176 CHAPTER 8 THE INDEPENDENCE OF LATIN AMERICA
Jesus, born on a small cattle- and cotton-raising
ranch in the province of Bahia, disguised herself
as a young man to join the revolutionary army.
Her valor won her a decoration in 1823 from Dom
Pedro, the fi rst ruler of independent Brazil. In the
struggle for the independence of Haiti, says Fran-
cesca Miller, women were “omnipresent,” and some
commanded troops.
In the aftermath of the struggle for indepen-
dence, some women drew the logical consequences
of their participation in that cause: if women fought
and died for independence, why did they not have
the right to vote and be elected? This was the mes-
sage of a petition submitted in 1824 to the govern-
ment of the Mexican state of Zacatecas: “Women
also wish to have the title of citizen... to see them-
selves counted in the census as ‘la ciudadana H...
la ciudadana N.’ ” But another century and a half
would pass before all Latin American women real-
ized that wish.
Latin American Independence:
A Reckoning
After more than a decade of war, accompanied by
immense loss of life and property, most of Latin
America had won its political independence. The
revolutions were accompanied or quickly followed
by a number of social changes. Independence
brought the death of the Inquisition, the end of
legal discrimination on the basis of race, and the
abolition of titles of nobility in most lands. It also
gave an impetus to the abolition of slavery, to the
founding of public schools, and to similar reforms.
All these changes, however, were marginal; in-
dependence left intact the existing economic and
social structures. This was natural, for the creole
elite that headed the movement had no intention
of transforming the existing order. They sought to
replace the peninsulars in the seats of power and
open their ports to the commerce of the world but
desired no change of labor and land systems. In-
deed, their interests as producers of raw materials
and foodstuffs for sale in the markets of Europe and
North America required the maintenance of the
system of great estates worked by a semiservile na-
tiveproletariat. No agrarian reform accompanied
independence. The haciendas abandoned by or
confi scated from loyalists usually fell into the hands
of the creole aristocracy. Some land also passed
into the possession of mestizo or mulatto offi cers,
who were assimilated into the creole elite and as a
rule promptly forgot the groups from which they
had come.
Instead of broadening the base of landown-
ership in Latin America, the revolutions actually
helped narrow it. The liberal, individualist ideology
of the revolutionary governments undermined in-
digenous communal land tenure in some cases by
requiring the division of community lands among
its members. This process facilitated the usurpa-
tion of these communal lands by creole landlords
and hastened the transformation of the native
peasantry into a class of peons or serfs on Spanish
haciendas (see Chapters 9–11). Because no struc-
tural economic change took place, aristocratic val-
ues continued to dominate Latin American society,
despite an elaborate façade of republican constitu-
tions and law codes.Go online for additional
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