Nacionalización del pasado y usos del americanismo a mediados del siglo XIX

Abstract

ABSTRACTOver the last decades a consensus has emerged among historians regarding the process of construction of Hispanic American nations. This consensus arose from the criticism to the essentialist view of the nation. Less attention has been paid to the process of construction of national identities in the mid nineteenth century and its relation to Hispanic American or Latin American representations of nationality. The aim of this essay is to analyze the factors that favor the coexistence, and even the complementarity, of two identity discourses that shared similar characteristics: both were based on the principle of nationalities and were considered to predate the crisis of the Spanish Empire and the Hispanic American independences. Nevertheless, they also referred to two different spaces: the first one fractured by the construction of the new national states, and the other based on the unification of the Hispanic American communities.