A Fervent Crusade for the National Soul: Cultural Politics in Colombia, 1930–1946

Abstract

This timely, well-organized, and highly relevant book might best be read by starting with the epilogue and working backward. Catalina Muñoz-Rojas focuses on the cultural politics of the Colombian Liberal Republic from 1930 to 1946 and the political culture of Liberal elites and bureaucrats who sought to include the popular sectors in the national citizenry. Those policies and practices also included traditional elitist, exclusionary polices to legitimize Liberal rule. The author places her home nation into a much broader and inclusive world, revealing how this paradoxical tension between inclusion and exclusion in governance and politics shapes the formation and contestation of citizenship in Colombia and in much of the Americas.The author argues and proves that Liberal reformers invented a notion of el pueblo as legitimate but static, romanticized, and essentialized campesinos, indígenas, women, and workers all in need of paternalistic direction and moral uplift by Liberal elites for Colombia to progress. Their constructions of “popular culture” revealed an elite-imagined purity lacking in reality, the gap between classes glaringly obvious when working-class families were tutored on how to achieve middle-class dreams while stuck living lives of poverty. Overall, the author finds that the Liberal reformers opened national identity for greater inclusion—especially for mestizos and indígenas—while rewarding themselves a place of privilege that legitimized their rule. Tellingly, and a lesson of universal import, inclusion and domination became two outcomes of the same process.This work started life as a University of Pennsylvania dissertation and morphed through time and experience into a polished monograph. The introduction situates the work and orients the reader in the dynamics of state formation and cultural politics during the Liberal Republic, the author citing relevant historiography from both English- and Spanish-language sources. Four chapters cover, respectively, the cultural politics of music; the forging of citizenship on stage and screen; hygiene campaigns and the healing of a population seen by elites as sick, weak, and in need of instruction on correct habits; and a reimagined past and a more inclusive notion of citizenship beyond the traditional Hispanist, Catholic, and white paradigm inherited from the colonial past. The tensions and contradictions inherent in democratic governance, and the definitions of citizenship manipulated and limited by elite authoritarians to justify their rule, could find easy comparison in contemporary Brazil and the United States.The stunning epilogue situates the book in the contemporary dramas of Colombia from 2019 to 2021, ranging from antigovernment protests, increasing poverty and immiseration, COVID-19, and a cynical tax reform met by intensifying protests and repression rather than dialogue from a government that still saw the public as unworthy of citizenship. The author makes clear that the cultural politics of the 1930s and the 1940s are part of long historical continuities that must be understood in order to build a more just, inclusive, and democratic order.Most of the book's primary sources come from archives and libraries in Bogotá, which prevents a larger national scope while illustrating the highly centralized and pocketed nature of the Colombian state. The author is a careful historian and is open to interdisciplinary insights from anthropology as well as cultural and literary studies. Professor Muñoz-Rojas moves with ease between languages, disciplines, and nations, connecting her work across a broad swath of the Americas. One hopes that a publisher will issue a Spanish translation soon, given the importance of the author's work in Colombia and across Latin America.Minor gripes include the lack of a glossary listing government acronyms for easy review and the lack of illustrations. More coverage of the state's emphasis on physical education for both males and females would have added to the author's focus on hygiene and the shaping of a healthier, more modern population. More coverage of Afro-Colombians and their views of and responses to the Liberal reformers' reimagined past and model of citizenry, which either ignored or disparaged Blackness, would also have been welcome. Finally, more discussion of Peruvian indigenista critiques—like those of José Carlos Mariátegui—of the abuses of the Indigenous population by the Catholic Church and large landowners would have provided context for the critiques of said abuses by the Colombian Left and by José Martí in Cuba and José Vasconcelos in Mexico.The writing is clear, jargon-free, and engaging. Graduate students in history and Latin American studies, specialists, and dedicated general readers will find much in this book about Colombian history as well as informed and sophisticated debates about democratic governance. Students of sociology and political science will also find useful comparative data for their work on state formation and democratic governance and on state and society dynamics in Latin America.