Essay on “Early Latin America. A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil” (1983) by James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz

Roberto Ponce Cordero, ,

It is not at all surprising that, in their book on the processes through which the subcontinent we now know as Latin America was produced, James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz insist on the importance of historical continuities, pointing out right at the beginning that, despite its being called the “New World,” neither the Iberians nor the Indians thought of America as something that was precisely new:

“Rather, both groups operated within worlds already highly structured, whole bodies of social, cultural, and technological practice, which shaped and colored all they did. […] The meshing of the respective backgrounds was a vital factor in quickly bringing some areas of America to the center of attention while others long remained on the margin (1)”.

What very well might be surprising is, however, the extent to which the authors emphasize the continuities, almost elevating force of habit, or perhaps even inertia (two terms which they, granted, do not use as such in the whole volume), to the level of decisive shaping influences in the history of Latin America. Thus, they dedicate the whole first section of their book (appropriately entitled “The context”) to both “Iberian ways” and “Indigenous ways” before contact, in order to –rather convincingly– argue that pre-Conquest demographic, social, cultural, institutional, economic, and ideological structures on both sides of the Atlantic ultimately determined, once clashed against one another, “not only the rate but also the forms of development” (1) in the region. Thus, and to mention only some examples, they claim that “[t]o understand Latin American slavery one must begin by comprehending that slavery was a tradition as well established in the Iberian peninsula as marriage, and the two familiar institutions were transferred to the New World in much the same way” (17); that “[i]t was people like him [Columbus] who maintained the continuities and transmitted the colonial techniques shaping the actions of both Portuguese and Spaniards in America” (29); and that “[a]t the same time that the area [America] was left vulnerable to conquest and population loss, its basic [indigenous] modes of social, political, and economic life had an exceptionally strong flavor of their own and an ability to survive under great pressures” (33).

Needless to say, the “Iberian ways” can be considered, on a macro perspective, more homogeneous than the “Indigenous ways,” if only because of the quite compact character of the Iberian Peninsula in comparison to the whole American continent, as well as of the peninsula’s common history and traditions of cultural and commercial exchange. Indeed, they go as far as stating that “[f]or all the differences of background and assigned status, Iberians and Africans in the New World were in some respects a single intrusive group, with some important common trait not shared by the Indians,” (32), suggesting that there was a common denominator between people not only from Europe but also from elsewhere which was, however, alien to the Indian world (see, too, the graphic of general racial configurations, in which the Spanish world [the world of la gente de razón] includes all “castas,” while the Indian world simply includes the Indians [130]). According to Lockhart and Schwartz, then, the single major force that made a region out of the vast lands of what we call Latin America would be the continuity between the pre-Conquest and the post-Conquest “Iberian ways,” both Spanish and Portuguese, as applied and adapted in the “New World.”

But these ways were not applied evenly and could not be adapted at will, since the geographic, demographic, and social realities of the continent were equally powerful forces, if not even more powerful, than the force represented by the centralized Conquest effort. It did matter to the conquistadors, as the authors painstakingly demonstrate, whereas a particular Indian population was fully sedentary, semi-sedentary or not sedentary at all, and the patterns of invasion, settlement, and colonization in America rather exactly follow the patterns of indigenous settlement prior to the Conquest. Hence, Central Mexico and Peru, which were the “central” American regions before the arrival of the Spaniards, kept on being the most densely populated areas – and this not just because of the fact that there were more Indians there, but also due to the fact that the conquistadors themselves preferred to stay there, in order to be able apply the model of colonization that they had themselves inherited from the Reconquista, and which included subjugating an existent population for tribute and eventually for cheap or even free – although not necessarily slave – labor. Conversely, regions such as the Pampas or the North of Mexico, mainly inhabited by non-sedentary peoples, were left practically alone until much later technological developments not only made their resources attractive and exploitable, but made it possible for those peoples to be exterminated, too.

In fact, these continuities from the pre-Columbian past are, according to this book, the main forces that produce variation in Latin America despite the relatively homogeneous character of Iberian influence. As Lockhart and Schwartz write (and I think it is important to quote in extenso here):

“The course of events in the Western Hemisphere over the several centuries following contact, if taken as a whole, demonstrates that the Iberian or European factor in early Latin America was essentially uniform and that it took certain shapes or developed at a certain rate in any given region depending principally on that region’s already existing attractiveness or potential. The Indian peoples and the resources of their lands were the primary determinants of regional differentiation. Or to put it another way, at any given time Europe was interested in, and technically capable of exploiting, certain New World resources more than others, and attention went to areas with such resources, no matter which group of Europeans was involved (59)”.

To sum it up once again, then, it is the continuities of Iberian “ways” which make it possible for the immense subcontinent to be considered a remarkably uniform region, that is, the fact that it was colonized by two imperial powers that were rather similar in their different elements and that reacted to similar stimuli in similar manners. As for the not less impressive diversity that characterizes Latin America today, it is due to the continuities of Indian “ways,” which (some common experiences notwithstanding) radically differed from part to part and from population to population in a big mass of land where there was no concept of identity or of being one single unity, as counterposed to the rest of the world, before the arrival of the Europeans.

Although this approach is obviously highly attractive (it has an incredible “simplicity,” as the authors themselves write [59], and in the end it even provides a schema for explaining not only the sequence of settlement and exploitation but also of independence of settlement and exploitation but also of independence [419ff]), it is by no means completely unproblematic. One of the problems that arise from it is, of course, the fact that the emphasis on continuity and on the importance of Iberian ways in Latin America can lead to a certain over-deterministic vision of the history of the region. Another problem, and a much more important one at that, is that it seems to exaggerate the Spaniards contribution and to present it as a single, just slightly changing one, almost inevitably leading to such a radical statement as can be found in the final sentence of the book: “at the deepest level, there are only two periods in the history of the Western Hemisphere, preconquest and postconquest, with the entire span since the arrival of the European a single, unbroken continuum in most respects” [426].

Authors like Miller would certainly disagree with this thesis, given that it does not really take into account the impact of technological development and, more concretely, of industrialization in our continent – a moment which, for Miller, would probably represent the ultimate break in the environmental history of Latin America, the moment where the balance between nature and culture was lost, and maybe forever. For their part, authors like Cunill would probably criticize the insistence on continuity instead of on technological breaks, because their focus is directed on the famous technological breaks that have made the overcoming of so-called natural constrictions possible. Nevertheless, Lockhart and Schwartz have a point, in my opinion, and prove it consistently in the epilogue of the book, where they – unconsciously leaning toward a postcolonial interpretation of Latin American history – argue that the developments of the Republican era (the “new” borders, the “new” rights, the “new” production and commercial conditions, the “new” status of the criollos, etc.) stem from processes that clearly started in colonial times rather than breaking with the fundamental historical lines of that period. As they convincingly put it, then, “[t]he entire conflict [of the independences] essentially took place within the Spanish world” (421), and the last sentence of the book is, hence, justified by their previous arguments, if maybe a little polemical.

 

(Crédito de imagen de thumbnail: http://globalbrief.ca/alejandrogarciamagos/2011/09/15/%C2%BFmestizo-zambo-prieto-o-saltapatras/. Crédito de imagen de inicio de post: https://www.amazon.com/Early-Latin-America-Colonial-Cambridge/dp/0521299292).

Published by Roberto Ponce Cordero

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