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Patricios en contienda. Cuadros de costumbres, reformas liberales y representación del pueblo en Hispanoamérica (1830–1880) by Felipe Martínez-Pinzón (review)

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 138; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mln.2023.a915383

1080-6598

Brendan Lanctot,

Historical Studies in Latin America

Reviewed by: Patricios en contienda. Cuadros de costumbres, reformas liberales y representación del pueblo en Hispanoamérica (1830–1880) by Felipe Martínez-Pinzón Brendan Lanctot Martínez-Pinzón, Felipe. Patricios en contienda. Cuadros de costumbres, reformas liberales y representación del pueblo en Hispanoamérica (1830–1880). U of North Carolina P, Department of Romance Studies, 2021. 396 pp. Felipe Martínez-Pinzón's Patricios en contienda: Cuadros de costumbres, reformas liberales y representación del pueblo en Hispanoamérica (1830–1880) convincingly argues that the brief and often humorous sketches of social types known as cuadros de costumbres constituted an important discursive space where elites promoted competing visions of the people, the ultimate source of legitimacy for nascent republican projects. In addition to representing various popular subjects, letrados fashioned literary profiles of notabilidades to establish their own qualifications for guiding such an undertaking. This book rethinks costumbrismo as something more than isolated vignettes or mere precursors to more prestigious literary forms. Martínez-Pinzón is not concerned with establishing a definitive corpus or conventions of a particular genre, and his study sidesteps such questions by defining his object of study as "literatura panorámica," a phrase borrowed from Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. This phrase evokes the emerging popular visual culture of the Atlantic world and permits Martínez-Pinzón to situate his deft readings of cuadros de costumbres produced in Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela during the half-century that [End Page 541] followed the dissolution of Gran Colombia in that broader, cosmopolitan framework. Just as crucially, it designates a mode of writing that not only dialogues with, but is embedded in the novel, geographic discourse, statistical sciences, and history. A major achievement of Patricios en contienda is how, over the course of its nine chapters, it reconstructs exchanges, re-editions, and polemics that played out in the newspapers, broadsheets, albums, and other printed materials in order to analyze how letrados sought to compose a pueblo nacional. In a sense, this book is itself an album that gathers and reedits a variety of materials, both written and graphic. Its three-hundred fifty pages (followed by a bibliography of nearly thirty pages, in a smaller font) are divided in three parts, each of which consists of three chapters. Each chapter, in turn, is broken into a number of titled subsections (usually five or six). Within these main chapters, there is no formal marco teórico or separate historical context; instead, Martínez-Pinzón's prose integrates the book's vast secondary bibliography, typically in the form of brief citations. Structurally and stylistically, then, this is a project that emulates its object of study, whose "métodos de recorte y ensamblaje, le [sic?] permitieron a estos compiladores 'desear el mundo' de otras maneras" (72). "Sensibilidades patricias," the first section of the book, focuses on the "galleries," "museums," "pantheons," and other similarly named publications that set new criteria of belonging for those aspiring to shape a nascent republican order. Surveying such competing initiatives by José María Vergara y Vergara, the Bolet brothers, and José María Samper, among others, Martínez-Pinzón detects "a sensibilidad patricia" that was "[n]i liberal ni conservadora, afectiva y condescendiente, embozadamente violenta… [que] confundía, en su propio beneficio, paz con pacificación, educación con disciplina, armonía con privilegio e historia con épica familiar o étnica" (113). In scrutinizing letrados' self-fashioning via bocetos of their chosen precursors, Patricios en contienda reveals the limits of framing of the intellectual debates of post-independence as merely an extension of civil war by other means (as Rafael Rojas does in Los derechos del alma: Ensayos sobre la querella liberal-conservadora en Hispanoamérica (1830–1870)). The second and third sections of the book shift from patrician self-representation to the depiction of those subaltern subjects that elites seek to pacify, educate, and discipline in order to integrate or exclude them from the pueblo. Part two, titled "Un pueblo para la patria" focuses primarily on the indigenous and mestizo inhabits of the hinterlands that intellectuals regard as the cradle of barbarism, which threatens the fledgling state, but...