Americanos

Throughout my entire teaching career I have been involved in conversations about bringing more of Latin America into World History courses. And, I, and we, have! My first teaching job was at a diverse and predominantly Latino East High Bakersfield School in California (Go Blades!). I learned a lot in my seven years there, including that I had a lot to learn. Part of being a World History teacher, in general, consistently encountering topics that we have never considered.

Latin American histories were definitely a part of this. I remember 0ne earnest East High student question in particular: hey, Beckman, what were the Mexicans doing during all of this? This was a US history class, and I had some sort of an answer about how the Mexican American War contributed the US Civil War. But, I knew that the class deserved more. I began reading a bit from The Mexican American Heritage, published in the 1990s by a Chicano publishing house and available by mail order.¹

Teacher’s Curriculum Institute published their first World History (Alive!) material in the mid-1990s. TCI was a startup managed by teachers at this point and one of my colleagues at East High was part of the writing team which provided early access. The materials corresponded to the California State Framework in which high school world history focused on the modern era, defined as c. 1750 to the present. Mainly using these materials, I taught my first lessons on “Modern Latin America” in the mid-1990s. I first learned about the colonial casta classifications from these materials. Some of these lessons have stood the test of time. I still use murals by Mexico’s Los Tres Grandes, including Jose Clemente Orozco’s depiction of Father Miguel Hidalgo beginning the revolution that began the Mexican Wars of Independence.

My interest in the Haitian Revolution also reflected efforts to bring more Latin American content into my World History classes after I moved to Minnesota in 1997. The oldest lesson on this site started as a project for a graduate class on e-learning. Even as I was refining this lesson, I realized that I needed to incorporate more Spanish-American history into my classes.

Teaching Latin American Independence

The wars and movements for independence in Latin America in the early Nineteenth Century are an excellent topic to incorporate into World History classes. The complexity and variety of the independence processes in Spanish and Portuguese America complicate this, however. Latin America, of course, contains multitudes, and attempting to gloss the independence processes of four Viceroyalties that became eleven independent states during two decades as one discrete topic naturally leads to over simplification. Of course, this is true for all topics in World History. In curricular discussions of Latin American independence with colleagues and, especially, with tutoring students from around the country is to make Latin American independence a passenger on the revolutionary train hurtling through the European tunnel of time and/or depicting it as the determined outcome of colonial casta classifications. While both are clearly factors, a lot is lost in this process, including the agency of americanos of all backgrounds.

In contemplating teaching Latin American independence, I came to realize that did not have a strong enough grasp on the narratives to effectively curate the most relevant narratives and sources for students to examine. In the past few years, I added understanding of the Indigenous Andes, with Charles Walker’s Out of the Ashes and Liberating Narratives and women in Buenos Aires with Jeffery Shumway’s A Woman, a Man, a Nation to add examples of Indigenous people and women. I’m currently enjoying Ten Notable Women of Colonial Latin America, which includes three women from the Revolutionary era—Manuela, Sáenz, La Pola, and Michaela Bastides—whose stories I read first as part of this project. I’ve added some interesting stories to my discussions with students.

In a testament to the variety of revolutionary experiences across the Americas and to the lack of a cohesive narrative in the legacy curriculum that accords americanos agency, I am still working on how we, World History teachers, can make this topic more useful for apprenticing students as global, historical thinkers. Toward this end, I recently read John Chasteen’s Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence. This engaging, almost breezy,-survey weaves together stories from Argentina to Mexico. Chasteen maintains a fairly strict chronology while moving between locations. The kaleidoscopic effect demonstrates the complexity and the contingency of the independence era. Chasteen also helpfully periodizes these swirling events to create units of study for classses with the curricular space to in greater depth.

Even without going deeper, I think that World History teachers can use Latin American independence to help students to understand the meaning of contingency in history. The complexity could be a feature, not a bug, if we eschew presenting independence as a simple story. As with all major historical developments, Latin American Independence was very complex. As I’ve noted before, our first obligation as history educators is to acknowledge that in our presentations to students.

This will mean presenting contingent factors for revolutionary action. Chasteen emphasizes that Latin Americans, overall, showed very limited interest in liberal revolution prior to the governing crisis created by Napoleon’s interventions in Iberia in 1808: “revolt was the last thing on people’s minds in América as a whole” (12). Given the lack of agitation for independence in América prior to 1808 factors beyond liberalism and the example of other Atlantic Revolutions must be considered.

Like in the Haitian Revolution, many rebels, notably General San Martín were actually royalists, at least in theory. Chasteen’s book helped me to understand how the first self-governing juntas (a term most students will need to study in order to operationalize) in Spanish América proclaimed allegiance to King Fernando VII after he was pushed off his throne by Napoleon. But, a few members of these juntas were interested in using the crisis to promote republican government and the juntas themselves were a limited type of popular sovereignty. The assertion of self government was contingent on the crisis of the Spanish monarchy. But, without a few radicals committed to liberal ideas and aware of other revolutions as examples, the “mask of Fernando” might have never come off. A push for republican government might never have materialized.

In 1810, in response to the apparent collapse of Spanish resistance to Napoleon, americano rebels reacted with impressive unanimity, forming caretaker juntas that asserted the right to home rule in the absence of clear royal authority….[T]he huge majority of people in América, americanoes españoles², Indians, mestizos, and pardos, swore their oaths of loyalty to Fernando with utter sincerity even while raging against the europeos³ in their midst. Without using the term, they were claiming popular sovereignty, América for americanos. Directing the new juntas in many cases were radicals who actually wanted to create republics similar to the United States. For the time being, the republicans had to wear the so-called mask of Fernando, disguising their true intentions for lack of majority support. Their numbers were few, but their influence would be great.

Casteen 65

The assertion of self government required the conjecture of the ideas and the political crisis. This presents an excellent opportunity to discuss contingency, because of the importance of Napoleon’s decision to intervene in Spain and Portugal. Students can see that Napoleon did not need to do this. Similarly, Chasteen points out that loyalist forces sent to América after the end of the Peninsular War in Spain restored royal authority that Fernando VII may have been able to retain were he not determined to rule as an absolutist. Again, the personal nature of this factor may allow students to see how the subsequent wars of independence were not the only way in which events could have unfolded.

My goal with this material is to create a useful timeline of key events using ClioVis that includes periodization. Then, I hope to create a set of important events that students can explore with an eye to locating contingency leading into and out of the events. Please share resources for and reactions to this idea.

1. This is in addition to the low literacy rates and general lack of printing presses and print culture. ↩︎