Santa Cruz

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Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz is the principal city in eastern Bolivia and a national department. Founded in 1561, Santa Cruz changed both its name and its location several times before definitively establishing itself in 1595 as Santa Cruz de la Sierra at a location near its current site. Until the mid-twentieth century, Santa Cruz was separated from the highland cities that governed it by some 350 kilometers of rain forest and high mountains. Geographical isolation has produced a self-perception of Santa Cruz as a distinctive region within the nation and a rivalry between its people (cambas) those of the highlands (coyas).

Recent research on the early history of Santa Cruz has shown that Spanish colonists, who explored the region in search of El Dorado, ultimately assumed a hardscrabble existence on the eastern frontier of the empire. Cowhides and sugar became the principal exports to the highland economy, and the latter product became a medium of exchange locally. Although the city never grew beyond a few thousand vecinos (Europeans) as the only consequential Spanish settlement east of the Andes, Santa Cruz exercised regional influence beyond its size, as exemplified by its becoming a bishopric in 1605.

The colonial period also saw the establishment of two mission systems in the region. In Mojos (present-day Bolivia's Beni department), Jesuits based in Lima founded two dozen mission centers stretching north along the Mamoré River basin. Another Jesuit mission in Chiquitos began near Santa Cruz and extended eastward toward Brazil. Spanish colonial law prohibited non-clerical and non-Indian contact with the missions, a proscription resented and furtively violated by cruceños, who saw the Jesuits as interlopers and the Indian neophytes as both a market and a labor supply. Jesuit banishment from the Spanish colonies in 1767 removed the priests and partially opened the former mission centers to commerce from Santa Cruz. For the last fifty years of the colonial period Santa Cruz maintained its bishopric but saw its former political authority curtailed in its subordination to the intendant of Cochabamba.

With Bolivian independence in 1825, Santa Cruz became de facto capital of the nation east of the Andes, which restored its political influence but did little to decrease its isolation. Two events in the middle of the nineteenth century marked the beginning of Santa Cruz's integration into the Bolivian nation. The first was the War of the Pacific, which produced a patriotic response to the nation's call for volunteers to fight against the Chilean army. The second came with a heightened demand for tropical products by the industrializing world. A brief involvement in the gathering of cinchona (a tree with bark containing a substance that could be used in malaria treatment) from 1840 to 1860 was followed by a longer-lived rubber boom. Rubber became the El Dorado that cruceños had long sought, and a few of the city's sons, especially Nicolás Suárez, reaped large fortunes in gathering and transporting latex to Europe and the United States. Santa Cruz also became the commercial center for provisioning those who extracted rubber from Bolivian forests. The discovery of oil in the Andean foothills, the completion of an auto road to Cochabamba, and the Chaco War (1932–1935) strengthened Santa Cruz's ties with the Bolivian nation. But these developments did not stifle desire for autonomy. Santa Cruz would declare itself a federal state in 1876 and sponsor brief federalist rebellions in 1891 and 1957.

After World War II, Santa Cruz became the focus of national development planning. Fueled by loans from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank, several Bolivian governments invested in building industry and a transport infrastructure that, along with petroleum revenues, made Santa Cruz the most prosperous region of the country and a magnet for internal migration. The city grew from 42,764 inhabitants in 1950 to 254,682 in 1976 to more than a million in 2000. The department's share of GDP is currently nearly half of the nation's aggregate.

In the early twenty-first century Santa Cruz is Bolivia's most cosmopolitan region. But even as increasing numbers of high lander smigrate there, cruceños insist on their uniqueness. The contemporary "autonomies movement," a demand for greater self-government and greater regional control of natural resources, expresses the continuation of a historic camba-coya rivalry.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

García Recio, José María. Análisis de una sociedad de frontera: Santa Cruz de la Sierra en los siglos XVI y XVIII. Sevilla, Spain: Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, 1988.

"Santa Cruz de la Sierra, ciudad de." In Diccionario histórico de Bolivia, vol. 2, pp. 861-862. Sucre: Grupo de Editores Históricos, 2002.

David Block

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture