Translators of 19th-Century Romanticism. Ignacio Manuel Altamirano and his invention of Mexican people

Ignacio Manuel Altamirano and his invention of mexican people.

Abstract

This article seeks to explore Ignacio M. Altamirano’s visión of the popular clases through the use of newspapers, literary works and chronicles by the author, as well as intelectual and political history. All of this with the purpose of examining the process, influenced by romanticism, of the construction of one of the protagonists in his writings, chronicles and novels: the new sovereign known as el pueblo. The aim is to answer the following questions: Who constituted el pueblo according to Ignacio M. Altamirano? Was el pueblo synonym of the crowd? In this work, I intend to demonstrate that Altamirano was one of the great creators of the concept of “pueblo” in the 19th-century literature and a proponent of a different, more inclusive liberalism, all through a systematic study of his most representative writings.