Fashioning Sovereignty in Latin American Narrative

With the arrival of the Europeans, the dressed body became a discursive forum upon which to negotiate the possession of land and the legitimate right to govern in Latin America. In conquest chronicles, the Aristotelian notion that mother nature marked the bodies of those she destined for slavedom came to be applied as a primary discursive tool to justify Spain's claim to sovereignty. Amerindian forms of dress (or lack thereof) served as visual markers of mental and moral inferiority, lack of civic principles, and an inability of indigenous peoples to self-govern. This study examines the persistence of these impressions of inferiority in modern day body politics. It also questions the applicability of concepts imported from Europe that are involved in the configuration of sovereignty as its formulation changed from something imposed by the conquest to a political principle upon which Latin America's political communities defined themselves.