This article contributes to broader discussions of early Latin American nation-making by focusing on the interplay among territory, sovereignty and human movement in nineteenth-century Central America. How did early Central American nations create sovereign spaces? And how did human movement in turn impact the meanings of bordered spaces? Drawing from constitutions, legal codes and archival documents related to the implementation of migration laws, the central argument of this article is that Central American governments typically treated free migration not as a threat to sovereignty but as an opportunity to reinforce sovereignty over the fixed spaces through which people moved.

Este artículo estudia la cultura afrobarroca y la soberanía negra de los afromexicanos a través del análisis de la descripción de dos performances de “reyes negros” que se encuentran en la “Relación de las fiestas insignes que en la Ciudad de México se hicieron en la dedicación de la Iglesia de la Casa Profesa y beatificación de nuestro Santo Padre Ignacio” de 1610. La finalidad de este análisis es triple. Primero se busca distinguir estos reyes negros festivos de los presuntos reyes negros rebeldes. En segundo lugar, y más central al artículo, se busca exponer la cultura afrobarroca que los afrodescendientes desarrollaron en el México colonial, resaltando su agencia cultural, social y política en la formación de esa cultura. Por último, a luz de esa triple agencia, se teoriza sobre su soberanía, o autonomía y libertad en darle el carácter que quisieron a su cultura criolla.

For over a decade, Salvadorean grassroots movements and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) pursued legal innovations with the aim of protecting their water sources from potentially polluting industrial activities such as mining. They initially drafted bans on mining that would preclude the extractive-based development path embraced by neighbouring countries. Eventually, they scaled up their approach and devised a draft proposal for a transboundary waters treaty that addressed the challenges that the ecological materiality of international watercourses poses to national de jure sovereignty. In so doing, the transboundary watershed has become a useful heuristic, a spatial trope to which Salvadoreans have turned to substantiate their claims to sovereignty over the Lempa River waters that El Salvador shares with pro-mining Guatemala and Honduras – claims imbued with an ethics of care rooted in wartime politics and Catholic morality.

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted among parents living in the affluent neighbourhoods of Ipanema, Brazil, and El Condado, Puerto Rico, I examine how urban Latin American elites deployed their parenting practices as moral justification for their racial and class privilege (what I call ‘sovereign parenting’). One way in which they do this is by producing particular forms of affective relationships with their nannies. The women these upper-class parents hired were largely dark-skinned immigrants: from the Dominican Republic, to work in El Condado, and from the Brazilian Northeast, to work in Ipanema. I demonstrate how elites cultivated a form of ‘informality’ and expressions of care in relation to childcare workers in ways that not only produced whiteness as a pillar of Latin American liberalism, but also associated whiteness with the world of interiority and personal growth.