Beatriz Gonzalez Stephan’s scientific contributions

... 41 As Santiago Castro-Gómez has pointed out, creating the identity of the modern Latin American citizen legally anchored in a constitution involved the simultaneous production of a counterpart that would make viable the modern project of governability in line with European standards. 42 The ensuing processes of othering made governability into a racial, gendered and class project, as Beatriz González Stephan has shown for Venezuela 43 : During the eighteenth century, the uprisings of the enslaved and mestizo population and the increasing destitution of vagrants and beggars had led economic elites to institutionalise Otherness by financing 'a correction house for mestizos, blacks, and particularly unruly slaves, a jail-hospice for white and mestizo women "with a dissolute life", and jails for Indians' 44 -thus quenching revolt and restricting full rights to membership. As a result, when the Venezuelan constitution of 1839 stated that citizens could only be married men, over 25 years old, who could read and write, who owned real estate and who practised a profession that generated an annual income of more than 400 pesos, only a small minority of white men qualified. ...

Reference:

Unequal institutions in the longue durée: citizenship through a Southern lens