20. Riding the Tiger
IN 1999, VENEZUELAN PRESIDENT HUGO Chávez officially renamed his country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The move underlined the fact that Venezuela had just joined the club of Latin American nations that embraced bolivarianismo, or socialism inspired by the life and works of the nineteenth-century revolutionary Simón Bolívar, who would come to be known as El Libertador (the Liberator). A soldier, writer, and thinker, Bolívar was a larger-than-life character who liberated half a dozen countries from Spanish rule. His charisma, drive, and determination inspire revolutionary longings to this day, but the legend of El Libertador has always overshadowed his inglorious end. Chávez no doubt omitted mentioning the fact that Bolívar turned into a dictator and that Venezuelans emptied chamber pots on his head as they chased him out of the country in 1830.
Today, there are entire books consisting exclusively of the rallying calls Bolívar coined while liberating Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama, and the country that took his name, Bolivia. They include La Patria es la América (Our nation is America), ¡Unión! ¡Unión! ¡O la anarquía os devorará! (Union! Union! Or anarchy will devour us!), No somos indios ni europeos, sino una especie media (We’re neither Indian nor European, but a race in between), El arte de vencer se aprende en las derrotas (The art of victory is taught by defeat), and La guerra a muerte (Fight to the death).
Perhaps thanks to his way with words, Bolívar became the best known of the Latin American revolutionaries who transformed Spain’s four viceroyalties into seventeen independent countries by the beginning of the twentieth century. By 1830, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba were the only remnants of Spain’s colonial empire, and Spain would lose these, in one fell stroke, sixty-eight years later, and Panama remained a province of Colombia until 1903.
But paradoxically, Spain’s loss turned out to be a fantastic boon for the Spanish language, since each new Spanish-speaking country offered a capital city as well as a unique vision, policies, and culture that would help further disseminate Spanish.
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The Latin American independence movement actually began stirring in the late eighteenth century, when colonials started seeing themselves as members of new cultures, whether they were Mexican, Peruvian, Chilean, or other. Bolstered by these new identities, the elite class of criollos began demanding reforms from Spain, ranging from more taxing powers, freedom of press, land reform, and universal male suffrage to free enterprise and a constitutional monarchy.
These reforms all fell short of a demand for independence. That’s because the vast majority of criollos were stakeholders in the colonial bureaucracy. They didn’t question the legitimacy of the Crown per se—at first.
Bolívar (1783–1830) grew up in this proreform atmosphere in eighteenth-century Venezuela. As one could guess from his full name—Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte y Blanco—Bolívar entered the world as a full-fledged member of the criollo aristocracy. His family, of Basque origins, had made its fortune ranching, running slave plantations, and mining in Venezuela. Bolívar’s reformist sympathies radicalized under foreign influence, especially when he lived in France, from 1804 to 1806.
But before Bolívar became El Libertador, another revolutionary figure set the Latin American independence movement in motion: El Precursor (the Precursor), Francisco de Miranda.
Like Bolívar, Miranda was born into Venezuela’s criollo elite. The son of wealthy merchants, Miranda (1750–1816) grew up believing in the legitimacy of the Spanish Crown. He became a captain of the Spanish army at age twenty-one, but he ended up in jail a decade later, accused of acting against the orders of a superior officer. Locked behind bars, Miranda began questioning the nature and legitimacy of Spain’s absolutist power.
After being released from jail, Miranda traveled to London, where his growing anti-Spanish sentiment found fertile ground and radicalized. At the time, both Britain and France were looking for ways to undercut the Spanish. By 1790, Miranda was conspiring with the British to help Venezuela gain independence from Spain. Miranda then fought as a general in the French Revolution, starting in 1791. (Miranda is the only American whose name is included on the Arc de Triomphe.) By 1806, Miranda was leading an attack on colonial Venezuela, waving a Venezuelan flag he had designed himself.
Miranda’s hope was that Spain’s colonies would one day be united in a vast federation of territories stretching from Cape Horn to el Norte, throughout the continent—in the Hispanic worldview, South, Central, and North America have always been a single entity called América. He envisioned this federation as a single country led by a hereditary ruler he called the “Inca,” in honor of the great Inca Empire. Miranda’s preferred name for the federation, Colombia, was originally coined by English poet and lexicographer Samuel Johnson for a female allegory of Britain’s thirteen colonies. The idea caught on among Spanish American revolutionaries, who also pictured Spain’s former colonies united under the umbrella of a Gran Colombia.
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Though the French Revolution inspired both Miranda and Bolívar, it was the Haitian revolution that really sparked revolutionary sentiment in Spain’s colonies. The slaves and Indians living in Spain’s colonies were equally inspired by the violent liberation struggle Toussaint Louverture led on the island of Saint-Domingue, causing the criollos to fear insurrection. In addition to Haiti, Tupac Amaru II’s rebellion in Peru in 1779–1781 had shown the criollos that if the underclass rose against Spain, it could also rise against them. Among his many famous phrases, Bolívar coined “riding the tiger,” meaning that if the criollos failed to master this powerful underclass, they would be devoured by it. Indeed, most criollos feared what they called pardocracía (mestizocracy)—a word coined in Venezuela.
Napoleon proved to be another catalyst to revolution in Latin America. When he lost the 1805 battle of Trafalgar, off the coast of Spain, he literally dragged Spain’s navy down with him. Spain lost eleven of its fifteen ships. With Spain’s navy now incapable of defending sea routes, colonial centers were left to their own devices. The resulting economic crisis aggravated social discontent and increased desires for autonomy there.
Napoleon then added fuel to the fire. In 1808, he invaded Spain and plopped his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. The Spanish suddenly found themselves fighting for their own independence in Europe, and the colonies were left utterly to their own devices. To fill the power vacuum, local juntas (councils) started popping up across the Spanish Empire. Rebellion broke out almost everywhere as loyalists rallied to fight the insurgents who were calling for independence.
Such calls for independence—called gritos—resounded throughout Spanish America. Mexico’s Grito de Dolores (Cry of Dolores) is still commemorated every September 15. On that day, in 1810, Miguel Hidalgo, a parish priest of the town of Dolores, rang his church bell and called for independence and sedition against the Spanish Crown. Each year, Mexican presidents reenact el Grito by solemnly ringing Hidalgo’s bell and calling out the names of Mexican heroes.
The first round of rebellions went nowhere. Most criollos remained royalists, and with well-trained armies at their disposal, they managed to quell most of the rebellions by 1812. The situation quickly stabilized. Using the threat of rebellion, the royalists then wrung concessions from Spain, forcing it to adopt a liberal constitution that granted the colonies some self-rule. That temporarily satisfied even the rebels.
But everything changed when Spain’s new king, Fernando VII, took the throne in 1814. He promptly threw out Spain’s new constitution and canceled the reforms the royalists had wrested from Spain. Alienated criollos everywhere realized that reform was futile. Independence was unavoidable. Criollos rebelled and Spain’s empire started collapsing, first on the fringes, with Venezuela and Argentina, later in the core areas of Mexico and Peru.
The fall of Peru was the combined work of Bolívar, who arrived from the north, and another liberator, the Argentine José de San Martín, who had liberated the Southern Cone countries, including Chile. The last battle of the wars of independence was fought in 1824 in Ayacucho, Upper Peru (now Bolivia). By 1825, Spain had lost everything except the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.
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But independence was only one step toward forming new countries in Latin America. Between 1820 and 1870, Spain’s former viceroyalties splintered into new countries, and most of the continent fought over their new borders.
Bolívar created Gran Colombia in 1825. In 1831, a year after his death, the union fell apart and splintered into the provinces of Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador, which became countries of their own. In the Southern Cone, the United Provinces of Río de la Plata was split among Bolivia, Uruguay, and Argentina. Between 1865 and 1870, Paraguay fought territorial wars with Argentina, Brazil, and Bolivia. Chile and Peru conquered Bolivian territory and cut off the country’s access to the sea. Colombia and Venezuela, Ecuador and Peru, and all the countries of Central America also ended up in border disputes with each other. Between 1838 and 1841, the runaway Federal Republic of Central America dissolved into Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
Not even Mexico avoided border battles. Mexico got its formal independence in 1821, but by 1841 it had splintered into seven different entities. One of these was Texas. But the Texas settlers got exasperated with Mexico’s unstable rule and called for independence of their own. After a brief war, Texas declared its independence in 1836, but Mexico never recognized it.
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Far from the rallying cries of his early days, Bolívar finished his life uttering bitter testimonials of failure: De lo heroico a lo ridículo no hay más que un paso (From heroism to ridicule, there’s only a step), and from his deathbed, Los tres gran majaderos de la historia hemos sido Jesucristo, Don Quijote … y yo (The three great idiots of history have been Jesus Christ, Don Quixote … and I).
Most new nations in Latin America kept the names they had acquired as Spanish colonies. But some, including Argentina, experimented with different names. Argentine was originally a nickname for the high society of Buenos Aires, poking fun at their attachment to French culture (argent means silver in French; the Spanish word is plata). Argentina then popped up among the various names the state experimented with after 1832, including Confederación Argentina, República de la Confederación Argentina, and Federación Argentina. Today Argentina’s official name is República Argentina.
Bolivia chose its name in 1825, and Colombia in 1886, after experimenting with República de Nueva Grenada and then Estados Unidos de Colombia. In 1822, the kingdom of Quito renamed itself Ecuador. Mexico, formerly New Spain, considered calling itself Anahuac, then Imperio Mexicano, República Mexicana, and Estados Unidos Mexicanos, settling for the latter in 1867. Uruguay started as Provincia Oriental, then called itself República Cisplatina, then settled for República Oriental del Uruguay in 1918. The term rioplatense, still used today, refers to people on both sides of the río de la Plata, in Montevideo and Buenos Aires.
Border conflicts weren’t the only challenge the new Latin American countries faced. The new nations of Central and South America quickly found themselves mired in conflicts over ideology, race, economic models, and relations with foreign powers like Britain, France, Spain, and the United States. These countries vacillated between becoming monarchies, republics, dictatorships, or empires. Centralists battled federalists, and conservatives fought liberals, while large segments of the clergy proclaimed their allegiance to the king, not the new republics. The conflicts were aggravated by rampant authoritarianism, low literacy rates, and intolerance, all of which stumped the continent’s development for generations.
The meddling of foreign economic powers—namely Britain, the United States, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal—added pressure to an already explosive situation. They were all hustling to get or to keep a piece of Latin America’s rubber, sugar, banana, coffee, and mining industries. On the Pacific side, foreign powers competed for control of the strategic guano industry. Guano (from the Quechua wanu) is a mix of bird, bat, and seal excrement. Exceptionally rich in saltpeter, it is an excellent fertilizer and an essential ingredient of gunpowder. Guano prompted Spain to wage war with Peru and Chile from 1864 to 1866.
The French and the Americans, meanwhile, were fighting for military control of Mexico and competing for the right to build a canal across Panama. The French, who had an important presence in the Lesser Antilles and French Guyana, were bluntly expansionist. In 1861, Napoleon III went as far as invading Mexico and attempting to install Maximilian I of Austria as the emperor. This move failed when French troops were badly defeated in Puebla on May 5, 1862—the famous Cinco de Mayo.
Yet, curiously, Latin American elites continued to emulate the French, no doubt in resistance to British and U.S. economic imperialism. French cultural diplomacy had always been effective in the Americas. In the 1840s, Latin American countries massively adopted the French metric system. It was the French who coined the name Latin America, to underline their shared heritage with Spanish and Portuguese speakers everywhere. It appeared in the early years of the twentieth century when many members of the Latin American ruling classes were taking long sojourns in Paris.
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In the continent’s most populous country, Mexico, the situation went from bad to worse. Whereas the population of most new countries multiplied four to ten times during the nineteenth century, Mexico’s only doubled, from 6.5 to 13.4 million, by 1900. After gaining independence, Mexico had to contend with secession movements on both its northern and southern borders, as well as two foreign invasions and almost permanent political instability. In the thirty-four years between 1824 and 1858, Mexico had forty-eight presidents—one ruled for a mere five days in 1829—and there were often two or three competing heads of state at the same time.
The Mexican name for its city squares—zócalos—was inspired by this instability. Zócalo means pedestal. Heads of state changed so fast that sculptors never had time to finish their statues before they had to make a new one. Inhabitants of Mexico City began referring to the Plaza Mayor as “the pedestal,” a name that stuck and was eventually extended to all central squares in Mexico.
Mexico didn’t gain even a semblance of stability until after 1867. Much of that was the result of Porfirio Díaz, who reigned as dictator for thirty-five years. In a way, Mexico owed its extreme instability to the fact that it had resisted dictators much longer. Most new Latin American countries turned to strongmen earlier in their history. Juan Manuel de Rosas, who ran Argentina between 1829 and 1852, was a typical Latin American tyrant: he put an end to anarchy, transformed Argentines into a united, patriotic populace, and boosted international trade—but only via a cruel and lawless reign of terror. When José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia—El Supremo—ruled Paraguay from 1814 to 1840, he sealed the country from contact with the outside world, preventing external trade, travel, and even mail service. And of course Simón Bolívar, though he started out as a democrat, ended up as dictator of Colombia.
Every new country in Latin America had to contend with Bolívar’s “tiger”—the possibility of slave and Indian uprisings. With the exception of Argentina, every country had to deal with large dissatisfied groups of mestizos, mulattos, and natives, or all three. In an effort to rally support from mestizos, blacks, and Indians, criollos offered undifferentiated citizenship. Mexico’s name, Estados Unidos de México, was coined to portray Mexico as the continuation of the former Aztec Empire and a union of diverse ethnic communities. Mexico’s instability during the nineteenth century was largely the result of jockeying among criollos, mestizos, and Indios for the upper hand.
Mexico would distinguish itself in embracing its mestizo identity—at least officially. When Jean-Benoît traveled in the Mexican countryside, he was always fascinated by the little shrines he saw tucked into corners of households. All had a candle of the Guadalupe, but many had an image of Benito Juárez next to them. Juárez, president of Mexico from 1858 to 1872, has a special place in Mexican political lore. He was Mexico’s first native president—and the first in the entire western hemisphere. Born of Zapotec Indian stock and orphaned at age three, Juárez did not speak Spanish until he was twelve. He surmounted almost impossible odds to become Mexico’s president, working as a domestic servant to pay his way through law school, then working his way up Mexico’s social ladder. One hundred and forty years after his death, he is still a cult figure in Mexico—as well as other parts of Latin America. His birthday, March 21, is a national holiday in Mexico.
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It is a bit of a miracle that Latin America is predominantly Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking today. The Spanish crown had done little to Hispanicize the masses during colonial times. And its successor states did not make much effort to teach Spanish during the entire nineteenth century—particularly in the areas with a strong native base, like Mexico, Central America, the Orinoco basin, Peru, and Bolivia.
Teaching Spanish to natives had never been Spanish colonialists’ priority, and the best way to sum up the Bourbons’ language policy in the eighteenth century is turning a deaf ear. By 1810, only half of Mexico’s 6.5 million inhabitants spoke Spanish. The same was true in Peru, Bolivia, and Guatemala, whose large native populations make up the bulk of the total native population in Spanish America. Spanish made inroads in the native population mostly because of mestisaje: most offspring of mixed unions were raised speaking Spanish.
At first, Spanish teaching wasn’t a high priority among Latin America’s new countries either. Criollos were leery of introducing mass education because of the “tiger”—they knew it was easier to control an ignorant underclass. The result was that as late as 1939, 63 percent of Mexicans were still illiterate, a staggeringly high rate compared to Argentina’s 25 percent. Countries with abundant native populations, like Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Guatemala, struggled with teacher and school shortages well into the twentieth century. Some 12 percent of Mexicans still don’t speak Spanish as a mother tongue and the proportions in Peru and Guatemala are even higher. Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, and Bolivia will probably never be 100 percent Spanish speaking.
The only reason that new nations with predominantly native populations—like Peru and Mexico—did not become Nahuatl or Quechua speaking was that neither of those tongues was a majority language in either country. Substantial proportions of the native populations rejected them in favor of a neutral language: Spanish. The few natives who, like Benito Juárez, rose up through society, owed their fortune to Spanish, not their native languages.
The only exception was Paraguay, where the criollo elite was fairly small, and native groups spoke a single language, Guaraní. Guaraní had benefited from extraordinary protection under the Jesuit missionaries. Its status increased when it was used as a secret tongue in the many wars Paraguay fought with Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia. In 1996, 95 percent of Paraguayans declared themselves fluent in Guaraní.
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Although lack of interest in teaching native Americans did slow the spread of Spanish, immigration didn’t.
On the whole, Latin America’s population was sparse. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, North and South America were practically empty. The total population was only 30 million, including 7 million in Brazil, 6.3 million in Mexico, and 5.3 million in the United States. This posed a problem for development. All the economies—excluding the United States—were based entirely on exporting primary resources, including agriculture and mining, and importing food and supplies. For the rest of the century, the former Spanish colonies suffered from underindustrialization and overreliance on exports.
Most Latin American countries tried to boost their populations by attracting immigrants. Yet only Argentina and tiny Uruguay across the río de la Plata were successful.
The Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes joked in his 1969 essay “La nueva novela hispanoamericana” that “Mexicans descend from the Aztecs, Peruvians from the Inca, and Argentines from the ship.” Fuentes was referring to the massive immigration of Europeans to Argentina from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth—while poking fun at Argentines’ supercilious attitude toward the rest of the continent, itself largely a product of European immigration.
With a population of only 300,000 in 1856, Argentina attracted more than 6.5 million immigrants by 1936. More than half the total 11.5 million European immigrants who came to Latin America during that period went to Argentina. As an immigrant destination, Argentina was second only to the United States (34 million) and well ahead of Canada (5.5 million) and even Brazil (4.4 million).
Despite huge efforts, Peru and Mexico’s attempts to encourage immigration fell flat. Political agitation in both countries was one deterrent, but another factor influenced European immigrants’ decisions: they preferred empty countries with few natives (criollos did not have the monopoly on racism). Argentina was just such a country. So from 1800 to 1939, Argentina saw its population multiply forty-two times, to 14 million. That put it close to Mexico’s population of 19 million.
Two other countries succeeded in attracting immigrants: Uruguay (700,000) and Cuba (1 million), although Cuba was not actually a country until 1903. Cuba was one of the few remaining Spanish colonies after the Latin American independence movement, and it became the control center of the Spanish Empire once again. Spain invested heavily in the island’s economy and infrastructure. Cuba had South America’s first railroad, finished in 1836—twelve years before Spain’s—and received a slew of new technologies including a telegraph service. Such progress made the island attractive to Spanish immigrants as well as American investors. During the first half of the nineteenth century, 600,000 Spaniards flocked there, more than to any other country (another 800,000 arrived after 1898, when Cuba was no longer part of the empire).
In Argentina, even though immigrant arrivals outnumbered births for three generations, immigration had relatively little impact on the country’s culture or language. Argentina is 100 percent Spanish speaking today, and its general pattern of speech—the use of voseo—has remained intact since independence, although Argentine slang developed interesting features, notably the famous che (man! or eh!) that Argentines drop into their speech.
What explains such linguistic continuity in a country that is so heavily dominated by European immigration? Some 80 percent of Argentina’s 6.5 million immigrants came from Italy, Spain, and France, countries with Latin-based languages. French immigrants introduced wine production and revived the custom of drinking yerba mate, a tea that Argentines had stopped drinking in the eighteenth century. Three Argentine presidents had French origins. But French immigrants assimilated quickly to Spanish. Argentina encouraged linguistic assimilation when it introduced mandatory schooling in 1884 and military service after 1902.
Yet the population movements in Argentina did affect the Spanish spoken there—albeit temporarily—by producing an Italian-Spanish pidgin called Cocoliche. Cocoliche comes from the name of a character in Argentine popular theater, Cocolicchio, an Italian peon. Between 1880 and 1930, 40 percent of people in Buenos Aires spoke Cocoliche and Argentine slang integrated Cocoliche expressions like guarda instead of cuidado (watch out) and birra instead of cerveza (beer). Most of these curious features have since disappeared.
Because of their country’s high proportion of citizens of European origin, Argentines ended up identifying strongly with Europe. There is no doubt that the Argentine government set out to make Argentina a “white” country from the start. To this day, there are no official figures on the proportion of Argentines who have indigenous origins. Some sources claim that between 1 percent and 5 percent of the population is native and between 3 percent and 15 percent is mestizo. But it’s anybody’s guess, given the lack of enthusiasm for collecting reliable statistics on the subject.
Argentine revolutionary Ernesto Guevara (1928–1967)—nicknamed El Che for his frequent use of the trademark Argentine interjection—was one of the few individuals who tried to bridge the identity gap between Argentina and the rest of Latin America. Before fighting revolutions in Cuba and Bolivia, Guevara, in his twenties, explored the South American continent on a motorcycle, an episode of his life that inspired the beautiful film The Motorcycle Diaries. His Marxist ideology never erased the sympathy that most Latin Americans feel toward him for having reached out to what he called nuestra mayúscula América, meaning “our superlative America,” an expression he coined to express the sense of pride and common destiny he hoped all Latin Americans would share, whether criollos, mestizos, Indios, or mulattos.
Argentines’ attitude toward Latin America changed as a result of the Falklands war (1980–1981). The war started when Argentina took over the British-controlled archipelago, 290 miles off its coast. Argentines were surprised at the swift response of the British, who ended up regaining control. But what shocked Argentines even more was the fact that no European power supported them. Argentines had always considered themselves more European than Latin American. The only support they got came from other Latin American countries—and that was a bit surprising given how often Argentina had turned its back on the continent in the past.
In the rest of Spain’s former colonies, the number and proportions of immigrants were a lot smaller than in Argentina, Cuba, and Uruguay, which together attracted eight million of the eleven million immigrants who went to Latin America before World War II. That left only three million to be divided up among sixteen other countries.
The impact of immigration would nonetheless be significant, for the simple reason that most other countries—except Mexico—were sparsely populated. There is a significant German and French presence in Chile and Nicaragua. Two Chilean presidents had French names—Pinochet and Bachelet. And the Mexican word mariachi came from the French word marriage (wedding). The famous Mexican painter Frida Kahlo was a descendant of German Jews. In Mexico and Colombia, two famously rich individuals, the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú and the pop singer Shakira are of Lebanese origin.
Despite the growing influence of Spain’s language academy, the Real Academia, in the same period, Spanish in the New World was developing its own unique characteristics. And as the demographic center of Spanish shifted from Europe to the Americas, some of these features would go on to influence standard Spanish into the twenty-first century.