Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

“Our Pueblos, Fractions with No Central Unity”: Municipal Sovereignty in Central America, 1808-1821

2006; Duke University Press; Volume: 86; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2006-001

1527-1900

Jordana Dym,

Cuban History and Society

One of many revolutions that swept the Americas in the early nineteenth century was the establishment of new republics that were independent not only of European sovereignty but also of monarchy. This article uses the case study of Central America to suggest that, in at least some parts of Spanish America, this political revolution did not just transform vassals into citizens and colonies into nation-states; it also identified a need to shift from a classical European political philosophy based on municipal sovereignty — that of the pueblos — to a politics of national sovereignty — that of the pueblo. In Spanish America, the political revolution that occurred between 1808 and 1821 delayed elites’ realization that a choice between the two was required. This period of upheaval following the collapse of the Spanish monarchy witnessed the emergence of leaders who simultaneously deployed both national and municipal sovereignties and who implemented both neo-Scholastic and liberal policies. Therefore, the move from municipal to national sovereignty, I argue, reflects not a poor or failed transition from traditional to modern governance but a gradual realization that a reconstituted central authority was incompatible with a hybrid political system. In Central America, this challenge first emerged at the moment of independence.As one of Spain’s most loyal colonies during the Napoleonic period — where elites had pressed medals in honor of the captive Ferdinand VII (1808) and implemented the Constitution of 1812 with vigor (1812–14 and 1820 – 21) — we might expect the Kingdom of Guatemala to have avoided the internal strife common to Spanish American republics in independence, especially since its residents did not take up arms against Spain to secure it. Yet, when making the decision to follow Mexico’s 1821 declaration of independence with their own, dozens of city councils from Chiapas to Costa Rica diverged sharply over where to establish a new political center. The capital’s authorities tried to gauge public opinion by first calling for a constituent assembly and then initiating a referendum of the region’s municipalities. Municipal challenges to the consolidation of a single power center continued after independence, as municipal councils in small villages and provincial capitals insisted that state and national governments address their demands regarding local governance and political affiliation. These pretensions contributed to a cascade of civil wars that began over the question of annexation to Mexico (1821 – 23) and continued under the weak state of the Central American Federation (1824 – 39), which soon separated into five republics.1While Central America’s internal strife and political divisions are similar to those experienced by Mexico and many South American countries in the first half of the nineteenth century, the municipal character of its independence process was unique. Early on, local political analysts identified Central America as a place where divisiveness and instability were rooted in continued appeals to municipal sovereignty rather than in republican ideals.2 For example, Guatemalan cleric and politician Juan José Aycinena (1792 – 1865) observed that at independence, “our pueblos did not present the appearance of a kingdom ruled by a unitary government, but many fractions dislocated with no center of unity.”3 Aycinena’s vision of Central American political authority fragmented at the municipal level merits attention as a key to analyzing the region’s political instability — particularly early leaders’ difficulty in convincing breakaway regions to respect and maintain the colonial districts and capitals whose legitimacy they had accepted for much of Spain’s tenure in the New World.Academic debate continues on the fundamental reasons for Spanish America’s difficulty in creating stable polities, but only recently have scholars considered the role of the city in the independence process. Early political histories, and particularly works by contemporaries to the events, tended to look at divisions between elite factions in the new states, blaming “conservatives” or “liberals” for conflict and focusing primarily on political activities within national capitals.4 Since the early twentieth century, historians have emphasized the Spanish colonial heritage of a semifeudal society, unprepared for the freedoms and responsibilities of democracy. This group of scholars includes O. Carlos Stoetzer, who showed in the early 1970s that Scholastic theory played a crucial role in the political movements of 1808 but who ignored the innovations of constitutional monarchy. Stoetzer concluded that the Spanish American revolution was “fundamentally a civil war resulting from the Napoleonic events in the Peninsula [with] profound medieval roots,” and he declared the cabildo “a medieval institution.”5 Without disputing the Scholastic origins of autonomist and independence movements, scholars (including Nettie Lee Benson, François-Xavier Guerra, and Mario Rodríguez) have argued that the constitutional “Cádiz experiment” of 1812 had sufficiently changed political ideas and institutions such that by independence, Spanish American countries operated squarely within the tradition of Atlantic revolutions.6 Adherents to neither the Scholastic nor the liberal revolutionary model grappled directly with the issues raised by the coexistence of both ideologies in the political rhetoric, institutional organization, and practice of the time — particularly the metamorphosis of the role and institution of the city council during the 1808 – 14 interregnum.Recently, the municipality has drawn attention from a new generation of political historians. First, studies of politics and conflict in independence-era Mexico and Argentina emphasized provincial regionalism, which made creation of a strong central state a task only a strong man — the caudillo — could accomplish.7 City councils and councilors have roles within most regional schemas, especially studies of Central America.8 However, such scholarship intended not to tease out the place of the municipality within the new order but to use city and village records to illustrate relations between provinces and national states, in order to show how the divergent goals of different classes and ethnic groups complicated the consolidation of new and fragile governments.9 Groundbreaking studies have begun to return the municipality to its rightful place as an important political institution in a moment of political crisis, including some research that has directly analyzed the impact that an ideology of “municipal sovereignty” might have had on the state-building project after independence.10 Yet, most of these analyses have followed the long-standing historiographic divide between studying either Spanish or Indian cabildos.11 That is, they have scrutinized the origins and impacts of change either in big cities and their elite actors or in Indian villages and their local agendas, even when they study systemic attempts to standardize municipal organization through the introduction of constitutional councils in all urban communities.12I argue that the systematic overhaul of Spanish governance between 1808 and 1821, including the application of Scholastic theory and the introduction of constitutional monarchy, produced a hybrid political culture in Central America. On the one hand, between 1808 and 1811, use of traditional ideas of “municipal sovereignty” increased the power of Spanish cabildos and set the stage for popular demands to share in self-government. On the other hand, constitutional reforms after 1812 replaced many cabildos with representative municipal councils. As a result, in the municipal independence process of 1821, leaders drew on traditional ideas of municipal sovereignty to convince recently introduced institutions to participate in colonial emancipation in order to create the illusion of a unitary decision to join Mexico. In the short term, this strategy short-circuited political fragmentation. However, those who relied on municipal sovereignty to fill the looming power vacuum in 1821 failed to predict that organizing the newly independent state on the basis of “fractions” — the pueblos — instead of developing a model of “central unity” actually set the stage for long-term instability.Guatemalan city councilor and historian Francisco Fuentes y Guzmán noted, in the late seventeenth century, that cities “are the security and constancy of con quered kingdoms, and, furthermore, their principal heads.” As principal heads, cities were not only “the center for establishing the primary armed forces and political government” but also the seats of commerce, religion, and ecclesiastic and secular justice.13 The city was the primary polity of Spanish America, as it was in early modern Spain. According to Spanish political theory, the householders or citizens (vecinos) of a Spanish city, as represented by their council (cabildo or ayuntamiento), made up a political community (pueblo or república) from which natural sovereignty and autonomy originated. Civil status, legal rights, and political power derived from citizenship (vecindad) in a municipality.14 Civil law (derecho civil) covered “all that pertained to the city.”15On the one hand, this idea of the city as city-state, or republic, was a holdover from Greek and Roman political theory. The Siete Partidas of Alfonso the Wise (1221 – 84) in this tradition defined the pueblo (people) as an ayuntamiento (council) of all a community’s residents.16 Such a community could be a kingdom, a province, or a city. The link between city and sovereignty was reinforced when Spain founded new cities as the principal institution of annexation in the fifteenth-century reconquista of Granada and in the sixteenth-century conquest of the Americas. Established by adelantados to legalize and consolidate military victories, American cities and their cabildos preceded the crown’s first appointed royal officials. By the time the Kingdom of Guatemala was established as a captaincy-general in 1542, most of its 15 Spanish cities and towns, with their jurisdictions extending many miles into their hinterlands, had existed for almost 20 years.17 Until Charles III established four intendancies in the kingdom in the 1780s, introducing a formal and theoretically uniform provincial structure, these cities remained district capitals, and most depended directly on the audiencia and captain general located in kingdom capital Guatemala City rather than on an intermediary authority.18 As late as 1647, Spanish philosopher Juan de Solórzano Pereira (1575 – 1654) confirmed that original sovereignty of the pueblos was vested in their city councils.19 While cities and towns existed inside a larger political framework of provinces and kingdoms within the Spanish Empire, their councils remained the political and judicial representatives of their residents, and therefore residents continued to identify membership in a municipal community as a political membership, much in the same way they developed regional or imperial political identities.20Further, Spanish political theory (again, dating to Alfonse the Wise) held not only that sovereignty originated in communities — the bonum commune — but also that it could revert to them.21 Jesuit philosopher Francisco Suárez (1548 – 1617) was an influential proponent of the idea that a monarch’s sovereignty derived from a pactum translationis, a transfer pact in which political communities ceded their natural sovereignty to the king. Under normal circumstances, such cession was permanent and irrevocable; only in cases of a vacancy in the monarchy or an improper selection of monarch could sovereignty (in theory) revert to the communities. Kings did not always appreciate this political model, for it signaled the pueblo’s right to revolt against an unjust monarch or tyrant by abrogating the pactum translationis, but a majority of early modern Spanish political writers upheld and taught it in universities throughout the Spanish Empire, including Guatemala.22 Napoleon’s 1808 invasion of Spain and the abdication of its Bourbon monarchs revived the pactum translationis, as cities and provinces across the peninsula invoked it to justify juntas formed to coordinate the fight against the French “tyrant.”23This renewed interest was evident in the Americas as well, though it took a distinct shape and entailed different consequences. In transferring municipal institutions from the Old World to the New, Spain adapted the principle of municipal sovereignty to address the challenge of governing a society made up of Spaniards, Indians, Africans, and their mixed-race descendants. As part of this process, the term pueblo retained traditional connotations of a political community or municipality but additionally developed two specialized meanings. First, as part of an extended theological and political debate over the status of indigenous people and Spain’s dominion over them, Indians came to be considered subjects of the king but a separate people from Spaniards — the pueblo de indios versus pueblo de españoles.24 Each group was supposed to reside in separate urban centers, with separate municipal governments and distinct laws to regulate their conduct. Second, the term pueblo, in the sense of a specific municipality, referred only to Indian settlements. Spaniards and their American-born creole descendants founded, were vecinos of, and governed incorporated municipalities that were labeled either cities (ciudades) or towns (villas), residing either in the urban center or on municipal lands that might extend up to 30 leagues and encompass dozens of Indian villages.Thus, while Spaniards organized municipalities to enjoy the rights and privileges of cities, indigenous residents were forcibly “reduced” into villages (pueblos) that were allocated up to a single league of jurisdiction. Only select indigenous groups — such as the Tlaxcalans who had helped Hernán Cortes bring down the Mexica Empire — received the full status, rights, and privileges of a Spanish city, the designation of “republic,” and thus the status of a sovereign pueblo.25 Nonetheless, Indian pueblos were political and territorial units, forming several jurisdictions within the kingdom whose cabeceras (district capitals) like Quetzaltenango (Guatemala) and Matagalpa (Nicaragua) were required to form city governments and, like Spanish municipalities, serve as administrative and judicial capitals. That is, in Spanish America, the generic idea of a “people” acquired ethnic and territorial, as well as municipal, significance, distinguishing the politically dominant from the numerically dominant segments of society.By 1808, the purity of the two pueblos was an obvious fiction in the Kingdom of Guatemala: of the 1 million residents, 40,000 were labeled “Spaniards,” almost 646,000 were “Indians,” and the remaining 314,000 residents were of mixed Spanish, Indian, and African ancestry. Equally fictitious was their physical separation into two types of settlement: late-eighteenth-century censuses indicate few communities with only one resident group.26 Yet, despite this reality, the legal and political separation of the two pueblos was recognized by Spanish colonial law and continued to regulate the separate city governments that administered the kingdom’s 15 Spanish municipalities and over eight hundred villages with Indian or mixed-race governance. So, any revival of the city as a politically autonomous body in this region in the early nineteenth century would occur within the context of different types of pueblos, distinguished by place of origin as well as residence, but all municipal in organization.From the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries, municipal authorities in the New World showed little awareness of the principle of municipal sovereignty. With Habsburg and Bourbon kings ensconced on the Spanish throne, city councils focused not on wresting back original rights but on using the institution to benefit local interests within a recognized imperial context. However, when King Ferdinand VII’s abdication undermined the Spanish political system in 1808, the doctrine of municipal sovereignty took center stage in political experiments undertaken on the peninsula and in the Americas to reconstitute a legitimate local and imperial government.27 Despite a thorough grounding in the ideas, events, and consequences of the North American and French revolutions and a leaning toward representative forms of government, in Central America it was the Spanish pueblo and its self-proclaimed representative, the city council, that volunteered and was asked by Spanish interim authorities to act to resolve the crisis. Whether expressing loyalty or promoting insurrection, the ayuntamientos of the region’s cities and towns used the language of the rights of a pueblo to reclaim sovereignty and justify efforts to increase their political power. From the councilors’ perspective, the ayuntamientos, as representatives of the Spanish pueblos, should determine the political destiny of their districts, either in private consultation or through open council meetings (cabildos abiertos) that included representatives of key secular and religious institutions, as well as important vecinos.28For those city councils that supported Spanish interim authorities, loyalty to a Spain in disarray was not automatic. The cabildos of at least two capitals — Guatemala City and Comayagua — demonstrated that they believed their institution possessed the right to determine to whom their cities would owe future allegiance, and why. In the capital of the kingdom, Guatemala City, the council met with representatives of other institutions in early 1809 to discuss the response to official notification of the abdication. However, it was at a later regular session that members swore a formal oath of loyalty, on their knees before the cabildo secretary (rather than a royal official), agreeing to obey the interim government of the Suprema Junta Central (SJC), “in which is deposited the Nation’s sovereignty and government in the name of our king and natural lord, Don Ferdinand VII.”29 While a council might deliberate with other institutions, the ceremony emphasized, it expressed its vote alone to show an independent decision. As the cabildo informed Ferdinand’s sister Carlotta, who in May 1809 offered to rule for Ferdinand during the king’s captivity, “[T]he government and guardianship of the nation fall to the pueblos.”30 In early 1810, the cabildo explained that it acted as a “constituent” of Spanish sovereignty, that Ferdinand VII had deposited in it “portions” of power when he had left the empire without an administrator, and that it thus rightfully exercised sovereignty in his absence.31 The cabildo’s declaration of loyalty both tightened ties to Spain and framed such ties as voluntary, rather than obligatory, following Ferdinand’s abdication. The longer the crisis continued, the more overt references to the sovereignty of the pueblos became. By mid-1810, five creole members of the ayuntamiento proposed that the body reject the dissolution of the SJC and the “transfer” of its acting sovereignty to a regency, because the decision had not been made by the whole nation — that is, the pueblos had not been consulted about the change.32In the intendancy of Honduras, the council of the provincial capital, Comayagua, also emphasized the legitimate “deposit” of Ferdinand’s authority in interim authorities. As in Guatemala City, the council renewed its oath of loyalty in the name of the city it represented.33 As the crisis continued, however, Comayagua explained that its seemingly conservative acceptance of the junta was due only to its distance from Spain and the urgency of creating a central government. As a city that was an “essential and integral part of the Spanish Nation,” the cabildo claimed the right not just to accept passively but to participate actively in the establishment of interim authorities, since “all cities and towns [of Spain and the Americas] ought to meet [ juntarse] as set out by the law to name the kingdom’s governors.”34 The cabildos of both Guatemala City and Comayagua believed in the principle that as pueblos they could claim “portions” of sovereignty deposited in “constituents” and as such voluntarily pledge continued allegiance to Spain and demand a voice in future imperial, and not just local, policy making.Although couched in terms of loyalty, such extravagant use of the rhetoric of the sovereignty of the pueblos was a noticeable innovation. Guatemala’s captain general, Antonio González Saravia (1801 – 11), became so concerned that he wrote to Spain in April 1809 about the ayuntamientos’ claim to a “more influential and representative” role. “These bodies,” he warned, “believed they had left their small sphere, and could aspire and raise themselves to where they never were, and should not be, concerned.”35 Two months later, however, in a closed-door meeting, he told the audiencia he believed “that in the Americas, sovereign authority resided in the cabildos.” The fiscal of the audiencia — reminding the governor of his oath recognizing the sovereignty vested in the SJC — recommended he hide this thought, because “we might all become victims of these authorities [the cabildos].36 As time passed, his concerns seemed justified. By March 1811, the cabildo of Granada (Nicaragua) boldly proposed to Guatemala City’s council that the kingdom’s ayuntamientos make an arrangement with the captain general for him to remain in his post as the cities’ (and not the king’s) chosen governor after the end of his royal appointment later that year, effectively suggesting an assumption of royal powers by an association of city councils.37 The king’s abdication and the civil war consuming the peninsula weakened the legitimacy of the governors, who hesitated to interfere with increasing municipal claims to self-rule. But their correspondence indicates that even loyal cities were claiming unusual and problematic authority.Ayuntamientos not only justified loyalty and sought expanded political clout by claiming sovereignty for their “portions” of Spain’s constituent elements; they used the same theory to support insurrection. Three did so in 1811 — San Salvador in El Salvador, and Granada and León in Nicaragua. San Salvador left the most extensive record of the thoughts and actions of the instigators of the insurgency. Rejecting the legitimacy of interim authorities, a spokesman of San Salvador’s council, Manuel José Arce (1787 – 1847), proclaimed on November 5, “There is no king, nor Intendant, nor Captain General: we ought only to obey our alcaldes.”38 His statement, issued in front of city hall, made clear that San Salvador’s councilors believed that royal officials governing Guatemala had no authority without a recognized king, leaving legitimate political power in the hands of the city’s elected justices. A cabildo abierto elected new city councilors and in the name of “our beloved Ferdinand VII” named a new intendant (Guatemalan creole and royal treasurer José Mariano Batres) and a new military commander (San Salvadoran José Aguilar). Not only did the traditional city council feel authorized to reject Spanish authorities; it also rethought the pueblo itself, bringing “honored mulattoes” formerly excluded from participation in government into the process of approving the revolutionary new cabildo and then suspending activities, “leaving open the discussions for subsequent Juntas, which will include representation of the other Cabildos of the Province, whom we convene.”39 The cabildos of León and Granada shared San Salvador’s view that Ferdinand VII’s abdication returned sovereignty to the pueblos. They also instigated uprisings that, while declaring allegiance to the king, deposed governors, set up juntas with popular representatives, and sought to abolish several taxes.40 Granada’s junta, which Nicaraguan bishop Nicolás García Jérez dubbed a “monstrous Junti-Ayuntamiento,” even sent delegates to neighboring towns to compel them to govern in the future “in accord with this ayuntamiento.”41Whether these uprisings sought to start an independence movement or to increase the power of local authorities while decreasing that of royal officials is still a matter of historical debate; royally appointed governors stopped them either by negotiation or by force of arms before permanent change occurred. What is unquestionable is the sense of sovereignty each city emphasized. Each insurgent ayuntamiento redefined citizenship by inviting “honored mulattoes” or representatives from unrepresented settlements or ethnic groups within the urban center and its hinterland to sit on their juntas. A generation earlier, the residents of the Kingdom of Guatemala had resisted new Bourbon taxes and institutions, arguing that this disobedience fit within the tradition of “obedience without compliance”: that is, that it stemmed from disagreement with specific policies rather than with the entire political order. In 1811, in a letter circulated to the other towns of its province and to neighboring capital León, the San Salvadoran junta called for the ayuntamientos to reclaim the “natural and civil rights usurped three centuries ago” and reassume “the political capacities that resided in [the deposed intendant].” There is some irony in this claim made by European descendants of the conquistadors. Nevertheless, the cabildos presented a challenge to the legitimacy of a monarchy in disorder that resonated in villages like Santa Ana, Usulután, and Metapán, where Indian, African, and mixed-race residents overthrew their own governors and abolished taxes, as had San Salvador. And, just like San Salvador, they were rapidly quashed by Spanish and creole authorities, including city councils fearful of the consequences of change imposed from below.42Further, the uprisings increased the local influence of those councils that did not foster revolt, since governors, who had learned that municipal loyalty was conditional, rewarded them. Guatemala City’s council set the strategy of negotiation that ended San Salvador’s insurrection, convincing Captain General José de Bustamante (1811 – 18) to name ex-alderman José de Aycinena as the province’s interim intendant and to send senior alderman José María Peynado as a second mediator. Spain’s Cortes later promoted San Vicente (El Salvador) from town to city, rewarding instead of punishing its cabildo’s decision to send militia forces to repress the revolt before receiving instructions from royal officials to do so. Guatemala City, already a kingdom capital with special privileges, earned a coveted honor for its perceived loyalty — the right to be addressed as “excellency” — which put it on the same honorific level as the audiencia, the highest regional court.43 Taking political charge paid dividends to cabildos, who offered loyalty in exchange for both real and symbolic capital.Whether they supported or opposed interim governments, there was no doubt that the Spanish city councils of Central America shared the assumption that sovereignty — or the right to determine political allegiance — devolved in times of crisis to the separate Spanish pueblos, which had, in theory, ceded sovereignty to the king as subordinate entities within the Spanish Empire rather than as components within a “kingdom” of Guatemala. Despite being organized for almost 300 years within a single colony, and despite being grouped for over 30 years within intendancies, the Central America’s principal city councils did not respond to the challenges and opportunities of the time as a unified kingdom or as unified intendancies. Instead, Guatemala’s residents could and did respond to crisis through their city councils.In championing the belief in cities as pueblos, they were not alone. Interim leaders in Spain acknowledged that the councils of Spanish American cities and towns were the legitimate bodies of political representation, if not explicitly a locus of sovereignty, when they asked cities to participate in the election of each captaincy-general’s or viceroyalty’s representative to the SJC (1808 – 10). They also underscored this legitimacy when they identifying the cabildos of each cabeza de partido (district capital) as the proper bodies to select a deputy to the Spanish Cortes convened for 1810.44 For the first time, Spanish Americans received direct representation as constituent parts of the empire, and it was Spanish city councils that served as the constituent institutions.However, the changing procedures adopted by the SJC and the regency showed Spain’s interest in fostering political organization and identity at the provincial, and not just municipal, level and also hinted at Central American discomfort with this definition. The 1809 electoral regulations recognized individual Spanish cities and towns as equal participants in the selection of regional representatives. Each Spanish cabildo proposed a candidate, and an electoral panel in the kingdom capital would narrow the nominees to three finalists and then draw the winner by lot.45 As reported in the Gazeta de Guatemala, between April 1809 and March 1810, Central American cabildos proffered their various candidates, from which the electoral panel chose Guatemala City lawyer, landowner, and alderman Manuel José Pavón y Muñoz, who had been nominated by several cabildos.46 Pavón never joined the SJC, which dissolved before he was able to travel. Nonetheless, the electoral process reconfirmed Central America’s Spanish-run municipalities as the region’s recognized political communities.The selection of Cortes deputies was more problematic, as it emphasized the provincial level of the political hierarchy. Standardizing the political uni