U.S. Independence Is a Story of the Entire Western Hemisphere

by Arturo Chang July 2, 2026 (zocalopublicsquare.org)

As the United States reaches the 250th anniversary of its independence, the nation is still debating what defines the “American” tradition. Are we characterized by a particular set of institutions? Are we characterized by national borders? And perhaps in the broadest sense, what identities, communities, and cultures comprise the category of “America”? These questions evade simple conclusions, but they are particularly important for situating our current, divisive political moment. One way to make sense of these questions is to turn to a hemispheric, more pluralized understanding of the publics, imaginations, and politics that were at stake in the early years of U.S. independence.

“America” is not a nation-state. Geographically, it encompasses the lands and peoples that extend from the Yukon to Patagonia. Ideologically, “America,” or what one might call the project of “American political thought,” offers a similarly capacious tradition. The shared politics, cultures, and identities of America and its publics are most apparent at the peak of hemispheric solidarity, during the so-called the Age of Revolutions (approximately 1770–1850). During this period, dozens of anti-colonial movements emerged to rebel against European rule, reject notions of American inferiority, and ultimately call for the establishment of their own political projects. At the same time, an astounding array of communities—Indigenous, Creole, Pardo, Mestizo, as well as enslaved and recently emancipated peoples—all self-identifying as Americans, together built a tradition that sought to live beyond the conditions of colonization.

The U.S. Declaration’s account of inalienable rights became a prominent example to follow for other American movements, with its ideas proliferating throughout the hemisphere by way of the press, political manifestos, and the first constitutions. For instance, the language of liberty and happiness framed Mexican Revolutionaries’ 1813 Constitution of Chilpancingo, which granted citizenship to all Americans (people born in the “new world”) or to non-Americans who aligned with the project of anti-colonial resistance. Similar language would also appear in the “Declarations” of the Republic of Texas (1813), Cartagena de Indias (1811), and the United Provinces of South America (1816). As such, anti-colonial revolution in the Americas evolved as a shared project of popular liberation that stretched from Boston to Buenos Aires.  

Shared sentiments associated with the Declaration, in turn, influenced the direction of 19th-century revolutionary U.S. politics. As historian Caitlin Fitz shows, many U.S. citizens understood themselves as part of the revolutionary efforts of their hemispheric “sister republics.” These connections manifested in songs, orations, poems, and plays like James Workman’s Liberty in Louisiana, which deployed comedy to simultaneously argue against Spanish rule in the region while celebrating the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. In the “borderlands” that today comprise Louisiana to California, in particular, national identities were not fully formed, and political rhetoric rarely operated within the constraints of state borders. This is reflected in the print activity of the region. Newspapers like El Misisipi (founded in New Orleans in 1808), for example, published in parallel Spanish and English columns to comment on events that cut across French, Spanish, and U.S. jurisdictions.

These points of exchange have been overlooked in favor of the simpler story of a nation-state that emerged and developed linearly and with little relation to parallel national projects. Nationalist histories are useful for retroactively concretizing the state as a perennial institution, but they do so at a cost. They evade the reality that cultural, social, and political practices and identities necessarily operated more freely. A more interesting history emerges when one takes seriously that early 19th-century nation-states were at best weak institutions with real concerns surrounding re-conquest. Americans throughout the hemisphere had a desperate need for regional allies and like-minded revolutionaries.

Take, for example, the little-known history of Mexican Texas. The first republic of Texas was founded in 1813 by Mexican citizen José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara. The militia which led to Texas independence—self-identified as the “Republicans of Nacogdoches”—received covert support from the James Madison administration, which hoped to expel colonial powers from the region, as well as direct aid from Caribbean and South American revolutionaries living in the U.S. who wanted to liberate their own communities. Gutiérrez de Lara traveled across the United States to recruit volunteers, meeting with prominent figures of the period such as future President James Monroe (secretary of state at the time), Louisiana Governor William C.C. Claiborne, and Cuban revolutionary José Álvarez de Toledo y Dubois.

The movement, however, was also driven by popular support among U.S. citizens who believed that the liberation of Mexico was directly important to the success of the Union. Regional newspapers celebrated Gutiérrez de Lara’s efforts. The Nashville Whig (1813), for example, encouraged U.S. Americans to “lend their aid” in liberating “another portion of the Western Hemisphere…from the bonds of European tyranny and oppression” and to help Mexico become “an empire among the nations of the earth.” As Fitz, the historian, shows, these appeals to mutual liberation would continue in the U.S. well into the 19th century. Celebratory gestures to Latin American revolutions would appear alongside 4th of July processions, parents named babies after Venezuelan Revolutionary Simón Bolívar, and the press published dedications to the “to the patriots of Mexico and South-America.”

Telling the story of independence grew more complicated as the U.S. made a turn toward empire, placing its relationship with Latin American allies in precarious standing. Cuban intellectual José Martí, for example, reflected on the ideological tensions symbolized by the United States as he worked toward Cuban independence while living in New York City in 1886, when the Statue of Liberty was being assembled there. In Fiestas de la Estatua de la Libertad, Martí wrote, “It is terrible, liberty, to speak of you for someone who is deprived of you.” For Martí, the political celebrations posed a political paradox: New York bustled with interest in the monument that would personify the United States’ best impulses—the “noise of triumph at rest.” But U.S. Americans didn’t consider the ways their nation’s expansion into Latin America took liberty away from other Americans who, until very recently, had been fellow travelers in the hemispheric project. “Darkness does not come from a rainy day, nor the gray of October,” he wrote, addressing the statue, “but of the dust, shadowed in death, that your carriage picked up on the way.”   

It is perhaps unsurprising that, today, as the U.S. reflects on its history, themes such as revolution, empire, and “the people” remain at the center of the conversation—making returning to the hemispheric character of American emancipation all the more important. The semiquincentennial anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence can help us think through all that undergirded North Americans’ break from colonial rule—rather than only considering the state that would eventually emerge. One way to begin is by recognizing that the “American tradition,” at its roots, operates far beyond the scope of the U.S. and its boundaries.

As historian David Armitage suggests, the Declaration was a genre-producing document that evolved alongside the public who saw themselves in it. That is, the Declaration—and its language of “equality” in “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” meant different things, to different people, both within the United States and across the world. Those people, and their communities, went on to transform this country’s young history. But Americans did not achieve those transformations through consensus; they were a result of conflict and contention. As celebrations of the 250th anniversary abound, it is worth deploying a broader story that embraces critique as a central catalyst of political change. One that opens possibilities for renewed understanding of the communities, cultures, and identities that make America.

Arturo Chang is assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto. His research centers on popular movements, nation-building, racial and ethnic politics, and Indigenous politics. He is the author of A New World of Revolutions: Popular Imaginations and Movements Across the Americas.

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Primary editor: Eryn Brown | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard