Beltrán, Manuela (1724–?)

Manuela Beltrán (b. 1724; d. ?), Comunero insurgent. A heroine of the Comunero Revolt that swept through the uplands of New Granada in 1781, Manuela Beltrán remains an obscure figure. Born of Spanish ancestry in Socorro, province of Tunja, she appears to have been a woman of modest means. Her home, a prosperous agricultural, commercial, and textile manufacturing town, was hit hard by the ambitious, intemperately applied revenue measures of Regent Visitor Gutiérrez de Piñeres. Riots erupted in Socorro on 16 March 1781 following the promulgation of the decree separating the collection of the Alcabala and the Armada de Barlovento taxes, which people mistakenly believed to be a new tax. Emerging from the angry crowd, Manuela Beltrán, in the midst of riotous applause, dramatically tore down the Armada de Barlovento ordinance, an act that at least symbolically marked the beginning of the Comunero revolt. Thereafter, Beltrán disappeared from history, but she is representative of the prominent role that women so often played in the popular protests of the eighteenth century.

See alsoComunero Revolt (New Granada) .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Pablo E. Cárdenas Acosta, El movimiento comunal de 1781 en el Nuevo Reino de Granada (reivindicaciones históricas), vol. 1 (1960), esp. p. 101.

John Leddy Phelan, The People and the King: The Comunero Revolution in Columbia, 1781 (1978), esp. pp. 46-60.

                                        Allan J. Kuethe