Ideology in Ninetenth-Century Latin American Historiography

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Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Latin American HistoriographyAuthor(s): E. Bradford BurnsSource: The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Aug., 1978), pp. 409-431Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2513957 .Accessed: 05/11/2014 06:10

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Hispanic Anserican Historical Review58 (3 ), 1978, 409-431Copyright (D 1978 by Duke University Press

Ideology in Nineteenth-Century LatinAmerican Historiography

E. BRADFORD BURNS

ISTORIANS impose on society a perception of the past

shaped by the topics they study, the values they hold,and their interpretations. When historians representa relatively homogeneous group, their histories tend to perpetuate asimilarity by ascribing to the past a uniformity more harmonious withthe class vision than with the totality of experience.' Such restrictionscharacterized nineteenth-century Latin American historiography.

To suggest that the histories written during the nineteenth centuryin Latin America represent more of a class than a national view is aserious indictment. To sustain it require's studying the lives of a suf-

ficient number of those historians to see if, indeed, common patternsemerge and analyzing a sufficient number of their historical worksto determine if similarity characterizes them. This essay attempts topoint out both the common denominators of their life-styles and therestricted themes and perspective of their histories. It concludes thatthe knowledge of the past which they handed down as history reflectstheir exclusive social position. In short, Latin America's writtenmemory consists largely of a limited socially constructed reality.2

The methodology, prosopography or, as it is more commonly re-ferred to, collective biography, while not used extensively in LatinAmerican historiography, has been employed admirably in the past

* The author Is Professor of History at the University of California, Los An-geles.

1. Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Knowledge, Isis, 27 (Nov. 1937),493; Edward Hallett Carr, What is History? (New York, 1961), p. 42; GunnarMyrdal, Objectivity in Social Research (London, 1970), p. 44; Felix Gilbert,

Intellectual History: Its Aims and Methods, Daedalus, 100 (Winter 1971),

87-88; Norman Pollack, Fear of Man: Populism, Authoritarianism, and the His-torian, Agricultural History, 39 (Apr. 1965), 60-64.2. Two useful essays in providing some theoretical framework for this study

are: Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality:A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, N.Y., 1967); and DianaLaurenson and Alan Swingewood, The Sociology of Literature (London, 1972).

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410 HAHR I AUGUST I E. BRADFORD BURNS

decade to provide diverse insights into the Latin American past.3 Itowes much to the tenets of the sociology of knowledge. Obviously,

biographies are easiest to collect among the elites, and few left morewritten mementos of their lives than the historians. Because they com-mitted their thoughts to paper, historians can be easily studied in-tellectually as well as socially. Responsible for recording nationalmemory and influencing generations of scholars and children, thesenineteenth-century historians played an unusually critical intellectualrole.

In selecting what I hoped would be a representative sampling ofhistorians, I attempted to balance the well-known with the more ob-

scure. No composite could be acceptable without some of the savantswho influenced not only their own generation but successive ones aswell. Hence, Bartolome Mitre, Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, LucasAlaman, Joao Capistrano de Abreu, Diego Barros Arana, and AdolfoSaldia were logical choices. However, to dwell only on the famouswould be unrepresentative of historiography. Therefore, it seemedprudent to include a representative number of historians whose legacyhas been less obvious but whose collective contributions helped toshape the contours of nineteenth-century historiography. CecilioAcosta, Pedro de Angelis, Pedro Fermin Cevallos, Januario da Cunha

3. In his essay Prosopography, Daedalus, 100 (Winter 1971), 46-69, Law-rence Stone provides a spendid overview of the use of collective biography. Hesingles out and comments on some of the pioneers and outstanding practitionersof prosopography and then discusses the weaknesses and strengths of prosopo-graphical studies. On the usefulness of collective biography, I concur with JamesLockhart, The effects of following the careers of several apparently similar in-dividuals . . . is to reveal and make intelligible a repeating pattern, one that isusually in the first instance what was called above a social type, or type of lifehistory with characteristic contours. The approach aims directly at understandinga general principle of the operation and articulation of society, and is thus theopposite of atomistic. Quoted from The Social History of Colonial SpanishAmerica: Evolution and Potential, Latin American Research Review, 7 (Spring1972), 30. Examples of the use of collective biography for the study of LatinAmerican history include Lockhart's own The Men of Cajamarca: A Social andBiographical Study of the First Conquerors of Peru (Austin, 1972), as well asHernan Godoy Urzua, La sociologia del intelectual en America Latina, in JuanF. Marsal, ed., El intelectual latino-americano (Buenos Aires, 1970); David V.Fleicher, 0 Recrutarnento Politico em Minas, 1890-1918 (Belo Horizonte, 1971);Antonine Tibesar, The Lima Pastors, 1750-1820: Their Origins and Studies as

Taken from Their Autobiographies, The Americas, 28 (July 1971) 39-51; DavidA. Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763-1810 (Cambridge,1971); Eul-Soo Pang and Ron L. Seckinger, The Mandarins of Imperial Brazil,Comparative Studies in Society and History, 14 (Mar. 1972), 215-244; and StuartB. Schwartz, Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil: The High Court of Bahiaand Its Judges, 1609-1751 (Berkeley, 1973).



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IDEOLOGY IN 19TH-CENTURY LATIN AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 411

Barbosa, and Gabriel Rene Moreno, among others, fit into that cate-gory.

Temporal representation also played a role in making this selection.Although the works of most of these historians fell within the last halfof the century, the period, by far, of greater historical production, aneffort was made to select historians who wrote during a variety oftime periods and who might reflect different generational influencesand preferences. Further, geographical representation merited someconsideration in order to avoid the complete domination by Mexico,Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, nations where historians flourished in thepast century. As it is, those four account for slightly over two-thirds

of the historians in this study. Nevertheless, eleven of the eighteennations are represented, with the Caribbean and Central America beingthe most neglected. Although some of their life'-spans extended intothe twentienth century, those particular historians were included ifthey had published their major ideas during the nineteenth. Thesecriteria account for the choice of the sixty-three nineteenth-centuryLatin American historians whose biographies and works provide thematerial for this essay.4

4. Much of information in this essay is based on a study of the biographiesand writings of the following nineteenth-century Latin American historians: JoaoCapistrano de Abreu (1853-1927), Brazil; Cecilio Acosta (1818-1881), Venezuela;Lucas Alamain (1792-1853), Mexico; Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810-1884), Ar-gentina; Miguel Luis Amunategui (1828-1888), Chile; Pedro de Angelis (1784-1859), Argentina; Mariano Arosemena (1794-1868), Department of Panama,Colombia; Diego Barros Arana (1830-1907), Chile; Januario da Cunha Barbosa(1790-1846), Brazil; Francisco Bauza (1849-1899), Uruguay; Eduardo Blanco(1838-1912), Venezuela; Carlos Maria de Bustamante (1774-1848), Mexico;Pedro Fermin Cevallos (1812-1893), Ecuador; Luis L. Dominguez (1819-1898),Argentina; Jose Esteban Echeverria (1805-1851), Argentina; Jose Manuel Es-trada (1842-1897), Argentina; Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta (1825-1894), Mexico;Juana Manuela Gorriti (1819-1892), Argentina; Jose Manuel Groot (1800-1878),Colombia; Paul Groussac (1848-1929), Argentina; Jose Ina'cio de Abreu e Lima(1794-1869), Brazil; Joao Francisco Lisboa (1812-1863), Brazil; Lucio VicenteLopez (1848-1894), Argentina; Vicente Fidel Lopez (1815-1903), Argentina;Sebastian Lorente (1813-1884), Peru; Agostinho Marques Perdigao Malheiro(1828-1881), Brazil; Alejandro Marure (1809-1851), Guatemala; Jose ToribioMedina (1852-1930), Chile; Francisco Inacio Marcondes Homem de Melo (1837-1918), Brazil; Manuel de Mendiburu (1805-1885), Peru; Jose Milla y Vidaurre(1822-1882), Guatemala; Bartolome Mitre (1821-1906), Argentina; Pedro Mon-cayo (1804-1888), Ecuador; Lorenzo Montu'far y Rivera Maestre (1823-1898),

Guatemala; Jose Maria Luis Mora (1794-1850), Mexico; Alesandre Jose de MeloMorais (1816-1882), Brazil; Gabriel Rene Moreno (1834-1908), Bolivia; JoaquimNabuco (1849-1910), Brazil; Manuel de Odriozola (1804-1889), Peru; ManuelOrozco y Berra (1816-1881), Mexico; Jose Maria da Silva Paranhos, Junior,Baron of Rio-Branco (1845-1912), Brazil; Mariano Felipe Paz Soldan (1821-1886), Peru; Pedro Paz Soldan y Unanue (1839-1895), Peru; Antonio Pereira



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412 HAHR J AUGUST I E. BRADFORD BURNSAvailable biographical data permits the sketching of a tentative

composite profile from which individual variance was slight. Sixty-two

of the sixty-three historians were male. Almost all boasted a second-ary school education or the equivalent, and most received advancedtraining in a university, military school, or seminary. Law degreesdominated their academic credentials. Their educations closely re-sembled those of their European peers. Most of them spoke Frenchand a considerable number added English and/or German to their lin-guistic repertory. Indeed, their knowledge of foreign languages insome cases was extraordinary. Jodo Capistrano de Abreu read French,English, and German, as well as Latin; Bartolome' Mitre knew English,

French, Italian, and Latin; Pedro Paz Soldan y Unanue masteredFrench, English, German, Italian, and classical Greek; Ernesto Quesadaknew French, English, and German. A few wrote with admirable graceof style in the foreign languages of their preference. Joaquim Nabuco,for example, not only wrote elegantly in French and commendably inEnglish, but authored several of his works directly in those languages.These historians were by no means exceptional in their linguistic skills.Although the historians relied on their languages to facilitate theirforeign travels, they used them principally to gain direct access toEuropean authors. Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Auguste Comte,Leopold von Ranke, Friedrich Ratzel, Frangois Pierre Guillaume Gui-zot, Jules Michelet, Thomas B. Macaulay, Henry Thomas Buckle,

Pinto (1819-1880), Brazil; Ernesto Quesada (1858-1934), Argentina; CarlosMaria Ramirez (1848-1898), Uruguay; Jose Manuel Restrepo (1781-1863),Colombia; Ernesto Restrepo Tirado (1862-1948), Colombia; Vicente Riva Palacio(1832-1896), Mexico; Silvio Romero (1851-1914), Brazil; Adolfo Saldia (1850-1914), Argentina; Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888), Argentina; JustoSierra Mendez (1848-1912), Mexico; Ina'cio Accioli de Cerqueira de Silva (1808-1865), Brazil; joaquim Caetano da Silva (1810-1873), Brazil; Joaquim Norbertode Sousa Silva (1820-1891), Brazil; Ramon Sotomayor y Valdes (1830-1903),Chile; Alfredo D'Escragnolle Taunay (1843-1889), Brazil; Manuel Ricardo Trel-les (1821-1893), Argentina; Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen (1816-1878), Brazil;Dalmacio Velez Sarsfield (1800-1875), Argentina; Benjamin Vicufia Mackenna(1831-1886), Chile; Antonio Zinny (1821-1890), Argentina. A basic similarityof life styles seems to exist between these Latin American historians and theircounterparts in nineteenth-century United States. Richard Hofstadter, Historyand Sociology in the United States, in Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard Hof-

stadter, eds., Sociology and History: Methods (New York, 1968). Hofstadter in-cludes a telling quotation from Henry Adams on history: the most aristocraticof all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as ed-ucated (p. 4). Further confirmation of similarities can be found in John Hig-ham, The Development of Historical Studies in the United States (EnglewoodCliffs, N.J, 1965), pp. 3, 11, 12, 13, 64.



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IDEOLOGY N 19TH-CENTURY LATIN AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 413

Thomas Carlyle as well as the philosophes of the European Enlighten-ment most absorbed their attention.

From the end of the eighteenth century onward, the Latin Ameri-cans paid increasingly less attention to the ideas emanating from theIberian peninsula as they attuned their thinking to the novelties prop-agated by English, French, and German philosophers. Those whofavored independence and subsequently set themselves to the task ofnation building rebelled against the metropolises, rejecting Iberian in-tellectual contacts as well as Iberian rule. They sought new modelsand northern Europe served their purposes well. Generally speaking,three major European philosophies dominated nineteenth-century

Latin America: the Enlightenment, the ideas of evolution put forthby Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, and positivism. Intercon-nected, the three found a common nexus in the concept of progress,the key word for the understanding of Latin American historiography.

Teaching the vincibility of ignorance, the Enlightenment philoso-phers concluded that if people had the opportunity to know the truth,they would select civilization over barbarism. Adherents to theEnlightenment believed in a universally valid standard to judgecivilization, and the criteria for such a judgment were based on Eu-ropean ideas of progress. Civilization and the progress which led toit became identified with Europe, or more specifically with England,France, and Germany. However, a burgeoning faith in science directedjudgments on progress, as well as progress itself away fromn philosoph-ical and moral matters toward material change. The popularizedidea of Darwin that organic forms developed over the course of timeand represented successive stages in a single evolutionary process fur-ther heightened the interest in progress, giving it in fact a scientificveneer. Very propitiously, Spencer, whose works enjoyed tremendouscirculation in nineteenth-century Latin America, applied the sameprinciple of evolution to society. Progress to Spencer signified a marchtoward the establishment of the greatest perfection and the most com-plete happiness. However, that march subsumed a great many eco-nomic changes and adaptations. As one example, Spencer advocatedrailroads as a vital part of the organic system of a modern society.As another, he regarded industrialization as a certain manifestation ofprogress. The Latin Americans drew from Spencer the interrelation-

ship of science, industry, and progress, a combination pointing tofuture glory through societal evolution. Like most European thinkers,

Spencer had much to say which damned Latin America, his racism



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414 HAHR I AUGUST E. BRADFORD BURNS

for example. The Latin Americans proved to be selective readers,however, and chose to ignore what displeased-or frightened-them.

Many of the ideas on progress pulled from the Enlightenment, Dar-win, Spencer, as well as other sources, seemed to come together in theform that Auguste Comte's positivism assumed in Latin America duringthe last decades of the century. Positivism affirmed that social evolu-tion and progress were inevitable. To Comte that progress was attain-able through the acceptance of scientific laws codified by positivism.Outward manifestations of progress-again railroads and industrial-ization-assumed great importance in positivism and emphatically soamong the Latin Americans, whether they acknowledged Comte or

not.Clearly, those intellectual mentors satisfied the longing of the

Latin American elites to replicate European civilization in theirhemisphere, which to their thinking evinced all too many barbaricIndian and African traits. Over the course of the century, the elitesdistilled a philosophical overview which approved European prog-ress in Latin American terms. Politically, they required order toimplement it. Economically, they adopted capitalism, which seemedto have transformed England into a modern nation, to finance it.Their measurement of progress increasingly became' material advance-ment, the number of miles of railroad and telegraph lines, the quan-tity of buildings in the capital city which resembled those' of the Parisof Napoleon III, and the availability of the knickknacks associated withEuropean consumerism. To the extent that Latin America came toresemble those nations the elite regarded as progressive, progress wasjudged to have been achieved.

The familiarity of the Latin American historians with European

ideas is readily evident in their biases and quotations. They had readboth the classic and contemporary European historians whom theyquoted with as much ease as admiration. They deferred to Europeanauthorities to settle any disputes. When writing on historiographicaltopics, the Latin Americans drew heavily from Old World sources andexamples. In consulting many of their essays, the scholar notes analmost total absence of any reference' to Latin America. Cecilio Acostaauthored an essay with the appealing title Influencia del elementohistorico-politico en la literatura dramAtica y en la novela, a hundred

pages discussing major and minor European savants without linkinghis important topic to anything in Venezuela, or in Latin America forthat matter.5 Only hesitantly and occasionally did Latin Americans

5. Obras (Caracas, 1908), II, 43-144.



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416 HAHR | AUGUST I E. BRADFORD BURNS

As a group these historians looked fondly to a European heritage,for themselves and their countries as well. The Chilean Francisco Bil-

bao unabashedly pronounced non-Iberian Europe to be the future ofLatin America. In the middle of the nineteenth century he intoned:The new age has dawned in France. '0 In addition to reading about

and admiring Europe, discussing the Old World, and aping continentalstyles, the historians knew it firsthand. They tended to be a well-traveled group. Some resided in Europe, preferably in Paris, for ex-tended periods; others studied there; still others served there asdiplomats; while most of them made the grand tour at least once. Theycoveted, and some received, European recognition. Elected to the

Academy of Sciences of Paris in 1882, Diego Barros Arana was awardedwhat most Latin American intellectuals considered the ultimate ac-colade. Toward the end of the century, their travels broadened to in-clude the Western Hemisphere. A representative number visited theUnited States or other Latin American nations. A few included both.

With rare exceptions, the historians resided in the capitals, partlybecause of the educational and cultural advantages, but also, sig-nificantly, because' most of them were connected at one time or an-other with the governments. They held a variety of bureaucratic posts,some served as legislators, judges, and ministers, and a couple even aspresidents, while' still others unsuccessfully sought that exalted office.A representative sampling of their governmental careers reveals thatCarlos Maria de Bustamante served for more than two decades inMexico's congress; the Mexican Lucas Alamain held the portfolio ofMinister of Foreign Relations on three occasions; Juan Bautista Al-berdi was Argentine minister to Great Britain and to France and latera congressional representative from Tucuman; Lorenzo Montifar car-

ried out numerous diplomatic missions and was both Minister ofForeign Relations and of Education in Costa Rica; Joaquim Nabuco,three times elected to the Chamber of Deputies, later represented Bra-zil as minister to the Court of St. James and then as ambassador to theUnited States; Vicente G. Quesada was a federal deputy representingCorrientes and later an ambassador; Vicente Riva Palacio governedboth the state's of Mexico and Michoacan; Ramon Sotomayor y Valdesrepresented Chile first as minister to Mexico and then to Bolivia be-fore being elected to the Chamber of Deputies and later appointed Of-

ficial Clerk of the Ministry of the Treasury.Obviously the people who wrote Latin American history in the last

10. The quotation comes from his Sociabilidad chilena, republished in Obrascompletes de Francisco Bilbao, Vol. I (Santiago, 1865), 17.



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century were not passive observers and recorders of their class orsociety. As members of a minute elite in new countries, they dividedtheir attention among myriad interests and responsibilities. Most sig-nificantly, they played active roles in shaping and administering na-tional institutions. Not surprisingly then, they displayed a loyalty tothe official institutions of which they formed such an important part.Such integration into and loyalty to the institutions shaped their his-torical world view as apologists rather than critics. Few, if any, earnedtheir livelihood exclusively as historians. Indeed, in twentieth-centuryterms, few could qualify as professional historians, although by the endof the century some did enjoy state appointments directing archives or

libraries or teaching history in prestigious national institutes whichpermitted them to devote much of their time to history.

Life in the capital cities definitely shaped their views, so muchso that some of the national histories they wrote were little more thanchronicles of events in the principal city. The capitals often com-municated more quickly with Paris and London than with the hinter-lands of their own countries. For example, in 1859, it took thirteen daysto cross from Buenos Aires to London but three to four months totravel from the Argentine capital to Salta. For geographic as well ascultural reasons, the historians were more attuned to the metropolisthan to the life-styles and preferences of their rural compatriots.Euclydes da Cunha's discovery of the sertdo of Brazil traumatizedhim as he found a Brazil that the urbanized intellectual never evenimagined. Others, raised in the interior, such as Domingo Sarmiento,fled to the capital and denounced the backwardness of the provinces.Still others, like the young Rufino Blanco Fombona, tried to exposethemselves to rural life only to be bored or disillusioned: The slow-ness and rusticity of the peasants exasperate me. They are alwayswrong and it is impossible that they should ever be rescued from theirsad condition of inferior beings except through a persistent educationalprogramme. . . . I cannot talk to any of them for more than fiveminutes at a time. I can find nothing to say to them. Such attitudesisolated most of the historians from national reality. Consciously orunconsciously they dwelt on their class and the national capital asthough they constituted the nation. Thus, they projected through theirhistories the life-style of the minority as though it represented the

majority, an extrapolation which might skew the perceptions of theunwaiy reader of their histories.

11. Quoted in Jean Franco, The Modern Culture of Latin America: Societyand the Artist (New York, 1967), p. 42.



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In accordance with the elitist dictates of the time, the historiansapplauded rule by the enlightened, a concept which disenfranchisedall but a few. The propertied and/or literate constituted that selectgroup. Esteban Echevarria summarized elitist political ideology whenhe distinguished in his Dogma socialist (1846) between collectivewill-the uneducated masses, and collective reason-the educatedelite. He concluded, Democracy, then, is not the absolute despotismof the masses or of the majority; it is the rule of reason. ''2 Even soardent a liberal historian as Jose Maria Luis Mora eschewed popularsovereignty in Mexico to advocate government by a new aristocracy.

The colonial past attracted considerable attention from the nine-

teenth-century historians, but they seem to have written as much,perhaps more, about their own century, revealing a strong contem-porary orientation. They wrote primarily political history and biog-raphies, a logical selection considering the times. As late as the 1880s,the noted Argentine historian Vicente Fidel Lopez declared, Argen-tine history is only and exclusively political history. ''3 The rulingelite felt obliged to justify the new national institutions and the courseof events shaped by independence, and the historians abetted the ef-fort by eulogizing individuals whose life-styles harmonized with thegoals and ideas of the elite. Januario da Cunha Barbosa, one of thefounders of the Instituto Historico e Geografico Brasileiro in 1838, of-fered a formula followed for the rest of the century. With wordsreminiscent of Thomas Carlyle, his Scottish contemporary, he wrote:

To know the biographies of all the outstanding men of any period isto know the history of those times.'4 Indeed, it became difficult toescape the great man approach to history. The writings of BartolomeMitre provide one of myriad examples. In his two major works, His-

toria de Belgrano y de la independencia argentina (1858-1859) andHistoria de San Martin y de la emnancipacion ud-americana 1887-1888), he viewed both national and South American independence as theconsequence of extraordinary individuals who contributed more thantheir share to effect those momentous events.'5 In his Historia Geral

12. Quoted in Jose Luis Romero, A History of Argentine Political Thought(Stanford, 1963), p. 145.

13. ROmulo D. Carbia, Historia de la historiograffa argentina (La Plata, 1925),

p. 54, n. 3.14 Iconographia Brazileira, Revista do Instituto Histdrico e GeograficoBrasileiro, 19 (1856), 353.

15. Alberto J. Pla, Ideologia y metodo en la historiografia argentina (BuenosAires, 1972), pp. 26, 33. J. R. Levy ably outlines the Argentine elites' pursuit ofa national hero in The Image of San Martin and Argentine Nationalism of the



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IEDEOLOGY N 19TH-CENTURY LATIN AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 419

do Brasil (1854-1857), Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen did not con-ceal his contempt for the vil populagio. He denigrated rebels, non-

conformists, and the masses alike. Their influence on the course' ofevents, if any, was negative. Great men shaped history and none hadcontributed more to Brazil's destiny than those of the ruling House ofBraganza.

Lucas Alaman expressed similar ideas in his disdain for popularparticipation in the political process as well as in his preference for amonarchy. His monumental Historia de Mefjico (1849-1852) did notconsider the movement led by Miguel Hidalgo and Jose Maria Morelos(anti-heroes) as a contribution toward independence but rather as an

attack on property and civilization. The creole elites effected inde-pendence in accordance with Alaman's interpretation, and Iturbideemerged as the embodiment of orderly transition to nationhood forMexico. Chilean historians displayed a similar bias for the individualwhose exemplary life offered a moral and patriotic model for thenation. So compelling was the urge to ferret out and glorify great menthat Diego Barros Arana conceded, If history does not offer us modelmen, it is the duty of the historian to make them. '6 Benjamin VicufiaMackenna determined to write a history of the people, but his Historiageneral de la Republica de Chile (1866-1883) reveals that he suc-cumbed to the usual temptations and produced instead a history of theheroes.'7 The aspirations to write broader histories, while' not lacking,were seldom realized.18

Nineteenth Century, Proceedings of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin AmericanStudies, 1 (1972), 13-20. William F. Sater provides a longer study of the makingof a Chilean hero, The Heroic Image in Chile: Arturo Prat, Secular Saint (Berke-ley, 1973).

16. Quoted in Francisco A. Encina, La literature historic chilena y el con-cepto actual de la historia (Santiago, 1935), p. 63.

17. Guillermo Feliu Cruz, Interpretacion de VicLfia Mackenna: Un historia-dor del siglo XIX, Atenea (Universidad de Concepci6n, Chile), 26 (Sept.-Oct.1949), 173-174.

18. Gareth Stedman Jones speaks of nineteenth-century British historians andhistory in terms which seem equally applicable to Latin America: In the originalpositivist programme, the collection of facts was to be followed by the framingof general laws comparable to those of Newtonian physics or, more relevantly,Darwinian biology.... In place of dangerously speculative and scientifically un-

founded general laws, the British historians substituted magisterial moral judg-ments. History, Thomas Arnold had stated in 1841, was a moral lesson.... It wasprobably for this reason that so much history was focused upon the Constitutionand upon 'great men.' For nonsensible realities like class, mode of production orpolitically and culturally determined patterns of behavior were not empiricallyverifiable. . . . History was more conveniently interpreted as the interaction be-



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In their own eyes, the historians of the new nations assumed a heavyresponsibility: to arouse the patriotism of their compatriots. Januario

da Cunha Barbosa piously predicted, The love of national glory willlead us to cleanse our history of inaccuracies. Then he asked rhetori-cally, And will not a truthful history of our country offer the lessonswhich can so profitably be used by Brazilian citizens in the perfor-mance of their important duties? 19 In 1845, Vicente Fidel Lopez in-formed the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities of Santiago duringa lecture, The goal of history is to teach men to live as good patriotsof their nation; to learn the virtues of a citizen; to defend what is righton all occasions; and, to know the desires of the state and try to fulfillthem as best they can. 20 Chilean historians apparently heeded theadvice. Through lectures, writing, example, and political position,they molded civic values and prescribed future development. Theynot only wrote the past, they formulated the future.21

To Lucas Alaman, too, history was more than the recreation ofthe past; it served as a guide for the future.22 Whatever patriotic les-sons history might teach, the historians drew inevitably and exclusivelyfrom the activities of the elites. In the case of Brazilian historians,for example, they chose to elevate Joaquim Jose Silva Xavier, betterknown by his nickname, Tiradentes, to the summit as national hero.In the ill-fated and equally ill-conceived and vaguely defined MinasConspiracy, 1788-1789, against Portuguese rule, he emerged as a prin-cipal plotter for which the authorities condemned him to death. Tira-dentes, by the way, represented the colonial elites, a white male ofsome substance and standing. For the much more revolutionary Ba-hian Conspiracy of 1798, four blacks were convicted and executed.Those subverters of Portuguese rule were humble folk. Until well into

the twentieth century, historians ignored both them and their con-

tween great men and the institutions they created, modified, or resisted. Quotedfrom History: The Poverty of Empiricism, n Robin Blackburn, ed., Ideology inSocial Science: Readings in Critical Social Theory (New York, 1973), pp. 97-98.

19. Discursos, Revista do Instituto Hist6rico e Geogrdfico Brasileiro, 1(1839), 17-18.

20. Quoted by Allen L. Wall, The Philosophy of History in Nineteenth-Cen-tury Chile: The Lastarria-Bello Debates, History and Theory, 13 (Fall 1974),276.

21. Gertrude Matyoka Yeager, Barros Arana, Vicufia Mackenna, Amunategui:The Historian as National Educator, Journal of Inter-American Studies and WorldAffairs, 19 (May 1977), 174.

22. Luis Martin, Lucas Alaman, Pioneer of Mexican Historiography: AnInterpretive Essay, The Americas, 32 (Oct. 1975), 241.



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spiracy. Tiradentes continues to be the national hero. Shelves sagunder the numerous biographies of him. Yet, to this day, not one biog-raphy exists of any of Bahia's black

conspirators.For sources, the historians relied on public and private libraries,the latter more frequently than the former. They were bibliophiles,each forming his own collection around the topics which most at-tracted him. They used public and private archives, but the hap-hazard storage of documents, few of which were cataloged, greatlycomplicated, if it did not discourage, research. From its inception, theInstitute Historico e Geografico Brasileiro strove to collect, organize,and preserve documentation. Further, it-as well as the imperial gov-

ernment-commissioned various Brazilians to locate and copy per-tinent manuscripts in foreign archives. Varnhagen discovered somefundamental documents for Brazilian history in the Portuguese andSpanish archives and extended his research to many of the other majorEuropean archives as well as to many in South America. Probably noone surpassed Jose Toribio Medina in the collection of documents.During several visits to Europe, particularly to Spain, the Chileanscholar copied thousands of manuscripts relating to Latin Americanhistory, which he later published. Some of the historians were ac-quainted with the families of the principal actors in the national dramaand were able to gain access to private papers. Some witnessed or evenparticipated in the events they described. Gabriel Rene Moreno mightwell typify the determined historian in search of varied documentation.The Bolivian historian enthusiastically collected books, pamphlets,and periodicals and incessantly copied manuscripts. In his youth, heinterviewed the surviving leaders of the revolution of 1809 and in-corporated their recollections into his work. His travels to Lima,

Buenos Aires, and Europe, as well as his long residency in Santiago,provided the bibliophile excellent opportunities to expand his libraryand explore archives which yielded rich details for his reconstructionof Bolivia's past.23 Moreno, like his counterparts in all of Latin Amner-ica during the last century, relied most heavily for his source materialon libraries and archives, which, in the final analysis we're repositoriesfor the books and papers of the elites. Consequently the major sourcesavailable to the historians-or perhaps the sources the historians choseto use most frequently-only reinforced their own elitist tendencies.

Boundary disputes among the nations of Latin America prompted

23. Valentin Abecia Baldivieso, El historiador Gabriel Rene Moreno, Kol-lasuyo: Revista de Estudios Bolivianos, 82 (Oct.-Dec. 1972), 12-13.



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422 HAHR I AUGUST I E. BRADFOB BURNS

the governments to take a serious interest in historical documentation.They dispatched officials to the Iberian archives in search of maps

and materials to support territorial claims. They delved franticallyinto the archives, returning to their respective capitals with thedocumentary evidence to press their cases. As early as 1849, the gov-ernment of President Manuel Bulnes sent Coronel Jose Maria SesePrieto to the Archive of the Indies to look for whatever documentsmight buttress Chile's claims of sovereignty over the Strait of Magel-lan. The last half of the century witnessed a parade of hopeful bound-ary litigants to the former metropolises. Not a few of those officialresearchers were the century's most distinguished historians. All be-

queathed valuable documentation to their own national archives.Historians of liberal, conservative, romantic, and positivist persua-

sions debated among themselves, sometimes acrimoniously. As onescholar of nineteenth-century Uruguayan historiography, Juan AntonioOddone, emphasized, history was an ideological arsenal from which itspractitioners drew whatever arms they needed to defend their cause.24Then as now, disagreements flared as to whether emphasis should fallon documentation or interpretation. Some argued that the facts spokefor themselves, while others relied on intuition, imagination, and in-sight to compose their studies of the past. Not a few saw the hand ofGod writ large and ascribed much causation to Divine Providence.Federico Gonzalez Suarez affirmed, Divine Providence and HumanLiberty are the fundamentals evident in History. Without losing sightfor an instant of the providential destiny of nations, History relatestheir vicissitude's through time demonstrating how they have fulfilledthat inviolable Law of Providence. 25 At the opposite extreme, thepositivist historians scoffed at the idea of such supernatural interven-

tions in human activities but did not hesitate to castigate the' RomanCatholic Church for most of the national problems they perceived.

Although historians regarded their nations as the products of Eu-rope, they could not entirely escape questions of Indian and Africaninput. Here, of course, European racial doctrines shaped their views-and must have generated many psychoses. A German historian in-troduced in 1843 the fascinating theme of the contributions of the threeraces to the formation of Brazil, but his ideas did not have an impact

24. Juan Antonio Oddone, La historiograflia uruguaya en el siglo XIX:Apuntes para su estudio, Revista Histdrica de la Universidad (Montevideo) Se-gunda Epoca, 1 (Feb. 1959), 3.

25. Defensa de mi criteria historico (Quito, 1937), p. 80.



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on Brazilian historiography for nearly a century.26 For nationalisticreasons, the Indian assumed a special significance and raised some

thorny ideological problems. The role of the Indian in Brazilian his-tory incited sporadic discussion. In fact, debate of some substancerevolved around the proper historiographical treatment to be accordedthe Indians and precipitated a stormy exchange between Joaio FranciscoLisboa and Varnhagen at mid-century.27 Significantly, Lisboa spentmost of his life in his native Sdo Luis do Maranhdo and thus repre-sented those few historians who resided in the' provinces in the nine-teenth century but still managed to have a national impact, while Varn-hagen, intimately associated with the court in Rio de Janeiro, spent

most of his life abroad. The historians often came to terms with thequestion of what to do with the Indians in history by envisioning thenoble Indian, an Indian prince who looked, acted, thought, and talkedlike a European and who possessed concomitant virtues. The idealizedand romanticized Indian was acceptable as a symbol.

Questions of interpretation absorbed much of the historians' at-tention and seemingly incited the most debate, at least some of themost excited debate. Into those arguments often intruded the liberaland conservative political perspectives for those historians were in noway apolitical. One of the major historical controversies occurred inMexico and pitted the conservatives, brilliantly represented by LucasAlaman, against the liberals, rather more ambiguously representedby Jose Maria Luis Mora. Alaman asserted that Hernain Cortesfounded the Mexican nation and that the long colonial period hadbenefited Mexico. In looking to the Spanish past, Alaman differedmarkedly from most historians of Spanish-speaking Latin America,but in overlooking-indeed, denigrating-the Indian heritage he was

well within the bounds of nineteenth-century historiography. In sum,Alaman, too, looked to Europe but, unusual for his century, more toSpain than to England and France. In his respect for the Spanishheritage, his ideas corresponded closely to those guiding the govern-ment of President Rafael Carrera in neighboring Guatemala at thesame time. Alamatn held that there were two distinct movements favor-ing Mexican independence, the first initiated in 1810 by Miguel Hi-dalgo whom Alamain deprecated and the second which effected in-dependence in 1821 under the leadership of Augustin de Iturbide.

26. Karl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, How the History of Brazil Should BeWritten, in E. Bradford Bums, ed., Perspectives on Brazilian History (New York,1967), pp. 21-41.

27. References to the debate are scattered throughout Bums, Perspectives, pp.65i, 152 ff.



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Independence constituted a political break with Spain unrelated to theplebian uprising of 1810. Iturbide emerged the hero; Hidalgo, thedemagogue.

Mora was less specific. Holding to the liberal interpretation, hejudged the independence' movement as integral, initiated by Hidalgoand carried to its ultimate success by Iturbide. Mora's emphasis fellon the achievement of independence, the end of Spanish tyranny, theemergence of the Mexican nation.28 Historiographical studies dwellon the apparent difference separating liberal and conservative inter-pretations of Mexican history. Still, the similarities seem more sig-nificant than the differences. In the final analysis, both concluded

that the creoles effected independence and that Mexico was a pseudo-European state linked to the Old World through Spain. Neither con-sidered the input or the interests of the Indian majority. When theyconsidered the Indians it was to brand them a threat to civilization(defined, of course, in European terms). In short, both liberal andconservative historians advocated a political, economic, and social or-der based on inherited institutions and creole supremacy. Theyrevered the land structure and labor systems, the hierarchy of privi-leges.

Fiery historiographical debates might have raged, but their out-come for the Indian, African, mestizo, and mulatto majorities and theinherited institutions was the same. The lively discussions amongClio's disciples in nineteenth-century Latin America concerned detailsrather than substance. The questions xvere not whether to European-ize but how, not whether to foster captalism but how to expedite it.No consideration was given to the reality that a majority had no con-nection with Europe but rather had their own folk cultures and pre-

ferred communal arrangements to competitive ones. Given their life-styles, the preferences of the elites were logical. The historians werea vocal element of the elites. It would seem unrealistic to attributeto their historiographical debates anything more' than class interests.For that reason, the similarities in their discussions were more strikingthan the differences.29 I would select the frothy historical debate pit-

28. Much of the above condensation comes from Martin, Lucas Alaman, pp.239-256, and Charles A. Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821-1853

(New Haven, 1968).29. Juan Eugenio Corradi, Cultural Dependence and the Sociology of Knowl-edge: The Latin American Case, International Journal of Contemporary Sociol-ogy, 8 (Jan. 1971), 35; Charles A. Hale, The Reconstruction of Nineteenth-Century Politics in Spanish America: A Case for the History of Ideas, LatinAmerican Research Review, 8 (Summer 1973), 53.



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ting Bartolome Mitre against Vicente Fidel Lopez in the early 1880sas aptly illustrative of the underlying uniformity among historians.

The debate seemed to focus on the use of documentation and its inter-pretation, questions, as it turned out, more of methodology than ofmeaning. When the sound and fury of heated charges and counter-charges subsided, the two historians shook hands and admitted theyessentially were in agreement. Lopez asked, After all, what haveGeneral Mitre and I disputed? Don't events and the valuable andnumerous documents prove and justify our agreement? 30 Mitre wrotehis former opponent that, indeed, basic ideas united them: Ourjudgment is more or less the same. 31

Organically integrated, the historians viewed history as a continuousmovement toward the realization of their desired goals, ultimately, ofcourse, the goals of the elites.32 They accepted independence, the newnational governments (which is to say, the dominance of the creoleswithin the familiar institutional framework of the past), and the urgeto Europeanize. The ultimate aspiration was Europeanization. TheLatin Americans believed Europe to be the focal point of history, re-garding their own histories as extensions of those of Europe. The OldWorld provided the impetus; the rest of the world reacted. WhileLatin Americans may have inherited such ideas from the Enlighten-ment, they were also explicit in Comte's positivism: a master programof social organization displayed in different places characteristics ofdifferent stages but all within a single, constant pattern of evolution.To the degree their nations came to resemble Europe in the nineteenthcentury, the historians judged they had developed or progressed. Con-sequently the men and movements favoring independence and Eu-ropeanization received praise from Clio's pens. The failure to Euro-

peanize or the tardiness of Europeanization required explanation andthe' obstacles, condemnation. Barros Arana in many ways typifiedthe historical perspective of the century when he concluded that his-tory permits us to observe in general terms the progressive march ofhumanity and to appreciate the moral laws on which its developmentdepends. 33 Commentators on Guatemala's past described their na-tion advancing through stages toward a complex and desirable civiliza-tion. They were wont to compare their nation to a person growingfrom an Indian infancy to the maturity of European-adopted civiliza-

30. Quoted in Pla, Ideologia y metodo, p. 29.31. Museo Mitre, Correspondencia iteraria, hist6rica y political del General

Bartolome' Mitre, Vol. III (Buenos Aires, 1912), 284.32. Merton, Sociology of Knowledge, p. 500.33. Encina, La literatura histarica chilena, p. 44.



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tion.34 Such teleological conceptions of progress constantly remind usof the intellectual's heavy debt to the philosopher of the Enlighten-ment as well as their later-and natural-conversion to the theories ofSpencer and Comte.

The exclusivity of Latin American historiography deflected atten-tion from the alternatives to Europeanization even though the major-ity of the populations still favored and practiced those alternatives.The historiographical treatment of the Americas in which history beganwith the' arrival of the Iberian conquerors relegated the long and richIndian past to the anthropologists or to those who practiced that disci-pline's nineteenth-century variant. Historians ignored folk cultures

(except occasionally to disparage them), and although forced to dealwith populist caudillos, they were quick to deprecate them. For ex-ample, once the traditional elites returned to power in Buenos Airesin 1852, they not only set about eliminating the populist caudillos inthe interior and in neighboring Paraguay but writing history com-plimentary to their actions, the official textbooks which nurtured suc-ceeding generations of Argentine schoolchildren. Mitre, both a prolifichistorian and energetic president of the nation subscribed fully to theelitist concept of Europe as the' single source of civilization. He be-lieved that the educated minority made history and should impose itswill on the ignorant masses.35 On the one hand, as president, he openedthe doors to foreign penetration and facilitated European economicand cultural domination. On the other, as an historian, he shaped thepast to suit his present ends. Leaders with whom he disagreed hesimply erased from the pages of history or relegated to inferior ornegative positions. He informed fellow historian L6pez, We havealmost the same predilection for great men and the same repulsionfor the' barbarian troublemakers such as [Jose Gervasio] Artigas whomwe have buried historically. The task of disinterring what previousgenerations of historians have buried is not an easy one, and it is com-plicated by the fact that most of society never articulated in writtenform its complaints, alternatives, or activities.

In studying nineteenth-century historiography, the researcher feelsa constant temptation to bypass the norm in order to dwell on theexception. The temptation is difficult to deny. There were some re-

34. See particularly Prospecto de la historia de Guatemala, escrito en 1825por Don Jose Cecilio de Valle, pp. 100-113, and Discurso del Dr. C. PedroMolina, in Hector Humberto Samayoa Guevara, La enseiianza de la historia enGuatemala desde 1832 hasta 1852 (Guatemala, 1959), pp. 113-120.

35. Pla, Ideologia y metodo, p. 33.36. Museo Mitre, Correspondencia, II, 284.



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markable historians whose sharp insights command attention. Capis-trano de Abreu denounced his compatriots' propensity to ape Euro-

pean trends and lamented that, in its imitation of the Old World,Brazilian culture did not represent the conscious expression of thepeople.37 He revolutionized historical studies in Brazil by turningattention from the coastal band, with its obvious link to Europe, toexamine the previously little-known interior. He presented his majorthesis in 1889 in a short but brilliant essay, Os Caminhos Antigos e oPovoamento do Brasil, the single most important statement on Brazil-ian history yet made. Neglecting the archbishops, generals, and vice-roys who had populated the histories of Brazil to that date-even

refusing to treat the official national hero, Tiradentes, whom he con-sidered more the creation of the elites than representative of theBrazilian people-he concentrated on the contributions of the masses,insightful periodization of the past, and dominant themes in history.He believed that the masses shaped history and that the' vast interiorconstituted the true Brazil, the valid national reality. Only when thecoastal inhabitants turned their backs on the sea and penetrated theinterior did they shed their European ways and become Brazilianized.For the first time attention focused on the national heartland and thepeople who opened and settled it.

Ernesto Quesada of Argentina also contributed to a renovation ofhistorical studies. In his controversial La e'poca de Rosas (1898), Que-sada, who had interviewed Juan Manuel de Rosas in England, madethe first systematic attempt to revise the historical view of the longand significant government of that gaucho leader. He pointed outthe positive contributions of Rosas: national unity and stability andthe reorganization of finances-achievements which the elites could

only prize and the positivists praise. According to Quesada, the prog-ress of Argentina in the last half of the century was possible onlybecause of the firm national foundation Rosas laid. The new insightsQuesada brought to bear on the Rosas period initiated a long series ofrevisionist interpretations which continue until today.

Jose Maria Ramos Mejia introduced into Argentine historiographysome aspects of the positivist theorie's of psychology. In his Las neuro-sis de los hombres celebres en la historia argentina (published in twovolumes, 1878 and 1888), he attempted to psychoanalyze such prom-inent historical figures as Juan Manuel de Rosas and Jose GasparRodriguez de Francia. In later works, La locura en la historic (1895),

37. O Caracter Nacional e as Origens do Povo Brasileiro, 0 Globo (Rio deJaneiro), Mar. 9, 1876, p. 3.



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428 HAHR j AUGUST I E. BRADFORD BURNSLas multitudes argentinas (1899), and Rosas y su tiempo (1907), thephysician-historian turned his attention from individuals to attempt apsychoanalysis of the Argentine masses. The studies of collective psy-chology were unique contributions which viewed the great man asthe instrument of larger segments of the population, quite a contrastwith the usual conclusions of the period. Rosas emerged from RamosMejla's studies as both the product of Argentine society in the first halfof the' century and the personification of that period. These penetrat-ing and controversial analyses were significant contributions to nine-teenth-century historiography.

Fascinating as were Capistrano de Abreu, Quesada, and Ramos

Mejla (as well as others who augment the' ranks of the innovators),it must be reemphasized that they we're not typical of the historiog-raphy of their century. They intrigue us because they stand out asprecursors of twentieth-century concerns and thus more in harmonywith later historians than with their own contemporaries. It is nocoincidence that their contributions emerge in the last decades of thecentury. European concerns with scientific history and greater ob-jectivity echoed in the Western Hemisphere and initiated a question-ing of documents and accepted interpretations. Further, larger urbanpopulations, a growing middle class, and more' complex manifestationsof nationalism prompted shifts in historical perspectives. Nonetheless,to dwell on those innovators is to select the exceptions and thus to dis-tort the major content and the characteristics of nineteenth-centuryLatin American historiography.

An examination of the biographies and writings of this representa-tive group of nineteenth-centuiy Latin American historians suggestssome tentative conclusions. The historians more often than not ex-

pressed elitist views because of their own background, associations, andaspirations, as well as their historical concerns and sources. They ac-cepted the national institutional structures and approved the activitiesof the elites from among whom they selected representatives for theirbiographies. A basic ideological conformity characterized these his-torians during much of the century. Probably their most importantideological commitment was to progress, which they equated withEuropeanization. By ignoring those aspects and sectors of their so-

ciety which resisted the European siren, the historians omitted themajority of the populations from their pages. When they did noticethe masses in their accounts, it was generally to deplore' them as back-ward and often to advocate' immigration to either civilize or replace



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them. Their heavy reliance on European historical thought and meth-odologies blurred their vision of their own national past.

European approved or inspired themes-the' romantics' search forthe noble Indian, the Spencerian attraction to social evolution, or thepositivist concern with political order and material progress-attractedthem. Besides stunting the historians' own intellectual growth, theoverdose of intellectual derivation condemned Latin America psycho-logically to an inferior position. The historians inevitably comparedtheir own nations to northern Europe and the United States. By mas-ochistically insisting on judging themselves by the experiences andconditions of others, they separated their own societies from their con-

text and not surprisingly found them wanting. Few were perceptiveor critical enough to realize that the Europeanization they approvedcontributed to their nations' dependency. Few appreciated the geo-graphical, racial, and historical uniqueness of Latin America.

While these conclusions may hold few surprises, the implicationswhich might be drawn from this narrow historiographical base de-serve attention. Most thought-provoking is the realization that theconsistency and frequency of the themes emphasized by the majorityof the nineteenth-century historians created an ideology of class. Thatideology rationalized the institutions and the elites who controlled them,a justification which helped legitimize both and contributed to theircontinuity. The values and goals of that ideology served the elites wellas one effective means to coerce larger and larger segments of the popu-lation into accepting the institutional structures and social systems ofLatin America in the past century, even though those structures andsystems were more detrimental than beneficial to an overwhelming ma-jority of the population. The historians contributed mightily to the

creation of a sense and feeling of nationality, albeit one complemen-tary to the interests of the elites. In doing so, they successfully shroudednational histories with a sacred mystique which has inhibited broaderhistorical investigations and even ridiculed the posing of some funda-mental historical questions which might cast doubt on the efficacy ofmodernization, progress, development, not to mention the nationalinstitutions themselves.

Indeed, nineteenth-century historians set patterns and emphasized

preferences which to an astonishing degree still pervade twentieth-century historiography. Sarmiento's Civilizacion y barbaric, a paean toEurope and a denigration of Argentina, is still dutifully read by Ar-gentine schoolchildren. The implication remains that what is foreign is



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superior to what is indigenous. For that matter, Vicente Fidel Lopez'Compendio de historia argentina, adaptado a la enseianza de los cole-

gios nacionales (published in two volumes, 1889-1890), withits

em-phasis on Europeanization and the political activities of the elites ofBuenos Aires, continued to be used by Argentine teachers, at leastthrough the 1930s, as a bridge for the ideas of nineteenth-century his-toriography to cross into the present.

Early in the twentieth century, two Brazilian historians, Jos6e Fran-cisco da Rocha Pombo and Jodo Ribeiro, wrote popular histories oftheir country synthesizing much of the material written in the last halfof the nineteenth century. Both texts have gone through repeated re-

prints until the present day and have been read by generations of sec-ondary school students. The texts offer a view of Brazil restricted bya class perspective of the last century. For example, both hardly men-tion the blacks even though they constituted a majority of the popula-tion for centuries and made monumental contributions to Brazil. In atext of 493 pages, Rocha Pombo spoke directly of them on only seven-teen, most of which concerned the slave trade and the abolition move-ment.38 Ribeiro did much the same making only sixteen references in avolume of 423 pages.39 A Brazilian history text published in 1961 byHelio Vianna and widely used in university courses altered not onewhit the emphasis of Rocha Pombo and Ribeiro.40 Serving as a sober-ing example of historiographical continuity, it devoted only 21 out of671 pages to the African background of Brazil and the blacks' experi-ence in Brazil. Even though written a half-century after Rocha Pomboand Ribeiro, the Vianna text still emphasizes the slave trade and aboli-tion to the exclusion of myriad other black themes. The cult of the' na-tional hero continues to be well tended by the high priests of Clio in

the twentieth century, and it is tempting to broaden that observationto conclude that the' great man theory of history persists.In viewing nineteenth-century Latin America, historians as a group

still seem to subscribe to the fundamental tenet of the historiography ofthat century: modernization and consequently Europeanization weredesirable, and conversely traditional folk cultures were detrimental.This indoctrination handed down by the nineteenth-century historiansis so effective that few will concede' that the modernization whichtook place in Latin America actually deepened dependency and low-

38. Jose Francisco da Rocha Pombo, Hist6ria do Brasil, 10th ed. (Sdo Paulo,1961).

39. Jodo Ribeiro, Hist6ria do Brasil, 17th ed. (Rio de Janeiro, 1960).40. Helio Vianna, Hist6ria do Brasil (Sdo Paulo, 1961).



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DEOLOGY IN 19rH-CENTURY LATIN AMERICAN HISTOIOGIRAPHY 431

ered the quality of life of the majority. Accepting the conclusion thatfolk cultures were backward, historians therefore do not question

whether they might have provided the majority with a more satisfac-tory life'-style. The fact that historians devote more study to immi-gration than to folk cultures seems to reflect further the essentiallyEuropean approach to history. The ideology of the nineteenth-centurycontinues, and its pervasiveness attests in some measure to the skilland impact of the nineteenth-century Latin Ame'rican historians. Ofcourse, parallel to that continuity, significant historiographical innova-tions have occurred in the twentieth century. Yet, the shadow of nine-teenth-century Latin American historiography hangs heavily over the

the present. Our perception of Latin American history deepens to theextent we understand the exclusivity characterizing this historiography.

Ideology in Ninetenth-Century Latin American Historiography

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