Realizing unity and stability: Carlos María Ramírez and the uses of Uruguayan independence for nation-building in the 19th century

Abstract

We aim, through this article, to address the uses of historical elements, typical to the Uruguayan national independence (1811-1828), by the writer Carlos María Ramírez (1848-1898) during the second half of the nineteenth century in that country. In this sense, we seek to understand how this intellectual, through such mobilizations contained in several of his writings, proposed political stability specifically throughout the last third of the 1800s. Thus, we believe that by making extensive use of the various symbols, events, and personalities of the Uruguayan emancipation process, Ramírez sought to defend national pacification and union as a way to symbolically materialize the country liberation and autonomy regarding internal civil wars and authoritarianism, as well as historical foreign interventions. Thus, such recurrences to the past were carried out in a context in which the nation was still in the process of consolidation, intending, thus, to conclude a historical and political process that, for him, still seemed unfinished.