What is Latin American History?. Marshall Eakin
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.
1 What 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