UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the emergence of modern civic identity in Spain from the long eighteenth century through the nineteenth century, arguing that debates over citizenship and belonging were never confined to legal or political discourse but were fundamentally shaped through cultural production. While the Cádiz Constitution of 1812 has been read as a foundational legal document of Spanish liberalism, this dissertation reinterprets it as a cultural artifact in which competing narratives of history, political legitimacy, and belonging were actively constructed.At the center of this intervention is the claim that liberalism in Spain, as elsewhere, was structurally shaped by the tension between universalist ideals and exclusionary practices. Drawing on Uday Singh Mehta’s critique of liberal imperial thought, From Subjects to Citizens argues that Spanish liberalism initially imagined political inclusion across the Atlantic empire yet ultimately reproduced hierarchies that restricted full citizenship along racial, gendered, and colonial lines, particularly through the juridical distinction between españoles [Spaniards] and ciudadanos [citizens]. In doing so, the debates in Cádiz exposed the unstable boundaries of political membership, where criollos, indigenous natives, women, and enslaved and free members of the African caste were variably included, marginalized, or excluded completely from civic recognition.This dissertation intervenes by reading these tensions through a transdisciplinary framework that places legal language in conversation with literary works from the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Engaging with the work of historians such as Antonio Feros, Josep Fradera, and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara—who have explored the intersections of empire, colonialism, and identity in Spain and Latin America—I analyze how writers navigated the tensions of liberal ideology to show how questions of political membership, belonging, and exclusion were deeply embedded in cultural production. Rather than treating literature as reflective of political and historical realities, I argue that literary form actively participated in the production of categories of civic subjectivity and exclusion. Across four chapters, I trace the evolving articulation of civic identity through shifting regimes of discourse—Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and sociability, neoclassical pedagogical theater, and Romantic subjectivity—each of which stages and destabilizes the boundaries of political belonging.The first chapter situates the Cádiz Constitution as a foundational site for understanding how modern Spanish civic identity emerged at the intersection of law, empire, and liberal political thought. Through a close reading of the impassioned debates that produced the constitutional document, I argue that delegates did not merely codify preexisting traditions but actively constructed historical continuities and political myths that would legitimize the new constitutional order. However, as delegates attempted to recast empire as a liberal polity, debates over sovereignty and equal representation revealed the limits of political inclusion within a racially stratified imperial order. The second chapter turns to Enlightenment civic ideals in Francisco Gutiérrez de los Ríos’s El hombre práctico (1686) and José Cadalso’s Cartas marruecas (1789), arguing that the emergence of the “good citizen” is inseparable from gendered and class-based exclusions, even as these texts articulate early models of cosmopolitan sociability and public virtue.The third chapter examines neoclassical theater, particularly Vicente García de la Huerta’s Raquel (1778) and María Rosa de Gálvez’s Zinda (1804), as a site where civic pedagogy and imperial ideology converge. These works stage the formation of rational civic subjects through opposition to racialized and religious others, revealing how Enlightenment notions of reason and progress were entangled with the legacies of limpieza de sangre, colonial governance, and emerging racial taxonomies. The final chapter shifts to the “American question” that shaped nineteenth-century parliamentary debates through Ángel de Saavedra’s Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino (1835) and Eugenio María de Hostos’s La peregrinación de Bayoán (1873), where Romantic interiority and narrative selfhood become spaces for negotiating the failures of liberal inclusion. These texts expose the persistence of racial and colonial hierarchies beneath liberal rhetoric, while also producing forms of critique that emerge from within Romantic subjectivity itself.Across these chapters, I show how legal discourse and literary texts worked in tandem to shape—and contest—the emergence of modern civic identity. From Gutiérrez de los Ríos’s emerging civic consciousness in El hombre práctico to the postcolonial subject’s disillusionment with Spain’s liberal project in Hostos’s La peregrinación de Bayoán, my project’s transatlantic and diachronic framework further expands the boundaries of eighteenth-century Iberian studies by illuminating the long arc of civic discourse across imperial, colonial, and postcolonial contexts. In particular, it brings renewed attention to the Cádiz Constitution not only as a legal document, but as a discursive and symbolic anchor with wide-ranging cultural reverberations. By doing so, From Subjects to Citizens offers a new framework for understanding the Spanish eighteenth century as foundational to the modern Iberian political imagination and repositions the period as central to ongoing debates about liberalism, empire, and political belonging.