Whitening the Region: Caucano Mediation and “Antioqueño Coionization” in Nineteenth-Century Coiombia

Scholars of Latín America have begun to interrogate the spatial dynamics of race within nations. We are starting to examine the regional dimensions of racial identity and the racial dimensions of regionalism.¹ This article traces the nineteenth-century history of the Colombian coffee region, which is famous for the whiteness and industriousness of its inhabitants, from the vantage point of Riosucio, a district in which almost half of the population identified itself in the 1993 census as indigenous. I consider regional identity, like race, to be a social construct that has resulted from specific historical processes. The history of Riosucio and the coffee region of which it forms a part illustrates some of the ways in which nineteenth-century Colombians organized racial hierarchy in their national space. They created an interregional geography of race and status that privileged certain places and peoples within the nation as white, modern, and progressive while denigrating others as backward and inferior. As anthropologist Peter Wade has observed, in Colombia “region has become a powerful language of cultural and racial differentiation.”²

During the nineteenth century, inhabitants of the state of Antioquia in northwestern Colombia migrated into neighboring states, most notably the state of Cauca.³ They settled an area that became known as “greater Antioquia” (Antioquia la grande). Scholarly literature and popular nostalgia have created a “rosy legend” (leyenda rosa) of Antioqueño migration that has idealized the Antioqueño migrants as the “self-styled Yankees of South America”⁴—intrepid white pioneers who civilized a wild frontier and integrated Colombia into the international market economy through the cultivation and marketing of coffee. In recent decades, a revisionist and more critical literature has painted the colonización antioqueña in more somber colors, emphasizing conflict and exploitation.⁵ Both the light and dark legends of nineteenth-century Antioqueño migration, however, share a common flaw. They attribute agency in the settlement process almost exclusively to the Antioqueños themselves, thus casting Antioqueños as inherently more energetic and innovative than other Colombians. This article, however, shows that the “Antioqueño colonization” was not exclusively an Antioqueño initiative. Cancanos participated actively in transforming (or “Antioqueñoizing”) part of eastern Cauca.

The history of Antioqueño migration into Cauca should be placed within the context of widespread nineteenth-century understandings of progress that associated modernization with European origin. Cauca elites encouraged Antioqueño settlement at a time when statesmen throughout Latin America were trying to modernize their populations by encouraging European immigration. Latin American elites associated Europeans with progress and often showed a marked preference for white European workers over those from other continents and over their own popular classes of African and indigenous origin.⁶ Historians have recognized and discussed the international dynamics of racial “whitening” for places such as Argentina and southern Brazil, where efforts to promote European immigration were most successful. But the interregional dynamics of whitening and migration have received less attention. The case of Antioqueño settlement is important because it demonstrates that whitening processes also took place in countries—and regions within countries—that lacked the necessary infrastructure and capital to effectively facilitate European immigration.⁷ When European immigration proved unattainable, some regional elites looked around and identified some of their own neighbors as potential “immigrants.” Such was the case for Antioqueño migrants in Cauca.

Catherine LeGrand’s pathbreaking research on Colombian frontier settlement has demonstrated that much of rural Colombia was on the move in the nineteenth century. Landless peasants, former slaves, and displaced Indians continually expanded the agricultural frontier. LeGrand suggested that in Colombia, unlike in countries where foreign immigration was successful, “the native settler was lauded as a hardworking, determined, even heroic type whose efforts to open new lands advanced the cause of national development.”⁸ This astute observation holds true for certain rural Colombians but—importantly—not for all. Not all of the poor cultivators clearing forested slopes and valley floors for agriculture gained elite approval.⁹ In Cauca, lawmakers, large landowners, and other leading citizens at the state and local level often expressed disdain for their own rural poor, especially Afro-Caucanos and Indians. Businessmen and politicians longed to replace their unsatisfactory local population with migrants whom they regarded as more productive. Since Cauca did not attract Europeans in large numbers, elite Caucanos turned instead to migrants from neighboring states, mainly Antioquia.

This article will demonstrate that while they had diverse economic and political motives for facilitating Antioqueño settlement, Caucanos displayed a common tendency to associate Antioquia with “progress.” When Caucanos advocated Antioqueño migration, they framed their arguments in a discourse of regional differentiation; they differentiated between regions they characterized as progressive and others they perceived as backward.¹⁰ By the mid-nineteenth century, Colombians (as well as foreign observers in Colombia) generally seemed to have accepted as “common sense” that Antioquia was more prosperous and progressive than backward Cauca.¹¹ This assumption was clearly predicated on racial hierarchy, even though sources do not always refer explicitly to race.¹² Nineteenth-century Colombians ascribed certain cultural, physical, and moral characteristics (both positive and negative) as inherent to specific groups within the nation. They associated backwardness with Indianness and blackness and they associated progress with European background and whiteness.

In order to understand how these processes played themselves out “on the ground,” I trace Caucano participation in the founding of several new Antioqueño settlements in Cauca, and then go on to focus on an area that already had a considerable poor rural population of people of indigenous, African, and mixed origin—the municipio, or district, of Riosucio, in the present-day administrative department of Caldas.¹³ The cultural and demographic transformation of northeastern Cauca culminated in 1905, when the national government created Caldas out of territories taken from Cauca, Antioquia, and (in 1907) Tolima. The boundaries of the new department roughly corresponded to “greater Antioquia,” which was also becoming known as “the coffee region” (la región cafetera or el eje cafetero). Colombians know Caldas as a “white” department founded and populated by Antioqueño pioneers. Popular and even scholarly literature has tended to portray Caldas as the offspring, or hijo, of Antioquia. The historical experiences of Riosucio suggest otherwise; Caucanos and Antioqueños collaborated to create the region in the image of Antioquia. Before turning to specific local examples, however, I provide an overview of Antioquia and Cauca in the mid–nineteenth century, a time when regional and political identities were solidifying.¹⁴

“Polar Opposites”: Antioquia versus Cauca

Colombia is often referred to as “a country of regions.”¹⁵ During the federal period (1857-85) Colombia was arguably not really a nation-state at all, but a loose federation of “sovereign states” known colloquially as países. Each had its own army, currency, passport, postal service, and constitutional government.¹⁶ By far the largest state in territory was Cauca, which included the Pacific coast from the Ecuador border to Panama, as well as part of the Atlantic coast and the southern Amazonian frontier. Northeast of Cauca was the smaller and more densely populated state of Antioquia.

Conflicts between partisan factions racked the federation. They fought electorally and militarily for control over local, state, and federal governments. A Liberal-Conservative split was evident by midcentury. By the second half of the nineteenth century. Conservatives came to dominate state politics in Antioquia.¹⁷ In Cauca, meanwhile, Liberals were deeply divided among themselves, but they did succeed in relegating the Conservatives to the margins of state politics during the third quarter of the century.¹⁸ As Conservative and Liberal factions strengthened their control over their respective state governments, their partisan conflicts increasingly took the form of civil wars between opposing states.

Economically and socially, these regional rivals shared some common characteristics. The populations of both Antioquia and Cauca had descended from a mix of Spanish immigrants, African slaves, indigenous populations, and a smattering of other Europeans and Asians. Gold-mining was important in both economies. There were also notable differences. Cauca boasted coastal ports and expanses of fertile lowlands suitable for plantation agriculture, especially in the zone north of the capital of Popayán, around the city of Cali, where the Cauca river valley opened up into a broad plain known simply as the Cauca valley (the present-day administrative department of El Valle).¹⁹ Planters and mine owners continued to depend significantly on slave labor until the mid-nineteenth century. Most of Antioquia’s slaves, on the other hand, had obtained manumission by the end of the colonial period.²⁰ Large estates and landholding indigenous communities remained central to the nineteenth-century economy and society of Cauca, while late-colonial landowners in Antioquia allowed some estates to be broken up and distributed among their growing population of landless poor.²¹ In the early republican period, Antioquia also broke up most remaining indigenous communal landholdings (known in Colombia as resguardos) and converted their lands into marketable commodities.²²

Large landholdings were not eliminated in Antioquia, but trade and mining provided major sources of income. Antioqueño merchants developed commercial networks that linked scattered mining and agricultural settlements via treacherous mule paths. Wealthy Antioqueños became the preeminent financiers, merchants, and investors of the new Republic. Starting in the 188os, first large and then small farmers started planting coffee, the marketing of which proved lucrative for Antíoqueño traders.²³

Over the course of the century, the merchant capitalist elite of Antioquia increasingly embraced the proclerical Conservative party. Research has shown that, while a significant Liberal presence endured, Conservative politicians and clergymen consolidated a substantial degree of political control over Antioquia.²⁴ Politicians’ authority apparently rested in part on their ability to tap into and foster a sense of regional allegiance that transcended internal divisions of class, race, and local origin.²⁵ Rather than denigrate the common people, Conservative political and religious leaders validated manual labor as honorable and embraced aspects of Antioqueño rural popular culture. The rough clothing of the rural working man (farmer, miner, or muleteer) became a regional masculine costume (see cover photo).²⁶ By sometimes wearing such clothing themselves, more prosperous men expressed a sense of regional pride and shared masculine identity that linked the identities of urban elites to the countryside. One foreign observer noted that when the wealthiest inhabitants of Medellín traveled outside the city, they donned the clothes of their rural paisanos; the rich travelers were distinguishable from the barefoot campesinos only by their shoes.²⁷

Politicians and priests emphasized the importance of legitimately constituted patriarchal families, piety, industry, commerce, social order, and Conservative politics. The Catholic hierarchy oversaw education and set up a series of lay institutions that wove men and women, hoys and girls, rich and poor into the social and political fabric, while reinforcing gender and social hierarchy.²⁸ Where consent failed, the government applied coercion.²⁹ A vagrancy code punished sexually deviant behavior (such as prostitution and cohabitation) as well as unemployment, thus providing a tool for repressing those who did not conform to Catholic prescriptions and uphold a commercially oriented economy.³⁰

Cauca’s elites, meanwhile, were not as successful in constituting Cauca as a cohesive entity or in fostering a sense of cross-class regional affiliation. Cauca suffered economic decline in the nineteenth century and the elites were politically divided. Patrician leaders based in Popayán and the Cauca valley found it difficult to control an extensive territory inhabited by a scattered population divided by class, racial identity, political allegiance, locality, and ethnicity. In the southern highlands, indigenous Andean communities spoke their own languages, retained their communal governing structures, and mobilized in defense of communal interests.³¹ In the area in and around Riosucio in northeastern Cauca, Spanish-speaking indigenous communities also maintained common landholdings and communal governing institutions. Racial and political divisions in Cauca were pronounced and sometimes violent, as was the case when Liberal artisans, slaves, and ex-slaves fought against Conservative landowners in the Cauca valley in the 1850s.³² The rebellious populace incurred the ire and disdain of upper-class Caucanos and foreign travelers.

By midcentury, Colombian and foreign writers—including novelists, geographers, and travelers—were emphasizing the differences between Cauca and Antioquia. Such accounts compared Caucanos, especially the lowland Afro-Caucanos of the Cauca river valley, negatively with Antioqueños. By the 1850s, Bogotá resident (and Cauca native) Manuel Pombo was explicidy likening Andoqueños to “Yankees.”³³ Swiss immigrant Carlos de Greiff lauded “the industriousness that distinguishes them . . . and their natural propensity for material improvements and for the march of progress.”³⁴ Meanwhile, negative images of Caucanos prevailed. Elite and foreign writers blamed Cauca’s economic woes on a population they perceived as lazy and tumultuous. In the 1880s, Santiago Eder, a United States consul and landowner in Cauca, joked that the Cauca valley was a paradise populated by Satan with people so awful that they were not tolerated even in Hell.³⁵ His contemporary, the priest Federico Cornelio Aguilar, described the same valley as a Garden of Eden converted into a hell by partisan violence.³⁶ Geographic determinism also infused nineteenth-century writings, which characterized the torrid and fertile lowlands as conducive to laziness and lasciviousness, while portraying the highlands of Antioquia as imparting a strong constitution to rugged and independent inhahitants.³⁷

Assumptions about gender and race were evident in this emerging discourse of regional differentiation. Central to both Colombian and foreign portrayals of orderly and moral Antioqueño society was a positive image of the patriarchal family. Pombo wrote detailed descriptions of domestic bliss among Antioqueño friends and quoted Antioqueño writer Juan de Dios Restrepo, who attributed the Antioqueños’ overall “morality” to the family: “the morality of their customs is due also to their passion for family life and to how popular marriage is among them.”³⁸ An important component of this image was the idealized Antioqueña wife and mother, an ideal that combined physical and moral strength with submission to male authority. As early as the 1820s, French engineer Jean Boussingault mentioned that Antioqueña women were reputed to be virtuous wives. In the 1860s another Frenchman, Charles Saffray, attested to the Antioqueñas’ virtue.³⁹ German visitors in the 1880s and 1890s reiterated the argument that the relative peace and order of Antioqueño society stemmed from the strength of the family, which they contrasted explicitly with the norm in Cauca. As traveler Friedrich von Schenck concluded in 1880, “in reference to family life, the Cancano must be seen as the polar opposite of the Antioqueño.”⁴⁰

Manuel Pombo’s midcentury memoir juxtaposed idyllic and orderly Antioqueño family life with images of unbridled and violent sexuality among black inhabitants of the Cauca valley. He described a seductive dance between an Afro-Caucano woman and man. The dance was interrupted when “another black broke the circle that surrounded the dancers and, agile as a tiger, reached the mulatta in one leap and stuck a knife through her heart.”⁴¹ Such animalistic imagery of sexuality, even when romanticized, reflected assumptions about the inherent superiority of Europeans and people of European descent. Writers emphasized the European-like (or Yankee-like) qualities of the Antioqueños by contrasting them with an Other that was usually represented as Afro-Colombian, sometimes Indian.⁴² Antioqueños were supposed to be everything that the Indians and Afro-Caucanos ostensibly were not: industrious, orderly, sexually respectable, and astute. Antioqueños controlled their “animal” passions; respectable Antioquia women ideally submerged their sexuality in religion and motherhood, supplemented by productive and commercial activities that further fortified the Catholic family.⁴³

Over the course of the nineteenth century, writers increasingly described Antioqueños as not only acting like Europeans or Yankees, but as looking like them as well. As early as the 1820s, Carl Gosselman praised the pale skin and rosy cheeks of Antioqueño highlanders; but he also noted the varied complexions of the diverse population of Antioquia.⁴⁴ Late-nineteenth-century writers tended to homogenize the Antioqueño population and described most or all Antioqueños as light-skinned and predominantly European in origin.⁴⁵ By the early twentieth century, as eugenics became increasingly influential, Colombian writers of fiction and of racial and social theory commonly referred to Antioqueños explicitly as white.⁴⁶

The racialized Antioquia-versus-Cauca dichotomy was further reinforced by the racial dynamics of partisan political affiliation in Colombia. Indigenous communities in Cauca formed alliances with various politicians and joined Conservative and Liberal forces, but Afro-Caucanos widely (though not by any means exclusively) identified as Liberal. Afro-Caucanos participated heavily in Liberal armies, providing important military and electoral support for Caucano caudillos such as Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera.⁴⁷ As a result, Antioqueños discursively “blackened” all of Cauca. For example, when Cauca Liberals took over state and local governments in Antioquia following a Liberal victory in the brutal interregional civil war of 1876-77, Antioqueño Conservatives referred to all of the soldiers and administrators of the occupation force—regardless of variations in phenotype—as los negros del Cauca.⁴⁸ The whitening of Antioquia implied the blackening of Cauca.

While Antioqueños endured this humiliating occupation, Cancanos were experiencing an invasion of another sort. Since the 1840s, Antioqueños had been migrating out of their densely populated state across the border into Cauca. They initially settled in the highlands of northeastern Cauca, where the broad Cauca river valley narrowed into a gorge hemmed in closely on both sides by the mountains of the western and central cordilleras. They set up farms and ranches in the mountains on the eastern and western sides of the river, on public unclaimed lands, and on lands claimed by either indigenous communities or heirs of colonial-era mining concessionaires (or both). But the Antioqueños did not carry on this process alone. To mediate with prior claimants and to gain official recognition of their settlements, the Antioqueño migrants needed the assistance of intermediaries—educated Caucanos with legal expertise and political connections.

Cauca “Land Entrepreneurs”

Many educated Caucanos with political connections and entrepreneurial aspirations helped facilitate Antioqueño settlement in indigenous resguardos and public lands in Cauca. One tireless Cancano promoter of Antioqueño migration was Ramón E. Palau. His long career is worth examining in detail because he was deeply involved in promoting Antioqueño migration throughout northeastern Cauca and was especially active in Riosucio. He was one of the most vocal visionaries of regional transformation. Born in the Cauca valley and active in Popayán political circles, his life actually followed the Antioqueño migration in reverse. As a young man, he helped new settlements in northeastern Cauca gain legal recognition and land grants. In middle age he moved to the town of Riosucio on the border with Antioquia, where he labored to dismember indigenous landholdings and settle Antioqueños therein. A decade later he moved on to Medellin, the capital of Antioquia, where he lived out his final years. He died in the heart of Antioquia proper—the town of Envigado, near Medellín—in 1914.⁴⁹

Like other nineteenth-century educated Caucanos, Palau sought to make his fortune in the context of a constricted regional economy and unstable political environment. Palau and others like him worked through patron-client and family networks in their efforts to advance economically. He used his literacy and legal expertise to build client bases while also attaching himself as the client of a more powerful caudillo, Mosquera. Palau and other midlevel politicians mobilized their client bases electorally in support of their patrons’ causes. And when his clients elected him to political office, Palau was able to gain access to government revenues in a milieu in which political and economic advancement were often linked.

Palau epitomized what LeGrand refers to as the Colombian “land entrepreneur,” someone who used political connections to gain access to land and who profited from promoting frontier settlement.⁵⁰ Palau got his start as an advocate of Antioqueño settlement during the late 1850s and 1860s, when he was a young lawyer and an aspiring politician in Mosquera’s camp. In frequent correspondence with his patron, Palau advocated, among other causes, increased Antioqueño migration into Cauca. In 1858, for example, he toured some new Antioqueño settlements and found himself impressed by “the growing and promising prosperity of . . . these new settlements and the constant and numerous immigration.”⁵¹

Many of Palau’s political activities and economic ventures involved Antioqueños. Mosquera appointed Palau as provincial governor of a (short-lived) territorial subdivision that included a new Antioqueño settlement, Santa Rosa. In 1860 Palau received a concession from the state government to maintain the trail over the Quindío pass of the central cordillera, an important path that would later facilitate Antioqueño migration into the Quindío valley. This concession also introduced Palau to the business of real estate speculation; he received a grant of 320 hectares of public lands in the same area in 1868.⁵²

The history of the new settlements in Cauca underscores the importance of Cancano intermediaries such as Palau in facilitating Antioqueño settlement and the positive reception Antioqueños received on the part of Cauca law-makers. The first permanent Antioqueño settlement in Cauca was Santa Rosa, founded in 1843 on public lands in the central cordillera on a narrow strip of Cauca territory on the eastern side (banda oriental) of the Cauca River.⁵³ In 1863, Caucano officials and migrants from Santa Rosa and Antioquia founded another town on the ruins of an old colonial settlement to the southwest of Santa Rosa. They named it Pereira, in honor of the Cauca family that had donated the lands initially allotted for the town. Pereira swelled with Antioqueño migrants during the 1870s.⁵⁴

The founding of Pereira provides an example of the active participation of Palau and other Caucano land entrepreneurs in the Antioqueño settlement of Cauca. Francisco Pereira Martínez, a Cauca lawyer with political ties to the Cauca state government, made an advantageous purchase of public lands with the express intent of founding a town.⁵⁵ His heirs were important Cauca politicians and active promoters of Antioqueño migration. His son Guillermo Pereira Gamba, who made the initial donation to the migrants, obtained government concessions in the 1860s to build mule trails connecting Antioqueño settlements. When Pereira Gamba balked at pressure from the vecinos of Pereira to cede additional lands for cultivation, they turned for help to Ramón Palau.⁵⁶

Palau used his legal skills and political connections to help new settlements obtain land. Most notably, in 1869 he convinced the state legislature to pass a law granting a total of 12,000 hectares in public lands to several new villages in the banda oriental. He wrote letters on behalf of Santa Rosa and Pereira settlers and helped Pereira win a land concession from the Cauca legislature in 1871.⁵⁷ Palau benefited economically by mediating such deals; cash-poor settlers of such towns typically paid their lawyers in land. The examples of Pereira and Santa Rosa demonstrate how land entrepreneurs stood to benefit in concrete ways from Antioqueño migration. Their advocacy of Antioqueño migration as the best hope for Cauca’s future was no doubt influenced by the personal gains they stood to make by participating in the process.

Lawmakers in Popayán also proved amenable to Antioqueño settlement. In 1855 the legislature awarded special privileges to Antioqueño homesteaders in various new villages in Cauca.⁵⁸ Palau lobbied with considerable success for laws benefiting specific communities such as Pereira and Santa Rosa, and he also helped obtain legislation that would favor Antioqueño settlement more generally. An 1873 state law allowed contractors to recruit settler families and individual laborers from outside the state.⁵⁹ In 1883 some state legislators even proposed setting aside public lands to attract European immigrants. They cited the advances that Argentina had made as a result of European immigration. As a last resort, Cauca would accept “some hardworking families” from neighboring states, such as Antioquia.⁶⁰ Though ultimately unsuccessful, this legislative proposal reflects the extent to which some lawmakers saw Antioqueño migration as the next best thing to European immigration.

By the early 1870s, Palau—who by this time had been elected to the Cauca legislature—successfully sponsored legislation to divide up and privatize indigenous resguardos.⁶¹ Palau and other sponsors aimed this legislation at the indigenous holdings in and around the districts of Riosucio and Supía in northeastern Cauca, where they intended to replace communal landholdings with private Antioqueño farms.⁶²

The history of Antioqueño migration in the heavily indigenous mining areas on the western side of the Cauca River is less studied than the better-known cases of the new settlements such as Santa Rosa and Pereira on the eastern side of the river, discussed above. The heavily indigenous district of Riosucio—as well as surrounding districts including Supía, Marmato, Anserma, Guática, and Quinchía—has been largely overlooked in much of the scholarly and popular literature, perhaps because it never conformed even superficially to the classic model of new white Antioqueño settlements.⁶³

Local vecinos of Spanish and mixed origin in the town center had long complained that Indians monopolized much of the land best suited for agriculture and pasture.⁶⁴ As of the mid-nineteenth century, several indigenous communities in and around the district of Riosucio continued to possess communal lands. They traced their ownership back to an inspection (visita) carried out by a colonial official in 1627. The existence of privately held estates, mines, and salt works within the resguardos complicated the situation.

When a constitution for the state of Cauca was being drawn up in 1857, vecinos from Riosucio and surrounding towns lobbied the Constituent Assembly in the hopes of disbanding and privatizing the indigenous landholdings. Petitioners made use of the discourse of regional differentiation that attributed certain desirable qualities to Antioqueños. According to one petition from Riosucio, if the indigenous resguardos were privatized, then “our neighbors, the Andoqueños, essentially hardworking, vigorous, and active, oppressed in their country by the excess population and scarcity of free lands to cultivate, would come rapidly to our soil to enjoy the many advantages provided by a virgin and fertile land.”⁶⁵ petitioners characterized lands utilized by indigenous communities since at least 1627 as “virgin,” reflecting assumptions that subsistence agriculture practiced by indigenous communities was not “work.” Dismissing the Indians as lazy, and indigenous land claims as illegitimate, the same petition went on to ask rhetorically: “Would it not be more in accord with justice, reason, and economic principles that these terrains without legitimate or known owner be given to industrious and laboring classes, rather than be allowed to remain the doubtful patrimony of those who have an aversion to work?”⁶⁶

The writers apparently assumed that state legislators would view Antioqueño migration as beneficial and indigenous communities as backward. Cauca’s political leaders may have agreed, but they were also concerned with social stability.⁶⁷ Southern Cauca indigenous communities had mounted active opposition to privatization.⁶⁸ So while other states continued to dissolve remaining indigenous communities, Cauca passed Law 90 of 1859, which protected the integrity of indigenous landholdings and prohibited indigenous communal authorities or individuals from selling portions of their land.⁶⁹

By 1850, however, some Antioqueño settlers were already crossing the state border into adjacent indigenous resguardos in the western cordillera.⁷⁰ They either rented lands from the indigenous cabildos, which was permitted under Law 90, or they squatted. They were assisted by men such as Santiago Silva, a local Conservative political boss and legal expert in Riosucio.⁷¹ The indigenous cabildo of the community of La Montaña had hired Silva (whose son-in-law was Miguel Antonio Palau, Ramón’s Conservative brother) to represent their interests.⁷² He used this position to help Antioqueños settle in La Montaña. One Antioqueño village in La Montaña, known as El Oro (or Oraida) was even recognized by the state government.⁷³ Yet its inhabitants could not legalize their possession of farmland and pasture. Such was the ambiguous state of affairs until the early 1870s, when Ramón Palau arrived in Riosucio.

Riosucio

In the early 1870s, Ramón Palau set his political and economic sights—and his marital sights as well—on Riosucio. He must have perceived Riosucio as a fertile terrain for cultivating his frustrated political ambitions. In 1871 he had lost an election for the legislature.⁷⁴ Having suffered one defeat, he then discovered the key to both electoral success and personal enrichment in Riosucio. Following the lead of his relative Santiago Silva, Palau started working for the indigenous cabildos. In 1872 Palau signed separate contracts with the authorities of two neighboring communities, Supía-Cañamomo and Quinchía, to help them obtain the official colonial titles to their resguardos, which had been lost.⁷⁵ In 1880 he cemented his ties to Riosucio by marrying one of his associates in a local mining venture. She was Purificación Ortiz, heir to various mining shares and indigenous land rights that her father, retired colonel Felipe Ortiz, had accumulated since the 1850s.⁷⁶

Soon after signing the contracts with the indigenous cabildos, Palau was elected to the state legislature in Popayán, where he sponsored legislation to partition the very resguardos he had been contracted to protect. The indígenas of Quinchía then complained that he had tricked them. They claimed to have paid him with an estate that included a salt mine as well as some other properties in lieu of his honorarium of 200 pesos. They also maintained that they had paid him to “take our resguardo documents to the legislature for their approval,” but were horrified when “he returned them along with the law of partition (repartimiento), and he sold the salt mine to señor Santiago Silva, for more than a thousand pesos.”⁷⁷ Palau was cheating his own clients. During the 1870s, in addition to supporting laws that promoted migration, Palau led a legislative assault on indigenous landholdings.

In 1873 Palau made a long statement in the Cauca legislature in favor of partitioning the resguardos around Riosucio. He argued that federal constitutional guarantees of private property rights mandated the privatization of communal landholdings. He also linked modernization, citizenship, and republicanism to private property, which he associated with Antioqueños. The great mineral wealth of the resguardos around Riosucio, Palau claimed, would attract the industrious “hijos de Antioquia,” who would establish family homesteads and private mining establishments.⁷⁸

The resulting legislation, Cauca Law 44 of October 1873, “on the administration and division of the indigenous resguardos,” mandated the creation of a padrón, or census, of each community.⁷⁹ With the agreement of a majority of the male community members, each cabildo would hire surveyors who would then proceed to partition its resguardo, set aside 50 hectares for the village and a school, and divide the rest into individual land parcels. In the mean-time, the law provided that until such a partition could be implemented, the individual Indians, male or female, could sell their birthrights as “shares” (acciones) even before their individual plots were titled, regardless of whether or not their communities carried out a formal partition.

Indigenous communities around Riosucio, the primary targets of Law 44, immediately suffered its effects. Several communities ceded considerable portions of their land. In October 1874, for example, a vecino named Juan Gregorio Trejo, acting as legal representative of the indigenous cabildo of Supía-Cañamomo, signed a contract with the authorities of the towns of Supía and Marmato whereby one-third of the resguardo territory was ceded to the vecinos of Supía and another third to those of Marmato.⁸⁰ In addition, the agreement recognized the holdings of private gold- and salt-mining establishments, estates, and an Afro-Colombian village within the resguardo. Trejo agreed to sell a total of 150 hectares to several of the mining establishments, the proceeds from which were to pay legal costs. In December 1874 the neighboring community of La Montaña, represented by Santiago Silva, ceded more than a quarter of its resguardo to non-Indian vecinos in the neighboring village of Quiebralomo, in an agreement that was formalized the following year.⁸¹ In 1876 the cabildo of the indigenous community of Quinchía also ceded a portion of its territory to the district of Quinchía.⁸² Through these contracts, townspeople in old mining settlements gained title to lands that they had coveted since the colonial period.

Law 44 mandated that the communities not only draw up censuses of members and survey lots, but also absorb the costs involved. With the exception of the tightly-knit community of San Lorenzo, which apparently met most of its legal costs through land rentals and communal industries, the cabildos of the indigenous communities in and around the district of Riosucio paid their surveying and other legal costs with land.⁸³ flood of land sales ensued as cabildos alienated portions of their territories and as individual community members started selling off their own shares as well.

Cauca Law 44 of 1873 thus gave rise to a real estate market in Riosucio and the other northern districts where almost none had previously existed.⁸⁴ Although Cauca Law 41 of 1879 rescinded the 1873 law and reinstated some protective safeguards, it also mandated that the division of the resguardos continue.⁸⁵ Even after the indigenous resguardos were awarded greater legal protection by national legislation in 1890, the market in lands and mining shares previously alienated from the communities continued to flourish.⁸⁶

Most buyers of resguardo lands were Cancanos (many of whom had recently migrated to the Riosucio area, underscoring the fact that Antioqueños were not the only Colombians who were on the move during the nineteenth century). Others included Antioqueño migrants and Europeans who had come to work as technicians in an English-owned gold-mining enclave in nearby Marmato.⁸⁷ Some, such as surveyor William “Guillermo” Martin, were able to gain significant landholdings in the resguardos in payment for their technical services. Others obtained scattered landholdings in payment for legal services. When lands were rendered as payment, often the lawyer or surveyor was able to choose whichever lot he preferred within the resguardo. This practice sparked conflicts with community members who cultivated the coveted lands. For example, in the community of Supía-Cañamomo, lawyers manipulated the census rolls egregiously, with the evident complicity of poor local vecinos, the indigenous cabildo, and the jefe municipal of Riosucio, who by 1874 was none other than Ramón Palau.⁸⁸

Certain geographical patterns of resource transferal and settlement emerged.⁸⁹ Initially, lands and mineral deposits at lower and intermediate altitudes were acquired by land-hungry local vecinos (many of whom were already squatting there), mining investors, and other Cancanos and foreigners who bought or received scattered plots that they consolidated into estates or sold to settlers. This pattern predominated in the resguardo of Supía-Cañamomo, for example. Supía-Cañamomo stretched from the lower eastern edge of the town of Riosucio (at about 1,900 meters above sea level) downward and eastward to the valley floor of the Supía River, and on toward the Cauca River. The resguardo contained salt-water springs as well as gold and other minerals. Its varied warm and midrange altitudes were highly suitable for crops that could he grown on small plots with low capital input and marketed domestically—crops such as maize, sugarcane, tobacco, cacao, plantains, beans, fruits, and, later, coffee for export. Some higher areas within the resguardo were mainly of interest for their timber, which was needed to fuel furnaces in the mining establishments. Only with the advent of coffee during the late 1880S and 1890s did the temperate slopes (between about 500 and 2,000 meters above sea level) attract a significant flow of Antioqueño migrants.⁹⁰

Initially, Antioqueños preferred the sparsely inhabited resguardo highlands (with altitudes ranging upward from about 2,000 meters), where they had established a foothold by 1850. With the passage of Law 44, Antioqueño settlers legalized what by then were middle-sized holdings (the average size of Antioqueño landholdings surveyed in the tierra fría of La Montaña in 1875-76 was about 40 hectares).⁹¹ Antioqueños did take over the cabeceras of some nearby districts, such as the depleted town center of Anserma, but by and large they initially avoided settling in large numbers within Cauca towns such as Riosucio, Supía, and Marmato until the twentieth century. They often avoided the more populated areas of the indigenous resguardos as well. While nominally under the administrative authority of Cauca cabecera towns, where they often marketed and attended mass, the Antioqueños maintained their strongest kinship and personal ties with each other and with their towns of origin in Antioquia. In the highland tierra fría, Antioqueños planted mainly maize and beans, specialized in livestock and dairy products, identified as Conservatives, and recreated their own society.⁹²

Even in the earliest Antioqueño settlements in the district of Riosucio, Cancano mediation was key. When the Antioqueños in La Montaña paid the indigenous cabildo for their legalized plots, the man collecting the money was Santiago Silva. Silva was at that time employed by the cabildo of La Montaña as the administrator of its resguardo.⁹³ Over the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, intermediaries would engage in practices similar to those of Silva and Palau in the indigenous communities. The brokers included land entrepreneurs of Caucano origin, such as various members of the extended Palau family as well as Eustaquio Tascón, Erancisco Tascón, and Lorenzo Villa, to name a few. Some Antioqueño land entrepreneurs, such as Rudecindo Ospina and Pedro Orozco, were also active in the area. Notably, while the nineteenth-century dismemberment of Latin American indigenous communities is often attributed to Liberals, some of these men, such as Santiago Silva, Miguel Antonio Palau, and Miguel Antonio’s son Marco Tulio Palau, were active Conservatives. Politicians in all factions favored progress. In addition, they sought to benefit from building client bases among Indians, settlers, and squatters, who would provide electoral support (and in times of civil war, military support as well) in exchange for legal services, access to land, and mediation with higher authorities. Finally, indigenous authorities, such as Vicente and Nicolás Largo of La Montaña, also participated in facilitating the alienation of their communal resources.⁹⁴

Like their non-Indian neighbors, indigenous authorities had multiple and complex reasons for cooperating in the alienation of their own resources. The complexities of indigenous economic and political involvement in dubious patron-client relationships with non-Indians are beyond the scope of this article. But one aspect of their participation in the processes of resguardo dismemberment and Antioqueño settlement deserves mention here: the pervasiveness of the discourse that associated Antioqueños with progress. Though we have few if any unmediated sources that provide direct insight into the motivation of nineteenth-century indigenous leaders, we have no reason to assume that they were impervious to “common-sense” understandings of Antioqueño settlement as progressive. Indigenous leaders did occasionally complain of the depredations of land speculators and settlers, but their actions often appeared contradictory.⁹⁵ Officers of the cabildo of La Montaña, for example, were among the signatories to the 1857 Riosucio petition that lauded Antioqueño settlers as industrious and derided Indians as averse to labor. In 1899 the cabildo of La Montaña recognized a new highland Antioqueño settlement in its resguardo, known as El Rosario, founded by Cancano land purchaser Rafael Tascón.⁹⁶ According to its notarized official minutes, the cabildo agreed that El Rosario would benefit the community economically. (Actually, it served to increase the monetary value of their lands and thus led to the alienation of yet more communal territory.)⁹⁷

As for Ramón Palau, the final years of his reign were marred by controversy. He was the target of a local Conservative uprising and briefly run out of town. His political opponents attacked him in the pages of the local Riosucio newspaper, El Iris, for his corrupt land dealings. Yet even those who criticized his tactics shared his vision of modernizing northeastern Cauca through Antioqueño migration. The editors of El Iris were careful to defend Antioqueño migrants as “hardworking and honest by innate virtue” and blamed not Antioqueños, but rather “Caucano malefactors,” for nefarious land deals.⁹⁸El Iris editorialized that “the impulse given by the immigrations is incalculable, with them come commerce, mining, agriculture, arts, and sciences. They come accompanied by every class of progress.”⁹⁹El Iris’s positive portrayal of progressive Antioqueños contrasted with its vilification of the local backward indígenas and their land “monopolies.”¹⁰⁰ Contributors to the newspaper also criticized the “decrepit” and ostensibly violence-prone Afro-Colombian inhabitants of the nearby town of Marmato.¹⁰¹

Similar contrasts were repeated at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth in the official reports of local and visiting government officials who perceived a disparity between Riosucio’s great potential and its lamentable poverty. Prosperity was stymied by the “monopoly” enjoyed by the indigenous communities. The resguardos were “a true Great Wall” (una verdadera muralla china) that enclosed the town centers and “asphyxiated” commerce, leaving Riosucio in a “colonial” state of backwardness.¹⁰² The writers repeated a familiar litany of complaints: the indígenas owned vast expanses of lands that they refused to cultivate sufficiently, preferring to live in poverty while also refusing to allow more productive (read: Antioqueño) people to settle on their lands.

Francisco Trejos, a local Riosucio official, described Riosucio’s diverse population in a 1906 published report on local land disputes. He lauded Antioqueño migrants for civilizing a wild and savage territory. He described them as “that army of men, who like excavators of progress, armed with the axe, have seized, scaled, and have taken over by force the ancient dominions of the jaguar, indisputable chief of the tropical jungles, to convert them into beautiful farms that will be the future of this province.”¹⁰³ The indígenas who shared this domain with the jaguar were, in Trejos’s eyes, obstacles to the progress heralded by the Antioqueños. He complained that the indigenous authorities—who by this time had become increasingly active in making use of the judicial system and new national protective legislation to defend their land rights—were monopolizing natural resources and tying up the local courts in litigation over land.

Trejos’s report also illustrates how, by the early twentieth century, “scientific” notions about race were becoming increasingly evident in Colombian discourse of regional differentiation and progress. His official report on the problems facing local government was based on an analysis of local society in which he classified groups of different ethnic and regional origin as discrete races. Trejos compared the raza indígena to the raza antioqueña. To each he ascribed a specific set of inherent traits. The indigenous race was lazy, selfish, poor, and alcoholic; the indígenas monopolized the district’s lands and mineral resources. The Antioqueño race, not surprisingly, was “known everywhere for its love of labor [and] enterprising nature.”¹⁰⁴

Trejos seemed almost defensive in his staunch support of the Antioqueños, perhaps in response to a growing ambivalence toward Antioqueños on the part of some of his Riosucio neighbors and other old-time inhabitants of Cauca. By the late 1880s, local and regional authorities in Cauca were increasingly expressing their disillusion with the Antioqueño migrants, as evidenced by an 1887 legislative attempt to regulate Antioqueño exploitation of public lands and resguardos.¹⁰⁵ Complaints surfaced about “vagrants” and “fugitives” migrating from Antioquia.¹⁰⁶ The civil war of 1885, when Conservative Antioqueños defeated Liberal Caucanos, further embittered Caucanos against Antioqueños. And, of course, many Caucanos, ranging from black and Indian villagers to patrician elites, suffered from economic changes—namely, the spread of export agriculture and capitalist competition—that accompanied the Antioqueño transformation of northern Cauca.¹⁰⁷ For many leading Riosuceños, moreover, their inclusion in the new department of Caldas in 1905 and their administrative subordination to the new departmental capital of Manizales—a classic highland Antioqueño settlement known for its fair-skinned population—provoked lasting resentments.¹⁰⁸

The national government carved the department of Caldas out of Cauca, Tolima, and Antioquia (see map I). Nonetheless, turn-of-the-century politicians and intellectuals in the new administrative capital of Manizales argued that Caldas was an “organic,” or “ethnographic” region unified by a fair and progressive Antioqueño “race.”¹⁰⁹ They conveniently ignored other identities in their efforts to constitute Caldas as a legitimate region unified by a homogeneous race, which Manizales was destined to lead. The image of Caldas as the hijo of Antioquia has become the predominant version of Caldas’s regional history. Colombians generally consider Caldas part and parcel of Antioquia la grande.¹¹⁰ Even scholars express surprise to find people who identify as indígenas and blacks living in a region known as white.¹¹¹

Cancanos participated in important ways in the whitening of Caldas. This article has highlighted the roles of nineteenth-century Cancanos in the creation of the region known as Greater Antioquia, or “the coffee region,” to show that the so-called Antioqueño colonization was not an exclusively Antioqueño endeavor.¹¹² In addition, this article has demonstrated the pervasiveness of a discourse of regional and racial differentiation that associated Antioqueño migrants with social order (premised on patriarchal notions of appropriate gender roles), progress, and whiteness, while associating native-born Cancanos with uncontrolled sexuality, backwardness, blackness, and Indianness. I have shown that the policies and tactics adopted by Cauca legislators, land entrepreneurs, and local vecinos were all conditioned by this discourse. Even when they did not refer explicitly to race as such, their discussions of progress reflected assumptions about indigenous and black inferiority and European and Antioqueño superiority. I have also suggested (though by no means proven) that indigenous inhabitants themselves were among those who were affected by the prevailing racial and regional discourse, to the point that they too associated Antioqueños with progress. Moreover, the discourse of regional differentiation served to reinforce racial disparities in Colombia. The case of Riosucio, in which indigenous communities lost much of their land base, demonstrates some of the problems experienced by sectors of the rural poor that did not conform to the elite’s racialized notions of progress.¹¹³ But I also found, as I was researching this article in Riosucio, that indigenous intellectuals have developed nuanced and critical views of the pros and cons of the relentless pursuit of progress. Likewise, some local townspeople in Riosucio and other colonized communities of what was once Cauca have had second thoughts about Antioqueño colonization. The example of multiethnic Riosucio, a town and district named for a “dirty river,” muddies the clean white image of Antioqueño Caldas. By the late twentieth century, as the following epilogue will illustrate, the inhabitants of Riosucio — both the vecinos of the town and the indigenous inhabitants of the rural hinterlands—were increasingly challenging the hegemonic regional image.

Epilogue: “This Was All Antioquia”

While doing research in and around Riosucio from 1993 to 1995, I repeatedly had the same argument with local residents. They would gesture to the surrounding mountains and affirm that prior to the creation of the department of Caldas in the early twentieth century, “this was all Antioquia.” Some black villagers in the neighboring district of Supía—the proud descendants of Cancano slaves—even told me that they had learned this ostensible fact in school. No, I repeatedly insisted, “this was never Antioquia. These districts belonged to Cauca.” I had seen thousands of archival documents that proved my argument, emblazoned with the seal of the estado soberano del Cauca.

The point of telling this story is not to argue that I, the professional foreign historian, was right and my informants were wrong. In a certain sense, they were right, because since the nineteenth century the area around Riosucio has been increasingly incorporated into Antioquia’s trade networks and political and cultural spheres of influence. I argued with the local inhabitants partly because I wanted them to give their white, mestizo, black, and indigenous Caucano ancestors their due. More importantly, I was intrigued by the dissonance between their insistence that “this was all Antioquia” and their explicit awareness, in many cases, that their own local familial and communal histories predated the Antioqueño migration. Black and Indian inhabitants even defined their racial identities as such in opposition to white Antioqueños. Various and contradictory notions of history and identity often coexisted side-by-side in the same communities, sometimes even in the same individuals.

Casual travelers through the verdant coffee-growing mountains of rural Caldas during the 1990s might conclude that Ramón Palau’s dream had come true. His vision of a modern transformation achieved through Antioqueño migration seems, on the surface, to have been realized. In the former indigenous resguardos, export agriculture predominates. Small and middle-sized private farms, as well as some more opulent haciendas belonging to businessmen (including reputed drug traffickers) from Medellín, have replaced most of the communal indigenous “monopolies.” The men who frequent the markets and cafés of the former pueblos indios of Guática and Quinchía proudly dress in regional Antioqueño masculine garb reminiscent of “Juan Valdez,” the famous fictional representative of the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation.¹¹⁴ Few people in these districts seem even to remember the indigenous cabildos that once governed them.¹¹⁵ The submergence and even disappearance of collective indigenous identities and institutions, along with the whitening of the official regional history, demonstrates the extent to which the construction of strong, racialized regional identities—such as the “Antioqueño race” or the “Caldense race”—implies the suppression of those identities and institutions that do not conform with the political, cultural, and economic ideals of emerging regional elites.

And yet, alternative versions of what it means to be Riosuceño, Caldense, or even Antioqueño continue to challenge the regional myths. While surrounding communities have disappeared, three (and by some counts four) indigenous communities in the district of Riosucio have preserved or reinvented their institutions, memories, and at least part of their land base. Their leaders have been trying to implement clauses of the 1991 Constitution that guarantee greater political, financial, and cultural autonomy to legally constituted indigenous communities with historically recognized resguardos. The indigenous activists engage in legal disputes and philosophical debates with local and departmental officials, landowners, and intellectuals over boundaries, property rights, local history, and the very meaning of the word indígena.

Side-by-side with “this was all Antioquia,” competing versions of historical memory are thriving. Intellectuals write about Caucano folklore and local history before the Antioqueño “invasion.”¹¹⁶ A nationally prominent intellectual and politician, Riosucio-born senator Otto Morales Benítez, insists on the importance of mestizaje in the history of Caldas.¹¹⁷ He has organized yearly intellectual and cultural conferences to study and debate local culture and history. Riosucio also celebrates its distinctive history and culture every other January in its raucous biennial carnavales. Thus, local townspeople continuously challenge the official regional historical narrative of white Caldas founded exclusively by intrepid Antioqueño pioneers. Indigenous activists in the rural district of Riosucio and black villagers in the districts of Supía and Marmato take this challenge even further, challenging both the regional white myth and the local mestizo version by asserting indigenous and black identities.

These memories are not without contradictions. When indigenous leaders claim that their own communities have “progressed,” in part through colonization and greater market integration, they almost seem trapped within a discourse of progress, whitening, and regional differentiation that has long associated Indianness with backwardness. And yet, they also redefine the terms of the discourse to assert that progress is not the sole possession of whites, that indígenas can also be modern. Likewise, when self-consciously black villagers also refer to themselves as both black and Antioqueño, they expand the geographic and even phenotypic boundaries of the discourse of regional differentiation to include themselves among the “progressive.” The extent to which local people have disputed and re-remembered their historical geography indicates that regional boundaries, like boundaries between races and ethnic groups more generally, are slippery, contested, and contingent.

Eduardo Posada-Carbó, in his monograph about the Colombian Atlantic coast region, suggests that “if nations are identified with ‘imagined communities’, regions are, in contrast, linked to ‘the reality of place’, insofar as they are directly concerned with the lives of men.”¹¹⁸ The reality of regional identities to the men and women who experience them, however, should not blind us to the power struggles out of which regions emerged. Regions, like nations, are power-laden “imagined communities.”¹¹⁹ As such, they exclude as well as include; they are products of historical struggles. As historians of Latin America, our task is to try to understand how historical processes of migration, whitening, struggles over resources, and complex drawing and redrawing of administrative jurisdictional boundaries resulted in regional identities that mean so much to so many people. Scholars have increasingly come to see nations as “imagined” and race and gender as “socially constructed.” And yet, the strong regional identities that have persisted in Latin America remain analytically somewhat elusive. I suspect that region, like race, gender, and ethnicity, is difficult to deconstruct precisely because it is still so central to the lives of so many Latin Americans.

This article is based on research carried out from 1993 to 1995 with funding provided mainly by the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies Joint Committee on Latin America and the Caribbean. I thank Patrick McNamara, Jared Orsi, Jean Quataert, and the HAHR editors and readers for helpful suggestions. My ideas and evidence are further elaborated in my 1997 doctoral thesis from the University of Wisconsin, Madison: “Remembering Riosucio: Race, Region, and Community in Colombia, 1850-1950.” The maps were prepared by Onno Brouwer and the staff of the Cartography Lab of the University of Wisconsin.