I would like to start off by thanking Margaret Crahan, for I felt her reading tried to tackle the very question that fuels my interest in Latin American Studies. Por que somos como somos? Why are we, that hard-to-define, yet clearly felt community of Latin Americans, the way we are? Why do the things that happen in our countries and the patterns that have emerged out of our regions happen? Crahan’s goal is to tie the structure of the state and society at large in Latin America to its “Iberian Heritage”. In the process of her argument I agreed with some things and disagreed with others. Overall, I enjoyed many of the historical connections she made throughout her account of the evolution of the state in Latin America.
Crahan makes a case for something of which I have been convinced for a while: that the revolutions that deposed the Spanish crown from Latin America were not for and by the people, as they have been romanticized in our (at least my) national histories. Rather, it was a war fought by the people, for certain elites. (24) This paper made me ponder on the origin of certain tendencies in Latin America. Perhaps in our revolutions we can see the origin of the tendency, or the initial manifestation of the curse by which Latin American nations always seem to be stuck choosing the lesser of several evils.
On page 27 she identifies the ideology at the root of another Latin American tendency: the susceptibility to fall into racism and classism as systems for understanding/navigating the social reality of our nations. I once had an Israeli-American friend who claimed he didn’t travel because he didn’t need to: he though anywhere you went was the same: The lighter people have the money and the power, and the darker people do the work. It was meant as a fatalistic, simplistic, inflammatory comment. Something to mess with the sensibilities of those discussing their latest travels. I couldn’t help remembering this comment as I read about the construction of a white-mestizo-black/indio caste system, and I can’t help thinking of my city, Bogota, where the president is white as milk, the struggling middle class has always been by large majority mestizo, and the darker brown and black skin tones are the norm for la gente de la calle.
Crahan also supplies a theory for the origin of clientelism, the ruling paradigm of government in Latin America, by which the highest law of the land is the golden rule: He who has the gold, makes the rules. She sees this as yet another trait passed down from the peculiar Iberian royalty, down to its successor, their illegitimate social offspring that was the mestizo elite. She also discusses the origin of the penchant for being ruled by caudillos, attributing it to the frustrated desire for stability post-independence. In my opinion, this was the simplest (or weakest) of her arguments.
Finally, I really enjoyed her account of the beginning of a true sense of social mobility in Latin American societies in what she dubs “the development of the modern state, 1920-1980” (36). Her description of the push by the “urban working class, small businessmen, professionals and others” to gain access to benefits paints these groups as “broadening the bases of collectivity without fully challenging the nature of centralized power.” (36) Perhaps in an overly cynical manner, I couldn’t help but feel that this was the moment in which the larger society became complicit in the perpetuation of what Crahan exposes to be an internally, inherently flawed system based on the privilege of certain elites. Perhaps Leon Gieco was not exaggerating when he sang “Cinco siglos igual...”
Your comment about the tendency to fall into racist and classist discourses when discussing the social hierarchies of nations really interested me. No matter how many times it is repeated, over and over again, that white people have historically viewed themselves (and some I'm afraid still do) as inherently superior to other races, I am still dumbfounded each time I encounter explicit examples of this racism. The reality is, as unfortunate and detrimental to society as it may be, white people (caucasian? I don't want to be nonPC) are still benefitting from 1000s of years of this racial superiority complex, at the expense of other "non-white" people. As your friend pointed out, in many places it is still the "white people who have the money and the power, and the darker people who do the work". When this will change and equality among races will be reached (or hell, race won't even be a common word anymore because gone will be the time of sorting people into race groups based on the color their skin), I don't know.
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