From vecinos to citizens, political and cultural strategies in the process of citizenship formation in Colombia: 1910-1860.

Abstract

This paper aims to show how citizenship in its origins was related to the figure of the vecino and how it, as the Nation-State, is a cultural construction. It is argued that being and feeling a citizen is not a “natural” state, but the result of a cultural process in the history of each individual and the society as a collective. Citizens are not born, they are constructed. But this construction involves shaping a whole legal and political discourse, resulting in a set of social practices that goes through political and electoral fields, and extends to the entire social fabric, with a prism of cultural behaviors and practices that find expression in the spheres of the public and private lives. In order to crystallize this cultural and political project, in the first half of the nineteenth century the State designed a number of strategies and pedagogies to impose a model of subject enrolled in the ideology and symbolic language of modernity. A subject who was claimed to be the support of the new Nation-State it was sought to implement.

Keywords: Vecino, Citizenship, Culture, Nation-State, Education, subject, Modernity.