Race, Integration, and Progress: Elite Attitudes and the Indian in Colombia, 1750-1870

I N the nineteenth century, elites in various Spanish American countries sought to create integrated nations by incorporating Indian populations into the general body of the citizenry, economically, socially, and politically. Through much of the colonial period, the Spanish crown had tried, with only partial success, to maintain a policy of separation between the Amerindian population (la repilblica de indios) and the dominant Hispanic culture (la repi'iblica de espainoles). In the latter half of the eighteenth century, Spanislh separationist policy began to give way to a new integrationist current. In the republican era, as creole elites sought to integrate and legitimize new polities, the ideology and policy of incorporating Indians into the general body of the citizenry became fully dominianit. The postindependence incorporative process took two major forms: I) symbolic incorporation, through legislative declarations that Indians were to be considered citizens, with equal rights and duties before the law;' and 2) economic integration, through the conversion of non-alienable Indian comilmunity lands to individual property. The broad pattern sketched above is well known to Latin American historians. The purpose of the present essay is to provide a sense of the specific content, or texture, of the process as it worked in Colombia. The essay contains three distinct but related segments. It first traces the development of integrationist ideas in the late colonial period; it thensketches some features of republican efforts at economic incorporation through the division of Indian community lands, from 1821 to 1850. A final section