The Spanish-Mexican Intellectual History of the Pueblo: A Usable Past

• In Event: Sexuality, Conflict, Community: Towards a Latine History of the Present

Abstract

“El pueblo unido jamás será vencido.” The people united will never be divided. It’s a political slogan that is heard at any Latine political rally. We might think that the idea of the pueblo is a simple folkloric expression of Latine culture. But there is a very long, if buried, history of the Hispanic concept of the pueblo. My conference paper will outline two related senses of the pueblo, one political and the other spiritual. I want to argue that these two senses of the pueblo have become latent, continuing to work at the level of the unconscious, subliminally, and they continue to shape Latine communities today. If we are to critically understand the Latine community today, we must unpack this long buried history of the pueblo.

On April 6, 1813 the Spanish-American residents of Texas did the unthinkable. Having defeated the Spanish royal forces, they declared themselves independent as a republic. A council came together and wrote their declaration of independence and a constitution. Texas would become the first province in all of New Spain to declare itself a republic. Indeed, even in 1821 when Mexico finally declared itself independent, it would do so as a constitutional monarchy, not as a republic. But as a republic in 1813, Texas rejected the notion that sovereignty rested in a monarch. Instead, they revered the community, the pueblo, as the origin of sovereignty and boldly declared that only the pueblo could determine its future.

The declaration begins: Nos el Pueblo dela Provincia de Texas “declare that …we are free and Independent; and that henceforth all legitimate authority arises from the Pueblo in whom this right Only belongs.” Historians had long been baffled by this 1813 declaration of independence. Most historians had dismissed it, seeing it as a half-baked attempt to mimic the United States or France. But the authors of the declaration had not made a mistake. While both the U.S. and Tejano declarations proclaimed independence in the name of the “people,” in English, “people” is understood to be composed of discrete persons. But the Tejanos had not used the language of individual rights or of the citizen. Instead, they insisted on speaking on behalf of “nos el pueblo.” And this would make all the difference.

Beginning with this 1813 declaration of independence, the paper traces the genealogy of the pueblo, returning to ostensibly illiberal Catholic political thought from the Counter-Reformation. In doing so, we can track a critique of possessive individualism, a concept that never developed or took hold in the Hispanic world in the way it did in Protestant societies. Through the concept of the pueblo and its cognates, Catholic Hispanics posited a spiritual sense of community. This spiritual sense of community would be reconfigured during the Spanish-American wars of independence. This time, the pueblo would be outfitted with an explicitly political sense of community. The paper concludes by making the case for using intellectual history as a way to animate our present. It can help us reimagine our past, borrowing concepts and tools that can allow us to imagine a better future.

Author

• Raul Coronado, UC Berkeley