These five books explore the economic dimensions of social and political life in the Cauca River valley in southwestern Colombia from the seventeenth century to the present. They address the question of how change occurred in a region virtually cut off from the world economy until recently. Spanish settlers divided the area into latifundios, but it experienced a measure of prosperity only in the eighteenth century—when the landlords began to supply gold mines along the Pacific coast with slaves, cattle, and sugar. The gold boom soon ended, however, and with independence the area subsided into economic depression and political turmoil until the rapid growth of a modern sugar industry beginning in the 1920s. Today, Valle del Cauca, centered on the burgeoning city of Cali, is one of the most dynamic, capitalistic regions of Colombia. Drawing on notarial, municipal, and family archives, these books examine how the dominant groups in Valle—the landlords, merchants, mine owners, and, later, industrialists—coped with an often insecure economic and political environment and, in doing so, became agents of change.
Much of the recent historical research on Valle del Cauca is inspired by the pioneering efforts of colonial historian Germán Colmenares, founder of a center for regional studies at the Universidad del Valle. In his book in this series, Colmenares meticulously examines the emergence of the latifundio system and the transformation of landholding, markets, and trade stimulated by the eighteenth-century mining boom. With the upsurge of commerce, merchants and miners—often Spanish immigrants—married into the old landowning families, and, at the same time, opposing political clans took form, foreshadowing the tensions that would erupt into violence in the nineteenth century.
Zamira Díaz de Zuluaga studies the economic impact of the wars for independence—the decline of commerce and return to production for local markets. Despite an interesting comparison of Cali, where black slave labor prevailed, with Popayán, the Indian area to the south, Díaz de Zuluaga does not fully examine the implications of her findings.
In contrast, José Escorcia has written an exemplary study of the socioeconomic roots of political conflict. Through an adroit use of notarial, tax, and census records, he distinguishes two groups within the creole upper class: the more powerful landlords, merchants, and mine owners, and an ambitious lower stratum of lawyers, government employees, and politicians, the first forming the nucleus of Conservative and the second of Liberal party leadership. Liberals appealed to black workers over land and labor issues, giving party conflict in Valle a particularly virulent social content in the early nineteenth century. Escorcia makes Liberal/Conservative divisions intelligible within a specific socioeconomic context and suggests that such divisions may have had entirely different meaning elsewhere in Colombia.
Richard Hyland takes up the story in 1851, the year the Colombian government began to secularize church wealth, creating new problems and opportunities for Valle elites. His is a stimulating study of national policy and its complex, often contradictory, local effects. By illuminating relations between the Catholic Church, economic change, and political ideology at the regional level, Hyland adds to our understanding of how embedded the church credit system was in Latin American life and how wrenching its elimination.
The growth of the modern sugar industry through changes in entrepreneurship, productive organization, and technology is the subject discussed by sociologist José María Rojas G. This final volume sheds light on the origins of the men who founded the sugar mills (most were the sons of elite families fallen on hard times or were immigrants); the articulation of sugar with cattle ranching; and the relation between production for national markets and for exportation, which began after 1960.
Together these books advance a conceptually sophisticated, empirically grounded framework for regional studies which, the authors argue, are essential to forging a new national history. Because of the centrality of the hacienda to regional social formation, Valle provides a striking contrast to Antioquia—the only other Colombian region to have received detailed attention—where the small coffee farm predominated. The Valle studies also address several issues of broader concern: the interpenetration of rural and urban society within a regional subsystem; shifts in land tenure with economic boom-and-bust cycles; and change processes in regions that existed beyond the direct influence of the export economy.
Nevertheless, much research remains to be done. Although these authors stress the importance of socioeconomic analysis to make sense of politics, the empirical connections between the two spheres are not always fully drawn. One is left wondering what happened to the family clans who exercised economic and political power before 1850, and the full range of causes and effects of the endemic nineteenth-century civil wars is not clear. Finally, although several authors acknowledge that the behavior of the lower classes should be studied in order to understand the problems and choices the upper classes faced—and although racial and class conflict was acute in this region—there is little information on slave resistance and later political activity of the lower classes. Fortunately for historians of Valle who would undertake the task of incorporating them into regional history, anthropologists Michael Taussig and Nina S. de Friedmann have already paved the way.
