What is it about?
Viscardo’s Letter to the Spanish Americans inaugurates a tradition of nonconformist political writing against Spanish colonial rule during the second half of the eighteenth century, a period characterised by the Crown’s attempt to reorganise several aspects of the colonial administration. Viscardo’s project relied on the assumption that popular support for the cause of independence would be secured in the colonies through ideological propaganda, a tactic that would ignite the already predisposed sentiments of Spanish Americans against their cruel oppressors. Hence his call for the patriotic sentiment of all Spanish Americans to assume their historical responsibility as an independent nation. Yet, his idea of a united country (‘patria’) evaded the complexities of a heterogeneous milieu where deep cultural, social and racial differences made it difficult to define the essence of the human conglomerate that was supposed to represent the ‘nation’ and its ‘people’. In a deeply hierarchical and racially stratified society economically dependent on slave work force, Viscardo’s project was doomed to perpetuate the social division of the Spanish colonial system he wanted to replace. In fact, Viscardo’s plans for emancipation included the instauration of a monarchical form of government, the only one that, in his opinion, would be appropriate to the character of the Spanish American people. Inevitably, this excluded a de facto participation of Indians and other subaltern groups from its future politico-administrative organization.
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Why is it important?
While Viscardo’s Letter has received considerable critical attention, there is a tendency to bypass certain aspects of his thought, one which was not exempted from social prejudices and political miscalculation. This article draws attention to this circumstance by highlighting the incompatibilities between Viscardo’s over-enthusiastic project for political independence and the reality of a continent from which he had been detached for many years.
Perspectives
As an ex-Jesuit living in exile after the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from all Spanish territories in 1767, Viscardo had a political as much as a personal motive in designing a project that would cut the colonial ties between Spain and the New World. However, his design was out of touch with reality and would have hardly been taken seriously by the inhabitants of the New World had a British-backed expeditionary force reached the coasts of Chile and Peru, as he had planned (since the 1780s, Viscardo had spent all his energies trying to convince the British Foreign Office to support his plans for the emancipation of the Spanish colonies but the volatile nature of Anglo-Spanish diplomacy had made this impossible). While Viscardo’s Letter may have stirred a sense of creole patriotism some years after his death (the Letter was published posthumously in London by Francisco de Miranda, the Precursor of the Venezuelan Independence), the political scruples of the ancien regime based on social privileges and racial distinctions were too strong to be dismantled by mere ideals of freedom, justice and equality. If Viscardo spoke of the existence of a united Peruvian nation based on strong fraternal links between creoles, Indians and mestizos, this ultimately obeyed a purely political need: that of representing his native country as a harmonious and mature social body capable of conducting its own commercial and administrative undertakings. Yet, this presumed social concord was by no means a palpable reality nor had the Indians and mestizos ever consented to be ruled by the creole elite, whom Viscardo saw as the legitimate guarantor of social order and economic prosperity. It is ironical that in the struggle for South American independence that would ensue some years after the publication of the Letter, Peru would be the last territory to break the colonial ties with Spain, and this only because of the pressure of the military campaigns led by men such as Simón Bolívar, José de San Martín, and Antonio José de Sucre against the dominant royalist stronghold. It was never easy for the Peruvian creole elite (on which Viscardo had so much depended for his project) to take sides with the Patriot rebels nor to accept the ideals of democratic republicanism that begun to germinate in the colonies after 1810.
Humberto Nunez Faraco
University College London
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This page is a summary of: Between political emancipation and creole hegemony: Viscardo’s Letter to the Spanish Americans (c. 1791), History of European Ideas, January 2017, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/01916599.2016.1261256.
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