This issue opens with Jordana Dym’s article, “Our Pueblos, Fractions with No Central Unity: Municipal Sovereignty in Central America, 1808 – 1921.” Entering the lively debate over Spanish legacy and liberalism, elite and popular, region and center, and city and countryside in the Latin American wars of independence, Dym argues that in Central America, the Spanish Scholastic notion of municipal sovereignty, revived in Spain and Latin America by Napoleon’s 1808 invasion, was transformed by the Cortes of Cádiz. The Cortes’ infusion of constitutional law created an expanded and more inclusive notion of municipal councils, recognizing Indian as well as Spanish cabildos, favoring individual over corporate rights, and extending the vote to all free adult males, regardless of caste. Dym is making a processual argument rather than one exclusively focused on ideas and formal law. The exercise of power by municipal councils during the long period of political instability in higher...
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