Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Latin American Historiography

Historians impose on society a perception of the past shaped by the topics they study, the values they hold, and their interpretations. When historians represent a relatively homogeneous group, their histories tend to perpetuate a similarity by ascribing to the past a uniformity more harmonious with the class vision than with the totality of experience.¹ Such restrictions characterized nineteenth-century Latin American historiography.

To suggest that the histories written during the nineteenth century in Latin America represent more of a class than a national view is a serious indictment. To sustain it requires studying the lives of a sufficient number of those historians to see if, indeed, common patterns emerge and analyzing a sufficient number of their historical works to determine if similarity characterizes them. This essay attempts to point out both the common denominators of their life-styles and the restricted themes and perspective of their histories. It concludes that the knowledge of the past which they handed down as history reflects their exclusive social position. In short, Latin America’s written memory consists largely of a limited socially constructed reality.²

The methodology, prosopography or, as it is more commonly referred to, collective biography, while not used extensively in Latin American historiography, has been employed admirably in the past decade to provide diverse insights into the Latin American past.³ It owes much to the tenets of the sociology of knowledge. Obviously, biographies are easiest to collect among the elites, and few left more written mementos of their lives than the historians. Because they committed their thoughts to paper, historians can be easily studied intellectually as well as socially. Responsible for recording national memory and influencing generations of scholars and children, these nineteenth-century historians played an unusually critical intellectual role.

In selecting what I hoped would be a representative sampling of historians, I attempted to balance the well-known with the more obscure. No composite could be acceptable without some of the savants who influenced not only their own generation but successive ones as well. Hence, Bartolomé Mitre, Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, Lucas Alamán, João Capistrano de Abreu, Diego Barros Arana, and Adolfo Saldía were logical choices. However, to dwell only on the famous would be unrepresentative of historiography. Therefore, it seemed prudent to include a representative number of historians whose legacy has been less obvious but whose collective contributions helped to shape the contours of nineteenth-century historiography. Cecilio Acosta, Pedro de Angelis, Pedro Fermín Cevallos, Januário da Cunha Barbosa, and Gabriel René Moreno, among others, fit into that category.

Temporal representation also played a role in making this selection. Although the works of most of these historians fell within the last half of the century, the period, by far, of greater historical production, an effort was made to select historians who wrote during a variety of time periods and who might reflect different generational influences and preferences. Further, geographical representation merited some consideration in order to avoid the complete domination by Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, nations where historians flourished in the past century. As it is, those four account for slightly over two-thirds of the historians in this study. Nevertheless, eleven of the eighteen nations are represented, with the Caribbean and Central America being the most neglected. Although some of their life-spans extended into the twentienth century, those particular historians were included if they had published their major ideas during the nineteenth. These criteria account for the choice of the sixty-three nineteenth-century Latin American historians whose biographies and works provide the material for this essay.⁴

Available biographical data permits the sketching of a tentative composite profile from which individual variance was slight. Sixty-two of the sixty-three historians were male. Almost all boasted a secondary school education or the equivalent, and most received advanced training in a university, military school, or seminary. Law degrees dominated their academic credentials. Their educations closely resembled those of their European peers. Most of them spoke French and a considerable number added English and/or German to their linguistic repertory. Indeed, their knowledge of foreign languages in some cases was extraordinary. João Capistrano de Abreu read French, English, and German, as well as Latin; Bartolomé Mitre knew English, French, Italian, and Latin; Pedro Paz Soldán y Unánue mastered French, English, German, Italian, and classical Greek; Ernesto Quesada knew French, English, and German. A few wrote with admirable grace of style in the foreign languages of their preference. Joaquim Nabuco, for example, not only wrote elegantly in French and commendably in English, but authored several of his works directly in those languages. These historians were by no means exceptional in their linguistic skills. Although the historians relied on their languages to facilitate their foreign travels, they used them principally to gain direct access to European authors. Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Auguste Comte, Leopold von Ranke, Friedrich Ratzel, François Pierre Guillaume Guizot, Jules Michelet, Thomas B. Macaulay, Henry Thomas Buckle, Thomas Carlyle as well as the philosophes of the European Enlightenment most absorbed their attention.

From the end of the eighteenth century onward, the Latin Americans paid increasingly less attention to the ideas emanating from the Iberian peninsula as they attuned their thinking to the novelties propagated by English, French, and German philosophers. Those who favored independence and subsequently set themselves to the task of nation building rebelled against the metropolises, rejecting Iberian intellectual contacts as well as Iberian rule. They sought new models and northern Europe served their purposes well. Generally speaking, three major European philosophies dominated nineteenth-century Latin America: the Enlightenment, the ideas of evolution put forth by Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, and positivism. Interconnected, the three found a common nexus in the concept of “progress,” the key word for the understanding of Latin American historiography.

Teaching the vincibility of ignorance, the Enlightenment philosophers concluded that if people had the opportunity to know the truth, they would select “civilization” over “barbarism.” Adherents to the Enlightenment believed in a universally valid standard to judge civilization, and the criteria for such a judgment were based on European ideas of progress. Civilization and the progress which led to it became identified with Europe, or more specifically with England, France, and Germany. However, a burgeoning faith in science directed judgments on progress, as well as progress itself away from philosophical and moral matters toward material change. The popularized idea of Darwin that organic forms developed over the course of time and represented successive stages in a single evolutionary process further heightened the interest in progress, giving it in fact a scientific veneer. Very propitiously, Spencer, whose works enjoyed tremendous circulation in nineteenth-century Latin America, applied the same principle of evolution to society. Progress to Spencer signified a march toward “the establishment of the greatest perfection and the most complete happiness.” However, that march subsumed a great many economic changes and adaptations. As one example, Spencer advocated railroads as a vital part of the organic system of a modern society. As another, he regarded industrialization as a certain manifestation of progress. The Latin Americans drew from Spencer the interrelationship of science, industry, and progress, a combination pointing to future glory through societal evolution. Like most European thinkers, Spencer had much to say which damned Latin America, his racism for example. The Latin Americans proved to be selective readers, however, and chose to ignore what displeased—or frightened—them.

Many of the ideas on progress pulled from the Enlightenment, Darwin, Spencer, as well as other sources, seemed to come together in the form that Auguste Comte’s positivism assumed in Latin America during the last decades of the century. Positivism affirmed that social evolution and progress were inevitable. To Comte that progress was attainable through the acceptance of scientific laws codified by positivism. Outward manifestations of progress—again railroads and industrialization—assumed great importance in positivism and emphatically so among the Latin Americans, whether they acknowledged Comte or not.

Clearly, those intellectual mentors satisfied the longing of the Latin American elites to replicate European “civilization” in their hemisphere, which to their thinking evinced all too many “barbaric” Indian and African traits. Over the course of the century, the elites distilled a philosophical overview which approved European “progress” in Latin American terms. Politically, they required order to implement it. Economically, they adopted capitalism, which seemed to have transformed England into a modern nation, to finance it. Their measurement of progress increasingly became material advancement, the number of miles of railroad and telegraph lines, the quantity of buildings in the capital city which resembled those of the Paris of Napoleon III, and the availability of the knickknacks associated with European consumerism. To the extent that Latin America came to resemble those nations the elite regarded as progressive, progress was judged to have been achieved.

The familiarity of the Latin American historians with European ideas is readily evident in their biases and quotations. They had read both the classic and contemporary European historians whom they quoted with as much ease as admiration. They deferred to European authorities to settle any disputes. When writing on historiographical topics, the Latin Americans drew heavily from Old World sources and examples. In consulting many of their essays, the scholar notes an almost total absence of any reference to Latin America. Cecilio Acosta authored an essay with the appealing title “Influencia del elemento histórico-político en la literatura dramática y en la novela,” a hundred pages discussing major and minor European savants without linking his important topic to anything in Venezuela, or in Latin America for that matter.⁵ Only hesitantly and occasionally did Latin Americans question the European masters and turn to each other for inspiration. Contrary to the currents of his times, Andrés Bello, in 1845, cautioned that while European historiography offered “a model, a guide, a method,” it could not provide the “philosophy” to interpret New World history.⁶ By the end of the century, some evidence does exist of a greater circulation of ideas among the Latin American historians themselves. Expounding on “La historia” at the University of San Carlos in Guatemala City in 1900, Rafael Montúfar displayed the usual intimate knowledge of European historiography, but then went on to praise the Chilean intellectual Valentín Letelier and in particular his La evolución de la historia (2d ed., 1900), a confection of Henry Thomas Buckle’s orientation with Comtean philosophy spiced with ideas from Spencer and Stuart Mill. Sympathetic to the Chilean’s positivist approach to history, the Guatemalan commended his deprecation of history’s inclusion of tradition, mythology, and legend and his insistence on “facts” in a sociological view of the past.⁷ Similarly, Domingo F. Sarmiento’s Civilización y barbarie: Vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga (1845) ranked as one historical work which enjoyed wide acceptance throughout Latin America.⁸

While it is difficult to indicate the precise class standing of all of these sixty-three historians, it is nonetheless true that all enjoyed privileges in a society which afforded few. If not born into the ranks of the wealthiest families, they lived comfortable lives more akin to the life-styles of the upper class than to the humble status of the majority. They associated and identified with the social, political, and economic elites. The pursuit of history assumed the availability of leisure time. Their longevity further testifies to their pleasant lifestyles. Their ages at death averaged more than sixty years in a society where half that life-span was more nearly normal.⁹ Such longevity speaks well of their diet, medical care, and routine. Further, almost all of them were of pure or nearly pure European lineage. None conceded any recent African descent, and those with Indian ancestors chose to prune rather than cultivate that branch of the family tree.

As a group these historians looked fondly to a European heritage, for themselves and their countries as well. The Chilean Francisco Bilbao unabashedly pronounced non-Iberian Europe to be the future of Latin America. In the middle of the nineteenth century he intoned: “The new age has dawned in France.”¹⁰ In addition to reading about and admiring Europe, discussing the Old World, and aping continental styles, the historians knew it firsthand. They tended to be a well-traveled group. Some resided in Europe, preferably in Paris, for extended periods; others studied there; still others served there as diplomats; while most of them made the grand tour at least once. They coveted, and some received, European recognition. Elected to the Academy of Sciences of Paris in 1882, Diego Barros Arana was awarded what most Latin American intellectuals considered the ultimate accolade. Toward the end of the century, their travels broadened to include the Western Hemisphere. A representative number visited the United States or other Latin American nations. A few included both.

With rare exceptions, the historians resided in the capitals, partly because of the educational and cultural advantages, but also, significantly, because most of them were connected at one time or another with the governments. They held a variety of bureaucratic posts, some served as legislators, judges, and ministers, and a couple even as presidents, while still others unsuccessfully sought that exalted office. A representative sampling of their governmental careers reveals that Carlos María de Bustamante served for more than two decades in Mexico’s congress; the Mexican Lucas Alamán held the portfolio of Minister of Foreign Relations on three occasions; Juan Bautista Alberdi was Argentine minister to Great Britain and to France and later a congressional representative from Tucumán; Lorenzo Montúfar carried out numerous diplomatic missions and was both Minister of Foreign Relations and of Education in Costa Rica; Joaquim Nabuco, three times elected to the Chamber of Deputies, later represented Brazil as minister to the Court of St. James and then as ambassador to the United States; Vicente G. Quesada was a federal deputy representing Corrientes and later an ambassador; Vicente Riva Palacio governed both the states of Mexico and Michoacán; Ramón Sotomayor y Valdés represented Chile first as minister to Mexico and then to Bolivia before being elected to the Chamber of Deputies and later appointed Official Clerk of the Ministry of the Treasury.

Obviously the people who wrote Latin American history in the last century were not passive observers and recorders of their class or society. As members of a minute elite in new countries, they divided their attention among myriad interests and responsibilities. Most significantly, they played active roles in shaping and administering national institutions. Not surprisingly then, they displayed a loyalty to the official institutions of which they formed such an important part. Such integration into and loyalty to the institutions shaped their historical world view as apologists rather than critics. Few, if any, earned their livelihood exclusively as historians. Indeed, in twentieth-century terms, few could qualify as professional historians, although by the end of the century some did enjoy state appointments directing archives or libraries or teaching history in prestigious national institutes which permitted them to devote much of their time to history.

Life in the capital cities definitely shaped their views, so much so that some of the national histories they wrote were little more than chronicles of events in the principal city. The capitals often communicated more quickly with Paris and London than with the hinterlands of their own countries. For example, in 1859, it took thirteen days to cross from Buenos Aires to London but three to four months to travel from the Argentine capital to Salta. For geographic as well as cultural reasons, the historians were more attuned to the metropolis than to the life-styles and preferences of their rural compatriots. Euclydes da Cunha’s discovery of the sertão of Brazil traumatized him as he found a Brazil that the urbanized intellectual never even imagined. Others, raised in the interior, such as Domingo Sarmiento, fled to the capital and denounced the backwardness of the provinces. Still others, like the young Rufino Blanco Fombona, tried to expose themselves to rural life only to be bored or disillusioned: “The slowness and rusticity of the peasants exasperate me. They are always wrong and it is impossible that they should ever be rescued from their sad condition of inferior beings except through a persistent educational programme …. I cannot talk to any of them for more than five minutes at a time. I can find nothing to say to them.”¹¹ Such attitudes isolated most of the historians from national reality. Consciously or unconsciously they dwelt on their class and the national capital as though they constituted the nation. Thus, they projected through their histories the life-style of the minority as though it represented the majority, an extrapolation which might skew the perceptions of the unwary reader of their histories.

In accordance with the elitist dictates of the time, the historians applauded rule by the “enlightened,” a concept which disenfranchised all but a few. The propertied and/or literate constituted that select group. Esteban Echevarría summarized elitist political ideology when he distinguished in his Dogma socialista (1846) between collective will—the uneducated masses, and collective reason—the educated elite. He concluded, “Democracy, then, is not the absolute despotism of the masses or of the majority; it is the rule of reason.”¹² Even so ardent a liberal historian as José María Luis Mora eschewed popular sovereignty in Mexico to advocate government by a new aristocracy.

The colonial past attracted considerable attention from the nineteenth-century historians, but they seem to have written as much, perhaps more, about their own century, revealing a strong contemporary orientation. They wrote primarily political history and biographies, a logical selection considering the times. As late as the 1880s, the noted Argentine historian Vicente Fidel López declared, “Argentine history is only and exclusively political history.”¹³ The ruling elite felt obliged to justify the new national institutions and the course of events shaped by independence, and the historians abetted the effort by eulogizing individuals whose life-styles harmonized with the goals and ideas of the elite. Januário da Cunha Barbosa, one of the founders of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro in 1838, offered a formula followed for the rest of the century. With words reminiscent of Thomas Carlyle, his Scottish contemporary, he wrote: “To know the biographies of all the outstanding men of any period is to know the history of those times.”¹⁴ Indeed, it became difficult to escape the great man approach to history. The writings of Bartolomé Mitre provide one of myriad examples. In his two major works, Historia de Belgrano y de la independencia argentina (1858-1859) and Historia de San Martín y de la emancipación sud-americana (1887-1888), he viewed both national and South American independence as the consequence of extraordinary individuals who contributed more than their share to effect those momentous events.¹⁵ In his História Geral do Brasil (1854-1857), Francisco Adolfo de Vamhagen did not conceal his contempt for the “vil população.” He denigrated rebels, nonconformists, and the masses alike. Their influence on the course of events, if any, was negative. Great men shaped history and none had contributed more to Brazil’s destiny than those of the ruling House of Braganza.

Lucas Alamán expressed similar ideas in his disdain for popular participation in the political process as well as in his preference for a monarchy. His monumental Historia de Méjico (1849-1852) did not consider the movement led by Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos (anti-heroes) as a contribution toward independence but rather as an attack on property and civilization. The creole elites effected independence in accordance with Alamán’s interpretation, and Iturbide emerged as the embodiment of orderly transition to nationhood for Mexico. Chilean historians displayed a similar bias for the individual whose exemplary life offered a moral and patriotic model for the nation. So compelling was the urge to ferret out and glorify great men that Diego Barros Arana conceded, “If history does not offer us model men, it is the duty of the historian to make them.”¹⁶ Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna determined to write a history of the people, but his Historia general de la República de Chile (1866-1883) reveals that he succumbed to the usual temptations and produced instead a history of the heroes.¹⁷ The aspirations to write broader histories, while not lacking, were seldom realized.¹⁸

In their own eyes, the historians of the new nations assumed a heavy responsibility: to arouse the patriotism of their compatriots. Januário da Cunha Barbosa piously predicted, “The love of national glory will lead us to cleanse our history of inaccuracies.” Then he asked rhetorically, “And will not a truthful history of our country offer the lessons which can so profitably be used by Brazilian citizens in the performance of their important duties?”¹⁹ In 1845, Vicente Fidel López informed the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities of Santiago during a lecture, “The goal of history is to teach men to live as good patriots of their nation; to learn the virtues of a citizen; to defend what is right on all occasions; and, to know the desires of the state and try to fulfill them as best they can.”²⁰ Chilean historians apparently heeded the advice. Through lectures, writing, example, and political position, they molded civic values and prescribed future development. They not only wrote the past, they formulated the future.²¹

To Lucas Alamán, too, history was more than the recreation of the past; it served as a guide for the future.²² Whatever patriotic lessons history might teach, the historians drew inevitably and exclusively from the activities of the elites. In the case of Brazilian historians, for example, they chose to elevate Joaquim José Silva Xavier, better known by his nickname, Tiradentes, to the summit as national hero. In the ill-fated and equally ill-conceived and vaguely defined Minas Conspiracy, 1788-1789, against Portuguese rule, he emerged as a principal plotter for which the authorities condemned him to death. Tiradentes, by the way, represented the colonial elites, a white male of some substance and standing. For the much more revolutionary Bahian Conspiracy of 1798, four blacks were convicted and executed. Those subverters of Portuguese rule were humble folk. Until well into the twentieth century, historians ignored both them and their conspiracy. Tiradentes continues to be the national hero. Shelves sag under the numerous biographies of him. Yet, to this day, not one biography exists of any of Bahia’s black conspirators.

For sources, the historians relied on public and private libraries, the latter more frequently than the former. They were bibliophiles, each forming his own collection around the topics which most attracted him. They used public and private archives, but the haphazard storage of documents, few of which were cataloged, greatly complicated, if it did not discourage, research. From its inception, the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro strove to collect, organize, and preserve documentation. Further, it—as well as the imperial government—commissioned various Brazilians to locate and copy pertinent manuscripts in foreign archives. Vamhagen discovered some fundamental documents for Brazilian history in the Portuguese and Spanish archives and extended his research to many of the other major European archives as well as to many in South America. Probably no one surpassed José Toribio Medina in the collection of documents. During several visits to Europe, particularly to Spain, the Chilean scholar copied thousands of manuscripts relating to Latin American history, which he later published. Some of the historians were acquainted with the families of the principal actors in the national drama and were able to gain access to private papers. Some witnessed or even participated in the events they described. Gabriel René Moreno might well typify the determined historian in search of varied documentation. The Bolivian historian enthusiastically collected books, pamphlets, and periodicals and incessantly copied manuscripts. In his youth, he interviewed the surviving leaders of the revolution of 1809 and incorporated their recollections into his work. His travels to Lima, Buenos Aires, and Europe, as well as his long residency in Santiago, provided the bibliophile excellent opportunities to expand his library and explore archives which yielded rich details for his reconstruction of Bolivia’s past.²³ Moreno, like his counterparts in all of Latin America during the last century, relied most heavily for his source material on libraries and archives, which, in the final analysis were repositories for the books and papers of the elites. Consequently the major sources available to the historians—or perhaps the sources the historians chose to use most frequently—only reinforced their own elitist tendencies.

Boundary disputes among the nations of Latin America prompted the governments to take a serious interest in historical documentation. They dispatched officials to the Iberian archives in search of maps and materials to support territorial claims. They delved frantically into the archives, returning to their respective capitals with the documentary evidence to press their cases. As early as 1849, the government of President Manuel Bulnes sent Coronel José María Sesé Prieto to the Archive of the Indies to look for whatever documents might buttress Chile’s claims of sovereignty over the Strait of Magellan. The last half of the century witnessed a parade of hopeful boundary litigants to the former metropolises. Not a few of those official researchers were the century’s most distinguished historians. All bequeathed valuable documentation to their own national archives.

Historians of liberal, conservative, romantic, and positivist persuasions debated among themselves, sometimes acrimoniously. As one scholar of nineteenth-century Uruguayan historiography, Juan Antonio Oddone, emphasized, history was an ideological arsenal from which its practitioners drew whatever arms they needed to defend their cause.²⁴ Then as now, disagreements flared as to whether emphasis should fall on documentation or interpretation. Some argued that the facts spoke for themselves, while others relied on intuition, imagination, and insight to compose their studies of the past. Not a few saw the hand of God writ large and ascribed much causation to Divine Providence. Federico González Suárez affirmed, “Divine Providence and Human Liberty are the fundamentals evident in History. Without losing sight for an instant of the providential destiny of nations, History relates their vicissitudes through time demonstrating how they have fulfilled that inviolable Law of Providence.”²⁵ At the opposite extreme, the positivist historians scoffed at the idea of such supernatural interventions in human activities but did not hesitate to castigate the Roman Catholic Church for most of the national problems they perceived.

Although historians regarded their nations as the products of Europe, they could not entirely escape questions of Indian and African input. Here, of course, European racial doctrines shaped their views— and must have generated many psychoses. A German historian introduced in 1843 the fascinating theme of the contributions of the three races to the formation of Brazil, but his ideas did not have an impact on Brazilian historiography for nearly a century.²⁶ For nationalistic reasons, the Indian assumed a special significance and raised some thorny ideological problems. The role of the Indian in Brazilian history incited sporadic discussion. In fact, debate of some substance revolved around the proper historiographical treatment to be accorded the Indians and precipitated a stormy exchange between João Francisco Lisboa and Varnhagen at mid-century.²⁷ Significantly, Lisboa spent most of his life in his native São Luís do Maranhão and thus represented those few historians who resided in the provinces in the nineteenth century but still managed to have a national impact, while Varnhagen, intimately associated with the court in Bio de Janeiro, spent most of his life abroad. The historians often came to terms with the question of what to do with the Indians in history by envisioning the noble Indian, an Indian prince who looked, acted, thought, and talked like a European and who possessed concomitant virtues. The idealized and romanticized Indian was acceptable as a symbol.

Questions of interpretation absorbed much of the historians’ attention and seemingly incited the most debate, at least some of the most excited debate. Into those arguments often intruded the liberal and conservative political perspectives for those historians were in no way apolitical. One of the major historical controversies occurred in Mexico and pitted the conservatives, brilliantly represented by Lucas Alamán, against the liberals, rather more ambiguously represented by José María Luis Mora. Alamán asserted that Hernán Cortés founded the Mexican nation and that the long colonial period had benefited Mexico. In looking to the Spanish past, Alamán differed markedly from most historians of Spanish-speaking Latin America, but in overlooking—indeed, denigrating—the Indian heritage he was well within the bounds of nineteenth-century historiography. In sum, Alamán, too, looked to Europe but, unusual for his century, more to Spain than to England and France. In his respect for the Spanish heritage, his ideas corresponded closely to those guiding the government of President Rafael Carrera in neighboring Guatemala at the same time. Alamán held that there were two distinct movements favoring Mexican independence, the first initiated in 1810 by Miguel Hidalgo whom Alamán deprecated and the second which effected independence in 1821 under the leadership of Augustin de Iturbide. Independence constituted a political break with Spain unrelated to the plebian uprising of 1810. Iturbide emerged the hero; Hidalgo, the demagogue.

Mora was less specific. Holding to the liberal interpretation, he judged the independence movement as integral, initiated by Hidalgo and carried to its ultimate success by Iturbide. Mora’s emphasis fell on the achievement of independence, the end of Spanish tyranny, the emergence of the Mexican nation.²⁸ Historiographical studies dwell on the apparent difference separating liberal and conservative interpretations of Mexican history. Still, the similarities seem more significant than the differences. In the final analysis, both concluded that the creoles effected independence and that Mexico was a pseudo-European state linked to the Old World through Spain. Neither considered the input or the interests of the Indian majority. When they considered the Indians it was to brand them a threat to civilization (defined, of course, in European terms). In short, both liberal and conservative historians advocated a political, economic, and social order based on inherited institutions and creole supremacy. They revered the land structure and labor systems, the hierarchy of privileges.

Fiery historiographical debates might have raged, but their outcome for the Indian, African, mestizo, and mulatto majorities and the inherited institutions was the same. The lively discussions among Clio’s disciples in nineteenth-century Latin America concerned details rather than substance. The questions were not whether to Europeanize but how, not whether to foster captalism but how to expedite it. No consideration was given to the reality that a majority had no connection with Europe but rather had their own folk cultures and preferred communal arrangements to competitive ones. Given their lifestyles, the preferences of the elites were logical. The historians were a vocal element of the elites. It would seem unrealistic to attribute to their historiographical debates anything more than class interests. For that reason, the similarities in their discussions were more striking than the differences.²⁹ I would select the frothy historical debate pitting Bartolomé Mitre against Vicente Fidel López in the early 1880s as aptly illustrative of the underlying uniformity among historians. The debate seemed to focus on the use of documentation and its interpretation, questions, as it turned out, more of methodology than of meaning. When the sound and fury of heated charges and countercharges subsided, the two historians shook hands and admitted they essentially were in agreement. López asked, “After all, what have General Mitre and I disputed? Don’t events and the valuable and numerous documents prove and justify our agreement?”³⁰ Mitre wrote his former opponent that, indeed, basic ideas united them: “Our judgment is more or less the same.”³¹

Organically integrated, the historians viewed history as a continuous movement toward the realization of their desired goals, ultimately, of course, the goals of the elites.³² They accepted independence, the new national governments (which is to say, the dominance of the creoles within the familiar institutional framework of the past), and the urge to Europeanize. The ultimate aspiration was Europeanization. The Latin Americans believed Europe to be the focal point of history, regarding their own histories as extensions of those of Europe. The Old World provided the impetus; the rest of the world reacted. While Latin Americans may have inherited such ideas from the Enlightenment, they were also explicit in Comte’s positivism: a master program of social organization displayed in different places characteristics of different stages but all within a single, constant pattern of evolution. To the degree their nations came to resemble Europe in the nineteenth century, the historians judged they had developed or progressed. Consequently the men and movements favoring independence and Europeanization received praise from Clio’s pens. The failure to Europeanize or the tardiness of Europeanization required explanation and the obstacles, condemnation. Barros Arana in many ways typified the historical perspective of the century when he concluded that history “permits us to observe in general terms the progressive march of humanity and to appreciate the moral laws on which its development depends.”³³ Commentators on Guatemala’s past described their nation advancing through stages toward a complex and desirable civilization. They were wont to compare their nation to a person growing from an Indian infancy to the maturity of European-adopted civilization.³⁴ Such teleological conceptions of progress constantly remind us of the intellectual’s heavy debt to the philosophes of the Enlightenment as well as their later—and natural—conversion to the theories of Spencer and Comte.

The exclusivity of Latin American historiography deflected attention from the alternatives to Europeanization even though the majority of the populations still favored and practiced those alternatives. The historiographical treatment of the Americas in which history began with the arrival of the Iberian conquerors relegated the long and rich Indian past to the anthropologists or to those who practiced that discipline’s nineteenth-century variant. Historians ignored folk cultures (except occasionally to disparage them), and although forced to deal with populist caudillos, they were quick to deprecate them. For example, once the traditional elites returned to power in Buenos Aires in 1852, they not only set about eliminating the populist caudillos in the interior and in neighboring Paraguay but writing history complimentary to their actions, the official textbooks which nurtured succeeding generations of Argentine schoolchildren. Mitre, both a prolific historian and energetic president of the nation subscribed fully to the elitist concept of Europe as the single source of civilization. He believed that the educated minority made history and should impose its will on the ignorant masses.³⁵ On the one hand, as president, he opened the doors to foreign penetration and facilitated European economic and cultural domination. On the other, as an historian, he shaped the past to suit his present ends. Leaders with whom he disagreed he simply erased from the pages of history or relegated to inferior or negative positions. He informed fellow historian López, “We have almost the same predilection for great men and the same repulsion for the barbarian troublemakers such as [José Gervasio] Artigas whom we have buried historically.”³⁶ The task of disinterring what previous generations of historians have buried is not an easy one, and it is complicated by the fact that most of society never articulated in written form its complaints, alternatives, or activities.

In studying nineteenth-century historiography, the researcher feels a constant temptation to bypass the norm in order to dwell on the exception. The temptation is difficult to deny. There were some remarkable historians whose sharp insights command attention. Capistrano de Abreu denounced his compatriots’ propensity to ape European trends and lamented that, in its imitation of the Old World, Brazilian culture did not represent the conscious expression of the people.³⁷ He revolutionized historical studies in Brazil by turning attention from the coastal band, with its obvious link to Europe, to examine the previously little-known interior. He presented his major thesis in 1889 in a short but brilliant essay, Os Caminhos Antigos e o Povoamento do Brasil, the single most important statement on Brazilian history yet made. Neglecting the archbishops, generals, and viceroys who had populated the histories of Brazil to that date—even refusing to treat the official national hero, Tiradentes, whom he considered more the creation of the elites than representative of the Brazilian people—he concentrated on the contributions of the masses, insightful periodization of the past, and dominant themes in history. He believed that the masses shaped history and that the vast interior constituted the true Brazil, the valid national reality. Only when the coastal inhabitants turned their backs on the sea and penetrated the interior did they shed their European ways and become Brazilianized. For the first time attention focused on the national heartland and the people who opened and settled it.

Ernesto Quesada of Argentina also contributed to a renovation of historical studies. In his controversial La época de Rosas (1898), Quesada, who had interviewed Juan Manuel de Rosas in England, made the first systematic attempt to revise the historical view of the long and significant government of that gaucho leader. He pointed out the positive contributions of Rosas: national unity and stability and the reorganization of finances—achievements which the elites could only prize and the positivists praise. According to Quesada, the progress of Argentina in the last half of the century was possible only because of the firm national foundation Rosas laid. The new insights Quesada brought to bear on the Rosas period initiated a long series of revisionist interpretations which continue until today.

José María Ramos Mejía introduced into Argentine historiography some aspects of the positivist theories of psychology. In his Las neurosis de los hombres célebres en la historia argentina (published in two volumes, 1878 and 1888), he attempted to psychoanalyze such prominent historical figures as Juan Manuel de Rosas and José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. In later works, La locura en la historia (1895), Las multitudes argentinas (1899), and Rosas y su tiempo (1907), the physician-historian turned his attention from individuals to attempt a psychoanalysis of the Argentine masses. The studies of collective psychology were unique contributions which viewed the great man as the instrument of larger segments of the population, quite a contrast with the usual conclusions of the period. Rosas emerged from Ramos Mejía’s studies as both the product of Argentine society in the first half of the century and the personification of that period. These penetrating and controversial analyses were significant contributions to nineteenth-century historiography.

Fascinating as were Capistrano de Abreu, Quesada, and Ramos Mejía (as well as others who augment the ranks of the innovators), it must be reemphasized that they were not typical of the historiography of their century. They intrigue us because they stand out as precursors of twentieth-century concerns and thus more in harmony with later historians than with their own contemporaries. It is no coincidence that their contributions emerge in the last decades of the century. European concerns with scientific history and greater objectivity echoed in the Western Hemisphere and initiated a questioning of documents and accepted interpretations. Further, larger urban populations, a growing middle class, and more complex manifestations of nationalism prompted shifts in historical perspectives. Nonetheless, to dwell on those innovators is to select the exceptions and thus to distort the major content and the characteristics of nineteenth-century Latin American historiography.

An examination of the biographies and writings of this representative group of nineteenth-century Latin American historians suggests some tentative conclusions. The historians more often than not expressed elitist views because of their own background, associations, and aspirations, as well as their historical concerns and sources. They accepted the national institutional structures and approved the activities of the elites from among whom they selected representatives for their biographies. A basic ideological conformity characterized these historians during much of the century. Probably their most important ideological commitment was to progress, which they equated with Europeanization. By ignoring those aspects and sectors of their society which resisted the European siren, the historians omitted the majority of the populations from their pages. When they did notice the masses in their accounts, it was generally to deplore them as backward and often to advocate immigration to either civilize or replace them. Their heavy reliance on European historical thought and methodologies blurred their vision of their own national past.

European approved or inspired themes—the romantics’ search for the noble Indian, the Spencerian attraction to social evolution, or the positivist concern with political order and material progress—attracted them. Besides stunting the historians’ own intellectual growth, the overdose of intellectual derivation condemned Latin America psychologically to an inferior position. The historians inevitably compared their own nations to northern Europe and the United States. By masochistically insisting on judging themselves by the experiences and conditions of others, they separated their own societies from their context and not surprisingly found them wanting. Few were perceptive or critical enough to realize that the Europeanization they approved contributed to their nations’ dependency. Few appreciated the geographical, racial, and historical uniqueness of Latin America.

While these conclusions may hold few surprises, the implications which might be drawn from this narrow historiographical base deserve attention. Most thought-provoking is the realization that the consistency and frequency of the themes emphasized by the majority of the nineteenth-century historians created an ideology of class. That ideology rationalized the institutions and the elites who controlled them, a justification which helped legitimize both and contributed to their continuity. The values and goals of that ideology served the elites well as one effective means to coerce larger and larger segments of the population into accepting the institutional structures and social systems of Latin America in the past century, even though those structures and systems were more detrimental than beneficial to an overwhelming majority of the population. The historians contributed mightily to the creation of a sense and feeling of nationality, albeit one complementary to the interests of the elites. In doing so, they successfully shrouded national histories with a sacred mystique which has inhibited broader historical investigations and even ridiculed the posing of some fundamental historical questions which might cast doubt on the efficacy of modernization, progress, development, not to mention the national institutions themselves.

Indeed, nineteenth-century historians set patterns and emphasized preferences which to an astonishing degree still pervade twentieth-century historiography. Sarmiento’s Civilización y barbarie, a paean to Europe and a denigration of Argentina, is still dutifully read by Argentine schoolchildren. The implication remains that what is foreign is superior to what is indigenous. For that matter, Vicente Fidel López’ Compendio de historia argentina, adaptado a la enseñanza de los colegios nacionales (published in two volumes, 1889-1890), with its emphasis on Europeanization and the political activities of the elites of Buenos Aires, continued to be used by Argentine teachers, at least through the 1930s, as a bridge for the ideas of nineteenth-century historiography to cross into the present.

Early in the twentieth century, two Brazilian historians, José Francisco da Rocha Pombo and João Ribeiro, wrote popular histories of their country synthesizing much of the material written in the last half of the nineteenth century. Both texts have gone through repeated reprints until the present day and have been read by generations of secondary school students. The texts offer a view of Brazil restricted by a class perspective of the last century. For example, both hardly mention the blacks even though they constituted a majority of the population for centuries and made monumental contributions to Brazil. In a text of 493 pages, Rocha Pombo spoke directly of them on only seventeen, most of which concerned the slave trade and the abolition movement.³⁸ Ribeiro did much the same making only sixteen references in a volume of 423 pages.³⁹ A Brazilian history text published in 1961 by Hélio Vianna and widely used in university courses altered not one whit the emphasis of Rocha Pombo and Ribeiro.⁴⁰ Serving as a sobering example of historiographical continuity, it devoted only 21 out of 671 pages to the African background of Brazil and the blacks’ experience in Brazil. Even though written a half-century after Rocha Pombo and Ribeiro, the Vianna text still emphasizes the slave trade and abolition to the exclusion of myriad other black themes. The cult of the national hero continues to be well tended by the high priests of Clio in the twentieth century, and it is tempting to broaden that observation to conclude that the great man theory of history persists.

In viewing nineteenth-century Latin America, historians as a group still seem to subscribe to the fundamental tenet of the historiography of that century: modernization and consequently Europeanization were desirable, and conversely traditional folk cultures were detrimental. This indoctrination handed down by the nineteenth-century historians is so effective that few will concede that the modernization which took place in Latin America actually deepened dependency and lowered the quality of life of the majority. Accepting the conclusion that folk cultures were backward, historians therefore do not question whether they might have provided the majority with a more satisfactory life-style. The fact that historians devote more study to immigration than to folk cultures seems to reflect further the essentially European approach to history. The ideology of the nineteenth-century continues, and its pervasiveness attests in some measure to the skill and impact of the nineteenth-century Latin American historians. Of course, parallel to that continuity, significant historiographical innovations have occurred in the twentieth century. Yet, the shadow of nineteenth-century Latin American historiography hangs heavily over the the present. Our perception of Latin American history deepens to the extent we understand the exclusivity characterizing this historiography.

Author notes