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https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2023.2281702

Writing the Liberal City: literature and the contested

experience of economic change. Bogotá 1849–1870
Constanza Castro Benavides
Departamento de Historia y Geografía, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia

ABSTRACT
Costumbrista literature has been repeatedly analysed as a strategy as well as an
expression of the process of nation formation in nineteenth-century Latin
America. However, it is also a powerful lens for exploring and interpreting
the urban visions of literate elites during the turbulent period of liberal
reforms and expansion of a capitalist market economy. Largely dismissed as
picturesque and inconsequential, in its apparent simplicity, Costumbrismo
casts light on how liberal and conservative elites attempted to capture the
daily effects of the market economy, and express their anxieties about the
increasing commodification of everyday life, the growing obsession with
money, and the changes in their own experience of time. As I argue here, as
writers tried to capture the experience of the market economy and the
changing experience of time, they helped shape partisan differences and, in
the process, became political elites.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 3 November 2021; Accepted 13 October 2023

KEYWORDS Costumbrismo; political economy; capitalism; city; experience of time; nineteenth century;
Colombia

Modern transformations have been preceded by the writings of philosophers,

novelists, and poets, despite the Bismarck and Napoleons, who, though they
laughed at the ideologues, became in the end the executors of their utopias
and dreams. (Rafael María Mesa)1

At the end of the nineteenth century, Colombian conservative writer José

María Cordovés Moure wrote about the ascent to power of the Liberal Party
half of a century earlier, and about its impact on the urban experience.
According to him,
… until 1849, when the political and social transformation of this country
began, we still lived in colonial times. It is true that there was no New
Granada, no Viceroy, no Oidores but if one of those Spaniards who emigrated

CONTACT Constanza Castro Benavides ccastrobc@uniandes.edu.co Departamento de Historia y

Geografía, Universidad de los Andes, Carrera 1 No. 18A-10 Edificio Franco Oficina 423, Bogotá, Colombia
@ConstanzaCBC
© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 C. CASTRO BENAVIDES

in the year 1819 had returned … he would have found the city to be exactly the
same.2

It was from that year on, he said, that Bogotá began to change. The 1849
abolition of the state tobacco monopoly decreed just one year earlier, pro-
duced the first export boom in Colombia, while the opening of steamship
navigation along the Magdalena River and the reduction of customs tariffs
stimulated the import and export trade. Money flowed in the city as never
before, and recently acquired capitals were invested in rural lands, new enter-
prises, and the consumption of new products from Europe and the Americas.
Just a decade later, according to Cordovés, the very changes, that ‘had
brought the isolated capital closer to civilization’, had also destroyed it.3
Since the ascent to power of the Liberal Party, foreign ideas and customs
demolished the local culture, greed for money had taken precedence over
any other interest, and the old social order was at risk. The economic
growth fostered by the agroexport economy had produced new needs for
credit that could not be fulfilled because there were no banks in the
country and the Church – the only existing credit institution – had just
lost its economic base with the expropriation ordered by President Tomás
Cipriano de Mosquera in 1861. ‘Santafé had started to fall into decrepitude
– Cordovéz wrote – and since the city did not want to die yet, the political
cataclysm of 1860–1863 finished it off.’4 The war initiated by Mosquera in
1860 to recover the power lost by the Liberal Party aggravated the fiscal
crisis, affected trade, and produced a generalised sensation of insecurity in
the city, especially among conservatives. If Cordovéz had accepted the
ascent of the Liberal Party in 1849 with some reserves, he considered its
renewed triumph after the war as the beginning of the urban debacle.
Alarmed, he concluded that the city had entered its final agony, and ‘its
funeral, like Alejandro’s, was bloody’.
Cordovéz’ opinion of the changes experienced in Bogotá was not reserved
to the conservative sector to which the writer belonged. Liberals shared an
optimistic vision of the city during the years following the Liberal Party
ascent to power in 1848, as well as a critical view of its failure decades
later. As liberal Miguel Samper wrote in 1867, ‘of all the capitals in South
America, Bogotá is the most backward, and cannot bear comparison to
Caracas, Lima, Santiago and Buenos Aires’.5 In less than two decades these
writers’ visions of the city had shifted from optimism to frustration. The
decrepitude that Cordovéz refers to and the backwardness that Samper
alludes to at the end of the 1860s reveal the anxieties of the lettered elites
from the Conservative and Liberal Parties during the great wave of liberal
reforms, and the influence of their values, interests, and their own experi-
ence, on the interpretation of change: Dangerous for the former and insuffi-
cient for the latter. The works of conservatives like Cordovéz, and also of
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liberals like Roldán, Samper, or Santander seem to show what Marshall

Berman considers as an inability to make oneself ‘at home in a constantly
changing world’, in the midst of the unavoidable transformations brought
about by the growing impetus of capitalism.6 They also show how, in this
dramatic process of change, some of them were strongly attracted by the
promises of the future and the impetus of progress, while others, chose to
preserve, and faced with the alternative of ‘catching-up’ time, chose to
delayed it.7
This article approaches costumbrista literature, as a manifestation of the
process of capitalist urbanisation in the mid-nineteenth century, when a
wave of liberal economic reforms swept across Latin America, definitively
changing economic institutions and daily experiences. I analyse costumbrista
accounts to understand how nineteenth-century capitalism was imagined
and experienced by Bogotá’s urban literate elites; how they grappled with
the changes that were occurring in the city; and how their works, even the
most critical, helped to place the country’s imminent integration into a
new economic order in the local imagination. By so doing, I see costumbrista
literature also as a contested terrain where elite members disputed their own
class and political identities and, in the process, helped shaping partisan
differences.8 As the article shows, these writers participated in what some
authors – ranging from the philosophy of history, conceptual history or criti-
cal geography – saw as a fundamental reconsideration of history: from one
based on a moral and political correspondence between past and present,
to another based on the continuous production of the new.9 Their works
show then, how temporal orientation was deeply linked to political ideol-
ogies and utopias.10
Largely considered a conservative and inconsequential genre, more ‘pic-
turesque than transcendent’, costumbrismo has gained recognition as a
representation of a profoundly changing time.11 In Latin America’s aca-
demic circles, costumbrismo began to be seen few decades ago as both a
strategy and an expression of the processes of national formation in the
nineteenth century.12 Recently however, scholars like Felipe Martinez
Pinzón have argued, that using the nation as an epistemological framework
has rendered invisible the transnational nature of costumbrismo and its
binding role in transatlantic modernity and the liberal project.13 Following
this idea, other studies have shown how the conventions of costumbrismo,
while profoundly local in content, were actively circulating across the
Atlantic and throughout post-independence Latin America.14 José
Escobar, for example, has argued that ‘the artistic representation of
reality as the result of a programmatic observation “of the commonplace,
of the daily and habitual”’ – highly criticised before – is precisely ‘the
great discovery of modern literature’.15 Costumbrismo is seen, then, as
the gateway to a new literary world that did not resist but rather
4 C. CASTRO BENAVIDES

appropriated and, at the same time, constructed modernity in the nine-

teenth century. Studies on the transnational and modern nature of costum-
brismo have also contributed to encouraging the analysis, albeit incipient,
of the close relationship between costumbrismo in Latin America and
the changes that followed the rise of the capitalist market economy in
the mid-nineteenth century.16 Today the previously underestimated cos-
tumbrista literature, could be seen as a rich and complex source for analys-
ing how economic realities were expressed not only through numbers, but
also through emotions, fears, and desires.17
First, I analyse the antagonistic representation between the city and the
countryside in costumbrista literature, as well as the role of economic
changes in the construction of this opposition. Then, I delve into the criti-
cisms of costumbrista writers to what they considered as a growing desire
for ‘novelties’ and the ‘whims of fashion’ in the new generations. As a
response, they defended inherited traditions, the value of objects preserved
over time, and their own ‘raizalism’ which converted immobility into a
virtue. Finally, I focus on usurers and bond traders as literary types. In cos-
tumbrista works, they represented the pernicious effects of an economy
encouraging immediate gratification. The credit system they dominated
allowed resolving problems of debt, crippling liquidity or sumptuary
desires with future work. As part of a larger contested political terrain,
these representations, I argue, expressed the link between temporal orien-
tation and ideology, and were central to elites’ class and political disputes
that emerged and also contributed to shape a changing political economy.
Since 1858 most costumbrista writers from the Conservative and Liberal
Parties, were united around the literary journal of El Mosaico. By the
eighteenth seventies their differences became unsurmountable. Costum-
brista literature, as a form of common expression, began to be perceived
by its liberal members as pointlessly bound to the past, outdated, and
even servile and ‘brutishly pious’.18 Considering themselves as the van-
guard of progress, liberals finally left the group. Until then, and for
more than two decades, costumbrista ‘types’ and conventions became a
way to make a changing society legible, and contributed to capture and
to get a handle on an urban and social environment dramatically impacted
by a growing market economy.19 As Walter Benjamin regards the French
‘panoramic literature’, costumbrismo was, one may say, ‘in fundamental
complicity with this world of mist, this cloud-world’ through which, at
times, ‘the light of their images breaks as through curtains of rain’.20 As
the opening paragraph of costumbrista writer Rafael María Mesa indicates,
costumbrista texts expressed – and contributed to paved the way – of mid-
nineteenth-century political and economic reforms, and of political elite’s
historical consciousness.
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Looking to the past: rural utopianism and the bad city

As various authors have pointed out, the European Romanticism of Lamar-
tine and George Sand or the pastoral utopianism of Balzac, for example,
arose to a great extent as an answer and a reaction to what was perceived
as the growth and decadence of urban life.21 In the United States, authors
like Thomas Bender have also argued that: ‘As the nation became increas-
ingly urban, city people tended to romanticize nature.’22 Even in the case
of Latin America, writer Beatriz Sarlo considered that ‘rural utopias are
not the literature of peasants but of urbanites, who find in the countryside
a reason for reverie or a community of values that in the modern city
have been shattered forever’.23 It is no coincidence that the uncertainties
and fears of the Latin American literate elites were also expressed through
the convention of rural utopianism that circulated through the Atlantic in
the mid-nineteenth century. Like the Romantics, Latin American authors
resorted to the convention of rural utopianism, but ‘contaminated’, by cos-
tumbrista ‘popular spirit’ as stated by Camilo José Celá.24
For writers living in Bogotá, the countryside began at the foot of the hills
where the towering city of Bogotá ended. You only had to climb to one of the
city’s highest neighbourhoods – wrote Rafael Eliseo Santander in 1859 – to
see the ‘lively savannah’ in all its extension and the ‘finished squares of the
supreme maker’ of which ‘there is nothing alike in the whole world … ’25
The conservative writer Juan Francisco Ortiz described something similar.
The vast savannah, ‘appears to the eye in bright emerald green; the fresh
and perfumed air restores lost strength; one can feel life and breathe the
aura of pleasure and happiness’.26 The beauty of the rural world surrounding
the city was described as incomparable, as was the friendliness of its inhabi-
tants and their values preserved intact by their distance from the urban
centres. Conservative José Maria Vergara describes the ‘affable’ face of a
peasant as an expression of ‘the serenity of his consciousness’, and ‘the ser-
enity of the landscape that surrounded him’.27 The beauty and calm of the
countryside and its inhabitants was associated with its immutability, and
with the order and stability provided by naturalised customs and hierarchies.
Cordovéz Moure, for example, described the Bogotá savannah, with its fields
sown with wheat, its large prairies, and its dense woods, as a kind of lost
paradise where naïve peasants and benevolent landowners established har-
monious relationships with each other and with nature. He described the
threshing of wheat as a ‘truly rural celebration’, while the harvest was a har-
monious time when ‘the master expressed his satisfaction by distributing
drinks among the workers while they, in turn, showered him with
congratulations’.28
Confronted with this idyllic world, costumbrista writers saw the city as the
expression of frivolity and vice. The city’s negative influence resounded in
6 C. CASTRO BENAVIDES

the countryside through the occasional arrival of shady characters, corrupt

politicians, or idealistic and arrogant liberal young men. The so-called tinter-
illos (pettitfoggers), recurring characters in the costumbrista pieces, came
from the capital city to small towns of the savannah, and, using their knowl-
edge on the workings of municipal politics and the law, swindled the unwary
by advising them on lawsuits or business. According to a story by Vergara y
Vergara, there would be no tinterillos in the towns ‘had they not come from
outside’. One precisely came from Bogotá to give ‘the neighbors useful
lessons on the art of dispossessing the Indians of their lands, on picking
fights with the priest, and on cheating in the elections … ’.29 Also from the
city came young elite liberals to spend their vacations in the family hacien-
das, members of the new parties looking for votes, ‘emigrates’ in times of pol-
itical turmoil, or ‘enlightened’ travellers getting to know the interior of the
country. They all arrived in the countryside with deluded political ideas or
with illicit initiatives.
Even in works critical of rural social conditions such as Eugenio Díaz’
Manuela, the countryside represented a world of genuine and reliable
relations as opposed to the vacuity found in cities. While Manuela, a sharp
peasant woman, is the realistic and critical character in this novel, Demós-
tenes – the urban traveller – was a naïf and intransigent member of the
radical liberal elite constantly contradicting his discourse with his actions.
… all the rest of us are exhausted – complains Manuela – while you rock your-
self in the hammock in front of us, often asleep … can’t you see that this isn’t
equality? … It is one thing to boast, and another to act; it is one thing to speak
about equality and another to hold oneself to it.30

Like in other mid-nineteenth-century works, the urban man’s disconnection

from the world around him became something of a literary convention. In
the case of many costumbrista works, the urban liberal particularly,
became a caricatured figure, ignorant of the reality that existed outside the
cities and salons, and superficial and unrealistic in his political ideas.
In addition to nefarious lawyers and ridiculed liberals, the shadow of the
urban life also loomed over the countryside as young people returned after
studying in the city. In one of his works, conservative writer Jose Manuel
Groot, described how once the country boys have wasted their parents’
money in the city ‘learning nothing’, they return as ‘the plague of the
towns’, and as ‘impious scamps from studying Bentham’.31 In another
work, Juan de Dios Restrepo (who wrote under the pseudonym of Emiro
Kastos), described how these youngsters came back ‘with a head full of cock-
roaches and grandeurs’, and ended up influencing not only the villages but
also their families. Even their sisters, while unable to leave their villages,
ended up ‘full of ideas, asking for gallantry, French teachers, and other
such nonsense!’32
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The contrast between the country and the city has been one of the most
pervasive motifs in western culture, and particularly in nineteenth-century
literature. Literary critic Raymond Williams, considered that the idealised,
timeless, and virtuous countryside represented the past, while the noisy,
mundane, and frivolous city, represented the future. This pervasive
imagery was a collective response and communicative expression to what
seems new and unknown for a society. The division between city and the
countryside was what he understood as a ‘structure of feeling’, that is to
say, the representation of liminal forms of experience; a first distinctive
signal of that which is striving to be born from the old but which has not
yet become in any settled way.33 As Williams affirmed, ‘we use the contrast
of country and city to ratify an unresolved division and conflict of impulses
… ’34 or, as I attempt to discuss in this article, to deal with the crisis produced
by the increasing divergence between experience and expectation, or
between the past and an increasingly closer future.35
This crisis was beautifully expressed in a short and seemingly inconse-
quential costumbrista sketch written in 1866 by liberal writer Rafael Eliseo
Santander. In his story, an elderly man walked ‘as lively and cheerful as a
young boy’ to the traditional bullfight in his parish fair. He was a man, as
he described himself, ‘with all the memories of the old regime and with an
undeniable tinge of the colorfulness of this century’. Wanting to enjoy the
occasion, and ‘emulating his youth’, he dressed as he would have done in
the past to celebrate ‘the coronation of Charles IV and Ferdinand VII’ or,
as he did years later, to celebrate ‘the wonders of Bolivar and the thousand
battles in the struggle for Independence’. However, as he walked to the
parish now, he felt disappointed and out of place. The turmoil was
evident, as it was the noise, and the growing and annoying presence of
a new Frenchified generation of young people, who, like his nephew,
mocked his style and his constant reminiscences. In this journey, the
old protagonist found himself in a new city that, as everything contempor-
ary, felt ‘miserable and petty’. While watching the people around him, he
yearned for ‘ … the seriousness and the gentility, the decency and compo-
sure, the luxury and the magnificence that reigned during those good old
days’. ‘Where has everything gone? – he asked – Noise and disorder, sha-
melessness and audacity, worthless trinkets and trifles are all I see, because
all that was positive has disappeared.’36 In a moment, however, in the
middle of the disorder and confusion, the man could still perceive some-
thing of the splendour of the past that moved him. As he recounted:
‘When some of the features of the old customs, almost erased from the
physiognomy of a people, reappear, they bring about among the masses
what pleasant memories give rise to in the spirit.’ Recapping his experi-
ence, the man reflected:
8 C. CASTRO BENAVIDES

This society that bustles, that attempts to discard its old clothing and take flight
wearing something new feels, nevertheless, tethered, defined by habits that it
seems to have lost but that all of a sudden it recovers and appears more
bound to them than ever.37

In spite of the progressive forces’ attempts, there was no total abandonment

of the past; it was not possible. As Walter Benjamin proposes in his ‘Theses
on the Philosophy of History’, the writers experiencing the mid-nineteenth-
century economic and political change could not escape from the past, and
neither could they escape from the future, drawn in as they were by the
vortex of progress.38

Foreigners in their own time

The noise, worldliness, and ambition that characterised the city in the
costumbrista literature were expressed also in the invasion of foreign
ideas and values, ‘novelties’ and imported products. ‘In the times we
live in’, – reads an editorial in El Mosaico – ‘luxury and the exaggeration
of fashions invade our society’.39 Goods that had remained in a family for
generations, and whose value depended on antiquity, now seemed to be
replaced with new objects whose value was defined by fashion. In the first
half of the nineteenth century, according to Cordovéz, ‘Older men and
bachelors used the same checkered dress coat for at least three or four
generations,’ while girls ‘after the soiree, carefully put away their
modest evening dresses to use at the next party, because they found it
natural to wear the same dress again so long as it was not worn out’.40
When organising a party, families asked their neighbours to lend furni-
ture, and servants went from house to house with messages inviting
guests to bring ‘sofas, chairs, candelabras, and vases for the living
room’. According to the same author, ‘if the party was larger than
normal, the city took on the aspect of an anthill whose center became
the house where the party was held and where the guests’ furniture,
fine china, and silverware converged from various directions’.41
Costumbristas showed, disappointed, how objects that were previously
treasured began to be rendered obsolescent, and considered ‘“worn
out” stylistically before they had failed functionally’.42 In 1859 an edi-
torial of El Mosaico, defined luxury, not as the consumption of valuable
objects, but of ephemeral objects which quickly became obsolete. For the
author, luxury did not mean to wear diamonds, ‘which last a lifetime’ and
were therefore considered ‘invested capital’, but to use ‘those things
which, being worth much, are soon destroyed’, because they were ‘con-
sumed capital’ that disappears.43 These products were avidly consumed
because there was a new impulse that seemed led more members of
society to discard ever earlier what was considered outdated and
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consume ever faster what was new. Among merchants, phrases intended
to increase their chances of selling by appealing to fashion, abounded:
I have old fashions at a very low price – say the character of a costumbrista
peace – but I don’t suppose you want anything old. Elegance and good taste
are everything; so, you shouldn’t hesitate to pay a little more because it is
the fashionable thing to do.44

The growing obsolescence of objects questioned by Cordovéz, evinced the

profound changes fostered by the economy, also in the experience of time. As
Marx had already explained, compressing the ‘turnover time’ of the pro-
duction-consumption cycle would enable more cicles to occur, and conse-
quently more value accumulated.45 Accelerating the capital cycle involved
motivating ever greater and faster consumption through the imperative of
fashion. The ephemerality of fashion, which began to be seen and questioned
in the mid-nineteenth century, was consequence of the need, already
described by political economy, of shortening increasingly the time required
for the circulation of capital. The obsolescence of objects, or the social press-
ures of fashion, forced society to ‘go with the times’. In the mid-nineteenth
century, Juan de Dios Restrepo wrote about a growing ‘restlessness and
mobility’ in contemporary cities. However, he contradicted the most conser-
vative costumbristas, by arguing that this mobility could not be attributed ‘to
novelty or inconstancy … but to the feverish desire to improve one’s con-
dition, to acquire independence and capital’.46 In any case, whether due to
what conservative costumbristas considered empty frivolity, and liberals
like Restrepo, an impetus to progress, the discussion about the obsolescence
of objects indicated a movement towards the future upon the belief that what
comes next will be an improvement over what preceded it.
But where, according to the costumbristas, did this obsession with imita-
tion and luxury come from? Some considered that it was a product of the
negative influence of French literature. In an article published about the
novel María, by Jorge Isaacs, the author pointed out that
this disbelieving, selfish, and materialistic society is undoubtedly the result of
the pernicious French literature which, invading the home, has infiltrated its
poison into the very heart of the family, and has undermined the most holy
foundations on which it rests.47

For older members of the lettered elite, young people, the so-called pepitos,
were the most strongly influenced. According to the writer Juan de Dios
Restrepo, pepitos were those beardless, idle youths, with intellectual preten-
sions, narrators of their own excesses, with existential, Frenchified airs.48
They were the heirs of the lechuginos, the name given during the time of
the Cádiz Cortes to Frenchified youths who supported the Napoleonic inva-
sion and dressed in green frock coats, breeches, and hats.49 In his work, Los
10 C. CASTRO BENAVIDES

pepitos, Restrepo gave an ironical rendering of a conversation among some of

these youths in a café. One of them was telling his friends that he had, as
usual, gone to bed at Dawn, read Dumas before dressing in the morning
and at the midday meal met with some friends ‘who had ordered lunch pre-
pared entirely in the French style, consisting of salmon, lobsters, roast meats,
fruit, white wine, and pure coffee’. Another, no older than eighteen, pro-
claimed himself a faithful reader of Lord Byron and declared in a dramatic
tone that ‘existence’ weighed on him ‘like a great heap of iron’, that he
had ‘used and abused everything … ’ and that he hoped one day to have
the means to procure ‘new emotions!’ The last one commented that he
was only interested in gambling and literature and that, despite having lost
money from betting, his rich father would pay off all his debts.
For authors like Restrepo, the danger of French literature laid in its ideal-
isation of frivolity and of ephemerality. For others, such as Cordovéz, it was
its anticlerical discourse and its vision of the Catholic religion as the religion
of the people with all its dangers. The French literatue emrging from the
popular revolution that seized Paris in 1848 and led to the fall of King
Louis-Philippe, dangerously imposed, according to him, democratic ideas
of equality and justice. Critically, Cordovéz wrote that in the mid-nineteenth
century ‘Lamartine’s Girondinos were considered the last historical word on
the events recounted in that work. Rousseau’s Emile and the social contract
were attributed the same importance as any of the gospels.’50 For other
authors, the obsession with the new did not stem from French literature
but from the immorality of the economic ideas in vogue. They blamed
British utilitarianism for reducing economic activity to exchanges between
commodities, its emphasis on self-interest, and its abject obsession with
finding pleasure. Bentham was the epitome of present times frivolity. His
theory of happiness, linked to the pleasure attainable here on earth, was con-
sidered by his critics as the reflection of the immediacy of the present times,
and a threaten to the ideals of transcendence guided by religious faith, essen-
tial to maintain stability. As historian Jaime Jaramillo stated, ‘Utilitarianism
meant a divorce from the Spanish spirit.’ This divorce occurred, not only
because it elevated ‘pleasure or happiness to the rank of fundamental
ethical principles’, but because by
representing the ideals of a pragmatic and rationalist merchant and industrial
middle class, utilitarian morality clashed with the noble sentiments of honor
and nobility in the profane, and with the religious ones of charity and ultrater-
restrial salvation that constituted the core of the Spanish conception of the
world … .51

But, it also could be said, that this considered divorce from the Spanish spirit,
was the expression of a present lived increasingly less on past experience, and
more on the expectation of the future.
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In the face of what they considered the degradation of contemporary

values by the invasion of foreign ideas and products, and their frivolity
and ephemerality, many costumbrista writers acted as defenders of tradition
and of a Hispanic vision of the national community, considered the result of
lineage and long-dating roots in the territory.52 The literary ‘type’ of the
cachaco, protagonist of many costumbrista works, represented the writers
who had created him. The cachaco, self-proclaimed raizal (Bogotá-rooted),
represented the stability of values and links with the past, in view of the
uprooting brought about by the invasion of ideas, foreign products, and
new desires. Writer José Manuel Marroquín was one of them. He did not
belong – he said – ‘to that class of people, exiled from their own country’,
who wanted to see Bogotá become ‘an exact copy of Paris and all its citizens,
living portraits of the Parisians, or copies of the “yankees””. For him, and
fellow costumbrista José María Vergara y Vergara, Raizalismo was the
antithesis of the ‘Frenchification’, or what he called una vida a lo extranjero
(a life in the foreign style). Vergara ridiculed the ‘imitators’ who, locked up in
their houses, ‘received no visitors so as to avoid vulgar influences’, and to
save enough money to organise ‘a tea, or a soirée, only inviting a few of
the most foreign people they could find, and one or two Colombians who
could serve as interpreters’.53
The arrival of new ideas and practices left the older generation of costum-
bristas in a state of dislocation, feeling that in the process they became
foreign in their own land. The literary figure of the exile, or the ‘foreigner
in his own land’, expressed the mid-century writers’ sense of being out of
place in a world in which the past had incresingly less to say to the
present. ‘Everything has changed!’ wrote José María Vergara in 1863, ‘how
sad it is to be left behind little by little! How sad and how desolate to find
oneself an outsider in one’s own native land!’54 As historian Peter Fritzche
has argued, narratives of exile represented a profound shift in historical con-
sciousness and served as ‘as a remarkable signature of displacement in the
modern age’.55 Thus, rather than the foreigner in his own land, the figure
of the exile recurring in the costumbrista works seemed to be the represen-
tation of the foreigner in his own time. They were living in a new era of
‘metallization’ and egoism’, determined ‘by the many caprices of fashion’,
speed and uprootnes.56 Resisting to ‘go with the times’, raizales defended
inherited traditions, valued treasured objects over time, and made of immo-
bility a virtue. The words of entrepreneur Medardo Rivas represented pre-
cisely the new experience of time rejected and questioned by ‘raizales’.
It is not my suffering what make me desperate – Rivas wrote – nor is it this life
of privations to which I am already accustomed, but the slowness of time to
make the crops produce, when my feverish activity would like to work tire-
lessly to speed up the future; and then, (to experience) the uncertainty of
the result.
12 C. CASTRO BENAVIDES

Costumbrists were experiencing and resisting what Marx had described years
before: ‘Economy of time, to this, all economy ultimately reduces itself.’57

Usurers and jobbers: the future in the present

Contemporaries nearly unanimously agreed that in the decades that followed
independence, Colombia was wracked by the scarcity of credit and money.
Growing domestic public debt and civil wars constrained the circuits of com-
mercial loans and the circulation of commercial paper, particularly outside
the major cities.58 Private credit was then a need, but interests’ rates were
extremely high. As historians Meisel and López have pointed out, only
after the founding of private banks, between 1871 and 1890, did commercial
credit rates fall and fluctuate between 6% and 12%. Before that, during the
early years of the Republic and until at least the 1870s, interest rates paid
to private lenders were high and varied, reaching levels of up to 60% per
annum after their liberation in 1835.59 However, in a society with growing
commercial and financial activity and without banks yet founded, workers,
businessmen, or fathers and mothers, had to resort to the services of money-
lenders to pay their debts, invest in their businesses and buy food. They also
used their services to supply the growing sumptuary needs of the new gen-
erations. According to some writers, ‘vanity, the foolish desire to show off,
(and) ridiculous emulation … ’ had made moneylenders and usurers, indis-
pensable actors in a credit economy, as well as in literature.60 Writers,
however, made a distinction between usury and loans at interest which
they said – were lower risk and less-greedy lending. This distinction was,
of course, arbitrary, since the loans between entrepreneurs and traders
were sometimes abusive and exceeded the limits set forth in the law. This
artificial division enabled the wealthier, more powerful merchants and entre-
preneurs, to freely engage in moneylending, while continuing to condemn
the practice when it was pursued by others. Camacho Roldan, owner of a
leading merchant house and debt bonds investor, wrote that ‘the bankruptcy
of the country was the result, among other reasons, of the ‘intrigue, trickery
and usury in fashion that disturb and infected private businesses’.61
Other writers, also entrepreneurs, did not agree with this differentiation.
When one is a child – wrote Medardo Rivas – one imagines the usurer as an
old Jew, with a black beard, piercing eyes, hateful face, avaricious, poorly
dressed, and spending his life in the den where he has hidden and well kept
his gold. What a deception! The usurer of Bogotá is a gentleman who lives
honorably, has a respectable family, lives in a decent house, educates his chil-
dren in Europe … and is not distinguished from other humans except by his
ferocious instincts … .62

But then he reflects and affirms that this description falls short, because in the
city, the usurer is
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 13

a merchant, a landowner, a trickster, a woman, a clergyman, a minister, and a

chichera (chicha seller). It is the man, who in the midst of luxury and increas-
ing wealth, has accumulated the great estates of the savannah, but also, the
man who stands behind a filthy counter collecting the gold of the poor families.

One of Bogotá’s famous usurers, turned into a literary character by Rivas,

was Don Antoñito. He, owned a store ‘in dreadful disarray’, where the
poor took ‘the spoils of misery to satiate the fierce hunger of the usurer’.
Don Antoñito gave them small amounts of money in exchange for
watches, earrings, crockery, veils, hats, used saddles, images of saints, silver-
ware or books of any quality or value. Through these small loans he even
managed to take over the house of a debtor after his death and dispossess
the widow and her children.63
For some, hateful usury, more than anything else, was a direct conse-
quence of the ever-increasing conspicuous consumption in the city. Accord-
ing to an editorial in El Mosaico in 1859 – ambitious merchants and
moneylenders (prestamistas) swarmed the city, ‘knowing that family men
had to dress their children with decency, and that they would fall into
their clutches, whether they wanted to or not, to give their daughters a
saya i mantilla’.64 The vilified usurer was, then, the counterpart of need
but also of desire. The credit granted by the usurer served to supply
urgent needs, but as El Mosaico shows, it was also a way to achieve gratifica-
tion in the present with future work. As Jean-Baptiste Say wrote condemning
‘empty luxury’, the pleasure given by ostentation perished when the con-
sumed object stops ‘to flatter the vanity of his possessor’.65 The object con-
sumed for vanity was ‘destroy … even before it stopped to exist’, and we may
say, even before it was paid. The leading role of the moneylender and usurer
in the nineteenth century reflected these profound changes in the experience
of time resulting from the expansion of the capitalist market economy. Marx
considered credit to be accounted for as ‘“fictitious capital”, as some kind of
money bet on production that does not yet exist’.66 Or, we may say, it was
central to an economy in which ends began to be considered before the
means or even without taking them into account.67
In these circumstances, Juan de dios Restrepo saw the emergence of what
he called a ‘monetary aristocracy’ which, thanks to its capital and its role as
moneylenders, acquired great political power. ‘Since this is a country in
which everyone trades on a higher scale than his capital’, wrote Restrepo,
‘regularly with money at interest or credit granted by the monetary aristoc-
racy, the underlying and mysterious influence of this aristocracy on all
classes of society is immense’.68 In the costumbrista works of the nineteenth
century, the rise of the usurer does not end with the ill-gotten wealth in his
store, or with the pitiful stories of loans made by merchants to their impo-
verished friends. The usurer could become even richer, gain the respect of
the economic elites, along with political power – as Restrepo said – if he
14 C. CASTRO BENAVIDES

negotiated with the State and became an agiotista, as people in the city called
government bond dealers.
By 1850, the fiscal administration was facing a debt of about 50% of its
current revenues, the economy was stagnant due, in part, to the debt accu-
mulated by the civil wars, and the operation of the public administration
was in a state of stagnation.69 Colombia had also lost any possibility of exter-
nal credit after independence for failing to pay its debt to England. The per-
manent fiscal deficit was then financed by contributions and internal public
debt. According to writer Miguel Samper,
the debt bonds began to be traded in concurrence with the payment orders,
and a real plague of promissory notes, bills, orders, certificates, vouchers
and all the invented vermin, came to the collection and payment offices.
The sophism is uncovered: credits of a thousand weigh on funds like ten,
the discredit appears and the new debt begins to age. The agiotistas, who,
according to the general belief, suck the blood of the people, lick their
fingers as one does when one burns them.70

Those who lent to the government received promissory notes containing a

future obligation whose value and price would be defined by the market.
Creditors could sell them, as there were enough buyers who would buy at
the lowest price to earn some profit when the term was due.71 By mid-
century, the Colombian government had constantly resorted to new loans
to pay off previous debts. Domestic indebtedness fuelled a persistent state
of fiscal crisis that caused spending to be executed against future revenues,
as current revenues had been consumed or pledged decades earlier on
account of wars or previous debts.72
In this fiscal situation, many import and export merchants, commercial
intermediaries, and landowners became rich by participating in speculative
operations with debt bonds. As affirmed by Miguel Samper:
the creation and recognition of domestic and foreign debts, the payment of
rents, the contracts originated arising from the new needs of the public
service and other similar causes, converted the Treasury into a powerful
force of attraction and endowed Bogotá with a new class: the public creditors.73

The 1860s, as he affirmed, were the golden age of the agio in Bogotá.74
Starting in this decade, and for the rest of the century, the role of the agio-
tistas or ‘the government bankers’ was so prevalent that some researchers
today have dubbed the Colombian state a ‘captured’ or ‘pawned’ state,
which was heavily dependent on private capital to function.75 Economic
historians have shown that, just as the interest paid by individuals for
each loan was very high, loans to the government, were agreed at
annual rates of between of 18% and 24%, making the domestic public
debt also onerous.76
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 15

In a text written in 1858 upon his return to Bogotá after some years of
absence, Juan de Dios Restrepo narrated how, during these years, some of
his childhood friends had become bureaucrats, others had moved to the low-
lands hoping to become rich by cultivating tobacco, and others were ‘dedi-
cated to the pleasures of agio and to financial scheming’.77 In a short
story, Francisco de Paula Carrasquilla narrated precisely how the usurer
became a state creditor and how he was formed in the province to become
rich in Bogotá. As a child, his wretched parents instilled in him the ‘instinct
for the art of good living’.78 Later, as an ambitious young man, he travelled to
the capital city in the footsteps of fellow provincial who had come up in the
world, and who, seeing in the young man ‘the makings of a usurer’, lent him
money to invest in a pawnshop. With the profits, the young man opened an
office where he gratified his ‘greed, regardless of social sanctions or divine
law’. There, he received the prized belongings of students, employees, pros-
titutes, gamblers and even soldiers, who accepted excessive repurchase agree-
ments (pacto de retroventa) so that they could eventually recover their
possessions. In Carrasquilla’s story, the usurer, like the miser, shares with
the capitalist a ‘boundless drive for enrichment’. But, as Marx wrote,
‘while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist [as the
usurer] is a rational miser’.79
Once the usurer managed to accumulate enough capital, he began to trade
in debt bonds, turn out to be a state creditor, and became rich. As Restrepo
narrated in another of his stories, though he was vilified and looked upon
with suspicion in private, with his new wealth the agiotista entered the
social circles that had once excluded him: ‘Although the means by which I
have gotten rich are not edifying – says the character in his story – society
shakes my hand warmly and all its doors are open to me.’80 Money, as
Restrepo said, opened all doors and forgave all sins. For Carrasquilla,
Restrepo, and other writers, both Liberal and Conservative, obtaining
wealth seemed to be the ultimate goal of the new generation of insatiable,
greedy and unscrupulous men who dominated the state. For him, ‘business-
men from the positive school of our elders, who only bought small amounts
in cash or using credit, were never been devoured by usury, like our modern
businessmen, who use and abuse credit sensessly’.81 Times have changed,
and ‘the passion for gold … as the sole motive of action, as the ultimate
goal of human activity in our time’ said Restrepo, ‘has bastardized noble pas-
sions, weakened vigorous feelings, debased the highest characters, and
turned man’s aspirations vulgar and material’.82
Passion for gold not only enriched usurers and debt bond’s speculators.
Credit, as costumbristas could foresee, put a heavy burden of debt on
future labour.
16 C. CASTRO BENAVIDES

Conclusion: distancing from the past

Describing the world that was contemporary to him, Bogotá writer José
Caicedo Rojas wrote in the mid-nineteenth century that,
the modern centuries, if we can call them so, are more different from each
other than the ancient ones, undoubtedly because the progress that humanity
is making in every way, and the various social evolutions that are their conse-
quence, multiply, mutually fertilize each other, and go in ascending pro-
gression, although not always in the direction of the good. One discovery
immediately brings in its wake several others; one new process in the arts or
in the sciences opens the door to another and another, and this movement,
today rapid and incessant, affects all branches of the human dreams that are
subject to change.83

The author described some of the changes in the experience of time that
came with technology: the discovery of steam navigation, compressed air,
and electricity, or of photography, the telegraph and the telephone. The
acceleration of time to which Caicedo referred was not an abstraction but
a constant and daily experience that he and the costumbrista writers tried
to express in their works.
The apologists of progress, among them liberals like Miguel Samper and
Juan de Dios Restrepo, were opposed by defenders of tradition like José
María Vergara y Vergara, José Manuel Marroquín, José David Guarín or
Ricardo Carrasquilla. Against the impetus of the times, the latter, the rai-
zales, extolled immobility, and against the considered imitation of foreign
ideas and values, they sought to protect what they called tradition. The
experience of this group of authors was probably not shared by other
members of urban society, nor was it the same among themselves. Fran-
cois Ewald wrote that to the uncertainty produced by the changes
brought about by modernity some responded with foresight and others
with prevention.84 With these options, according to him, they faced the
changing experience of time.
In this profound economic and political transition, notions of time
overlap, entangle, and conflict. This happened precisely with the very
members of El Mosaico. After more than two decades of shared work, they
could not reconcile their political views and, one may say, their experiences
of time. At least until 1870, they had privileged their literary and class inter-
ests over their political differences. The group, they insisted in their first col-
lective publications, was on the fringes of ‘party struggles’ and politicking. As
they wrote in one of their editorials:
Some have found El Mosaico too Gólgota, and others too conservative. We
declare that El Mosaico has nothing to do with politics, and that we insert
everything that is well written, with no exceptions other than those writings
that offend religious opinions or morals, two sanctuaries that we do not
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 17

profane. On the contrary, we take pleasure and infatuation in bringing

together the very names that politics separates and makes enemies.85

These consensuses collapsed when their differences seemed unsurmounta-

ble. In a letter written to a fellow liberal, Ezequiel Uricoechea questioned
not only the superficiality of Costumbrismo, but also some of the conserva-
tive members of El Mosaico.
We agree, or rather, I agree with you, who put forward the idea, regarding the
pernicious influence of certain literature from the motherland. There [in
Colombia] has been ease of expression but little depth and servile tendencies
in many. Vergara did not owe the path he took to this literature but a political
circle of hungry, backbiting, envious, and brutish pious people (that’s how they
all are … and God forgive them, I don’t have the soul for that) who make a
career out of saying Our Fathers and sticking their fingers in their neighbor’s
pockets. Unfortunately, he became a member among them and since then we
have had to see less of him, who used to be with us; El Mosaico came to an end
and we bibliophiles, of whom I was the longest serving, if not also the oldest
member, almost, almost never met again.86

By criticising ‘certain literature of the modern country’, Uricoechea tried to

separate himself from the discourse of the Spanish heritage defended by the
most conservative costrumbristas, and positioned himself on the side of pro-
gress. To act in the present, like Caicedo Rojas, he looked to the future more
than to the past. However, in their attempt to preserve, conservative writers
show us their experience in a changing society. Appealing to tradition was a
way to containing the desire for innovation and its unknown consequences,
and avoiding that leap into the void. Costumbristas described increasing
trade flows, and the possibilities to travel and move faster and farther. But
they also criticised what they called the ‘fashion’, whose dynamics would
be discuss by theoreticians as the obsolescence of objects. The also wrote
about the deep transformation that the integration into the world market
economy produced on social values: between treasuring what was inherited
to desiring what was new, between an identity built on tradition to an iden-
tity build on ‘servile’ imitation, between the ‘natural’ peace of the countryside
to the uncertainty of urban disarray, between stability and ephemerality.
They expressed their fears and anxieties in a period of change, and the
loss of their place in the world and in their own time.
Conceptual history has taught us that modernity implied the perception,
since the end of the eighteenth century, of an increasing distance between the
past and the present, and an increasing proximity between the present and
the future.87 On the other hand, economic history and theory have shown
us that the orientation towards the future can only be understood as an
inherent aspect of the functioning of capitalism. As Vanessa Ogle stated,
‘capitalism as a socio-economic formation bring out this particular tempor-
ality in its most pronounced form … it was capitalism that more than
18 C. CASTRO BENAVIDES

anything depended on the futures it generated’.88 Capitalism, as Marx had

already said, was speeding up or sweeping away ‘all fixed, fast frozen
relations’.89
Costumbrista literature gave an account of these changes in perception,
and also on how a historical consciousness was taking shape alongside the
profound and visible changes in the economy. The conventions of costum-
brista literature, with its techniques of ‘isolation’ and ‘framing’ of individual
elements, and the creation of types, allowed mid-nineteenth-century writers
to capture episodes, people, and places while everything around them was in
constant flux. Amid an ongoing transformation, this form of writing
appeared to give order and legibility to the uncertainty brought about by
economic change. By virtue of what they controlled and concealed, but
also by what they yearned for and criticised, these apparently depoliticised
works helped to understand and perhaps to handle the impact of the
market economy in daily life. costumbrista literature, questioned for being
imitative, conservative, and provincial, provides a sharp interpretation of
the specific experiences of the literate elite of a considered peripheral
society within capitalism. They could help us to think about the relationship
between cultural change and the advent of a market economy in the mid-
nineteenth century, and to include the complex universe of emotions
when writing the histories of political economy.

Notes
1. Rafael María Mesa, Colombianos ilustres. Estudios y obras (Bogotá: Imprenta
de la República, 1919).
2. José María Cordovéz Moure, De la vida de antaño (Bogotá: Editorial Minerva,
1936), pp. 19–20.
3. Ibid., pp. 28, 32.
4. Ibid., p. 43.
5. Miguel Samper, La miseria en Bogotá (Bogotá: Imprenta Universidad Nacio-
nal, 1969), p. 8.
6. Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Penguin Books,
1982), p. 6.
7. Reinhart Koselleck, Future’s Past. On the Semantics of Hihstorical Time (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
8. Lina del Castillo, Crafting a Republic for the World. Scientific, Geographic and
Historiographic inventions of Colombia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2018), pp. 131–80.
9. Koselleck, Future’s Past, pp. 4, 15; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
(London: Continuum Impacts, 2006); François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity,
Presentism and Experiences of Time (New York: Columbia University Press,
2016); John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past
(New York: Schocken Books, 1985). Among critical geographers see: David
Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (London: Blackwell, 1989); Doreen
Massey, A Global Sense of Place. Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis:
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 19

University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Soja Edward, Postmodern Geographies:

The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989).
10. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of
Knowledge (Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2009), pp. 173–9; Paul Ricoeur,
Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986), pp. 269–284; Koselleck, Future’s Past, pp. 26–42.
11. Camilo José Celá, Los españoles pintados por sí mismos (Madrid: Banco Ibérico,
1971), pp. 13–18. Current designations for works such as costumbristas were
not necessarily used the mid-nineteenth century. See: Flor María Rodríguez,
‘El realismo de medio siglo en la literatura decimonónica colombiana: José
María Samper y Soledad Acosta de Samper’, Estudios de literatura Colombi-
ana, No. 14 (2004), pp. 55–77.
12. On the relationship between literature and nation formation in Latin America
see: Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions, the National Romances of Latin
America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Angel Rama, La
ciudad letrada (Hanover: Ed. Del Norte, 1984); Pedro Maíz, comp., Literatura
y nación en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2007). For the case of
Colombia see: Gilberto Laiza Cano, ‘La nación en novelas. Ensayos sobre las
novelas Manuela y María’, in Humberto Quiceno, La nación imaginada:
ensayos sobre los proyectos de nación en Colombia y América Latina en el
siglo XIX (Cali: Universidad del Valle, 2015), pp. 131–75, and Sociabilidad, reli-
gión y política en la definición de la nación: Colombia, 1820–1886 (Bogotá: Uni-
versidad Externado, 2011); Erna Von der Walde, ‘El “Cuadro de Costumbres”
y el proyecto hispano-católico de unificación nacional en Colombia’, Arbor,
ciencia, pensamiento y cultura, 183.724 (2007), pp. 243–53; José David
Cortés, ‘Las costumbres y los tipos como interpretaciones de la historia: Los
mexicanos pintados por sí mismos y el Museo de cuadros de costumbres’,
Estudios de Literatura Colombiana, 33 (2013), pp. 13–36; Efraín Sánchez
and Carlos José Reyes, ‘El costumbrismo en Colombia’, in Manual de literatura
colombiana 2ª ed. (Bogotá: Procultura, 1993), pp. 175–266.
13. Felipe Martínez Pinzón, ‘Estudio introductorio’, in José María Vergara y
Vergara. Museo de cuadros de costumbres y variedades (Bogotá: Universidad
de los Andes-Universidad del Rosario, 2020), Vol I, pp. XIX–LXXII; Felipe
Martínez Pinzón and Kari Soriano Salkjelsvik, eds., ‘Edición especial: Revisitar
el Costumbrismo: cosmopolitismo, pedagogías y modernización en Iberoa-
mérica’, Hispano-Americana Geschichte, Sprache, Literatur, No. 46, 2015.
14. Mary L. Coffey, ‘El imperio pintado por sí mismo: el Costumbrismo transat-
lántico’, in Leonardo Funes (ed.), Hispanismos del mundo: diálogos y debates
en (y desde) el sur (Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila Eds., 2016), pp. 139–50.
15. José Escobar, ‘Costumbrismo: estado de la cuestión’, Romanticismo 6 (1996), p.
119.
16. See for example: Margarita Serje, ‘El cuadro de costumbres como modo de
intervención en Los trabajadores de tierra caliente de Medardo Rivas’, in Mar-
tínez-Pinzón, Revisitar, pp. 209–30; Felipe Martínez-Pinzón, ‘El costumbrismo
cosmopolita: deuda, producción de pueblo y color local en el siglo XIX’, in
Martínez-Pinzón, Revisitar, pp. 231–50.
17. For studies on the relation between literature, modernity and economic change
in Latin America, see: Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian
Culture (London: Verso, 1992); Angel Rama, The Lettered City (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Jean Franco, Critical Passions: Selected
20 C. CASTRO BENAVIDES

Essays (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Julio Ramos, Divergent
Modernities. Culture and Politics in Nineteenth Century Latin America
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Beatriz Sarlo, Una modernidad
periférica: Buenos Aires 1920–1930 (Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 1988);
Ericka Beckman, Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export
Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
18. Mario Germán Romero, ed., Epistolario de Ezequiel Uricoechea con Juan María
Gutiérrez, varios colombianos y August Friedrich Pott (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y
Cuervo, 1998).
19. Masha Belenky, Engine of Modernity: The Omnibus and Urban Culture in
Nineteenth-Century Paris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019),
pp. 36–8. On panoramic literature see also: Judith Wechsler, A Human
Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Margaret Cohen, ‘Panoramic Literature
and the Invention of Everyday Genres’, in Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz
(eds), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1996).
20. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge/London: The Belkn AP
Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 101.
21. David Harvey, Paris Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 248.
22. Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision, Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth
Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 85.
23. Beatriz Sarlo, Borges, un escritor en las orillas (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1995), p. 8.
24. Camilo José Celá, Los españoles, pp. 13–18.
25. Rafael Eliseo Santander (1858), ‘La Nochebuena’, in Martínez-Pinzón, Museo,
Vol. I, p. 139.
26. Juan Francisco Ortiz, ‘Motivo por el cual: cuentecillo al galope y al paso’, in
Martínez-Pinzón, Museo, Vol. I, p. 204.
27. José María Vergara y Vergara, Olivos y aceitunos todos son uno (Bogotá:
Imprenta de Foción Mantilla, 1868).
28. José María Cordovéz Moure [1957], Reminiscencias de Santafe de Bogotá
(Bogotá: Aguilar, 2000), p. 153.
29. José Manuel Marroquín, ‘Vamos a misa al pueblo’, in Martínez-Pinzón,
Museo, Vol. I, p. 508.
30. Eugenio Díaz, Manuela. Novela de costumbres colombiana (París: Librería
Española de Garnier Hermanos, 1880), p. 63.
31. José Manuel Groot, ‘La Junta Vecinal’, in Cuadros de costumbres (Bogotá: Edi-
torial Minerva, 1926), pp. 103–4.
32. Juan de Dios Restrepo [1855], ‘Costumbres parroquiales en Antioquia. Mi
compadre Facundo’, in Emiro Kastos. Artículos escogidos (Londres: Juan
M. Fonnegra, 1885), p. 123.
33. Michael Pickering, ‘Structures of Feeling and Traces of time’, in History,
Experience and Cultural Studies (London: Macmillan Press, 1997), pp. 23–53.
34. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1973), p. 297.
35. Koselleck, Futures Past; Williams, The Country and the City.
36. Rafael Eliseo Santander, ‘Las fiestas de mi parroquia’, in Ortiz Santander and
Caicedo Rojas (eds), Cuadros de Costumbres (Bogotá: Editorial Minerva,
1936), p. 28.
37. Ibid., 20.
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 21

38. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), pp. 253–
64.
39. ‘Esto sí es raro’, El Mosaico, No. 15 (1859), p. 101.
40. Cordovéz, De la vida de antaño, pp. 24, 27.
41. Ibid., pp. 21–2.
42. Neil Maycroft, ‘Consumption, Planned Obsolescence and Waste’, Working
Paper, Lincoln School of Art & Design, University of Lincoln, 2009, p. 3.
43. ‘El lujo’, El Mosaico, No 19 (1859), pp. 146–7.
44. Medardo Rivas, ‘El comerciante’, in Obras de Medardo Rivas (Bogotá:
Imprenta de Medardo Rivas, 1883), Vol. I, p. 198.
45. Karl Marx, Grundrisse [1857–1861] (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 173, 534–
8.
46. Restrepo, Emiro Kastos, p. 115.
47. Francisco Sosa, ‘María (Juicio de la prensa en Méjico 1871)’, El Mosaico, No 2
(1872), pp. 15–16.
48. Restrepo, Emiro Kastos, pp. 245–50.
49. Alberto Buitrago and J. Agustín Torijano, Diccionario del origen de las palabras
(Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 2008), p. 137.
50. Cordovéz, Reminiscencias, 1375–6.
51. Jaime Jaramillo Uribe, El pensamiento colombiano del siglo XIX (Bogotá:
Planeta, 1996), p. 51.
52. Martínez-Pinzón, Museo, Vol I, p. XLIV.
53. José María Vergara y Vergara (1866), ‘Las tres tazas’, Obras escogidas de José
María Vergara y Vergara (Bogotá: Editorial Minerva, 1931), p. 171.
54. Ibid., p. 166.
55. Peter Fritzsche, ‘Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity’, The
American Historical Review, 106.5 (2001), p. 1588.
56. ‘Fraternidad de la época’, El Mosaico, no. 14 (1859), p. 0059.
57. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 173.
58. Ángela Milena Rojas, ‘Impactos monetarios e institucionales de la deuda pública
interna en Colombia 1840–1890’, Borradores del CIE, No. 8 (Medellín: Univer-
sidad de Antioquia, 2004), and Deuda pública interna en Colombia. Política,
moneda y finanzas, 1840–1894 (Medellín: Universidad de Antioquia, 2015);
Catherine LeGrand, Frontier Expansion and Peasant Protest in Colombia,
1850–1936 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986); Salomón
Kalmanovitz and Edwin López Rivera, Las cuentas del federalismo colombiano
(Bogotá: Universidad Externado de Colombia, Universidad Jorge Tadeo, 2019).
59. Alejandro López and Adolfo Meisel, ‘Papel moneda, tasas de interés y revalua-
ción durante la Regeneración’, in Adolfo Meisel (ed), El Banco de la República.
Antecedentes, revolución y estructura (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1990), p.
102.
60. ‘El lujo’, p. 146.
61. Salvador Camacho Roldán, Escritos varios (Bogotá: Imprenta de la luz, 1896),
85.
62. Medardo Rivas, Obras de Medardo Rivas, Novelas, artículos de costumbres, var-
iedades, poesía (Bogotá: Imprenta de Medardo Rivas, 1883), Vol. I, p. 120.
63. Ibid., pp. 121–2.
64. ‘El lujo’, p. 146.
65. Jean-Baptiste Say, A Treatise on Political Economy, Book III, Chapter IV
(New York: Routledge, 2008).
22 C. CASTRO BENAVIDES

66. Harvey, The Condition of Posmodernity, p. 107.

67. Karl Marx, ‘Credit and Fictitious Capital’, in Capital. A Critique of Political
Economy (Middlesex-New York: Penguin Books/New Left Review, 1982),
Vol. III, pp. 525–42.
68. Restrepo, Emiro Kastos, p. 69.
69. Angela Milena Rojas, ‘Deuda pública interna, patrón metálico y guerras civiles:
interconexiones institucionales, la Colombia del siglo XIX’, Lecturas de Econ-
omía 67 (2007), p. 202.
70. Miguel Samper, La miseria, p. 46.
71. Juanita Villaveces Niño, ‘Formación de la deuda pública en Colombia, 1821–
1873’, Borradores de investigación No. 84 (Bogotá: Universidad del Rosario,
2007).
72. Rojas, ‘Deuda pública’.
73. Miguel Samper, La miseria, p. 26.
74. Agio could be defined as any monetary speculation with public funds.
75. Juanita Villaveces, ‘Formación de la deuda pública’, p. 17.
76. Ibid., pp. 23, 25.
77. Restrepo, Emiro Kastos, p. 245.
78. Francisco de Paula Carrasquilla, ‘El usurero’, in Tipos de Bogotá (Bogotá:
Imprenta de Fernando Pontón, 1886), pp. 37–45.
79. Karl Marx. Capital, Vol. I, p. 254.
80. Restrepo, Emiro Kastos, p. 111.
81. Ibid., 115–16.
82. Ibid., 104.
83. José Caicedo Rojas, Recuerdos y apuntamientos (Bogotá: Biblioteca popular de
cultura colombiana, 1950), pp. 17–18.
84. Francois Ewald, ‘The Return of Descartes Malicious Demond: An Outline of a
Philosophy of Precaution’, in Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon (eds), Embra-
cing Risk. The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility (Chicago,
IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 273–302.
85. Cited by Andrés Gordillo, ‘El Mosaico (1858–1872): nacionalismo, elites y
cultura en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX’, Revista de Historia Colonial Lati-
noamericana: Fronteras de la Historia, 8 (2003), pp. 19–64.
86. Mario Germán Romero, ed., Epistolario de Ezequiel Uricoechea con Juan María
Gutiérrez, varios colombianos y August Friedrich Pott (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y
Cuervo, 1998).
87. Koselleck, Future’s Past; Francois Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism
and Experiences of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015);
Javier Fernández Sebastián, Historia conceptual en el Atlántico ibérico. Len-
guajes, tiempos, revoluciones (Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2021).
88. Vanessa Ogle, ‘Time, Temporality and the History of Capitalism’, Past &
Present, 243.1 (2019), pp. 312–27.
89. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1976), Vol. 6, p. 487.

Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). I
would like to thank Ingrid Bolívar, Ricardo López, Felipe Martínez Pinzón, Ana
Otero, Erna von der Walde, and the members of the group of Intellectual history
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 23

of political economy in New Granada 1771–1885: Francisco Ortega, Pablo Casanova,

Benjamín Golliard-Garrido and Juan Osorio for their valuable and generous
comments.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID
Constanza Castro Benavides http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2825-7759