“Here is a word that everyone pronounces, it is the favorite theme of every orator. There are not gatherings, nor meetings, nor discussions in which you do not hear . . . the word ‘Democracy.’†Thus opined the politician and poet Vicente Paz in 1876, in the newspaper El Montañes , from the coastal Pacific town of Barbacoas, Colombia. Democracy, constantly invoked, was rarely defined in the political discourse of nineteenth-century Mexico and Colombia. Indeed, democracy was a contested term (along with republicanism, citizenship, liberty, equality, and liberalism), embraced by many liberals and rejected by some conservatives, interpreted quite differently by popular groups versus educated elites. This essay explores how the idea of democracy was employed in the period from the 1840s to the 1870s, when the majority of the world’s republics were in Spanish America, even if that region is almost always left out of world histories of democracy. I focus not on the great political theorists—such as Alberdi, Sarmiento, Alamán, or Bello—in writings geared to cultured audiences (often Europeans), but instead on how democracy appeared in the quotidian discourse of the broader public sphere.