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Chapter 15
The Americas in the 19th Century
The nineteenth century saw Euro-American domination continue to spread across the Americas. The United
States had won its independence and almost immediately continued its westward expansion at the expense of
Native Americans. In the early nineteenth century Canadians won a different kind of independence, one that
more closely linked them to the mother country while Latin America also won independence but with far
more political and economic instability than the United States or Canada. All three areas had the common
factors of westward movement, mass immigration (mostly from Europe, but later from Asia), economic growth
(explosive in the United States; parallel but smaller in Canada; variable and dependent in Latin America), and
conflict (civil wars, ethnic violence, along with class, racial and gender struggles).
I - The United States
In 1777, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation which provided for strong
state governments and a weak federal government. The Articles provided stability during the War, but after
the war their weaknesses soon became apparent. The Federal Government had no power of national taxation,
no power to control trade, and could not enforce legislation. The states, however, had the power to collect
taxes, issue currency, and provide their own militia. The federal government’s main activities were to control
foreign policy and conclude treaties. George Washington summed it up when he said that the Articles of
Confederation united the states by a “rope of sand.”
It was Alexander Hamilton who first suggested calling a 13 state convention to discuss a better form of
union. With the influence of Washington and other leaders, each State Legislature sent delegates to a
Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, where - after much debate and compromise - the
Constitution was adopted and ratified by all the states by 1790. George Washington was unanimously elected
the first president. William Ewert Gladstone, the great English prime minister during the late 19th century,
remarked, "As the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has proceeded from the womb
and long gestation of progressive history, so the American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most
wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man."
The ratification of this new Constitution in the United States was the culmination of a long historical process
that had evolved with the development of English constitutional law: The Magna Carta, The Petition of
Right, the English Bill of Rights and the charters which established the thirteen original colonies. The
Constitution was a flexible masterpiece which included Checks and Balances between judicial, executive
and legislative branches of government and formal guarantees of individual liberties. Voting rights had
limitations linked to ownership of property and socially it avoided the issue of slavery. It is important to
remember that one of the chief reasons that the framers of the United States Constitution were opposed to
abolishing slavery was because of their recognition of the sanctity of private property. Nevertheless, by the
late 1820s most property qualifications for voters had disappeared and by mid-century almost all adult white
males were eligible to participate in the political affairs of the republic.
Although the bulk of the population was spread along the Atlantic seaboard, a great movement of people
towards lands in the west began long before the Revolution. In the peace treaty of 1783, Great Britain had
ceded all the lands between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi river, which doubled the size of
the country. In 1803, Napoleon desperate for cash again doubled the United States by selling the young
republic the Louisiana territory, which stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. It took
years even after the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-1806 to grasp the size of this new territory. But
the land acted as a magnet and attracted settlers in search of cheap farmland. By the 1840s the westward
expansion was a migratory flood and Americans began to speak of Manifest Destiny or their right to occupy
all of North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
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This westward torrent brought settlers into conflict with the indigenous peoples of the continent. Although
the Indians sought help from the British and tried to ally among themselves, they were no match for the
American military forces which by 1840 had pushed the Indians beyond the Mississippi River. The Indian
Removal Act of 1830 established a policy of forced relocation, the most important of which were the
Seminoles transported from Florida to Oklahoma and the horrific “Trail of Tears” in 1837-1838 when the
Cherokee were forced to leave their eastern woodland also for Oklahoma.
By the 1850s the pioneers were crossing the Mississippi in search of more land and faced determined
resistance from the plains Indians like the Sioux, Comanche, Pawnee and Apache who possessed firearms
and were skilled horsemen. In spite of a few stunning victories like General Custer’s defeat at the Battle of
the Little Big Horn in 1876, American military technology (repeating rifles, canons and Gatling guns) and
organization pushed the Indians on to marginal lands called reservations. The last, large conflict came in
1890 at Wounded Knee (in southern South Dakota) where the American army with machine guns massacred
more than two hundred Sioux Indians to prevent an uprising.
American settlers also moved in the Spanish territories in North America, especially Texas, but also New
Mexico and California. In 1836 settlers in Texas declared independence from Mexico and won their
independence. In 1845, the United States admitted the country of Texas into the union as the State of Texas
against vigorous Mexican protest. This led to tensions and conflicts that resulted in the Mexican-American
War of 1845-1848 in which American forces invaded Mexico, crushed the Mexican Army and captured
Mexico City. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the United States paid Mexico fifteen
million dollars for Texas north of the Rio Grande, California and New Mexico.
As the Untied States expanded, the young nation faced a serious problem in Sectionalism, or in simple
terms, the phenomenon that occurs when individuals put the good of their section of the country over the
greater good of the nation. In the young republic, this took the form of a dichotomy between the north and
the south. The Northern States evolved into a manufacturing economy with a strong agrarian base interested
in high tariffs to protect their developing industries. The Southern States remained a strong agrarian economy
without industrialization and its social order was founded on slavery and the plantation system, even though
there were numerous small free farmers. The South thus favored low tariffs so that they could import cheaper
European manufactured goods rather than be forced to buy more expensive Northern manufactured goods.
Hostility between the two sections grew perceptibly (more apparent) after the War of 1812, when antislavery
forces in the North tried to prevent the spread of slavery in newly acquired territories. Opponents of slavery
had hoped that the decline of tobacco farming would hasten the end of slavery, but then a new, highly
profitable crop, cotton, reinvigorated the plantation system. The first major crisis came in 1820, when
Missouri sought to be admitted as a slave state. Northern congressmen tried to block Missouri’s admission. A
serious constitutional crisis was avoided by the efforts of Henry Clay who engineered the Missouri
Compromise in which Missouri was admitted as a slave state and Maine as a free state. This compromise
balanced the number of free and slave states (including the number of senators), but did not stop sectional
bickering over slavery and tariffs.
In the North moral indignation increased in the 1830s with the rise of abolitionist societies who were
uncompromising foes (enemies) of slavery. As the United States moved westward, the South had a problem:
slavery was much less adaptable for much of the newly acquired Western Territories. So Southerners,
anxious to maintaining an equal number of Senators and a balance in congress, strongly supported the
annexation of Texas and even agitated for the annexation of Cuba. More compromises followed, but the
balance was broken in the Compromise of 1850 (California entered as a free state) and the election of
Abraham Lincoln in 1860. These two events were too much for the South and were the spark that ignited
the War Between the States.
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It is ironic that, although Lincoln strongly opposed slavery, he pledged not to use his presidency to curb the
institution. In 1858 Lincoln had declared that a house divided against itself, cannot stand but after his
election he could not stop the Southern States from seceding and war broke out in 1861, when he would not
allow South Carolina to seize Fort Sumter in Charleston. For the South the war was about States’ Rights and
the preservation of their way of life, including slavery. The Southerners considered themselves self-sufficient
because of the great demand in Europe for their cotton. To the North the war was about the preservation of
the Union, but later the emotionally charged issue of freeing the slaves.
The Southerners had the advantage of defending their own homes and the North the burden of invading the
South. The first two years of the war stalemated: the South winning in the East with a string of victories by
the almost mythical Robert E. Lee who time a time again defeated superior Union armies. But in the West,
the North slowly began to cut the South in half by seizing fort after fort along the entire Mississippi river
under the leadership of Ulysses S. Grant. On January 1, 1863 Lincoln issued the Emancipation
Proclamation which freed all slaves in Confederate territory. Moreover, in the summer of 1863 Union
victories at Vicksburg (Grant took the last Confederate fort on the Mississippi) and Gettysburg (Lee was finally
pushed back in defeat when he tried to invade the North) tipped the scale in favor the North. In 1864, Grant
came to the east and in little more than a year with overwhelming strength he defeated Lee, took Richmond
and ended the war. The bottom line was that the Industrial North simply out produced, outnumbered and
overwhelmed the agrarian South and two fundamental issues were settled: Slavery was outlawed and States
could not leave the Union.
a - Economic Expansion of the United States
It wounds American pride to understand that British investment was crucial to the early stages of industrial
development in the American Republic, especially in the Textile Industry and later in the Coal and Iron
Industries. Even in the latter half of the 19th century when America experienced dramatic industrial growth,
British investment would help spur on that expansion that would make the United States the largest industrial
nation in the world.
The growth of railroads was even more important than foreign investment in the development of industrial
growth because railroads linked all areas of the large republic and helped create an integrated national
economy. Railroads provided cheap transportation for agricultural, mineral and manufactured commodities,
as well as for human passengers. Railroads hauled grain, beef and hogs from the Plains States, cotton and
tobacco from the South, lumber from the North West, iron and steel from the mills of Pennsylvania and
manufactured good from East Coast cities. Railroads even shaped time. In 1883, the railroads adopted
Railroad Time which replaced local sun time making 8:00 a.m. the same everywhere. Later in 1918 the
entire nation adopted Railroad Time and created four time zones to standardize time increasing efficiency
and preventing accidents.
After the Civil War, the United States industrial output and invention set a blistering pace. Inventions
appeared in astonishing numbers: electric lights (especially Edison’s Incandescent Lamp), the telephone
(Alexander Graham Bell), typewriters, phonographs (also Edison), film photography, motion picture cameras
and more powerful electric motors all made their appearance between 1870 and 1890. There seemed no end
to both consumer demand and industrial expansion. This was the great era, for better or worse, of Big
Business and, along with big business, came the rise of labor unions, which sought to protect the wages and
security concerns of workers. In 1877, a National Railroad Strike shut down two-thirds of the nation’s
railroads. Just like in Great Britain, however, Big Business usually won these nineteenth century
confrontations, but workers began to make gains which would blossom in the twentieth century. VITU: By
the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States was the largest single industrial power in the
world.
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b - Social Observations
Migration: Economic growth would have been impossible without large migration. In the 1850s about 2.3
million Europeans migrated to the United States, as many as had come to the United States since in the
previous fifty years. Almost always, they came to seek economic opportunity, mostly in search of
farmland, but also to work in factories or mines or prospecting. In the first half of the nineteenth century
they came mostly from Ireland, Scotland, Germany and Scandinavia, but by the end of the century they came
mostly from Eastern Europe: Poland, Russia, Jews displaced by pogroms, Italians, Greeks and Portuguese.
But the bottom line was that the titanic agricultural and industrial expansion of the United States could not
have occurred without them.
After 1850 Asian migrants also came to the United States in large number, including some 250,000 Chinese
who came to California, some to the gold fields, some to cultivate crops or work in industry and some to help
build the railroads. As the century ended, large numbers of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Filipino migrants
came to Hawaii to work on the Sugar Plantations. Migrants to the United States all brought their own
customs and culture which were all thrown into the American Melting Pot (or Salad Bowl if one likes the more
politically correct term). Often earlier immigrants (now middle class citizens) resented the newcomers and so
newcomers often began life in Chinatown or Little Italy, but as time passed they and their culture became
part of the American culture. Thus the United States, as the nineteenth century progressed, became more and
more an expanding land of cultural assimilation or, as Walt Whitman observed, “a teaming, mixing pot, not
merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations.”
Native Americans: We have already seen how Euro-American settlers came into conflict with Native
American peoples, with resulting disaster for the Indian peoples whose survivors (what few there were) were
“given” (code for pushed on to) reservations, which were usually the poorest, marginal lands. But railroads
and settlers continued to encroach on even these lands. The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 even tried to
persuade the Native Americans to join the larger Euro-American society and settle down as farmers, but the
experiment failed because the Indians were culturally unequipped to give up their hunter-gatherer ways and
adopt sedentary culture and lifestyles. So the Indians became dependent on the government for education and
health care. It is interesting to note that some Indians (and recent scholarship suggests more than was once
believed) were able to adapt and even marry into Euro-American society, but most stayed on the reservations
or worked in mines and factories in great poverty. In 1881, Helen Hunt Jackson wrote an influential book,
A Century of Dishonor, in which she chronicled the history of Native Americans during a century of
American broken promises (treaties) and the flagrant wrongs done by the breaking of these promises.
Race-Relations: In 1865 the slaves were freed in and in an effort to establish a place for them in society,
Northern armies occupied the South and forced white Southerners to undergo a program of social and
political Reconstruction. Black males were given the right to vote and participate in political affairs. But
when the Northern soldiers left, Southern whites took back political power and dismantled Reconstruction;
and blacks lost many of the civil and political liberties they had gained. Blacks were blocked from voting and
because most had not received land, they were forced to survive by sharecropping or working on farms
owned by others and paying rent by giving up a large portion of the crops grown. White southerners also
segregated society, which further deprived blacks of educational, economic and political opportunities. The
former slaves still had their freedom, but were forced to occupy an inferior place in society.
Women too fought for equal rights and especially suffrage. We have already discussed the Seneca Falls
Convention of 1848 which issued a “declaration of sentiments” modeled on the Declaration of Independence
and which demanded equal political and economic rights for women both in the home and in the workplace;
We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men and women are created equal. But in spite of their
efforts women would not see meaningful equality until the 20th century.
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II - Canada: a different kind of Independence
Canada had originally been colonized by French fur trappers with some settlers around Quebec and then in
1763, after the French and Indian War (Seven Year’s War), had become a British possession and British
colonists began to arrive. After the 13 Colonies had won their independence, many Tories (Loyalists in
America who supported Britain) migrated to Canada. The British government, however, was determined NOT
to lose Canada as they had lost the 13 Colonies, so in 1791 they divided Canada into Upper Canada (around
Ontario were the English speaking lived) and Lower Canada (around Quebec where the French speaking lived)
Moreover, the British made considerable concessions to the French by recognizing the Catholic Church and
permitting the use of French Civil Law. By 1800, British settlers outnumbered the French. But Canada still
faced deep differences and stresses.
The War of 1812 between Great Britain and the United States ironically helped to shape Canadian identity
when two unsuccessful American invasions of Canada united the British and French Canadians who both
became determined to avoid absorption or domination by their stronger neighbor to the south. After the War,
Canada grew dramatically and began to expand westward. But tensions remained. The middle classes wanted
more voice in government and the French were still resentful of British control. There were rebellions in the
late 1830s. The British set up a commission headed by Lord Durham, who in 1839 issued the Durham
Report which recommended that the London government grant self-rule to the Canadians. Thus, The
British North American Act of 1867 joined Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick into the
Dominion of Canada. Manitoba soon joined and, in parallel fashion to the United States adding more states,
so Canada’s westward expansion produced the same results.
As a Dominion, Canada was self-governing in her domestic affairs, but still part of the British Empire. Each
province had its own seat of government, provincial legislature and a lieutenant governor representing the
British Crown. A British appointed Governor General headed a federal government with an elected House of
Commons and appointed Senate. The bottom line was that the provincial legislatures and the federal
government in Ottawa governed Canada while British government in London retained jurisdiction only in the
area of foreign affairs.
John A. Macdonald became the first prime minister of Canada, a man of remarkable energy and vision. He
was determined to overcome regional and social differences to build a strong nation. He boldly negotiated
the incorporation of all British territory in North America into the Dominion getting the Hudson’s Bay
Company to cede to Canada the Northwest Territories in 1870. In the same year, Manitoba joined the
original provinces of Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. In the following year, Mac Donald
persuaded British Columbia to join the Dominion. MacDonald was also the driving force in the building of a
transcontinental railroad, which was completed in 1885 and tied the nation together. And he pursued an
economic policy which promoted development and trade within Canada. He died in 1891 while still in office.
Canada continues to grow and evolve. In 1898 the Yukon Territory separated from the Northwest Territories;
in 1905 Alberta and Saskatchewan joined the Dominion; Newfoundland in 1927. In 1999, Nunavut Territory
split off from the Northwest Territories. In contrast to the United States which won independence through
rebellion, Canada won a unique Dominion Style Independence, which retained close ties to the mother
country, but at the same time forged a unique Canadian identity forged from three principal roots: British,
French and Native American.
a - Canadian Prosperity
Just as in the early economic development of the United States, British investment was crucial for the
development of Canadian industry. Moreover, Britain willingly paid high prices for Canadian agricultural
products and minerals not only to foster Canada’s growing economy, but also to prevent the growth of
separatist movements.
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When the Dominion was established, John A Macdonald, took three important steps that spurred on
economic growth
1. He made Canada as attractive as possible to immigrants;
2. He protected nascent (emerging) industry through tariffs; and
3. He built a national transportation system.
As a result of these policies, Canada experienced growth and prosperity parallel to the United States. And
just like the United States, migrant helped to increase the population and open Western Canada’s agricultural
and mineral treasures. The migrant then supplied farmers for the prairie and workers for growing eastern
industries. It is important to note that Canada was still wary of the United States (big brother to the south), but
allowed economic investment by the United States and Ontario particularly benefited from the spillover
effect of American Industry.
Canada is usually thought of as an uneasy mix of British and French settlers but the reality is much more
complex. The French frequently intermarried with Native Americans and their descendents were called
Métis. The Indigenous peoples who did not intermarry remained a significant portion of the population, but
both lived on the fringes of society. Slavery was abolished in 1833 and before the American Civil War,
Canada was a haven for runaway American slaves. But like the Northern States, Blacks were subject to
discrimination and segregation. Chinese immigrants came in large number to build the railroads, but also
because of the gold rushes. Most settled in segregated Chinatowns in major cities, mostly in British
Columbia. Proportionally, Canada’s greatest period of immigration came much later than the United States.
Between 1896 and 1914 three million migrants came from Britain, the United States and Eastern Europe.
A major outbreak of civil unrest shook Canada profoundly in the 1870s and 1880s. Native peoples and Métis
who had settled western lands were threatened by the westward migration of British Canadians. Louis Reil
(1844-1885) emerged as the leader of the Métis and indigenous peoples of Western Canada. A Métis himself,
Riel had abandoned his studies for the priesthood and returned to his home in southern Manitoba where he
took up the fight. He became president of the provisional government in 1870. He captured modern
Winnipeg (Fort Garry) and negotiated the incorporation of the province of Manitoba into the Dominion of
Canada.
But Canadian government officials soon outlawed his government and forced Riel into years of exile, during
which he wandered through the United States and Quebec, even suffering confinement in asylums. In the
1880s, work on the Canadian Pacific Railroad renewed the threat of white incursion against Métis and Native
American society. The Métis asked Riel to lead resistance to the railroad and British Canadian settlement. In
1885 he organized a military rebellion known as the Northwest Rebellion. The Canadian Mounted Police
quickly defeated Riel and his force and Riel was executed for treason. Riel’s execution had a profound effect
on Canadian society. It particularly made the French suspicious of the British and it foreshadowed a long
period of cultural conflict between Canada’s major ethnic groups.
III - Latin America
In the Chapter on Revolutions, we studied Simon Bolivar’s attempt to create a ‘United States’ style
confederation called Gran Colombia. Bolivar was an admirer of George Washington and he saw the people
of Gran Colombia as neither European nor African nor Native American, but a new people in a new country
indebted to many traditions: European by law and culture, Americans (Creoles) by birth and in a process of a
continuous mixing and struggling for social and political identity. But when confronted with Creole selfinterest, Bolivar despaired and summed up the developing political fragmentation in Latin America when he
said, "I fear peace more than war."
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To be fair to the Creole elites who founded the Latin American Republics, it must remembered that they,
unlike their American or Canadian counterparts, had little or no experience in self-government, since the
Spanish and Portuguese colonial governments had ruled the king’s colonies in an autocratic manner or as we
might say, “from the top down.” To make matters worse, these Creoles, once they had their freedom, used
their power to prevent the great mass of the population from participating in government. To the Creole
elites, Enlightenment principles did NOT extend to the lower classes. As a result, less the 5% of the adult
male population participated in government affairs in the 19th century.
Moreover the Creole elites could not agree among themselves on what kind of republics to form.
Struggles developed between Centrists, who wanted to create strong, centralized national governments and
Federalists, who wanted more decentralized governments where tax and commercial policies were
established by regional interests. Liberals stressed the rights of individuals and attacked the social structure
of Colonial Society and dreamed of a secular society along the lines of the U. S. or France. Conservatives
wanted strong centralized states, which usually included preserving many aspects of Colonial society. These
Creole-Conservatives believed that society was not based on open competition (like the Liberals), but that
each group in society was linked to the other groups just like arms or legs to the human body. Although
many of these Conservatives were children of the Enlightenment, most were skeptical of secularism and
strove to preserve the Roman Catholic Church and its heritage in society.
The result of all these competing political philosophies was political instability, armed conflicts and wars of
revolution, which, in turn, led to the rise of Caudillos, or independent military strongmen who dominated
local areas by force and many times seized control of national governments and nations. Sometimes,
Caudillos were populists who spoke up for and even mobilized indigenous peoples and the poor. Most of the
time, however, the Caudillos and the Creole Elites worked together to push aside the indigenous peoples,
claim (steal) their lands for agriculture and ranching and keep them subservient and destitute under the class
system of Colonial Society. By the 1870s, the Euro-American Creole dominated population controlled 95%
of the good (arable) land and had forced the indigenous peoples to either assimilate (if they could) or retreat to
reservations or marginal lands.
One of the most famous Caudillos was Juan Manuel de Rosas, who ruled a badly divided Argentina from
1835 to 1852. He used brutal tactics to keep order and was called the “Machiavelli of the Pampas,” but he
was able to successfully keep peace between the bitterly-divided urban elites of Buenos Aires and the rancher
elites of the pampas. Another Caudillos, Rafael Carrera, who ruled Guatemala from 1839 to 1865, was a
populist who sincerely tried to help the poor farmers and the Native America majority. The bottom line was
that Rosas and Carrera did what Caudillos did best: they kept order in lands torn by political strife. VITU:
some countries in Latin America, most notably Brazil and Chile, managed to establish functioning
political systems, but it still remains fair to say that Latin America was slow to resolve basic questions
of government and society in the nineteenth century.
a - The Mexican Illustration
After Independence, Mexico successively experienced monarchy, republic and Caudillos rule, but also
managed (albeit painfully) to generate a liberal reform movement. The Mexican general Santa Ana, who lost
Texas and was defeated by the United States in the Mexican War, was the last major Mexican Caudillos.
After his downfall in 1848, Benito Juarez became president of Mexico and launched La Reforma: a reform
movement that tried to limit the power of the army and the Roman Catholic Church. La Reforma confiscated
church lands, which accounted for about half of the arable (farming) land in Mexico, and tried to extend land
ownership to indigenous peoples. Their cry was Tierra y Liberdad. Nevertheless, La Reforma was ultimately
unable to prevent rich and powerful speculators and large landowners from grabbing up most of the land.
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This failure to correct this unequal land distribution (remember China?) caused increasing friction and unrest
as Mexico entered the 20th century and directly led to the Mexican Revolution of 1911. This bitter and
bloody conflict broke out when Middle Class Mexicans joined the peasants and workers to overthrow the
Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz. Dynamic revolutionary leaders, such as Emialiano Zapata and Pancho
Villa, organized large paramilitary forces to fight for Tierra y Liberdad. Although the revolution failed to
overthrow the Mexican government, it did force the creation of the Mexican Constitution of 1917, which
addressed many concerns of La Reforma, including:
1. Moderate Land Redistribution
2. Universal Suffrage
3. State Supported Education
4. Minimum wages and maximum hours
5. Restrictions on foreign ownership
b - Latin American Economic Dependence
Unlike their northern neighbors, Latin American did not undergo industrialization or enjoy economic
prosperity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Why?
1. Colonial Legacy: The Spanish and Portuguese colonies had been run by their mother countries
for profit of the mother country, which took natural resources and agricultural products and in
return made huge profits by forcing their colonies to buy mother country manufactured goods.
2. Greedy Creole Elites: Urban merchants and large landowners who had profited under the
Colonial system did NOT want to change to an industrialized economy. They made their money
by being the middle men in the trading of new world agricultural and mineral products for
European manufactured goods. They did not want to make the financial sacrifice which would
have been required to stimulate industrial growth.
3. Foreign Investors: had the same profit motive of the Greedy Elites. They did not want
industrialization in the Latin American world because it would mean competition for their
manufactured goods. They wanted to keep Latin American countries as dependent trading
partners who sold their meat, grain or minerals in exchange for imported manufactured goods.
In Argentina, for example, foreign investors encouraged the development of cattle and sheep
ranching, who controlled the industry and reaped huge profits. The local elites who shared in
these profits had little or no motivation to invest in industrialization.
It is important to note, however, that attempts at Industrialization did occur in a few Latin American
countries. Most notable among these were the efforts Porfirio Diaz in Mexico. He played a double game. He
built railroads and telegraph lines along with small steel, glass, chemical and textile industries. He had
Mexico City modernized with electric streetlights and electric streetcars. However in reality, he was
representing the large landowners, the wealthy merchants and foreign investors. So the problem was that the
profits generated by these industries went almost completely into the pockets of the Creole elite and foreign
investors. Frustration with widespread poverty in the midst of this industrialization helped to explain the
outbreak of the Mexican Revolution of 1911.
Thus the growth of Latin American economies was led by exports and each nation had a specialty: bananas
and coffee from Central America, tobacco and sugar from Cuba, rubber and coffee from Brazil; hemp,
copper, silver and later petroleum from Mexico; and phosphates and copper from Chile; wool, wheat and
beef from Argentina. (By 1861 Argentina was the leading supplier of beef to Britain.) This export-driven economy
made these countries vulnerable to the whims of world market prices and caused rivalries between Latin
American countries competing for a larger share of world trade. Peru, Bolivia and Chile fought a 3-way war
over control on Nitrate deposits adjacent to all three countries.
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c - Social Observations in Latin America
Colonial Legacy: Colonial and slave legacies left Latin American society with a profound hierarchical,
race-driven structure. At the top were the creoles who dominated the mestizos, the native indigenous
population and the descendents of freed slaves, black or mixed mulatto. Nineteenth Century Independence,
therefore, did not bring social equality; that would begin to take shape late in the century and in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries.
Migration: like North America, Latin American society was shaped by migration. Most migrants went to
work on agricultural plantations, often as indentured servants. About 4 million Italians worked in Argentina
in the 1880s and 1890s and Brazil paid other Italians to work as coffee growers. Many of these Italians were
called Golondrinas or “Swallows” because they regularly traveled back and forth annually between Europe
and South America, taking advantage of hemispheric growing seasons. The first Asians to settle in the region
were Filipino, as a result of Spain's Manila Galleon Trade Route System. Chinese came to the Caribbean to
work on Sugarcane plantations. Chinese and Japanese worked on Cotton plantations in Peru. One stunning
legacy of migration is that today the largest ethnic group in Latin America is European (36%), followed by
Mestizo (30%), Mulattos (20%), Amerindian (9%) and Blacks and Mulattos (4%). Although Asians make up
less than 1% of Latin American population, Peru has a million and a half Asians today, one of the largest
outside of Asia proper.
This large scale migration brought complex cultural diversity throughout Latin America. Indian migrants to
Trinidad and Tobago formed tight nit communities. Many French and other European migrants went to
Argentina and made Buenos Aries a handsome city called the Paris of the Americas. Parts of Southern
Brazil, Paraguay and Chile are heavily Germany. Native American languages and cultures became more
influential. In Paraguay, where 80% of the population speaks Guarani, the Guarani language is now on an
equal footing with Spanish.
Competing Values: many Latin American intellectuals were torn between a cultural affiliation to
European influences or American roots. Some, like Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in his Facundo:
Civilization and Barbarism, saw the cities and their European culture as a civilizing influence on the
countryside. Others looked to influences such as the Argentine gauchos (cowboys) for inspiration. Gauchos
lived off their own skills and with their distinctive dress and lifestyle inspired songs and legends about their
courage, skills and amorous conquests. Yet the coming of independence and the rise of the Caudillos was the
beginning of their demise. The poet Jose Hernandez in his epic poem The Gaucho Martin Fierro
immortalized the gauchos in Latin American culture.
Women: a huge part of the Latin American, and especially gaucho, placed an enormous emphasis on
machismo or the social ethic that placed more value on males than females. Adela Zamudio in her poem To
be Born a Man bitterly bemoaned the second place status of women. Nevertheless the reality remained even
to this day that Latin American women struggle under male social domination and only slowly and haltingly
have begun to get more educational opportunities in the cities as the 19th century progressed.
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