This dissertation analyzes the novels of three female writers of the XIX Century from the Americas, The Squatter and the Don (1885) by Mara Amparo Ruiz de Burton, La Hija del Bandido (1887) by Refugio Barragn de Toscano, and El Espejo de Amarilis (1902) by Laura Mndez de Cuenca. These narratives share the desire of the authors to make the female voice heard in a world that relegated women to second-class citizenship and, at the same, time to participate in the construction of the citizen of the new Republics. I argue that Ruiz, Barragn, and Mndez replicated the national discourse on citizenship and nationhood and did not provide an alternative national narrative to the overtly masculine rhetoric that characterized nineteenth-century national-building projects. I will show that the bodies of their main characters suffer a metamorphosis in order to conform to the national definition of citizen. I contend that Ruiz, Barragn, and Mndez, through the construction of the bodies of their characters, participate in the exclusionary definition of who belongs to the nation and who enjoys citizenship. These authors metamorphosed their characters' bodies in order to fit the letrado model of the ideal citizen of the young nations.