Bargaining with the State: Liberal Redemption and the Politics of Social Inclusion in Cali, Colombia, 1930–40

In 1930, after close to five decades of Conservative rule, Liberals returned to power. During Alfonso Lopez Pumarejo’s first presidency (1934-1938), reformers reached out to rural and urban areas in an effort to turn peasants and workers into modern, healthy, productive citizens. For these officials, disease was at once a threat to their nation’s economic progress and a metaphor for the social and political ills that plagued their society. They imagined liberal social programs as ideal tools to bring economic prosperity and promoted a brand of modernity that relied on science, education, and state intervention to diagnose, treat, and cure their society. Government officials defined citizenship in ways, which reproduced assumptions about race, gender, and class and inscribed these differences onto distinctions between health/disease and moral/immoral bodies. However, as municipal records show, this process of defining who belonged in the nation and who could claim citizenship rights relied on negotiations between community members and local officials. Memorials and petitions sent to local councils show that contrary to reform rhetoric, the men and women who the state imagined would benefit from the implementation of its social programs and public health initiatives, were far from passive recipients of state efforts.