TRADITION, POPULAR POLITICS AND CONSTITUTION. A HISTORY OF LATIN AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONALISM BETWEEN THE ATLANTIC CRISIS AND THE WORLD CRISIS (C. 1810-1930).
Starting from a conventional notion of constitutionalism, which links discourses and practices limiting political power with the guarantee of rights, the aim of this Symposium is to problematize the history of Latin American constitutionalism from its origins to the world crisis (to include the Mexican Revolution and the region’s social constitutionalisms), prioritizing consideration of the subject and its rights in all their complexity (gender, class, colonial condition, racialization). In contrast to the more common perspective centered on the construction of national states equivalent to integrated and homogeneous communities, we propose to approach integration as a process conditioned by conflicts, as a problem and a contested field that involves and runs through constitutionalism. To this end, it is essential not to reduce the history of constitutionalism to the more or less contextualized history of constitutional texts, but to broaden its object to encompass the discourses and practices involved in the struggles for rights.
Against this backdrop, and with the primary aim of avoiding the most widespread explanatory scheme — based on the contrast between foreign models (republican, liberal, conservative) and local adaptations — our proposal involves considering, within their own context, the constitutional experiences that developed in this extremely complex multi-ethnic and multicultural space throughout the long nineteenth century, in order to debate arguments such as the following four: a) the characterization of the first Ibero-American constitutionalism based on the robust continuity of the Iberian legal tradition and its colonial imprint, key to assessing the scope of the political rupture present in the multiple experiences of representative governments and popular participation, along with the social controversies that accompanied them; b) the protean category of “the constitutional,” resulting from the tension between constitutionalism (culture) and constitution (text), which requires paying attention to the parallel development of popular agencies that operate at the margins of the hegemonic framework delimited by constitutional texts, driven by those whose political institutionality is not fully recognized and who make their voices heard through petitions, mobilizations and judicial recourses, among other forms of resistance and intervention endowed with constitutional significance; c) the problem of citizenship, which paradigmatically involves the struggle over redefining the subject of rights to incorporate historically subordinated groups (women, indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants) and, even while focusing on its first long century of history, is essential for reconstructing the conflictive path leading from the extremely prolonged colonial constitutionalism to the recent multicultural and plurinational constitutionalisms; d) rights and their problems, from the relationship between political rights and civil rights relating to property in its various forms (individual and communal) to the emergence of social rights, passing through the conflict between old and new forms of representation in the state arena.
Through these avenues, our aim is to critically reframe the debate on the history of Latin American constitutionalism, with the purpose of recovering all the diversity that emerges from these complex societies, in favor of building a postcolonial constitutional culture and preserving the social memory of marginalized populations in Latin America.
