On the First America

I notice that the only review of this text calls it “concise.” It’s quite the opposite. In fact, it’s a leviathan of a text. With nearly 700 pages of text, Brading chews on a lot of material here. More than anything, this text reads like an intellectual history, making it even more difficult to absorb. It doesn’t help that Brading’s aims are truly ambitious.

In short, Brading is trying to find the origins of the liberal state in Latin America. Given the strength of the centralized state in colonial Spanish America and the importance of Europeans to their functioning, how did the peoples of Latin America develop a unique, separate identity? While there is a lot to be said about Latin American identity, Brading finds its origins in two publications written in the early seventeenth century. The first, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios reales de los Incas (whose mother was an Incan princess) was produced in Peru; the second, Juan de Torquemada’s Monarquía indiana was produced in Mexico. Unlike the accounts of the Spanish conquest at the time—which were nearly all developed by Italian humanists—these texts frame pre-Columbian Aztec and Inca society in a positive light. In Brading’s view, this is largely a reflection of Bartolomé de las Casas’s findings, who argued that American Indians were not intrinsically “slaves,” but were as culturally sophisticated as the Greeks and Romans (still a slight from our modern eyes, but one nearly as catastrophic as the opposing argument made by Juan Ginés de Supúlveda.

Out of these texts, creoles—or white Spaniards born in the Americas—developed a sense of identity as Americans rather than being Europeans. Much of their identity also came out of a sense of grievance against the peninuslares who held privileged positions in the Spanish colonial system. Trying to compete with them, who largely took on positions within the colonial state, huge numbers of creoles were educated in Latin America’s many (Spanish) universities and joined the Catholic Church.

From this educated, second-class, and deeply American identity, Brading argues that they produced an ideology that he calls “creole patriotism”—a combination of “Catholic republicanism” and “insurgent nationalism” which first took hold in Mexico and had its first real outbreak under the insurrection led by Guanajuato native Father Miguel Hidalgo. Creole patriotism caught fire, spread throughout Latin America, and inspired new movements throughout the rest of the region. However, after the coming of Latin American independence, the vacuum in power caused by the end of the primacy of church (which partially happened with the eviction of the Jesuits) and centralized state allowed all types of caudillos and caciques to emerge. Liberal reform movements throughout the region largely succeeded in weakening the position of caudillos, setting the stage for the modern Latin American states that we see today.

The text is organized chronologically, which works well for a text like this. Part 1 covers intellectual ideas about the Americas from the moment Columbus sighted the Bahamas to the publication of Garcilaso and Torquemada’s works and includes a great analysis of “the Great Debate” between Las Casas and Supúlveda. Part 2 looks at the rise of creole identity between the publication of those books to the expulsion of the Jesuits. Part 3 is a study of the development of creole patriotism as an ideology and its institutionalization within various states, it covers the period from the expulsion of the Jesuits to the administration of Benito Juárez—much of the writing here is on Latin American independence movements.

Fortunately, Brading does not draw a straight line between the emergence of creole identity and the development of the liberal state. The reader is able to experience the seemingly perpetual setbacks faced by creoles while still seeing their aims come to fruition, if in a modified form.

I don’t know enough about this subject to evaluate the text, but I am certain that there is more necessary to understand the development of creole identity and the liberal state than merely its intellectual milieu and creole competition with peninsulares, but a lot here seemed convincing. If Brading were to fit into any of the typologies examined by Jorge Domínguez in Insurrection or Loyalty: The Breakdown of the Spanish American Empire, I believe that he would say the main cause of Latin American independence was intra-elite competition.

Fascinating stuff.