Colombianists are often struck (or at least I am) by a jarring contradiction between Colombia’s long history of democratic and popular mobilization and the somewhat condescending image of “false democracy” generated by a more recent and journalistic focus. James Sanders’s excellent new book once again drives home this recurring sense of discontinuity. He dives into the popular politics of the nineteenth-century Cauca Valley, a key region where many of the nation’s pivotal political struggles were won or lost. In the process, he exposes the complexity of Colombia’s recurring subaltern mobilizations, as well as the multiple interpretations and meanings of republicanism.
Offering a welcome antidote to the ungrounded truism that popular participation in Colombia’s nineteenth-century wars and electoral struggles was devoid of ideological motivation, Sanders explores the various republican discourses of the region’s popular classes. Migrants from Antioquia moving into Cauca from the north stressed liberty and independence, reflecting their smallholder...
