Anthropology Latino history essay OUTLINE!

Latin America: What’s in a Name?

Thomas H. Holloway, University of California, Davis

[This is the first section of my introductory essay in A Companion to Latin American

History. Waltham, MA: Wiley/Blackwell, 2008.

<http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405131616.html>

It provides a historical answer to one of those questions that isn’t a question

until someone asks it: “Why is Latin America called ‘Latin’?”]

What constitutes “Latin America” and its “history”? All three of these words merit some

consideration, to trace parameters for both the place (Latin America), and the topic (history). It

is not the result of some teleological process by which what is today commonly termed Latin

America came to be, for which we can identify a starting point and visualize a neat and discreet

evolutionary trajectory. And history itself needs to be distinguished from other fields of

scholarly inquiry. To begin such a discussion, it is as useful as it is obvious to recall that these

and similar descriptive labels are the products of human mental activity, and did not emerge from

natural phenomena or processes. The region of the world now commonly referred to as Latin

America existed long before the term emerged as the mental construct that it is. And in the

recent past the validity of the label has come under fundamental question (Mignolo 2005),

despite the fact that it continues in academic and public discourse as a shorthand label of

convenience. It is thus appropriate to sketch both the origin and evolution of the label, and what

constitutes the history of the region of the world so designated.

We can assume that the indigenous peoples who lived in what is now called Latin

America in ancient times, whatever cosmological and descriptive notions they developed to

locate themselves in time and space, probably did not have a conception of territory and peoples

stretching from what we now call Mexico to the southern tip of South America. They located

themselves in relation to other culture groups they were aware of and the landforms and bodies

of water they were familiar with, as well as in relation to how they explained how they came to

be—their origin myths, in the condescending terms of Western anthropology. Indeed, the same

could be said for other peoples of the ancient world, including those who lived in what is now

called Europe, right through to the Age of Discovery roughly in the century from 1420 to 1520,

the external manifestation of the European Renaissance. In the imagination of Europe, people

Latin America: What’s in a Name?—T. Holloway p. 2

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and places in the rest of the world only began to exist when they entered the European

consciousness. That consciousness then proceeded to categorize and compartmentalize regions,

“races,” and cultures in ways convenient for the purposes of European hegemony (Wolf 1982).

One of those compartments has become Latin America, which we need to define more

explicitly. Following the informal consensus among most historians, and most of the

historiography they have produced, there are several parts of the Western Hemisphere which are

not normally included in the rubric Latin America. Most obviously, these are Canada and the

United States, despite the fact that a considerable proportion of the population of the former

speaks French, a neo-Latin language; and despite the relevance of the latter in discussions of

Latin America’s international relations, particularly in the 20th century. Through the colonial era

and up through the taking of about one third of Mexico by the U.S. as of 1848, what is now

Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California, plus some territory beyond, figured on

maps as part of we now call Latin America. The European-descended populations in those

regions spoke primarily Spanish. In the more recent past immigration and cultural assertion by

people who trace their origins to former Spanish- or Mexican-held territories makes the U.S.-

Mexican border less relevant in distinguishing Anglo America from Latin America (Acuña

1972).

Also not usually included in Latin America are the three Guianas (French Guiana,

technically decolonized by being designated an overseas department of continental France in

1946; Suriname, formerly known as Dutch Guiana; and Guyana, known in the Colonial era as

British Guiana and before that as Demerara), as well as Belize (formerly British Honduras).

Their historical trajectories have more in common with the non-Spanish Caribbean islands than

with Latin America, and historically they were never effectively occupied by either Spain or

Portugal. Haiti comes into the historical narrative of Latin America especially because of its

importance as a sugar producing colony of Saint Domingue in the 18th century, as well as the

resounding message sent to other slave societies by its independence process, following an

uprising of the slave majority and Haiti’s establishment of the second independent nation in the

Western Hemisphere, after the United States of North America (Trouillot 1995; Fischer 2004).

Similarly, Jamaica and all of the Lesser Antilles, from the Virgin Islands just east of Puerto Rico

to Trinidad just off the coast of Venezuela, as places eventually colonized by European powers

other than Spain and Portugal, do not figure in the conventional definition of Latin America as

Latin America: What’s in a Name?—T. Holloway p. 3

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such. These omissions hint at the usual informal definition of what constitutes Latin America

historically: Those areas of the western hemisphere originally claimed (even if not completely or

effectively occupied) by Spain and Portugal, and where the dominant national language today is

either Spanish or Portuguese.

Geographers, it should be noted, giving priority to contiguous landmasses and bodies of

water rather than to historical processes or cultural commonalities, traditionally divide the

Americas into two continents and two regions. The continents are North America (from northern

Canada to the isthmus of Panama) and South America (from the Panama-Colombia border to the

southern tip of Tierra del Fuego, an island south of the straight of Magellan). The sub-regions

are Central America (from Guatemala to Panama) and the Caribbean (the islands from the

Bahamas and Cuba in the northwest to Trinidad and Tobago in the southeast). These different

approaches to regional divisions and groupings have led to confusion as frequent as it is

superficial. For example, Mexico might be placed in North America by geographers (and in the

names of such economic and political arrangements as the North American Free Trade

Agreement, NAFTA), but it is definitely part of Latin America for historians. And Puerto Rico,

an island of the Caribbean, is politically attached to the United States, but is historically and

culturally part of Latin America.

These considerations lead to a question central to the label itself: What is “Latin” about

Latin America? There are several historical and cultural issues that, in fact, make the term quite

problematic. The language of the Iberian groups engaged in conquest and colonization was not

Latin, despite the roots of the Spanish and Portuguese languages in the Roman occupation of

Iberia in ancient times. While Latin remained the language of the Roman Catholic Church so

central to the Iberian colonization project, there is no apparent connection between Church Latin

and the label “Latin America.” Christopher Columbus himself, mistakenly insisting until his

death in 1506 that he had reached the eastern edge of Asia, used the term Indias Occidentales, or

the Indias to the West. That term lingers today, after being perpetuated especially and perhaps

ironically by British Colonials, in the West Indies, the conventional English term for the islands

of the Caribbean Sea eventually colonized by Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and

Denmark.

It is commonly known that the more general term “America” derives from the name of

Amerigo Vespucci (1451?-1512), another navigator of Italian origin who made several voyages

Latin America: What’s in a Name?—T. Holloway p. 4

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to the Caribbean region and along the coast of northern Brazil from 1497 to 1502. Unlike

Columbus, Vespucci concluded that Europeans did not previously know about the lands he

visited in the west, and he thus referred to them as the New World. In a 1507 map by German

cartographer Martin Waldseemuller, America appears for the first time with that name. While

the protocol of European exploration usually gives primacy to the first “discoverer,” there would

seem to be some justification for naming the newly known land mass after the navigator who

recognized it as separate from Asia (Amerigo Vespucci) rather than for the first European to

report its existence, but who subsequently insisted that he had confirmed a new way to reach

Asia (Christopher Columbus) (Arciniegas 1990).

In subsequent centuries, Europeans and their colonial descendants applied the term

America to the entire western hemisphere (which half of the globe is called “western” and which

is called “eastern” is itself a convention of European origin). That usage continues today in

Latin America, where it is commonly taught that there is one continent in the western

hemisphere: America. The Liberator Simón Bolívar famously convened a conference in Panama

in 1826 to work toward a union of the American republics. He included all nations of the

hemisphere in the invitation, and it would not have occurred to him to add “Latin” to the

descriptors, because the term had not yet been invented. When in 1890 the United States and its

commercial and financial allies around Latin America established the Commercial Bureau of the

American Republics, which became the Panamerican Union in 1910 and the Organization of

American States in 1948, no terminological distinctions were made by culture or language. In

the modern era “America” has of course become the common shorthand name of the nation that

developed from the thirteen English colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America. This

apparent appropriation by one nation of a label that traditionally refers to the entire western

hemisphere has been a recurring source of puzzlement and occasional resentment among Latin

Americans (Arciniegas 1966).

Historically, the first use of the term Latin America has been traced only as far back as

the 1850s. It did not originate within the region, but again from outside, as part of a movement

called “pan-Latinism” that emerged in French intellectual circles, and more particularly in the

writings of Michel Chevalier (1806-79). A contemporary of Alexis de Tocqueville who traveled

in Mexico and the United States during the late 1830s, Chevalier contrasted the “Latin” peoples

of the Americas with the “Anglo-Saxon” peoples (Phelan 1968; Ardao 1980, 1993). From those

Latin America: What’s in a Name?—T. Holloway p. 5

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beginnings, by the time of Napoleon III’s rise to power in 1852 pan-Latinism had developed as a

cultural project extending to those nations whose culture supposedly derived from neo-Latin

language communities (commonly called Romance languages in English). Starting as a term for

historically derived “Latin” culture groups, L’Amerique Latine then became a place on the map.

Napoleon III was particularly interested in using the concept to help justify his intrusion into

Mexican politics that led to the imposition of Archduke Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico,

1864-67. While France had largely lost out in the global imperial rivalries of the previous two

centuries, it still retained considerable prestige in the world of culture, language, and ideas

(McGuinness 2003). Being included in the pan-Latin cultural sphere was attractive to some

intellectuals of Spanish America, and use of the label Latin America began to spread haltingly

around the region, where it competed as a term with Spanish America (where Spanish is the

dominant language), Ibero-America (including Brazil but presumably not French-speaking

areas), and other sub-regional terms such as Andean America (which stretches geographically

from Venezuela to Chile, but which more usually is thought of as including Colombia, Ecuador,

Peru, and Bolivia), or the Southern Cone (Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay) (Rojas Mix

1991).

Not until the middle of the 20th century did the label Latin America achieve widespread

and largely unquestioned currency in public as well as academic and intellectual discourse, both

in the region (Marras 1992) and outside of it. With the establishment of the Economic

Commission for Latin America (ECLA, later adding Caribbean to become ECLAC) under

United Nations auspices in 1948, the term became consolidated in policy circles, with political

overtones challenging U.S. hegemony but largely devoid of the rivalries of culture, language,

and “race” of earlier times (Reid 1978). The 1960s saw the continent-wide Latin American

literary “boom” and the near-universal adoption of “Latin American Studies” by English-

language universities in the U.S., Great Britain, and Canada. This trend began with the

establishment of the Conference on Latin American History in 1927 and was consolidated with

the organization of the interdisciplinary Latin American Studies Association in 1967. Despite

the widespread and largely unproblematic use of the term in the main languages of the western

hemisphere since that era, regional variations remain: In Brazil América Latina is commonly

assumed to refer to what in the United States is called Spanish America, i.e., “Latin America”

minus Brazil.

Latin America: What’s in a Name?—T. Holloway p. 6

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While discussing the spontaneous creation of such collective labels, we need to recognize

that the terms “Latino” or “Latina/o” now widespread in the United States have no basis in any

specific nation or sub-region in Latin America. Like the latter term, from which it is derived

linguistically, Latina/o is an invented term of convenience—a neologism built on a neologism

(Oboler 1995; Gracia 1999; Oboler & González 2005; Dzidzienyo & Oboler, 2005). Whatever

their origins, Latino or Latina/o have largely replaced the older “Hispanic” or Hispanic

American” within the United States, although that English-derived term, problematic on several

counts, lingers in library subject classifications.

But there are other questions that need to be posed, in the age of identity politics and the

assertion of alternative ethnicities and nationalisms. By its historical and intellectual origins and

the claims of pan-Latinism, the term Latin America privileges those groups who descend from

“Latin” peoples: Spain and Portugal (but not, ironically enough, the French-speaking populations

of Canada or the Caribbean). By another set of criteria, what is now commonly called Latin

America might be subdivided into those regions where the indigenous heritage is strong and

native identity has reemerged to claim political space, especially in Mesoamerica and the Andean

region; Afro-Latin America, especially the circum-Caribbean region and much of Brazil; and

Euro-Latin America, in which relatively massive immigration from 1870 to the Great Depression

of the 1930s transformed the demographic and cultural makeup of southern Brazil, Uruguay, and

Argentina (Rojas Mix 1991). In other words, Latin America as a term ignores or claims

dominance over other cultures in the region, which have recently come to reassert their

distinctive traditions, including a plethora of languages spoken by tens of millions of indigenous

people—none of which have any relationship to Spanish or Portuguese (or Latin) beyond a

scattering of loan words. The current condition of peoples of indigenous and African heritage

has a historical relationship to conquest, colonialism, subjugation, forced assimilation,

exploitation, marginalization, and exclusion. Those are not processes to celebrate and use as the

basis for national or regional identity challenging the hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon “race,” as

was the thrust of pan-Latinism of yore. But they are basis for claiming cultural and political

space—as well as territory and access to resources—within Latin America, today and into the

future.

Latin America: What’s in a Name?—T. Holloway p. 7

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