Session Abstract

This panel brings together scholars of the Caribbean, Brazil, Honduras, and Bolivia, to explore how peoples’ lives and their relationship with the state informed and shaped state formation from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. Focusing on the law, public order, and popular participation in national politics, these presentations have broad application for historians focusing on state formation in nations built on internal colonialism and racial hierarchies. We also hope that the treatment of sources—such as police records, interviews by clergy, and legal trial records—will provoke a methodological discussion of their potential uses and difficulties in discussing regional differences, the construction of racial identities, and negotiations between subaltern actors and state representatives.

Anne Eller considers the varying Dominican responses to Spanish annexation in 1861 as questions of labor modes and modernity were thrust to the fore by reoccupation. Eller’s paper explores the political allegiances and identities of the purportedly quiescent rural population.  Urban elites cheered on the idea of a more productive peasantry and others questioned the very meaning of civilization in the so-called “century of lights.” These voices offer insight into remarkable urban-rural alliances at mid-century and staunch defenses of local autonomy.

Martine Jean analyzes the emergence of Rio de Janeiro's Police Chief as a social patriarch. Focusing on the reforms of the police under the Old Republic (1889-1930) and on correspondence between the city's Police Chief and resident associations and families regarding the deployment of the police, Jean argues that the multiple roles that the law enforcement official took on among the populace illuminate how modernization signaled a profound transformation in social control in Brazil.

Kevin Coleman shows how Honduran political elites declared an estado de sitio (i.e., a state of exception) on at least seventy-four separate occasions during the period between 1890-1956. An estado de sitio permitted the government to legally ignore due process and habeas corpus, as well as the rights to private property, free speech, and freedom of assembly.  This paper considers both the Honduran legal context as well as the lives of those set outside the law, especially the lives of those people that governing officials decided could be legally killed or exiled, silenced or conscripted.

E. Gabrielle Kuenzli examines two major regional Indian mobilizations in late nineteenth-century Bolivia: the Aymara indigenous group’s participation in the 1899 civil war between liberals and conservatives, and, the 1892 Battle of Kuruyuki between the indigenous Guaraní population and the Bolivian army. Scholars tend to isolate these movements from the broader political scenario and from national political struggles, treating the first as an autonomous Aymara-led movement and the second as a messianic Indian movement. Kuenzli offers the first-ever comparison of these two movements, insisting that these “Indian histories” were very much part of “national history,” and key in shaping constructions of region, race, and nationalism in Bolivia.

This panel will be of particular interest to scholars of modern Latin American history, especially those who study issues of nation-state formation.