Latin America in the World

An Introduction

Antonia Garcia-Rodriguez, Daniel J. Greenberg, Antonia Garcia-Rodriguez, Daniel J. Greenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780765645234
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317509646
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique latine et des Caraïbes

From the Foundations in Global Studies series, this text offers students a fresh, comprehensive, multidisciplinary entry point to Latin America. After a brief introduction to the study of the region, the early chapters of the book survey the essentials of Latin American history; important historical narratives; and the region's languages, religions, and global connections. Students are guided through the material with relevant maps, resource boxes, and text boxes that support and guide further independent exploration of the topics at hand.

The second half of the book features interdisciplinary case studies, each of which focuses on a specific country or subregion and a particular issue. Each chapter gives a flavor for the cultural distinctiveness of the particular country yet also draws attention to global linkages. Readers will come away from this book with an understanding of the larger historical, political, and cultural frameworks that shaped Latin America as we know it today, and of current issues that have relevance in Latin America and beyond.

PART ONE

Overview

1

Overview

Latin America and Its Subregions

Daniel J. Greenberg

What does Latin America mean? More often than not, Americans’ understanding of our southern neighbors is informed by stereotypes rather than facts. One such notion is a Mexican peasant wearing a broad-brimmed hat and serape, snoozing in the shade of a cactus with a hot sun blazing overhead. Another is 1940s Brazilian movie star Carmen Miranda in her “Tutti Frutti” hat, singing and swaying to a rumba beat. A third is one of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits. Frida’s huge, black eyes stare back, a monkey perches on her shoulder, and brilliantly colored orchids dominate the background. A fourth popular image is that of Machu Picchu, an ancient Inca city built so high into the Andes mountains that clouds nestle near the ground. And finally, there is Buenos Aires’s Obelisk, a sharp-pointed, soaring white monument that sits at the center of a broad urban boulevard, flanked by fin de siècle Parisian architecture and surrounded by throngs of smartly dressed pedestrians.

Like many stereotypes, each of these bears a grain of truth. They convey concepts of mixed Amerindian-European ethnicity, a polyglot culture, a virgin natural environment, a legacy of great indigenous civilizations, and of a Europe transplanted to the New World. Yet each stereotype belies Latin America’s world of nuance, diversity, and complexity. Like the world of the Mexican peasant, Latin America is a mixed- and multi-racial society, mostly poor and underdeveloped, and situated in tropical latitudes. Like Miranda and her music, it offers a mosaic of cultures fashioned into an intriguing synthesis. Like Kahlo, the daughter of European immigrants whose life combined revolutionary politics with art, its history is dominated by human migration, political turbulence, and social unrest. And like coastal Argentina, part of the region is characterized by incorporation of European people, customs, and styles of life, a large middle class, and an urban lifestyle more reminiscent of Spain or Italy than that of the “Third World.”

Geographers define Latin America as a group of nations that share geographical, ethnic, linguistic, historical, and cultural ties. These commonalities forge a reality: while history may have divided the region, its people remain connected by bonds of common ancestry, language, culture, and religion. Thus, Latin America can be defined as those nations in North and South America and the Caribbean that share Spanish or Portuguese colonial heritage; this includes most of the nations beginning with Mexico in the North and extending south to Argentina and Chile in the South, and including the Hispanic Caribbean. Thus, the twenty-six Latin nations are, roughly north to south, Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Haiti.

A definition based on Spanish and Portuguese colonial heritage can lead to some confusion and complexity. For instance, the three “Guianas,” which include Guyana, French Guiana, and Surinam, are not technically considered Latin American because their colonial background is neither Spanish or Portuguese, but rather British, French, and Dutch respectively, and their economic, cultural, and political connections are more closely directed toward Africa and their former mother countries, rather than neighboring Latin states. This distinction also holds true for some of the islands of the Caribbean, such as St. Lucia, formerly a colony of France, and Jamaica, formerly a colony of Britain. Still, several Caribbean nations (such as Jamaica) have bonds to both their non-Latin peers and Latin America. In Jamaica’s case, this is because the island was originally a Spanish colony and retains linguistic and historical legacies from that background.

FIGURE 1.1 Political map of Latin America.
Source: Shutterstock.

FIGURE 1.2 Buenos Aires’s graceful Obelisk is emblematic of the city’s European traditions.
Source: Alex Proimos/Wikimedia.

Ethnic, historical, linguistic, and cultural bonds weigh importantly in defining the region. As discussed above, all of Latin America, according to the definition applied in this book, was at one time part of Spain’s or Portugal’s colonial empires, both founded at the end of the fifteenth century and surviving until the nineteenth. Over more than three centuries, the empires planted deep roots that have endured over the centuries. Thus, Iberian notions influence Latin political institutions, economic life, religions, gender relations, languages, ethnicities, and cultures. This is why Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Peru, while characterized by obvious differences in ethnicity, geography, and level of economic development, reveal similarities in social structures, languages, religion, and cultural norms. Religion is a case in point. Despite recent inroads made by Protestant faiths, Roman Catholicism remains the religious preference of more than 80 percent of all four countries’ populations. Common languages have been another unifier. Except for Haiti and Belize, most citizens of all Latin nations speak either Spanish or Portuguese as their mother tongue. Law and political institutions, moreover, possess notable Iberian characteristics. Rather than the constitutional democratic tradition dominant in Europe and North America, a tendency toward authoritarianism and militarism has predominated. Iberian structures are even visible in urban planning. This is why Mexico City, Lima, Buenos Aires, and Salvador de Bahia all possess colonial quarters centered around a main plaza, with the towering institutions of church and state occupying strategic locations which in centuries past symbolized dominance.

The structuring of distinctions of race, gender, and class is another Iberian legacy. In both colonial-era Spain and Portugal, society was built upon rigid social hierarchies, dominated by the Church, the Crown, landed aristocracy, and nobility, and bolstered by a patriarchal structure of gender and family relations. Few members of the peasantry, working class, or urban bourgeoisie could expect to rise to society’s elite groupings. Thus, the middle class remained small and politically weak, while women were limited to traditional, male-dominated roles in family and marriage (except for employment as nuns and the occasional princess or queen). Blacks, Amerindians, and mixed-race people, moreover, were so sharply constrained by concepts of white racial superiority that colonial Iberian society has often been referred to as a “pigmentocracy.” At the zenith of the social pyramid stood European-born Spanish and Portuguese, or “Peninsulars,” a term derived from the fact that Spain and Portugal occupy the Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe. Immediately beneath them were American-born Iberians; then mestizos (mixed European/Indian people), Amerindians, free black people, mulattos (descendants of black and white forebears), and finally, black slaves. Thus, the colonial period bequeathed hierarchical concepts of wealth, gender, racial, and social status. Happily, recent decades have seen much greater social mobility and racial and gender equality. In particular, women’s advances can be seen in the several nations that have elected female presidents, including Brazil, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Argentina, and Chile. But stark class stratifications, widespread poverty and homelessness, and relatively closed economic and social elites remain the rule. In a similar manner, the economies of all five nations suffer from underdevelopment. Much of this springs from overdependence on one or a handful of export commodities, and a failure to industrialize or integrate remote, impoverished areas into national economic life.

Consequently, coffee long dominated the economy in Brazil, and subjected it to the fickleness of world demand. Argentina was similarly dependent on beef, wool, and cereal exports. In Mexico, an economy relying on mineral and agricultural exports created the same kind of instability and generated widespread poverty. And in Peru, the nation’s heavy reliance on mineral exports began under Spain, when a bounty of Andean silver created the expression “a Peru,” meaning “a great treasure.” While economic diversification has recently increased, underdevelopment and its tragic consequences have condemned Latin America’s masses to a life of hard toil, grinding poverty, and political powerlessness.

But if commonalities of history, language, religion, and economic life have served to unify, differences of ethnic background, culture, and history have combined to shape six distinct subregions: (1) Mesoamerica, (2) the Hispanic Caribbean, (3) the Bolivarian Republics, (4) Andean Latin America, (5) Brazil, and (6) the Southern Cone. A discussion of each of these regions follows.

The CIA’s World Factbook is the source for the “At a Glance” and “Basic Economic Indicators” statistics for each region in this overview. You can explore more data about the countries in these regions by looking at the online version of the Factbook at this URL:

www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world-factbook/.

Mesoamerica

Mesoamerica contains Mexico and the eight countries of Central America—Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Panama, Belize, and Nicaragua. The factors binding these nations are historical and cultural. During the colonial period, all belonged to the Viceroyalty of New Spain (Spain’s colonial government for this part of its American empire). But Central America, which enjoyed partial autonomy in the Audiencia of Guatemala, developed a unique regional identity. (Due to their remoteness from the capital, areas like Central America were sometimes granted audiencia status, providing a measure of local self-government.) Except for Belize, all of these countries bear the marks of Iberian concepts of social hierarchy, gender relations, language, and religion. For the first decades of independence from Mexico, Central America formed the short-lived Federation of Central America. For what, in hindsight, seems a stunning mistake, the Federation’s members’ loyalty to their provinces led them to split into separate countries. Ever since, a conspicuous Central American attribute is the minuscule sizes of these nations, especially in comparison to Mexico. This has left them all at a disadvantage in terms of economic capacity and demographic strength (Table 1.1).

TABLE 1.1 Mesoamerica at a Glance

Unhappily, Central America’s breakup reflected a regional tendency that saw Spanish America’s balkanization—its breakup into small, frequently conflicting nations—from four viceroyalties to twenty-six independent nations. This was a phenomenon that obsessed visionary thinkers like Bolivar. The development condemned many small nations to struggle for economic stability and territorial integrity. A foundation of all these societies is two shared legacies: pre-Columbian Maya and Aztec civilization are combined with those of Catholic Spain. Moreover, with the exception of Guatemala, which is Mayan, the current majority populations of all these countries are mestizo, that is, of mixed indigenous and Spanish racial/ethnic background. Also standing a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About This Book
• Part One: Overview
• Part Two: Fundamentals
• Part Three: The Global Context
• Part Four: Case Studies
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index