LATIN AMERICA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 183
Juan Alvarez in Mexico, and such talented leaders as Juan José Flores of Ecuador,
Andrés Santa Cruz of Bolivia, and Ramón Castilla of Peru illustrate the ascent of
mixed-race people.
The rise of these mestizo or mulatto leaders inspired fears in some membersof the creole elite, beginning with Bolívar, who gloomily predicted a race war that
would also be a struggle between haves and have-nots. Bolívar revealed his obses-
sive race prejudice in his description of the valiant and generous Mexican patriot
Vicente Guerrero as the “vile abortion of a savage Indian and a fi erce African.”
These fears proved groundless; although some mixed-race leaders, like Guerrero
and Alvarez, remained to one degree or another loyal to the humble masses from
which they had sprung, the majority were soon co-opted by the creole aristocracy
and fi rmly defended its interests.
On the other hand, creole politicians of the postcolonial era had to take ac-count of the new political weight of the mixed-race middle and lower classes, es-
pecially the artisan groups. They were exploited politically by white elites who
promised to satisfy the aspirations of the masses, promises they failed to fulfi ll.
This happened in Bogotá, where Colombian liberals courted the artisans in their
struggle against conservatives, and in Buenos Aires, where Juan Manuel Rosas
demagogically identifi ed himself with the mixed-race gauchos and urban artisans
against the aristocratic liberal unitarios.
After mid-century, the growing infl uence of European racist ideologies, espe-cially Spencerian biological determinism, led to a heightened sensitivity to color.
From Mexico to Chile, members of the so-called white elite and even the middle
class claimed to be superior to natives and mestizos. Dark skin increasingly be-
came an obstacle to social advancement. Typical of the rampant pseudoscien-
tifi c racism by the turn of the century was the remark of the Argentine Carlos
Bunge, son of a German immigrant, that mestizos and mulattos were “impure,
atavistically anti-Christian; they are like the two heads of a fabulous hydra that
surrounds, constricts, and strangles with its giant spiral a beautiful, pale virgin,
Spanish America.”
As a rule, neither liberals nor conservatives were free from the pervasiveracism of the time. Carried away by his enthusiasm for “civilization,” which he
identifi ed with the European bourgeois order and white supremacy, the Argen-
tine liberal Domingo Sarmiento proclaimed, “It may appear unjust to exterminate
savages, destroy nascent civilizations, conquer peoples who occupy land that is
rightly theirs, but thanks to this injustice, America, instead of being abandoned to
savages who are incapable of progress, is today occupied by the Caucasian race,
the most perfect, intelligent, beautiful, and progressive of all the races that inhabit
the earth.” A handful of Latin American intellectuals dissented from such a view.
One was the Chilean Francisco Bilbao, who condemned “the great hypocrisy of