Tutor Lesson

Latin American independence was complicated by the region’s size and diversity, Napoleon’s interventions, and the fact that political revolutions did not always produce deep social change.

Aristotle would have written more if he had done any cooking.Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

• Peninsulares: white people born in Spain.
• Creoles: white people born in the Americas.
• Native Americans.
• Enslaved Africans.

Religious life makes this mixture especially visible. Native Americans continued to call the Virgin of Guadalupe Tonantzin, the Indigenous earth goddess, while abundant blood in Mexican religious imagery recalled Aztec ritual practices. Blending also shaped food, secular music, and clothing.

1. White.
2. Black.
3. Mestizo: a person of white and American Indian ancestry.
4. Mulatto: the historical category for a person of white and black ancestry. The term is now considered offensive.

From the sixteenth century onward, authorities repeatedly tried to sort the growing mixed-race population into castes. Casta paintings attempted to display every supposed racial combination. Yet these rankings were not fixed: a successful person assigned to a lower caste could receive gracias al sacar and become legally white. By 1800, mixed-race people made up about one quarter of the population.

Brazil differed from most of Latin America because Portugal, rather than Spain, ruled it. Its Creoles wanted independence from Portuguese-born Peninsulares without surrendering their own privileged position, giving the movement a conservative character.

1. After Napoleon seized Portugal in 1807, the Portuguese royal family and court moved to Brazil.
2. King João enjoyed Rio de Janeiro and remained there after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo.
3. Portuguese demands brought João back to Lisbon in 1821, while Prince Pedro stayed in Brazil.
4. Creoles organized around a separate Brazilian identity and created a Brazilian Party to campaign for independence.
5. In 1822, they persuaded Pedro to proclaim an independent constitutional monarchy with himself as king.

Brazil therefore gained independence with little bloodshed. Plantation owners remained at the summit of society, and the preserved hierarchy helps explain why Brazil did not fully abolish slavery until 1888, the latest abolition in the New World.

In 1808, Napoleon installed his brother on Spain’s throne and sought to introduce French revolutionary liberalism. Peninsular aristocrats in New Spain opposed this program because they preferred divine-right monarchy and a powerful church. Creoles, hoping to weaken Peninsular control, initially declared loyalty to the French-appointed Spanish king.

1. Padre Hidalgo, a rebellious priest, led a huge peasant uprising. Some Creoles supported it because it challenged the Peninsulares.
2. Hidalgo’s mestizo followers often attacked Creoles as well as Peninsulares because both groups appeared to them as domineering white elites.
3. Although tens of thousands participated, this first revolt eventually collapsed.
4. Father Morelos led a second and more radical peasant rebellion. He declared independence in 1813, and the struggle lasted until his death in 1815.
5. Because Morelos was mestizo, he received little Creole backing, and revolutionary energy declined.

The situation shifted in 1820. Spain again had a Spanish monarch, but a liberal revolution produced a constitution that reduced church power. Mexican elites who had supported Spain then joined the Creoles, seeking independence as a way to safeguard their privileges.

Creole general Iturbide allied with Guerrero, a mestizo rebel commander, and together they won independence. Most Peninsulares departed for Spain. Iturbide became Mexico’s king in 1822, making this a revolution directed against representative rule. The military removed him within a year, after which Mexico became a republic.

By 1811, trained Creole revolutionaries had formed a junta, taken Caracas, and founded a Venezuelan republic. They could not extend their authority inland because the Llaneros—mixed-race cowboys of the interior—remained loyal to the Spanish king.

Bolívar demonstrated endurance by crossing flooded plains and going without sleep. These displays helped convince the Llaneros to stop fighting for Spain and join the opposition. He soon captured Bogotá, the viceregal capital, and his forces controlled Caracas and Quito by 1822.

Argentina’s general José de San Martín was likewise essential to Spain’s defeat. He commanded expeditions against Spanish forces in Chile and led another major campaign in Lima.

The final Spanish viceroy was captured at the Battle of Ayacucho in December 1824, ending Spanish rule across Latin America.

By 1825, nearly all the Western Hemisphere was outside European rule, apart from Canada and a few Caribbean territories. This rapid transformation was striking because Spain and Portugal had controlled much of the region for almost three centuries.

• Popular sovereignty became established in the New World, and permanent European control over Latin America ended.
• Despite Bolívar’s hope for a united South America, the region quickly separated into individual states whose people saw themselves as distinct from Europe and from neighboring societies.
• This development anticipated the formation of European nation-states in the middle of the nineteenth century, placing Latin America at the forefront of that historical pattern.
• Latin America’s cultural history also anticipated the modern importance of multiculturalism.

• Social hierarchy endured: Peninsulares departed, but rich Creoles occupied the highest position.
• The Catholic Church retained great influence over everyday life, unlike established churches weakened by the French and American revolutions.
• Patriarchy remained powerful despite women’s military participation. Juana Azurduy led a cavalry charge against Spanish troops in Bolivia, yet women could not vote nationally in Mexico until 1953 or in Peru until 1955, and ideas like Mary Wollstonecraft’s did not gain broad acceptance.
• War brought enormous loss and did not guarantee stability. Mexico’s independence conflict killed 425,000 people, while nineteenth-century warfare in Venezuela caused as many as one million deaths.
• Struggles described as fights for freedom were followed during the next two centuries by many military dictatorships that defended private property at the cost of egalitarian government.

Consider two newly independent countries: Brazil, where independence came through a conservative process led from above, and Mexico, where a longer and more violent struggle drew in several social groups.