“The Knife of the State:”
Popular Politics, Modernity and State Power in Nineteenth-Century Mexico and
Colombia
James E. Sanders
Utah State University
Political scientists, and to a lesser extent some historians, lament the weakness of
the nineteenth-century Latin American state. However, state power posed a curious
contradiction for the region’s poor and working class peoples. Subalterns often needed a
state capable of defending their interests and rights as citizens in the face of hostile local
potentates eager to assert their own economic and political dominion. Yet, as states in
Mexico and Colombia actually gained power in the late nineteenth century, these states also
grew more confident in their ability to ignore subaltern demands (if not actively repressing
them).
Around mid-century, the still weak nation-states in Mexico and Colombia attempted
to legitimize themselves not through their success as states (since they were constantly
failing to provide order or basic service), but via their triumph as nations—as a community
of citizens enjoying republican rule. That is probably overstating the planned nature of this
project; however, in the public sphere, a sense of Mexico and Colombia’s future as
democratic republics destined to remake the world had certainly emerged. As one
Guadalajarense paper argued, Mexico “represents the interests of the New World, land of
democracy, combating the interests of the Old World, land of tyranny and human
degradation.”1 The Americas, due to their adoption of democratic republicanism were at
“the vanguard of civilization,” at the forefront of modernity, but a modernity located in the
Americas and defined by republican politics.2
Subalterns heard this language and appropriated it as their own, claiming
citizenship and insisting the state act to protect their rights and interests. Demanding
repeal of a liquor tax, Cali’s Democratic Society argued that in “republican countries” the
executive must act in moments when the pueblo demanded succor, and the State President
needed to prove he was a “magistrate fit to lead a free people.” If the Legislature expressed
outrage at his bypassing its authority, he could comfort himself knowing he enjoyed “an
approbation that is more valuable, that of the sovereign pueblo.”3 The indigenous village of
Huimilpan in Mexico wrote to the President in 1856 demanding help in reclaiming land
from a hacendado: their strongest argument was that the President was beholden to them
as a servant of the nation: a “republican magistrate” should dedicate himself “to serve the
Pueblo who elevated him.”4 In Mexico and Colombia, subalterns thought the democracy
Liberal elites promoted as making them modern, and thus justifying their rule, should have
real meaning: the state should administer justice as demanded if popular sovereignty
mattered.
To maintain any legitimacy, states needed to at least attempt to respond to popular
demands, and at times did. In Colombia, subalterns, at times, succeeded in forcing the state
to administer justice by abolishing slavery, ending vagrancy laws, securing citizenship (for
adult males regardless of race or class), protecting indigenous communal landholdings,
ending monopolies and taxes on aguardiente, and fending off land speculators. However,
weakness (along with elite interest) often limited states’ ability to respond, and both
Liberals and Conservatives all agreed the state needed to be stronger. However, even
1
around mid-century, some dissenters knew that an increase in state power could have
nefarious results. The Chilean letrado Francisco Bilbao thought state power, “the knife of
the state,” was antithetical to popular sovereignty; he argued it was European despots who
prided themselves on powerful states, which only suppressed popular aspirations and
weakened citizenship.5
Eventually, in Mexico and to a lesser extent Colombia, those states did grow
stronger, under the projects of the Porfiriato and the Regeneration. And, of course, those
newly empowered states did not respond by aiding subalterns, but by ignoring and
repressing them. In order to do this, they had to change their legitimizing language of
modernity, from one of democratic republicanism, to one of order and economic (rather
than political) progress. In 1884 La Libertad criticized old attempts to create a model
democracy in Mexico: “The disrepute of the old revolutionary utopias increases daily. Those
who still pursue an unrealizable democracy, fight with arms whose point has been broken
by the iron-plated armor of reality.”6 Modernity and civilization (and thus a state’s
legitimacy) were now completely redefined around economic development: “relations of
industry, contract, and commerce that [are] the urgent necessity of modern life.”7
Democracy and republicanism no longer mattered, were indeed a hindrance. If necessary to
secure order and develop the economy, “a healthy dictatorship” would suit Mexico fine.8
Critically, this entailed a new relation of the state to popular classes. While republican
modernity had rhetorically celebrated the people and the nation, Mexican Regenerators
sought to elevate the state above the nation: “The State is not a servant of the nation to
whom it owes services in exchange for taxes. The State does not offer services, but, rather,
exercises its own functions, since it is…superior to society.”9
Subalterns, however, were very slow to accept this new ideology, sensing it held
little place for them but as quiescent laborers for capital. Indians from a village near Celaya
wrote to President Díaz to demand justice in a land dispute. They applauded the new
President for carrying “the standard of Liberty and Justice,” but also implicitly warned that
the “sovereign pueblo” was “the guardian of our institutions that watches over the
fulfillment of our rights.”10 This language, however, no longer resonated with the dominant
ethos of modernity in the public sphere, and Díaz’s state now had the power to ignore
subaltern demands. Elite petitioners knew better, emphasizing order and material progress
in their requests.
Stronger states might only be of use to subalterns if they continue to legitimize
themselves via an ethos of democratic republicanism. But that had already been abandoned
in both Mexico and Colombia by the 1870s and 1880s. Erika Pani has astutely noted how
the Imperial, Juarista and Porfirian states all sought an increase in state power, thus
questioning the Porfiriato as an important break in Mexican history. However, it was a
major intellectual and cultural break in how the regime sought to legitimize itself and how
the public sphere imagined modernity. I argue that how the public sphere envisioned
modernity and how states’ legitimized themselves were vitally important for subalterns’
relations to the state and to their calls for justice. The strength of the state, so pined for by
nineteenth-century elites and twenty-first century political scientists, seemed to grow
inversely to the inclusion of subalterns as meaningful citizens in new nations.
2
El Voto del Pueblo (Guadalajara), 29 June 1862.
Speech of Manuel Ojinaga, Chihuahua, 16 September 1861 in La Alianza de la Frontera Suplemento (Chihuahua), 5 October 1861.
3 The undersigned members of the Democratic Society (over 600 names, most signed for by
another) to State President, Cali, 14 October 1866, Archivo Central del Cauca (Popayán), Archivo
Muerto, paquete 65, legajo 67.
4 Trinidad García and 5 others to Ecsmo. Señor, México, 30 August 1856, Archivo General de
la Nación (México), Instituciones Gubernamentales (Siglo XIX), Fondo Justicia, vol. 547, exp. 13, 106.
5 Francisco Bilbao, “El evangelio americano,” in Las obras completas de Francisco Bilbao,
vol. 2, edited by Manuel Bilbao (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de Buenos Aires, 1865), 334.
6 La Libertad (México), 27 December 1884.
7 José Ramon Leal, “Cartas íntimas a mi amigo Don Emilio Castelar: Séptima,” El Siglo Diez Y
Nueve (México), 15 September 1884.
8 José Ramón Leal, “Cartas íntimas a mi amigo Don Emilio Castelar: Séptima,” El Siglo Diez Y
Nueve (México), 15 September 1884.
9 La Libertad (México), 3 September 1884
10 C.D. Rodríguez for Antonio Medrano and 15 others to President, Pueblo de Santa María del
Monte del Puente de la Concepción, 19 May 1877, Archivo General de la Nación (México),
Instituciones Gubernamentales (Siglo XIX), Fondo Secretaría de Justicia, vol. 69B, exp. 1402.
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