Chapter 4: Independence and nation-building

Notes
Wars of independence began in 1792:
 African slaves and free men and women in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) revolted
against French rule and achieved sovereignty in 1802 (Chapter 3).
  By 1810 rebellions had engulfed most Spanish colonies
 with the 1824 defeat of royal troops in Ayacucho, Peru, Spanish crown rule effectively
ended in most of LAC.
 Spain formally recognized Mexico’s independence only in 1836, and it held on to its
Caribbean colonies for quite some time.
 after decades of unsuccessful secessionist wars, Spain lost Cuba, along with Puerto Rico
(and, in the Pacific, the Philippines), to the US after the 1898 Spanish-American War.
 While Cuba officially gained its independence from the US in 1902, the Platt
Amendment to its constitution – written under US rule – severely limited its sovereignty
for decades.

Independence had far-reaching consequences for LAC peoples. The decades following colonial
rule witnessed concerted drives by Creole elites to more effectively govern and extract resources
from their largely rural populations. These attempts often translated into strategies that further
stimulated the expansion of haciendas, plantations, mining, and cattle ranching. These strategies
also included policies that undermined the economic autonomy of peasant communities by, for
example, attacking the foundations of communally owned lands, or stimulating the growth of
economic enclaves geared toward the production of commodities for the world market.
(Sanabria, 2019)

Forging nation-states
Nation states build infrastructure to unify their huge, rugged, culturally and geographically
fragmented territories. (Railways, bridges, etc.) In building nation-states, elites faced the task of
crafting an “imagined community” with a common sense of nationhood free of cultural, racial,
and other kinds of divisions (Anderson 2006). They met this challenge by disseminating print
media, establishing national school systems, casting their sight on gender, promulgating national
cuisines, promoting racial homogeneity, and establishing national health programs. (Sanabria,
2019)

Print media and schools

Anderson emphasized years ago how “print-languages” were important for the emergence of
European nationalism. He stressed that newspapers, periodicals, and gazettes created “unified
fields of exchange” through more powerful national languages that transcended language
dialects/speech communities. By linking people, events and practices – “this marriage with that
ship, this price with that bishop” – print-languages also created a symbolically and emotionally
charged geographic space with which the public increasingly identified (2006:62). (Sanabria,
2019)
The expansion of public education was also an important mechanism of nation-state formation. It
is partly through public schooling that national symbols are conveyed, internalized, become
dominant, and the nation-state legitimized. Public education contributes to a common bond of
national consciousness by transmitting a national culture and identity transcending local and
regional linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences – and competing visions of the past. (This is
one reason why state public education is usually mandatory.) The ability of public education to
widely instill a sense of national identity depends on whether elite factions reach a minimum
consensus on state rule; if they fail to do so, then either a national education system is simply out
of the question, or its capacity to generate a national consciousness is severely limited. (Sanabria,
2019)

Gendered states of mind

Dominant masculinity came to be identified with the public world of political reconstruction and
the feminine with what remained outside. . . . Both men and women might subscribe to liberal
and republican citizenship but in separately engendered spheres: the men in public governance
(politics), the women as reproducers and as managers (though not the ultimate authority) of
private life (the domestic economy). Good masculinity entailed public virtue; good femininity,
private morality . . . [women were] increasingly identified as mother[s] or prospective mother[s]
of the patria, and the feminine with family values, order and nurturance. Women could play their
part in building new societies from within the family, the pillar of the state; they are defined in
relation to men, not as free-standing individuals.
(Davies and Brewster, et al. 2006:269)

Health and the diseased nation

Syphilis, tuberculosis, and smallpox were among the many Old World diseases that decimated
indigenous peoples (Chapter 3). After independence, LAC governments viewed disease as a
major stumbling block at developing viable modern nation-states and forcefully turned to its
containment through public health measures.

During the colonial era diseases were typically not considered matters of state concern but as
individual aliments to be treated by physicians or clergy. It was only after syphilis and other
diseases were understood as contagious and potentially spreading from one person to another –
that is, when their consequences breached the boundary between the private and public spheres –
that they “became the center of debate, fear and anxiety” (González Espitia 2009:248). 

 Syphilis

was a cosmopolitan disease . . . one that always appeared side by side with what was considered
civilized. It was a disease that equalized both hemispheres; it was a degenerative menace that
could not be connected to a specific Latin American racial group as a vector of decay. Thus, at
the national level, syphilis was a very egalitarian, democratic and republican ghost, and its
 characteristics did not provide an easy way to structure a discourse of segregation based on
race.
(González Espitia 2009:265)

 Tuberculosis
Some claimed that alcoholism and excessive sexuality (including masturbation) debilitated men
and women’s bodies, making them less resistant to disease. For others, poor hygiene in
overcrowded tenement housing was the primary reason for the spread of the disease-causing
mycobacterium. Still yet others thought that domestic promiscuity facilitated the spread of TB
from parents to children. Despite the debate on its causes, public health officials agreed that TB
was primarily an urban and working-class affliction. 
 Smallpox

Sometimes adopted and modified . . . health policies and medical campaigns, but they also
sometimes covertly resisted them by hiding children from inoculators, fleeing from them, or
fighting against them to a degree that necessitated the military occupation of some communities
and the prosecution, physical punishment, and jailing of indigenous elites who refused to submit
to health care programs. . . . In the face of these different forms of resistance, personnel engaged
in antiepidemic campaigns had to account for the perceptions of Indigenous peoples, which
meant negotiating with Indian agents such as medical specialists, village leaders, heads of
households, and parents who had significant influence on local and indigenous health care.
(Few 2015:17)
Figure 4.1 Cinco de Mayo celebration, Washington, D.C.

Source: Rob Crandall/Alamy Stock Photo

I had happened to be in Guadalajara on May 5, so I had hurried downtown, expecting to

find parades, music, dancers, and orators. I thought the center of action would be the
cathedral plaza, so I picked out a spot on the sidewalk and waited to see the activities . . .
and waited . . . and waited. Hours later, I returned to my cousins’ house, disappointed.
Rather than witness the most spectacular Cinco de Mayo festivities of my life, I was
witness to the fact that it is not a major celebration in Mexico.
(Hayes-Bautista 2012:2)

Possible essay questions:

What role did religion play in negotiating cultural rationales regarding health and disease?
What role did education play as a mechanism of nation-state formation?
In Latin America, the nation-states emerged as a civil society that had not acquired the character
of a national society. If we think of the conditions in which society was at that time as the arrival
of immigrants to populate the country and work the land: but at the same time with different
languages, customs and values. The society did not have a national identity. Therefore, the
formation of a national conscience in society was necessary, that is, a sense of belonging to a
nation, a common language, symbols such as the national flag and anthem, traditions and beliefs.
The most suitable means to shape that collective identity was education and it will become
mandatory and free, since through the educational system it was possible to install these
necessary elements, such as imparting the same language to all, religion and respect for certain
values, etc. This was also important, to achieve a certain social order and achieve the adhesion of
society to accept the values of this state.