Abstract

This article analyzes the transformation of the colonial social and political hierarchies and the shaping of new citizenship rights during the crisis of the Spanish empire and the independence wars. After having examined the late-colonial dynamics of class, caste, corporations and social belonging during the final decades of the Bourbon regime, it explores popular participation in the transformation of political space by focusing on the specific choices and agendas of people of color within the social and political spheres of the time. As in other colonial contexts, in Spanish America struggles for political voice, rights and citizenship took place within the empire before they became revolutions against it.