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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Serie: What is History series
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

What is Latin American History? surveys the development of this vibrant and dynamic field of study in North America, Latin America, and Europe. After briefly sketching the growth of the topic up to the 1960s, Marshall Eakin focuses on the past half-century, from the dominance of social history to the cultural turn. He surveys innovative work on topics including slavery, indigenous peoples, race, the environment, science, medicine, and gender, and ends with a discussion of the emergence of the concepts of borderlands, the Atlantic world, and transnational history - that both enrich and challenge the very idea of Latin America. This concise volume offers the first broad overview of Latin American history and historiography for students, scholars, and the general reader, outlining the key social, cultural, and political forces that have shaped both Latin America and its study.

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Leseprobe

Cover

Series Title

Title Page

Map

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 What Is Latin America?

Notes

2 The Pioneering Generations

History and Colonialism

Nineteenth-Century Origins

Professionalization: An Academic Community Emerges (on Three Continents)

On the Eve of the Boom

Notes

3 The Economic and Quantitative Turns

El Boom

The Quantitative “Moment”

Marxisms and Dependency Theories

Notes

4 The Social Turn

Comparative Slavery, Abolition, and Race Relations

Indigenous Peoples

Rural History

Miners, Merchants, and Urban Workers

Women and Gender

Institutions: New Perspectives

Institutionalization of the Field

Notes

5 Cultural and Other Turns

Fin de Siècle

A Cultural Turn?

Latin American History and the Cultural Turn

Gender and Sexuality

Indigenous History

Notes

6 Beyond Latin American History

A New Century, a New Millenium

Borders and Frontiers

Transnational History

A New Economic History?

The Atlantic World Emerges

Race and Ethnicity

A Natural Turn?

Science, Medicine, Public Health, and Technology

Unity and Diversity

Notes

Epilogue: The Future of Latin American History

Notes

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Pages

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Series Title

What is History? series

John H. Arnold,

What is Medieval History?

2nd edition

Peter Burke,

What is Cultural History?

3rd edition

Peter Burke,

What is the History of Knowledge?

John C. Burnham,

What is Medical History?

Pamela Kyle Crossley,

What is Global History?

Pero Gaglo Dagbovie,

What is African American History?

Marshall C. Eakin,

What is Latin American History?

Shane Ewen,

What is Urban History?

Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder, with Donna Gabaccia,

What is Migration History?

J. Donald Hughes,

What is Environmental History?

2nd edition

Andrew Leach,

What is Architectural History?

Stephen Morillo with Michael F. Pavkovic,

What is Military History?

3rd edition

James Raven,

What is the History of the Book?

Sonya O. Rose,

What is Gender History?

Barbara H. Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani,

What is the History of Emotions?

Hannu Salmi,

What is Digital History?

Brenda E. Stevenson,

What is Slavery?

Jeffrey Weeks,

What is Sexual History?

Richard Whatmore,

What is Intellectual History?

Merry Wiesner-Hanks,

What is Early Modern History?

What is Latin American History?

Marshall C. Eakin

polity

Copyright Page

The right of Marshall C. Eakin to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2021 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

101 Station Landing

Suite 300

Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3851-5

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3852-2 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Eakin, Marshall C. (Marshall Craig), 1952- author.

Title: What is Latin American history? / Marshall C. Eakin.

Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2021. | Series: What is history? | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The first student-friendly guide to the sub-field of Latin American history”-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021006121 (print) | LCCN 2021006122 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509538515 | ISBN 9781509538522 (pb) | ISBN 9781509538539 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Latin America--Historiography. | Historians--Latin America. | Latin America--History--20th century.

Classification: LCC F1409.7 .E24 2021 (print) | LCC F1409.7 (ebook) | DDC 980.03--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006121

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006122

by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

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Map

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Pascal Porcheron and Polity Press for the invitation to write this book. Although I have long reflected on the history of Latin American history, and have even written a bit about the subject, writing this volume has given me the opportunity to take a closer and deeper look at the longue durée of the field. I have been a participant-observer over the past five decades in the shifting historiographical approaches I describe in chapters 3–6. Revisiting this history has been an enlightening personal as well as professional encounter with Latin American history and historians across decades and centuries.

An abraço to Tom Holloway for his advice and suggestions since the inception of the project. I also very much appreciate the generous and helpful comments of the two anonymous outside readers of the manuscript. Many, many years ago, Teresa Meade (without either of us knowing) gave me the initial push in our work on the Conference on Latin American History’s Teaching Committee. Obrigado, Teresa. After a quarter century, here is the result of our discussions. As always, many thanks to my colleagues in the Department of History at Vanderbilt University, especially Jane Landers, Celso Castilho, Eddie Wright-Rios, and Frank Robinson, our Latin American history junta. The graduate students in my Research Seminar in Latin American History during the fall of 2020 read and discussed an earlier version of the manuscript. Thank you, Claudia Monterroza Rivera, André Ramos Chacón, Ricky Sakamoto-Pugh, and Alex Sanchez.

Finally, my thanks to Pascal and his able crew – Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, Stephanie Homer, Rachel Moore, and Caroline Richmond – who have shepherded the project from inception to completion.

Introduction

Latin American history has become a vibrant and dynamic field of study over the last half-century even as historians of Latin America have found it increasingly difficult to agree on how to define the region they study. As the field has become more and more professionalized and specialized, some of the most influential and innovative work on the region crosses multiple political and cultural boundaries, often stretching thematically and geographically into other areas of the world. The field began to emerge a century ago, largely out of work inspired by national histories written by Latin Americans and of a few historians in the United States and Europe, whose work was often shaped by the power of their own countries in Latin America and the world. Today, in an age of rapid globalization and transnational exchanges, Latin American history is a highly developed field within the historical profession, but it will become more difficult in the coming decades to speak of something we can call Latin America. The end of Latin America as a coherent region and object of study could be the future of Latin American history.

In the United States the professionalization of Latin American history began at the close of the nineteenth century, grew slowly in the first half of the twentieth century, and emerged as a dynamic and substantial professional field in the last decades of the twentieth century. The Conference on Latin American History, the primary professional association of historians of Latin America in the United States, counted more than one thousand members in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. (As a point of comparison, the membership of the American Historical Association in 2020 was about 12,000.) A much smaller but important community of historians emerged simultaneously in Great Britain and Canada, and a very small but excellent group had taken shape in Australia by 2000. Much as in Great Britain, there is a small community of historians of Latin America across Europe, most notably in Spain, Portugal, France, and Germany.

Latin Americans, not surprisingly, have produced the vast majority of historical writing on Latin America. Until the second half of the twentieth century, writers who were rarely professional or university-based historians produced most of this work. With the rise of universities and graduate programs since the Second World War, nearly all the nations of Latin America now generate a steady stream of professional historians with university positions who publish in a vast array of professional journals and with many publishers. Despite a growing trend after 1950 toward a greater awareness of work across national boundaries, overwhelmingly the publications of historians in Latin America focus on the history of their own nation or some part of their nation. In Brazil alone, for example, by 2010 university graduate programs generated more than 1,000 M.A. theses and 300 doctoral dissertations per year, the vast majority on the history of Brazil. In short, there are striking asymmetries in the production of work on the history of Latin America. In the United States, with its enormous and highly developed university doctoral programs, more than 170 in history alone, historians of Latin America make up about 7 percent of the profession and produce around 75 doctoral dissertations annually. In Mexico and Brazil, both with highly developed graduate programs in history, probably above 80 percent of the academic historians work on their native country.

This short book traces the development of the field of Latin American history with an emphasis both on recent decades and on Anglophone scholarship, for two key reasons. First, its principal audience is in the United States and the United Kingdom. Second, the historical literature produced in Latin America is so vast and diverse that it would be impossible for one historian (from anywhere in the region) to do it justice. Throughout this volume, I will discuss trends in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, but the emphasis is on work in English. In the endnotes, I note some examples of key works, but I do not attempt to be comprehensive in my citations.

One of the objectives of the historian is to attempt, however imperfectly, to recover the past to understand who we are by seeing from whence we came. Who we are – as individuals, societies, nations – bears the traces of decades, centuries, even millennia of historical processes and events. Contemporary Latin America cannot be understood without a deep knowledge of at least five centuries of these processes and events. In this slim volume, this historian turns to the past to understand the field of Latin American history, its origins, patterns, and multiple paths. Just as one cannot understand Latin America today without the long view of how we arrived at this moment, the historian of Latin America cannot fully appreciate the field without looking back over the decades and centuries to appreciate the many converging and diverging paths. This is a field that has long been open to influences from multiple disciplines and approaches on multiple continents. My hope is that this brief survey provides some insights into the creation, development, complexities, and fragmentation of the field of Latin American history.

The first chapter grapples with a central conundrum – how to define this region called Latin America. Those in the humanities and social sciences who study this region cannot even agree on a definition of the term. Increasingly, those in cultural studies have argued that the very notion of a region called Latin America is an illusion, one created out of imperial and Cold War struggles, a term flawed from the beginning, and one that we should discard. Chapter 2 then traces the origins of the field in the work of what I call “gentlemen scholars” in the nineteenth century and the growth of small academic communities in North America, Europe, and a few nations of Latin America before the First World War. The professional field in the United States begins to emerge gradually in the first half of the twentieth century and, by the 1950s, the Cuban Revolution and U.S. responses to the rise of leftist revolution in Latin America spurred a boom in Latin American studies. The following four chapters are largely thematic with a touch of chronological order. In the 1960s and 1970s, the historical profession, in general, and Latin American history, in particular, took a social and economic turn. Historians moved away from the history of high politics, diplomacy, and warfare to emphasize social classes, “history from below,” and quantification. Structure came into vogue as historians of Latin America counted, tabulated, and computed prices, wages, and economic indicators and sought to uncover foundational economic and social structures. Chapters 3 and 4 look at the social and economic turns.

By the late 1980s, the wave of social and economic history, especially quantification, faded, and (along with much of the profession) historians of Latin America took the so-called cultural turn, especially in the United States. Shunning structures and meta-narratives, they honed in on identities, race, ethnicity, and cultural analysis. Rather than constructing narratives of nations and structures, they turned to agency and micro-history. Chapter 5 analyzes these trends. Chapter 6 turns to the diverse trends within Latin American history over the past two decades. The dominance of the cultural turn has eased as new forms of social and political history have emerged. An emphasis on the imperial, transnational, regional, and global has emerged, represented most dramatically by fields such as borderlands and Atlantic world history. Most striking has been the continually rising production and expansion of the academic communities in Latin America over the last two generations. In the epilog, I return to the idea of Latin America, the increasing diversity of the countries and peoples in the region, and the challenges of writing the history of Latin America in the future.

1What Is Latin America?

Latin America is a conundrum, a statement that applies to both the region and the name. The dimensions of the region are unclear, the name a misnomer, and, for some, the place does not even exist. Thousands of scholars on several continents study Latin America. In the United States, the broader field of Latin American studies has been vibrant and growing for decades. Every four years, the U.S. Department of Education awards millions of dollars to about fifteen “national resource centers” in Latin American studies. Yet, no one seems to like the name for this region of the world, and a growing number of academics have even declared that the very idea of Latin America is a fiction invented by European and American elites. If they are correct, the field of Latin American history is an illusion. Even those who argue for the usefulness of the term (despite its flaws) cannot agree on a definition of just what it encompasses. Moreover, as the many nations in the region continue to develop in the twenty-first century, it will be increasingly difficult to discern strong similarities that hold them together as a coherent and meaningful regional unit. In short, we may be able to speak of Latin America’s history, but it may not have much of a future.

The name Latin America, or, more precisely in Spanish and Portuguese, América Latina, does not even appear in print until the mid-nineteenth century. Three hundred and fifty years earlier, when Christopher Columbus came ashore on the islands of what he called El Mar Caribe (the Caribbean Sea), he firmly believed that he had arrived on the eastern shores of the Indies (Japan and China). A German cartographer, Martin Waldseemüller, produced one of the first maps of the region in 1507. He had read the accounts of Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci’s transatlantic voyages, believed he had discovered this new world, and proceeded to designate this “new” landmass America in his honor. The great cartographer later regretted his error and removed the designation from his maps, but the name has stuck with us now for more than five centuries.

The lands and peoples of the Americas presented a major intellectual challenge for Europeans. They did not appear in the two most important authorities in Western civilization, the Bible and the classical writings of the Greeks and Romans. For many decades after the “Columbian Moment” the Europeans would puzzle over how to explain their absence from these foundational sources and how to fit them into their worldview.1 Were these “Indians” descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel? Were they humans? Did they have souls? Europeans often referred to the Americas as the “New World” to differentiate it from the “Old World” of Europe, Africa, and Asia, continents they had long known. The Spanish crown gradually created a vast bureaucracy to govern their new colonies as they took shape and, following Columbus, called the region the Indies (las Indias).

This vast geographical region of North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean was home to possibly 75 million or more native peoples in 1492, peoples Columbus (mistakenly) called Indians (indios), another name that stuck. The Native American population declined dramatically, possibly by as much as 75 to 90 percent in the sixteenth century, largely from diseases that arrived from Europe and Africa (smallpox, measles, influenza, plague, malaria, yellow fever). The populations of indigenous peoples began slowly to recover from this staggering demographic catastrophe in the seventeenth century. During four centuries of conquest and colonial rule, Europeans brought at least 12 million Africans across the Atlantic in chains to provide enslaved labor on plantations and in mines, and to work in nearly every aspect of colonial life. Slave traders shipped the vast majority of these Africans (around 80 to 85 percent) into the Caribbean basin and eastern Brazil. Probably fewer than 1,500 Spaniards and Portuguese per year arrived in the region over the course of the sixteenth century and during the remainder of the colonial period. Consequently, when the wars for independence erupted in the early nineteenth century, the estimated 25 million inhabitants of the region probably consisted of about 15 million Native Americans, about 3 million people of European descent, 2 million enslaved people of African descent, and about 5 million people of racially mixed heritage. Even after three centuries of colonialism and exploitation, more than half the inhabitants of what we now call Latin America were Native Americans, and only a little over 10 percent were persons who claimed European (or Latin) ancestry. The vast lands the Spanish and Portuguese claimed stretched from what today is the southern tier of the United States (California to Florida) to Tierra del Fuego. With the rise of the French, English, and Dutch empires after 1600, these European powers seized control of many Caribbean islands (such as Jamaica, Barbados, Saint-Domingue, and Curação) and enclaves on the American mainland (such as the Guianas, Belize, and, eventually, Louisiana).

By the eighteenth century, those of Spanish descent born in the Americas increasingly referred to themselves as creoles (criollos) to distinguish themselves from Spaniards born in Spain but residing in the Americas (peninsulares). Although those of Portuguese descent in Brazil were cognizant of their differences with those born in Portugal, the social distinctions were less pronounced than those between the criollos and peninsulares. Europeans and Euro-Americans sometimes referred to their regions as América española or América portuguesa. As the Euro-Americans fought to break with their colonial masters in the early nineteenth century, they contrasted themselves with the Europeans and began to call themselves americanos or, in the case of the Spanish colonies, hispano-americanos.

The violent break with Spain and Portugal, and the fitful emergence of about fifteen new nations by the 1840s, confronted the leaders of the wars for independence with the need to construct names, symbols, and rituals for the nations and nationalities they sought to create out of the fragments of the collapsing colonial empires. Simón Bolívar, the great liberator of northern South America, dreamed of forging a confederation of the former colonies as one great American nation. Disillusioned, dying, and heading off into exile in late 1830, he could see that his dream had failed, and he concluded that “America is ungovernable” and that “He who serves the revolution ploughs the sea.” When he spoke of America, he clearly meant the former Spanish colonies as a whole (and not the United States or Brazil). While most of the new leaders focused on constructing their own nation-states, some intellectuals took Bolívar’s larger view and envisioned a region with a common cultural identity, if not a political one.

The first documented usage of the term Latin America (in Spanish and French), ironically, emerges in France in the 1850s and 1860s in a series of essays by French, Colombian, and Chilean intellectuals.2 In part, the term served to contrast Spanish (and sometimes French and Portuguese) America from the growing power of the United States, what these intellectuals called Anglo-Saxon America. Intellectuals and diplomats in the region envisioned a Latin race defined by its cultural heritage of languages (derived from Latin) and religion (Catholicism) opposed to the aggressive and increasingly imperialist, Protestant Anglo-Saxons in the United States. From the French perspective, the effort to stress common cultural bonds between the old Spanish, French, and Portuguese colonies (“Latin” peoples) also served to help justify Napoleon III’s imperial ambitions in the Americas, especially his invasion of Mexico in the 1860s. France had also become, by the mid-nineteenth century, the most important cultural influence on the newly ascendant national elites, and that cultural captivation helped to bolster the rationale among intellectuals in the region for adopting the name.

Multiple ironies permeated the creation and then gradual adoption of the name Latin America. First, and most striking, the vast majority of peoples living in the region in the mid-nineteenth century were Native Americans (especially in Mexico, Central America, and the Andes), Afrodescendants (especially in the Caribbean basin and Brazil), and the racially and culturally mixed. In places such as Mexico, Central America, and the Andes, the indigenous majority did not even speak a “Latin” language. Euro-American elites created the Latin modifier as the politically and culturally hegemonic group, but it represented an aspiration, not a reality on the ground. These intellectuals created “Latin” America as a contrast to “Anglo-Saxon” America (the United States), another term that is also deeply ironic. Despite the massive influx of Europeans into North America, even in the 1850s, nearly one in seven inhabitants of the United States was an enslaved person of African descent, native peoples were numerous, and large percentages of the Euro-Americans were neither Anglo-Saxons nor Protestants! As immigration accelerated in the late nineteenth century, the largest waves of immigrants came not from England but from the European continent, especially Southern and Eastern Europe. The misguided creole elites who sought to create Latin American nations had mislabeled both their own region and the United States. It was a false and flawed dichotomy from its inception, but one that would have a long life.

As a small but vibrant scholarly community developed in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, the term Latin America began to appear in book titles and essays. When this group of scholars created their own journal during the First World War, Latin America remained but one possible term for the region. They debated among themselves and finally settled on the Hispanic American Historical Review (not the Latin American Historical Review), arguing that the term “Hispanic” also encompassed Portuguese Brazil. It was not until the end of the Second World War that the term Latin America became the most common for the region south of the United States. In the aftermath of the world war and the emergence of the Cold War, for strategic purposes, the U.S. defense and security community divided up the globe. Much of this terminology became standardized in the National Defense Education Act of 1958, a direct response to the perceived threat of the Soviet Union and the launching (in 1957) of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to circle the Earth. The Act aimed to build up U.S. higher education (especially in math and science) to confront the challenges of the Cold War, especially from the Soviet Union. The legislation led to the creation of “national resource centers” and “area studies” fellowships funded by the federal government to develop expertise in the various regions of the world. Along with centers for the study of Russia and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and other world regions, the government began funding centers for Latin American studies.3

Our current conception of Latin America has its strongest roots in the efforts of foundations and government agencies to “map” world regions in the post-1945 era. The National Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Smithsonian Institution formed the Ethnogeographic Board in the 1940s. Through their work, and especially after the passage of the National Defense Education Act, (as with the intelligence and defense communities) academia in the United States carved up the world into regions or areas and universities scrambled to organize “area studies” centers. Latin America, with its seemingly dominant Iberian linguistic, political, and cultural traditions, was one of the most clearly coherent world regions. In many ways, it is a more coherent region than “Europe” or “Southeast Asia,” with their multiple languages and ethnicities. In the words of José Moya, the region is “the largest contingent area in the world bound by similar legal practices, language, religion, naming patterns, and the arrangement of urban space.”4 Latin American area studies programs faced dilemmas from their inception in how to deal with “non-Latin” regions and populations, especially in the Caribbean basin (particularly the British West Indies and U.S. territories) and areas that once formed part of the Spanish empire in the Americas, but eventually came under control of the British, the French, the Dutch, and the United States.5

The confusion about the boundaries and scope of the region can be seen in the variety of names for Latin American centers in the United States. Some are simply Latin American centers or institutes. Others have been centers for Iberoamerican studies or Latin American and Caribbean studies or centers for Latino and Latin American studies (to include those of Latin American heritage in the United States). At times, some of these centers have been broad enough to be centers for the Americas (as a whole) or transatlantic (Latin American and Iberian studies). Those fifteen or so “national resource centers” receiving government funding are required by law (whatever their name may be) to spend their funds only on “Latin American” programming, that is, not on Latin Americans and their descendants in the U.S. or on the English- or French-speaking Caribbean. The U.S. government very specifically defines the region as the Spanish-speaking nation-states south of the United States (thus excluding Puerto Rico), Brazil, and Haiti.

As government funding and influence shaped the use and definition of Latin America in the United States, the enormous power and presence of the latter, ironically, helped spur a sense of solidarity among the peoples of the region to see themselves as Latin Americans. During the Cold War, Mexicans, Chileans, Brazilians, and the like increasingly spoke of themselves as Latin Americans (latinoamericanos) as a means of contrasting themselves with the imperialist power to the north. As with Anglo-Saxons in the nineteenth century, in the postwar struggle Latin Americans often referred to the citizens of the United States as North Americans (norteamericanos), another misnomer that should technically include Canadians and Mexicans. Although U.S. citizens like to refer to themselves in English as Americans, the term really encompasses everyone from Arctic Canada to Tierra del Fuego. Understandably, many Latin Americans refuse to use the term and resort to norteamericanos, leaving both groups with dubious terminology.

One of the first institutions in the region to apply the terminology was the Comisión Económica para América Latina [CEPAL] (Economic Commission for Latin America, or ECLA), created by the United Nations in 1948 and located in Santiago, Chile. Its principal task has been to encourage economic cooperation, especially through the gathering and analysis of data on Latin American economies. In the 1980s, it added the Caribbean to its title (becoming ECLAC and CEPALC). By their count, there are twenty Latin American nations (eighteen Spanish speaking, plus Brazil and Haiti). Over the decades other regional organizations took on the terminology, such as the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales [FLACSO] (Latin American Social Sciences Faculty), created in the 1950s by UNESCO to promote the teaching and influence of the social sciences in the region. Unlike the United States or Europe, Latin American countries rarely have created strong and enduring centers for the study of Latin America or, for that matter, centers for the study of the United States.

As Latin American studies boomed in the 1960s, new professional organizations began to take shape in Europe and the United States, and they adopted the terminology, reinforcing its linguistic dominance. U.S. scholars founded the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in 1965 along with its own journal, the Latin American Research Review. Originally an association primarily for academics in the United States, in the last two decades it has become a truly international organization of more than 12,000 members, two-thirds of them residing outside the United States. Similarly, the Society for Latin American Studies was founded in the United Kingdom in 1964 with its own journal, the Bulletin of Latin American Research. The institutional and professional associations, centers, and agencies in the United States, Europe, and Latin America had overwhelmingly adopted the terminology of “Latin America” by the 1970s.

The recent critiques of the term Latin America have roots at least back to the early twentieth century. Intellectuals in regions with indigenous or Afrodescendant majorities in the 1920s and 1930s spoke of Indo America or Afro America. In Mexico and Brazil, the largest countries in the region (and with half the population), intellectuals consciously spurned the Eurocentric visions that had dominated in the nineteenth century and began to emphasize the racially and culturally mixed heritage of Mexicans and Brazilians. They embraced the African and Native American contributions to national culture along with the European (or Latin) heritage. Despite these critiques, the majority of these intellectuals were themselves primarily of European descent, and rarely did they reject the increasingly awkward term Latin America.

The systematic critique of the terminology has taken shape over the last three decades among academics across the Americas and Europe. Much of this discussion has focused on how the terminology emerged among the Europeanized elites in the nineteenth century, together with the role of the U.S. security and defense communities in promoting it. Walter Mignolo, an Argentine cultural theorist who taught for many years at Duke University, was one of the earliest and most vocal critics, arguing that the terminology was flawed and that Latin America, in fact, did not even exist.6 The emergence of a powerful wave of identity politics across the Americas has deconstructed the notion of a Latin American identity and has also called into question national identities. Despite regular calls among a wide variety of groups across the Americas for solidarity in the face of the cultural imperialism of the United States, these groups emphasize the multiplicity of identities (especially ethnoracial ones) and de-emphasize national and Latin American identity. The result of the intense conversation about identity over the past three decades has been to leave us in a quandary. Very few would rise today to defend the adequacy of the modifier “Latin” in front of America, yet no one has put forward another label for the region that has gained traction. For the moment, we continue to use this inadequate terminology with an awareness of its limitations, but without a more acceptable name.

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