Borders, Migration and Asilo Sagrado: How Early Central American Nations Used Open Borders to Reinforce Sovereignty

Abstract

This article contributes to broader discussions of early Latin American nation-making by focusing on the interplay among territory, sovereignty and human movement in nineteenth-century Central America. How did early Central American nations create sovereign spaces? And how did human movement in turn impact the meanings of bordered spaces? Drawing from constitutions, legal codes and archival documents related to the implementation of migration laws, the central argument of this article is that Central American governments typically treated free migration not as a threat to sovereignty but as an opportunity to reinforce sovereignty over the fixed spaces through which people moved.