Governing Infrastructures: Crafting Loyalty While Engendering Dissent in the Spanish Transpacific Empire

Abstract

The Latin American wars of independence (1810-1825) dealt a severe material blow to the Hispanic world, separating the majority of Spain's former colonies from the Spanish crown. This dissertation aims to investigate the visual and discursive narratives developed in support of the Spanish Crown in the nineteenth century, which were fundamental to sustaining the colonial system in Spain's remaining colonies, including Cuba and the Philippines. Spain’s final attempts to recover its continental empire were invested predominantly in military strategies of reconquest between 1827 and 1830. However, this dissertation shows that, alongside military incursions, another campaign—a vindication of the Spanish Crown’s image and government—was employed in Cuba and the Philippines to illustrate the benign side of Spanish colonialism through urban improvements and infrastructure achieved by colonial administrations. These infrastructure programs, known as -policía de ornato-which loosely translates as "ornamental policing"--persisted under Isabel II's reign and were cemented with many projects on the islands.In the 17th century, the word - "police"- in Spanish, -"policía"- could be understood as referring to the executive branch, since it controlled several things such as education, health but the term lingered into the 19th century. The term "policía de ornato" refers to the aesthetic qualities of infrastructure such as city squares, promenades, and fountains. By portraying itself as secondary to security, the -policía de ornato- was able to become a prescriptive tool in the formation of urban areas, as well as in the negotiation of a new manner of exercising power. This ability to arrange space outlasted Ferdinand VII's reign and ensured the Spanish Crown's hegemony in the nineteenth century. My aim in researching these infrastructure projects is twofold: I show how their aesthetic aspects aided their function as disciplinary mechanisms, while also demonstrating how their representations in literary and visual artifacts compromised their intended regulatory function. Although infrastructure is undeniably a tool for enacting various types of social control and oppression, I argue that it also allows for a resistant counterpoint to intentional violence. My research seeks to uncover how early nineteenth-century aesthetic artifacts questioned and unearthed such brutality. Rather than slowing down the critical process, reimagining these infrastructures through visual culture or literature enables us to rethink space, politics, and even material structures. A tri-continental archival research was indispensable to recover the infrastructure programs developed in these final Spanish colonies since most of the records and projects are still housed in various institutions. Through the lens of Global Hispanophone studies, this dissertation adds to the history of other visualities in the nineteenth century, the image of power in the Hispanic world, and studies of colonialism, urbanization, and infrastructural studies.