The Work of Recognition: Caribbean Colombia and the Postemancipation Struggle for Citizenship

Introduction

1 Introduction In return for my friendship I ask only a single thing of you, . . . You should say how citizens Are black, white, Indian . . . If someone wants To climb to the top, He should look for a ladder Somewhere else; . . . . The time of the slaves Is over; Today we are as free As the white. . . . —Candelario Obeso, Cantos populares de mi tierra, 1877 This is a historical study inspired by the work of a poet. Candelario Obeso was born free in 1849, on the eve of New Granada’s slave emancipation, in the Magdalena River town of Mompós, in what would become the Caribbean region of Colombia. Raised and initially educated on the coast, Obeso eventually made his way to Bogotá, which afforded him access to higher learning, a flourishing print culture, and the political patronage that signaled his status as a lettered individual, a letrado. In the national capital during the decade before his death in 1884 he became a prolific writer of polemics, language manuals, legal documents, and poems, whose audience was a close-knit if fractious group of leading politicians and intellectuals. Obeso orbited at the social margins of his reading public , and while he sought various means of belonging in this lettered world, his decision to identify as negro was often taken as a provocation by the men from whom he sought respect. Of his extensive oeuvre one provocation in particular caught the eye of Obeso’s readers, a small poetry collection from 1877, Cantos populares de mi tierra (Popular Songs of My Land), which secured his reputation and to a great degree defined his life.1 2Introduction No Colombian in the generation after slavery articulated the problem of citizenship more trenchantly than Obeso. The thirteen brief poems of Cantos, written in Caribbean dialect, are spoken or sung by plebeian women and men who often call themselves black and who demand respect and rights. In “Epresion re mi amitá” (Expression of my Friendship), a “poor black man” offers allegiance to a “white” leader, but only if the latter first recognizes all citizens. The precondition for any politics, the man insists , must be equal standing for “black, white, Indian” citizens, or perhaps for citizens who are a mixture of the three. A universal sense of belonging undergirds this friendship, which in the poem is not a private relationship but a public bond of affection that does not abrogate differences between individuals. In another poem, “Seranata” (Serenade), another black man makes other demands, this time for an end to coercion and for his personal sacrifices in war not to serve merely as a “ladder” in the white man’s bid for power. By invoking emancipation (“the time of the slaves / Is over”), the man extends freedom beyond the legal fiat of abolition to a meaningful independence and reciprocity between blacks and whites. Freedom for the speaker is not just the absence of black bondage but also the foundation, and the consequence, of social relationships between Colombian citizens.2 Although the two poems are remarkable for many reasons, their articulation of irreconcilable demands for recognition is particularly striking. The speaker of the first poem calls for, and calls into being, a universal if multihued citizenry. He petitions for a radical equivalence in which racial differences do not prevent parity in civil standing; on the contrary, differences require formal equality as an assurance of a meaningful public life. The speaker of the second poem claims something else entirely: regard for a collective “we” based on a particular experience of freedom not shared by the majority of that same multihued citizenry. Formal equivalence between defined groups, or of a citizenry sprung from once-defined groups, gives way to equality won through the historical struggle against slavery. If both speakers desire the similar outcome of a polity where racial difference does not preclude equalitarian citizenship, they nevertheless seek that goal by divergent paths and through different relationships with their fellow citizens. The lettered rejection of Candelario Obeso’s dual vision of citizenship as multiracial belonging and black freedom was widespread, and it was this general denial that informed the writing of subsequent narratives about Afro-Colombians. Despite the sizable national population of African descent, estimated at 10 million strong, they appear in most published histories as slaves, regardless of how few people were enslaved at Introduction3 any given time.3 In part this fixation on slavery has...