FREE ESSAY ON LATIN AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

LATIN AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

The Independence of Latin America was a process caused by years of injustices,
discriminations, and abuse, from the Spanish Crown upon the inhabitants of Latin America.
Since the beginning the Spanish Crown used the Americas as a way to gain riches and
become greater in power internationally. Three of the distinct causes leading Latin
America to seek independence from Spain, were that Spain was restricting Latin America
from financial growth, (this included restrictions from the Spain on international trade,
tax burden, and laws which only allowed the Americas to buy from Spain), The different
social groups within Latin America, felt the pressure of the reforms being implicated on
them by the Spanish Crown. They wanted freedom to decide how to run their home without
the crown deciding for them what they should do. The Wars of Independence in Latin
America, The Bourbon Reform, was one form of reforms pushed by the people of Latin
America towards Independence. The Bourbon bureaucracy engineered unprecedented campaigns
to extirpate the vices of the People and to inculcate in them the new virtues of hard
work, sobriety, and proper public propriety (Voekl, 183). Spain used the Americas as a
way to rise from economic low and to take their riches from them. The role of America
remained the same to consume Spanish exports, and to produce minerals and a few tropical
products. In these terms comercio libre was bound to increase dependency, reverting to a
primitive idea of colonies and a crude division of labour after a long period during
which inertia and neglect had allowed a measure of more autonomous growth ...With the
result that Spain itself was seen as an obstacle to growth. Secondly, in one of the great
ironies of Spanish, the elite was divided by on their decision to push towards revolution
within. Those creoles pushing towards revolution to free themselves from Spanish rule
felt that the Spanish crown was only abusing, discriminating and holding them back form
growing economically. The elite felt they were not part of a revolution seeing themselves
only as people who were All those part of the social context of Latin America, felt
differently within Indians, on side of the Spanish King, though great abuse fell through.
Nonetheless, the Indians of New Spain (and elsewhere) enjoyed a set of legal privileges,
exemptions, and protection which significantly interferes with their complete integration
into colonial society, and kept them in a legal bubble of tutelage ruptured only with the
advent of independent Mexican nationhood in the third decade of the nineteenth century
(Van Young, 154). The point here is that where these and other legal and administrative
remedies were applied in favor of the Indians of colonial New Spain, they were applied in
the kings' name. Furthermore, religious and civic ritual of all kinds constantly stressed
the centrality of the Spanish king to the colonial commonwealth, and his benevolence and
fatherly concern with the welfare of his weakest subjects (Van Young 155). Situated as
they were between the Spaniards and the masses. The creoles wanted more than equality for
themselves and less than equality for their inferiors (Lynch, 44). The creoles
discriminated against those in lower classes than themselves. Though they wanted freedom,
they did not wanted to lose their status, within society, only wanting to gain position.

Bourbon reforms In Spain, the Bourbon monarchs were convinced that the Spanish empire
could not play an important role in global politics if it did not redress its
characteristic state of social and economic backwardness. In order to address these
problems, it was necessary to have profound understanding of the situation both on the
Peninsula and the colonies (Viqueira, 37). The thinkers of the Enlightenment were
developing a type of knowledge that was useful to the state in its implementation of
economic, political, and social reforms. But it also served to create a new form of
legitimation (Viqueira, 37). The Regulations of 1786, boldly modern and markedly
repressive, were the appropriate means for the creation of a theater that corresponded to
the ideals of the Enlightenment (Viqueira, 50).The Regulation of 1786 dealt with many
other details that touched upon diverse subjects, but all related to the imposition of
good order in the theater (Viqueira, 50). Brandishing reason, which they considered to be
all-powerful, the enlightened thinkers wished to reform society, to clear out its
abasement, and to lead it along the road to progress (Viqueira, 36). To avoid losing its
public, the coliseum had to set aside the plays of the Enlightenment, which reflected
good taste, and scheduled plays that appealed to the common people (Viqueira, 89). As
shown the common people, rejected the reforms that the Spanish crown was imposing on
them. They rejected their regulations, and lead them to rebel against the Spanish Crown.
I contend that these reforms involved more than the promulgation of new tax laws, the
trimming of corporate privileges, and, and the rationalization and expansion of the
bureaucracy; Reformers through new institutions like the Alcaldes de Barrio - engaged in
radical social engineering to produce a more rational and productive citizen (Voekl,
183). Before 1810, two distinct, rival, and incompatible forms of society, two differing
kinds of civilization existed in the Argentine Republic: one being Spanish, European, and
cultivated, the other barbarous, American, and almost wholly of native growth. The
revolution which occurred in the cities acted only as the cause, the impulse, which set
these distinct forms of national existence face to face, and gave occasion for a contest
between them, to be ended after lasting many years, by the absorption of one into the
other (Sarmiento, 54). But what my object requires me to notice, is, that the
revolution-except in its external symbolic independence of the king- was interesting and
intelligible only to the Argentine cities, but foreign and unmeaning to the rural
districts....Outside the cities, the revolution was problematical affair, and so far as
shaking off the kings authority was shaking off the judicial authority, it was
acceptable. The pastoral could only regard the question from this point of view
(Sarmiento, 56-7). The contradiction that produced the explosion of revolutionary
insurgence originated not from the base of society but from its summit: the schism
between criollos and Spaniards. The inferior status of the criollos -in politics, the
administration, and the military, not in the sphere of wealth - did not conform to the
status of the kingdom of New Spain within the empire. New Spain was a kingdom like no
other kingdoms, but the criollos were not treated as equal to their kinsmen born in
Spain. This allied to the revolt of the landless peasants was the cause of the wars of
independence (Paz, 17) In the economic sphere, Spain removed from Mexico more riches than
she returned  (Paz,17).
Nationalism: New Spain is a good example of this common place: from within the bosom of a
vast philosophical, political, and religious universalism - imperial Spain- emerged the
criollo sense of a distinct identity that evolved into Mexican nationalism. (Paz, 30).