Join Patrick as he explores the national anthem of Bolivia, a song that encapsulates the country's journey to independence and its rich cultural heritage. The episode delves into the historical context surrounding Bolivia's declaration of independence in 1809 and the role of key figures like José Ignacio de Sanez, who penned the anthem's lyrics, and composer Leopoldo Benedetto Vincenti. Patrick highlights the significance of Bolivia's official name, the Plurinational State of Bolivia, reflecting its diverse indigenous nations and the impact of Evo Morales' government in acknowledging this heritage. Through a detailed examination of the anthem's verses, listeners will discover themes of freedom, nationalism, and the honor bestowed upon those who fought for Bolivia's liberation. This engaging narrative not only celebrates the anthem itself but also invites reflection on the cultural and historical significance embedded within its lyrics.

Hi. Thanks for visiting the show notes. Here are some actual fun facts:

• While in space Neil Armstrong saw what he described as a gigantic mirror reflecting out of South America. It was actually the Salar de Uyuni. He was so struck with the salt flat of over 10000 square kilometers that he went on vacation there with his family.
• Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid ran through Argentina and landed in Bolivia where they tried to repeat their wild west stick up act. The authorities were having none of that, they surrounded their lodgings, a gun fight ensued, and the duo were left dead.
• Bolivia is also where the efforts of Che Guevara came to an end when he attempted to overthrow the 1966 and 67 government and claim it for communism. He was executed in La Higuera.
• Bolivia is landlocked, Laka Titicaca is the highest elevation lake (at 12500 ft) that you can put a boat in, plus they have the highest elevation forest.

Here are my sources:

1. https://dctourguideonline.com/the-george-washington-of-south-america/ 
2. https://www.opinion.com.bo/articulo/cancionero/historia-himno-nacional-bolivia/20110808202000373031.html 
3. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5251306.stm 
4. https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/bolivia/ 
5. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Foraging_and_Farming/qxghBQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA496&printsec=frontcover 
6. https://web.archive.org/web/20101104191224/http://embajadadebolivia.com.ar/histhim.htm 
7. https://web.archive.org/web/20100328130208/http://www.redpizarra.org/HuellasDeBolivia/ElHimnoNacional 
8. https://www.loc.gov/item/90026427/ 
9. https://web.archive.org/web/20030801122417/http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/1958.htm 
10. Arnade, Charles W. (1970) [1957]. The Emergence of the Republic of Bolivia. New York: Russell and Russell.
11. https://archive.org/details/briefhistoryofbo0000mora 
12. https://read.dukeupress.edu/hahr 
13. https://www.ecured.cu/Leopoldo_Benedetto_Vincenti_Franti 
14. https://www.t13.cl/noticia/deportes13/copa-america-2019/Copa-America-2019-Por-que-se-parecen-himnos-de-Chile-y-Bolivia1 
15. https://correodelsur.com/ecos/20181125_las-musas-que-inspiraron-el-himno-nacional.html 
16. Miranda, Edmundo (2009). The National Anthem of Bolivia (to understand what we sing).
17. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Desarrollo_demogr%C3%A1fico_de_la_ciudad_de/dTwTAQAAIAAJ?hl=en 
18. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Gran_gu%C3%ADa_estad%C3%ADstica_sud_americana/WF7Rk5KFes4C?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA696&printsec=frontcover 
19. https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/mururata-bolivia-ca-1851/#:~:text=Bolivia%20officially%20ended%20slavery%20with,formed%20villages%20such%20as%20Mururata. 
20. https://web.archive.org/web/20180321130807/http://www.la-razon.com/sociedad/pueblos-logran-traducir-Himno-Nacional_0_2761523856.html 
21. https://www.mcislanguages.com/fatherland-vs-motherland-what-is-the-gender-of-your-country/#:~:text=Derived%20from%20the%20Latin%20word,sense%20of%20belonging%20and%20love. 
22. https://bolivia.justia.com/nacionales/nueva-constitucion-politica-del-estado/primera-parte/titulo-i/capitulo-primero/ 

Hello and welcome to the Anthems podcast. I'm Patrick, and I'm here to tell you the story of a song that helps to tell the story of a nation.

Today's episode is brought to you by the need for an introduction of another recurring character and another one of the Nexus points that I've referred to before.

Laying historical groundwork is not a real fun reason for choosing a country to talk about, but the chances of them all being entertaining reasons are less than 100%. We still get a good story out of Bolivia, though.

Yesterday I realized that one of the things I get to do is chronicle little bits of the decolonization of the world. It's one of the good things that I get to talk about. We'll also be jumping over to a continent that I have yet to land on, which is a fun bonus.

So where are we headed today? We are going to talk about Bolivia, officially the pleurinational state of Bolivia, and the anthem. The national anthem of Bolivia.

Yes, that is what it's called.

Like I said, we're going here because this country is at the tail end of one of the nexus points that I'm been trying to figure out how to talk about better. It's also the namesake of another recurring character and one of my favorite historical figures, Simone Bolivar.

He is often referred to as the George Washington of South America, but I think that that moniker does the man a disservice because he was personally involved in the liberation of six countries to Washington's one. So we'll hear about him at least five more times in some capacity.

I won't mention the five countries yet, but I will challenge you to guess before you look it up. If you do look it up, just look at Google Maps and remember that he did all of this on a horse.

What I will mention is that you're about to hear an anthem, because that's what I am here to talk about.

And I've previously stated, and you have heard that we've got to get that out of the way early on and with very little context, which I'm consistently failing at the no context thing. But what are you going to do? This is as smooth a transition as we're going to have into five minutes and change of the national anthem of Bolivia.

The party. See, when I go, yes, we are. Get to know it's the Lord. Even then. I love you.

You might have guessed that my initial reaction is favorable to this tune. It's another that sure sounds like it's written for a marching band. And I'm into it.

The version moves the foot a bit and has the feel of anthem music, but it's actually a little bit long for me. Other than that, I will add it to the list more on the song in a little while. So where are we in the world?

I said this was going to be a continent that I have not visited yet. So South America it was. And we happened to get the 6th largest country in South America.

If you look at the continent, you'll notice that on the west coast there's a bit of a cleft and that's right where Chile and Peru meet. They have about 100 miles of shared border with each other. That is about the midpoint of Bolivia's western border.

It's bordered to the south by a bit more of Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay, with Brazil taking up the entire north and east borders. Because Brazil is actually gigantic, Bolivia itself is also not tiny and it clocks in with a land area of 424,124 sq. Mi.

That's about 1.09 million km² for the rest of the world, making it the fifth largest south american country by area and 28th in the world.

The nation contains a wide range of ecological regions, including most of the Altiplano, which is the most extensive plateau outside of Tibet, and almost 60% of the country is Amazon rainforest. So it is a biodiverse place and it's beautiful and it has a bunch of the most endangered ecosystem on the planet inside of it.

Evo Morales. Evo. I'm going with Evo. It sounds more correct.

Evo Morales finished a campaign promise to convene an assembly that would rewrite the constitution to give more power to the approximately three dozen indigenous nations that live within its borders.

One of the outcomes of this was adding plurin national to the country's name to acknowledge that it is in fact a nation of nations that predate the current Bolivia. Like any country, Bolivia has some serious issues that it should be addressing. But this is one place where I feel like they got it right.

Given the very deep roots that the country has, its portion of the human story goes back at least as far as one of my objectively favorite historical events, the domestication of the mighty potato.

This is tied in with the revolution that was part of getting colonial Spain the heck out of South America. And the bolivian part of that was joined by the non indigenous people near the end of the 18th century.

Bolivia is the last of the regions freed in the campaigns involving Simone Bolivar, aka el Liberator, and they took a bit after that to actually get into a proper state situation. So I will pick up at the end of the 18th century, right about the time our poet, one Jose Ignacio de Sanez, was born.

More on him in a few the indigenous resistance was a reaction to the exploitation and oppression by the Spanish, and it was a constant background hum during the 300 something year long spanish occupation.

The revolution, though, didn't really start happening until the criollo, that is, people of spanish descent that were born in the colonies, realized that the exploitation was not just limited to the native people, and they were getting the short end of the stick as well.

Truquissaca, and graduated with a juris doctor.

During the same period of time, a bunch of people at places like the university Jose went to had been reading Franklin, Payne, Locke and Machiavelli, while steadily learning that the old nations were right about the people.

Back in Europe, as Napoleon waged war, the spanish homeland's influence in South America was weakened substantially when their government was completely destabilized by Napoleon's armies. Then the iberian peninsula was invaded properly by french forces, and Joseph Bonaparte was installed as the new monarch in Spain.

This was really the final straw for lasting spanish rule in South America.

I understand that this is a member of an upper house, kind of like the US Senate.

This group was formed when Bolivar and his most effective general, Antonio Sucre, called a meeting in Chuquisaka, which has been renamed since then for Sucre after the last of the royalist generals had been defeated.

At this meeting in the halls of the very university that he attended, our poet Jose was one of the 39 men that decided the fate of the province of Charcos. There were three options presented that you've kind of gotten the spoiler about already.

The options were that they could unite with Argentina, they could unite with Peru, which was the liberator's favorite option, or they could become an independent nation.

Dessent Heinz was in favor of full independence himself, and is noted to have said, considering that ascension to Peru or Argentina would later make separation difficult, and that, on the other hand, if the trial of its own state was not successful, one of the other solutions could be sought.

Enough of the rest of the people there thought similarly enough so that even though they didn't all vote for independence, they did all sign the declaration of independence. I think this is the first national anthem lyricist that we've run into that has also signed a declaration of independence for their country.

Time will tell if he is the only one. After that, things didn't exactly settle down for Bolivia, with revolutionary fighting continuing in the country for another 15 years or so.

During the first presidency, that of the liberator himself, Simone Bolivar. Jose found himself as the secretary of state.

But we have another half of a story to tell before I can tie threads off like that. This story is about a conspicuously absent so far.

Composer sometimes this means that the person that wrote the music is temporally removed from the timeline I'm working through, such as, you know, born hundreds of years earlier or something. But here it's mostly because when Jose was voting to make Bolivia an independent nation, Leopoldo Benedetto Vincenti was like ten years old.

He's also one of the people who are involved in anthem history that they really, and a lot of information about.

His father, Antonio, was the captain of Napoleon's version of the Hussars, a kind of elite light cavalry shock troop that was originally developed by the hungarian army in the 16th century.

So Leopoldo was moved into the house of one Melchor Dazza and tasked with creating a patriotic song.

Senor Daza was, like our poet, a signatory to the declaration of independence, and they were also friends, or at least they were close enough that their daughters were friends with each other.

So while Leopoldo was hard at work writing anthem music, he was also falling in love with a couple of women that one source described as the muses of the bolivian anthem.

So we do at this point have the national anthem of Bolivia as a written and performed musical piece of as is often the case, thats not quite the end of everything because the tying off thread stuff, theres two quick things that well discuss. First, where did Leopoldo end up? He married Melkors daughter, Carmina Carosa, and settled in La Paz. He had a son.

Initially the anthem was written in four four time and in b flat major, as explained earlier.

Seven years later it was modified to e flat major along with a couple of melodic modifications, because it was originally written as sort of a hymn with verses and stanzas that styled it as an italian opera, which makes sense given that the man most responsible for writing the music was an italian musician trained in France to write opera music. With the passage of time, many things change, but the popularity of the bolivian anthem remained high.

And unlike a case of somewhere like Iceland, the anthem was actually unofficially changed to be easy for people to sing, and it is now often done in twelve eight time with c major as the key. But there might be more to this one, or rather, there's some sort of a little twist.

Recall that Leopoldo lived in Chile and he worked with the military band there, and that he definitely knew the chilean national anthem, then listened to the bolivian and the chilean anthems back to back. And I defy you to not come. Hmm. They're both either four four marches or twelve eight vocal songs.

The melodies are extremely close and the choruses are essentially the same thing.

There is supposedly no proof that anyone ripped anybody else off, but I have heard them both and it's impossible for me to unhear just how the same they are. The lyrics, though, are definitely the original work of Ignacio, and we have arrived at finding out what he wrote in English.

Because even though Spanish is the closest thing I am to a second language, I've been trying to learn it on and off for literally decades. I still will be reading this in my native tongue again.

The song is four verses, with four two line stanzas in each verse, and each verse is followed by the seven line chorus. The song follows with explanations for the verse in between each and I will do the chorus after the first verse.

Bolivians a propitious fate has long last crowned our vows and longings. The land is free, free at last. Its servile state has now finally ceased.

The martial turmoil of yesterday and the horrible clamor of war are followed today in harmonious contrast by the sweet hymns of peace and unity. In the first verse we are presented with the culmination of the struggle for freedom and the calm after the war.

They are not slaves to the Spanish any longer, and instead have united as their own culture.

It reads, let us keep the lofty name of our fatherland in glorious splendor and on its altars once more we must swear to die before we would live as slaves. To die before we would live as slaves. To die before we would live as slaves.

The chorus serves mostly to move the song here, and to me at least, it seems like the least inspiring part of the lyrics.

The thematic elements certainly match up with the general tone of the anthem, but I will note the use of fatherlander or patria in the Spanish rather than motherland, not because it's a controversial thing, but because it gives me something to explain.

Using the masculine term implies that heritage, tradition, and government and order are important, whereas the feminine suggests nurturing and a place of birth. With the heavy emphasis on patriotism and loyalty in the song, fatherland does fit for the feel of the country.

This refrain even ends with a call of loyalty to the death, so it's a very anthem esque stuff, a word that I might have just coined. It is a fitting tone to recur throughout the song.

On to the second verse, eternal praise to the brave warriors whose heroic valor and firmness conquered the freedom and glories that now happy bolivia just begins to enjoy. Let their names be preserved forever in marble and bronze, transmit their glory to remote future ages and in resounding songs, let them repeat.

Freedom, freedom, freedom. That Leopoldo was writing a hymn really comes forward for me in this verse.

It's not overtly religious in any way, but it has a particular kind of reverent tone and lyrical cadence to me. He is reaching out to honor all the people that have died in the pursuit of the american dream of freedom.

Praise for those that have died in pursuit of that which we enjoy is some solid national anthem fare. Now this is followed by the second refrain of the song and then the third verse. The third verse is as follows.

Here has justice erected its throne which vile oppression ignores and on its glorious loyal bequeathed us freedom, freedom, freedom. This innocent and beautiful land which owes its name to Bolivar is the happy homeland where mankind enjoys the benefits of bliss and peace.

A fairly common anthem theme, at least in countries where the song is directly tied to the events of the revolution, is the declaration of the surety of the victory of justice. The author proclaims that they are oppressed no more and freedom has come to Bolivia.

We also get a name drop, or rather a recognition of the country's namesake, Senor Bolivar. He closes the verse again with a recognition of the calm after a little more than 40 years of war in the country.

This is followed by the third refrain of the chorus. And then we have the final verse.

If a foreigner may any given day even attempt to subjugate Bolivia, let him prepare for a fatal destiny which menaces such superb aggressor. For the sons of mighty Bolivar have sworn thousands upon thousands of times to die rather than see the country's majestic banner humiliated.

In the final verse we hear the nationalism surfacing in the song. Not a strange thing in this case given that Jose was directly involved in the political foundation of the country.

It's further not surprising because nationalism is inherent to the very idea of a national anthem. I think it just kinda is.

The first stanza is a fairly straightforward threat of death to anyone that threatens Bolivia's sovereignty and independence. The last stanza acknowledges the honor of the people that have died many times for their freedom and will not hesitate to do so again.

A triumphant and fitting declamation to wrap up an enthusiastically patriotic song and lead into the final refrain of the chorus. Clearly an anthem meant to inspire patriotism in the people of Bolivia and state. An invocation to national sentiment.

The words are penned by a man espousing a firm hatred of tyranny and a love of liberty and freedom. What strikes me is that they are lyrics written by a man that has lived his entire life up to the day.

He was inspired to write this verse with a desire for the sureness of independence while being constantly in, or at least near, the struggle for that independence.

It gives people the ability to translate official documents and current cultural norms, such as the national anthem, into native languages.

This has already been done with six of the country's 36 constitutionally named official languages, apparently by towns that have had their school children singing the anthem in a particular native tongue for quite a while, and now they have officially recognized translations. I'd love to say that in the future I'll talk more about that in a bonus episode, but maybe it'll be a mini episode.

I've been getting a lot of future stuff lined up lately, so we're getting episode nine. Pretty cool.

Mostly, though, it's because giving the cultures the language came from the attention they deserve would require six more podcasts to explore and my time on earth is a finite thing. But do read more on your own and tell me about it because I would love to know. I just can't do all the work.

As for me, I have reached the last bit of what I want to tell you that isn't effectively part of the credits. So the writing, recording, and production for the show are done by me and I wrote played the intro outro music.

The music was used with my permission unless otherwise noted. The anthem I play are public domain stuff. My sources and other tasty bits I found are contained in the show notes.

I realize that I am not being very good at leaving extra tasty bits for you, so I'm going to do a little bit digging about Bolivia, leave some fun facts and stuff.

The most direct way to get to these notes and stuff is@anthemspodcast.com you can find me on Facebook, the old people, social media, and WhatsApp as the Anthems podcast.

I'm not on the rest of them, but I am sharing these episodes with the hashtag anthemspod, so if you follow that, maybe it'll pop up in your feed somewhere. I've also heard that ratings and reviews super duper matter, so if you feel like doing that, I guess it would be super cool.

Plus then I can get some feedback and find out what I am not doing good at and do better at that. Oh, non zero numbers of people. Keep listening, which is wild. I'm gonna keep doing it. Please keep listening and enjoy.

Anyway, email me corrections, comments, concerns, recipes, ideas, instructions on how to do stuff. Yell at me, ask me questions. I'll draw a picture of a horse and send it to me at anthemspot@gmail.com and give me a call.