Chapter 04 Summary

CHAPTER 4

In the half-century after independence, traditional peasant communities across Latin America, like others around the world, faced new pressures on their landholding and communal identity. The expansion of commercial agriculture, often geared toward export markets, led capitalists to covet lands formerly devoted to local subsistence farming. Liberal nation-builders sought to break down these formerly autonomous communities and transform their residents into individual citizens and private landowners, tenants, or wage earners in a modern, capitalist economy. The Liberal modernizers' assault on the privileges of the Catholic Church struck at an identity that, for everyday people, was often stronger than their national allegiance.

Everyday people responded to these pressures and contested their exclusion and exploitation in myriad ways. Indigenous people supported caudillos and politicians – often Conservative – who promised, and occasionally achieved, the preservation of their communities. Bandits took what they felt was rightfully theirs. Enslaved people of African descent resisted, ran away, and, at times, fought for their liberation; they and their abolitionist allies of all races advocated for emancipation, succeeding in mainland Spanish America by mid-century, and in Cuba and Brazil – where slavery and export-oriented commercial agriculture had expanded together – in the 1880s. Excluded from the voting booth everywhere in the hemisphere, women also participated in political and economic life, by hosting meetings, advocating for their economic interests, and using hard work and some legal protections to achieve a measure of autonomy and security. So, too, did poor men of all races, who were often denied the franchise as well. As the Church's institutional power declined, rural and indigenous people developed their own strains of popular Catholicism. As elites pursued their new political and economic projects, Latin Americans of all races, classes, and genders contested the terms on which they would integrate into their emerging modern states, economies, and societies.