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132 CHAPTER FIVE The Rise and Fall of Popular Politics After a day out drinking in late October 1874, Étienne Cassez arrived at his home in the coastal tobacco province of El Carmen only to be arrested by the district alcalde, taken to the municipal jail, and placed in the stocks. Upon his release Cassez fled to Barranquilla, where he reported the incident to the French consul, whose formal complaint to national and Bolívar state officials prompted Alcalde Ignacio Mendoza’s summary removal from office and initiated an investigation into the incident. The investigative commission recorded testimonials about the episode from merchants, farmers, and day laborers, including one tobacco grower who confided that Cassez was a “provocative and perverse drunkard,” who, if not for the graciousness of the pueblo, “would have been taught a lesson long before now.” Others clarified that the Frenchman had been arrested not for drunkenness but for assault, which directed investigators to a deposition previously taken from the victim , an illiterate laborer named Casimir Valencia. The deposition asserted that Étienne Cassez, “completely intoxicated on liquor,” had attacked Señor Valencia, “and that according to what was expressed, when he was carrying out the beating, did it only because Valencia was black.” Valencia and two eyewitnesses had then reported the racist attack to the alcalde, instigating the lesson from which the pueblo had restrained itself for so long.1 The fragmentary records do not divulge the outcome of the investigation or what became of Étienne Cassez, Ignacio Mendoza, and Casimir Valencia, but they do evince something of the politics of a Caribbean community at the height of the Rionegro constitutional era. Alcalde Mendoza had etched the local boundaries of belonging by punishing a “perverse” foreigner, and perhaps aware of where his power lay, he had taken action based on the word of unlettered men whom official documents accorded the same title of respect as literate merchants. The alcalde had also meted out justice in the name of fighting racial discrimination and in doing so, notably, had violated etiquette by publicly identifying a citizen by color. If Mendoza’s hand in producing Valencia’s deposition led its veracity to be questioned, he nevertheless justified official action through the will of the populace. Local determinations, however, had not ensured the alcalde’s position in the eyes of political superiors, and the events in El Carmen The Rise and Fall of Popular Politics133 demonstrated how authority established in the name of the people was easily undone by competing sources of rule. The milieu of the Cassez incident contrasted with the lettered republic and the commercial sphere, as Caribbean citizens joined civic cultures that nurtured many emancipation-era popular practices. Unlike the exclusions built into national law and letters or the expanding state coercion to enforce industrial freedom, coastal politics in the two decades after passage of the postwar Rionegro Constitution in 1863 offered citizens opportunities to demand and receive representation, validation, and on occasions, material concessions. Public life developed boisterous and even violent procedures— what Candelario Obeso called “commotions”—that provoked national costumbrista writers to depict ungovernable pueblos or the provincial death of citizenship. Contrary to these fictionalized versions of local politics, however , actual bosses like Ignacio Mendoza did not control all aspects of civil affairs, and at times plebeian citizens pushed them toward more substantive and responsive forms of recognition. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, the coast witnessed tax revolts, land occupations, the parishioner takeover of church parishes, and plebeians’ demands for public legitimacy of their families . Many civil and church officials who refused to acknowledge the standing of the local populace met with mass repudiations of their authority. Yet as the alcalde and other regional leaders also discovered, these commotions contained a generative force that could be channeled toward personal or partisan ends. By the late 1870s, Caribbean cliques led by Luis A. Robles in Magdalena and Rafael Núñez in Bolívar struggled for control of the Liberal Party. This factional rivalry, which occurred amid Liberal supremacy in the region, opened politics to new participants at the same time that it tied the legacy of the 1850s reforms to the party’s fate. Ultimately , the particular mix of partisanship and popular politics proved unstable. Caribbean citizens who exacted tangible and intangible gains from their role in public life provoked a growing chorus of national leaders to call for an end to political mobilizations, yet not until coastal Liberal leaders joined with Bogotá letrados did serious...

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