Silencios y disputas en la historia de Hispanoamérica

Antonio Annino announces this book as part of “work in progress” (p. 11). The studies included result from his dedication to solving the conceptual quandaries faced during the previous 20 years of scholarly historical research by numerous academics who have, in his opinion, entirely recast the analytical framework of interpretation. The book is composed of a prologue, an introduction, 11 essays, and a “final reflection” as a tentative conclusion. Nine of the studies and the final reflection have been previously published. The silences and disputes alluded to in the title are, of course, what he considers to have been left out or distorted in previous histories of the independence period and that are now frequently the subject of intense historiographical debate.The essays are organized in three sections intended to deal with major conceptual problems. In the first section, relating to disputes on the nature and history of Spanish America, the author's main concern is to show that there is a long tradition of limiting monarchical power by means of “creole constitutionalism,” or appeal to jus gentium, the laws of Castile, and other sources of local prevailing tradition (p. 55). The author believes that this had a basis in Catholic thinking on natural law but that it was partially secularized and updated by the Protestant northern European natural law tradition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which gave rise to the thesis that in the absence of a sovereign, power reverted to the component parts of the state. Once 1808 created a situation of vacatio regis, this power vacuum was filled by the preexisting corporate entities, particularly pueblos, which picked up the restraining practices previously applied against monarchical determinations, especially the Bourbon pretense of absolutism, and perpetuated a situation of power dispersal through the nineteenth century. They did so, Annino argues, within the bounds set by an ambiguous constitutionalism that perpetuated corporate identities in the pueblos. Annino also uses this section to place Latin American liberalism during this century in the context of liberalism in other Western countries, pointing out the radical difference between liberal practices everywhere then and later twentieth-century democracy. Voting practices come in for a prolonged analysis to drive this point home. This serves to suggest that liberalism and voting practices in Latin America were by no means aberrant for their times.The second section is dedicated to essays on empire and monarchy, in which Annino posits that an “incomplete duplication” of Spanish monarchical institutions in America was at the heart of tension between creoles, peninsular Spaniards, and Bourbon reformers (p. 117). The disparity was replicated in the Cádiz Constitution of 1812, in which American representation was not proportional to its population. Cádiz resuscitated Bourbon aims for a centralizing, uniform body politic, insensitively perpetuating inequalities between Spain and America, so that “unresolved ambivalences” dating back to the seventeenth century—particularly the relation between Castile and the Indies—continued (p. 153). This led to two distinct readings of constitutionalism and political contract in which it became clear that the basic components of the Spanish monarchy were in debate, with peninsulars following a more Bourbon line of thinking and the creoles appealing to a Hapsburg model. Thus ensued a deepening of autonomist demands that, left unsatisfied, led to Spanish American independence. But the demands also broke the Spanish monarchy itself and led to nation creation in Spain as well as America. Both Spain and the new Spanish American nations were beset by centrifugal forces that obeyed the same basic principles mentioned above as monarchical legitimacy was either discarded or questioned. A ruralization of political power, based on the constitutional handing over of power regarding justice to the pueblos and their alcaldes (and their eventual right to define their needs in defiance of any one constitution) was the result (p. 192).The third section, dedicated to Mexico as a case study, drives home these theses. Independence and the nineteenth century represent not a colonial heritage but the monarchy's “crisis” (p. 257). Annino expands on the juridical basis of his thinking and underscores how the pueblos acquired more power from the end of the eighteenth century on by being the basis for organizing militias, a process that intensified during the war of counterinsurgency. This allows him to then expand on his view of the robust power of municipalities under nineteenth-century Mexican constitutionalism, which gave rise to “multiple readings” of the law and constitutions as national politicians spoke of popular representation and the municipal authorities spoke of justice (p. 277). He also discusses the wellsprings and rupture of creole patriotism, the birth of a more modern concept of constitutionalism, and the lingering complexities of a politics that could not free itself from its distant origins in “conceptual dualism” (p. 330). The creation of a unified nation was a major hurdle in these conditions of enhanced local power, and in Annino's view, the nineteenth century was an “open antithesis” between the local and the national (p. 455)

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