196 CHAPTER 9 DECOLONIZATION AND THE SEARCH FOR NATIONAL IDENTITIES, 1821–1870
social and occupational cleavage, complicating the
political picture.
Liberals wanted to break up the hierarchical
social structure inherited from the colonial period.
They had a vision of their countries remade into
dynamic middle-class states on the model of the
United States or England. Inspired by the success
of the United States, they usually favored a fed-
eral form of government, guarantees of individual
rights, lay control of education, and an end to a
special legal status for the clergy and military. In
their modernizing zeal, liberals sometimes called
for the abolition of entails (which restricted the
right to inherit property to a particular descendant
or descendants of the owner), dissolution of con-
vents, confi scation of church wealth, and abolition
of slavery. The federalism of the liberals had a spe-
cial appeal for secondary regions of the new states,
which were eager to develop their resources and
free themselves from domination by capitals and
wealthy primary regions.
Conservatives typically upheld a strong cen-
tralized government, the religious and educational
monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church, and the
special privileges of the clergy and military. They
distrusted such radical novelties as freedom of
speech and the press and religious toleration. Con-
servatives, in short, sought to salvage as much of
the colonial social order as was compatible with
the new republican system. Indeed, some conser-
vative leaders ultimately despaired of that system
and dreamed of implanting monarchy in their
countries.
Neither conservatives nor liberals displayed
much interest in the problems of the indigenous,
black, and mixed-race masses that formed the ma-
jority of the population in most Latin American
countries. Liberals, impatient with the supposed
backwardness of indigenous peoples, regarded
their communalism as an impediment to the de-
velopment of a capitalist spirit of enterprise and
initiated legislation providing for the division of
communal lands—a policy that favored land grab-
bing at the expense of indigenous villages. Despite
their theoretical preference for small landholdings
and a rural middle class, liberals recoiled from any
program of radical land reform. Conservatives cor-
rectly regarded the great estate as the very founda-
tion of their power. As traditionalists, however, the
conservatives sometimes claimed to continue the
Spanish paternalist policy toward indigenous com-
munities and often enjoyed their support.
This summary of the conservative and lib-
eral programs for Latin America in the fi rst half-
century after independence inevitably overlooks
variations from the theoretical liberal and conser-
vative norms, variations that refl ected the specifi c
conditions and problems of the different states. A
brief examination of the history of Mexico, Argen-
tina, Chile, and the United Provinces of Central
America reveals not only certain common themes
but also a rich diversity of political experience.Mexico
The struggle for Mexican independence, begun
by the radical priests Hidalgo and Morelos, was
completed by Agustín de Iturbide, who headed a
coalition of creole and peninsular conservatives
who were terrifi ed at the prospect of being gov-
erned by the liberal Spanish constitution of 1812,
which was reestablished in 1820. Independence,
achieved under such conservative auspices, meant
that Mexico’s economic and social patterns under-
went little change. To be sure, the popular insur-
gency begun by Hidalgo had at least a short-term
impact on the social, economic, and political pat-
terns of Mexican development. John Tutino, for
example, has shown that in the Bajío the insur-
gency destroyed commercial hacienda production,
which generated profi t by storing maize until prices
peaked with scarcity. It also forced a shift to ten-
ant ranchero production, which maximized maize
production, bringing “real and enduring benefi ts
to both rural producers and urban consumers of
maize across the Bajío during the fi rst half-century
of national life.” Similarly, Florencia Mallon and
Peter Guardino stress the revolutionary participa-
tion of popular urban and rural groups in Mexican
nineteenth-century political struggles, revealing
their long-term impact on Mexican state formation
and peasant consciousness.