Watching a marvelous Netflix series - an epic biography of Simon Bolivar, I have to note how many parallels there are to our Revolution and yet in how many ways we differed.
South America is our close cousin, so to speak. We share so much history and geography and yet how little history the average American knows about South American or Mexican history.
Really really short intro (in my own prose style): Simon Bolivar united many rebel factions of the under classes in several provinces in Spanish controlled South America. He pulled together over-taxed farmers, small merchants, and enslaved African plantation workers. Together, under extremely unbalanced conditions in regard to organization, supply, weaponry, experience and discipline, these rebel factions under Simon Bolivar defeated one of the great empires of the time, the Spanish Empire and drove them from South America.
So therein lies one of the fascinating divergences. Bolivar's army was largely populated by African workers freeing themselves and joining up. The structure of enslavement must have been much different here to cause so few African soldiers in the American Rebellion. Although I do know enslaved people in the plantations of our South were used as pawns by the British with false promises. It may be that we (or I) just don't know enough about that subject to have encountered information about it. I know of a few instances here and there of a regiment as in Rhode Island, but Bolivar's entire army was completely integrated. I do not recall an African officer, however; I would have to look into that.
The Colonial Revolution in South America, which included Venezuela, Columbia, Peru and Bolivia, happened two or three decades after our own and lasted thirteen years. Africans were freed fifty years after the Revolution, about the time of our own Civil War. There is awareness of the injustice in the tv series and sometimes a Creole or Indigenous soldier will ask an African one if he has been freed or if he freed himself.
Confession: I have not yet read any on-line reviews of the authenticity of the history in this Netflix series BOLIVAR, however, generally I can be trusted to go on and read from several sources when I get interested in something and the South American Revolution is very interesting. I think I started to get interested after a novel by Isabelle Allende which was set in Santo Domingo/Haiti. Then I saw several documentaries about the Cuban Revolution and Che Guevara, so BOLIVAR was a natural transition.
An aspect that I find engaging, is the portrayal in BOLIVAR, of the lives of ordinary people (if any such thing can be said of a telenovela type show as this). But any glimpse back into history that is alive and moving, in color and plausible costuming) is a big treat. It is intently interesting to observe the gender politics of the time and place as well, not that things were that much better for women in the US in the last decades of the 1700's and the beginning of the 1800's. Our rebellion was yet to get off the ground. In both countries no woman had autonomy either legal or social. Legally, marriage itself, for women, was a kind of indentured servitude "to death" before it ends. The more entrenched patriarchal social environment of the Catholic Spanish countries however, was always a more complete and brutal suppression of women.
The writers of BOLIVAR in their attempt to give us women some same gender interest have made many clever female characters who use the traditional movie and literary seductive charms to get information and influence men in power. That is the only road to freedom. How explicit it is portrayed in the overtly transactional dialogue in the series makes it all so obvious. The male character in power promises to see to it that something is done that a woman wants done, and she in turn promises to have sex with him.
The Mid-Atlantic former Colonial colonies in which I grew up and which had so much influence over the society of the Revolutionary period here, were Quaker colonies and had the influence of Quaker values of equality. Even the puritans were not as restrictive as Spanish society after the period of Inquisition era Spain.
It has been a long slow climb out of gender and racial domination to the place we have reached, however, we have come far and have far to go.
Happy trails through history, the woods, books, however you travel!
Jo Ann
wrightj45@yahoo.com
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