America generated many more rebels during an era of unfettered European colonialism that lasted, in most parts of the region, well into the early 1800s. In that period, white settlers born in America imagined and actualized a distinct political identity separate from their colonizer ancestors and European imperial rulers. Some in the earlier settler generations had imagined America in religiously utopian and millenarian terms: Free from Europe, the new Babylon — America — offered the possibility of making a new Zion, a new Jerusalem. The end times and the second coming of Christ were at hand for Franciscan friars in 1500s Mexico and Puritan preachers like Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewell in late 1600s New England — if only they could convert enough of the Indigenous peoples suffering European genocide, enslavement and disease.
Unsurprisingly, these forms of domination generated resistance from Indigenous peoples, sometimes in the form of mass insurrections. From King Philip’s War of 1675-1678 and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 to Túpac Amaru II’s 1780 multiracial rebellion in the Andes, to kill a European was to fight for anti-colonial liberation.
During this Age of Revolutions, as historians would later call it, “America” and “American” came to be used as anti-colonial identities. But these identities were shot through with the same kinds of racial hierarchies and ideas of domination and separation that structured colonial societies.
In Spain’s racial caste colonial societies, mestizo (mixed-race) descendants of Indigenous nobility and Creoles — Spaniards born in the Americas — writing in the 1600s helped set the foundations for the emergence of an American identity separate from Europe. Noble mestizos in New Spain and Peru produced histories of the Mexica (Aztecs) and Incas that challenged self-serving Spanish depictions of these Indigenous polities as “barbarian” and “tyrannical.” These histories served as early critiques of Spanish colonial rule while generally stopping short of calling for the overthrow of colonial hierarchies.
Creole intellectuals, too, looked to preconquest Indigenous pasts to help forge an American “creole patriotism” by the 1700s. Yet even as they valorized the achievements of past Indigenous empires, Creoles tended to minimize the conditions of existing Indigenous communities — not to mention the mixed-race, enslaved and free Black communities.
This contradiction — a testament to Spanish colonial societies predicated on Catholic orthodoxy, “blood purity” and racial separation — would continue to plague most new nations that emerged from the Spanish American Wars of Independence of 1808 to 1826. If wars of national liberation had turned “America”/“American” into broadly inclusive categories, the ensuing decades displayed an exclusionary narrowing. Creoles simply replaced the Spanish at the top of racially stratified, exploitative regimes, and republics replaced the crown; domination continued under new names. “Same horse, different rider,” the old Latin American saying went.