Citizenship in a Culture of Conspiracy

• In Event: Ciudadanía y construcción de las naciones latinoamericanas

Abstract

Historians James Wood (working on Chile) and Chad Black (working on Ecuador) have extended and complicated discussions of what citizenship meant for the new American nations and specific sectors of those nations—such as women, artisans and the military. They have surprised us in showing that nationhood for the military and women was often disenfranchising. On the other hand, the constant civil war of the first thirty years of “independence” have traditionally painted the notion of “citizenship” as little more than a fictional term. How, then, might we strike a useful framework for understanding citizenship in the “age of caudillismo”? Why, or how, could people use it or hold on to it? What status was afforded those hundreds of exiles, or those expelled from their nation by force, who continued to play an important role in government in more than one country simultaneously? The current paper looks at the function of Guatemalan emigrados in early independent Chiapas. I argue that rather than function as a destabilizing force in early Guatemalan or Mexican politics and nation-making, the emigrado played the critical role of emissary, spy and paramilitary in still ill-defined national territories. I also argue that we consider the nation-making process in 19th century Mexico and Guatemala—or modern Mesoamerica—not as a struggle to draw borders and integrate patriots, but as an effort to keep multiple mobile groups in and outside of the borders working against the same “enemy,” whether national or regional.

Author

• Lean Sweeney, University of New Mexico