Bringing Thomas Paine to Latin America: An Overview of the Geopolitics of Translating Common Sense into Spanish

Abstract

The reception of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in Latin America did not come as a surprise to legislators, politicians, intellectuals, aristocrats, and radical reformers in Latin America during the mid-eighteenth century.¹ Neither did it happen by pure chance. Like his ongoing legacy in the United States and his contested fame in England and France, there are specific reasons why Paine gained popularity in this southern region of the world. Moreover, it is clear from studying authors like Manuel García de Sena, Vicente Rocafuerte, and others like them that Paine’s influence and ideas would, in fact, spread much further afield to places that we rarely associate with Paine such as Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru, and Mexico,² not to mention Namibia and Haiti.³