In February 1800, members of the white elite of the Captaincy General of Venezuela, a peripheral but vital Spanish American province, addressed a letter to the king of Spain in which they sought permission to establish a printing press in Caracas, the capital city of the province. In the letter, they argued that the establishment of such a press was fundamental for the economic and commercial development of the Captaincy:
With a printing press, the experienced farmers will communicate with other fellow countrymen all the knowledge they have obtained in their fields in order to improve crops; artists will do the same for the benefit of their class, and other citizens will feel encouraged to share the product of their chores.Footnote 1
The petition was probably motivated by the difficulties that most Venezuelans encountered when trying to acquire books from the Iberian peninsula but, above all, the document showed the deep interest these Venezuelans had in fomenting the circulation of local knowledge that, in accordance with eighteenth-century Spanish reformism, could bring beneficial transformations into Venezuela.Footnote 2 The importance they afforded to local knowledge shows that these Venezuelans were well aware of the relevant differences that separated the metropole in the Spanish Peninsula from the American province, while also recognising the need for Venezuelans to became producers—not only receptors—of “useful” knowledge.Footnote 3 Months later, they learned that the Spanish Crown had denied them permission for a printing press. Without clear explanations for restricting this privilege, Venezuela became one of the last provinces of Spanish America to possess the technology.Footnote 4 It was not until 1808, in the midst of the Spanish monarchical crisis due to the Napoleonic invasion, that Venezuela finally obtained permission to have a printing press, one that was initially used to print texts supporting the Spanish king.Footnote 5
Without significant mine centres and with a scarce and dispersed but resilient indigenous population, Venezuela was never at the core of the initial colonial interests of Spain; for decades the province was considered marginal to the economic and geopolitical interests of the Iberian empire. The reasons why the printing press came so late to Venezuela have been the subject of interesting debates; some scholars argue that by the time Venezuela acquired economic relevance for the Iberian empire—due to the increasing production and successful commercialisation of cacao around the 1770s—the menace of the circulation of enlightened and revolutionary ideas in the Atlantic world triggered the Crown's concerns about establishing printing presses in regions that were potentially vulnerable to foreign influence. With an open and vast coast facing the Caribbean Sea, Venezuela was one of those colonial provinces that needed close vigilance and control by the metropolitan power.Footnote 6 The lack of printing presses in Venezuela or of formal intellectual societies, however, did not prevent the Venezuelan public from exchanging ideas and participating in an incipient yet dynamic public sphere during the Age of Revolutions. Between 1790 and 1800, diverse political movements erupted across coastal towns of Venezuela, exposing how Venezuelans from different socio-racial groups were well informed on current revolutionary movements and debated about the republican ideals enshrined by these movements, while envisioning new political possibilities for the province.Footnote 7
Following Benedict Anderson's idea that the press was a crucial instrument for the formation of political communities, many historians have insisted on the idea that low literacy rates and the absence of printing presses in certain regions of colonial Latin American represented important limitations for the transmission of knowledge and the circulation of information among the population; these historians often assume a linear and straightforward relationship between the local production of printed texts, the emergence of formal spaces for political debate, and the shaping of a public sphere.Footnote 8
The case of late-colonial Venezuela has been often at the centre of these debates. Historian Jean-François Guerra, for example, questioned Anderson's idea that a national community began to be imagined in Venezuela at the end of the eighteenth century with the help of printing presses. Correctly, Guerra argues that during this period there were not local presses nor formal political or academic societies in Venezuela, therefore the possibility for the development of political communities was minimal. For him, the emergence of early forms of public opinion in different colonial cities of the region took place a little later, between 1808 and 1814, and as a consequence of the crisis that the Napoleonic invasion generated in Spain. Guerra's main argument is that the Spanish crisis of 1808 was what sparked a higher demand, both in the metropolis and the colonies, for information and the subsequent proliferation of newspapers and of public spaces for political debate.Footnote 9 How do we explain, however, the development throughout the last decade of the eighteenth century of political movements in Venezuela that expressed calls for republicanism, liberty, and racial equality? What category would allow us to analyse the emergence of spaces and opinion groups in which individuals of diverse socio-racial groups envisioned social equality and political participation? Although Venezuelans were not imagining a national community yet, it seems clear that despite the lack of printing presses and formal literate societies, they were able to give shape to an incipient public sphere that was not grounded or dependent on a local newspapers or elitist intellectual societies, not moulded by an idea of a national state, but that was based on local networks of circulation of texts, informal reading circles, and semipublic debates triggered by the theatre of the revolutions, one that was visible and palpable for Venezuelans. Historians who keep placing the printing press at the centre of their analysis are at risk of becoming victims of the written and printed character of their historical sources and, perhaps unintentionally, end up neglecting the many other diverse and creative ways that people in the past—and in the present—interacted with different texts, produced knowledge, debated ideas, and put them into circulation.Footnote 10
In this article I argue that the lack of printing technology did not prevent the Venezuelan public, living in the fringes of a colonial world but very exposed to the Atlantic revolutions, from exchanging ideas and opening new spaces for political debate. In fact, I propose the opposite: the lack of printing centres and of identifiable intellectual nuclei might have allowed different socio-racial groups to create original networks of information sharing and give shape to an emergent public sphere that often passed unnoticed by colonial state agents. Officials and church representatives certainly feared that the circulation of revolutionary texts that flooded the coastal region would make Venezuelans vulnerable to ideological contagion; the lack of printing presses, the absence of formal booksellers or bookstores, and the prevalence of smuggling activities along Venezuela's Atlantic coast made efforts at controlling and censoring reading materials much more difficult. This colonial context seemed to have complicated the controlling efforts of Spanish colonial agents, allowing for the creation of a contested and malleable public sphere that rested in the hands of diverse social and political groups, and definitely challenged the state.
The Colonial Public Sphere as an Unfinished Process
Today most scholars who challenge the normative character of Habermas's paradigm widely recognise that his category of a public sphere continues to be “a functional paradigm for analysing historical change,”Footnote 11 one that captures the teleological progression from monarchic to modern-republic nation-states (especially in Europe), a process that entailed the emergence of spaces of intellectual activity and the formation of a civil society, whose political existence grew increasingly autonomous from the power of the state.Footnote 12 Historians, however, have openly argued that intellectual exchange and the circulation of challenging political ideas also spread in societies with no printing press and among a variety of social groups that could not be strictly classified as “bourgeois.” François-Xavier Guerra and Annick Lemperiere, for example, argue that Habermas's model left aside other significant media of information sharing such as pasquinades and pamphlets, and even popular forms of communication such as rumours.Footnote 13 Arguing that the public sphere emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, historians of early modern Europe and the Americas, for example, have not only questioned Habermas's historical periodisation, but have also critically examined the social and political uniformity of the public sphere, showing that it was socially heterogeneous and politically multidirectional.Footnote 14
In historical studies of processes of state formation and the transition from colonialism to modern republicanism, historians of Latin America have also offered important contributions to the public sphere debate. Pablo Piccato, in particular, has offered a rich analysis of what he has defined as the “historiographical map of the public sphere in Latin America,” and explores the usefulness of the term to analyse the intellectual debates during the wars of independence and the emergence of republicanism and modern political communities in nineteenth-century Latin America. For Piccato, the concept of public sphere remains valuable to understand relevant connections between meaning, communication, and politics and their interaction with cultural changes and processes of identity formation in Latin America, but he reminds us that, above all, “the public sphere refers to an unfinished historical transformation rather than a stable structure”Footnote 15 that entails different processes—the development of capital markets, the expansion of literacy, increasing circulation of the printed word, and the emergence of social life—evolving at different rhythms.
For the case of late-colonial Latin America, this idea proves particularly apt, as the public sphere that emerged around—and even before—the Spanish monarchical crisis of 1808 was based largely on colonial institutions and interests, and was socially diverse.Footnote 16 Historians Pablo Piccato, William B. Taylor, Víctor Uribe-Urán, for example, have argued that in Spanish America the public sphere began to take form during the Age of Revolutions, was always politicised, and was politically fragmented.Footnote 17 Historian Elías José Palti, for example, shows that even during the process of independence, Latin American emerging public opinions expressed the hope of national unity but were, in fact, the product of fractious polities that cannot be easily categorised as conservative, liberal, republican, or monarchical but that integrated critical debates about what those political projects entailed in each region and for different social groups.Footnote 18
In my opinion, late-colonial Venezuela represents an interesting case of study within Picatto's historiographical map of the incipient public sphere in colonial Spanish America. Here, I argue that during the late-colonial period, semiliterate forms of knowledge transmission and informal networks of information sharing that emerged in urban centres of Venezuela allowed for the initial formation of a public sphere, one that passed unnoticed to colonial agents, but that departed from reformist discourses and practices that the Spanish empire had first put in place: it depended on colonial networks of commercialisation and communication; its participants were inspired by the ideas of social and educational reformism that spread from Madrid; and it reproduced the social-racial dynamics and tensions of the Spanish American colonial world. The public (often semipublic) debates that emerged in Venezuelan urban centres at the end of the eighteenth century and the varied texts that accompanied them were far from unitary: they stemmed from different regions, were led and created by varied socio-racial groups, and expressed diverse—even contrasting—political narratives. The nascent public sphere of late-colonial Venezuela would be a place of contestation, one that certainly questioned the colonial state and its institutions, and although it was not formally grounded on intellectual societies or the operation of a printing press, allowed for the development of new state policies.
In late-colonial Venezuela, diverse semiliterate groups of people created a myriad of strategies to follow and disseminate information: some borrowed and copied books, others translated foreign broadsides and produced handwritten pasquinades, while others held public readings or performed songs. These practices gave shape to a creative and socially diverse platform for the circulation of political knowledge that escaped the control of colonial institutions. During the late-colonial period of 1780–1810, more groups of Venezuelan society, especially plebeian artisans and mixed-race and black labourers, took part in this emergent yet vibrant public sphere that grew despite the nonexistence of a printing press.
In the following pages I will describe and analyse three social scenarios that allow us to understand the nature and character of the incipient public sphere that developed in late-colonial Venezuela and how it responded to the constraints of the colonial world. First, I will look into the materiality of the public sphere, specifically the ways Spanish and European printed materials circulated in the colonial context and were, more or less, shaped by imperial constraints and infrastructure of communication, but also intervened by colonial subjects who sought to broaden their reach. Understanding the materiality implies also analysing processes of production and reception of texts that in colonial Venezuela entailed a second scenario: the circulation of ephemeral texts and the increasing social expansion of literacy. Last, focusing on performativity, I will study how performances such as public readings, debates, and collaborative writing of political texts gave shape to a republican conspiracy—the conspiracy of La Guaira in 1797—a movement that had important repercussions for the crisis of colonial rule in Venezuela and that definitely set the ground for the appearance of new state policies that sought to reduce local socio-racial tensions and diminish the transformative effects of the Atlantic revolutions.
The Spanish Book and Its Colonial Interventions
During most of the colonial period, books and printed texts were very expensive and difficult to acquire in Venezuela because most of them had to be directly imported from Spain. These circumstances had two effects: first, most of the printed texts that circulated in colonial Venezuela were produced in Spain, and second, only a small group of people belonging to the economically privileged white elite could afford to buy Spanish books. White Spanish and creole elites, colonial officials, and the clergy were traditionally the social groups who possessed the majority of important libraries in the urban centres of the province. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, a more stable and open book market, a consequence of a stronger local economy and the gradual development of a capitalist market, brought members of lower social groups of colour, such as artisans and labourers, into more regular contact with the printed word.
The great majority of the printed materials that arrived in Venezuela throughout the eighteenth century came through the same colonial commercial networks that brought bottles of wine and olive oil, textiles, and tools from the Iberian peninsula to the province. In 1728, the Crown authorised the founding of the Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas, a Basque company that was granted the monopoly over the Venezuelan cacao trade with Spain and was also charged with commercialising local products and managing all European imports such as textiles, iron, agricultural tools, foodstuff, and books.Footnote 19 The incipient book market of late-colonial Venezuela, then, emerged in the hands of the Company and was limited by the same commercial restrictions that other products suffered in Spanish America. In the case of colonial Venezuela that meant that most of the books and printed materials that circulated were manufactured in Spain.
By the mid-1700s, however, the Crown enacted a string of new reforms designed to make the empire's administration more effective and to improve economic productivity in the colonies. As part of these reforms, in 1765 the Crown started a process of trade liberalisation that allowed different ports of Spanish America to trade legally with one another. By the 1780s it was possible for Venezuelans to have access to a more diverse variety of editions printed in different European printing centres and even in North and South American cities, but overall the Venezuelan colonial book market was clearly dominated by Spanish editions.Footnote 20 As we move towards the end of the eighteenth century, the presence of Spanish books on politics, law, agriculture, sciences, and education increases significantly while the presence of religious books drastically decreased.Footnote 21
The stabilisation and opening of the market also meant that an increasing number of people in different coastal cities of Venezuela were able to order books from Seville and Cádiz. Some merchants, residents of Venezuelans ports, also began to offer new titles and more editions to a selected clientele in their homes or shops, while popular shops, commonly called pulperias or bodegas, also offered hundreds of inexpensive Spanish printed material, such as librillos (booklets) on saints’ lives, religious catechisms, and cartillas Footnote 22 to a growing public.Footnote 23
The absence of local print shops and the often difficult and the expensive shipment of books from Spain (or Europe) to Venezuela, however, did not prevent Venezuelans of more modest means from accessing printed and hand-copied materials: public auctions (remates), an expanding circuit of book lending, and a widespread practice of transcription of texts represented some of the strategies that made written texts accessible to a larger group of people in this colonial world. For those less privileged readers, public auctions of private libraries offered a good opportunity to acquire books at accessible prices. People in the urban centres learned by word of mouth about titles and prices offered at public auctions and attended them frequently. These public auctions also became semipublic spaces where people exchanged information about new titles, expressed their literary tastes, and made book recommendations.Footnote 24
New and old titles were publicised by diverse groups of people who gathered in taverns, pulperías, barbershops, and the street market to talk not only about what they were reading, but also about European news and Atlantic politics.Footnote 25 Concerned city-dwellers often denounced semipublic political debates to priests and officers of the Inquisition. Subsequent investigations by colonial agents reveal yet another complex network of circulation of texts that connected local readers with the printed word: a network for lending books.Footnote 26
It is, for example, very common to find notes at the end of post-mortem inventories clarifying that there were books out on loan that had to be returned to the original owner before the final appraisal.Footnote 27 Priests, university professors, and students regularly lent their books to students, family members, or friends, or invited them to read at their homes.Footnote 28 During the period of 1795–1810, when officers of the Inquisition frequently visited the homes of individuals suspected of possessing forbidden books in order to confiscate them, many of them found that suspects avoided further investigation by alleging that the said book was “running freely” from one house to another. The same book could spend weeks going around a neighbourhood, and many readers were even interested in making their own copies, partial or entire, of a particular book that they often accompanied with their own notes.Footnote 29
In the colonial context of Venezuela, the printed world was certainly dominated by Spanish editions produced in the metropole, but as these same books navigated local networks of used-book markets and book lending, they suffered several transformations in their format and content. The lack of a local printing press and the existence of an informal web for sharing printed materials encouraged practices of hand-copying and translation. Seminary and university professors, for example, offered their books to students, who copied parts of them.Footnote 30 Many readers became also copyists and translators of particular excerpts of texts containing ideas they wanted to preserve after they had returned the book to its owner or passed it on to another reader.Footnote 31 Caracas's and La Guaira's private libraries contained not only printed but also many manuscript books. Even local representatives of the colonial power—a governor, priests, and university professors –faced the difficulties of accessing printed books and ordered local transcriptions of those books they wanted to preserve in their libraries.Footnote 32
Although they resorted to practices of copying and translating books, colonial officials and members of the church were especially concerned about this common practice because they believed that subversive individuals could spread copies of prohibited texts in order to incite insubordination. In fact, numerous denunciations to the secretary of the Inquisition claimed that certain individuals possessed handwritten copies of French prohibited books.Footnote 33 The colonial state and the church could do little to control these networks of circulation of texts; colonial authorities could not single out places for investigation (e.g., the printing shop or the bookshop); books and texts were not being produced in a specific location but were instead produced and reproduced simultaneously in several private studies, where every reader and copyist became either a translator, a transcriber, or an author and made their own decisions on what parts of the books to copy, to translate, and to preserve.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the establishment of a small but more stable book market and the popularity of public auctions had brought readers (as well as listeners or potential readers) closer to printed materials. The lack of printing presses and bookshops did not prevent local readers from accessing books or connecting with each other to talk about books; instead it encouraged them to create effective networks for sharing, lending, and transcribing books. The radical changes promoted by the Atlantic revolutions and the flood of news and rumours about these events that circulated in the Venezuelan coastal towns would certainly increase people's need to use all possible means to access printed materials and texts that could keep them well informed and up-to-date on new political developments in Europe and the Americas. Venezuelans had devised strategies to access books and printed materials, and they were ready to use these same strategies to engage with the political debates of the time.
Subversive Ephemeral Texts and the Expansion of the Colonial Public Sphere
During the age of the Atlantic revolutions, networks for the circulation of imported books and local manuscripts also served to spread hundreds of newspapers, revolutionary pamphlets, and broadsides from Europe and the Americas—in particular, Spain, France, Saint-Domingue, and Trinidad—that were smuggled by travellers, traders, refugees, and spies into the vast coast of Venezuela. While these seditious texts mortified local officials and some groups of the white elite, they aroused the curiosity of the common people who, regardless of race, education, and status, did not hesitate to read them or to listen to their contents in public meetings.Footnote 34
As I argue in my book Tides of Revolution, ephemeral texts, including newspapers, broadsides, pamphlets, proclamations, and letters, were perhaps the most important media for late-colonial Venezuelans who relied on mediators and semiliterate practices to access the written word. In a colonial society with limited access to books, broadsides and booklets facilitated the exchange of ideas and information among underprivileged groups and offered a bridge between the oral culture and a written world largely controlled by the white elite and the representatives of the colonial power.
Most historians agree that the eighteenth century witnessed the rise of a new generation of newspapers and political journals that extended the range of political commentary and reflection in Europe and North America.Footnote 35 In Spain, enlightened reformism promoted the growth of periodical publications: the production and circulation of newspapers in different cities of Spain expanded greatly, in number and diversity, throughout the entire eighteenth century. The content of these Spanish newspapers was varied, but most of them provided their readers with information on European court gossip, military and diplomatic reports, political and moral essays, news about the ships and American goods coming into the European ports, scientific findings, poetry, and lists of new printed editions and book recommendations.Footnote 36
Within the colonial context, the Spanish newspapers and periodical publications also favoured the development of more flexible and extensive circuits of communication between the Spanish metropole and the American provinces. Travellers to Spanish American cities and ports frequently carried several European newspapers and gazettes in their baggage, but many of these urban centres also witnessed the emergence of their own periodical publications and journals.Footnote 37
Unlike other Spanish American residents, Venezuelans did not enjoy local newspapers that could offer visions and opinions of their own realities, however, a close look at local inventories of private libraries and travellers’ baggage reveals that they had regular access to Spanish and foreign newspapers and other periodical publications. Approximately 18 percent of the post-mortem inventories in Caracas (1770–1810) mentioned newspapers, journals, and/or periodical publications such as semanarios (journals). If one takes into consideration the low value of newspapers and journals and how little importance they should have had in a testament, this number seems rather high. In most of these cases, the owners had collected entire collections of periodical publications, which had often been bound together and archived in specific sections of their libraries.Footnote 38
La Gaceta de Madrid was in fact one of the most popular newspapers found in late-colonial Venezuela. Authorised by the Crown, this Spanish newspaper offered relevant information about the latest events in European and Atlantic politics, even providing its readers with detailed news on the developments and progress of revolutionary movements, such as those in America, France, and Haiti. It is not surprising to find in historical records that residents of Caracas reported to the authorities that they learned about the French and the Haitian Revolutions in the pages of la Gaceta. Colonial officials believed this was an absolute neglect on part of the Spanish printers who seemed unaware of the particularities of their colonial world, where political information could have different reverberations than in the metropole, especially in a province where more than 45 percent of the population were people of African descent.Footnote 39
Spanish newspapers and journals were not the only available source of information. Venezuelans also had access to foreign newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets that were smuggled through Caribbean connections into the mainland. Several written texts from France, Saint-Domingue, and Trinidad—in printed or in manuscript form—were collected by officials in different coastal towns of Venezuela. From 1793 until 1808, officials continuously reported the ease with which these papers circulated in the region. Among the texts that circulated in the coastal towns, there were political proclamations and letters, like the Spanish translation of the “Réponse de la Convention nationale aux manifestes des tyrans ligués contre la republique, proposé par Robespierre au nom du comité de salut public, et décrété par la Convention dans la séance du 15 frimaire (an II, 5 décembre 1793),”Footnote 40 a document that was translated and locally distributed by navy captain and port merchant Juan Xavier Arrambide in the town of La Guaira, or the “Instrucciones que debe servir de regla al Agente Interino Francés destinado a la Parte Española de Santo Domingo,” a text written by Mr. Roume de St. Laurent, the French agent appointed, after the Treaty of Basel in 1795, to Spanish Santo Domingo in order to organise the local civil administration.Footnote 41 Several copies of crucial political texts like The Social Contract (1762), the Declaration of Independence of the United States (1776), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), the Last Will of Louis XVI, the king of France (1792), and the Declaration of Independence of Haiti (1804) found their way to Venezuela, where they even suffered discursive and narrative adaptations to make them more comprehensible to the population at large, while eluding attempts at control and censorship by both the state and the church.Footnote 42
These ephemeral texts arrived into the mainland ports and cities through different routes: first, Spanish and foreign visitors and also temporary travellers brought books, gazettes, and newspapers with them and shared them with locals in private meetings and discussion groups;Footnote 43 and second, smuggling was also a very effective way to introduce texts. Venezuela had a coast wide open to the Caribbean Sea, and foreign merchants and local traders easily smuggled boxes of prohibited books, pamphlets, and booklets. These prohibited printed materials circulated locally because of internal and external—specifically Caribbean—networks of circulation of texts that colonial agents could not effectively control.Footnote 44
Agents of the Inquisition found many prohibited texts, pamphlets, and broadsides in the libraries of white priests, rich planters, military officials, and merchants, but their main concern was that these ephemeral texts could reach subordinated social groups of colour, such as mixed-race pardos, free blacks, slaves, and Indians, who according to them lacked the intelligence to differentiate good texts from bad, and therefore might misuse these seditious texts.Footnote 45 In the colonial context of Venezuela, the public sphere was grounded on a wide variety of texts and social networks of information that escaped the control of the state, but it was also subjected to important debates about who in the colonial world was entitled to partake in the dynamics of knowledge transmission and information sharing.
Colonial authorities believed that reading might sow “erroneous ideas” among subordinated groups, encouraging them to challenge the institutional order, the authority of the colonial government, and even the sovereignty of the Crown. These fears of ideological contagion of lower-status groups reached a peak in the Spanish American provinces during the years of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), a movement that spread information about racial confrontation, the abolition of slavery, freedom, and racial equality throughout the Atlantic world. But, how could Venezuelan pardos, free blacks, and enslaved people—who were denied any possibility of a formal education by the colonial government—access these written materials?
Not everyone in Spain and Venezuela believed that access to print should be restricted to the elite. Possibly inspired by eighteenth-century Spanish reformism, some educated members of the colonial white elite, specially professors and teachers, believed that artisans and skilled pardo workers —who were not allowed to attend public schools or universities—should learn to read and write in order to improve their own condition and contribute to the country's progress.Footnote 46 They were also convinced that these artisans and skilled workers should use literacy to transmit their own knowledge and improve the economic and social conditions of the province.Footnote 47 Local proponents of changes for the colonial educational system were probably inspired by Spanish reformists in Madrid who promoted public education as an antidote to illiteracy and ignorance, argued in favour of creating schools to teach peasants, artisans, and urban labourers to draw, read, and write, and defended the need for the cultivation of useful fields of knowledge that could improve the economic and commercial circumstances of the empire.Footnote 48
Although none of these Spanish reformists living in the metropole addressed the need to educate the indigenous population or the people of African descent in the American provinces, when translated into the Spanish American context their ideas implied that groups of colour, who actively participated in economic and productive activities, should have access to literacy and partake of this much-needed social and cultural change. Following this reformist drive, concerned teachers in Caracas advocated for improving the quality of public schools—traditionally attended by whites—and for creating schools for mixed-race pardos (Escuelas de pardos) in the cities of the province.Footnote 49 In 1786 and 1794 respectively, two white local teachers, José María Buñuelos and Simón Rodríguez, advocated for the creation of these schools and proposed their ideas to the city council; but during the Age of Revolutions, not many members of the council seemed interested in pursuing a project that seemed to imply empowering lower groups of colour and improving their social conditions in a particularly tense moment. Unlike Spain, in the colonies, popular literacy could have unexpected consequences that the colonial state wanted to prevent at all costs.
Despite the several restrictions that the colonial state and Venezuelan white elite imposed on popular education, people of African descent found access to literacy: some wealthy pardo families could afford to hire private tutors who taught students to read and write, but surprisingly, an important number of pardos learned to read and write at the shops of barbers and shoemakers, or thanks to the assistance of priests, artisans, and musicians who informally offered their educational services to pardo children.Footnote 50 Although the vast majority of the poor mixed-race pardo and black populations of Venezuela struggled to get an education, historical sources suggest that many of them, especially those who lived in urban centres, had access to a rudimentary instruction in informal and unofficial schools that afforded them access to literacy.Footnote 51 Despite official prohibition, groups of pardos received a basic, improvised, and austere education, and probably took part in a semiliterate culture where brief written texts intermingled with images, dialogues, songs, and performances that became structural in the formation of this colonial public sphere.Footnote 52 Semipublic spaces such as barbershops and artisanal workshops not only served as underground schools; these were also dynamic spaces for socialising where teaching, exchanging knowledge, and debating ideas took place.Footnote 53 These spaces of socialisation fostered a variety of literary practices that in the end contributed to the emergence of an incipient public sphere open to diverse socio-racial groups with different interests and political ambitions.
Texts, Readings, and Networks of Information in the Conspiracy of La Guaira
On 13 July 1797 the captain-general of Venezuela, Don Pedro Carbonell, first heard the news about an evolving republican movement in which hundreds of people from Caracas and La Guaira were supposedly implicated. Rumours of the conspiracy travelled through circuitous channels. Manuel Montesinos y Rico, a merchant in Caracas and a participant in the movement, told his barber, Juan José Chirinos, who was also a pardo soldier, that a group of people in La Guaira and Caracas was planning a republican movement based on the principles of equality and liberty. Inviting his barber to join the movement, Montesinos provided Chirinos with a copy of a republican song, the “Soneto Americano,” and encouraged him to copy it and pass it along to others who might join the movement.Footnote 54
In the port town of La Guaira, the movement had a significant number of supporters, and barbers and artisans were among the social groups most attracted to such a political project. Montesinos probably thought that the pardo barber in Caracas would be eager to share the news with those of his class and status. Unfortunately for him and his collaborators, Montesinos was absolutely wrong.Footnote 55 By midnight the news of the existence of a republican “conspiracy” had already reached the ears of the captain-general of Venezuela.
According to investigators, the main goals of the republican movement were various, but included the establishment of free trade, the abolition of slavery with compensation to slave owners, the elimination of Indian tributes, and the abolition of taxes (specially the estanco, taxes imposed on foodstuff, and commercial alcabalas). The movement also sought to foster harmony among races: whites, pardos, Indians, and blacks were seen as “brothers in Jesus Christ” and as equals under the law.Footnote 56 Though the main leaders, Manuel Gual and José María España, were both white creoles, they obtained considerable support from a group of pardos and poor whites, small merchants, royal officials, soldiers, artisans, and free blacks from La Guaira and Caracas. All of these actors participated in complex networks of information through which ideas of revolution, equality, liberty, and republican principles were spread.Footnote 57 Analysing these networks and the kind of texts that collaborators produced allows us to understand the importance that performativity had in processes of production and spreading of information and political opinions that gave shape to this anti-colonial movement.
Official records of the inquiry reveal that the insurgents of La Guaira translated foreign writings and produced a considerable number of written texts designed to instruct their followers in the republican principles of the movement. Among these documents were local texts, such as proclamations of insurrection, poems, stories, letters, and songs, as well as translations and adaptations of foreign texts like the Declaration of the Rights of Man, as well as revolutionary texts from France, Spain, and Saint-Domingue.Footnote 58 The local texts produced by diverse subjects in La Guaira provide a vantage point for analysing the insurgents’ strategies for imparting political knowledge and galvanising their supporters, the kind of narratives and discourses they used to call the attention of colonial subjects, and how they devised the political outcomes of the movement.
Despite the evident socio-racial tensions that existed between whites and people of colour in colonial Venezuela, the conspiracy of La Guaira was planned by a socially diverse group of people who together created a network for the production and distribution of texts: white creole port officials illegally collected foreign papers and books in the port, while other white creoles shared their books, transcribed them, and organised dinners and walks to talk about Atlantic and local politics; a French barber and a mestizo pharmacist translated texts from French into Spanish and circulated their transcriptions, a Spanish prisoner, Juan Bautista Picornell, accused of organising a conspiracy in Spain and held in the fort of La Guaira, wrote political stories, dialogues, and political catechisms to be read out loud to potential contributors,Footnote 59 as mixed-race pardo militiamen coordinated meetings in different semipublic spaces to share news, discuss ideas, and plan a republican government.
Authorities discovered that the barbershop of the mixed-race pardo Narciso del Valle, located in the port of La Guaira and close to the pardo militia barracks, served as the central place were organisers met to produce, reproduce, and diffuse texts that the insurgents had written to recruit people to join the movement. There in the barbershop, but also in the military barracks, the streets, and in the private houses of collaborators, readers and listeners got together and transposed texts from one medium to another: written messages (letters, newspapers, and pamphlets) were read aloud to others who did not know how to read, and were even transformed into poems or songs, while oral messages and stories were recorded in writing and passed along in improvised pieces of paper.Footnote 60
The texts written by Picornell and spread at the barbershop aimed at creating a consciousness of how the Crown had oppressed its vassals, insisted on the idea of responsibly defending the American fatherland (patria americana) and legitimated the idea of rebellion as a resource to establish revolutionary equality and fraternity with the Christian love for others and divine justice.Footnote 61 These texts that circulated in La Guaira were written using distinctive narratives: fictional biographies, epistles, short stories, and dialogues designed to attract the black and mixed-race population, written in a style and discourse appropriate for reading out loud, using familiar narrative formulas that made them easily digested, memorised, and retold orally.
In one text, entitled “Letter from a Grandfather to His Grandchild,” Picornell offers an imaginary epistle from a grandfather in Cádiz (Spain) to his grandchild who lives across the Atlantic in America. The grandfather describes the difficulty of living in Spain, where “bad government” oppresses the poor people, and where agriculture, commerce, and the arts are devastated by the tyranny of the king. He comments that Americans, too, experience oppression and misery, but that he has heard that a new political movement will soon liberate them.Footnote 62 With this text, Picornell sought to foster a sense of empathy between peninsular and American Spaniards, both of whom are depicted as victims of the monarchical system. He optimistically placed his hopes of change in the Spanish American colonies, inviting Spanish Americans to be protagonists of their own political destiny.
It is interesting to note that these manuscripts produced and spread in La Guaira provided readers and listeners with something no other foreign revolutionary texts had offered before: an intimate awareness of their own lived reality. With no printing press, people in Venezuela frequently complained about the seeming irrelevance of peninsular books, French treatises, and North American proclamations to their geopolitical situation, but the writings of La Guaira seemed to have ended these problems, speaking directly to local concerns. Collectively, insurgents of La Guaira created texts that sought to adapt republican ideas to local social and economic circumstances, and through innovative narrative strategies made them accessible to a semiliterate population of colour. In this context, the La Guaira movement's social networks developed around multimedia sources of information that were crucial to the formation of an incipient public sphere, one that “brought together autonomous individuals who believed in their social and cultural equality.”Footnote 63
Conclusions
In the colonial reality of Venezuela, the effective circulation of the written word and the subsequent emergence of a public sphere did not depend on printing presses, local newspapers, or the existence of intellectual societies. As discussed here, the incipient public sphere that emerged in Venezuelan coastal regions around the last decade of the eighteenth century was highly politicised and closely linked to revolution-era discourses and developments, but still structured by colonial reformist narratives, institutions, and socio-racial divisions.
Although the Crown never authorised the establishment of a press, books, newspapers, pasquinades, and pamphlets found their way to Venezuela. The colonial commercial networks that existed between Spain and Venezuelan privileged the domination of Spanish books and newspapers that found new uses in the colonial world. The lack of presses encouraged dynamic practices of book sharing and lending, text transcription, and manuscript production that ended transforming the books and newspapers into new and different texts, but that also entailed the expansion of social spaces of reading, discussion, and debate; Venezuelans seemed aware that in order to keep themselves up-to-date in the literate world with current information they needed to rely on social networks of friends, teachers, neighbours, and family members. These diffuse networks of readers and listeners did not depend on the colonial state and its institutions, in fact, they actually escaped their control. Colonial subjects were also able to introduce many foreign and prohibited books, newspapers, and pamphlets that suffered the same fate of Spanish books as they were transcribed and, in many cases, assembled with other texts.
The flexibility and easy circulation of ephemeral texts also allowed for a social expansion of literacy. Although traditionally the colonial state and its political and social elites had put restrictions on literacy education for colonial subjects of lower social standing such as indigenous groups and people of African descent, those ideas became obsolete to eighteenth-century Spanish reformists, who promoted education for all the classes and encouraged the productive participation of artisans, labourers, and peasants in the configuration of a new country. Spanish reformism was deeply felt in the colonies, and in Venezuela it became a springboard for local teachers to promote the formal education of pardos; these same teachers discovered, however, that pardos and free blacks had already contemplated alternative systems of education to provide their children with basic literacy skills. Broadsides, pamphlets, and letters became a medium comprehensible to the large “semiliterate” population of the urban centres of Venezuela.
All the printed materials circulating in the region were produced abroad, but colonial readers and writers transcribed and translated many of these, contextualised them, and gave them new meaning for local consumption, creating a fertile ground for political debates and actions locally. Those who were not afforded a formal education or did not have the means to buy expensive books could read and use these texts to participate in an emerging sphere of public opinion, where ideas about abolitionism, racial equality, and republicanism were debated and the Spanish monarchy was also openly criticised. These networks for the circulation of texts might have been, then, the first steps that Venezuelans took to create social public spaces where autonomous individuals discussed matters of common interest while successfully evading the control of colonial institutions. The Spanish monarchical crisis of 1808 and the subsequent process of independence opened a new era in the configuration of the public sphere: one that constructed a solid bridge between the private realms of domesticity, the publicity provided by the operating of the press, and the emergence of a new state.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Emma Hunter, Leslie James and Lara Putnam for their guidance and thoughtful comments as she wrote this article, and to the two anonymous readers who offered valuable suggestions and thoughtful criticism. Some of the historic evidence presented in this piece has been drawn from my recently published book Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela.
