Conceiving Central America: A Bourbon Public in the Gazeta de Guatemala (1797–1807)

Abstract

In the age of economic reform that swept the Spanish empire in the late eighteenth century, Guatemala City's intellectual elite conceived and presented an ideology of Guatemalan identity based on abstract ideas: prosperity, patria and equality before the law. They believed that these ideals, promulgated by Bourbon policy and officials throughout the empire, would appeal to compatriots in the provinces who shared their love of a historical and geographical Guatemala, a Guatemala that proposed to bring all its inhabitants into the new Spanish-speaking commercial society they advocated. This new unity, the authors hoped, would contribute to prosperity within the context of a Bourbon Spain rebuilding and reorganizing to compete with the commercial empires of France and Britain. In the end, the patria with a history, geography, language, public, and culture, would be appropriated by independence-era leaders, as in the rest of Spanish America. However, as originally presented, this conception of Central America was part and parcel of Bourbon reformism.

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