The life of Juan Friede, the Colombian historian who died in Bogotá on June 28, 1990, was no less admirable and surprising than his work. Born at the beginning of the century in a Polish village near the border with Germany, into a family of merchants, he moved as an adolescent to Vienna, where he studied economics and social sciences—disciplines that he would never abandon, not even in the midst of the mercantile activities that brought him to Colombia in 1925 as agent of the import-export firm F. Stern and Co. Vienna was then one of the great intellectual and scientific centers of Europe. It was the epicenter of the new logic, the new mathematics, the new economics. It was also a center of literature, music, and art.
From Vienna he went on to England, where, continuing his vocation and his eagerness for knowledge of human history and of the complexities of life in society, he enrolled in the recently founded London School of Economics. There, in 1925, he was presented the opportunity to come to Colombia. He arrived in Manizales as a commercial agent, and occupied himself with the coffee business and the sale of automobiles and imported merchandise. As a merchant, he traveled over the entire territory of the nation on muleback, on the steamships of the Magdalena and Cauca rivers, in buses and trucks on the primitive roads of those years. In connection with these travels as commercial agent of Stern and Co., he had the opportunity to travel through the regions of Cauca and Huila. Crossing the Colombian massif from Neiva to Popayán, he came to know the ruins of the San Agustín culture and the unhappy social situation of the Indian communities that survived in the region. From this experience probably arose his interest in and passion for studying the problems and the history of the Colombian Indian population, which made him one of the pioneers of national ethnohistory and one of the persons who were most knowledgeable about Indian problems, as well as one of the most tenacious defenders of the Colombian Indian. He took his place in the best tradition of the great apostles of American indigenismo, like Father Las Casas and the bishop of Popayán, don Juan del Valle, to each of whom he dedicated an erudite volume.
I believe it no exaggeration to say that the appearance in 1943 of Friede’s book El indio en lucha por la tierra is the starting point of modern studies of the Indian in Colombia. To be sure, the Colombian indigenista movement did not lack antecedents. Under the fruitful and innovative rectorship of César Uribe Piedrahita in the ancient Universidad del Cauca, Antonio García, José Ignacio Bustamante, Gerardo Cabrera Moreno, and Álvaro Pío Valencia were presenting the situation of the Colombian Indians as a social and political problem that demanded real and practical solutions, such as the return of lands that had long ago been usurped from them.
In 1947 Juan Friede was named a corresponding member of the Academia Colombiana de Historia, and in subsequent years he was made a member of the Instituto Fernández de Oviedo in Madrid and the Société des Americanistes in Paris. From these years onward, he dedicated himself fully to research, alternating with other periods of teaching activity in universities of Colombia and the United States. He spent long periods of hard work in the archives of Spain, especially the Archivo de Indias of Seville; he was a familiar figure in Colombian archives too, in Bogotá, in the Cauca, and in the parish archives of cities and towns. From this wandering through the archives and burrowing in the sources there resulted his enormous body of work on the colonial history of Colombia, which was his field of specialization. The listing of his books, monographs, essays, documentary compilations, prologs, and critical editions fills various pages of his curriculum vitae. A simple quantitative review yields these data: ethnohistorical studies, 11; topics of general history, 18; documentary sources for the history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 25 volumes; biographical studies, 7; economic topics, 11; questions of historical geography, 11; essays of historical anthropology and indigenismo, 31; miscellaneous studies, 40. In this vast bibliography certain works stand out: Los quimbayas bajo la dominación española; Los andaki; Los Welser en la colonización de Venezuela; Vida y obra de don Juan del Valle, obispo de Popayán y protector de los indios; Bartolomé de Las Casas, precursor del anticolonialismo; La otra verdad, la independencia americana vista por los españoles.
If Juan Friede’s extensive work of scholarship is examined as a whole, one sees that it is characterized by two constants. The first is his admiration for the Indian past and fervent defense of the rights of the Indians who survived the great demographic catastrophe of conquest and colonization. The second is the documentary rigor of his research. For Friede, as for every true historian, the work of history was not a mere accumulation of documents; but he clearly thought that without documents, as one of the founders of modern historiography expressed it, there is no history. To this essential principle of method Juan Friede was invariably faithful, and that was one of the most valuable lessons of his magisterio.
