Ciudadanos, electores, representantesDiscursos de inclusión y exclusión políticas en Perú y Ecuador (1860-1870)

Laburpena

This doctoral thesis offers an analysis of the construction of citizenship and political representation in Peru and Ecuador during the second half of the nineteenth century, specifically around the 1860s. Therefore, it fits into a period of consolidation of the liberal regimes in Latin America. This moment of greater political stability facilitates the approach to the legislative strategies and the institutional structures that gave support to parliamentary life. In this sense, it is presented an analysis of history of politics or, rather, the history of the political, a broader notion of the concept that contains cultural components. So, from the methodological point of view, this thesis adheres to the cultural history of politics. The configuration and functioning of Parliament is situated as the fundamental point of reference in this work, in which the analysis of discourse, especially parliamentary discourse, is crucial. The parliamentary representatives were in charge of elaborating, debating and enacting all kinds of legislative texts, which would lay the foundations of the political game. At the same time, they were responsible for designing the electoral system, in which the own parliamentarians would be elected. In this process, the development of parliamentary debates was fundamental, especially those that shaped the contours of political inclusion and exclusion. From this point, the Peruvian and Ecuadorian political and intellectual elites defined different political categories, which appear in the title of this thesis: citizens, electors and representatives. To access each of these categories, the parliamentarians had to delimit a series of requirements, related to some aspects that are intersected in this research, such as territory, gender or race. In addition, this work inserts the case studies above in a broader geographical context, using a comparative methodology and a transnational approach that allows reaching several spatial levels: the Andean area, the Ibero-American context and the Atlantic space. The circulation of people, ideas and political models would greatly influence the configuration of the Peruvian and Ecuadorian representative systems. Thus, this research is interested in the processes of cultural transfers, as well as in the specificity of each community, opting for transcending national borders and promoting transnational analysis.