SOCIOECONOMIC CHANGE, PARTISAN POLITICS, AND ARTISAN ORGANIZATIONS
THE PACE AND CHARACTER OF THE ARTISAN LABOR MOVEMENT IN Bogotá were shaped by two variables. The generally downward trend in the socioeconomic position of bogotano craftsmen, caused by competition from foreign goods and by the rise of industrial wage laborers in the city and region, spurred artisans to protect themselves by organized activity, much of it political in nature. At the same time, the partisan struggle for power drew craftsmen into the political arena as the parties attempted to broaden their base of support. Taken together, these factors help to explain the pace of artisan political and organizational activity, its objectives, and, to a certain degree, its impact.
Artisans and their handicrafts evolved during the one-hundred years after independence from the single most important productive sector in the Colombian urban economy to one portion of a complex mix of workers utilizing a variety of productive techniques. This was hardly a rapid transformation that might have provoked craftsmen to violently resist threats to their socioeconomic well being. Rather, it was a long process that slowly eroded the importance of artisans within the productive and social hierarchy of the city. Nor did all crafts share a similar experience. Some suffered rapid changes while others underwent a gradual transformation. The responses by different craftsmen to economic change varied; political efforts often depended upon their particular fortunes.1 Existing information suggests that the trades of tailors and cobblers, which suffered from early competition, were more active in organizations of the liberal reform era. Other craftsmen, those who practiced construction activities, were more vocal in the last third of the century.
Public statements by craftsmen are perhaps the surest route to the examination of issues affecting their socioeconomic condition, especially as the detailed analysis of artisan lifestyles awaits further study. Public declarations do not reflect the full range of craftsmen’s concerns, but they do serve as possible barometers of crisis, revealing pressing issues that threatened the way of life held dear by artisans, or at least by their public spokesmen. Repeated references to particular topics indicate either their perceived importance or the intensity of the threat—or both. How the content of those statements varied through time further suggests internal changes in the artisan class and signals when the class began to lose some of its cohesion.2
Commonly voiced concerns fall into four interrelated areas: economic, political, social welfare, and the public image of artisans. The most frequently expressed grievances were economic, especially the desire for tariff protection, but included opinions on industrial education, internal trade order, credit, and the economic dislocations caused by war. Political comments centered on the aspirations of craftsmen to gain a legitimate voice in the polity and a general disenchantment with partisan politics. Welfare concerns ranged from the desire for better educational and health facilities to support for agencies that afforded a degree of social protection, such as the church or mutual aid societies. Finally, craftsmen projected their social, economic, and political contributions so as to mold a positive public image they felt was their due. This pride “de ser artesano” served to reinforce the right of craftsmen to express themselves publicly.
Craftsmen reasoned that the tariff structure that insulated their production from foreign competition was critical for their socioeconomic well-being. As the moderately protectionist tariffs of the early national period gave way to liberal tariff reductions, craftsmen from Bogotá and other areas of the country repeatedly petitioned for the restoration of a protective tariff policy.3 When tariff rates were raised in the 1880s, craftsmen praised the Regeneration government and certain trades seemed to benefit from the decrease in foreign competition.4 However, neither the tariffs of Núñez nor those of Reyes were necessarily intended to foster a resurgence of artisanal production, but to foster development of manufacturing industries within the country. While certain artisans may have enjoyed short-term benefits from these tariffs, the long-term effect was increased competition for artisanal producers from native or foreign manufactures.
Craftsmen thought that governmental measures in addition to the maintenance of tariff barriers could help their industries. Demands that primary products and machines used by native craftsmen in their trades should be allowed to enter the country with a minimum of duties and restrictions were presented first in the 1846 petition and were included in almost every other petition thereafter, including that of the Colombian Workers’ Union of the 1910s.5 As early as the 1840s, craftsmen sought exposure to the techniques of foreign artisans, even if they were critical of those foreigners in Bogotá who refused to associate with their native counterparts.6 Artisans often requested that the government organize workshops to disseminate new skills and that it try to attract foreign craftsmen willing to train natives, or send Colombians abroad to learn the latest skills.7 Craftsmen claimed to need additional sources of credit, and thus supported the Caja de Ahorros and repeatedly tried to start their own savings institutions. Every mutual aid society included at least plans for a bank, as did political associations such as the Unión Nacional de Industriales y Obreros in the 1910s.8
Conceivably, artisan political pressure had the potential to force the Colombian government to protect their industries, to begin programs of industrial education, and to establish credit institutions. Political pressure had less ability to affect the cost of transportation, a buffering factor in the price of foreign goods in Bogotá. The importance of high transportation costs as a protector of interior craftsmen was apparently not appreciated by artisans, even though they probably equalled tariff duties in adding costs to the consumers of foreign products. Permanent steamboat navigation on the Magdalena River lowered transportation costs by perhaps one-third and aggravated the onslaught of foreign goods by the 1860s.9 Rail links to the river, established in the first years of the twentieth century, undoubtedly amplified the amount of imported merchandize available in the Colombian capital.
The civil wars that accompanied the ever-present partisan strife disrupted the local and national economies and caused serious dislocations among craftsmen.10 Artisans lost many orders during the wars and saw credit, which was expensive and in short supply in the best of times, rise in price and be diverted to fund military adventures. Moreover, artisans were frequently called to service as members of the militia, an obligation that kept them from working and sometimes led to injury and death.11 Since partisan machinations caused practically every conflict, artisans urged that parties alternate in control or share power—anything to reduce the level of strife. This undoubtedly accounted for the popularity of Núñez and perhaps contributed to the appeal of Mosquera and Reyes, all men who seemed dedicated to the notion of political stability, even at the expense of constitutional guidelines or competitive elections. Craftsmen thought that partisan abuses denied them a political voice, which in turn provoked demands for more effective representation in politics. On numerous occasions this sentiment was expressed by the complaint, “we were used as a ladder for Liberal [or Conservative] ambitions, only to be thrown away when we were no longer needed.”12
The artisans’ economic and political interests shared the characteristic that they could be furthered primarily by power or influence within the realm of political activity. This was generally not true of their immediate social welfare concerns, which artisans more frequently tried to resolve on their own. Although limited in its actual delivery of services, the church offered artisans and their children educational programs and health care until the reform era, when clerical authorities were stripped of many temporal functions and resources, a move artisans condemned in several public statements.13 The Society of Artisans, the Popular Society, and the Union Society all attempted to answer the need for adult education by conducting their own classes. After the 1860s craftsmen appealed to the government to expand its educational programs. Social welfare needs were met in a similar fashion, with general mobilizations such as the Union Society attempting to look after the needs of its membership. The mutual aid societies (that were developed after 1872) responded directly to these concerns, even if their membership was limited to the artisan elite. At least some of the support for the Regeneration can be attributed to the restitution of the church as a formal agent in the maintenance of Colombian society.
Why did artisans think that their complaints should be recognized and addressed by the nation’s “natural” elite? A reading of craftsmen’s public manifestations suggests that artisans thought their contributions to the nation valuable enough to earn a political voice and policy influence. Craftsmen’s consciousness seems to have been based upon the belief that the labor of producing the nation’s consumer goods, while not always rewarding financially, was both honorable and necessary. The 1858 article “The Artisan of Bogotá” stressed that while the rich and social luminaries refused to abandon the colonial attitude that “the arts dishonor,” artisans maintained that “it is worth more to be an honorable poor man than a rich man and a thief.”14 José Leocadio Camacho, writing in the 1860s for La Alianza, argued that production itself contributed to society by its creative function and justified the resultant feelings of self-respect, personal worth, and economic value.15
The trades that craftsmen practiced afforded them a feeling of economic independence and a middling social rank that set them apart from the masses. This status was a source of pride and self-respect. The work of an artisan might not produce wealth, but it did avoid vagabondage. By contrast, artisans often juxtaposed the value of their production with the “social evil” of empleomanía. The employee who consumed the scarce taxes of the nation and produced nothing tangible was anathema to many craftsmen. Craftsmen viewed themselves as positive political forces: they paid taxes to support local, state, and national governments, acted as night watchmen in their barrios, served in the militia, defended the constitutional order, and, in general, acted as good republican citizens.16
The aims that craftsmen tried to satisfy, either through organizational pressure or by individual initiative, originated in their socioeconomic status as independent producers and from their political rights as citizens. The transformation of Bogotá and Colombia’s economy threatened the ability of many artisans to preserve their traditional social position and caused most of the pressures that craftsmen tried to alleviate by political action. The persistence of demands such as tariff protection and industrial education throughout the nineteenth century indicates the ongoing threat to the artisans’ socioeconomic status. The appearance of new demands in the 1910s, for laws pertaining to work accidents and for basic education, evidences the emergence of the wage laborer as an important component of Bogotá’s working population and, by implication, the eclipsed status of artisans as the leaders of the labor movement. Similarly, artisan demands for effective political participation within a republican system gave way to workers’ calls for a vaguely defined socialist state. Craftsmen had a strong stake in Bogotá’s social, economic, and political life; they wanted not to abolish it, but to shape it more to their advantage. The same was not necessarily true of the wage laborers, many of whom backed socialist calls for a transformed state.
The Partisan Struggle for Power
The conjuncture of the republican ideal and the partisan struggle for power shaped the initial stages of artisan political participation in early national Colombia. The leaders of the Colombian movement for independence and those who shaped the country’s constitutional structure not only rejected Spanish domination but also the rule of absolute monarchs, whom they felt fostered tyranny and lessened the opportunities for social, economic, or moral progress. Those who compared the fortunes of Spain with that of the United States reached the conclusion that republican government fostered economic prosperity, social progress, and political stability; it was therefore the ideal form of government for the emerging nation. The republican model implied popular participation in the election of representatives to govern the nation (to the relief of many, it had been demonstrated in the United States that a responsible citizenry could avoid the popular anarchy of revolutionary France and usually selected the “natural” elite as its rulers). Throughout the nineteenth century, with only a few exceptions, constitutions granted citizenship to “respectable” individuals, as determined by property holdings, income, occupational status, or literacy.17 Artisans constituted a significant portion of the urban population deemed worthy of participation in the republican political system. The extension of this right surely evoked a favorable response from craftsmen who reasoned that as honorable citizens, as defenders of the legitimate order, and in recognition of their productive functions, they deserved such a privilege.
The reality of nineteenth-century Colombian politics, however, was far removed from the republican ideal. An intense struggle for power and frustrated efforts to form a stable governmental structure lasted until after the disastrous War of the 1000 Days.18 Regional forces fought for political power and control of the state through the guises of the Conservative and Liberal parties and their multiple factions. Fundamental programmatic differences separated these groups only on social and church-related issues; control of the nation’s purse strings and appointative powers were the central bones of contention. Since no single group could monopolize power, broadened bases of electoral and popular support quickly became necessary. In rural areas, traditional patronage ties simplified the matter; the power of landlords, clerics, or others readily translated into votes. Some of the same patronage relations, notably those of the church, influenced urban politics, but the presence of relatively autonomous individuals such as artisans made the cities, especially Bogotá, distinct political environments.
The necessity of partisan groups to recruit clients and the ideal of popular participation in a republican government resulted in the appeal for the political allegiance of urban craftsmen. The 1838 struggle between factions of the developing Conservative and Liberal parties led directly to the recruitment of artisans into the Catholic Society and the Democratic-Republican Society of Progressive Artisans and Laborers. Both Societies solicited votes and attempted to instill in their members a particular ideology. There is, however, little evidence to indicate either that a rigid alignment between politically active artisans and parties emerged, or that craftsmen accepted without question partisan ideological stances, either in the 1830s or beyond, although during some periods more craftsmen tended to work for the endeavors of one or the other party. More often than not, the most visible political associations linked artisans to the leaders of dissident or third-party movements such as the draconianos (1850s), Manuel María Madiedo (1860s), the Independent Liberals (1870s), Núñez (1880 and beyond), and the Republicans (1910s).
Various reasons explain craftsmen’s associations with third parties, or with groups that did not fit neatly into the Conservative or Liberal camps. In the early 1850s, I suspect that much of the Democratic Societies’ relationship with the draconianos stemmed from their loyalty to Obando and many members of the military, whose social status was akin to that of the craftsmen. Artisans shared the draconiano common interest in slowing down, if not halting altogether, several aspects of the reform agenda, and from the necessity of joining forces to enhance their potential strength in opposition to groups favoring the reform process. These three factors—loyalty to particular leaders, ideological similarities, and the mutual advantages of concerted action by “outsiders”—account for the majority of the artisan/third-party associations, with the desire to advance each other vis-à-vis the dominant parties probably the single most important factor. This is evident in the relationship that workers developed with the Republicans of the 1910s, a group that finally was eclipsed by the two traditional parties.
The relationship between artisans and the mainstream Conservative and Liberal parties was considerably less complex. During periods of intense political rivalry, parties regularly recruited artisan support. The records of the two Societies of 1838, of the Democratic and Popular Societies of the reform era, and of the electoral organizations thereafter illustrate this tendency. Significantly, the frequency of such appeals dropped off sharply in the 1870s almost to disappear between 1880 and 1910. The fragmentation of the artisan class that occurred after the 1860s, along with the development of party infrastructures, accounts for this tendency.19 By the 1870s, after years of propaganda and efforts to inculcate party loyalty into the voting populace, it seems that people spontaneously identified themselves as Conservatives or Liberals in most elections. This lessened the need to use artisan-based ad hoc electoral groups and diminished the importance of artisan associations. The revival of open recruitment in the 1910s can be attributed to the damage done to party loyalties by the National party of Núñez in the 1880s, by the Reyes government in the years after 1904, and by the need to rebuild the party system. Importantly, the dominant parties in the twentieth century eventually became patrons to labor unions, much to the disadvantage of non-aligned labor organizations.
The initial opening whereby artisans could participate politically thus came not from their own pressures, but rather from above, as a result of the partisan struggle for power. Partisan patrons recruited political clients, who in the urban setting were drawn from the ranks of the artisan sector. In return for their votes, craftsmen expected that their special interests would be heard and that the ideal republic would function in fact. That it did not is hardly surprising. Nevertheless, the expression of goals and objectives particular to the artisan population and the collective activity undertaken to satisfy those desires, despite repeated failures, left a record that deserves careful examination.
Craftsmen’s Organizations and Periodization
Numerous problems plague the periodization of artisan activity and the construction of a typology of organizations in which they participated. General Latin American labor histories typically describe the nineteenth century as either a “formative period” or as a period of “workers movement without a working class,”20 without attempting to subdivide the period of “artisan hegemony” or to determine reasons for variations in artisan organizational activity.21
Bogotano craftsmen articulated their particular interests through four types of organized expression: temporary electoral groups, broad-based mobilizations, mutual aid societies, and direct action. The functions of these organizations were not mutually exclusive, but were sufficiently distinct to require separate analysis. The periods of organizational activity visible in this study are, 1832–46, 1846–68, 1868–1904, and 1904–19. Partisan “top-down” recruitment by leaders of the emerging Conservative and Liberal parties characterized the fourteen years after 1832. The party-dominated Catholic Society and the Democratic-Republican Society of Progressive Artisans and Laborers attempted to instill in craftsmen and others the particular beliefs of the two parties.22 The most intense artisan political activity of the nineteenth century took place in the 1846–68 period, when general mobilizations of artisans exercised a marked influence upon bogotano and Colombian politics. However, before 1855, these organizations tended to be more oriented toward the Liberal party, while after the defeat of Melo in 1854 they were more oriented toward the Conservative party.
The Society of Artisans represents the first formal effort by laborers to autonomously influence the workings of the Colombian state. Craftsmen mobilized to protect their trades and livelihoods from the dangers they saw in the 1847 tariff law—which they sought to repeal—but they also attempted to enhance their intellectual “awareness” and to work for their mutual aid. The Society’s involvement in the 1848 presidential election brought it under the influence of non-artisans associated with the Liberal party, an alliance that was cemented in the 7 de marzo. That election spurred Conservatives to form the Popular Society, a group that articulated the interests of both the Conservative party and those craftsmen who had favored the candidacy of Joaquín Gori in 1848. Partisan confrontations between the Democratic and Popular Societies resulted in the suppression of the latter group, while the former successfully advanced the reform objectives of its gólgota patrons. Gólgotas used artisans as political instruments, just as Progressives had used craftsmen in the Democratic-Republican Society. However, in contrast to the 1830s, by the early 1850s, artisans manifested a clear recognition of their own class concerns and their notions of how Colombia should properly be structured. Many craftsmen perceived that reformers would not favor their demands for a protective tariff and came to view the redefinition of the role of the church in Colombian society as detrimental to social morality and welfare. In time, many Democratic craftsmen joined with draconiano Liberals and disgruntled elements of the military to stage the ill-fated 17 de abril insurrection against the reform package.23
The movement away from reformers evident in the 17 de abril accelerated in the 1855–68 period. The most important similarity between this and the earlier period was the continued appeal to, and use of, tradesmen by political parties. The opportunistic nature of the recruitment process generated feelings of political exploitation among craftsmen, who perceived that only their votes or service as cannon fodder mattered to the political elite. President Mosquera’s anti-church decrees, which threatened what many craftsmen saw as the source of a “moral” life, further alienated tradesmen. The depression that affected Bogotá after the 1859–62 civil war brought economic misery to all social levels, especially the artisan sector. In the face of economic hardship, wartime abuses, and political disillusionment, the Union Society rejected the system that used tradesmen as partisan tools. It tried instead to assert both the value and potential political power of united artisans. Like the Society of Artisans, the Union Society was a general organization established by artisans to defend their special interests, which, by 1866, were conceptualized in a more conscious and ideologically mature fashion than had been the case in 1847. The Union Society focused its concerns on the tariff, the need for industrial education, the shortage of agencies to which craftsmen could turn for social welfare assistance, and a powerful rejection of partisan manipulation of artisans as political puppets. The Union Society earnestly attempted to shape an organization that could meet the needs of mutual protection and thereby alleviate some of the economic pressures upon its members in particular and the artisan class in general. It assumed an essentially non-partisan stance, but tended to side with dissident Conservatives such as Madiedo. Partisan political action was rejected outright by almost all craftsmen, but the 1867 coup attempt by Mosquera and subsequent political turmoil splintered the Union Society, leading to its collapse in November 1868.
No broad-based organization of artisans appeared during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Temporary political groups periodically appeared around elections. The divergent courses of action taken by “elite” and “mass” artisans during this period supports the notion that the shared experiences of the Liberal Reform era that had shaped the artisan class consciousness of the Union Society had changed, which in turn led to distinct socioeconomic experiences. Associations such as the Mutual Aid or Philanthropic Societies reflected the efforts of artisans who had maintained their productive integrity to look after their own social welfare concerns, as did trade organizations. These craftsmen maintained their relationship with the partisan camps, especially with the Nationalists, who most closely approximated their ideologies. With members of the artisan elite seeking to protect themselves, and in the absence of general mobilizations, the mass of less-successful artisans and other popular sectors were left without the means to express their socioeconomic grievances. This may help to explain why the only major incidents of direct action that occurred during the whole of the years under investigation took place during the 1869–1904 period. Since no institutional vehicle was available to alleviate the very real needs of the rank-and-file craftsmen and urban poor, the bread riot of 1875 and the police riot of 1893 attempted to rectify perceived injustices.
The organizations that dominated the final years of this study illustrate the halting cooperation between the artisan, industrial, and wage laborer.24 Mutual aid societies persisted, but their visibility tended to be eclipsed by organizations such as the National Union of Industrials and Workers (UNIO). The National Union reflected the complex nature of Bogotá’s laboring population, which now consisted of artisans, small industrials, and wage laborers. The group attempted to form a coalition of these sectors, but the contrasting concerns of industrials and workers doomed the venture. Organizations such as the Colombian Workers’ Union (UOC), representing increasingly articulate wage laborers, replaced the National Union. Craftsmen probably identified themselves intellectually and socially with industrials, but their socioeconomic situation was undoubtedly more akin to that of workers. Partisan efforts to use labor organizations intensified after the collapse of the Reyes quinquenio in 1909. Liberal followers of Rafael Uribe Uribe appealed to the industrials of the UNIO, while the Republicans favored fledgling socialist groups. However, just as had happened with the Union Society in the 1860s, the parties’ manipulation of workers’ organizations brought about a powerful backlash, which contributed to development of a socialist ideology and the rejection of partisan politics. These trends appeared in the 1919 Workers’ Assembly and saw more forceful expression in the Socialist congresses of the 1920s. The Conservatives also made efforts to mobilize workers on their behalf, especially in the clerical-dominated Workers’ Circle that tried to counter the influence of “foreign” ideologies. This organization did little more than previous informal mobilizations of workers by Catholics, but it demonstrated that Conservative forces would not abandon workers to Liberals and others without contention.
The organization of craftsmen of Bogotá between 1832 and the 1920s took place within a dynamic political system that enabled artisans to seek goals relevant to their social sector. In rejecting an analysis that would treat artisans as singularly responsible for their own organizational destiny, I do not mean to suggest that the special socioeconomic conditions of artisans did not affect their political activity, only that they did not serve as the initial precipitant for those efforts. In reaction to top-down pressures from partisan groups, artisans took advantage of the political opening to pursue numerous objectives originating in their particular social and economic positions, which, with only a few exceptions, differed from those presented by the political parties. The pre-1870s period was characterized by a more homogeneous artisan experience, as well as by threats to many trades in the form of foreign competition, and partisan appeals to the artisans to serve the limited interests of the parties. During this period, craftsmen’s collective interests were voiced through broad-based organizations. When the artisan class fragmented after the 1860s, collective activity tended to reflect the interests of the divisions of the artisanal population and not of the entire craft sector. Mutual aid societies and direct actions characterized these years. As a new wage-labor population emerged in the early years of this century, and as petty industrials replaced craftsmen as the most prominent producers, artisans who had retained their independent status fluctuated in aligning themselves politically with workers or industrials in coalition groups. Craftsmen initially sided with industrials, men who often came from the artisan ranks. Over time, however, craftsmen developed strong associations with wage laborers, insofar as they both shared less promising futures. This was especially the case when industrials fell victim to traditional partisan tactics and as socialism emerged as an alternative to “politics as usual.”
Especially in the last third of the nineteenth century, the middling status of artisans within bogotano society was clearly exposed. A constant class experience, subjected to partisan and socioeconomic pressures, sustained the popularization of politics in the mid-nineteenth century. As elites recoiled from the specter of armed melistas challenging their authority, the Conservative and Liberal parties recruited craftsmen only timidly. As the artisan class lost its cohesion, it could only undertake diluted and uncoordinated action. Not until the early years of the present century did craftsmen again participate in large-scale organizations that attempted to forge class alliances.
Artisan leaders such as José Leocadio Camacho, José Antonio Saavedra, or Emeterio Heredia were central characters in the relationship between the political parties and artisan organizations. They acted as middlemen: their persistence as leaders depended upon their capacity to negotiate for the interests of the two sides. The parties sought loyal followers; as potential patrons they had to offer some form of return to artisans in payment for craftsmen’s clientage. For craftsmen, attention to their specific socioeconomic interests was the price parties were expected to pay in exchange for their support. Many of the grievances that artisans expressed came from the failure of politicians to fulfill their election pledges to craftsmen. It was the function of artisan leaders to seek objectives consistent with the needs of the broader artisan sector and to turn out voters on election days. Leaders such as Camacho—who maintained his preeminent stature for almost fifty years—consistently voiced concerns held by the rank-and-file artisans. By contrast, the fall of Heredia from his leadership role in the Democratic Societies after the 1850s probably lay in his inability to recognize the more conservative tendencies among his fellow craftsmen and from his ardent commitment to partisan politics even after the Melo coup. Although he lived through the 1880s, after 1857 he was unable to mobilize large numbers of craftsmen. Leaders, then, were men who satisfied the interests of political patrons by turning out the vote, but who also satisfied the interests of artisan clients by representing their needs to the parties. The success of a leader seems not to have been in the satisfaction of artisan needs, but leaders had to defend such interests in their dealings with the parties.
A Comparative Perspective
The political activity of artisans in nineteenth-century Bogotá was bound up in the struggle between parties for political domination and the socioeconomic pressures upon artisans. Urban craftsmen throughout Latin America struggled to maintain their status as independent producers against threats originating in the abandonment of colonial economic policies, increased competition from foreign goods, and the emergence of native industrial production. The definition of national political cultures provided varied opportunities for artisans to express their social, economic, and political interests. I suspect that craftsmen’s voices were most audible during the political openings created by competition for power by individuals, parties, or regions. When competition for power was heated, as it often was in Mexico City, Santiago, or Lima, artisans offered elite political associations an additional weapon to be employed in their struggle for political domination. Autonomous political activity seems to have been most frequent around the Liberal Reform period. Toward the end of the period under study, craftsmen were bound up with the early stages of modern labor organizations, even though their voices were sometimes lost to more ideologically outspoken individuals.
Geography and the pace of structural economic change shaped the lives of artisans in distinct fashions. The physical isolation of the Colombian capital buffered bogotano craftsmen from direct and immediate competition with goods produced in the industrializing nations of the North Atlantic region. High transportation costs protected artisans in Bogotá, Quito, Córdoba, La Paz, and countless other cities from less expensive industrial manufactures long after liberals had lowered tariff rates. Craftsmen who lived in coastal areas easily reached by foreign manufactures, such as Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro, suffered more abrupt competition than those living in the less accessible interior.25 The steamboat and the railroad paralleled the factory as threats to artisanal production in Latin America. As these technologies lowered transportation costs, the buffers of geographic isolation were reduced. Indeed, I suspect that the profile of the urban laboring population was as profoundly affected by reduced transportation costs as by lowered tariff schedules, although considerable research is required to verify the hypothesis.
Those areas of Latin America that were earlier and more completely integrated into the world market have been the object of considerably more scholarly attention than countries such as Colombia, Guatemala, or Peru, whose nineteenth-century economic histories probably reflect the more common Latin American experience. A slower pace of economic development or the lack of demand for export commodities correlated to less rapid changes in urban and rural social structures. Conversely, a city such as Buenos Aires, with a strong economy, extensive industrial concerns, reliable transportation connections to Europe and the United States, and an expanding population, had a markedly distinct occupational profile at the end of the nineteenth century than it had had at the beginning. The social structure of Quito, more typical of 1900 urban Latin America, changed less over the course of the century than did its Argentine counterpart.
Craftsmen who had been part of the colonial guild structure entered the nineteenth century with a heritage distinct from that of artisans who had labored in the absence of guilds. In Mexico City and Lima, where guilds seem to have been the strongest, conflicts between masters and journeymen hindered the expression of a cohesive artisan voice.26 In these cities, skilled craftsmen served a clientele enriched by mines, landholdings, administrative coffers, and commercial activities. Guild craftsmen had strained relations with their less wealthy counterparts. In Mexico City, according to one account, property-holding craftsmen “constructed an ideological wall” to maintain the separation between themselves and the propertyless poor.27 In the national period, artisans in such cities were trapped in a paradoxical situation as the abolition of guilds enabled journeymen to establish their own shops and to take advantage of new economic opportunities but, at the same time, undermined guild protective mechanisms at a time of increased economic competition. Cohesive economic agents were reduced and divisive influences increased for some urban craftsmen in the early national period.28
In geographically remote urban centers where guilds had been weak, such as Bogotá, the likelihood of cohesive behavior in the face of economic threats seems to have been greater. By contrast, in the port of Buenos Aires, whose economic structure had developed in cadence with an export economy, many craftsmen in trades that benefited from the international trading system were therefore less vocal protectionists. Spanish efforts to establish a strong guild structure fell victim to internal trade dissension and to competition between those well positioned to take advantage of the Atlantic economy and those who preferred economic protection.29 Thus, when Spanish authorities opened the port of Buenos Aires to free trade in 1809, the artisan reaction was relatively muted.30
The economic liberalization of the mid-nineteenth century engendered widespread political activity by Latin America’s artisans. In Lima, artisans who had earlier been divided because of guild-based economic differences cooperated to win passage of the 1849 Ley de Artesanos, which raised a short-lived tariff barrier around the country, reinforced the dwindling economic power of the guilds, and enhanced the political capacity of craft organizations.31 Artisans in Bolivia echoed President Manuel Isidor Belzu’s call for higher tariff rates in support of “nationalist” economic policies.32 In Buenos Aires, where economic liberalism became standard policy early in the national period, porteño craftsmen, by contrast, raised fewer voices in favor of protective tariffs, although their counterparts from interior cities labored fruitlessly for such measures.33 These efforts seldom reached the intensity of the struggle by artisans of the Democratic Society of Bogotá, but they certainly represented a common response by craftsmen to similar economic programs.
Quite significantly, the era of Liberal Reform frequently brought artisans into the political arena as either pawns or allies of elite political forces. Chilean liberals who had been inspired by the events of 1848 in Europe recruited craftsmen into the Sociedad de Igualidad (Society of Equality), a group that collapsed within three years.34 Paul Gootenberg and Jorge Basadre trace a dynamic recruitment process in Peru, one which, however, ended in the abandonment of craftsmen by the end of the 1850s and the exclusion of artisans from the polity until the end of the century.35 Somewhat surprisingly, Mexican artisans appear to have been quiescent during the reform era, perhaps because the Mexican polity had been at least partially closed to non-elite voices in the beginning of the 1830s, although it certainly expanded somewhat during the reform process. Or perhaps for some, other interests, such as anarchism, diverted their attention from events in the political arena. Numerous accounts attest to the political role of craftsmen in the years before the revolution. In any case, further research is needed on the nineteenth-century Mexican craftsman,36 a statement true of other countries as well.
Craftsmen throughout the Western world assumed a major role in the transition from artisanal to wage-labor-based labor movements. Michael Hanagan’s Logic of Solidarity suggests that labor militancy (as measured by strike activity) in late nineteenth-century France was greatest in settings where either artisans were threatened by technological change or where artisans and industrial workers forged coalitions for joint action. Settings dominated by only industrial workers were less prone to militancy.37 The associational tradition of craftsmen, coupled with a defense of threatened livelihoods, which resulted in artisan/worker coalitions, is also visible in United States labor history.
Yet, while European and United States labor history almost takes this as a given, recent studies of the transitionary period from artisanal to proletariat labor movements in Latin America tend to ignore these insights. Peter Blanchard, for example, recognizes the contributions of artisan mutual aid societies to the Peruvian labor movement, but allows that anarchist ideology, not craft-based organizations, spurred its early militancy. Blanchard gives the Sociedad de Artesanos de la Unión Universal credit for the momentum for the reincorporation of craftsmen into the polity in the 1890s and suggests the importance of political openings for the expression of artisan class interests, but he fails to fully incorporate craftsmen into his account of the Peruvian labor movement.38 Peter DeShazo gives craftsmen even less importance in the early Chilean labor movement, even though the conditions he describes produced artisan political activity in many other countries.39 Argentine craftsmen, both native and immigrant, were instrumental in the formation of labor organizations in late nineteenth-century Buenos Aires, although the pace of that city’s industrialization rapidly diminished their influence.
Several recent studies of Colombian labor history suggest that artisans played a more important role in the twentieth century than has been recognized heretofore. Mauricio Archila’s studies of the 1910-30 period emphasize the artisanal presence in the urban workforce and in the labor organizations of Bogotá, Cali, and Medellín. Archila suggests that artisan mentalities shaped the labor movements through the 1920s, although Gary Long contends that this influence continued until the late 1940s. Long, especially, following the analysis of Herbert Braun, suggests that Jorge Eliécer Gaitán’s ideology of small producers appealed most systematically to urban craftsmen, who constituted a significant proportion of his following. Gaitán’s ideological cornerstone that “no individual ought to work for another” coincided perfectly with the premise of nineteenth-century artisan republicanism and with the ideology of artisans of twentieth-century France.40
The recognition of the continued role of the artisan within Latin America’s twentieth-century workforce and in the range of organized activities undertaken by those workers demands a reconsideration of the modern labor movement. The emphasis upon the industrial worker that shaped early labor historiography contained a European/United States bias. Scholars in those areas of the world that experienced early and full industrialization rightfully focused upon the complex surrounding the industrial worker as a means of understanding the economic, political, and social consequences of industrialization. In Latin America, studies of the industrial workforce became both a measure of “modernization,” that is, how much the area had “progressed,” and a means whereby Marxist critics could condemn the structural dynamic for that “progress.” Analysts from the dependency school, notably Bergquist, have partially corrected this interpretive bias by directing attention at the export worker, a clear recognition of the labor structure that was defined by Latin America’s place in the world economy.41 A linkage of these two schools of thought, focusing upon both export and industrial workers, as Reid Andrews has suggested, offers a more complete understanding of twentieth-century Latin American labor history.42 So, too, does the increased recognition of the significance of household and informal laborers in Latin America’s working population.43 The outlines of a labor history that incorporates the public activities, private lives, and working conditions of export workers, industrial proletariat, household workers, and informal laborers are now visible.
That study is not complete without the artisan however. Most areas of Latin America were not wholly transformed either by industrialization or by the impact of dependent economic relations. Artisans continue to be important members of urban and rural society. Small producers are visible in every city of the region, making a substantial contribution to the urban economy. Craftsmen’s heritage of independent thought has important political connotations, although it seldom receives the attention it deserves. In short, artisans persist as important, though not as numerous, elements of Latin America society. Their lives and organized activities have both historical and contemporary importance.