Holding The City Hostage: Popular Sectors and Elites in San Miguel, El Salvador, 1875

During the past 20 years, historians have made great strides in studying the engagement of rural communities with the formation of nations and states in nineteenth-century Latin America. The formation of citizenship, popular liberalism, local pueblo sovereignty, and alternative nationalisms and the influence of local struggles on state institutions have all been plotted, from very local communities to regions. However, the recent emphasis on the integration of peasant communities into regional and national history has largely failed to highlight the importance of provincial cities, even as it gives ample evidence of how important they became as bridges between the local, the regional, and the national.