The Quandary of 1492

The year 1492 evokes a powerful symbolism.1 The symbolism is most charged, of course, among peoples whose historical memory connects them directly to the forces unleashed in 1492. For indigenous Americans, Latin Americans, minorities of Latino or Hispanic descent, and Spaniards and Portuguese, the sense of connection is strong. The year 1492 symbolises a momentous turn in historical destiny: for Amerindians, the ruinous switch from independent to colonised history; for Iberians, the launching of a formative historical chapter of imperial fame and controversy; for Latin Americans and the Latino diaspora, the painful birth of distinctive cultures out of power-laden encounters among Iberian Europeans, indigenous Americans, Africans, and the diverse offspring who both maintained and blurred the main racial categories.

But the symbolism extends beyond the Americas, and beyond the descendants of those most directly affected. The arrival of Columbus in America symbolises a historical reconfiguration of world magnitude. The fusion of native American and European histories into one history marked the beginning of the end of isolated stagings of human drama. Continental and subcontinental parameters of human action and struggle, accomplishment and failure, would expand into a world stage of power and witness. The expansion of scale revolutionised cultural and ecological geography. After 1492, the ethnography of the humanoid other proved an even more central fact of life, and the migrations of microbes, plants and animals, and cultural inventions would transform the history of disease, food consumption, land use, and production techniques.2 In addition, the year 1492 symbolises the beginnings of the unique world ascendance of European civilisation.

In Tlatelolco, in the symbolically laden Plaza of the Three Cultures, there is a famous plaque commemorating the fall of Tenochtitlán, after a heroic defence organised by Cuauhtemoc. According to the official words there inscribed, that fall ‘was neither a victory nor a defeat’, but the ‘painful birth’ of present-day Mexico, the mestizo Mexico glorified and institutionalised by the Revolution of 1910. Starting with the experiences of 1968 – which added yet another layer to the archaeological sedimentation already present in Tlatelolco – and continuing with greater force in the face of the current wave of indigenous movements throughout Latin America, as well as the crisis of indigenismo and of the postrevolutionary development model, many have begun to doubt the version of Mexican history represented therein.1 Yet it is important to emphasise that the Tlatelolco plaque, fogged and tarnished as it may be today, would never have been an option in the plazas of Lima or La Paz. The purpose of this essay is to define and explain this difference by reference to the modern histories of Peru, Bolivia and Mexico. In so doing, I hope to elucidate some of the past and potential future contributions of indigenous political cultures to the ongoing formation of nation-states in Latin America.

As suggested by the plaque in Tlatelolco, the process and symbolism of mestizaje has been central to the Mexican state's project of political and territorial reorganisation. By 1970, only 7.8 % of Mexico's population was defined as Indian, and divided into 59 different linguistic groups.

Research into the economic structures established by Spain in the Indies, based on sources which allow at least an approximate reconstruction of reality, dates only from the last thirty or forty years. The advances made, despite the uncertainty still surrounding certain aspects of the processes of production, appropriation and distribution, enable us to abandon traditional conceptions of this economy as isolated, closed, rustic in its technology, archaic or ‘feudal’.

The dominant profile of the economic structures imposed on New Spain and Peru, especially during a fifty-year cycle the nature and timing of which will be discussed below, was shaped by the transfer of the European system of mercantile production, in terms of both its technological bases and the legal structure and methods of calculation which governed its reproduction. Thus, we retain the adjective ‘colonial’ for this modern economy, in as much as its development was conditioned by the need to maximise shipments of silver to the metropolis and, in pursuit of this aim, the indigenous population was subjected to severe oppression. Likewise, the metropolis maintained a high level of control over the internal economic dynamic of these regions and a monopoly of their foreign trade.

Towards the mid-sixteenth century the expression ‘conquista y población’ was frequently invoked to characterise Spain's dominion in the New World. ‘Conquista’ referred to the initial feat of arms, by which the papal right to grant lands to the Catholic monarchs (hitherto only valid within the order of European nations) was imposed on the indigenous kingdoms and domains of the Indies.

The colonial state

Spain asserted its presence in America through an array of institutions. Traditional historiography studied these in detail, describing colonial policy and American responses in terms of officials, tribunals, and laws. The agencies of empire were tangible achievements and evidence of the high quality of Spanish administration. They were even impressive numerically. Between crown and subject there were some twenty major institutions, while colonial officials were numbered in their thousands. The Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias (1681) was compiled from 400,000 royal cedulas, which it managed to reduce to a mere 6,400 laws.1 Thus the institutions were described, classified, and interpreted from evidence which lay in profusion in law codes, chronicles, and archives. Perhaps there was a tendency to confuse law with reality, but the standard of research was high and derecho indiano, as it was sometimes called, was the discipline which first established the professional study of Latin American history.

This stage of research was brought to an end by new interests and changing fashions in history, and by a growing concentration on social and economic aspects of colonial Spanish America. Institutional history lost prestige, as historians turned to the study of Indians, rural societies, regional markets, and various aspects of colonial production and exchange, forgetting perhaps that the creation of institutions was an integral part of social activity and their presence or absence a measure of political and economic priorities. More recently, institutional history has returned to favour, though it is now presented as a study of the colonial state.

The persistent instability and disorder of Spanish American polities in the post-Independence period was undoubtedly one of the most perplexing concerns of Spanish American elites in the nineteenth century. It has remained a subject of interpretive debate by twentieth-century students of the area. The following article sketches several general approaches to the problem among twentieth-century interpreters, compares contemporary nineteenth-century analyses with the salient twentieth-century interpretations, and offers a critical commentary on the various sorts of twentieth-century analytical frameworks.

The three salient twentieth-century interpretations of political disorder in the nineteenth century are: (1) those that emphasise deeply embedded characteristics of Spanish American culture as underlying causes of political instability; (2) those that attribute political disorder to structural problems, particularly to weaknesses in the economic structure or shifts in the social structure; (3) those that see political instability as a reflection of conflicting ideologies, economic interests, and/or the aspirations or fears of identifiable social groups.

The distinctive feature of cultural interpretations of Latin American politics is their common belief that cultural characteristics are indelible and more-or-less unchangeable. And, since such cultural interpretations emphasise what might be considered ‘negative’ aspects of Spanish or Spanish American culture in order to explain defects in Spanish American politics, their assumption that cultures do not change over time tends to imbue such interpretations with a certain pessimism about the future of Spanish American politics.

An early twentieth-century exponent of cultural approaches to understanding Spanish-American political disorder was Francisco García Calderón, who, thinking particularly of the phenomenon of caudillismo, emphasised Spanish authoritarian individualism.

This is a piece of comparative history, not an exercise in folkloric whimsy. It does not attempt to probe the secrets of lo mexicano, la mexicanidad, or any of the other quasi-metaphysical concepts which litter the field of Mexican cultural history.1 Nor does it pay too much attention to those more positivistic analyses which try to encapsulate Mexican (political) culture in terms of statistical comparisons.2 Rather, it offers some comparative generalisations about Mexican history in the national period, stressing both broad patterns of socio-economic development and specific politico-cultural factors. Thus – for better or worse – its model is Barrington Moore rather than, say, Octavio Paz or Gabriel Almond. It also draws inspiration – and borrows its title – from the work of E. P. Thompson, which in turn has been developed by Eley and Blackbourn in the German context, Corrigan and Sayer in the English.3 Its purpose is to offer some explanations of the distinctiveness (as well as the commonality) of Mexico's history, compared to the history of Latin America, in the national period.4

Let us begin at the end. In the last fifty years, Mexico has experienced relatively rapid economic growth coupled with relative political and social stability.5 The achievements of the ‘stabilised development’ of the 1950s and 1960s are well known: a solid regime, rapid growth rates, low inflation, rising per capita income.6 And, while the 1980s were a decade of relative stagnation, Mexico's relative position within Latin America has not deteriorated.7 Furthermore, the prospects for future development – of a capitalist kind, with all that that entails – look better now than they did in the late 1980s; all the more if the Free Trade Agreement with the U.S.A. is concluded, as now seems probable.

Although in the literature there is almost a consensus that there was an advance of modernity in Brazil after 1870, tradition was sufficiently strong to maintain the values of a rural, patriarchal and hierarchical society. This modernity assumed characteristics that distinguished it from the classic model, represented by the Anglo-Saxon experience. In the period between 1870 and 1914 the ground was cleared for the conservative modernisation of the 1930s.

In 1949 Raúl Prebisch, an Argentine economist, published a study for the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), in which he attributed the failure to reach sustained economic growth in Latin America to the international division of labour. Based on research carried out by ECLA on the terms of trade between manufactures and primary goods, he concluded that – contrary to expectations – they moved against primary products. If prices decline as productivity increases (in competitive markets), industrial goods, where the technological improvements had been more significant, should have declined in price more than agricultural goods. The empirical results of the study showed the opposite.1 If the Latin American countries therefore wanted to benefit from technological progress, they should move towards industrialisation. Almost at the same time, based on the same empirical study, Hans Singer not only argued that the gains from trade had not been distributed equally, but also that foreign investments in the export sector were not part of the domestic economy, but represented an enclave belonging to the countries of the centre which received its benefits.2 Singer advanced an argument that became popular later on; he noted the existence in the underdeveloped countries of a dual economy with two sectors each with different productivity and segmented markets: a modern sector linked to the central countries and a traditional sector linked to the rest of the economy. Also, from the critics of the classical theory of trade, another argument was put forward: the different income elasticities of demand for manufactures and agricultural goods (Engels’ law) suggested that expenditure on agricultural goods would decline in relative terms as incomes rose, hurting the terms of trade for primary products.3

The current enthusiasm for trade liberalisation in Latin America, and indeed for a broad-ranging return to the market, has as its backdrop the widespread disillusion with the protectionist model of the 1950s and 1960s. Import substituting industrialisation (ISI) is seen as having used tariff barriers and controls to generate an extremely inefficient industry, suffering under a weight of state bureaucracy, with often inappropriate direct state participation. Its excessive import needs, for all its import-substituting origin, are directly related to the generation of the debt crisis.1 The high and poorly-structured tariffs brought tariff-hopping foreign investment on inappropriate terms. Repressed domestic interest rates allowed such firms to borrow locally at negative real rates and crowd out locals who then borrowed abroad. This inefficiency, plus the overvalued exchange rates implicit in heavy protection, made exports of manufactures unthinkable, and thus condemned the incipient industry to severe limitations of market size as well as condemning the economies to growing balance of payments non-viability. This in turn severely affected industrial progress by limiting growth and exposing firms to stop-go policies.

In turn, ISI policies themselves are seen as having originated with the turning point of the 1929 depression, when the export-led growth mechanism essentially broke down and at least the more sizeable Latin American economies turned fatally inwards. The trajectory from 1930 to the ‘fully-fledged’ ISI model of the 1950s and 1960s is typically left vague.

This article will attempt to show that recent research now allows us a much fuller and more nuanced view of the evolution from the export economy model of the early century through to the later ISI model.2

In the thirty years between 1950 and 1980, Latin America experienced rapid growth. During this period, output expanded at an annual rate of 5.5% with per capita increases averaging 2.7% a year. Table 1 provides country details. The star is clearly Brazil, whose share in regional product increased from less than a quarter to more than a third. At the other extreme are two groups: the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile and Uruguay), whose mid-century leading position in the region was eroded by below average performance; and a group of smaller countries, including several in Central America. On average, Latin America's record, viewed from an immediate post-World War II perspective, is impressive. It far exceeded the target of the Alliance for Progress implemented in 1961, which called for an annual rate of 2% per capita. It also compared very favourably with European per capita income growth in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, which was 1.3% from 1850 to 1900 and 1.4% between 1900 and 1950. Long-term US economic growth has been at 1.8%.

Yet two factors combine to make the 1950–80 Latin American growth performance seem less positive. One is its dramatic reversal in the 1980s, a period in which GDP per capita fell by 8.3%. By 1989, with the exception of Brazil, Chile, Colombia and the Dominican Republic, per capita GDP had fallen below its 1980 level. At the extreme, Venezuela, Nicaragua and El Salvador show levels below those attained in 1960. The 1980s have truly been a lost decade and thus one tends to underestimate the earlier achievement.

As the quincentennial of what we do not dare to call the discovery of the New World approaches, Spanish America remains impervious to the festive mood reigning in Spain. The reasons are painfully obvious: a region facing an at best uncertain future, while trying to close the wounds opened by a quarter-century of acute sociopolitical confrontation, and still reeling under the blows inflicted to its economy during the unlamented ‘lost decade’ just closed, has good reason to wonder whether it has anything to celebrate.

Justified as it may be, the despondency caused by recent misfortunes does not offer the best inspiration to achieve a fair and balanced view of a five-centuries long historical experience. It is enough to compare the assessments inspired by the current centennial milestone with those of one century ago to discover how dangerous it is to pass judgement on such an experience by projecting onto it the dominant features of the immediate present.

Yet in 1892 the times were not much more brilliant than today; several among the largest neo-hispanic countries were suffering the devastating impact of the worst economic crisis in their history: these circumstances did not, however, seriously undermine the optimism with which they looked at their future, an optimism that encouraged the founding fathers of their national historiographies to take in their stride the sombre aspects of the national past. If today a very different approach seems in order, it is not only because the atrocious history of our century has all but killed the faith nineteenth-century historians deposited in all kinds of manifest destinies, but perhaps also because of the justified suspicion that what Latin America faces today is different in kind from the streaks of bad luck all too frequent in its short history, that the world-wide transformations that reached spectacular culmination in the breakdown of the ‘really existing socialism’ are full of menace for the region, and the practical wisdom distilled from the experience of the past five centuries cannot offer any valid guidance for the challenges of the ‘new world order’ that is currently striving to be born.