The White Dream and Its Unraveling, Race and Nation in Colombia

“ The large proportion of mestizos, if these percentages are correct, is significant because it implies a persistence of type that may largely determine the character of Colombia’s future population, unless the more slowly increasing white element can be reinforced by immigration. ”

“ Colombia claims a population slightly in excess of 5,000,000, but I doubt if it really has 4,000,000. About one-tenth of the inhabitants are pure white and there are 200,000 wild Indians, living primitively under tribal chiefs, nominally under the control of the local government. The remainder are mixtures of 117white, black and Indian in varying proportion, over 300,000 of whom are negroes and mulattoes. Little can be hoped for from the majority of these people owing to their poor source of origin and the climatic conditions which surround them. ”

“ The black race is doing its work, and the continent is returning to its primitive barbarism.” [67] This melancholy fate can, according to Garcia-Calderon, be averted only by wholesale white immigration: “In South America civilization is dependent upon the numerical predominance of the victorious Spaniard, on the triumph of the white man over the mulatto, the negro, and the Indian. Only a plentiful European immigration can re-establish the shattered equilibrium of the American races.” ”

“ In other words, the white race has been going back, and Latin America has been getting more Indian and negro for the past hundred years.
This cycle, however, now nears its end. Latin America will be neither red nor black. It will ultimately be either white or yellow. The Indian is patently unable to construct a progressive civilization. As for the negro, he has proved as incapable in the New World as in the Old. ”

“ Wealth increases and internal order is greater in the Argentine, Uruguay, and Chili, and it is precisely in these countries that the proportion of negroes has always been low; they have disappeared in the admixture of European races. In Cuba, San Domingo, and some of the republics of Central America, and certain of the States of the Brazilial Confederation, where the children of slaves constitute the greater portion of the population, internal disorders are continual. A black republic, Hayti, demonstrates by its revolutionary history the political incapacity of the negro race. ”

“ It is also to be hoped that our Argentine politicians, taught by experience, and comprehending all the responsibilities imposed upon them by their noble mission—the work of racial regeneration and the betterment of South America—will succeed in making constitutional government an actual fact, by restraining and uprooting the tendency to personal power, which is the lamentable heritage of indigenous tradition. ”

“ Almost the only effect this wealth of nature seems to exercise upon the Indian or negro mestizo is to incapacitate him from mastering by any effort of his own the lethargy that preys upon him. Where a few rare exceptions occur, as, for instance, in Costa Rica, 402in which a sounder policy is preserved, it is invariably found that they are of purer Spanish descent than their sister republics in tropical South America. ”

“ In Bogotá there is an intense anti-Negro social sentiment. The isolation of the half-breeds in Colombia has come nearer to producing a new racial group than is to be found elsewhere in Latin America.
Venezuela, in spite of its nearly three million inhabitants, is an unimportant country, largely hybrid with extensive Negro infiltrations. As in many other Latin American countries, the number of Whites is officially put down as about 10 per cent, but as in most such instances it is doubtful whether one resident in fifty can properly be called a white man, except by courtesy. ”

“ The white contingent in the population of Colombia is chiefly composed of the descendants of the Spanish colonists who settled there during the three centuries following its discovery and conquest. Mining enterprises and climate drew them into the highlands of the interior, and there they have remained down to the present day, their only settlements on the hot, unhealthy coast being the few ports necessary for commercial and political intercourse with the mother country. ”

“ CARTAGENA, or Carthagena, a city, seaport, and the capital of the department of Bolívar, Colombia, South America, on the Caribbean coast, in 10° 25′ 48′′ N., 75° 34′ W. Pop. (1905, official estimate) 14,000. The population of Cartagena is largely composed of blacks and mixed races, which form the predominant type on the lowland plains of northern Colombia. The well-to-do whites of Cartagena usually have country houses on the Turbaco hills, where the temperature is much lower than on the coast. ”

“ A very small proportion of the white element consists of foreigners engaged in commercial and industrial pursuits, but they very rarely become permanently identified with the fortunes of the country. The native whites form the governing class, and enjoy most of the powers and privileges of political office. ”

“ Anyone who chooses to consider all the more educated mestizos as whites, and all Indians with any touch of white blood as mestizos, would, of course, bring out different figures. The tendency of official statistics is in that direction, for everybody wishes to be reckoned as a white man, but such a method does not truly represent the racial facts. ”

“ The district of Columbia was one of the grandest appanages of the Spanish throne when the appanages of the Spanish throne were grand indeed. The town and port of Cartagena, on the Atlantic, were admirably fortified, as was also Panamá on the Pacific. Its interior cities were populous, flourishing, and, for that age, fairly civilized. Now the whole country has received the boon of Utopian freedom; and the mind loses itself in contemplating to what lowest pitch of human degradation the people will gradually fall.
Civilization here is retrograding. ”

“ But they have little fear of death and can be readily forced or tempted to swell the forces of a revolting general. Although in Venezuela, Colombia, and Panama, the proportion of whites and mestizos is larger, the general result is the same, for the vast majority of the people are illiterate and qualified only for the fighting side of public life.142
Some may conceive that the racial facts of the country are unfavourable in a further way. That an admixture of the blood of a backward race must injure the white element, is a view which suggests itself naturally to European pride. ”

“ The zambos have created nothing in America. On the other hand, the robust mestizo populations, the Mamelucos of Brazil, the Cholos of Peru and Bolivia, the Rotos of Chili, descendants of Spaniards and the Guarani Indians, are distinguished by their pride {360} and virility. Instability, apathy, degeneration—all the signs of exhausted race—are encountered far more frequently in the mulatto than in the mestizo.
The European established in America becomes a Creole; his is a new race, the final product of secular unions. He is neither Indian, nor black, nor Spaniard. ”

“ A sentiment of equality, among the whites, has penetrated every bosom. Wherever men of colour are either considered as slaves or as having been enfranchised, that which constitutes nobility is hereditary liberty—the proud boast of having never reckoned among ancestors any but freemen. In the colonies, the colour of the skin is the real badge of nobility. In Mexico, as well as Peru, at Caracas as in the island of Cuba, a bare-footed fellow with a white skin, is often heard to exclaim: "Does that rich man think himself whiter than I am?" ”

“ He cannot deny the deterioration consequent upon an amalgamation of races, more wide-spread here than in any other country in the world, and which is rapidly effacing the best qualities of the white man, the negro, and the Indian, leaving a mongrel nondescript type, deficient in physical and mental energy. At a time when the new social status of the negro is a subject of vital importance in our statesmanship, we should profit by the experience of a country where, though slavery exists, there is far more liberality toward the free negro than he has ever enjoyed in the United States. ”

“ Colombia and Venezuela, with perhaps eight million people, have at least one-third of their population of Negro and Indian descent. Here Simon Bolivar with his Negro, mulatto, and Indian forces began the war that liberated South America. Central America has a smaller proportion of Negroids, perhaps one hundred thousand in all. Bolivia and Peru have small amounts of Negro blood, while Argentine and Uruguay have very little. The Negro population in these lands is everywhere in process of rapid amalgamation with whites and Indians. ”

“ There are no social barriers in their intercourse with the whites, nor race barriers against those who have political aspirations. The negroes of pure blood are to be found principally on the coastal plains and in the great lowland river valleys, where they live in great part on the bounties of nature. A small percentage of them are engaged in trade and other occupations; a few are small agriculturists.
Bogotá was reputed to be a centre of learning in colonial times, but there was no great breadth and depth to it, and it produced nothing of real value. ”

“ The problem of lifting up the negro in Cuba and Porto Rico is an easier one in one respect, even if it proves more difficult in others. It will be less difficult, because there is the absence of that higher degree of race feeling which exists in many parts of the United States. Both the white Cuban and the white Spaniard have treated the people of African descent, in civil, political, military, and business matters, very much as they have treated others of their own race. Oppression has not cowed and unmanned the Cuban negro in certain respects as it has the American negro. ”

“ Everything points to a continuance of the process of race mixture. It is the rule in all parts of the world, except where religion or a strong feeling of race antagonism (such as exists in the United States) prevents it. Neither of these hindrances exists in South America. In Peru and Bolivia, however, the process is so slow that it may be centuries before the white and aboriginal elements have been so completely commingled as to form one race, and leave no pure Indians remaining. ”

“ Brazil has never had a “colour line,” and there has never been any popular prejudice against race mixtures. According to the census of 1872 the total population was 9,930,478, of which 1,510,806 were slaves; the race enumeration gave 3,787,289 whites, 1,959,452 Africans, 386,955 Indians, and 3,801,782 mixed bloods. The Indian population certainly exceeded the total given, and the white population must have included many of mixed blood, the habit of so describing themselves being common among the better classes of South American mestizos. ”

“ He instinctively hates the superiority of the white race, and even of the mestizos, to whom institutions both of long ago and of the present day, customs, greater civilization, and above all the allotment of land, give so many advantages. His almost irresistible inclination carries him into isolation, almost exile, in order to escape from the torment of seeing them and from social duties. He retires where the land is free, where he can till his field wherever he pleases. ”

“ At the signing of the peace agreements, Guatemala’s racial and cultural diversity was largely absent from the country’s legal framework and political debate, State institutions and educational system. Rural areas where most of the indigenous population resides exhibited the worst social indicators and received the lowest levels of public investment. Indigenous women were doubly victimized, suffering racial and gender discrimination at the same time. ”

“ The indigenous question will not have a solution if there is not a RADICAL transformation of the national pact. The only means of incorporating, with justice and dignity, the indigenous of the Nation, is to recognize the characteristics of their own social, political and cultural organization. Autonomy is not separation; it is integration of the most humble and forgotten minorities of contemporary Mexico. ”

“ The management of cultures will be decentralized. One of the pending challenges that we as a Republic maintain is the recognition of cultural diversity in the formulation of public policies, which has meant that Peruvians from rural sectors continue to be invisible as they were two hundred years ago. That is why it is necessary to interculturalize the State, that is, to establish that when the most relevant decisions are made, the voices of indigenous peoples and communities and of the Afro-Peruvian people are considered. ”

“ On the basis of what has been verified, the Mission feels that important limitations persist in the political will to undertake the necessary changes to break the structures of monocultural and racial discrimination and to advance in the construction of a democratic culture and one of peace based on the recognition of ethnic diversity and equitable access to public spaces. The State must recognize the existence and the rights of the indigenous peoples and recognize and respect and promote the various ethnic and cultural identities which make up the Guatemalan Nation. ”