What is Latin American History?. Marshall Eakin

What is Latin American History? - Marshall Eakin


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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 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).

      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 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.


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