Debates on the Education and Citizenship of Indigenous People during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century in Colombia

The new republican institutions that emerged after the wars of independence sought to obliterate the jurisdictional, hierarchical, corporative, and territorialized monarchy that characterized the Spanish colonial project and replace it with a legalistic, horizontal, individualistic, and abstract unified nation. This chapter analyzes the project of reconstitution of the political community and how it challenged the local grammars that had organized social difference in the former regime. It focuses on the attempt to implement massive public elementary schools, and the debates surrounding the education of the Indigenous population between 1810, the onset of the political revolution, and 1850, the year when the liberal reforms decreed the freedom to provide and receive education. It argues that these debates constituted a battlefield in which the expectations about Native citizenship changed dramatically. Ultimately, the chapter demonstrates that Indigenous peoples and communities were at the center of the process of nation-state formation and the struggles for citizenship in at least three ways: as objects of pedagogical efforts and eventual citizens; as means to finance the national educational system; and as “others” on which to establish the boundaries of “civilization” by defining who belonged to the political community.