Cultural Politics under the Liberal Republic: Forging Citizenship through the Stage and the Screen

Colombia’s Liberal Republic of 1930 to 1946 is usually recognized in the historiography for being a period of citizenship expansion after decades of contraction started with the Constitution of 1886. Indeed, when the Liberals won the presidency in 1930, they asserted that the relationship between the ruler and the ruled in Colombia needed to be redefined. The existing historiography has tended to interpret the sixteen years of Liberal rule that ensued in terms of success or failure of this enterprise. Did they succeed in expanding democracy and citizenship or not? This paper steps back from this question to inquire about the meanings that the Liberal rulers and those they ruled over attributed to citizenship at the time. I do so by examining the implementation of cultural policies like the expansion of access to theater, poetry recitations, dance performances, lectures, music concerts of classical and folk music alike, and educational cinema. Through these programs, the Liberals opened the doors of elitist institutions like Teatro Colón to the popular classes, and also took culture to city parks, schools, the public squares of working-class neighborhoods, and remote locations in trucks called escuelas ambulantes. While these programs sought to turn culture into a social right—that men and women from the popular classes embraced, joining in the language of cultural democratization— they did not escape persistent narratives and practices of class, race, and gender hierarchy that can be traced back to the nineteenth century.