ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the enlightened legacy that the Cadiz Constitution left in the political construction of the Hispano-American republics but also in the challenges that these new States had to face from their independence. The central thesis is the creation of a political culture of liberalism in the formation of Latin American republics, addressing issues such as sovereignty, political representation and electoral participation, republicanism and monarchism as alternative forms of state or revolutionary transformations that the independence assumed. Liberalism and republicanism were two vector axes that overlapped with enlightened legacies but were also reinvented in a new conceptualization of the political that permeated the future of the Spanish-American States in the following decades of the nineteenth century.
