Citizenships and cultural politics

Despite Latin American independence yielding nations that would depend on popular sovereignty and representation instead of divine monarchical rule, the parameters of citizenship were fluid, and access to its benefits a work in progress throughout the 1800s. Birthplace, race, and ethnicity were central to both legal and social conceptions of citizenship throughout the century. Overlapping with questions of social and racial hierarchy were concerns about public health and hygiene, poverty, and public image that a nation could project on the global stage. Gender and the social expectations that accompanied gender identities, as well as sexuality, were omnipresent in all these aspects of citizenship, too. This chapter looks closely at the links between such elements, nation, and language, and then surveys modes of political participation and cultural citizenship. The goal is to understand the evolving meanings of citizenships and how these, along with the politics of culture, were so central to the state-making processes in nineteenth-century Latin America.