Politics and Ideas in Latin American Independence

In 1985, a leading Latin American historian in the United States concluded in a cogent essay that independence from Spain changed its former colonies in Spanish America very little: "in this maintenance into the national period of the basic structures of colonial society, one sees vividly the antirevolutionary character of the independence 'revolutions.'"¹ Colonial elites, he said, led the independence movements, and they did so largely to defend their privileges against both unruly subalterns and a potentially aggressive reformed Bourbon monarchy. Twenty years later, the same historian had come to see the independence movements quite differently: they were indeed revolutionary, in spite of the antirevolutionary ambitions of many leaders who "had not foreseen . . . that the free population would prove just as internally divided in Spanish America as in Haiti and that bitter civil wars would rage on in much of the region for a decade or more." Conflicts within the colonies provided subaltern groups, including slaves, with an opportunity to influence the outcomes of independence and the early formation of national states in "the first great wave of social and political reform in Latin American history."² What caused historians of independence to experience such a profound reevaluation, from a gloomy emphasis on colonial legacies to a cautiously optimistic view of democratic revolution, a view that many today share?

Part of the answer lies in the transformations in social and cultural history under way in many fields: a shift from structural analysis to an explanation of agency, from large narratives to competing ones.³ Yet this change of perspective is also particular to the findings and methods of scholarship on Latin American history. The collected volume Debates sobre las independencias iberoamericanas offers an excellent starting point for exploring changes in the field by offering informed overviews of historiography in various Latin American countries, with the exception of the Spanish Caribbean (Spain and Portugal are also absent). In their introduction, Manuel Chust and José Antonio Serrano cite the historiographical break that occurred in the 1960s. Until then, there was "una interpretación maniquea" among Latin Americanists and across the political spectrum in regard to the causes, protagonists, and consequences of the wars of independence: these wars were "la forja de la nación," in which the distinct pueblos of America came together and threw off the divisions of colonial society (10-11). Heroes celebrated by the left and right alike led this collective struggle against the gachupines (Spaniards born in the Iberian Peninsula).

In the 1960s, an explosion in academic studies and the introduction of dependency theory and Marxism as explanatory paradigms challenged this consensus. Chust and Serrano signal four areas of innovation that made the greatest impact on the field: "primera, la historia regional; segunda, el cuestionamiento de la ineluctable independencia; tercera, el debate sobre el desempeño productivo de las estructuras económicas de los siglos XVIII y XIX; cuarta, los aportes de la historia social; y por último, el 'desmonte del culto a los héroes' " (15). Dependency theory and Marxism have since lost their explanatory edge, whereas democratization in many [End Page...