Race, Class, and Postcolonial Legacies in Gran Colombia
People of mixed racial backgrounds, often called pardos in Spanish America, along with enslaved people of African descent, comprised a majority in Venezuela and in the Magdalena department of Gran Colombia along the Caribbean coast. Despite their numerical strength, pardos failed to consolidate themselves as a group and push for equality in both public and domestic spheres of Gran Colombian society. Instead, the pardos, who contributed their lives through military service in the independence struggles, continued to serve the descendants of the former Creole elite, who retained their positions of leadership. The mixed-race population included a people deeply divided by class and occupational differences, which unquestionably hindered the development of a common racial and class identity.
One cause of the absence of class and racial identity among pardos was their resistance to being affiliated with slavery and the enslaved African population. Since the colonial period, free blacks and mulattoes often migrated to cities and towns to work as artisans or join various militias to avoid farm labor and its negative connotation. Therefore, pardos preferred an urban life where they worked as butchers, tailors, barbers, masons, blacksmiths, and carpenters and in local militias. Pardo reluctance to associate with black slaves directly contradicted the claims of Caracas’s Creole elite, who associated pardos with “the dark people of Africa. ” Obviously, this was not the case for the majority of pardos because a multiracial background automatically African-born slaves, who were fully black.
Thus, pardos, who were born in the Americas, looked to Spain for their cultural and political aspirations instead of Spain. Similarly, gens de couleur in the French Caribbean carried similar attitudes about their identity and relationship with black slaves. The defeat of Andre Rigaud, the Haitian mulatto by Toussaint L’Ouverture and Pelage’s resistance to cultivateur uprisings in Guadeloupe illustrate this rift between blacks and mulattoes. Indeed, some biracial people in the French Caribbean worked as managers on sugar plantations, joined colonial militias to capture runaway slaves or owned their own plantations.
During the early post-colonial period, Gran Colombia’s pardo population exhibited the same ambivalence and differing views on slavery and racism in Cartagena, with no significant calls for emancipation. Unfortunately, this partition of Afro-Colombians left pardos without a key ally, the slave masses whose significant numbers could have given them leverage in dealing with the white power structure.
In addition, pardos as a group within themselves lacked a collective racial identity, causing Padilla’s endeavors to mobilize the mulattoes of Cartagena against bolivaristas like Montilla and the Creole elite in the city to fail. The integration of the military encouraged a burgeoning sense of equality with whites among pardos along with Gran Colombia’s constitution avoidance of the former colonial castas, only referring to slaves and Indians as ethnic minorities. Furthermore, the disproportionate number of women in cities such as Cartagena was conducive to interracial marriages and relationships, whose progeny possessed an ambiguous racial position, caught between their mixed mothers and white fathers. Consequently, many publicly identified themselves as citizens, especially because until 1827 soldiers could also vote, meaning pardo soldiers could vote regardless of literacy, property, or independent trade requirements. This absence of racial solidarity inhibited attempts to challenge the system because others were content with the practice of the promise of citizenship proffered by the Constitution.
Moreover, pardo mobilization was unsuccessful because of manipulation by Spanish and Creole leaders in the late colonial and early post-colonial periods of Colombian history. Pardos, free blacks, and enslaved men were encouraged to fight for both royalists and the liberation armies. Promises of abolition and citizenship enticed them, and the language of the liberators equated Spanish colonialism with slavery, another stimulus for blacks and pardos to join their cause. In fact, liberation in Nueva Granada would have been impossible without the participation of pardos and others of African descent, the majority of Venezuela and coastal Colombia. On the other hand, during the colonial period, the Spanish sought pardos for military service in the militias. Due to the desire of peninsulares to hold all public and growing Creole demands for public office, the Spaniards used the pardo militias as a loyal military force that would protect Spanish interests and rule in the colony because they were protected by the military. Of course pardos also received protection from fueros, or military courts that oversaw the behavior of pardos instead of the city courts.
However, pardos in the military began to disdain the mechanical professions, creating a schism within the already deeply divided pardo group. The Creoles of Caracas unsurprisingly hated seeing the pardos “ready to speak up for themselves and even hurl abuse, simply because they have a red badge. ” These pardos however, did not work as a corporate body for citizenship, an end to Creole domination of the government, and the absence of schools for themselves. Their claim to pretensions of status and respect increased their arrogance, but separated mixed-raced people by profession, with soldiers considering themselves superior to artisans and laborers on the farms, though all were essentially members of the working class. The lasting influence of this persisted through the post-independence period as well.
During the independence wars, pardo movements for equality in public and private dimensions of society always incited fear of pardocracia, a fear of pardo rule through a Haitian-style revolution along the Caribbean coast. Connections with the Haitian Revolution sowed further disagreement, as pardos did not share the same opinion on Haiti. Though Bolivar was successfully liberated the coast of Venezuela and Colombia by receiving soldiers, arms, and money from Petion’s Republic, Haiti was not recognized by Gran Colombia. Interestingly, Padilla’s calls for mobilization of pardos in Cartagena mentioned nothing of Haiti, a country where he spent time with Bolivar preparing for the imminent liberation of Venezuela. Fear of pardocracia also motivated Bolivar to appoint Montilla, a former royalist, to the governorship of Cartagena and the Magdalena province instead of Padilla, who always supported Bolivar, due to his fear of black rule. Yet Haiti did not inspire Padilla. Likewise, the mulatto Manuel Piar’s challenge of Bolivar’s supremacy in Venezuela in 1817 was also correlated with the Haitian Revolution, because Piar allegedly organized blacks against whites, resulting in his execution. Fear of similar extreme reprisals likely influenced the decisions of pardos in Cartagena who decided not to support Padilla.
However, Padilla’s movement in Cartagena also failed to rouse the people of Cartagena because of its focus on military and political issues and its unpopularity with the people. Many of the soldiers in Cartagena’s army were Indians, pardos, and blacks conscripted from their villages or artisans from the city like the carpenter Jose Escudero, whose arrest Padilla ordered for disobedience. Furthermore, political and military issues considered important by Padilla such as Bolivar’s plan to change the Gran Colombian constitution made little difference to pardo artisans and black slaves in the city. Besides, Cartagena was already in decline from destruction during the war and isolated from the rest of the Magdalena department so Padilla’s attempts to organize them were doomed to fail because the pardo citizenry saw little benefit in joining his cause with little chance of success. When the chance of success and the unpopularity of the military were added together, pardo artisans in the city realized they had nothing to gain. Thus, intra-class differences among the pardo population prevented Padilla from assembling the pardo population.
In summation, pardo advances in Gran Colombian society were hindered by a dearth of common class and racial consciousness among members of the biracial population. The partition of Afro-Colombians into pardo and black, free and slave, and the further separation of pardos into militia units and artisans buried the path to commonality from the colonial to post-colonial periods. As elsewhere in Latin America, the promise and practice of nation prevented a truly democratic and representative government for all its populace.
Works Cited
Blanchard, Peter, “The Language of Liberation: Slave Voices in the Wars of Independence.”
Hispanic American Historical Review, 82:3 (2002): 83-107.
City Council of Caracas, “Pardos in the Colony and Their Place,” In John Lynch, Latin American
Revolutions, 1808-1826: Old and New World Origins. Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1994.
Davis, David Brion, “Impact of the French and Haitian Revolutions,” In The Impact of the
Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, edited by David P. Geggus. Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press, 2001.
Dubois, Laurent, “The Promise of Revolution: Saint-Domingue and the Struggle for Autonomy
In Guadeloupe, 1797-1802,” In The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World,
edited by David P. Geggus. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001.
Helg, Aline, “Simon Bolivar and the Spectre of Pardocracia: Jose Padilla in Post-Independence
Cartagena.” Journal of Latin American Studies 35 (2003): 447-471.
Love this essay on Race, Class, and Postcolonial Columbian Hx.
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