ABSTRACT
Since colonial times residents of Mexico City relied on multiple mechanisms to engage and participate in public affairs, including representaciones (a written petition of sorts), and political riots. This chapter focuses on the riot of December 1, 1849, and the representación of October 11, 1850. Both events, which took place amidst the tumultuous, highly contentious nature of post-U.S.–Mexican War politics, shed light on the manner nineteenth-century Mexicans—elites and the masses—understood, and sometimes manipulated, the collective actor commonly referred to as el pueblo (the people), and the attendant proclamations of popular sovereignty. The chapter also argues that the ideas made evident by the events of late 1849 and 1850 in Mexico City ultimately found expression in the 1857 constitution, as that charter went on to state, for the first time in Mexico’s history, that sovereignty resided in the people.
