Confident in Reason and Rights: Indigenous Peoples, Citizenship, Land, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Venezuela

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Indigenous Venezuelans in the eastern province of Barcelona (the modern-day state of Anzoategui) used the legal tools available and other creative strategies to attempt to legally define Indigeneity and to protect resguardo land. In the process, Indigenous Venezuelans in the oriente created their own version of citizenship. This article uses documentation available in the Registro Principal de Barcelona, a state public registry office, that is not digitized, indexed, or part of the national archives system. In addition to enhancing understanding of Indigeneity and citizenship, study of these cases furthers understanding of state formation, the centrality of communal land in Indigenous identity, state-elite-Indigenous relations, and the evolution and application of law in mid-nineteenth-century Venezuela.