed directly to this end its control over education, its vast resources of moral suasion, and its temporal wealth. It upheld, moreover, the role of the crown as the ultimate temporal authority and as a symbol of Spanish Christianity.

Mexican colonial society has traditionally been viewed as static and ponderously stable, an interpretation epitomized in the expression, la siesta colonial. Traditional history has it that this structure was abruptly fractured by the Wars of Independence producing a half century, more or less, of anarchy. In fact, from the moment of the Conquest it was characterized by continuous although unspectacular change.47 The formation of the castes and the creation of an American system of estates was certainly an evolutionary if not a dynamic process. In the preceding pages reference has been made to qualities of flexibility and openness which characterized social stratification. Within certain limits upward and downward mobility existed. Castes with luck, enterprise, or official favor might and did become whites, while whites through misfortune or mismanagement might sink into the lower estates. A similar mobility appears to have existed between castes and Indians. Bagú emphasizes the miscibility of the colonial social system and particularly stresses the instability of the “middle classes.” Adverse regulation, misfortune, lack of enterprise, or alcoholism constantly submerged artisans and shopkeepers into the mass of the indigent poor.48 Substantial changes in the character of the upper nobility also took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In rural areas the nucleus of a new elite appeared, the masters of the great haciendas and estancias. Some of its members derived from the old encomendero nobility but others were American and European Spaniards who were rewarded for services to the crown by grants of land. Although some of the beneficiaries came from titled families and others subsequently acquired titles, the new upper nobility was primarily a nobility de hecho rather than de derecho. Titles simply confirmed a status derived from the ownership of latifundia. In contrast to its attitude toward the encomienda, the crown permitted and encouraged the growth of the hacienda as an instrument of economic development and social control. The strength of the hacendado group was consolidated by the entailment of its estates. By preserving indivisible family patrimonies, entailment established a family lineage through which status could be transmitted.49

The growth of a landed aristocracy was paralleled by the development of a mercantile patriciate in the cities of the viceroyalty. This element derived in part from the old morador class; that is householders (vecinos) of the sixteenth century towns who were not among the privileged few receiving encomiendas and who generally lived by trade or manufacturing.50 It was augmented by second sons of encomenderos and new arrivals from Spain who entered commerce. The concentration of trade in a few cities, and monopolistic privileges conceded to merchant groups encouraged the accumulation of mercantile fortunes by a relatively small number of families. The mine-owners who accumulated great wealth through the exploitation of Mexico’s silver resources constituted a related group. The possession of great wealth conferred influence and status, much to the disgust of the old encomenderos. “Those who yesterday operated shops and taverns and engaged in other base occupations,” wrote one disgruntled benemérito, “are today placed in the best and most prized positions.”51 Mercantile and mining fortunes were recognized or perhaps it would be better to say exploited by the crown through the concession of titles of nobility. These were granted with increasing frequency in the latter half of the eighteenth century.52

At the same time that new elite elements were emerging, the economic base of the encomenderos was deteriorating. In the seventeenth century there was a strong trend toward reversion of encomiendas to the crown while those remaining in private hands were subjected to new fiscal exactions. The lot of the bulk of the encomenderos is described by Guillermo Céspedes:

With such a small sustenance, the more tenacious of the beneméritos—converted into social parasites—composed accounts of the merits and services rendered by their distinguished ancestors, and swarmed the antechambers of the viceroys to beg corregimientos, tenientazgos, alcaldías, or any other bureaucratic post befitting the glory of their lineage. Their pride of caste, exacerbated by their economic difficulties would not countenance any occupation or employment other than waiting patiently for a shower of royal favors. They looked down on the newly rich, emerged from the ‘ashes and soot of the stew-pots,’ and particularly on the hateful and wealthy merchants and on the chapetones who came from Spain to enjoy benefices in the governmental bureaucracy. They continued their addiction to pious works which revealed to them a God by whose inscrutable designs the grandsons of the conquerors lived on the verge of starvation. Some even reached the point of asking if they were suffering punishment and penance for the blood which their heroic ancestors shed during the conquest.53

With the abolition of the encomienda system in the early eighteenth century they finally disappeared as a class.

A certain coalescence took place in at least a peripheral way among the various elements of the colonial elite. The more enterprising encomenderos managed to escape the general decadence of their class. Some managed to retain or acquire landed estates. Others, forgetting their class pride, married into the aristocracy of wealth or entered commerce themselves. Such concessions although distasteful were not degrading since commerce at the wholesale level had become officially and socially honorable.54 Among the other groups, wealthy merchants and miners employed excess capital for the purchase of rural estates, and needy hacendados contracted marriage alliances with willing merchants and mining families.55

During the eighteenth century and particularly its later four decades social change was accelerated by the interaction of multiple influences including population growth and progressive miscegenation, expansion of areas of settlement, economic development and the increase of wealth, fiscal, administrative, and military reforms, and infiltration of egalitarian doctrines from abroad. Among the whites, new opportunities appeared to acquire wealth and improve social status. Creoles found additional avenues for social advancement in the officer corps of newly organized regular and militia regiments while the castes through enlistment in the army achieved exemption from tribute and acquired status through the possession of the fuero militar.56 In general there appears to have been a further blurring of the line between white and caste. Official documents and legal formulae of the last half of the eighteenth century frequently employ expressions such as que se tenga por español or recibido por español57 when referring to mixed bloods, and euphemisms such as pardo and moreno were increasingly used in place of Negro and mulatto. Aguirre Beltrán quotes contemporary sources to the effect that all those who were not clearly Indians or of color achocolatado were said to be and were considered as Spaniards.58 Indeed, identifications based on place of birth and ethnic origins tended to be replaced by others expressing only social quality. In the service records of militia and regular officers in the 1770’s, under calidad are found the terms mestizo, castizo, pardo, español europeo and español americano. By 1806 these were largely replaced by such identifications as noble, ilustre, conocida, distinguida, honrada, and buena.59 Without renouncing its support of a stratified society, the crown attempted to ameliorate some of the more obvious—and more troublesome—inequities. The new army had an explicitly stated secondary aim of providing honorable and status-conferring careers for creoles in the officer corps and castes in the ranks.60 Titles were conceded with greater frequency to creoles, and the castes could achieve legal whiteness by the purchase of cedulas called gracias al sacar.61 Moreover, a cedula of February 1, 1795 dispensed pardos and quinterones from the status of infame, authorized them to contract matrimony with whites, and permitted them to hold public office and enter Holy Orders.62 The castes also found advocates among the whites. Viceroy Croix believed that their superior physiques, amenability to discipline, and inclination toward military service made them better soldiers than the effete and prideful whites.63 Lucas Alamán, who was certainly no egalitarian, rated them as the most useful part of the population and reported that the only time that Matías Martín de Aguirre, a European Spaniard and deputy to the Cortes of Madrid in 1821, rose to speak was to deliver a eulogy of the mulattos who had served in the royalist armies.64

There appears also to have been some erosion of the bases of the corporate social structure. During the reign of Charles III, direct and indirect efforts were made to restrict or to level or to rebalance the power and status of traditional corporate groups. The principal device was the limitation of privileged fueros and the renovation and extension of the royal or ordinary jurisdiction. Crown policy was most striking in the ease of ecclesiastical corporations. The royal patronage was extended, the ordinary ecclesiastical fuero was restricted, rights to church asylum were limited, the power of the Holy Office was circumscribed, the Society of Jesus was expelled from Spain and the empire and the famous amortización of 1804 struck at the pious foundations. In New Spain there appears to have been both an absolute and relative decline in the power and prestige of the ecclesiastical establishment as a whole.65 The reglamento of free trade of 1778 was a blow to the power of the consulados and at the same time the state loosened the restrictive practices of the artisan guilds. In New Spain an increasing volume of trade and manufacturing was conducted outside the guild system.66 One striking and consequential exception to these trends must be noted. At the same time that the status and power of other corporate groups were being subverted, the metropolitan and colonial armies were not only strengthened and reorganized, but their fueros were extended, their prestige enhanced, and their morale cultivated.67

In summary, three general and interrelated observations may be made. First, a close look at New Spain on the eve of independence reveals a gradual erosion of a social structure based on estates, corporations, and juridical inequality, and outlines, at least, of a new system based on economic class. Perhaps the most apparent manifestation of the latter phenomenon was the growing strength of the mercantile “bourgeoisie” and the emergence of an entrepreneurial sector among the textile manufacturers of Valladolid, Guadalajara, and the Bajío.68 Second, the velocity of change was insufficient to accommodate severe tensions within the social order, principally the stored-up resentments of the lower estates and the frustrations of the white creoles. The former exploded in 1810, the latter boiled over in 1821, and the two combined fleetingly in the latter year to produce political independence. Third, the hierarchical colonial society survived the break from Spain with some reordering of its components, but with the disappearance of the symbol of the crown as an instrument of social control, its invertebrate character became fully emergent. It required nearly one hundred years for the formation of a juridically egalitarian society and the creation of a new social myth as an instrument of cohesion.

Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (New York, 1939), pp. 158-159.

The treatment of some quite similar concepts in this paper and in Richard M. Morse, “Toward a Theory of Spanish American Government,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XV (1954), 71-93, might be compared.

See the remarks on social structure in Julian Pitt-Rivers, The People of the Sierra (London, 1955), pp. xiii-xiv.

The following discussion of Spanish social structure, except where otherwise indicated, is based on Juan Beneyto, Historia social de España y de Hispanoamérica (Madrid, 1961) and Jaime Vicens Vives, dir. and contr., Historia social y económica de España y América (4 vols, Barcelona, 1957-59), vol. II.

Novísima recopilación de las leyes de España, Lib. V, tit. ii, ley xv.

As quoted in Beneyto, p. 215.

The role of the state in social formation is examined in Richard Konetzke, “Estado y sociedad en las Indias,” Estudios americanos, III (1951), 33-58.

See the remarks on the use of the word “caste” in Joaquín Roncal, “The Negro Race in Mexico,” HAHR, XXIV (1944), 531, note 2.

These are described in Nicolás León, Las castas del México colonial o Nueva España (México, 1924). See also Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, La población negro de México, 1519-1810 (México, 1946), pp. 175-179.

Instrucción reservada que el conde de Sevilla Gigedo dió a su sucesor en el mando . . . (México, 1831), pars. 579-580; Aguirre Beltrán, p. 226; Fernando Navarro y Noriega, Memoria sobre la población del Reino de Nueva España escrita en el año de 1814 (México, 1954), Table and pp. 21, 24.

Juan de Solórzano Pereira, Política indiana, Lib. II, cap. xxx, núms. 1, 20-28; Aguirre Beltrán, pp. 174-175; Angel Rosenblat, La población indígena de América desde 1492 hasta la actualidad (Buenos Aires, 1945), pp. 264-65, 271-272.

Aguirre Beltrán, pp. 248-254; Solórzano, Lib. II, cap. xxx, núms. 2, 20-28, 55; Salvador de Madariaga, The Sise of the Spanish American Empire (London, 1947), p. 21.

Aguirre Beltrán, pp. 187-190.

The legal status of the castes is examined in William H. Dusenberry, “Discriminatory Aspects of Legislation in Colonial Mexico,” Journal of Negro History, XXXIII (1948), 284-302.

Aguirre Beltrán, pp. 270-271.

Richard Konetzke, “La formación de la nobleza en Indias,” Estudios americanos, III (1951), 330, 341-346.

Both quoted in ibid., p. 356.

Vicens Vives, III, 430; Mario Góngora, El estado en el derecho indiano (Santiago de Chile, 1951), pp. 186-187.

Aguirre Beltrán, pp. 187-190.

Solórzano, Lib. II, cap. xxx, núms. 20-28.

The principal legislation affecting the juridical status of the Indian in Spanish America is brought together in Recopilación de leyes de los reinos de las Indios, Lib. VI. Extensive commentary on Indian legislation is found in Solórzano, Lib. II. It is analyzed in Góngora, pp. 198-221.

Lesley B. Simpson, The Encomienda in New Spain (Berkeley, 1950), p. 120.

Solórzano, Lib. III, cap. xxv; José Miranda, Las ideas y las instituciones políticas mexicanas, 1521-1820 (México, 1952), pp. 33-34, 46; J. H. Parry, The Audiencia of New Galicia in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1948), p. 9. Góngora presents a thoughtful essay on feudal elements in the conquest and settlement of America (pp. 181-185).

Góngora, pp. 175-176; Simpson, Encomienda, p. 121.

Góngora, pp. 175-177; Silvio Zavala, New Viewpoints on the Spanish Colonization of America (Philadelphia, 1943), p. 73.

Konetzke, “Estado y sociedad,” pp. 38-39; Philip W. Powell, Soldiers Indians and Silver (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1952), pp. 111-112, 115, 119, 130.

Milicia y descripción de las Indias (2 vols., Madrid, 1892), I, 60-61; II, 61-62.

“Instrucción del marqués de Mancera al duque de Veragua,” 1673, Instrucciones que los vireyes de Nueva España dejaron a sus sucesores (México, 1867), p. 275.

Konetzke, “La formación de la nobleza,” pp. 350-352; Góngora, pp. 179, 340.

Vicens Vives, III, 427.

Robert S. Smith, “The Institution of the Consulado in New Spain,” HAHR, XXIV (1944), pp. 61-62.

The best account of the guilds in New Spain is Manuel Carrera Stampa, Los gremios mexicanos (México, 1954). A collection of their ordinances may be found in Legislación del trabajo en los siglos XVI, XVII y XVIII. Breve ensayo crítico (México, 1938).

Carrera Stampa, pp. 223-243.

The best discussion of colonial social structure in terms of economic class is Sergio Bagú, Estructura social de la colonia (Buenos Aires, 1952).

The last statement is probably debatable. M. Hernández Sánchez-Barba in describing colonial society in the eighteenth century postulates a “bourgeois mentality” (in Vicens Vives, IV, pp. 422-427). The research of Stanley Stein on Mexican merchant groups may throw some light on this subject.

On the subject of gachupín-creole rivalry the observations of Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa in their Noticias secretas de América (2 vols., Madrid, 1918), II, Chap. V, are particularly revealing. Among modern studies of specific aspects of the problem is Antonio Tibesar, “The Alternativa: A Study of Spanish-Creole Relations in Seventeenth-Century Peru,” The Americas, XI (1955), 229-283. A more theoretical approach is Richard Konetzke, “La condición legal de los criollos y las causas de la independencia,” Estudios americanos, II (1950), 31-54.

Pablo de Olivides’ description, written in 1769, of the highly compartmentalized character of Spanish society (quoted in Beneyto, p. 290) is equally applicable to New Spain.

The theme of his book Invertebrate Spain (New York, 1937).

Quoted in Konetzke, “Estado y sociedad,” p. 58.

The Structure of Spanish History (Princeton, 1954), p. 51, note 15.

Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, La sociedad española en el siglo XVIII (Madrid, 1955), pp. 29-30; Morse, p. 78; Vicens Vives, IV, 416.

The evolutionary character of Mexican society is clearly brought out in Lesley B. Simpson, “Mexico’s Forgotten Century,” Pacific Historical Review, XXII (1953), 113-121.

Chap. II and particularly pp. 87, 92, 104-105. See also Vicens Vives, III, 526.

François Chevalier summarizes the formation of this class in his La formación de los grandes latifundios en México (México, 1956), pp. 233-240. See also Vicens Vives, III, 520-524.

Quoted in Vicens Vives, III, 524-525.

Ibid., III, 529-530; IV, 423; José Bravo Ugarte, “Títulos nobilarios hispanoamericanos,” Memorias de la Academia Mexicana de la Historia, XV (no. 3, julio-septiembre, 1956), 258-264.

In Vicens Vives, III, 518-519.

Vicens Vives, III, 526; Chevalier, p. 240.

Konetzke, “Estado y sociedad,” pp. 40-41; L. N. McAlister, The “Fuero Militar” in New Spain (Gainesville, 1957), passim and particularly Chap. IV.

Rosenblat, pp. 264-265, 271-291; “Diversas solicitudes,” AGN (México), Indiferente de Guerra, vol. 194, passim.

For example, compare the hojas de servicios of the Legion of the Prince for 1771 (AGN, Indiferente de Guerra, vol. 138A) with those of the Battalion of Provincial Infantry of Guanajuato and the Regiment of Provincial Dragoons of the Prince for 1804 and 1806 respectively (AGN, Indiferente de Guerra, vols. 121A and 278A). The latter two units were formed from the Legion in the late 1790’s.

Instrucción del virrey marqués de Croix que deja a su sucesor Antonio María Bucareli (México, 1960), par. 138 (pp. 111-112); “Dictamen del Coronel D.n Fran.co Antonio Crespo, Inspector interino de las tropas . . . de N.a Esp.a sobre su mejor arreglo y extablecim.to,” México, July 31, 1784, MS 173, Biblioteca Nacional de México, pars. 227-235; 238-254.

“Memoria conserniente à la expedición q.e bajo las ordenes del Exm.o Sr. D. Juan de Villalba se hizo à la América,” August 20, 1764-April 30, 1769, MS in the Edward E. Ayer Collection, the Newberry Library, pp. 156, 159; Croix to Minister of the Indies, Julián de Arriaga, México, October 26, 1767, AGN, Correspondencia de los Virreyes, vol. 1/11, no. 289, fol. 456.

Historia de México (5 vols. México, 1942), I, 33.

Mariano Otero makes some penetrating observations on the state of the Mexican church on the eve of independence (Ensayo sobre el verdadero estado de la cuestión social y política que se agita en la república mexicana (México, 1842), pp. 54-59.

Agustín Cue Cánovas, Historia social y económica de México (2 vols., México, 1946-1947), I, 115.

Manuel Giménez Fernández, “Las doctrinas populistas en la independencia de Hispano-América,” Anuario de estudios americanos, III (1946), 615; Félix Colón de Larriátegui, Juzgados militares de España y sus Indias. 2nd ed. (4 vols., Madrid, 1786-1796), I, lxv-lix. See particularly the royal decree of February 9, 1793, reproduced in McAlister, pp. 76-77.

In connection with the textile manufacturers see Robert A. Potash, El Sanco de Avío de México (México, 1959), Chap. I.

The author is Head Professor of History at the University of Florida.

Page 2

Our subject is Colonial Institutions and Contemporary Latin America: my portion is political and economic life. Both subject and portion are vast and attractive but fearfully complex. As we all know, Latin America is a continent and a half, by no means of uniform heritage and with regions of considerable cultural diversity. Furthermore, these regions are undergoing change which moves at differential rates and may not even be in the same direction. There are, in addition, ambiguities and assumptions within the topic itself that require at least mention. Within this context, what is an institution? One can accept at once the statement that it is an organized society, or a form of social organization, or an established practice or custom. But is it also an attitude or a complex of attitudes that constitute a way of looking at life and of organizing life? I think that this too must fall within our definition. Next, the subject would seem to contain the idea of survival. Is that term to mean that a colonial institution continues to the present day in demonstrably uninterrupted continuity and value? Here the lapse of old needs and the appearance of new ones obviously have meant in many instances extinction but in many others change in function and value so that one must examine the degree of alteration.

Again, the topic, it seems to me, carries within it a conception of divisions of time and nature of change, which may be summarized as follows: There was a colonial period which began some time after 1492 with the European incursion and came to a close about 1825 when most of Latin America became politically independent of Europe. During the colonial period a fairly uniform pattern of life developed or was implanted. This has remained as a relatively rigid mold that has broken down more or less gradually in the period of independent states. The latter period is frequently called national on the theory that the states contain nations or will do so in time. This kind of division is characteristic of our textbooks. It has the blessing of many of our own members, and carries with it some interesting analogies to the conception of mega-evolution in the sciences. In comment, let me suggest that one can hold with equally good reason that the colonial period has not yet ended. Today’s program with equal logic and identical wording of topic could deal with the institutions that work to keep Latin America impoverished and subservient to other regions. However, since the intention of the Program Committee is clear, I shall accept the definition that colonial means whatever existed in Latin America in 1825, without reference to questions of dependence. Even within those terms, the lapse of time between the coming of Columbus and the achievement of formal political independence for most of Latin America is greater than that since 1825 to our day. Despite the steady acceleration in human history of rate of change, it is unlikely that so long a period of time meant merely an initial explosive contact and then the firm setting of a mold. What is called the colonial period contained fairly steady change even after the first century of European domination. The eighteenth century particularly was one of especially great change, both directed and unplanned, with profound effects upon popular life as well as government. Indeed, I personally should be inclined to hold that the inter-semester pause in the school year, which underlies much of this search for periods, falls better at the middle of the eighteenth century. For, in many ways, the history of Latin America since perhaps 1760 has been the implantation and working out of the ideas of the Enlightenment in administration, religious life, and the application of rational ideas to such matters as economic improvement. In consequence, if we consider colonial anything that appeared in Latin American prior to 1825, however few years earlier, the number and importance of survivals we shall find will be very much greater. Lastly, let me point out that the formulation of the topic and the conception of the nature of the colonial period implicit in it have the virtue of ignoring the problem of origins, that is whether an institution or trait is Indian or European, some blend of the two, or a new development within new needs. We may thus declare irrelevant a particularly thorny set of questions. Now that I have stated some of my caveats, let me embark upon what must be at best a partial and inadequate catalogue.

In the field of government and administration, perhaps a broader term than political life, even the casual visitor to Latin America is struck by the survival of institutions and features that are patently colonial. The systematic codes of laws clearly derive from the French Revolution and through it from Roman precedent rather than from the codifications of the Iberian monarchs, but behind that logical renewal and revision lie older peninsular and American content and notarial and administrative forms. In most of Latin America notaries continue to draw up legal instruments and serve as witnesses of integrity and credibility; except for the dates and circumstances, their documents are couched in the same form and language as those of their sixteenth century predecessors. Court procedures and writs, in many instances such, notably, as the famous Mexican writ of amparo, represent modifications and adaptations of colonial and earlier Peninsular practice. The very form of administration is inherited from colonial times in a characteristic Latin American phenomenon to which William Whyte has applied the term external administration. The person needing a document or permit must himself coordinate the operations of the various agencies, and even of the people within an agency which must pass upon the issuance of a permit, or authorization or even collection of a tax. The client himself moves his papers from desk to desk and from office to office. He himself arranges to reconcile the conflicts which arise from contradictory hours or severely limited periods of service set by unconcerned agencies. The idea is virtually unknown of a systematic organization of procedure in which the government itself sees that once the application is filed, all steps follow automatically as a coordinated responsibility of its employees. Correspondingly, fees, tips, or bribes for coordinating and expediting functions became an indispensable lubricant.

Latin American government in general is characterized further by a series of survivals which may be grouped under the term centralization. Whatever the legal fiction of local autonomy, the province captures power and revenues from its local units, and the national government in turn strips states and provinces of sustenance and vigor. The extremities are left to a rachitic and penurious existence, in which they are forced to apply to higher authority for assistance in so local and elementary a matter as the repair of a town pump. This destruction of local vigor is clearly not an inheritance from the sixteenth or seventeenth century in Spanish America but rather derives from the great reforms of the eighteenth century. In Brazil it may go back to the reforms of the 1690’s.

The phenomenon of centralization also embraces the characteristic vesting of power in the executive, converting legislative bodies into adulatory claques and depriving judicial bodies, to a degree that varies widely from region to region, of much of their independence. The effective appointive powers of the center, whatever the legal fictions, reach far down the lines of authority, just as the effective control of the Minister of the Interior extends to all territorial units and very often sets the results of elections. Paralleling and reinforcing this extension of centralized executive authority is the very real fear in lower or regional officials, of making a decision without knowing the mind of the higher official or of the center. In effect, whatever the constitutional provisions, the presidents have the royal power of former regimes but, perhaps because office is not hereditary and tenure is precarious, are somewhat less inclined to show the scrupulous royal respect for vested interests. Further, because of this absorption of all effective power by the executive, and by the supreme executive above all, much of the necessary dealing with government proceeds by personal interview and appeal, which may secure finally an order to enforce rights, or may guarantee that an inconvenient regulation will not be enforced. A number of us who have seen peasant delegations waiting for the President of Mexico in the presidential patio of the National Palace or in the antechambers of Los Pinos have been struck by the fact that we were watching the General Indian Court of New Spain functioning today rather much as it must have when Antonio de Mendoza gave it informal existence or Luis de Velasco II gave it formal structure. Personal intervention and wide use of dispensation, I should hasten to add, although colonial, may well be beneficial and give needed flexibility to an otherwise rigid and at times brutal administration.

Local administration in whatever function is left to it is characterized today very much by a colonial organization. Much of it is carried on through the cargo system. Unpaid or very poorly paid local officials work for the social prestige attached to their posts and the posts of local administration, official and customary, are organized in a progressively more responsible and prestigious order. A young man enters upon the lowest of these and works his way upward as a matter of community service and prestige, defraying community expenses out of his own resources. It is the translation to America of the cursus honorum of ancient Rome.

Unpaid or poorly paid officials, wide dispensing powers, and the need of each person to negotiate passage of his papers through the numerous official agencies and formalities have fostered survival and perhaps extension of yet another colonial phenomenon. We call it graft; Mexicans, the mordida; Brazilians, the suco. Virtually every country has its own term, but the phenomenon is really the survival of the characteristic system of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, and in many instances of our own time, by which the person who needs an official or legal service or document, pays for securing it. In other words, government service is financed directly through fees of some kind levied upon the person who requires the service. The mordida functions to a great extent as a means of supplementing painfully low salaries or providing payment where there are none through imposition of a moderate surcharge which in turn is earned by prompt and efficient or even extraordinary service. The custom has the vast advantage of enabling the private citizen to cut through bureaucratic detail and spare himself hours and even weeks of exasperation; it is probably as efficient and more accessible to the average man than our own proud invention of the expediter or troubleshooter. In yet another form the mordida functions like the colonial composición, payment to the state for dispensation from inconvenient law or conflicting right. It goes back to the vast extension of such practice in the seventeenth century as the impoverished Castilian Crown tried to meet the fiscal burdens of the Thirty Years’ War. In its perhaps most unpleasant form, the mordida functions as graft or peculation, but again with ample colonial precedent. One may recognize the practice in accordance with which the viceroy brought an entourage of hungry followers and organized the colony for yield.

Finally, in this series of items relating to administration and political life, let me point to two fundamental features of Latin American society which have strong colonial roots. The first is caudillismo or caciquismo, the organization of political life in terms of congeries of leaders, each with his band of followers bound to him by personal interest, family, or regional association. The phenomenon is remarkably reminiscent of the Europe of the early Middle Ages, the Spain of the Reconquest, and the America of the Conquest. Since it is essentially social, I merely mention its existence. The second feature is the militarization of political life: the holding of civil office by military, the discharge of civil administration by military process, the predominant advantage of the military career as the means of political and economic advancement, and the special legal and de facto privileges of the military. The widespread nature of this militarization is most easily gauged by the extraordinary degree to which ordinary and unrelated civil administrative posts are held by military men. In its most extreme form such militarization becomes pretorianism: steady interference in political life by the armed services either as organized pressure groups or as participants in a series of coups-d’état. Pretorianism can hardly be ascribed directly to colonial Hispanic America with its monarchs ruling by divine right, but the militarism which has fostered it is a colonial heritage and gives further point to my earlier comment that the centuries of European political domination witnessed continuing change. The governments of the earlier colonial period were singularly devoid of organized military establishments. For decades the only semblance of a regular army was the armed guards around the viceroys. When forces were needed, they were raised by calling for volunteers or by summoning the adult Spanish males to rally around the royal standard with whatever arms they could muster. Enforcement of law and the royal will was secured far more through the persuasion of the Church, just as royal administration relied relatively heavily upon advisers and administrators recruited from the clergy. Until the accession of the Bourbon dynasty in Spain, and the regime of Pombal in Portugal, the only regular forces to come into being in Latin America were the army in Chile and the garrisons at some of the ports. It was the massive reorganization of colonial life in the eighteenth century that changed the pattern. Royal administration relied far less upon the Church and even came into serious public conflict with the Church through the expulsion of the Jesuits. The royal bureaucracy increasingly was recruited from soldiers until the practice of employing military for civil functions became common. Substantial army garrisons were built up, and finally Charles III in his dominions and Pombal in Brazil established an organized militia in the colonies with special privileges, legal, social, and economic. The preferred position gained by the military has been consolidated since. Some may demur that in the collapse of traditional authority in the past century, the armed forces would have become the core of effective authority whatever previous practice. I can only say that the practice was there.

Let me turn now to economic life. This is a field so vast in itself that I can do no more than point to some institutions and practices. Differential rates of change have been especially prominent here so that any generalizations at best apply only to parts of our continent and a half. I shall be brief primarily because, for an audience with your knowledge, I fear that I belabor the obvious.

We all know the role of Latin America as a supplier of foodstuffs and raw materials to the industrially more developed countries—colonial in the other possible sense, with concomitants of monoculture, excessive dependence upon world markets and prices, and unfavorable relations of raw to processed materials. In this meaning, despite recent industrialization, nearly a century and a half of independence have made Latin America more rather than less colonial. The point is easily established if we compare the impact upon it of the interruptions of international supply during the eighteenth century, with the shortages and dislocations of 1914-1919 or 1940-1946. Spain and Portugal never were able to achieve such integration in their economic systems.

But, let me return to the more conventional meaning of colonial. Much of the technology of the colonial period continues in use to the present day and tends to preserve with its use the associated practices and forms of organization of production in agriculture, manufacturing, household use, and labor. I need merely mention the Mediterranean plow, the coa, foot plow, and backstrap loom among others. Thus in many regions village life has changed little in the past two centuries and retains traditional land tenures, forms of labor, especially labor exchange among neighbors, and contributions to communal needs in production. In Mexico there has even been an attempt to return more fully to the colonial system of ejidos but with the hope of moving away from the old rather than toward it. Throughout most of Latin America, village distribution and even much distribution within the cities remain the colonial one of barrio, town, and regional markets in which the market is not merely the center of economic exchange but provides a welcome social diversion, and may indeed be associated further with the celebration of a saint’s feast day. In many regions barrios and towns still specialize in the production of one item which is then exchanged at the markets. In complement to this system, there continues to exist the pulpería or general store with its supply of goods on credit and absorption of village products. It fulfills a function of exploiter, patron, and friend that no supermarket can replace.

Alongside the villages there existed and yet exist the haciendas that were both units of production and means of stable investment in an age that had few other outlets for capital. They were an answer further to the Peninsular stress upon land and livestock—particularly cattle and horses—as the basis of social prestige, and blended well with the social relations of caudillismo with its emphasis upon patronage and service. The relations might be reinforced by debt peonage but were not necessarily oppressive, as indeed the colonial hacienda with its varied relations was not invariably an oppressive institution. It evoked much loyalty on both sides until the development of profitable urban and foreign markets for foodstuffs and special crops in the nineteenth century made possible a much sharper exploitation aimed at large commercial profit and further made possible the life of an absentee landlord in the capital city or abroad. Despite the upheavals of a century and a half, the hacienda is very much a feature of the economic landscape today. With increasing emphasis upon new techniques, expensive machinery, and large-scale production, the hacienda may well triumph over the village. The forms that have been employed to save the village are the cooperative and the collective, the former of restricted feasibility and attraction in Latin America, the latter in the end a new and more efficient hacienda under state ownership.

Capital accumulation in Latin America is obstructed or even prevented by an interesting complex of survivals. Their effectiveness was reinforced through the destruction, early in the nineteenth century, of the well-developed class of artisans with its manufactures, especially textiles and metal goods. They could not compete with the flood of cheap British wares that entered the various countries once the metropolitan commercial system ceased to operate and the new rulers hastened to adopt the latest fashion of economic liberalism. A class that might have furthered habits of saving was thus eliminated, not to be replaced until almost our day and in other ways. As part of this complex of customs and outlook that militate against capital accumulation, one may point to the entire Iberian system of values with its emphasis upon a fairly static investment in land and cattle. It is essentially a non-industrial, non-saving psyche, interested in conspicuous expenditure and usury, in fees, rents, and salary rather than commercial or industrial profits. Such remains the criollo system of values today and the search for government posts often described as empleomanía.

In the villages this system of values and customs is paralleled by another, characterized by conspicuous and levelling expenditure, that may go back to the Roman custom of placing municipal burdens upon the wealthy. The holders of municipal and local posts must provide the costs of service and celebration, most often from their own substance. The majordomo of a confraternity in Mexico, for example, will bankrupt himself and his family in order to make prestigious provision of food, drink, and fireworks for the year’s feast. Even in Brazil, where the festeiro can manage to spread the cost and even make a profit, the village or district uses in one splurge what is hardly a surplus. What takes place in essence is the consumption of the only possible saving—I repeat it is hardly a surplus—and a steady destruction of any accumulated savings held by any family in the town lest that family emerge above the general level. A recent study in Chiapas has disclosed that in a number of villages most of the saving, especially that which goes into productive forms, is by Protestant families, which as a matter of religious conviction refuse to participate in the system of cargos or mayordomías. It is an interesting corroboration of Weber’s thesis. Further corroboration may be found in the report that in many Mexican villages returned braceros have been made mayordomos and have been forced to spend the savings of their labor for the year’s festival. They are deliberately prevented from using their savings for investment that might disturb egalitarian village society. Were the missionaries who brought to the New World the European sodalities and confraternities to be polled, they might well approve the twentieth century operation of their work, but obviously further movement of Latin American countries toward capital accumulation and economic improvement will require massive modification in this complex. The counterbalancing factor in this picture is that governmental plunder increasingly results, in part, in productive investment and must be rated, to some extent, as an effective form of capital accumulation.

I should make one final comment. I have sketched (most inadequately) matters as they exist in this year. Inevitably there is an urge to look ahead, for we deal with process that does not halt. We can be sure that the next year will be somewhat different and the situation ten years from now more different. That is as far as we can go with any assurance. We can not even be sure of the direction of change which might permit some prediction of the degree or type of survival, for our ideas are based really upon the first forms of the Industrial Revolution with its emphasis upon metals and fossil fuels and with its temporary superiority of the English-speaking peoples. I recall the confident prediction in the 1920’s of one eminent man still alive that Latin America could never hope to have an industrial revolution because it then had no known large deposits of iron ore and coal. Let us by all means discuss survival to this year. Let us further try to scan the future if we will, but let us do so with a decent lack of assurance in our own powers of prophecy.

The author is Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley. I wish to thank Professor John H. Rowe, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, and Professor Dauril Alden, University of Washington, Seattle, for generous help in preparing this paper. This paper and the two which follow were read at the American Historical Association meeting in Chicago, December, 1962.

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In Latin American history a familiar observation concerning the colonial period relates to its duration. The Spanish and Portuguese empires persisted in America for more than three centuries, and this extended time span not infrequently evokes a grudging admiration for the administrative systems that sustained them. Whatever else we may say about the Hispanic empires, runs a familiar comment—and the implication is that we may say a great deal else, little of it complimentary—whatever else we may say about the Hispanic empires, we must grant that they persisted in America for these 300 years. Their persistence is a foil that may be set against the briefer accomplishments of rival empires as well as against internal Hispanic deficiencies, and it appears as a measurable indicator of strength.

But the admiration or awe or grudging respect that we may express with regard to the duration of Hispanic rule is likely to become something quite different when we contemplate colonial survivals thereafter. Independence enforces fresh perspectives. Our new vantage point is liberal, and what were indications of strength now become obstacles to progress. It is as if the colonial period somehow had its historic role to fulfill, while we accompany it in retrospect and give it our support, and as if with independence a new role is called for, with which we also sympathize. If the observer is off his guard, this transition in perspective may pass only as a form of objectivity, a proper historian’s accommodation to the spirit of different ages, or an absence of bias. It means however that we confront with quite opposite attitudes two related historical topics: the colonial period itself on the one hand and the persisting colonial features of its aftermath on the other.

Like any historical period the colonial portion of Latin American history is most obviously defined by its chronological limits. But the chronological definition has the practical disadvantage that it affords us no scope for our discussion. In the chronological sense the colonial period came to an end in the early nineteenth century, and in this sense there can be no colonial institutions in modern Latin America, for a modern institution, precisely by being modern, escapes the definition of colonial. The difficulty is one that has been appreciated principally in the terminology of Latin American folk art, where the term colonial is recognized as inappropriate for styles that extend into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In a wider and looser sense the colonial classification is not limited to the period prior to 1810. I judge that the “colonial economies” of modern Latin America are so called partly because they are more or less unchanged from the real colonial period, partly because they are subordinate to foreign controls after the manner of true colonial economies. There appears, in other words, a characteristic type that we recognize as colonial, and a colonial institution of this type may occupy by extension any of several historical periods. An institution may begin and end wholly within the colonial dates, without any direct perpetuation thereafter. Examples would be the classic conquests, or the society of the viceregal courts. An institution may begin in the colonial period, persist into the middle nineteenth century, and then disappear, never becoming part of modern Latin America. An example is native Peruvian tribute liability, which has a full colonial history, a nineteenth-century history to 1854, and no history, or no official history, thereafter. An institution may originate before the colonial period and persist into, through, or beyond it. Examples would be the Araucanian family or the Christian church, and though in particular contexts we may refer to such institutions as colonial they are clearly not colonial in their origin or, necessarily, with respect to their major influence. Finally an institution may be post-colonial and yet so similar to a truly colonial institution that allowance is easily made. Thus exports of meats and bananas are understood to be aspects of the “colonial economy” of modern Latin America, despite the fact that these products themselves were not colonial exports. To surround our topic with further problems of this introductory nature we may add that all these examples depend on simplifications of reality. Institutions do not simply originate, exist, and die. They continually change, and as they change the question for us becomes: Are they the same institutions or different ones?

This last point may be appreciated through an examination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century attitudes toward the Spanish conquests. Conquest is a theme of importance for the entire subsequent history of the conquered areas, and it has been earnestly debated in the post-colonial period. In some degree, at least, approval or disapproval of conquest depends upon approval or disapproval of the long-term effects of conquest. Thus conquest is an issue in the modern intellectual history of Latin America. But it has no nineteenth- or twentieth-century existence except as a subject of discussion or as a remote cause for post-colonial conditions. Important as they are such long connections may be held to be irrelevant to our topic for the reason that the relationship is one of cause and consequence rather than continuous existence. One can avoid the difficulty, possibly, by identifying certain intermediate consequences of conquest which persist from late colonial times to the present. I do not mean to involve us in a discussion of the effects of conquests, but only through this example to indicate that a colonial institution may be consequential without being continuous and that modern legacies of colonial institutions may appear in disguised forms. Thus the classic conquests are associated with their own time and place; but one might argue that something of the spirit of conquest remains in Latin America in modern dress.

Because the particularities of institutions change through time, it may be felt that our most convincing instances of continuity are better selected at less concrete levels of institutionalism than any of those so far mentioned. If we now eliminate political and economic, and concentrate (in accordance with our assignment) on social and cultural, themes, we may consider such standard Latin American traits as family cohesiveness, aristocratic concepts of privilege, intellectual conservatism, cultural exclusiveness, and others, all of which can still be identified, in one or another particular form, in modern Latin America. These appear not as institutions but as attitudes or principles that are expressed in institutions. They appear more viable, less changeable, than the institutions that express them because they occur at higher or more durable levels of abstraction. The truth is that it is impossible to think of anything social or cultural that has not been modified in some degree in Latin America since the colonial period. But it is also possible to see some of these changes as superficial adjustments that do not affect underlying uniformities, or as variations on constant themes.

We may take as our next example the institutions of Latin American education. Our argument here would be that the institutions themselves have undergone transformation in numerous ways, while some of the larger attitudes or principles that these institutions express have remained constant. Between the colonial universities and the national universities of the middle twentieth century there appear immense differences, in size, in number, in composition, in function, and in technique of operation. The modern university’s political role and the power of its student groups have developed far beyond any comparable conditions of the colonial period. The state has replaced the church, or is in process of replacing the church, as the controlling force in education. But the university’s concentration on special subjects (we think of law and medicine), the pedagogical emphasis on memory learning and dialectics rather than on empiricism, the limited libraries, the dilettantism, the “manipulation of concepts,” the elite principle that denies primary and secondary schooling to large masses of the population—these appear in unbroken continuity from the colonial period.

Again what could be more modern, more post-colonial, in Latin America than its urban industrial society, its rapid-tempo business culture, its labor unions, and its twentieth-century political pressure groups? One might expect little by way of colonial connection here, for the institutions are modern and their ultimate historical origins lie outside Latin America entirely. Further one might be inclined to classify them in wholly political and economic categories and hence as more appropriate to Professor Borah’s paper than to mine. But they have all had to adjust to the continuing social-cultural conditions of Latin America, and among others to the intimacy of family ties and the nepotistic tangle that is characteristic of Latin America at all periods. The family, which is the social institution par excellence, fixed fundamental forms of association in the colonial period and continues to do so in the twentieth century. “In Latin America culture,” as Frank Tannenbaum has said, “business is part of the total scheme of things; it is part of the family, of the compadre system, of the friendships, of the Church. It is done among friends in a leisurely and understanding way.” Traditional cultural concepts in other words—concepts of interpersonal relations, of honor, of ethics, of work—continue to impinge on political and economic events in Latin America, and to the extent that they do so they represent persistent social-cultural forces to which other areas of life must make adjustment.

There is an opposite and contrasting type of colonial survival in which a particular thing continues with relatively little change, while the surrounding circumstances are so modified as completely to alter its meaning and its import. The type is most clearly exemplified in the physical survivals of colonial buildings and of colonial documents and artifacts. Public buildings, originally erected in a genuinely colonial spirit, are put to uses not originally intended. I have frequently been struck, in studying the history of Latin American towns, by how commonly the casas reales of the colonial period survive to become the juzgado or the house of correction or the local jail in subsequent periods. Documents that once served a legal purpose are relegated to archives and serve only a historiographical purpose. Works of art that reflected living aspirations fail to find a response in new environments and become testimonies to a dead past. Objects that were used in homes become objects that are looked at in museums. Such fragmentary remnants of colonialism sometimes require support in the twentieth century in order to withstand the destructive forces of modernization, and committees for their defense are sometimes created to safeguard their preservations. As in Peru after the earthquake of 1950, the colonial remains must also compete with the pre-colonial remains, for as one was built upon the other both cannot be simultaneously exposed or maintained. The effort to reconstruct the fortifications in Havana harbor, the effort to prevent the paving of the cobblestones in Pátzcuaro, and the effort to save Taxco from neon lighting are examples of this protectionism, which is partly romantic and nostalgic in spirit and which incidentally allows our tourist brochures to speak of locations of quaint colonial charm.

My impression is however that relics deliberately retained—I am speaking here of secular relics, not of ecclesiastical—are less a part of the Latin American than of the Anglo American or western European scene. Latin America has nothing to compare with the impressive institutionalized antiquarianism of the British Museum or Williamsburg, Virginia. The Latin American cultural heritage has not, in general, been perpetuated in this way—perhaps for the reason that it is already being perpetuated in other, more immediate ways. Preservation in museums is not consonant with the aristocratic, anti-democratic tradition. It is not consonant with the program either of liberalism or of conservatism, for it stands apart from both. To Latin American liberals the society and culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seem insufficiently changed from the colonial period, and the need for preservation of any kind is denied. Conservatives seek to retain colonial forms, but as realities in their own social lives, not as objects in museums, and not because they are colonial but because they serve a living purpose.

Historical change in Latin America often strikes observers as change of a peculiarly uneven sort. If I may cite our brochure again the “unique contrasts between the old and the new” are features of contemporary Latin America frequently remarked upon by visitors. The colonial and the modern worlds are juxtaposed. The references here are to oxcarts, single-handed plows, draft animals, digging sticks, backstrap looms, handmade pottery, adobe walls, thatched roofs, jugs carried on the head, and the leisurely peace of community existence, especially as these may be observed in conjunction with television, airports, modern architecture, and twentieth-century symbols in general. I do not mean to suggest that such contrasts do not exist. But I think that they need further analysis. The contrasts are “unique” partly because the foreign visitor is unfamiliar with them in his own society, and he should not forget that the contrasting solutions of his own society may appear equally unique from other points of view. In our own country the persisting influence of Puritanism and the continuing depressed position of the Negro provide what might also be called “unique” contrasts to modernism, and they relate the United States more closely to its own colonial past than we are likely to realize or wish. What we mean by “unique contrasts,” in short, may imply some imagined or false standard of uniformity, as if there were a proper way for a society to change.

We call Latin America an undeveloped, or underdeveloped, or less euphemistically a backward area, but we could not do so unless we regarded our own, or some other, area as developed and advanced. The concept of underdevelopment, stated in other terms, implies an insufficient change from the colonial period, and the programs for development, or for progress, in Latin America, seek to widen the historical gap. But the notions of development and underdevelopment ordinarily relate to the political and economic spheres that are not the subject of this paper. In modern commentaries on Latin America of all kinds, it seems to me, economic and political topics are receiving more attention, and cultural and social topics less. The programs for progress ordinarily look to the economic scene in the belief that if economic reorientation is accomplished, appropriate social and cultural change will follow. Social, and especially cultural, underdevelopment are less easy to measure than is economic under-development, and from the point of view of those who speak in these terms social and cultural underdevelopment are less important. An economic deficiency can be “corrected” simply by a grant of funds, whereas for a social or cultural deficiency much more subtle methods are required. Though we may speak of an outmoded social structure in Latin America, lacking a middle class, we do not normally allow ourselves to speak of a Latin America that is underdeveloped in its cultural life. Even if made with the best intentions such an observation is likely to be construed as unfriendly. Besides, in remarks that all of us have heard, the charge of cultural underdevelopment is one that Latin Americans make against us, not we against them. It may be that Latin America is closer to its colonial past socially and culturally than it is politically and economically, but I think either proposition would be difficult to prove, and, as we have said, these categories are not so easily separated in Latin American life as in our own.

I agree with Pedro Carrasco, who says that change or continuity will receive different emphases according to whether we consider the structure, the form, or the function of a social institution. We may exemplify the observation with reference to any of the institutions that span the period from the colony to the present. Thus the small Latin American community displays a structure and a form quite similar to those of its colonial prototype. Its function has been modified by modern communication systems and access to the outside world. In the city, on the other hand, both structure and form have been subjected to new influences; function, by contrast, appears to have changed least. The modern class structure, to take another example, is essentially the colonial class structure, despite the evident facts that slavery has been abolished, mobility facilitated, and social differentiations, especially that between peninsulars and creoles, modulated. In form the class system is being inflated and modified by population increase. In function, which is a kind of guide to future structure and form, class plays a still vital, but perhaps a progressively less vital, role.

Change and continuity may be classified in other ways. Between rural and urban societies the degrees of survival from the colonial period to the present consistently differ. Rural society displays the lesser inclination to change. There exist parts of rural Latin America where time appears to stand still, where the material cultures and the society and psychology accompanying them appear almost unchanged in 150 years. By contrast the great Latin American cities resemble, at least externally, not their urban antecedents of the colonial period but the metropolitan types of the twentieth-century world at large. Oscar Lewis has pointed out, with regard to the “culture of poverty,” that even the proletariat society, the slums, of a Latin American city, though specifically deriving from their Latin American past, are closely related to the phenomena of twentieth-century world urbanism. In any case even the most unobservant visitor responds to the contrasts between city and countryside. He is familiar with them at home too, but in Latin America the degrees of difference are exceptionally striking and the rural resistance to change exceptionally strong.

In the social structure of Latin America there occur similar differences. As in other parts of the world, but here with a particular Latin American intensity, the upper classes choose to retain what they already possess and to resist changes that would equalize peoples. In some instances the present possessors of large properties are the actual descendants of colonial possessors of large properties, and the continuity of inheritance is unbroken. Both the ancestor and his modern heir exemplify social conservatism. In terms of power and wealth and social attitudes it would perhaps be true to say that the upper classes have changed least since the colonial period and the lower and middle classes most, while the very lowest classes—the rural agriculturists, Indian groups, and “marginal” peoples outside the main society—have changed least of all. But the greatest force for change appears in the unprecedented demands voiced in the twentieth century by a whole middle portion of the society whose colonial counterpart was nonexistent, or, if existent, inarticulate. My point here is that the rate of historical change is modified, not simply as we move from city to country but as we move up or down the social scale.

Again it seems to me that our analysis of colonial survivals will vary according to whether we consider the question primarily from a modern, or primarily from a colonial, point of view. To historians of colonial Latin America it is likely that the present-day world will appear quite different from the colonial world and that the elements of change, rather than the elements of continuity, will dominate a first impression. To the observer more familiar with the modern world, on the other hand, the peculiarities of present-day Latin America, by way of contrast with non-Latin areas, will present themselves in a more forceful way and will receive explanation as ideo-syncratic, historically derived, characteristics. The matter is not confined to first impressions but is an integral part of the large, complex question of the relation of the historian, or of any observer, to the subject being considered. The historian of the colonial period typically takes a particularistic view, examines the details of colonial life, recognizes the changes that occur within the colonial period itself, and is less likely to consider the broad attributes that distinguish the colonial from other periods or to accept the characterizations that are postulated by persons who know the subject in less detail. Viewed from a greater distance, on the other hand, the colonial period has a kind of massive unity, and traits can be ascribed to it with less concern for qualification. From this latter standpoint, the object of attention, or the puzzle, is the chaos of modern Latin America and not the chaos of colonial Latin America. It is modern Latin America that demands explanation, and colonial Latin America acquires a certain clarity simply by being removed and subordinated in the formulation of the problem. But if the colonial scene itself constitutes the problem, these roles are reversed.

I think that we should not allow the term “colonial” to suffer the fate that has overtaken the word “medieval” at the hands of careless users and writers of editorials. We should not allow “colonial” to be applied to everything that appears illiberal in Latin America or that is vaguely out of date. Colonial status was what the revolutions for independence were against, and it is perhaps natural that when independence failed to achieve its liberal goals the colonial legacy was blamed. It may be pointed out, on the other hand, that Latin American liberalism has its own colonial antecedents, limited as these may be, and that some of what is condemned as colonial survival in modern times is colonial only in one of the extended meanings indicated above. Again if we consider internal peace and absence of revolution as desiderata then the colonial period appears to this extent preferable to the national period and a favorable aspect of the heritage was rejected. Moreover not all colonial legacies conform to the modern liberal’s pejorative typology. Mestization for example is an evident social phenomenon of the colonial period. It was colonial in its origin and had no pre-colonial history. It continued and expanded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it appears with vigor in the contemporary social scene. In the colonial period “mestizo” might be synonymous with bastard or vagrant or outcast. In the nineteenth century mestization was still ordinarily viewed as a defect in the Latin American character. But in various interpretations in more recent Latin American thinking, mestization provides a nationalistic ethos wholly compatible with the most advanced social aspirations. Mestization exemplifies a kind of colonial legacy in reverse, neglected or denounced in its early stages, exalted and proclaimed in its later.

We come then to the major point. I think that most persons are not primarily interested in colonial survivals by way of an historical exercise or an academic question. The fact is that again and again what are called colonial residues in modern Latin America are the objects of condemnation because they appear to be obstacles to change. If Latin America could truly escape from its colonial heritage, so the argument runs, the way would be cleared for Latin America to take its rightful place in the twentieth-century world. In a sense the proposition is undeniable. The principal inhibiting social legacy is the rigid class system, which neither the revolutions for independence nor any of the subsequent revolutions successfully destroyed, and which is only now being partially modified. The inhibiting cultural legacies relate primarily to education, for though the 50% literacy, more or less, of 1962, represents a marked change upon the colonial figure, still the other 50%, of illiteracy, is seen as a colonial heritage in need of correction. To historians it appears obvious that both the rigid class system and the aristocratic educational system may be traced to pre-colonial origins in the Old World, and that there is a sense in which it is gratuitous to speak of them as colonial rather than as pre-colonial or nineteenth-century. But in comparison with the urgency of the practical demand for improvement, such questions appear immaterial. Who but an historian would consider them at all?

The author is Professor of History at the State University of Iowa.

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The task of commenting on two such thoughtful and penetrating papers is a challenging one, for the areas of agreement among us are so broad as to limit the opportunity for meaningful observation. There are, however, a number of points, some minor, others of greater importance, which call for comment.

Let me begin by noting that both authors were particularly sensitive to the various connotations of the term “colonial.” Professor Borah pointed out that today’s program “with equal logic and identical wording of topic could deal with the institutions that work to keep Latin America impoverished and subservient to other regions.” Professor Gibson, on the other hand, offered a plea that “colonial” should not be allowed to suffer the fate that has overtaken the word “medieval” in the hands of careless users or writers of editorials. This plea, I fear, will have little effect where it is most needed. The term “colonial” has been so closely related to the word “imperial” as to be rendered guilty by association and thus doomed to suffer the penalty of pejorative usage.

Turning now to Professor Borah’s paper, we find our attention directed to various survivals of colonial administrative experience. Any of us who have had to deal with governmental agencies in Latin America, whether to extend a temporary visitor’s permit so as to complete an archival search, or simply to withdraw an international package from the customs, immediately recognize the features of external administration to which he refers. Were they ever to disappear, I fear that our capacity as historians to appreciate something of the human realities of colonial life would be materially lessened.

Professor Borah proceeds to analyze for us the centralizing features that characterize much of contemporary Latin American government. Here I find myself a bit puzzled since there is no clear effort to differentiate the colonial survivals from the accretions of one hundred and fifty years of new experiences. The current subordination of provincial and local authority to the will of the center cannot be regarded simply as a survival of eighteenth-century Bourbon administrative reforms. To do so would be to underestimate the twentieth-century pressures that have augmented the powers of national governments everywhere in the world as well as in Latin America, and also to deprive of all meaning nineteenth-century experimentation in administrative organization. At the least we should bear in mind the discontinuity between the centralizing tendencies of the eighteenth century and those that prevail today. After all, in Mexico it was not until the Díaz regime that the central government effectively controlled local and provincial elections, and determined the appointment of the lowliest officials. In Argentina the national government, when it existed, had only imperfect control over the provinces until after the 1880’s; and in Brazil, between 1890 and 1930 the states, or more accurately certain states, seemed to have had greater power and revenues than the national government. The centralized political systems that do in fact exist today in such countries as Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, despite their federal constitutions, are not lineal descendants of eighteenth-century centralizing tendencies. Rather they are the product of conflict between those tendencies and regionalist forces—another and unmentioned colonial legacy—and of the new economic, social, and ideological demands that have reshaped political relationships within these states since about 1930.

As regards the preponderance of the executive power within contemporary political systems, I find myself in greater agreement with Professor Borah. The presidency does seem to embody and perpetuate the vast powers and broad personal authority exercised by colonial viceroys and captains-general. Here too, however, one must be wary of generalizing from the example of the Mexican president to his counterparts elsewhere. The prestige this official enjoys within the Mexican political system—especially his freedom from public criticism while in office—is a case in point. If this is a legacy from colonial times then the heirs to the viceregal tradition in the Río de la Plata have reason to complain about their inheritance.

In his examination of the basic features of political life Professor Borah quite properly directs our attention to the eighteenth-century origins of Latin American militarism. The creation of standing armies, the extension of the fuero militar to officers of the colonial militia, and the employment of military men in civil posts undoubtedly helped to pave the way for the militarization of political life after Independence. But whether one can link the political influence of Latin American armies today in any causal way to eighteenth-century developments is something else. Perhaps a case for this could be made in negative terms. The failure of the colonial political experience to prepare civilians for effective self-government permitted the assumption by military men of political power after Independence. Subsequently, whenever and wherever civilian groups have been able to achieve a broad consensus and have learned to fashion effective political parties, military influence on politics has receded. The resurgence of Argentine militarism on the one hand and the decline of Mexican militarism on the other in the years since 1930 give little support to any hypothesis based on colonial precedents.

Professor Gibson’s paper offers the intriguing observation that “a colonial institution may be consequential without being continuous,” and that “modern legacies of colonial institutions may appear in disguised forms.” What he is suggesting, it would appear, is that changes in form and structure of institutions—indeed their very disappearance as far as law or practice is concerned—do not mean that the function performed by the institution has ceased or even that the ideas associated with it have lost their vitality.

One can make a case for the persistence of colonial institutions in disguised forms. The problem then becomes one of definition: does a contemporary social, economic, or political practice similar to one found in colonial times but performed in a different manner constitute a colonial legacy? Is it possible to disembody the spirit from the structure of a colonial institution, recognize it in its modern social garb and acclaim it as a survival? The difficulties involved are illustrated by practical examples.

It has been suggested—although by a political columnist rather than an historian, I hasten to add, that the residencia has been recreated in contemporary Argentina. The allusion is to the investigatory committees that are created each time that a government has been forcibly overthrown. These committees, appointed by the successor regime, have inquired into the use and abuse of public office by members of the prior administration; they have produced reports, often voluminous ones, and in some instances their recommendations have resulted in judicial proceedings. The fact that such committees were consistently created after the fall of Yrigoyen in 1930, Castillo in 1943, Perón in 1955, and Frondizi in 1962 suggests that we are indeed in the presence of an institution. But its function appears to be less the administrative one of elevating standards of official conduct or of maintaining royal control over remote officials that we associate with the residencia and more the political one of providing the public with proof that the ousted officials were in fact corrupt, as their opponents had charged, and that they deserved to be put out of office. Perhaps the chief resemblance between the residencia of colonial times and the modern Argentine institution is the failure of either to raise standards of public morality.

Now let me cite one other example where I think the spirit of a colonial institution is still at work. This is the blanqueo de capitales or whitewashing of taxable assets that occurs in Argentina—and possibly other countries as well. In Argentina in 1956 and again in 1962 delinquent taxpayers—those who had failed to file statements of assets subject to certain taxes—were invited to register those assets and pay the current tax with the inducement that all previous tax obligations on those assets would be forgiven. Some 15,000 took advantage of this offer in 1956; some 100,000 taxpayers presented themselves this past September and October. Now what we have here, I believe, is the revival of the composición. Just as Philip Il’s government, pressed for funds, was willing to update land titles and overlook past irregularities in return for present payments, so the Argentine government in its desperate search for funds whitewashes past tax irregularities and regularizes the status of those who will come in and make payment of current taxes.

Returning to Professor Gibson’s paper, I find myself attracted to his assertion that the most convincing instances of continuity are found at what he calls the “less concrete levels of institutionalism.” As one reflects on the examples he cites—the persistence of the aristocratic principle in the sphere of education, the role of nepotism and family ties in the varied aspects of urban society—it seems evident that it is not institutions in the usual sense of the word that have slowed and complicated the transformation of Latin America but the survival of a system of values. Professor Borah confirms this in his definition of institutions and in his discussion of the obstacles to capital accumulation.

Even where, as the result of evolving class structure, sharp changes have taken place in the formal aspects of institutional life, certain basic attitudes have shown a tremendous vitality. In education for example it appears that the new middle class has taken over elitist viewpoints once associated with the colonial aristocracy. Víctor Alba has recently asserted that one characteristic of the new middle class in Latin America is that “although it advocates public education, it is in fact much more urgently interested in developing higher and professional education, though this preference is never frankly stated.”1 Thus the addition of engineering and economics faculties in the universities alongside the traditional ones of law and medicine expands the avenues through which one can join the elite but does not resolve the problem of the illiterate mass.

If it is true then, as these two fine papers seem to suggest, that the value system erected in the colonial era has been more impervious to change than the structure of institutions, and if those concerned with promoting the rapid modernization of Latin America become increasingly aware that the process involves much more than directing capital flows or altering the terms of trade, then perhaps next year’s program committee could perform a real service by organizing a session to take up where this one leaves off, a session that could perhaps be called “Colonial Values and Contemporary Latin America.”

“The Latin American Style and the New Social Forces,” in A. O. Hirschman, Latin American Issues, Essays and Comments (New York, 1961), p. 50.

The author is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts.

Page 5

As late as 1927 history texts in use in Cuban schools were still presenting the island’s struggles for independence in much the same manner as they were treated in history textbooks in this country; that is, (1) early plots, conspiracies, and attempts at invasion down to about 1865 which aimed at cutting Cuba loose from Spain (often thought of as aiming at annexation to the United States); (2) the reformist movement of the late Fifties and Sixties when Cubans hoped for freedom within the Spanish connection; (3) the failure of the reformist efforts followed by the first war for independence, known as the Ten Years’ War, 1868-78; (4) the Guerra Chiquita of 1878-80 led by Cuban generals who refused to accept the Peace of Zanjón; (5) the autonomist movement once more aiming at liberty within the Spanish Empire; (6) its failure followed by the War for Independence, 1895-98; and, finally, La Guerra Hispanoamericana in 1898 (Cuban texts still used the Spanish version of “Spanish-American War,”1 which term has since become anathema to Cuba historians as well as politicians).

Most school texts as well as larger histories had good words for the administration of General Leonard Wood2 during the First Intervention (1899-1902), saying little about his predecessor in that position, General John R. Brooke. There were expressions of regret and even resentment over the failure of the United States government to recognize the government of the “República en Armas” which had directed Cuban efforts in the War for Independence, but for the most part, criticism of this policy was soft-pedaled, censure being reserved for the imposition of the Platt Amendment and later interventions and meddling in Cuban affairs under the Amendment. Charles E. Magoon, the United States governor during the Second Intervention, was a favorite target, charged with having, by precept and example, instructed Cuban politicians in the ways of graft and other forms of corruption.

This is not to insinuate that historical revisionism had no advocates among the scholars of the island. From 1910 the Academy of History (organized after the models of those of France and Spain) was a center through which such intellects as Fernando Ortiz, Enrique José Varona, Raimundo Cabrera, Rafael Fernández de Castro, José Miró Argentier, Juan Miguel Dihigo, Enrique Collazo, Francisco de Paula Coronado, Tomás Justiz, Emeterio S. Santovenia, and Carlos M. Trelles, promoted investigation. Since most of them had been participants in one or more phases of the independence efforts, it is understandable that their historical work was directed in great part toward clarifying and interpreting the events that had led to the separation from Spain and the establishment of the Republic. Much of what they did was necessarily revisionist in nature, but was carried out in the best tradition of scientific historians who seek the facts and present them with as little conscious bias as possible.

More nearly revisionist in the early years of the Republic was a group that gathered around Dr. Fernando Ortiz, long time member of the Academy of History and for a while its president. Primarily interested in problems of sociology, anthropology, archeology, and folklore, Dr. Ortiz, nevertheless formed a nucleus for younger scholars to whom he lent inspiration. Once a week they lunched together and exchanged intellectual findings. One of the number later characterized the members of this circle as inconformes. The writer had the pleasure of attending one of these almuerzos in December of 1959.

The member of the inconformes who is perhaps best known of any of the revisionists in this country is Herminio Portell Vilá, who has refused to become fixed in any one school and has remained pretty much of a free lance as a historical writer as he has in politics, journalism, and radio and television newscasting. As a result he has often been dubbed anti-United States in this country and pro-United States in his own.

In 1930 Dr. Portell Vilá published the first of his three volume definitive study on Narciso López y su época. Although the other two volumes did not appear until 1952 and 1959 respectively,3 the first was sufficient to make clear the author’s thesis (announced two years earlier in his history of his home town of Cárdenas)4 that López was an advocate of complete independence for Cuba and not of annexation to the United States. This volume also gave its author a high rating, both in and out of Cuba, as a careful, painstaking investigator and able writer, and paved the way for a Guggenheim fellowship that enabled him to continue his studies during his exile from the Machado dictatorship which came close upon the heels of this publication. This opportunity he used (with the cooperation of his wife) to explore archives and other sources in the United States for material on the whole story of the relations between this country and Cuba, as well as to gather further data on López. The result is perhaps the most thorough piece of revisionist historical writing yet to come from a Cuban—the four volume Historia de Cuba en sus relaciones con los Estados Unidos y España.5

This valuable work should have been published in English as well as Spanish, and then distributed by some foundation in such a manner as to make it available to all historical writers and teachers in this country, particularly those who produce our textbooks. Dr. Portell Vilá is a fearless writer and speaker, and has never hesitated to express unpopular views whether he was dealing with the policies of the United States or with the politicians of his own country. This is not always a safe line to follow, and on more than one occasion he has been imprisoned, threatened with execution, and exiled. The last time that I saw him (December of 1959) he told me that Raúl Castro had ordered his television news commentary cut off in the middle of a speech one evening with orders that he not be permitted to broadcast again. His treatment of Cuban-United States relations in the work mentioned is well documented and frank, and of course not always flattering to this country or its agents. These sordid facts needed to be exposed, but unfortunately the wrong people read the work. Our people, our leaders, our historians, needed badly to be told these things, but they have been buried in the Spanish language. They have been read in Cuba, where all too often isolated statements have been lifted out of context, or have been slanted to support the particular anti-United States feeling of an extremist, rather than to promote a better understanding of the fundamental relations of the two countries. The good of both demands a mutual understanding.

Considerably before Dr. Portell Vilá achieved prominence as a historian, the man who was destined to become the center around which the revisionists were to gather, had already made a name for himself in a number of fields of writing. In 1912, at the age of 23, Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring of Habana won first prize in a costumbrista contest with his near classic ¿Se puede vivir en la Habana sin un centavo?6 His later writings on the history of Havana and Cuban folklore are among the best on the subjects. But without losing interest in his first love, Dr. Roig turned more and more to broader topics of history, including the impact of United States influence in Cuban affairs. In 1922 he published a volume entitled La enmienda Platt, su interpretación primitiva y sus aplicaciones posteriores hasta 1921, followed the next year by his Análisis y consecuencias de la intervención norteamericana en los asuntos interiores de Cuba. Two years later came his pamphlet with the significant title, La colonia superviva. Cuba a los veintidós años de la República,7 the contents of which foreshadowed later assertions by the same author and other revisionists that Cuba’s battle for independence did not end in 1898, nor even in 1902, but that in later years it only entered into another phase with the United States as the enemy of Cuban independence instead of Spain.

It was in 1927 that Dr. Roig first entered the field that was to make it possible for him to assume dynamic leadership of most of Cuba’s revisionist historians. In that year the mayor of Havana placed him in charge of historical studies of the city with the title of comisionado municipal, which position he used to promote a series of studies in the city’s archives on Havana under Spain. Radical changes in Havana’s administration by the dictator Machado forced Dr. Roig from this position in 1931 and eventually into exile, but after Machado’s fall in 1933 he returned to the city hall with the new title of Historiador de la Ciudad de la Habana, which he held continuously until the present upheaval, and which office he organized and expanded into a center of historical investigation and interpretation that has rivaled the Academy of History, although that was not his original intention, for Dr. Roig was one of the inner circle of the Academy until he resigned from it in the late Thirties.

He had scarcely taken possession of the Office of City Historian when from it he launched a series of historical conferences, adult education courses on historical exposition open to the public, and sponsored several series of historical publications including one of the colonial records of the municipality under the title Actas Capitulares del Ayuntamiento de la Habana, the Colección Histórica Cubana y Americana, and the more popular Cuadernos de Historia Habanera. By 1959 more than one hundred volumes of historical studies had been published by the Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de la Habana.8

To such a center historically minded persons naturally gravitated. In 1940, in conjunction with a number of them, Dr. Roig launched the Sociedad Cubana de Estudios Históricos e Internacionales, broadly based so as to admit all those interested in historical studies—for he and many others thought of the Academy as too exclusive, and too conservative. Two years later this society and the office of the City Historian joined in promoting the First National Historical Congress of Cuba, the Thirteenth of which met in February of 1960. It was intended that the Congresses should be annual affairs, and they were until 1952, after which the political situation under Dictator Batista became impropitious for such meetings since they were invariably forums for some very plain-spoken opinions on such matters as dictatorship, imperialism, and colonialism. The papers presented to these historical congresses, the addresses actually delivered, and especially the resolutions and recommendations approved, are among the best sources of information on the revisionist interpretations of Cuban history.

The papers and discussions at the first such congress (1942) covered a wide variety of subjects on the history of all of the Americas as well as that of Cuba itself. Those touching on Cuban independence movements were only mildly revisionist—with one exception, that written by Dr. Roig himself, entitled Revaloración de la Guerra Libertadora Cubana de 1895. This did not appear in the published report of the congress,9 but was left for separate printing. Actually Dr. Roig used it as a stepping stone to a number of studies on the whole independence movement which have set the tone for the revisionists. The most significant of these works are: La Guerra Libertadora Cubana de los Treinta Años, 1868-98; La lucha cubana por la república, contra la anexión y la Enmienda Platt, 1899-1902; Juan Gualberto Gómez, paladín de la independencia de Cuba; and La Guerra Hispano-Cubanoamericana fue ganado por el Lugarteniente General del Ejército Libertador Calixto García Iñiguez (all from the Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de la Habana, the first two in 1952 and the others in 1954 and 1955 respectively). In all of them Dr. Roig insisted that the struggle for independence was not a series of wars but one continuous struggle of thirty years’ duration; that there were never lacking in the United States friends of Cuban freedom, but that our government was consistently opposed to Cuban independence. He further insisted that the entry of the United States into the struggle in 1898 was not necessary for Cuban victory, because the Cuban patriots had the mother country defeated by that time; furthermore, after entering the war the United States found it necessary to use Cuban plans of strategy and Cuban forces to win the Santiago campaign; that Spanish defeat did not bring Cuban freedom but simply turned the struggle into a new phase with the United States as the opponent.

Much of this had been foreshadowed in Dr. Roig’s publications of 1921-22, and 1924, already cited. In these later works he documented heavily his statements about the incapacity of General Shafter, his discourtesy to Calixto García and to other Cuban officers during the Santiago campaign, and particularly about Shafter’s refusal to permit García to share in the surrender negotiations or in the surrender ceremonies, after having used his battle plans, his leadership, and his army to achieve victory. Objection was made to the name, “The Spanish-American War” because the Cubans were given no credit. As opposed to this the revisionists for their part suggested a variety of more acceptable names, finally obtaining from the Cuban Congress a law officially adopting that of “Guerra Hispano-Cubanoamericana.”10 The revisionists assert that the war was won before the United States entered and robbed them of the fruits of victory.

Dr. Roig, along with others of his persuasion, praises Senator Teller for insisting that the United States announce to the world a guarantee that it was entering the Cuban struggle to obtain freedom for the island instead of to annex it. They also praise General John R. Brooke, the first governor under the Intervention, for his efforts in behalf of Cuban independence, but severely condemn Elihu Root, President McKinley, Leonard Wood, and Theodore Roosevelt as rabid imperialists seeking to annex the island. The following quotation from the resolutions of the Ninth Historical Congress of 195011 will make the contentions of the revisionists clear:

Cuba does not owe its independence to the United States of North America, but to the efforts of its own people, in their firm, unbreakable will to put an end to the injustices, biases, discriminations, and exploitations that they suffered under the despotic colonial regime, and to conquer liberty, democracy, justice, culture, and civilization. Convinced that it was impossible to obtain these things under Spanish sovereignty, they decided to win them by means of revolution and after numerous conspiracies and expeditions, a national consciousness was developed. Then broke out the great Thirty YearsWarof Liberation which in its final phase (1895-98) had the support of the majority of the people of the island, of the groups of Cuban exiles on the Continent, and, through the power of the Liberating Army, due to the superior military capacity of its leaders and the spirit of discipline, heroism, disinterestedness, and sacrifice of its soldiers, was able to destroy the economic and military power of Spain and defeat the best of its military forces, although it had against it at times the indifference, and at others the hostility of the North American State; having brought about even before the intervention of the United States in the Cuban-Spanish conflict the complete exhaustion of Spain’s “last man and last peseta,” the limit indicated by the leaders of her political factions in Spain as the extreme to which it could go in the battle against the Cuban Liberating Revolution.

The North American State was always the enemy of Cuban independence and hindered and annulled the work of the Cuban patriots directed toward sending to the island expeditions, medicines, and war material, and contumaciously opposed the recognition of belligerency, offering, instead, on various occasions, material support to Spain to help keep the island under her dominion, and even to recover it, if she came to lose it. This attitude was in evident contrast to the sympathies, demonstrated at all times in favor of Cuban independence, by the North American people, who gave decided cooperation to the revolutionary efforts developed in territory of the Union, many of its citizens taking part in the revolutionary armies and some of whom gave their lives for Cuban liberty. Finally in 1898 there existed in the United States a state of opinion in favor not only of the right of the Cubans to liberty and independence, but also to the recognition the Republic organized in the field of battle, but this popular desire was ignored by the United States government by suppressing the Joint Resolution voted by Congress on April 19, 1898, and approved by the President on the 20th, having already been approved by the Senate.

This was little more than a restatement in more positive form of the resolution on the same subject adopted by the Eighth Congress the year before; in fact it had been foreshadowed in the resolutions of the First Congress in 1942.12

While the most conservative historians in Cuba agreed with a number of these assertions, there have not been lacking scholars who rejected them in whole or in part. Noteworthy are two works by “The Grand Old Man” of Cuban history and diplomacy, Cosme de la Torriente. In his Fin de la dominación de España en Cuba13 and Calixto García cooperó con las fuerzas armadas de los Estados Unidos en 1898, cumpliendo órdenes del gobierno cubano,14 Torriente admitted the crudity of Shafter, but contended that this did not represent the studied policy of the United States or its leaders, pointing out the effort of General Nelson A. Miles to make amends. Torriente also expressed doubts (and he was Garcia’s chief of staff) about the ability of the Cuban army to defeat the Spanish forces without the assistance of the United States navy. This view is also expressed in a paper read before the Cuban Academy of History by Julio Morales Coello, entitled La importancia del poderío naval—positivo y negativo—en el desarrollo y en la independencia de Cuba.15

Much the same conservative line was followed in the ten volume Historia de la Nación Cubana,16 prepared in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Republic. This was a cooperative effort of many scholars, drawn in great part from the Academy group. Nearly all of these writers are well known in Hispanic American circles in this country. The directors of the project were Emeterio S. Santovenia, Ramiro Guerra, Juan J. Remos, and José María Pérez Cabrera. While the list of contributors contained such revisionists’ names as Enrique Gay-Calbó, Julio le Riverend, and other collaborators with Dr. Roig in the work of the Sociedad Cubana de Estudios Cubanos e Internacionales, the majority leaned more toward the conservative school. In dealing with United States’ participation in the Cuban independence movements, Dr. Remos contributed a section under the traditional title “La Guerra Hispano-Americana,” already condemned as heretical and anti-patriotic by the revisionists ; in fact, it was technically illegal since the Cuban Congress had passed a law in May of 1945 (in conformity with a recommendation from the Historical Congresses in question) making official the name “La Guerra Hispano-Cubanoamericana.”17

I myself heard caustic criticism of the editorial policy of the directors of the Historia de la Nación Cubana and their sponsors, largely on account of their conservatism and traditionalism, and because the Cuban government of the hour contributed to the costs of publication and was suspected of dictating the tone. This is highly improbable for the scholars who produced this history were (and are) among the best prepared, the most objective, and the most scientific historians of Cuba, comparable in ability to the best in any country in the world; in fact, their objectivity and their inclination toward conservatism were two of their strong points, but the revisionists were neither in a conservative nor an objective mood. They had been impatiently striving for a generation to correct what they considered false interpretations of their country’s history. While the traditionalists were accepted in this country both in historical and diplomatic circles, the revisionists were often frowned upon, even to the extent of being considered communists.

There were some grounds for this point of view. At the National Historical Congress of 1952 (meeting in Havana and Cárdenas) one of the invited speakers was the “President of the Government of Santo Domingo in Exile,” and at the banquet one of the guests was the “foreign minister of the Puerto Rican Republic in Exile,” who recited Puerto Rican problems and the “sins” of the United States to those near him.

Freedom of thought is one of our great privileges, the basis of human liberty, but unfortunately, while the revisionist historians were exercising their rights, and recapitulating their just grievances against the United States, they were, unwittingly, preparing the ground in which would thrive most abundantly the anti-United States propaganda of our communist rivals. The proceedings of the Thirteenth Historical Congress, which met in February, 1960, revealed the extent to which the revisionists went over to the Castro program. I did not get to attend this meeting, but I was in Havana a month before while the preparations for it were being made. Most of the revisionist historians saw in the rise of Castro the realization of their dreams of complete Cuban independence. There was noticeable at the time a ground swell of cautiously expressed doubt. Already a number of the more conservative scholars were in exile or under suspicion, as were some of the revisionists, one of whom informed me that he was threatened for daring to suggest that all was not well. Nevertheless, the prevalent feeling at the Thirteenth Congress was one of rejoicing that Cuba was at last free, a harp of ten strings on which the Castro administration played deftly. In the welcoming address to the Congresistas18 Dr. Roig reviewed his previous interpretation of the independence movements with emphasis on the frustration of Cuban liberty by the United States. He called on the group to rejoice that through the new Revolution Cuba was at last free from the tyranny of Batista, and from dictators forced upon it by Washington and Wall Street, and that it had entered a new era in which American imperialism was banished from the island forever.

A similar note was sounded by Professor Fernando Portuondo of the University of Havana, long among the revisionist historians attending the Congresses, and now president of the Thirteenth.19 Paper after paper repeated the theme, and at the principal banquet of the Congress, prepared on one of the government-sponsored cooperative farms, bearded officials echoed the refrain that the political, social, and economic millenium had come to Cuba. Thus the Castro Revolution had completed the unfinished work of 1898 when the battle for freedom had shifted from a struggle against Spain to one against the United States and the “exploiters” who had entered the island under its auspices. This became the official claim of the Castro government, so stated on numerous occasions and at great length by the hero himself, and is clearly expressed in the official elementary school geography by Antonio Núñez Jiménez entitled Así es mi país. Geografía de Cuba para los niños, printed at the government press in 1961:

The children of Revolutionary Cuba should know well what Imperialism is and what it has meant for our Country. The word Imperialism comes from the word Empire and an empire is a system through which the evil interests of one group of very rich and powerful men, by means of well-equipped armies, dominate other weaker and smaller people which they convert into colonies, although they call them deceptively Free and Independent Republics. The imperialists invest their capital in these countries to control the communications, the railroads, the telephone system, the land, the mines, and all the national wealth. In this way they remove and put in “governments,” as they did in Cuba until the triumph of the Rebel Army and the Cuban people, commanded by Fidel Castro, on January 1, 1959, the true date of liberation of the fatherland of Maceo and Martí.20

The most widely used text on Cuban history in the elementary schools at the time was Vidal Morales, Nociones de historia de Cuba (published in many editions by Cultural S.A.). It had a chapter with the title “La Guerra Hispano-Americana.”

The praise accorded to Wood in the Vidal Morales text, for instance, might easily have been written by an author in the United States.

The volumes were printed in editions of 1000 copies each by different printing establishments in Havana: I by Cultural S.A.; II by Compañía Editora de Libros y Folletos; III by Jesús Montero, Editora.

Historia de Cárdenas, La Habana, 1928.

Habana, Jesús Montero, 1939-41.

Published in El Fígaro, 1912.

These three works were all printed in Havana by “El Siglo XX,” in the following years respectively: 1922; 1923; and 1925.

A complete list of these collections with titles of other publications down to 1960 is found in No. 72 of the Cuadernos de Historia Habanera, (La Habana, Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de la Habana, 1960). See also Duvon C. Corbitt “Historical Publications of the Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de la Habana,” HAHR, vol. XXXV, No. 4, November, 1955, pp. 498 for comments on those down to 1955.

2 vols. La Habana, “El Siglo. XX,” 1943.

Gaceta Oficial de la República de Cuba, May 22, 1945.

Cuadernos de Historia Habanera, No. 48.

La Habana, “El Siglo XX,” 1948.

La Habana, Historia de la Nación Cubana, S.A., 1952.

Cuadernos de Historia Habanera, No. 72, pp. 37-42.

Antonio Núñez Jiménez, Así es mi país. Geografía de Cuba para los niños (La Habana, Imprenta Nacional de Cuba, 1961), p. 8.

The author is Professor of History at Asbury College. This paper was read at the Southern Historical Association meeting in Miami Beach in November, 1962.

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Historians have often asked why Joel Poinsett refused to undertake a second mission to South America when President Monroe asked him to serve in 1817 as a “special commissioner.” Poinsett’s polite but definite refusal, it is suggested, proceeded from thoughts of military service or else diplomatic employment of a higher order than that which had been his experience during the years 1810-1815.1 But even his excuses of lengthy absence from home and friends, and recent election to the South Carolina legislature sound peculiarly hollow in the light of his well-known republicanism.

During his five years in South America, Poinsett’s opinion of leading revolutionaries was exceedingly unfavorable. The abilities of Don Manuel Belgrano were “overrated,” and he “disappointed the expectations of the people.”2 Juan Martin de Pueyrredon was a man who had “conducted a successful course of intrigue.” The spirit of unrest which these men and others engendered was undermining the cause of true revolution in South America; and the United States could not afford to rush to the support of such instability.

Poinsett’s reply to the Department of State outlined his essential position, and warned of the personal ambition of many leaders.3 There is almost no later official correspondence touching this problem until the celebrated Poinsett Memorandum of 4 November 1818 to Secretary Adams. Researchers have deplored the lack of documentary materials from May, 1817, to November, 1818, which could shed light on Poinsett’s views of the leaders in the Río de la Plata as well as give some indication of the direction of his thinking in refusing the mission. In one piece of evidence—an unpublished source— Poinsett did make some rather startling summations of his views of South American loyalties and politics as he had observed them from 1810 to 1815. This is a letter of 31 October 1817 to an unknown recipient but a close personal friend, probably in Washington, D. C.4 The letter gives definite reasons for his refusal of a second mission: owing to the imprecise nature of the proposed journey and his rapidly declining confidence in the personalities involved, the “leader of firmness and talents” to head the “powerful” American party in Chile would not be Joel Poinsett.

Charleston Oct 31. 1817

My dear Sir

I have this moment received your letter dated the 23d. and feel much gratified by your communications with regard to S.A. affairs. It is a question of such vital importance to this country that I am rejoiced to see it brought forward in every point of view and that such able writers are engaged as its advocates. With respect to my own opinion, it remains unshaken, it has been given to the government on several occasions and if you have leisure to peruse the documents I presented to the Secretary of state upon my return you will there see it fully expressed. I do not understand the nature of the expedition which was proposed to me—If it is simply pour tater le terrain, that has been done thoroughly, and I may safely say that I am better acquainted with the resources of that country and with the character of the People than with those of my own state. Govt, knows from me the disposition of every leader of the revolution—If it is merely to furnish such a report as might induce Congress to declare openly in favor of the Emancipation of the Colonies—my former views of that subject are I suspect more favorable than they would be at present, I mean with regard to the resources of the country & the union of Parties—If it is again to defeat the Influence of Gt. Britain there, I think it an easy task, and the Govt can find many men equal to it, and to whom such an appointment may be useful. I never will again leave America in a subaltern Capacity, or as an unauthorized agent of the Government; but if the U.S. resolve to espouse the cause of our Brethren of the South, and I should be thought worthy to contribute towards so glorious an end, there is no sacrifice I think too great. I am ready to promote the cause of Freedom by every exertion in my powers. When it was proposed to me by my friends & especially by Mr. Gallatin to go to Russia,5 it occurred to me, that I might avail myself of my influence at that court to induce the Emperor to espouse the cause of the Spanish Colonies, for it is obviously his interest to do so—6 Govt—did not think proper to give me the appointment which was solicited for me, and as my opinion has always been, that in a republic a man is amply repaid for having served his country with zeal, by the consciousness of having promoted its interests to the best of his ability, I felt that I had acquired no claim and was not mortified by the refusal But when the offer was made me to go on this expedition I could not be ignorant that my standing at home enabled me to be more useful here, than if I should undertake to execute a commission of such a vague and indefinite character, and which might materially affect my future usefulness. So much for self—With regard to the Publications you were good enough to send me, they will certainly be useful in awakening the attention of the Government and people to this important subject, but I advise you by all means to abstain from Personalities. If you call P. & B. & H. British agents you will make them so, if they are denounced here as leaders of a british faction, they will consider themselves as deserted by the Mexicans and will cling to the party from which it is our interest to separate them—Ohiggins [sic] is not an Englishman in his politics and is easily led and most firmly attached to republican principles, more so than our friend C— [Carrera] The latter possesses more intellect & more vigour of Character and I think is the only man I knew there capable of carrying the revolution to a successful termination, but his Republicanism was due to my ascendant over him & I found on that subject he was difficult to govern—Ohiggins is a well disposed man, & a skillful agent can render him subservient to all his views—he must be managed [sic] dealt gently with in these discussions—Belgrano is a firm American & was my intimate friend—Pueyrredon is no friend to the English, I should rather suspect him of being attached to the Portuguese—I know that he was strongly so to the French, both he & Terrada [Interior Secretary of the Plate Republic]—I feel as you know a great friendship for C—a, but when the cause of a nation is to be supported it must be done without regard to personal feelings—the only support of the british party in B. & A. [Brazil and Argentina] & in Chile is the british Commerce in the former—they could not subsist their armies 2 months with the funds arising from duties on English importations

The American party is still powerful there & only wants a leader of firmness and talents—

When I first arrived in Buenos Ayres we had no party, and we were not known at all—at that period, the greatest of british Influence, Lord Strangford swayed the councils of those countries, He did so from the Brazil perhaps better than if he had been present, for he could excite no jealousies—I understand that Govt intend to send Mr. Graham to that court. I have a high opinion of his talents & beleive [sic] that he might easily play the game as L.d Strangford—Whenever he goes I can establish a correspondence for him with those countries—and I will renew my letters to whoever is sent in the Congress so that he may find acquaintances, if not friends there—

I beg that you will send me Mr. Breckinridge’s [sic] Pamphlet7 and everything that is written on the subject, and tell me if I can in any way contribute to the good cause—Especially if you receive any information respecting the state of those countries—does the Ontario touch in the river of Plate? Let me know when you expect the Congress to sail—

truly & Affectionately

Yours

J. R. Poinsett

Scrawl for Servants

Fred Rippy, Joel Poinsett: Versatile American (Durham: Duke University Press, 1935), p. 66.

Folio, “The Revolution in Buenos Ayres,” Volume 1, Poinsett Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

The letter was addressed to Richard Rush, Acting Secretary of State, and dated 23 May 1817. W. R. Manning, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States Concerning the Independence of the Latin-American Nations (New York: 1925), I, p. 39. Also see Mss. Journal of Joel Poinsett in the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

Original manuscript in possession of the writer. Acquired from Carnegie Book Shop, New York City, in 1961.

John Quincy Adams defeated Poinsett’s application to the post at St. Petersburg in 1817 even though Peter Poletica, Russian Minister to the United States at Washington, was in favor of Poinsett’s going to Russia. Vide Rippy, pp. 32 33

Cf the view that it was to Russia’s best interest “that the Spanish colonies were not freed, since, if they should be, the country about Buenos Aires would undoubtedly take away Russia’s trade in hides and tallow.” Philip C. Brooks, Diplomacy and the Borderlands: The Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1939), p. 76.

Undoubtedly a slip of the pen, Poinsett refers here not to James or John. Breckinridge but to Henry Marie Brackenridge (1786-1871), son of Hugh Henry Brackenridge. The pamphlet was Brackenridge’s South, America (1817), a writing which stressed the American position later adopted to a large extent in the Monroe Doctrine.

The author is a candidate for the Ph.D. in American history at George Washington University.

Which groups of people were at the top in the middle and on the bottom of the social hierarchy in the Spanish colonies?

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