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Hispanic American Historical Review 84.2 (2004) 277-313



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"Citizens of a Free People":

Popular Liberalism and Race in Nineteenth-Century Southwestern Colombia


"All that belong to the Liberal Party in the Cauca are people of the pueblo bajo (as they are generally called) and blacks," observes an 1859 letter written by Juan Aparicio, a local political operative who had undertaken the unenviable task of recruiting these same "lower classes" to support the powerful caudillo Tomás Mosquera's new National Party. Aparicio tried to explain his failure in this assignment, arguing that "this class of people will not listen to anyone that is not of their party."1 How had the local Liberal Party—controlled at the national level by wealthy white men—become associated with blacks and the poor in the Cauca region of southwestern Colombia? Or, more to the point, how did Afro-Colombians and other lower-class people transform elite political organizations into "their party"?

In the Cauca, Afro-Colombians actively negotiated, bargained, and came to identify with the Liberal Party, seeing it as a means to enter the nation's public, political life and improve their social and material condition. This alliance would last for roughly three decades, from the late 1840s until the late 1870s. [End Page 277] During this time, both popular liberals and party leaders continually negotiated the meanings and terms of this association. This political bargaining arose most powerfully and memorably over the institution of slavery but soon included questions of land, rights, and citizenship. Many of the political transformations and civil wars of this period hinged on the social dynamics engendered by Afro-Colombians' embrace of popular liberalism, a phenomenon that would significantly democratize Colombian republicanism. Eventually, the fates of Afro-Colombians and the Liberal Party became so closely intertwined that, especially for Conservatives, liberalism and blackness became synonymous.

The Afro-Caucanos' story occurred in both a postcolonial and—as their efforts bore fruit—a postemancipation environment. Perhaps even more directly than Rebecca Scott's pioneering work revealed for Cuba, in Colombia slaves and freed communities played an important role in abolition.2 This grand effort was intricately linked with Afro-Colombians' pursuit of full membership in the nation via the medium of popular liberalism.3 People of African descent succeeded in making liberalism their own very early in the century and, for a time, remarkably thoroughly. Ada Ferrer notes the uniqueness of the multiracial armies in Cuba's wars for independence. Similar armies emerged in Colombia almost half a century earlier, and, although they were not as fully integrated as Cuba's, they played an equally profound role in Colombia's national development.4 Along with their compatriots engaged in similar struggles across Latin America, Afro-Colombians were part of a pan-Atlantic movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to contest the meanings of liberalism and republicanism.5 Liberalism, republicanism, and democracy were not only created in the salons and statehouses of London, Paris, and Philadelphia; they were also given life in the streets and surrounding countrysides of Cap François, Havana, and Cali.

The alliance that developed between the Cauca's elite and subaltern liberals [End Page 278] involved three dimensions: first, bargaining over the social, economic, and political structures of the region; second, the weight of Afro-Caucanos' military and political support in the region's elections and civil wars (which made the Liberal Party unbeatable when it was not internally divided); and third, the confluence of Liberals' conception of citizenship with Afro-Colombians' appropriation of that identity. While a full accounting of this story would begin with the wars of independence, the association of the Cauca's Afro-Colombians and liberalism crystallized in the early 1850s with the emergence of the Liberal Party and the final struggle to abolish the lingering stain of slavery.

Everyday Forms of Party Formation

During the turbulent years of 1850 and 1851, the Afro-Colombians of Cartago (a city in the northern Cauca) gathered at the local Democratic Society— a...

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