Democracy in Latin America, 1760-1900. vol. 1, Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru

Abstract

Few fields have been revisited so thoroughly as that of political and civic life in nineteenth-century Latin America. Ideas concerning citizenship, elections, representation, participation, political groups and parties, communitarism, and civic patterns have undergone considerable revision and are the subject of ongoing research. Renewed theoretical and practical concerns have led historians and social scientists to reorient their quests, to reinterpret old data, and — most important of all — to track down repositories and information sources that have not been previously tapped. This turn has challenged long-standing views and has launched a lively re-examination of political and civic practices in the nineteenth century. The resulting debate — encompassing a broad range of scholars in the Americas and Europe — is not merely academic; indeed, it sheds light (and certain shadows) on more recent political concerns.Carlos Foment’s analysis makes a substantial and often passionate contribution to this revisionist trend. The book revisits the emergence and scope of democratic life in Latin America, understanding the “sovereignty of the people” as the horizontal capacity to generate social power rather than as a structural by-product of state building, economic development, and “modernization” (p. 29). To that end, he projects on the region the Tocquevillian perspective based on “civic life” that enlightened our understanding of North American society more than 150 years ago. Diving into a vast array of documentary sources — pamphlets, tabloids, travelogues, private letters, journals, and so on — the author offers a striking panorama of associational life in nineteenth-century Latin America. He challenges the idea that civic life and the performance of democratic principles are linked to a unique pattern of democratic practices. His research spans Mexico, Peru, Argentina, and Cuba, and although the present volume focuses only on the first two, it is evident that this multisided research project influenced the complexity of his analytical vision.Tocqueville’s nineteenth-century account of North American civic life inspired this revision of civic association in Latin America; historians and social scientists should be grateful for this enriching panorama that had hardly been glimpsed previously. However, by employing Tocqueville’s model, Foment restricts and minimizes the very scope of his analysis, imposing an externally crafted and lopsided pattern that obscures the complexities and interconnections of Latin American civic and political processes. This is related to the fact that although Foment’s analysis forms part of the revisionist trend discussed above, he does not demonstrate familiarity with the historiographical debates at the core of that trend. Though conversant with an interesting amount of theoretical literature, he tends to ignore certain recent historiographical productions relevant to his question. Attending to this growing body of literature would have helped him avoid commonplace perspectives that oversimplify, and even discredit, some parts of his analysisI shall give three examples. Foment’s documentary evidence, however rich, does not support the idea that postcolonial life was “radically lopsided, with citizens inclined to practice democracy in civil society more than in any other terrain,” and “radically bifurcated, with citizens depositing their sovereignty on each other rather than in government institutions.” In fact, the underlying idea that civic life developed in Latin America within an everlasting authoritarian context ignores the complexity, as well as the diversity, of political processes in Latin America during the long period covered by the analysis. Also, the notion that subaltern groups were totally segregated from civic and political life has been disavowed by a wide literature that shows the political participation and civic life of indigenous, mulatto, and mestizo populations, at different levels and through changing, nonlinear patterns across the century. Finally, the perspective of a political vocabulary based exclusively “on Civic Catholic notions of selfhood” entails biased implications that ignore the weight of the theological discussion in the political developments of the Western world — not just in the Catholic parts of the same — and disregards the considerable influence gained by the secularist trend in some Latin American countries during the nineteenth century (such as the Leyes de Reforma in Mexico or the laws on education and civil marriage in Argentina).Although these criticisms do not negate the pathbreaking character of Foment’s proposal, his perspective would have been strengthened if more contrasting historiographical information had been taken into account. Perhaps this aspect will be addressed in the second volume on Argentina and Cuba.