To Colombianize Colombia: Cultural politics, modernization and nationalism in Colombia, 1930--1946

Abstract

This dissertation examines cultural politics as a crucial component of the program of political and social reform promoted by the Liberal governments that ruled Colombia from 1930 to 1946 seeking to modernize the country. Side-by-side policies like governmental support to unionized workers, labor legislation, and a constitutional reform that ascribed to property a "social function," the Liberals established an unprecedented campaign to include the masses into the national project through cultural programs. This dissertation looks at the formulation, implementation, and limits of the Ministry of Education's cultural programs, including educational cinema, free cultural conferences and concerts, traveling schools, radio broadcasting, music education, archaeological research, folkloric surveys, hygiene campaigns and cultural centers for workers. An exploration of governmental records, institutional archives and press debates evidences the complex and often contradictory relation that the Liberals established between the state and the masses. Some cultural programs like public performances of folk music and dance or the institutionalization of anthropological studies in the country exalted the masses as the bedrock of the nation, furthering the democratizing and inclusive aspect of the Liberal political program. Others like educational cinema, cultural conferences or concerts of classical music concentrated on the diffusion of "high" culture in order to empower the masses through education. Liberal use of culture as an uplifting and "civilizing" tool tended to portray the masses as backwards, uneducated and in need of the guidance of the more able and progressive Liberal reformers. While seeking to give the masses the elements for active and prolific political and economic participation through education, cultural politics were also patronizing. These contradictions in Liberal cultural politics are representative of the limitations of the Liberal reformist project as a whole. Cultural policies were not isolated policies disconnected from other fields of intervention, but rather a central part of Liberal reformism. This approach to the Liberal Republic complements our understanding of this period of Colombian history by assessing the limits of its modernizing project, the redefinition of the relation between the state and society, and the consolidation of democracy and citizenship.

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