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

4 The Lettered Republic

99 CHAPTER F OUR The Lettered Republic Because you see me the skin The color of ink Perhaps you believe that My soul is also black? —Candelario Obeso, Cantos populares de mi tierra, 1877 All the others are sickly and of an ambiguous race. Their endeavor is to be white and pretty. For me, it is an honor to be black and my ugliness delights me. Human regeneration is in my race. Science has already said this. —Candelario Obeso, Lecturas para ti, 1878 Obeso was an Othello without a Desdemona who would love him. —José María Rivas Groot, La lira nueva, 1886 The bogas’ absence from the crafting of policies that impinged on their lives reflected their physical and above all social distance from the world of men who monopolized the writing of law and the written word itself. While illiteracy denied most plebeian citizens firsthand knowledge of legal codes, the learned minority cultivated intellectual and cultural distinctions to explain the existence of a republic with a vast unlearned majority. The midcentury social struggles did compel discussions of rights in the generation after the civil war, a period when Liberal letrados consolidated influence over Colombian law and letters. As political debate was driven by an expanding print medium, the very venue for public engagement intensified differences between literate national leaders and nonliterate provincials. Educated men assumed stewardship of the legacy of emancipation with ambivalence, their hold on power complicated by the preservation of a gulf between cultural exclusions and universal citizenship.1 The paradox of the national Liberal leadership’s simultaneous promotion of social distinctions and democratic values testified to the strength of Colombia’s lettered republic. Less a physical location than a social network , with Bogotá as its universally acknowledged base, the lettered republic encompassed men who converted their erudition into public stature , active citizenship, and administrative élan. The university-trained 100The Lettered Republic letrados practiced reading and writing as modes of cultural attainment in a society without vast disparities of wealth albeit one where literacy touched as few as one person in ten and primary schooling reached only one in fifty.2 They assumed the reins of the republic despite their concentration in Bogotá exactly because this physical isolation ensured their position, according to José María Samper, as “great agents of democratic civilization” over the unlettered populations of the lowland provinces. Inspired by European and North American ideas of progress, these agents universalized their customs in part by downplaying the status of the ubiquitous oral cultures in their midst. In their attempts to remake national life, Samper and his contemporaries, including a few provincial brethren, saw their role not as direct emissaries but as models for the majority of citizens to emulate.3 If most letrados understood the need for economic development, they nonetheless preferred to preoccupy themselves with the major institutions of their democratic civilization, education and print culture. After 1850, they passed several significant reforms over public instruction, from the freedom of learning during emancipation to the major reform of 1870 known as the Organic Decree over universal primary education. Each systemic change in schooling embodied particular features of liberal civilization , and while letrados understood basic instruction as a precondition for citizenship, their adherence to sophisticated learning often trumped the attempts to promote literacy. By framing education reform as a moralizing emulation of literate culture and the eradication of barbarism, letrados shored up their own authority at the expense of constitutional rights and guarantees. Debates over education appeared in the newspapers and books that proliferated as vehicles for the political rhetoric many literate men considered the preeminent form of public action.4 In the largely unregulated press, writers of every political faction and partisan persuasion expressed ambivalence over how to reconcile a privileged erudition with democratic governance, the refinement of the minority with the coarseness of the majority. As a consequence of this ambivalence, prose, poetry, political philosophy, and legal thought appeared in the public sphere alongside costumbrismo stories filled with racial stereotypes of the same lowland populations expected to emulate lettered culture. Liberal policies engendered fierce opposition and counterreform, yet even when education efforts and print culture fueled partisan antagonisms, they nonetheless helped ensure bipartisan lettered supremacy, one written for a time in the language of liberty and rights.5 The Lettered Republic101 As the church and Conservative opposition asserted its influence in the 1870s and early 1880s, Candelario...