The following disquisition by Jaime Jaramillo Uribe really needs no introduction. Nothing can be said here that he has not already said more eloquently. This introduction serves only to underline some points that in any case will be obvious.
Before the years in which Jaramillo became active, Colombian history was largely the property of upper-class amateurs and of traditional elements of the middle class oriented to survival by government patronage. They used this property in two ways. One tendency, generally conservative socially and politically, was, and still is, centered in the Academia Colombiana de Historia and in similar institutions in the provinces. The historians of the Academia have tended to concentrate their efforts on such topics as the events (and the dates) of the conquest and the foundation of cities, the political and cultural superstructure of the colonial period, and the lives of heroes of independence and postindependence political leaders. Merely philiapietistic at its worst, at its best this group has produced solid, often archivally based, works of biography, institutional history, and political history. The other dominant pattern has been that practiced by amateurs in a less serious vein, who, rarely resorting to archival research, have written history as political polemic, using historical materials for the purpose of partisan symbolic manipulation. The two groups have had in common an obliviousness to modes of research obtaining among academic historians in Western Europe or the United States.
Jaime Jaramillo Uribe represented a new development. He differed from his predecessors not so much perhaps because of his middle-class origins as because of his clear orientation to the university and to modern academic ways of conceiving historical research and writing. In part because of the influence of the German scholars who taught him at the Escuela Normal Superior in Bogotá as well as of later experiences in Europe, Jaramillo felt compelled to work within Western European scholarly categories and standards. Armed with his very substantial European intellectual formation, Jaramillo brought two innovations to Colombian historiography. The first was a highly structured, systematic, thematically organized intellectual history, which culminated in El pensamiento colombiano en el siglo xix (1963). The second was a series of essays in the social history of Colombia, which he began to publish in the same year.
Jaramillo’s Pensamiento colombiano is a splendid work, filled with insights from his Colombian materials, but also structured by concerns apparently deriving in part from European intellectual models. Among other things, the work displays a Weberian concern for predominant economic and social values as well as a preoccupation with concepts of the state, the latter theme continuing to figure in some of his later work. In addition, as might be expected from Jaramillo’s familiarity with European intellectual history, he ably places Colombian writings within a broader Western context.
His work in social history has been important not only because it was some of the earliest work in this field in Colombia but also, most particularly, for its attention to central issues and its interpretive grasp of those issues. Jaramillo’s method in social history is that of what would now be considered an older school. While he uses quantitative materials, their interest for him is essentially illustrative. With the exception of a single venture in Indian counting, he has not been attracted by the new orthodoxy of history-by-the-numbers. Rather, in the manner of an older tradition (with which some of us feel more comfortable), he seeks in the incomplete materials of history those qualitative understandings without which the most elaborate tables must remain skeletons lacking recognizable human features.
Perhaps as important as his distinguished scholarship is the unique role that Jaime Jaramillo Uribe has played as a mentor and organizer. When he was at the Universidad Nacional in the 1950s and 1960s, he became the first Colombian to provide really professional training in history. Most of the leading professional historians in Colombia today began their training with Jaramillo in those years. In the same years he founded the Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura, Colombia’s first serious journal of social history. Unfortunately, Jaramillo’s seminal work at the Universidad Nacional has remained a more-or-less isolated episode in the development of a seminary of modern historical research. Largely because of the political afflictions suffered by the Universidad Nacional at the end of the 1960s, Jaramillo decided to leave the University for a less disruptive environment. Since that time, it appears, there has not yet recurred the singular conjunction of mentor and able students of the late 1950s and early 1960s that produced the current stars of university-based history in Colombia. The students of those years are carrying on at the
Universidad del Valle, at the Universidad Nacional and in Tunja, in a number of cases performing splendid research. But their efforts as mentors are hampered by the institutional instability and institutional poverty that drove Jaramillo from the Universidad Nacional and that have undermined so many other Colombian enterprises. That institutional weakness is reflected not merely in the total inadequacy of university libraries. It also may be seen in the sadly limited possibilities of university employment for historians, which has necessarily blighted the growth of professional training in history. Nevertheless, one may hope that the various institutions staffed by Jaramillo’s students may in the future prove as fertile seedbeds of historical scholars as did the Universidad Nacional in the time of Jaramillo.
Professor Jaramillo, would you please start off by telling us something of your background.
I was born in 1917 in Abejorral, Antioquia Department. My father, Teodoro Jaramillo Arango, was the grandson of Lorenzo Jaramillo, one of the patriarchs of Antioquia Province and possessor in his time of a considerable fortune, which he lost in the civil wars of the final decades of the last century. My mother, Genoveva Uribe Ochoa, came from El Retiro in the province of the same name. I was the youngest of six children. My family was part of one of the last waves of emigrants that moved from Antioquia to the present Departments of Caldas, Risaralda, and Quindio. For many years, the family was somewhat nomadic. My father had an average education. His principal tools of trade were a solid grounding in law and grammar and beautiful handwriting. He always worked in the legal field, as secretary and judge of municipal districts. He died when I was ten years old.
When I was eleven, I entered the Colegio de Enseñanza Secundaria, a church school in Pereira, capital of Risaralda, paying my fees with income I earned as an acolyte in the parish church. During holidays, I also worked as a clerk in a local store. When I was fifteen, my family’s economic difficulties obliged me to interrupt my secondary school studies and to become a full-time store clerk and assistant bookkeeper. Since then, both commerce and the personality of the merchant have interested me, although I have never engaged in any sort of business.
By the time that I was forced to suspend my education temporarily, I had become, thanks to my mother and a sister, a voracious reader and was well on the way to developing a broad background in literature. I remember being particularly impressed by books on World War I, especially those of the French authors Henri Barbusse and Romain Rolland. I recall that my interest in literature and in learning generally early instilled in me a desire to become a university professor, a goal I clung to throughout my youth.
When I was seventeen, my mother died, and I resolved to go to Bogotá and resume my studies. Once in the capital, I entered the Escuela Normal de Varones de Bogotá. I completed the requirements for a degree, all the time needing to combine earning a living and pursuing my education.
During my years at the Escuela Normal de Varones, numerous writings on socialism and the history of the labor movement appeared; and in the course of reading many of them, I acquired a strong interest in social problems. By the time I completed my course of study, my primary intellectual interest had turned to medicine, but I also had a strong secondary interest in law. I was ultimately to foresake both of those fields in favor of the social sciences, primarily because of the influence of Dr. José Francisco Socarras (of whom more later), then rector of the Escuela Normal Superior de Bogotá. Besides offering me a scholarship in that school, Dr. Socarrás reenforced my youthful interest in being a university professor and thereby having the opportunity to share knowledge with others and guide students into research and writing.
In the Escuela Normal Superior—an institution that played a major role in the educational reform that began in the 1930s—there were courses in mathematics, natural sciences, philology, and social sciences (including economics). I initially enrolled in the philology department, but at the end of my first year of studies, transferred to the social sciences. In 1942, I received the degree of Licenciado en Ciencias Económicas y Sociales.
There was then a small but select group of European scholars among the professors of the Escuela Normal Superior—French, Spanish, German—who, like hundreds of others fleeing political persecution in the years before World War II, had emigrated to various Latin American countries. Some of them were invaluable teachers. There were three professors from Germany, Rudolf Homines, Justus W. Schotellius, and Gerhart Masur. Professor Hommes introduced me to contemporary historical trends, and Professor Schotellius to Americanist studies. Professor Masur, author of Simon Bolivar, introduced my peers and me to the German school of cultural history. There were other foreign scholars who brought fresh approaches to university studies in Colombia: for example, José Francisco Cirre, an instructor in Spanish history. And there were, of course, Colombians who were unusually able teachers. I think particularly of Antonio García, Gabriel Giraldo Jaramillo, and the aforementioned Dr. Socarrás.
Other Colombians who influenced my work and ideas have included Luis Ospina Vásquez and Luis Eduardo Nieto Arteta. And, of course, I cannot fail to mention other Latin Americans, especially Gilberto Freyre of Brazil and José Luis Romero of Argentina.
It was Socarrás, however, who made the deepest impression on me. He was a medical doctor (a psychiatrist) by training. He was, however, devoted to scholarship in general and he was profoundly aware of social issues. He taught that the basis of higher education should be the study of Colombia and especially studies that might lead to the practical resolution of such problems as health, nutrition, and elementary education. In his weekly discussions with the students of the school, he repeated phrases like: “Colombians don’t know how to walk, eat, bathe, or love, and one must teach them how.” His obsession was understanding Colombia. He was determined to create a great library of materials concerned with Colombia, and in pursuit of that objective, he personally visited bookstores in search of a wide variety of materials not ordinarily available in the regular book trade. Socarrás always retained a progressive and liberal (though not propagandist) attitude. He did not, however, hide from his students his distaste for the imbalances and notorious injustices of Colombian society or his concern for the backwardness and deficiencies of Colombian culture. That spirit of intellectual commitment and integrity was assimilated and has been kept alive by several of his pupils.
The years between 1934 and 1945 saw significant political changes in Colombia. The country ceased to be a basically rural society and entered an era of rapid urbanization and industrialization, with concomitant social and political conflict. I remember the ideological skirmishes well because as a university student I was very active in movements dedicated to university reform and social change. About 1936, I had made contact with university Marxist groups that members of the generation preceding mine—for instance, Gerardo Molina—had formed in Bogotá.
From my adolescence, as I have observed above, I had both an interest in, and an acquaintance with, the socialist literature. But I had not studied in depth the works of Marx or other of the principal socialist thinkers. In 1936 I accordingly began an intense period of immersion in their works—without abandoning my interests in other scholarly and philosophical thought or in classical studies, all of which helped to broaden my liberal, humanistic background.
In 1942, upon finishing my university studies in social sciences and economics, I was named professor of sociology in the Escuela Normal Superior. I simultaneously began to study law and political science, and in 1952 received my law degree.
In 1944, I had the opportunity to attend a course at the Universidad Nacional given by the Spanish sociologist José Medina Echeverría. As a result of that course, I developed a lasting interest in Weber, and I believe that his influence on my formation as a historian has been considerable.
As long as I am on the subject of influences on my career, I will relate my travels abroad, as each left a definite imprint. In 1946, I went to France on a scholarship granted by the French government. I studied sociology at the Sorbonne and at the Centre National d’Investigation Scientifique under the direction of Georges David and Georges Gürvitch. At the same time, I enrolled in history courses at the Political Science Institute with Pierre Renouvin, Charles Moraze, and Edmond Vermeil. During that sojourn, which lasted for two years, I also became acquainted with the works of Ernest Labrousse and the Annales school, both of which influenced me considerably.
In 1954, I went to Germany where I was a visiting professor at the University of Hamburg, and where I gave courses in Latin American history. I remained there until 1957.
My stay at the University of Hamburg afforded me the opportunity to improve my knowledge of German and to establish very enriching personal and academic relationships. I have a special remembrance of, and maintain the sincerest gratitude toward, Rudolf Grossmann, then director of Hispanic Studies at the university, and Adolf Mayer-Abich, historian of science and philosophy.
In 1966, I spent six months as a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. I have the most pleasant memories of the contacts that I had with my North American students and colleagues—especially Paul Hardacre, who then chaired the Department of History; William Nichols, director of the Center for Latin American studies; J. León Helguera and Peter Marzahl; and the late Alexander Marchant, whose discourses in the Vanderbilt cafeteria were lively lessons in criticism, irony, and good humor.
I could say practically the same things about my stay at St. Anthony’s College at Oxford University, where I spent a semester in 1975. Great Britain’s university ambience, my long hours in the Bodleian Library and the British Museum and the Public Record Office (then in London), as well as contact with D. C. M. Platt, Malcolm Deas, John Lynch, Harold Blakemore, and others—all these constituted some of my most fertile intellectual and human experiences.
Next I went to Spain. My time at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville gave an added dimension to my development as a historian. To immerse myself in that sanctum sanctorum of Spanish American history produced in me varied and special impressions. To know that I would be there for only one semester, when I would have liked to have had several years, left me feeling both perplexed and discouraged. There, more than in any other archive, I was aware of the difficulties of historical research, of the vastness of the material facing the historian, and of the humility and skepticism with which the historian should regard his work. The friendship and cooperation offered me during that time in Seville by Francisco Morales Padrón, and the hospitality that he extended to me in the Colegio Hernando Colón, which he then directed, and where I had marvellous round table discussions with Spanish students and professors of different specializations, left me with an indelible memory of the magnanimity and spiritual richness of Spain.
When in 1948 I returned to Colombia from my two-year sojourn in France, political circumstance of the day prevented my going back to teaching and research. Instead, I worked as an inspector in a government agency, the Revisoría Oficial de Instituto Oficiales de Crédito, subordinate to the National Congress. That assignment gave me the opportunity to carry out research in economics, and I gained expertise in the areas of credit and banking that has proved extremely useful in my career as a historian.
In 1952, I was named professor of European history in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá; I held that position until 1970, offering courses in European and Colombian history, with, as I have noted, occasional and fruitful breaks for travel abroad. In spite of heavy teaching and administrative loads (I was then dean of Philosophy and Letters and director of the History Department), I was able to spend some time doing research. Most of my scholarly works, in fact, date from that period.
Speaking of those works, which do you consider to have been your most important?
Of my most important works, I would mention in the field of intellectual history, Pensamiento colombiano en el siglo xix (1963); in social history, Ensayos de historia social colombiana (1969): the first because in it I developed a new methodology and a new way of treating the history of ideas, and the second because it called attention to the study of social life and to the need to study what I have called “interior social history.”
My reasons for choosing the themes of these books were varied, but the principal one was my belief that those aspects of Colombia’s evolution had received little attention in the traditional historiography. Also influential was the contact with European teachers like Friedrich Meinecke and Ernst Cassirer, whose works sparked my enthusiasm for the history of ideas. Henri Pirenne, Marc Bloch and G. M. Trevelyan, and Max Weber reaffirmed my interest in economic and social history, acquired when I first studied Marx. In the case of my interest in slavery and the role of the Black population, reading Gilberto Freyre’s Casa Grande y Senzala was decisive. There were even circumstantial factors: in the case of Pensamiento colombiano en el siglo xix, for example, I promised Leopoldo Zea, the Mexican historian and philosopher, to write an essay for the collection Historia de las ideas en América, which he directed and which the Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia published.
What of your other contributions to the field of historical studies— your influence on students, or in building an institutional context for research on Colombian history?
Given the organization of history studies in Colombia, I have generally had only undergraduate students. In instructing them, I have tried to emphasize and encourage the study of Colombian social history and the use of archival primary sources; to demonstrate the need to produce objective history—free from methodological dogmas and political, national, or social prejudices. I have also sought to guide both students and those who ask me about areas of research, first, to the least known fields of national history; second, to those fields of study with the most accessible sources; and third, to the themes that best lend themselves to the preparation, inclination, and capability of the individual involved.
My greatest satisfactions have been to have been involved in the renovation of Colombian historiography, by calling attention to social and cultural history and the need for rigorous scholarly preparation in order to write history; and also to have contributed in some way to the knowledge of certain aspects of Colombian history.
Many of those who were my students today make up the first generation of professional historians of Colombia. I had many students in my classes and seminars at the Universidad Nacional and the Universidad de los Andes. Some left history in favor of other disciplines—sociology, economics, anthropology. Among those who made history their profession, and who have produced significant works, I think of, in colonial and economic social history, Germán Colmenares, Jorge Orlando Melo, Margarita González, Jorge Palacios, and Hermes Tovar Pinzón; in art history, Germán Rubiano Caballero, and Carmen Ortega. The centers promoting this new approach to the history of Colombia are the Universidad del Valle (Cali), the Universidad Nacional (Bogotá), the Universidad de Antioquia (Medellín), the Tecnológica (Tunja), and the Universidad de los Andes and the Javeriana (both in Bogotá). I am pleased to say that in other universities, and individually, there are scholars working along the same lines.
Currently I am busy with research on the second half of the eighteenth century in Colombia, i.e., the so-called epoch of the viceroyalty (1750-1810); this research has taken me in considerable depth into the economy, social and cultural history, and the organization of the state.
It is perhaps interesting to note that almost all of those engaged in revising national history belong to the Colombian middle class. Some have roots in families of teachers and professors. The stimuli for this entire group came from the ambience that characterized Colombia in the 1940s and 1950s, and especially from the intellectual movements then present in the university: Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, existentialism, modern sociology. All these movements gave rise to particular interest in the social sciences and politics, just as did some of the period’s major events: World War II, the struggle against Fascism, the rise of socialism, and the Latin American progressive political movements. History appeared in this panorama as a focal point. To social and political circumstances, one must add, as always, the personal influence of teachers and professors, personal sensitivity, and admiration for the great European and North American historians who were beginning to be read in this country. In this sense, I believe that for my generation and the following one, the publishing efforts of companies like the Fondo de Cultura Económica of Mexico, the Revista de Occidente and the Editorial Espasa-Calpe of Spain, which facilitated contact with the great works and figures of European thought and historiography, have had much importance.
Furthermore, during this period, between the 1940s and 1960s, various works and figures appeared that dealt with social and economic themes, and that notably changed historiography in Colombia. Among those who immediately come to mind are Indalecio Liévano Aguirre, with his biography of Rafael Núñez (1946) and Los grandes conflictos sociales y económicos de nuestra historia (1962); Guillermo Hernández Rodríguez, author of De Los Chibchas a la colonia y ala república (1949); Luis Eduardo Nieto Arteta, Economía y cultura en la historia de Colombia (1942); Luis Ospina Vásquez, Industria y protección en Colombia (1954); Juan Friede, with his colonial studies, like El indio en la lucha por la tierra (1944) and Los Quimbayas bajo la dominación española; Orlando Fais Borda, El hombre y la tierra en Boyacá; Rafael Gómez Hoyos, La revolución granadina de 1810 (1962). This reform movement—which was actually on the periphery of academia—owed a great deal to the North American geographer James J. Parsons, and to his La colonización antio-queña del occidente colombiano (1950).
By way of further background, I would digress.
Traditional historical studies have dealt predominantly with the independence era and the nineteenth century. Yet there are very few colonial studies based upon primary sources. The better works on this period were done during the last few decades, and the majority of them, if we except those of Juan Friede, are by young historians. Neither have North Americans dealing with Colombia been attracted to colonial history as a research area. There are, of course, exceptions (the late John Phelan, for example). Thematically, at present, military and political history dominate.
Although in the last few years there has been a reawakening of an interest in economic and social history, there is still much to be done in those fields as well as in cultural, regional, and urban history.
What has occurred in Colombian historiography since the 1940s, however, must be considered a major intellectual achievement by any standard when we fully appreciate the base from which the new generation started. If, for example, we consider only the republican period, the historians in the nineteenth century were always writers, journalists, or politicians—in short, historians by avocation. They produced books and essays on varied aspects of history, usually military or political events, or biographies of important personalities. That was the case with José Manuel Restrepo, the classic historian of the wars of independence, and with José Manuel Groot, author of the Historia eclesiástica y civil del Nuevo Reino de Granada. Social, cultural, and economic history received little attention. Still, the nineteenth century in Colombia saw the production of such works as Las minas de oro y plata de Colombia by Vicente Restrepo (1892), a valuable contribution to the country’s mining history, and La historia de la literatura colombiana, by José María Vergara y Vergara.
The Academia Colombiana de Historia, founded in 1902, continued that tradition and has carried out important documentary work through its Boletín de Historia y Antigüedades and its serial publications, like the Biblioteca Nacional de Historia.
Still, for the new generation of historians, that tradition, though respectable, was not sufficient, and it had to be superseded. That was the import of the aforementioned researchers and of those who have graduated from Colombian universities in the last twenty years and have done specialized study outside the country (especially in France, England, and the United States). In part, a demonstration of the new tendencies is the Manual de Historia de Colombia, published by the Instituto Colombiano de Cultura (1978-81).
In June 1977, at the inauguration in Medellín of the Fundación Antioqueña para las Ciencias Sociales (founded by Luis Ospina Vásquez), a group of sociologists, economists, historians, and researchers in various other fields proposed the writing of a historical manual that would treat the nation’s economic, social, and cultural evolution. Such a manual did not exist in Colombian historiography, and the group considered it a national necessity. The idea was well received by the director of the Instituto Nacional de Cultura, Gloria Zea de Uribe, and, in effect, the Instituto underwrote the execution of such a work. The proposed project, because of its breadth and the complexity of its themes, of necessity had to be a collective undertaking. From the first, the only criteria in selecting the authors were scholarly training and research experience in assorted fields. Given the limited development of modern research in the country, there were in some disciplines very few qualified scholars. At the same meeting, the guidelines for the individual studies were set. Some recommendations about style (clarity, avoiding jargon) were made, with the goal of producing a work accessible and comprehensible to the average educated reader. Apart from those guidelines, the authors were given free rein and personal responsibility for their methods and analyses.
About twenty scholars of recognized ability and prestige in our field participated in carrying out the project. The result is a work that, obviously, provides a new perspective on some aspects of national history, be it because earlier Colombian historiography failed to reflect Colombia’s historical evolution as a modern nation, or because, in light of newly discovered documents and new analytic criteria, traditional themes received different interpretations.
It is clear that you have dedicated your career to the development of historical studies in Colombia. Why is history so important to you? Did you consider other careers in the social sciences, for example?
I did in fact think of devoting myself to sociology. I opted for history for a variety of reasons: 1. the duty I, as a Colombian, had to know and to make known the history of my country; 2. my conviction that only on national history could I do research based on primary sources; 3. the certainty that history is the academic discipline of synthesis par excellence and one that offers a better knowledge of social reality than any other discipline.
My insistence on the importance of national historical studies was stimulated by the great desire that I acquired at the Escuela Normal Superior to know the reality of Colombia and by my conviction that history was an essential part of that reality. The precarious state of studies of this kind in the country—and the unfavorable position in Colombia compared to the situations in other Latin American countries like Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina—made an impression on me. I insisted on the necessity of incorporating history into the curriculum and of establishing a major in it, with an eye to training good professional historians and eventually researchers with scholarly and professional backgrounds. Fortunately, university administrators supported my proposal.
Needless to say, after establishing a major in history at the Universidad Nacional, I went after (successfully) the creation of a Department of History. When it was founded in 1962, I became its first director and then I chaired it for several years. I ought to point out that the drive for national history was born in me and in many of my generation as a result of the revision of historical studies that scholars like Eduardo Nieto Arteta, Luis Ospina Vásquez, and Guillermo Hernández Rodríguez had begun in the 1940s and 1950s as a reaction to the so-called Official Academic History.
Subsequently, my own research on the process of mestizaje, on the national formation of Colombia, and on eighteenth-century slave society showed me the importance of social history. My works on slavery, Colombia’s pre-Hispanic population, and mestizaje were published in the Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura, as were the first essays of Germán Colmenares, Hermes Tovar Pinzón, Jorge Orlando Melo, Margarita González, and Jorge Palacios on various aspects of economic, social, and demographic history, all of whom began their training in history at the Universidad Nacional. The Anuario, founded in 1963, by the way, reflected that early group’s attempts at the renovation that was taking place in historical studies in the university. Many of these graduates went on to train in France and the United States, and then returned to teach in Colombian universities, where departments of history were being created and where they were instrumental in promoting the new Colombian historiography.
The Anuario also received contributions from English and North American historians, such as Malcolm Deas, Frank Safford, and Anthony McFarlane. Besides articles it contained a section on documents for Colombian social history and a bibliographical section. The journal follows that same format today.
In light of your emphasis on the need for Colombian national history, how do you view non-Colombian historians working in the field?
I have had many North American friends and colleagues who have made valuable contributions to Colombian historiography, from the generation preceding mine through that following. Contact with foreigners has generally proved beneficial to the development of Colombian historiography, just as for social and cultural development. Be it foreign researchers or professors who have come to do research or to teach in Colombia, or Colombians who have gone outside the country, or personal contacts, or attendance at international scholarly meetings—I believe that all such forms of contact have been beneficial. We need to continue exchanges of researchers and professors, to hold meetings that encourage the interchange of ideas, and to make inventories and critical evaluations of historiographical materials. In short, we need more, not fewer, contacts, both personal and academic.
Professor Jaramillo, would you like to favor the readers of the Hispanic American Historical Review with a final statement or a word of advice?
I would like to end by stating with considerable conviction that the role of the historian in Colombia—or in any country or culture—consists of establishing, as far as is possible, historical truth; so that citizens may know the country in which they live, where they come from, and what native-sons have done in the fields of economics, culture, institutional and social organization to make their lands into nations.
Translation of the interview was made possible by a grant from the Tinker Foundation of New York.
