Race and Ethnicity in Latin American History by Vincent Peloso

Author:Vincent Peloso [Peloso, Vincent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, History, Latin America, Social History
ISBN: 9781136331718
Google: X_UjAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-03-21T05:56:07+00:00

Elite Divisions, the Church, and Government Income

Creole elites were ideologically divided into liberals and conservatives, although the distinctions between the two were not always sharp. Liberals generally favored free trade and were often hostile to the Church. Conservatives tended to support a strong Church role in politics, and some conservatives hoped that republican government might fail. Fear that Latin American republics might be subject to uprisings similar to the Tupac Amaru rebellion and the Haitian Revolution drove some conservative creoles to devise schemes to revive monarchy in Latin America. Conservatives often supported caudillos, men with military experience and political ambition, to lead their countries as an alternative to monarchy. In the conservative elite view, a military leader could more easily impose social order, which was preferable to social plurality. This outlook implied that the indigenous and the people of color were an uncontrollable and unpredictable monolith, incapable of living under the social and political rules of republican society. On the subject of race, the broader creole elite was in agreement. Many creoles, liberal and conservative, believed that the indigenous and people of color in general could not be educated.

Creole elites did not propose an alternative to Spanish as the primary language of the republics, or to teach Nahuatl, Quiché, Guaraní, or Quechua alongside Spanish. It was easily argued that the indigenous languages were not languages of international commerce and that the commercial sector had to speak at least Spanish or Portuguese if not French and English to do business. Nor were proposals made to teach Spanish to the indigenous. Indeed, there were few proposals in the early decades of Latin American independence to invest in public education of any kind. It was widely believed by liberal and conservative creoles throughout the region that elite children needed an education if they were to grow up to conduct commerce or the business of the state, but the conviction was also widespread among them that the education of the popular sectors was an issue so complex that it was best left to the future. Despite the rise of positive feelings among some sectors of the elite toward the indigenous past, it was strongly emphasized that the past was over and that while all sectors shared the glories of those pre-imperial developments, the future belonged to the creole descendants of the biological mixture generated by the sixteenth-century European invasions. Most creoles were willing to leave the task of educating the indigenous and people of color to the Church.

Financial problems plagued the new republican leaders. The decade and a half of independence wars was costly. Every new republic was left with huge debts from the purchase of arms and other war-related goods. By 1829, government income no longer matched expenses, and most of their loans could no longer be repaid. The social and political fallout from this indebtedness was linked in some ways to problems of race and ethnicity. For example, a government’s failure to control the public debt and pay off foreign loans frequently

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