Making the Americas

The United States and Latin America from the Age of Revolutions to the Era of Globalization

Thomas F. O'Brien

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780826342010
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Americans' belief in their economic, political, and cultural superiority launched them on a mission to transform Latin America that has evolved into a global process of Americanization. From corporate and philanthropic initiatives to military interventions, Americans motivated by self-interest and idealism sought to reshape Latin America and gave birth to the American driven process of globalization.

Synthesizing a broad range of international relations scholarship, including perspectives from gender, race, and cultural studies, O'Brien offers a sweeping history of the Americas that ranges from the adventures of eighteenth-century whaling men to the contemporary struggle over globalization. As a part of this study, the author explains how the responses of Latin Americans to Americanization have varied from the vehement rejection of U.S. economic dominance to embracing as well as reconfiguring the icons of American consumer culture.

O'Brien's goal is to provide readers with a nuanced understanding of how the people of the Americas have shaped their own history, and influenced the development of U.S. economic, strategic, and cultural power in the world today.

CHAPTER ONE

FROM ENCOUNTERS TO EXPANSION, 1776–1861

ON OCTOBER 3, 1839, NEW YORKER JOHN L. STEPHENS SET SAIL FOR British Honduras to assume his new post as the U.S. diplomatic representative to the Confederation of Central American States. The position itself owned a rather unhappy history. Of the eight previous appointees, four had died before or shortly after reaching Central America, three never occupied the post, and one brave soul, who held the position for five years, committed suicide shortly after learning that his appointment in Central America was being extended. Stephens, however, seemed ideally suited to the job. On the advice of his doctor, the young attorney had abandoned New York in 1834 to tour Europe and the Middle East. Upon his return to Manhattan he published two highly successful accounts of his adventures, making him the best-known travel writer of his day. With a serious interest in archaeology, he culled what information he could from the meager writings on Central American ruins, and now he eagerly looked forward to the prospect of exploring the “lost cities” of the Maya.

On October 30, the brig on which he had sailed safely deposited Stephens in the port city of Belize where he began his trip to Guatemala City, the capital of the fragile confederation. From the first, Stephens enthusiastically embraced Central America, comparing the humble port with its simple wooden structures to the likes of Venice and Alexandria. Growing up in a society where racial distinctions were strictly drawn, Stephens came to grips with the obvious racial amalgamation in Belize by concluding, “I hardly knew whether to be shocked or amused at this condition of society.”¹ However, his Protestant moral rectitude left him offended by the willingness of so many poor Central Americans to opt for the practical arrangements of common-law marriage, rather than the formal bonds of a church-sanctioned union.

Stephens experienced considerable hardship on his journey toward Guatemala City, enduring seemingly endless hours on muleback over dangerous mountain trails, through drenching rain, and in debilitating tropical heat. Yet these challenges in no way deterred him from sidetracking from the direct route to the Guatemalan capital in order to visit the ruins of Copán. Even though much of the city’s grandeur remained hidden beneath dense forest growth, Stephens was overawed by the majesty of this ancient Mayan center, later writing, “The beauty of the sculpture, the solemn stillness of the woods disturbed only by the scrambling of monkeys and the chattering of parrots, the desolation of the city, and the mystery that hung over it, all created an interest higher, if possible, than I had ever felt among the ruins of the Old World.”² However, the American adventurer expressed a far less positive view of the region’s current inhabitants and their knowledge of the ruins, noting, “When we asked the Indians who had made them, their dull answer was, ‘Quien sabe? (Who knows?)’”³ Yet his disparaging attitude toward the contemporary indigenous population in no way dimmed his enthusiasm for Mesoamerican archaeology. His descriptions of ruins in Central America and in the Yucatan helped stir scholarly and popular interest in the subject. But Stephens’s other mission, that of diplomacy, would prove far less successful.

When the American diplomat arrived in the region, the Confederation of Central American States was already in its death throes, wracked by a civil war that pitted the confederation president, General Francisco Morazán, headquartered in El Salvador, against the Guatemalan Rafael Carrera. Stephens found himself a diplomat in search of a government to accept his credentials. In the process, he experienced firsthand the acute political instability that characterized the region. In this tumultuous period, Stephens’s sympathies lay with the Liberal faction, in no small measure because “they had thrown off the yoke of the Romish Church, and in the first enthusiasm of emancipated minds, tore away at once the black mantle of superstition which had been thrown like a funeral pall over the genius of the people.”⁴ However, the American diplomat’s principal dealings were with Rafael Carrera, who was emerging as the dominant political figure in Guatemala.

Like most Latin Americans of his time, Carrera held no particular opinion about the government that Stephens represented because he had only the vaguest notions about the United States itself. Stephens, however, had very strong opinions about the popular forces that propelled Carrera to power. They were “barbarians” and “fanatic Indians.”⁵ As far as Stephens was concerned, Carrera and his allies, who enjoyed the support of the indigenous population, “were consorting with a wild animal which might at any moment turn and rend them in pieces.”⁶ In turn, the conservative elite, who supported Carrera, were highly suspicious of the U.S. government, certain that Texas’s secession from Mexico was just the first step in U.S. territorial aggression that would engulf Mexico and eventually Guatemala.⁷ Not surprisingly, Stephens parted on less than friendly terms with the de facto regime in Guatemala and proceeded to El Salvador in hopes of finding the confederation government. The closest he would come to that goal was an interview with the confederation’s vice president, whom he encountered on his trip into El Salvador. But by then the confederation was collapsing and was about to splinter into separate states.

With no government to accept his credentials, Stephens sailed off to Costa Rica and then trekked across Nicaragua. His new, self-appointed mission was to explore a possible route for a canal that would connect the Atlantic and the Pacific. Since 1825, various groups in Central America and the United States had attempted to launch plans for a canal across Nicaragua. But despite those efforts, little or nothing had been accomplished. Stephens gained access to the work of a British naval officer, who had surveyed the possible canal route. As a result, his book on his travels in Central America provided the most thorough assessment of the canal route yet available in the United States. But Stephens was not simply a cool-headed analyst. He was a thoroughgoing promoter of the canal. The prospect of an American-built canal funneling American merchants to Pacific ports from South America to China drove Stephens to a euphoric depiction of the proposed canal, claiming “it would be glory surpassing the conquest of kingdoms to make this greatest enterprise ever attempted by human force entirely our own work.”⁸ Stephens’s specific dream of a canal would not be fulfilled in his lifetime, but his entrepreneurial energies helped create an important alternative to an isthmisian canal. In 1848, Stephens joined with New York capitalists William Aspinwall and Henry Chauncey to form the Panama Railroad Company. Serving as vice president of the corporation, Stephens went to the isthmus to oversee the construction. After an enormous toll in lost lives, the rail line was successfully completed in 1855. However, Stephens did not live to see his dream of a rail connection between the seas fulfilled. He apparently contracted a tropical disease during his work on the railway and died in New York in 1852. By the time of Stephens’s death, thousands of Americans were already crossing and recrossing both Panama and Nicaragua as the two easiest routes between the east and west coasts. That activity was only a small part of what had become a growing number of interactions between North Americans and their Latin neighbors since the American Revolution.

Exchanges between intellectuals in the Americas and the tales of New England whaling men returning from the Pacific coast of South America in the late eighteenth century gave way in the first half of the nineteenth century to increasing trade, the declaration of a virtual U.S. guardianship over the Western Hemisphere in the Monroe Doctrine, the growing belief by white Americans in their racial superiority, the seizure of vast stretches of Mexico’s territory driven by the American conviction that territorial expansion was crucial to domestic stability, the developing American commitment to a civilizing mission in the Western Hemisphere, the rush of Americans across Central America to California, the pioneering ventures of entrepreneurs such as William Wheelwright in Chile, and the invasions of American mercenaries or filibusters seeking to seize control of nations in the circum-Caribbean. Latin Americans, in return, offered a range of responses to their encounters with North Americans, envisioning the United States as a paragon of republican virtue, enthusiastically embracing American technology and business practices while denouncing U.S. territorial aggrandizement at the expense of Mexico and the violent actions of the filibusters. During these decades American and Latin Americans had begun a series of interactions that would profoundly influence the history of the Americas and the world. The roots of that process and Latin American reactions to it extended back to the colonial past.

MISSION TO THE AMERICAS

The United States and the Latin American nations were born in the Age of Revolutions that swept the Atlantic world during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet the peoples who occupied the Western Hemisphere and would soon share this formative experience knew precious little about each other. With the exception of Mexicans, Latin Americans still did not see their destinies as being inextricably linked to the actions of the United States. Initially, what little Spanish, Portuguese, and English colonists knew about each other did not bode well for future relations. For the Spanish and Portuguese (Brazilian) colonists, their rare encounters with English colonists usually came in the form of privateering attacks on their ships and port cities. Furthermore, even the more peaceful inhabitants of Britain’s North American colonies were known to be heretical adherents of Protestantism. As for the residents of English colonies, they readily accepted the Black Legend that portrayed Spaniards as fanatical Roman Catholics, who spared no act of brutality in their conquest and treatment of the indigenous inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. As exaggerated as these stereotypes may have been, the fact remained that distinctly different societies were emerging in the British and Spanish colonial systems.

The colonists, who populated the shores of North America, had fashioned societies of small agrarian producers. Having destroyed or driven off the indigenous population, less than 2 percent of white settlers were subject to indentured servitude, with black slaves replacing them as the principal form of bound labor, particularly in the southern colonies. Eighty-five percent of the white male population became farmers, while most of the rest found employment as craftsmen, day laborers, or seamen. Even while British rule persisted, these colonial communities had developed individualistic, competitive cultures with notable degrees of religious freedom and political participation. To their south, a dramatically different set of societies was emerging.

Spain had conquered a series of densely populated Indian empires stretched along an axis running from Mexico to Chile. After destroying indigenous leadership and institutions, the Spanish imposed their own administrative superstructure and initiated a massive religious conversion of the population. A small group of Spanish colonists ruled over societies comprised largely of Indian and mixed-race people. A patrimonial order and an elaborate racial hierarchy marked these societies. Despite the destruction of the old imperial structures, and the imposition of Christianity, much of what was indigenous society and culture survived in the form of peasant villages with their communal practices and landholdings. These villages became the key source of labor for the silver- and gold-mining enterprises that underpinned the colonial economy. A variety of forced-labor practices controlled the villagers, who worked in the mines and on the landed estates. At the pinnacle of this social, economic, and political hierarchy, the Spanish crown maintained an uneasy truce between its colonists and the large subjugated population whose labor and land they exploited.

Despite dramatically different social systems and cultures, as well as often negative perceptions of their neighbors, the colonists of the Western Hemisphere did begin to gain some limited knowledge of each other. The eighteenth-century European Enlightenment with its emphasis on human reason and individual freedom as the underpinnings of all knowledge and effective social institutions found an attentive audience among elites throughout the Western Hemisphere. Benjamin Franklin’s reputation as a scientist was second only to that of Isaac Newton in Latin America, and the American Philosophical Society eagerly acquired the writings of scientists from Spain’s colonies. Indeed, political philosophers in the Americas began to stress the homogeneity of the Western Hemisphere as a pristine environment in which the Enlightenment ideas of rational thought and democracy would flourish as they never could in the decadent societies of Europe.⁹ On a more practical level, economic interests drew the two regions closer together.

On March 23, 1793, young boys raced through the streets of Nantucket, Massachusetts, anxious to be the first to bring the glad tidings that one of its sailing vessels had just safely returned from an eighteen-month voyage. The arriving vessel, the Beaver, captained by Paul Worth, was a slow-moving, often malodorous whaling ship. The rugged Nantucket whaler enjoyed the distinction of being the first American ship of her kind to sail from a U.S. port to the new whaling grounds off the Pacific coast of South America. Worth had enjoyed a highly successful hunting season, returning with hundreds of barrels of whale oil that helped to light the lamps of America and fuel the economic growth of the northeastern states. The Beaver opened the way for a steady stream of New England ships rounding the Horn by the early 1800s in search of whales and seals.¹⁰ The New England whalers found another lucrative enterprise in the form of smuggling. Insisting that supply shortages forced them to enter South American ports, the crafty New Englanders exploited these visits as opportunities to violate Spanish bans on trading with foreigners. While the New England whalers undertook contraband trade as a sideline activity, their mercantile counterparts pursued it as a full-time enterprise.

The United States’s official position of neutrality during periods of European warfare, especially the 1790s, had allowed its merchants to supply the needs of European, especially Spanish, colonies starved for supplies by wars between their mother countries. Even in peacetime, the Spanish colonies offered significant opportunities. Although technically a closed-mercantilist-trading system, the Spanish empire in the Western Hemisphere operated with sievelike efficiency. Contraband had become a way of life for colonies whose economic needs often could not be adequately met by Spain, even in peacetime. Merchants from Boston to Baltimore played an increasing role in this process, providing much-needed goods and essential transport services at times when war in Europe effectively cut off the Spanish colonies from the mother country. Most of this activity was centered in the Caribbean region, but American merchants ventured as far south as Buenos Aires and Valparaiso to exploit the opportunities.¹¹ North American merchants, sea captains, and their crews were fast becoming a familiar if not frequent sight in some of the largest colonial ports to their south. Now rather than a few scholarly interchanges between members of their respective elites, several thousand American captains, merchants, whaling men, and general seamen were seeing and being seen in Latin America. Crewmen shared their experiences with sea shanties, telling of the dangers of the hurricane-wracked Caribbean and the furious waves and high winds of Cape Horn, while also recounting their few moments of pleasure on shore with “Rosita, Anna and Carmen too, They’ll greet ye with a hullabaloo, and soon ye’ll know what they can do.” They also recalled the charms of “Them Dago gals we do adore, They all drink wine and ask for more.”¹² North Americans were already envisioning Latin America as a largely untamed, dangerous wilderness, inhabited by dark temptresses. The themes of wilderness, danger, and exotic females would reoccur time and again in the encounters between North Americans and Latin Americans. As for the reaction of Latin Americans to their occasional guests from the sea, they found them to be a generally noisy, often inebriated, and sometimes violent lot in need of restraining by local authorities. But for those who led these early voyages, the merchant adventurers of this time, Latin America soon took on significance beyond the opportunity for large profits in smuggling ventures. American merchants carried not only cargo but also ideology to the south.

In colonial America, much of the population shared the vision of preachers like Cotton Mather, viewing their scattered outposts as the rebirth of a pure Christian society that would be a shining light for the rest of the world to follow. Indeed, Mather’s f...