Aun en la muerte separados: *Class, clergy, and society in Aragua de Barcelona, Venezuela, 1820--1875

This dissertation rests on three fundamental premises. First, between 1820 and 1875 the elite of Aragua de Barcelona, Venezuela did not consider themselves as peripheral or less important than elites in Caracas. They reveled in their contacts with presidents in Caracas and their relationships with the international creditors located in the Caribbean. Located at the crossroads between Caracas, Barcelona, and Ciudad Bolivar, elites in Aragua took advantage of their special conditions to build economic, political, and social hegemony. Second, the State delegated its powers of social control to the provinces and the municipalities. As a result, the local elite acted like a State and with the power of a State in matters of social control. Finally, I assume that hegemony was not formed through a process in which the subaltern had the ability to shape the rules that governed them. Hegemony was power, pure and simple, coercive, manipulative, and often violent.;Because of the above, the Aragua's elite, with the aid of the clergy, built a two tiered social order in which the wills of the masses were subjugated to the desires of the elite. The elite based their social order on the manipulation of crucial social categories---race, family, wealth, and legitimacy. This system had serious consequences for the poor in general, people of color (ex-slaves and Indians) and women specifically, because the elite thought that these two groups presented the greatest threats to their social order. In order to make this system complete, the elite needed the support of the clergy to cement the fictive kinship ties that kept the elite together and bound the poor to the rich, preach messages of social control, and to build structures that symbolize power and the social order. The clergy, because they served in one of the poorest and weakest Catholic Churches in Latin America, either complied with the elite agenda or risked involving themselves in class and racial conflicts. Together, the elite and clergy of Aragua de Barcelona, Venezuela built a system of hegemony that lasted until the 1950s.