What is Latin American History?

Marshall Eakin

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509538539
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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, MarshallEakinfocuses 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.

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 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.”...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Map
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 What Is Latin America?
• 2 The Pioneering Generations
• 3 The Economic and Quantitative Turns
• 4 The Social Turn
• 5 Cultural and Other Turns
• 6 Beyond Latin American History
• Epilogue: The Future of Latin American History
• Further Reading
• Index
• End User License Agreement