Colonization and State Formation in the Frontier Provinces of Cauca and Antioquía, Colombia, 1825–70

This paper will consider internal, as opposed to international, processes of colonization that took place in the Colombian regions of Antioquía and Cauca in their transition from colonial to republican governance. In these frontier regions, which colonial state had been incapable of controlling, a gradual process of rural land occupation unfolded steadily after independence. While most of this mobilization occurred as a spontaneous though long migration process, part of it was spurred by empresarios territoriales who had received land grants from colonial authorities and sought much needed field labor. These empresario’s lands were preserved by the new republican order, whose taking sides stoked a conflict among colonos who claimed access to landed property and the empresarios’ turn to specialized agro-exports such as cocoa and coffee. Taking James Parson’s work as a point of departure to argue that the emergence of small-property-holding in this region was in fact a far less homogeneous process than it appears. The Post-independence social formations in Antioquía and Cauca were the result both of natural demographic pressures and of political tensions in frontier regions. An examination of land distribution models, social conflicts, urban planning and governmental institution-building processes demonstrates that, in spite of the rural and agrarian roots of this colonization phenomenon, the results were decidedly urban: internal migrations, in addition to the arrival of colonos from abroad, led to the founding of a network of cities, each of which functioned as a regional center of commerce and administrative power and had to “manage” or adapt to diverse elements, such as the existence of resguardos indígenas or free landless black populations.