Agustín Agualongo Revisited: Popayán and the Pacific Royalist Block

In 1822, while Simón Bolívar was seeking to unify Colombia under republican rule, royalists in the southwest continued to pose a serious challenge to the independence project. A major leader in this royalist struggle against Bolívar and his army was the mestizogeneral from Pasto, Agustín Agualongo, who had been in the royalist army since 1811 and was captain of the royalist militias in 1822, when he reorganized multiethnic royalist guerrillas to fight in the name of the king and against the usurpers of the rights of King Ferdinand VII. Agualongo became the rebel government’s longest lasting leader, fighting until his death at the hands of the republic in July 1824. With Agualongo’s defeat in 1824, the Bolivarian Republic achieved their final victory in Colombia. From the nationalist perspective, in the historiography and popular accounts, Agualongo was an anti-hero who represented the stubbornness and backwardness of the people of Colombia’s southwest region.

            I challenge this founding narrative that strictly defined the Popayán royalists in negative terms, as anti-Colombian rebels, by examining the emergence of royalist alliances in the first years of the monarchical crisis, and emphasizing the vitality of imperial political identities among Indians, free blacks, and slaves in the region. I expand the temporal frame even further and explain subaltern royalism in Popayán during the Spanish monarchical crisis studying the relationships that Indians, slaves, and free blacks had with the monarchy before 1809. In this way, royalism can be seen in a “positive” or creative way. I also argue that Colombian historians who generally portrayed Popayán as an abnormal, anti-national enclave, have ignored the broader political geography in which the region was inserted during this context. In other words, the story of New Granada’s southwestern royalists cannot be comprehended if it is kept within the bounds of Colombian national geography.