Taken together, these papers shed light on three elements that shaped political identity within Spain’s empire: negotiation, kinship ties, and popular participation. The first presentation seeks out the underlying back-and-forth dynamic between the people and their king through its analysis of a flurry of petitions submitted to the royal court by the cabildos of Lima and Buenos Aires in the early 1800s. Brittany Erwin reveals how requests for seemingly frivolous honors--the right to use velvet cushions during church services, for example--fortified essential bonds between the ruler and the ruled during this period of empire-wide instability. Heading north, the second paper explores the chaotic period of uncertainty in Bogota in the wake of news about the French invasion of Spain in 1808. Philip Baltuskonis illustrates how family networks became an influential factor in the decision-making process of Spanish vassals whose communities faced growing factionalism as they grappled with imperial instability and invoked calls for independence. The third contribution to this theme of political identity formation employs a trans-Atlantic perspective in its investigation of the activities of the city councilmen of Cádiz, Cusco, Montevideo and Pamplona from 1765-1823. By closely studying the language utilized by these municipal officers, Ahmed Deidán de la Torre explores the relationship between their strategic choices to assert power and portray their esprit de corps in light of the dire state of the empire and widespread popular confusion. For his part, Juan Pablo Ardila studies the different ways in which monarchical and colonial archetypes shaped the political and social tensions of the 1820s in the first Republic of Colombia. His paper discusses how Old Regime mental images of power and of society brought about particular emotions and emotional expressions and how these were strategically employed to give meaning to emerging political identities.