What is Latin American History?. Marshall Eakin
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.
Further complicating the conundrum is a lack of consensus on something as seemingly simple as who we should include in the region that we cannot adequately name! A brief survey of the major English-language textbooks on the history of Latin America across the twentieth century quickly reveals the range of definitions. In the U.S., textbooks on Latin America throughout the first half of the twentieth century took a very simple political approach to defining Latin America as the twenty republics that gained