The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon political equality and inequalities during the nineteenth century, a period that witnessed the formation and transformation of new polities in the former Spanish colonial territories in America. There are different ways of addressing this question; in this essay, I have chosen the category of citizenship as a conceptual tool that will allow me to provide a specific focus to an otherwise broad and imprecise topic. This category is central to our contemporary political debates, but it was also part of the political concerns, languages, and practices of the nineteenth century, although with different connotations from our own.
