Abstract

This article explores the process of creating citizenship in Combarbala, a mining town in northern Chile, during the first half of the 19th century. We want to show the political reality of this remote and distant town of Santiago and analyze, above all, how its elite received the republican ideas presented to them by the new order, a situation similar to what happened in other parts of Latin America at that moment. The option for a focused analysis of this local space is justified by several reasons: first, because it allows to show the historicity of these places, their projects and aspirations at moments of the construction of the national State; second, because the observation of this corner of the republic helps to understand what we could define as the essential ray of the republican order that was being constructed (order, justice, political inclusion, respect for rights and republican education, among other points); and third, because, in this way, the traditional centralist, unifying and generalizing view of a classical historiography can be avoided, which still recognizes the strength of the capital as the center.