In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

14 The First Written Constitution of New Granada Important though the fiscal measures may have been, the core of the capitulations was constitutional and political in nature: (I) an aspiration for a larger degree of self-government on the local and regional level and (2) a claim staked out by the creole elites to self-government for the whole of the New Kingdom of Granada. Regional rivalries played a major role in the events of 1781. The most important of these was the tension between Tunja and Socorro, and in this "tale of two cities" attention must be focused on the origins and development of their rivalry. Founded on August 6, 1539, a few years after the establishment of Santa Fe de Bogota, Tunja was the rival of Bogota in the sixteenth century. The initial source of its wealth was the dense Indian population in the adjacent areas. The encomienda took deep roots in Tunja, where there grew an aristocratic society based on relatively large landholdings and a servile Indian labor force. Another source of Tunja's earlier prosperity was the large herds of sheep raised in the neighboring valleys. That wool helped to create a flourishing cottage textile industry. But during the eighteenth century the sheep herds declined and textile production sharply fell off. As the political capital of a large territorial area which included Socorro, Tunja prospered during the seventeenth century. Her territorial extent was enormous. In the south it bordered on the province of Santa Fe. It extended northward to the coastal provinces of Cartagena and Santa Marta. The western frontiers touched the Magdalena River (the provinces of Mariquita and Antioquia) and its eastern extremity extended to the province of the Llanos. Inside this sprawling territory there were a few small, independent 172 New Granada's First Written Constitution / 173 governmental enclaves such as the governorship of Giron and corregimiento of Sogamoso-Duitama. Splendid baroque churches and convents that remain to this day and a spacious main plaza adorned with stately seignorial homes provide ample testimony to Tunja's early opulence, which, however, was gradually declining during the course of the eighteenth century. The Indian population, Tunja's initial source of wealth, had sharply diminished by then. Indicative of decaying prosperity is the fact that the tithes collected from the province of Tunja amounted to 25,360 pesos in 1800, whereas in the then separate province of Socorro-San Gil the revenues had climbed to 39,993 pesos.1 The social and political life of Tunja was dominated by an aristocratic class, some of whose members were able to or pretended to trace their ancestry back to the companions of Jimenez de Quesada. Socorro stood in sharp contrast to Tunja. Socorro was a new area, an eighteenth-century settlement, many of whose citizens were second- and third-generation descendants of poor Spanish immigrants (see chapter 3). While there was a small group of new rich in Socorro, few of her citizens could lay claim to the aristocratic pretensions of the patricians of Tunja. Minifundia predominated. The Socorro-San Gil area never had a dense Indian population, and their numbers by the eighteenth century were insignificant. The region was predominantly white with a significant number of mestizos and a tiny minority of blacks and mulattoes. The fertile valleys in the warm temperate climate of Socorro and San Gil provided for a diversified agricultural production as well as for a flourishing cattle industry. Cotton became a major crop, and Socorro replaced Tunja as a principal center of textile production. By 1781 the population of the urban nucleus of Tunja was not more than 3,000 in contrast to Socorro's population of about 15,000 people. The pastor in Tunja, whose magnificent church was spacious enough to be a cathedral, received an annual income of 1,600 pesos, whereas in Socorro the pastor's annual income was 5,000 pesos-larger than the total rents of the bishop of Santa Marta. As late as 1781 the seven religious houses of Tunja had not lost the wealth that they had accumulated in more prosperous times. Although Socorro's economy was expanding and Tunja's declining, the new wealth of Socorro often had to go to the "old wealth" of Tunja's convents to secure loans and mortgages to finance the expansion of their community. In 1781 Socorro had no convent. In the 1770's the citizens of that community were requesting that the Franciscans establish a convent there. Not only...

Share