Los derechos colectivos en el México del siglo XIX

Abstract

Traditionally it was considered that during the nineteenth century the defense of certain individual rights and liberties was an essential part of liberal discourse and Mexican constitutionalism. However, recent studies on the socalled "popular liberalism" show that the defense of some collective rights was an important part of the liberal movement. This paper advances a conceptual and a methodological thesis through a historical example: the first is the claim that collective rights can conceptually coexist with liberal ideology; the second is that many of the historical studies on rights in Mexico have accounted only for the history of individual rights during the nineteenth century. These studies have done so from the legal positivist standpoint of studying only positive laws, and have ignored the fact that in political and legal discourses of the time collective rights played an important role.