Religion, Culture and Society in Colombia: Medellin and Antioquia 1850-1930 (review)

Antioquia, one of the largest and most industrialized of Colombia's thirty-two departments, has traditionally been regarded as unique in a country characterized by regional differences. Before 1950, Antioqueños were known for their industriousness, thrift, and intense family and regional loyalties, while their society was seen as more egalitarian and democratic than elsewhere in Colombia. By contrast, in the 1980s, Medellín, the capital, was most famous for supporting a vicious drug cartel. The department had the highest proportion of violent deaths in Colombia, and huge influxes of illegal drug profits fostered the decline of education and a widening gap between social classes

Londoño-Vega sets out to analyze this remarkable turnabout by focusing on the interaction of social classes in the earlier "utopian" period between 1850 and 1930. In the first section of her book, she employs methodologies drawn from cultural and institutional history, art and literary analysis, and sociology to analyze the crucial role played by the Catholic Church, as well as the progress of parishes, devotional associations, religious communities, private and public religiosity, and numerous philanthropic societies, in fostering social solidarity. The ultra-montane Catholic Church, contrary to popular assumption, was a key factor in the material progress of the region. By fostering popular, technical education, and the development of cultural societies, it encouraged the intermingling of social classes and the development of a regional social desire to achieve "civilization" (303).

In the second section, using the same approach, she turns her attention to achievements in education and the emergence of literary groups, public libraries, social clubs, and other associations created to promote good manners, temperance, cultivated music, and moral improvement. Londoño-Vega argues that the proliferation of these organizations encouraged "a complex and closely integrated society, with an optimistic and constructive view of itself" (book jacket).

Based on an imposing collection of materials found in local and national archives, periodicals, diaries, autobiographies, travel accounts, statutes, statistics, collections of visual sources, as well as other published and unpublished sources, Londoño-Vega's detailed and persuasive history of the church and education is a major contribution to our understanding of the profound impact of organized religion not only in Colombia but in all of nineteenth-century Latin America and Europe, a topic understudied perhaps due to the unproven assumptions of secularized scholarship in the twentieth century (305).

In "A Final Comment," Londoño-Vega revisits the question why Antioquia's tightly knit social fabric disintegrated in the years after 1930. She suggests that the influx of rural migrants to Medellín, the national tendencies toward political strife and violence, and a general decline of community participation vitiated the quality of public instruction while growing poverty and unemployment produced high rates of criminality and prostitution. As a result, during the severe economic crisis of the 1980s, Medellín fell prey to expectations of easy money brought by the cocaine trade, and rural guerrillas found northern Antioquia "attractive for its strategic location, its rich natural resources, its remoteness, and relative absence of authority" (312). Antioquia may have fallen on hard times in recent decades, but Londoño-Vega concludes that its social disintegration might well have been worse had it not been for the legacy of "dense sociability" and the relatively fluid channels that joined private initiatives, government, and the Catholic Church, which were cemented in the era between 1850 and 1930 (315).