On Political Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Abstract

IN THE LAST TEN TO FIFTEEN YEARS, citizenship has become a crucial term in political and academic debates. Not least in Latin America. While in the turbulent decades of the 1960s and 1970s, that term was absent from the mainstream political and ideological discourses of most Latin American countries, in the 1980s it became a key word in the language of the transition to democracy, and in the 1990s, a major topic of public debate. This classic theoretical concept has expanded and diversified its meaning in controversial ways. The most interesting recent attempts to define (or redefine) citizenship are those that delve into the two great intellectual traditions where the concept originated and flourished, civic republicanism and liberalism, and connect to the old dilemma of how to reconcile la liberte des anciennes and la liberte des modernes.''1 The problematic of citizenship has also informed studies of the past and has been particularly productive in the field of political history. In the case of Latin America, scholars are using this new lens to revisit the nineteenth century, when the definition of citizenship and the constitution of a citizenry became key aspects of the nation-building process triggered after independence. Most of the previous historiography had interpreted that process in terms of the transition of the Western world from the ancien regime societies to the modern states, and of the advancements made, and the obstacles encountered, in the linear and progressive path that presumably led from the former to the latter. The new literature has questioned this linear view, and by introducing the problematic of citizenship, it has