Contingency and Latin American Independence

I frequently tell AP History students that they don’t need to know everything, as long as they know some things. This is a dangerous statement to make with teenagers¹, many of whom are inclined to focused on the first part of the statement, but it is as true as it important to to keep mind. Historians, history teachers, and history students, we are all learning. I want students to think about how they can use what they know rather than stress themselves out temporarily committing a mountain of details to memory.

This aphorism of mine is top of mind tonight as I returned to resource for teaching Latin American independence that I began working on last fall. I reflected and outlined my thinking at the time in a post called Americanoes. As I described in the post, I have been working sporadically on building my content knowledge on Latin American History, including the independence period, since I began teaching in the 1900s. Relying most on John Chasteen’s Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence, I organized events into a timeline using ClioVis. Screen shot is below and link to the timeline as of late December, 2025 is here.

A quick glance reveals too many details. Kids will never remember all of those. The good news is that they don’t need to. What they do need is to see patterns, such as how Napoleon’s interventions in Portugal and Spain influenced events across Latin America. More importantly, I have an idea that this tool can help students with the think about contingency. in historical events.

But first a word about what I have assembled here. ClioVis allows users to create categories that can be hidden. I created six categories: Iberia, Brazil, and the four Spanish Viceroyalties at the time of independence. If I only show Iberia and New Spain, the visual data are more manageable.

Students could focus on one of the five areas of independence (Brazil, New Spain, Peru, New Granada, and Río de la Plata). Within this area, they could read the brief descriptions of the events consider how the events themselves were contingent on factors represented on the timeline and, importantly, outside of what is listed. The idea is to provide a set of events that are largely unfamiliar to most students and encourage them to consider what else had to have happened. For instance, students could read this block of text on the Grito de Delores:

Father Miguel Hidalgo declared independence for Mexico, especially in the name of laboring indios, mestizos, and pardos. Hidalgo became the head of a massive army. Creole elites mobilized counterrevolutionary forces that defeated Hidalgo’s army leading to Hidalgo’s execution.

Students might see or be nudged to see that this event was contingent on Father Hidalgo’s reputation before the event (otherwise, why would people follow him?) or on the discontent of laboring people (otherwise, why would they rebel) or on the political destabilization in Spain and Mexico City (otherwise, why did he not do this earlier). Many students know that history is sketchy, as one astute youth once announced in my class. Meaning, the kids know that there is more to the story than we are presenting. We can encourage them to wonder why and how things happened. Moreover, students could also consider the contingency of Latin American Independence, either in general or for a particular polity. The timeline extends earlier to include the Bourbon reforms and the Tupac Amaru Rebellion in Peru. These events could also be considered context, of course.

The technology is not the critical piece here. These events could be on note cards. A pod of kids could have four to eight cards in front of them and consider contingency. The key is to encourage students to think about seen and unseen relationships between events, not to commit these events to memory. As a takeaway, students could write a few sentences on how one event was contingent on another. They could identify one relationship between two events.

Students would need a little bit of background to approach this, but far less than may seem necessary. Before working through these events, students need to know:

• In the early 1800s much of North America and most of South America changed from being colonies of Spain and Portugal to being independent states (before and after maps can help with this).
• Juanta means council
• Casta terms that denoted the racial and class hierarchies in Latin American society, including Pardo (a free person of color)

To encourage curiosity and reading, we need to keep the contextualization simple.

As I noted in my post last year, Chasteen emphasizes that Spanish and Portuguese America did not appear to be on the verge of revolution in the first years of the Nineteenth century: “revolt was the last thing on people’s minds in América as a whole” (12). Although there some passionate Americanos with revolutionary ideas or simmering social frustrations, turning these notions into mass action was contingent on developments in Europe and the Americas. I would put this forthrightly to students before embarking on this exercise, perhaps using Chasteen’s words and authority. I would also be honest with students that history teachers and textbooks oversimplify events too often. Even though casta systems and the Enlightenment were important aspects of context of Latin American independence, their effect on the movement was contingent on other factors.

We can present students with more things than they need to master. We should be upfront that that is what is happening, and then provide them with opportunities to work through those events. The people in Javiera Carrera’s salon disagreed about what should happen in Chile. Outside of the salon these arguments contributed a civil war. Nothing was foreordained.

1. I say teenagers, but, really, it applies to most of us, and not to all teenagers. ↩︎