Parámetros Químicos Medidos en Laboratorio

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Antioqueños have been wont to compare themselves to, and to have a sense of rivalry with, people in Bo- gotá. But perhaps a more interesting comparison is of Antioquia with the Cauca region to its south. Antioquia boasted important gold-mining sites at various points throughout the colonial period, but its period of overwhelm- ing dominance came late, beginning to build toward the end of the eighteenth century and becoming particularly evident in the nineteenth century.

By contrast, the Cauca region was important throughout the colonial pe- riod. The region had been a leading gold producer practically from the time the Spanish had established themselves in Popayán in 1536. Furthermore, in contrast with the agricultural limitations of the rugged Antioquia, both the Popayán region and the flat expanse of the Cauca Valley to its north offered evident potential for the production of food. The agricultural and miner- alogical bounty of the Cauca made it an attractive focus of Spanish settle- ment, and Popayán emerged early in the colonial era as the political and ecclesiastical, as well as the economic, capital of the West. Popayán in the colonial period thus developed an aristocracy that came to be based on gold mining powered primarily by black slaves and agricultural estates making use of the labor of both slaves and the surviving Indian population in the western flank of the central cordillera.

By the 1820s and 1830s Popayán, and the region as a whole, had lost much of its economic weight, in large part because of the effects of the strug- gle for independence. Pasto had been devastated, mainly by republican re- pression, during the 1820s. Both around Popayán and in the Cauca Valley, contending armies had recruited much of the available labor force, includ-

ing not a few slaves, while many other slaves escaped during wartime dis- order. Warring armies also stripped haciendas of cattle, horses, and food. During the independence war food became so scarce in the Cauca Valley that it was no longer able to supply the mines in the Chocó and slave gangs there tended to disintegrate. Recurring regional conflict in the early 1830s brought further disruptions, and in his rebellion of 1840–1841 General José María Obando, along with all of the other predations that attended civil war, filled his ranks with slaves. The mobilization of slaves and free blacks by Obando and others brought not only the further erosion of slavery but also some cases of slave rebellion during the 1840s. Racially configured class an- tagonism and violence continued a central feature of the Cauca’s society and politics in subsequent decades.

The continuing decline of slavery until its abolition in 1852 further weak- ened gold mining in parts of the Cauca region, whereas Antioquia, more de- pendent on free labor, recovered quickly after the independence crisis. Estimates at mid-century by the Comisión Corográfica suggest that the per capita value of Antioquia’s regional trade may have been more than five times that of Popayán and the Cauca Valley.

Yet aristocratic Popayán remained significant politically, far beyond its size or its economic strength, for much of the nineteenth century. The Mos- queras, the Arboledas, and others in the Popayán elite with whom they in- termarried retained their distinction among the political leadership of a society that was at once republican and aristocratic. During the nineteenth century, four Mosquera brothers occupied eminent positions in New Granada. Two were presidents, Joaquín (1830) and Tomás Cipriano (1845– 1849, 1861–1863, 1863–1864, 1866–1867). Manuel María Mosquera was a perennial ambassador in Europe (1838–1849), and his twin brother, Manuel José, became archbishop of Bogotá (1834–1853).

Despite the damage wreaked in the independence period, Popayán in the 1820s still retained some of the glow of its colonial glory. A British visi- tor, Colonel J. P. Hamilton, was dazzled by Popayán and its aristocracy. He found the city’s buildings “much superior to those of Bogotá,” particularly the mansions of the “few very rich families.” He was especially impressed by the homes and estates of the Mosqueras and the Arboledas. Joaquín Mos- quera had been in England and “tried to imitate [English] habits and cus- toms as much as possible.” And at Japio, José Rafael Arboleda’s estate near Quilichao, everything was beautifully ordered. The bedrooms were deco- rated “completely in the French style” and were stocked with French and British toiletries found only “among rich families in Europe.” Even the slave women who panned the gold, according to Hamilton, were “neatly dresssed in white petticoats with blue ornaments.”

There was, however, a grittier side to the Mosqueras and Arboledas that Hamilton did not notice. A hint of the less idyllic: The much respected Joaquín Mosquera, considered in the political class the very emblem of judg- ment and moderation, in 1824 severed a tendon in his finger, with subse-

quent gangrene and amputation, from “a blow to the tooth of a Negro.” And while some in these families lived in style in Popayán, others might be found in crude huts in the depressingly primitive Chocó, looking after family min- ing enterprises.

In any event, if the Mosqueras, Arboledas, and their kind were the ele- gant ornaments of the Cauca, they were not completely representative of even the upper class in the rest of the region. Particularly in the Cauca Val- ley north of Popayán, some landowners with large tracts of land lived among their slaves and tenants in a relatively simple manner, and even in rude con- ditions, whether in town or country, their relative wealth visible mainly in the quantities of their land and cattle. They occupied a beautiful valley, fer- tile and well-watered, but whose economic possibilities were constricted by the surrounding mountains that walled them off from potential markets. In the first half of the nineteenth century the region’s only products that could reach farther markets were its gold and cinchona bark, to which tobacco was added after mid-century. Improved transit across the Isthmus of Panama by an American railway constructed in the 1850s began to strengthen the in- centive to link Cali more effectively to the port of Buenaventura on the Pa- cific. But fuller integration of the region into world markets had to await the construction of the Panama Canal.