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Give a brief review or summary of the two articles (no more than one third of your post).
Give you own reaction to the points raised in the articles. Do you agree? Disagree?
Give the relevance of the author’s main points to our survey of Latin America; what points were helpful?

A several questions to consider:

What do you think about Latin America as a distinct cultural-linguistic area of study?
Does the idea of “Latin” America exclude Brazil or Haiti? What about Jamaica?
Do you agree with Drake and Hilbink that there is still value in studying Latin America from the Area Studies perspective?

At least two citations

300 words minimum

What are the advantages of studying from an “Atlantic” perspective rather than just a “Latin American” perspective?

Peer Reviewed

Title:
The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines

Author:
Szanton, David L, University of California, Berkeley

Publication Date:
01-01-200

Series:
GAIA Books

Publication Info:
GAIA Books, Global, Area, and International Archive, UC Berkeley

Permalink:
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/59n2d2n

Keywords:
Comparative Studies

eScholarship provides open access, scholarly publishing
services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic
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The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies
and the Disciplines

Edited by David L. Szanton

Published in association with University of California Press

LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES: THEORY AND PRACTICE
by

Paul W. Drake and Lisa Hilbink1

Introduction

Latin Americanists have developed and/or contributed to some of the most important and
influential theories and debates in the social sciences and humanities in recent history2. From
dependency to democratization, from studies on the state to research on social movements,
scholars of Latin America have been at the forefront of theoretical development in a variety of
disciplines. Despite these achievements, Latin American studies in the United States, along with
all foreign-area studies, is suffering from a decline in intellectual and material support. The
possibility of specialization in the region, which demands field work and sustained dialogue with
Latin American scholars, is threatened. It has therefore become necessary to turn our analytical
lenses inward to examine critically the past and future trajectory of Latin American studies and
to evaluate and respond to criticisms of the field.

As a contribution to this effort, this essay traces the institutional and intellectual history
of Latin American studies, principally in the United States, and, with this in mind, addresses
contemporary criticisms of area studies. It contends that scholarly work under the umbrella of
Latin American studies has been and will be innovative and important in a variety of disciplines.
The mid-level theorizing which has been the hallmark of Latin American studies offers a healthy
balance between problem-driven research and causal analysis. Moreover, the crossnational
collaboration and inter-disciplinary cross-fertilization which characterize Latin American studies
are precisely the sorts of practices which should be encouraged in the emerging era of global
cooperation and production.

Institutional History of Latin American Studies

The origins and characteristics of Latin American studies differ somewhat from those of
other world areas. To begin, the study of Latin America did not originate in an
“Orientalist” tradition, such as that which initiated the study of Asia and the Middle East. In
other words, present-day Latin American studies is not rooted in colonial scholarship, heavily
oriented toward ancient history and language.

While some scholars of the region have always

1For comments o n earlier drafts o f this e ssay, we are grateful to Sonia Alvarez, Victor Bulmer-Thomas,
David Collier, Carlos I van De Gregori, Eric Hershberg, Evelyne Huber, Elizabeth Jelín, Gilbert Joseph, Ira
Katznelson, Gwen Kirkpatrick, Gerardo Munck, Peter Smith, Doris S ommer, Carlos W aisman, and two
anonymous r eviewers.

2 The authors, two political scientists, acknowledge the emphasis, perhaps i nescapable, placed on the s ocial
sciences, and especially political science, in this c hapter. A reasonable attempt was m ade to discuss t he
increasingly important contributions o f scholars i n the humanities t o debates i n Latin American Studies,
but the authors r ecognize that there remain many worthy ideas a nd works t hat they were unable to cover in
this s hort essay.

3As R ichard Lambert explains, “for a scholar studying China or India, the classical civilization is p art of
everyday life. Serious s cholars, even social scientists, must master it to make sense of the contemporary
society.” See Richard Lambert, “Blurring the Disciplinary Boundaries: Area Studies i n the United States,”
American Behavioral Scientist 33:

(July/August 1990): 712-732, at 724.

focused on Amer-Indian cultures and institutions, and while the influence of postmodernism has
brought the region’s cultural heterogeneity to the forefront of contemporary concerns, most U.S.
researchers have traditionally followed the Latin American lead in defining the region as
primarily New World and predominantly mestizo (mixed-race peoples exercising some
combination of indigenous and European cultural practices). Partly because of this mixing of
peoples and cultures, claims of uniqueness or exceptionalism — e.g., Ecuador is so unusual that it
can be understood only on its own terms and only by Ecuadoreans or by those deeply immersed
in Ecuadorean culture — have been less common in Latin American studies than in studies of
some other areas, such as the United States, China, Japan, India, etc.

Secondly, and relatedly, Latin American studies has become a cooperative endeavor
between U.S. scholars and their counterparts south of the border. That is, Latin American studies
is something that North Americans do with Latin Americans, not to Latin Americans. Indeed,
much of the knowledge production about the region has always come from the Latin Americans.
This is as it should be, since the internationalization of knowledge production through dialogue
with researchers around the globe is today a keystone of not only the social sciences and
humanities but also the natural sciences and all scholarly pursuits. A reciprocal and free flow of
questions, ideas, and information is essential to all scientific inquiries, whether in physics or
anthropology. Perhaps due to the geographic, linguistic, religious, and historico-political ties
between the United States and Latin America, there have been fewer cultural barriers to such
scholarly collaboration than there might be between U.S. and African or East Asian scholars.
Moreover, many Latin American scholars have come to the United States either in exile or for
education, and political obstacles have diminished over the years.

Interactions between national and foreign analysts of Latin America have been beneficial
to both sides. Fruitful interdisciplinary work has been fostered, partly because disciplinary
boundaries are less rigid in Latin America, and new questions have been generated. For
example, the content of scholarly debate in Latin America compelled North American
scholarship to address issues such as class inequality and class conflict, both domestically and
internationally, while North Americans have brought to the table concerns about democratic
stability and gender inequities.

Cross-fertilization occurred between the approaches of the generally more qualitative,
theoretical, often Marxist Latin Americans and the frequently more quantitative, empirical, often
liberal North Americans. Such interchange tested theories, whether modernization from the
north or dependency from the south. Both sides helped each other see beyond their biases.
These interactions also produced some unfortunate intellectual distortions, including the
imposition of U.S. Cold War research concerns on Latin America, the uninhibited imbibing of
U.S. economic models by some Latin Americans, and the uncritical consumption of dependency

4This i s n ot to say that claims o f exceptionalism are completely absent in Latin America.

5Two caveats t o this g enerally positive cooperative scenario are in order. First, there have always b een
huge inequalities b etween U.S. and Latin American scholars i n terms o f the resources, both financial and
scholarly, to which they have access. These inequalities h ave worsened since the continent-wide
depression of the 1980s i n Latin America. Second, the developmental heterogeneity of the region has a lso
produced inequalities a mong Latin American scholars t hemselves, such that scholars f rom the larger,
middle-income countries, particularly Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, have always a ssumed a larger role in
the field of Latin American Studies t han their counterparts i n poorer countries s uch as B olivia, Paraguay,
or the Caribbean states.

theory by many North Americans.6 Yet gradually, the two sides have converged around key
issues, methods, theories, and even policies, especially with the end of the Cold War and the
seeming triumph of classic liberal economics and politics in the 1980s.

Although relations between the colossus of the north and its neighbors to the south have
long been asymmetrical, examples of inter-American scholarly cooperation abound. From 196

to 1989, nearly half of all of the Social Science Research Council’s Joint Committee on Latin
American Studies (JCLAS, jointly sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies)
advanced research grants were awarded to Latin American investigators. In addition, before its
closure, Latin American researchers came to constitute approximately half of the membership of
the JCLAS,

and Argentine sociologist Jorge Balan once served as Chair of the Committee.
Heavy Latin American participation has also been the norm at conventions and on committees of
the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), as well as on the editorial boards of the major
area journals.

Thus, while there have always been segments of Latin American populations
suspicious of the yanquis, and while there are certainly some very real reasons justifying these
suspicions, the production of knowledge about Latin America has been a transnational enterprise
for at least three decades.9

Of course, this is not to dispute that Latin American studies, as all area studies in the
United States, acquired its present-day stature as the result, at least in part, of U.S. foreign policy
and especially Cold War reasoning.

While programs on Latin America developed in the 1920s,
they got their first big boost with the announcement of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor
Policy” in the late 1930s, the creation of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs
(headed by Nelson D. Rockefeller) in 1940, and the founding of the SSRC’s Joint Committee on
Latin American Studies in 1942.

However, because policy-makers did not deem Latin
America a national security priority, and because they viewed Spanish as an “easy” language

6Fernando Henrique Cardoso, “The Consumption of Dependency Theory in the United States,” Latin
American Research Review 12:3 (Fall 1977): 7-24.

7John H. Coatsworth, “International Collaboration in the Social Sciences: The ACLS/SSRC Joint
Committee on Latin American Studies” (Paper presented at the SSRC/CLACSO conference on
“International Scholarly Relations i n the Social Sciences,” Montevideo, Uruguay, August 15-17, 1989), 31.

8 Europeans h ave also been active in the programs o f the JCLAS and LASA.

9On Latin American attitudes t oward the United States, see Carlos R angel, Latin Americans: Their L ove-
Hate Relationship with the U.S. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977).

10See Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Unintended Consequences o f Cold War Area Studies,” in Noam
Chomsky et al., The Cold War a nd the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Y ears
(New York: The New Press, 1997),esp. p. 202; Vicente L. Rafael, “The Cultures o f Area Studies i n the
United States,” Social Text (Winter 1994): 91-111; Paul Drake, “From Retrogression to Resurgence:
International Scholarly Relations w ith Latin America in U.S. Universities, 1970s-1980s” (Paper presented
at the SSRC/CLACSO conference on “International Scholarly Relations i n the Social Sciences,”
Montevideo, Uruguay, August 15-17, 1989).

11See Charles W agley, ed., Social Science Research on Latin America (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1964).

https://reasoning.10

with bountiful practitioners, they did not see specialized knowledge of Latin America as a major
investment in the late forties and early fifties.

Only with the Cuban Revolution of 1959 did Latin America once again become a
strategic priority, and it remained so through the end of the Cold War.

From 1959 to 1989, the
JCLAS funded the research for 488 dissertations, provided advanced research grants to 762 U.S.,
Latin American, and west European scholars, and sponsored nearly 80 workshops and
conferences involving more than 2,000 leading researchers (50% of them Latin American). In
addition, between 1949 and 1985, the Fulbright and USIA faculty exchange programs brought
12,881 Latin Americans to the United States and sponsored 4, 589 North Americans in Latin
America.

Meanwhile, area studies centers throughout the United States benefited from federal
government grants given under Title VI of the National Defense Education Act, created in
response to the launching of the first Sputnik in October of 1957.

“By the 1970s, more than
150 organized Latin American studies programs were offering courses and enrolling students at
U.S. colleges and universities.”

A significant number of research projects were also funded
over the years by the Ford Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, the Tinker Foundation, the Henry L. and Grace Doherty
Charitable Foundation, Inc., the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Hewlett and
Mellon foundations, and the MacArthur Foundation.171 As a result of this support, Latin
American studies became arguably “the largest, most intellectually vibrant, and influential of the
area studies communities in the United States.”

12In fact, the JCLAS was d isbanded from 1947-1959. Nonetheless, during this p eriod some Latin
Americanists d id serve as c onsultants t o the U.S. State Department. See Michael Jiménez, “In the Middle
of the Mess: Rereading John J. Johnson’s Political Change in Latin America Thirty Years L ater” (Paper
presented at the Latin American Studies A ssociation XV Annual Conference, Miami, Florida, December 6,
1989).

13See Thomas C . Wright, Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution (New York: Praeger, 1991).

14Thus, in cumulative totals, Latin America outranked Africa (5,066), Eastern Europe (6,638), and Near
East and South Asia (13,873), but not East Asia and Pacific (20,487) or Western Europe (88,837). Board
of Foreign Scholarships, Fulbright Program Exchanges, 1984-85 (Washington, DC, 1985).

15Wallerstein , “Unintended Consequences,” p. 209 . Latin America was i ncorporated into the Title VI
mission in 1960. It should be noted, however, that “The legislative debate [over the NDEA] had less t o do
with the cold war than with whether the federal government should fund higher education. … The bill was
strongly contested by conservatives w ho argued that the NDEA would open the floodgates o f federal
assistance to higher education” (Gilbert Merkx, “Editor’s F oreword,” Latin American Research Review 30:1
(1995), 4).

16Gilbert Merkx, “Editor’s F oreword,” Latin American Research Review 29:1 (1994), 4-5.

17Coatsworth, “International Collaboration,” 2.

18Ibid. As M erkx (“Editor’s F oreword,” 1994) notes, “in 1985, the Library of Congress’s National
Directory of Latin Americanists identified some 5,000 professionals w orking as s pecialists o n the region”
and judging by student enrollments, subscriptions t o LARR , and attendance at LASA conferences, the field
is n ow even larger (p. 5).

https://America.14

https://fifties.12

Notwithstanding the Cold War “national interest” incentives for funding U.S. scholarship
on Latin American, many tensions arose over the years between the Latin American Studies
community and the foreign policy, defense, and intelligence circles of the U.S. government.

Interestingly, and perhaps somewhat ironically, “Title VI programs actually resulted in a
democratization of foreign area intelligence that fueled opposition to cold war policies of the
government.”

The first serious conflict emerged around the “Operation Camelot” scandal in
1964. Project Camelot was a U.S. Army-funded initiative of the Special Operations Research
Office of American University that sought to use area scholars to gather information relevant to
the counterinsurgency program of the U.S. government. The operation turned scandal when a
Norwegian sociologist working in Chile was invited to participate, but instead publicized the
goals of the project to his Chilean colleagues. This was “enough to arouse considerable
discussion in Chile, an intervention by the president of Chile with the U.S. State Department,
debate in the U.S. Congress, and cancellation of the project worldwide.”

It also led to fear on
the part of the Latin American studies community that their scholarship would be tainted,
appropriated for improper purposes, and even made impossible by anti-U.S. security agency
suspicions on the part of Latin Americans.

In the years that followed, scholars of the hemisphere criticized a wide array of U.S.
policies, including those toward Cuba, multinational corporations, Brazil, Central America, and
especially Chile.

As Gilbert Merkx explains, “U.S. Latin Americanists of all persuasions felt
deep sympathy and support for professional colleagues suffering under dictatorship. [The] Latin
American Studies Association achieved a certain fame (or notoriety) for the frequency and rigor
of its criticisms of U.S. actions in the hemisphere.”

This passionate engagement of U.S. Latin
Americanists with policy issues in the region was one outcome of their collaboration with their
counterparts to the south, most of whom were sharply critical of U.S. imperialism,
interventionism, capitalism, conservatism, and association with dictators.

19Coatsworth, “International Collaboration,” 15. See also Mark T. Berger, Under N orthern Eyes: Latin
American Studies a nd U.S. Hegemony in the Americas, 1898-1990 (Bloominton, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1995).

20Merkx, “Editor’s F oreword,” 1995, 4.

21Wallerstein, “Unintended Consequences,” p.223.

22On this i ssue see Irving Louis H orowitz, The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies i n the
Relationship between Social Science and Practical Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967); and Sigmund
Diamond, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities w ith the Intelligence Community,
1945-1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

23Christopher Mitchell, “Introduction,” Changing Perspectives i n Latin American Studies (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1988), 10-11. See also Robert Packenham, The Dependency Movement
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).

24Merkx, “Editor’s F oreword,” 1994, 4. Indeed, in his c ontribution to Samuels a nd Weiner’s ( 1992) edited
volume on the political culture of area studies, Gabriel Almond notes t hat the politicization of area studies,
which the volume discusses a s a general problem, has b een “the most marked in Latin American studies.”
See Gabriel A. Almond, “The Political Culture of Foreign Area Research: Methodological Reflections,” in
Richard J. Samuels a nd Myron Weiner, eds., The Political Culture of Foreign Area and International
Studies (New York: Brassey’s, 1992).

https://Chile.23

https://Americans.22

https://government.19

The conservative drift of U.S. public opinion and Capitol Hill politics in the 1980s and
1990s is one of the factors contributing to the present decline in support for area studies. Yet
cuts to area studies programs began even earlier — in the 1970s — due to economic recessions and
stagflation, the contraction of the academic market in the United States, the war in Vietnam, and
the turn from revolutionary expectations to right-wing authoritarianism in Latin America, where
repression severely damaged the social sciences. Total Title VI Fellowships for Latin
Americanist graduate students plunged from an average of around 170 per year in the 1960s to a
low of 54 in 1975, and by 1979, U.S. government investment in exchange programs had fallen
proportionately beneath that of France, Great Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany, Japan,
China, and the Soviet Union.

At the same time, previous foundation support for Latin American studies dried up.
Some, like Rockefeller, withdrew almost completely. Most importantly, Ford Foundation
funding for advanced training and research in international affairs and foreign areas fell from
approximately $

million per year in the 1960s to $4 million per annum in the 1970s. Its direct
grants to U.S. area studies centers faded away and its Foreign Area Fellowship Program for
graduate students was passed on a smaller scale to the JCLAS. Nevertheless, Ford continued to
have a smaller, less direct impact through its crucial support for thematic U.S. university
programs, for the Latin American Studies Association, for conferences, and, above all, for Latin
American social scientists, whether at home or in exile.

The 1980s witnessed a resurgence of course enrollments, graduate training, and public
interest in Latin America. As always, many trends in Latin American studies followed
international events. Several factors were at work: turmoil in Central America, the movement of
migrants and narcotics across borders, the wave of democratization throughout the hemisphere,
the international debt crisis, the revival of the U.S. economy and the decline of inflation, and the
reawakening of the academic marketplace in the United States. However, funding continued to
lag behind the swelling need for new researchers and research, despite the emergence of some
new — albeit small — private benefactors of Latin American studies (e.g., the Helen Kellogg
Institute for International Studies at Notre Dame, the Howard Heinz Endowment, and the Gildred
Foundation). In 1987, the Tinker Foundation terminated its Postdoctoral Fellowships, and the
Henry L. and Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation, Inc., which had produced the dissertations
of many of the leaders in the field, shut down. Consequently, by 1989 the total available awards
per year for U.S. faculty to conduct extended research in Latin America were only sufficient to
cover 7% of the existing pool of approximately 1,800 active researchers.27

As historian John Coatsworth noted in 1989, this lack of institutional support means that
the number of active researchers working on Latin America has stagnated since the 1970s, that
graduate students increasingly find themselves unable to obtain funding for research in the
region, and that young scholars in both Latin America and the United States have become
isolated from one another, and hence less able to benefit from the collaboration which has been
so fruitful in the past.28 In the 1990s, this disturbing trend has continued. In 1993, the Ford and

25Drake, “Retrogression to Resurgence,” 3.

26President’s C ommission on Foreign Language and International Studies, Strength through Wisdom
(Washington , D.C., 1979), 8-9, 101-103.

27Drake, “Retrogression to Resurgence,” 28.

28Coatsworth, “International Collaboration,” 8-9.

https://researchers.27

https://exile.26

https://Union.25

Mellon foundations reduced their funding of regionally-focused scholars and projects and
inaugurated a joint “globalization” project.29 In 1997, the Social Science Research Council
terminated its area studies committees, the JCLAS among them, replacing them with less
powerful “regional advisory panels.” These panels no longer control significant funds for
fellowships or research projects. This comes at a time when restricted public funds for education
and general economic hardship have made it extremely difficult for most Latin Americans to
pursue academic careers in their own countries. Given the past success of Latin American
studies in terms of the strengthening of ties between scholars in North and South America and
the advancement of research agendas in both hemispheres, this weakening of support should be
of great concern to all those interested in the future terms and quality of intellectual inquiry.

Intellectual History of Latin American Studies

As discussed above, the collaborative research fostered under the umbrella of Latin
American studies has had many general benefits for scholarly work, including the generation of
new questions, the testing of theories, and the challenging of national biases. This section
discusses the evolution of particular topics, theories, and approaches which have tied the field of
Latin American studies together, and which have contributed to the understanding of issues of
common concern to scholars in different academic disciplines. The emphasis is on
transdisciplinary trends, especially in the United States. No attempt is made to map all the key
intradisciplinary debates and patterns, although Political Science receives some extra attention.30

The earliest U.S. works on Latin America were concentrated in History and Literature.31
The first journal specific to the area, the Hispanic-American Historical Review, began
publication in 1918.32 In Language and Literature, journals such as Hispania, the Hispanic

29Jacob Heilbrunn, “The News f rom Everywhere: Does G lobal Thinking Threaten Local Knowledge?”,
Lingua Franca, May/June 1996, 49-56 at 52.

30Because the study of Latin American Literature followed a slightly different path, we do not treat
developments i n that discipline below. However, interested readers c an consult the following essays for
discussions o f the developments i n the region’s L iterature and Literary Criticism during the same period:
Jean Franco, “From Modernism to Resistance: Latin American Literature 1959-1976,” Latin American
Perspectives 5:1 (Winter 1978): 77-97; Saúl Sosnowski, “Spanish-American Literary Criticism: The State
of the Art,” in Christopher Mitchell, ed., Changing Perspectives i n Latin American Studies (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1988): 163-182; Paul B. Dixon, “‘Decentering’ a Discipline: Recent Trends i n
Latin American Literary Studies,” Latin American Research Review 31:3 (1996): 203-217; and essays i n
Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America Vol. X (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1995).

31See Wagley, Social Science Research. For other surveys o f work done under the umbrella of Latin
American studies s ee Bryce Wood and Manuel Diegues J unior, eds., Social Science in Latin America:
Papers P resented at the Conference on Latin American Studies H eld at Rio de Janeiro, March 29-31, 1965
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1967); Roberto Esquenazi-Mayo and Michael C. Mayer, Latin
American Scholarship since WWII (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1971); and Gláucio Ary
Dillon Soares, “Latin American Studies i n the United States,” LARR 11:2 (1976): 51-69.

32Howard F. Cline, “Latin American History: Development of Its S tudy and Teaching in the United States
Since 1898,” in Howard Cline, ed., Latin American History Vol. I (Austin: University of Texas P ress,
1967), pp. 6-16. The Handbook of Latin American Studies began publication in 1936.

https://Literature.31

https://attention.30

https://project.29

Review, and the Revista Hispánica Moderna, appeared on the scene. Anthropologists and
archaeologists also became early leaders in Latin American studies, specializing in native
cultures.33

Since the 1960s, however, and with support from the SSRC, the social sciences, and
especially Political Science, have come to rival History for dominance in the major area journals.
In 1974-75, submissions to the Latin American Research Review,34 the most prominent area
journal, were dominated by History and Political Science. By 1979, Political Science
submissions had taken the lead, rising from 1/4 to 1/3 of the total. In the 1980s and 1990s, this
flow of articles from Political Science continued unabated. Meanwhile, History submissions
remained solidly in second place in most years, and Languages/Literature and Anthropology
submissions were displaced by those from Economics and Sociology.35 The Journal of Latin
American Studies, founded in 1969 and published in England, has featured articles primarily in
History and Political Science, with none in Literature or the Arts. The bulk of these articles in
both journals focused on Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Central America or individual Central
American countries, Chile, and Peru.36

In general, the nature of such social scientific studies has tended to be more qualitative
than quantitative, and generally (and not surprisingly) more oriented towards a transdisciplinary
audience. What characterizes the field of Latin American studies is methodological diversity, a
fact which may be partially explained by the significant percentage of Latin American
contributions made to these journals (30-40% to LARR in recent years37). LARR regularly
solicits and includes manuscripts from Latin American scholars and reports on the activities of
research centers in the region. It also incorporates Latin American colleagues into the editorial
process.38 Such collaboration demands greater openness to different approaches and methods,
since Latin American disciplinary norms and boundaries differ from those of the United States.

This is a very positive development, since some Latin Americans have had harsh words
for scholars trained to think exclusively in North American terms. As one Brazilian researcher
argued in 1975:

33Lewis H anke, “The Development of Latin-American Studies i n the United States, 1939-1945,” The
Americas 4:1 (July 1947): 32-64, at 58-9.

34The Latin American Research Review (LARR) was f ounded in 1965 as t he official publication of the
Latin American Studies A ssociation (LASA), established in 1964.

35John D. Martz, “Political Science and Latin American Studies,” Latin American Research Review 25:1
(1990): 67-86, at 75; Gilbert Merkx, “Editor’s F oreword,” for Latin American Research Review volumes
28:1, 29:1, 30:1, and 31:1 (1993, 1994, 1995, 1996).

36From 1965-95 LARR featured 191 entries o n Mexico, 136 on Brazil, 112 on Argentina, 80 on Central
America or individual Central American countries, 64 on Chile, and 58 on Peru. From 1969-95, JLAS
published 62 articles o n Brazil, 57 on Mexico, 50 on Argentina, 37 on Central America or individual
Central American countries, 32 on Peru, and 28 on Chile.

37 Merkx, “Editor’s F oreword,” 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996.

38Joseph Tulchin, “Emerging Patterns o f Research in the Study of Latin America,” Latin American
Research Review 18:1 (1983), 86.

https://process.38

https://Sociology.35

https://cultures.33

All too often the attitude of the visiting North American scholar was that all he had to do
was collect the data, take them home, and analyze them. He looked at Latin America
from his own theoretical and existential perspective. He was closed to local intellectual
inputs and often found local criticism and points of view difficult to understand.
Unfamiliarity with the history of the country, regions, and institutions involved, as well
as the with the data sources, has placed narrow intellectual constraints on the outcome of
this type of research.39

With Latin Americans themselves influencing the research agenda in the United States, this
unfortunate situation has changed for the better.40

Such influence has not been unidirectional, however. While Latin Americans may
challenge North Americans to pay greater attention to historical and structural variables, U.S.
scholars have begun to persuade their Latin American counterparts of the value of new types of
empirical research. For example, survey research has become a virtual cottage industry in Latin
America.41 By the same token, the study of institutions and institutional change has become a
central focus for many Latin American as well as U.S. scholars.42

What specifically have been the contributions of Latin Americanists to scholarship in the
United States? While the most important contributions have been made in the past thirty or forty
years, it is useful to begin with a historical discussion of the intellectual trajectory of the field.
The first North American university to accept a dissertation on a Pan-American topic was Yale in
1869. From 1869-1960, 103 North American institutions accepted some 2,000 theses on some
topic involving one or more Latin American countries.43

Today, the prevailing view of these early works (especially those of the pre-1950s) is that
they were largely narrative, parochial, and atheoretical. Indeed, many early historical and
political studies tended to be more descriptive than analytical, and very legalistic and elitist in
approach.44 However, many authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries did work with implicit

39Soares, “Latin American Studies,” 52.

40However, the current crisis i n Latin American academia has m eant that the possibility for such influence
has d iminished significantly. As a result, the social scientific research agenda in the U.S. is i ncreasingly
shaped by narrow theoretical debates w hich are specific to U.S. disciplines a nd divorced from Latin
American concerns. We thank Eric Hershberg for this i nsight.

41Examples a re Edgardo Catterberg, “Attitudes t owards D emocracy in Argentina During the Transition
Period,” International Journal of Public Opinion Research 2:2 (Summer 1990): 155-68; Catherine M
Conaghan, “Polls, Political Discourse, and the Public Sphere,” and Miguel Basáñez, “Public Opinion
Research in Mexico,” in Peter H. Smith, Latin America in Comparative Perspective (Boulder: Westview
Press, 1995), 227-274. See also the uses o f survey material in Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems o f
Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe
(Baltimore: Johns H opkins U niversity Press, 1996).

42See for example Juan J. Linz and Arturo Valenzuela, eds., The Failure of Presidential Democracy
(Baltimore: Johns H opkins U niversity Press, 1994); Arend Lijphart and Carlos H . Waisman, Institutional
Design in New Democracies: Eastern Europe and Latin America (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).

43Allen D. Bushong, “Doctoral Dissertations o n Pan-American Topics A ccepted by United States a nd
Canadian Colleges a nd Universities,” Latin American Research Review Supplement 2:2 (Spring 1967).

44Charles W . Bergquist, “Recent U.S. Studies i n Latin American History: Trends s ince 1965,” Latin
American Research Review 9:1 (Spring 1974): 3-35; Arturo Valenzuela, “Political Science and the Study

https://approach.44

https://countries.43

https://scholars.42

https://America.41

https://better.40

https://research.39

or explicit theories, albeit theories which have since been dismissed due to their proven
inaccuracy and general unpalatability. One such discredited theory is climatic determinism, or
“tropicalism,” which suggested that the tropical setting of many Latin American countries
inhibits economic growth, debilitates sickly and enervated populations, and foments hot-headed,
violent politics. The fact, however, is that the majority of Latin Americans live in temperate
zones, either far from the equator or up in the mountains. Moreover, the tropical zones exhibit a
wide variety of experiences and achievements: from a revolution and long-standing socialist
government in Cuba to flourishing British-style parliamentary governments in the English-
speaking Caribbean. Although climate and geography present challenges in Latin America, we
now know that they do not determine national development.

A second school of thought was based on racial determinism. According to racist ways
of thinking, Latin America is made up of poor, backward, inequitable, and politically volatile or
dictatorial countries because of the large number of darker peoples, especially Indians and
Africans. Latin American intellectuals themselves imbibed Social Darwinism in the closing
decades of the 19th century, blaming their lagging behind northern Europe on the prevalence of
the offspring and admixtures of “inferior” races.45 Racism most certainly played a part in the
exploitation of Latin America by richer western nations. Today, however, all educated people
know that racial characteristics do not determine prosperity, productivity, class relations, or
political beliefs or behavior. Moreover, after centuries of miscegenation in Latin America, it is
futile to try to categorize the region’s people precisely by genotype or phenotype.46

Following World War II, these theories were definitively abandoned by serious scholars,
but the metahistorical determinism which characterized them was not.47 The two major
paradigms which dominated social scientific inquiry on Latin America in the 1950s, 1960s and
1970s, modernization theory and the dependency approach, were both holistic interpretations
grounded in economic determinism. In addition, arguments based on cultural determinism,
which were not really new to the field, emerged (or re-emerged) to complement or challenge
these perspectives.

Modernization theory arose in the context of decolonization in Africa and Asia and the
early years of the Cold War. It grew out of efforts to understand how recently independent
nations and other “Third World” countries might achieve economic and political development
similar to that of the United States and northern Europe, which were viewed as the products of a
linear and potentially universal process of rationalization and progress.48 The theory was

of Latin America,” in Christopher Mitchell, ed., Changing Perspectives i n Latin American Studies
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988): 63-86.

45See Albert O. Hirschmann, “Ideologies o f Economic Development in Latin America,” in Hirschmann,
ed., Latin American Issues: Essays a nd Comments (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1961), 3-42.

46Paul Drake, “Latin America in the Changing World Order: 1492-1992,” in Roberto G. Rabel, ed., Latin
America in a Changing World Order (Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press, 1992).

47On the continuity in theorizing, see Hirschmann, “Ideologies o f Economic Development.”

48As P eter Klarén explains, modernization theory evolved, via Talcott Parson’s s tructural-functionalism,
from Max Weber’s p olar conception of traditional versus m odern and Auguste Comte’s t heory of social
evolution via stages ( See Peter F. Klarén, “Lost Promise: Explaining Latin American Underdevelopment,”
in Peter F. Klarén and Thomas J . Bossert, Promise of Development: Theories o f Change in Latin America
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1986), 9.

https://progress.48

https://phenotype.46

https://races.45

developed largely by specialists on Africa and Asia, but Latin Americanists in all the social
scientific disciplines fell in line to offer supporting evidence.49 Following the spread of U.S.
interest in the region from the Caribbean basin towards the larger, industrializing countries,
scholarly attention turned towards Mexico, and the Southern Cone of Latin America.50

The main argument of modernization theory was that industrialization and economic
growth, and/or the value orientations associated with them, were the engines of social and
political progress.51 This was a vision rooted in classic, Western liberal economic and political
thought. In order to develop, Third World societies needed to embrace ideas, values, techniques,
and organizations commensurate with urbanization, a complex division of labor, increased social
mobility, and a rational-legal, impersonal economic and political system. As countries
overcame feudal, semifeudal, precapitalist, or at least inefficient behavior patterns and
institutions from the past, new urban social groups, particularly the middle classes, would
emerge, and these groups would in turn push for social equality and political democracy. The
appropriate subjects for social science research were thus the social groups and institutions that
would implement and reflect these changes, and as noted above, plenty of funding was
forthcoming for extensive studies involving scholars from many disciplines.52

In Economics, the structuralist school within the U.N.’s Economic Commission on Latin
America (ECLA) supported the strategy of import substitution industrialization which had begun
in Latin America in the 1930s and 1940s and had launched several Latin American countries into
what many hoped would be the “take-off stage,” as theorized by Walt Rostow.53 Rostow argued
that Third World countries could replicate the industrialization and economic growth of Western
Europe and the United States by adopting policies to increase capital accumulation and

49See for example Gabriel A. Almond and James S . Coleman, The Politics o f Developing Areas
(Princeton: Princeton University Press,1960); Seymour Martin Lipset and Aldo Solari, eds., Elites i n Latin
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); Jacques L ambert, Latin America: Social Structure
and Political Institutions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). Latin America was a lso used as
the point of comparison for Seymour Martin Lipset’s c lassic work in this p aradigm, Political Man : The
Social Bases o f Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960).

50Jiménez, “Middle of the Mess,” 24.

51Classic works i n modernization theory are W.A. Lewis, The Theory of Economic Growth (London:
Allen and Unwin, 1955); W.W. Rostow, The Stages o f Economic Growth (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1960); Cyril Black, The Dynamics o f Modernization (New York: Harper and Row,
1966).

52See Lipset and Solari, Elites i n Latin America ; Lambert, Latin America: Social Structure and Political
Institutions; and John J. Johnson, Political Change in Latin America (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1958).

53See Albert Fishlow, “The State of Latin American Economics,” in Christopher Mitchell, ed., Changing
Perspectives i n Latin American Studies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988): 87-119, and Rostow,
The Stages o f Economic Growth . On the general evolution of economic thought in Latin America after
1930, see Joseph L. Love, “Economic Ideas a nd Ideologies i n Latin America since 1930,” in Leslie Bethell,
ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America , Vol. XI (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
393-460; Joseph Love, Crafting the Third World: Theorizing Underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); E.V.K. Fitzgerald, “ECLA and the Formation of Latin
American Economic Doctrine,” in David Rock, ed. Latin American in the 1940s: War a nd Postwar
Transitions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 89-108.

https://Rostow.53

https://disciplines.52

https://progress.51

https://America.50

https://evidence.49

investment and to promote entrepreneurial values.54 Central to the structuralist strategy was land
reform, a policy which was advocated by the United States in the “Alliance for Progress,”55 and
which enlisted the support of many anthropologists who specialized in community studies and
understood well the dynamics of the countryside in Latin American countries.56 Structuralist
policies, by creating an industrial bias in the economy, “enhanced the power and prestige of the
urban industrialists vis-à-vis the rural oligarchy,” 57 and urban industrialists, it was believed,
would direct the social and political changes integral to modernization.

This change in value orientations was a central concern of modernization theorists within
Political Science and Sociology, who focused on issues such as elite and mass education,
mobilization of the popular classes, interest articulation, and institutional development. Political
scientists produced valuable studies on “key institutions such as the military and the Church, and
about the political role of urban dwellers, peasants, and students, all of which were studied as
interest groups –that is, as actors within a political process of competing groups at different
levels of modernization.”58 Meanwhile, sociologists in both the United States and Latin America
studied emerging social groups and boasted “grand visions of guiding or at least aiding major
processes of societal change,” focusing on “the [generalizable] forces that produced sustained
economic growth and improvements in mass standards of living.”59 Historians, too, were
brought on board to offer historical perspectives on the “geographic, demographic, social,
and…even social-psychological preconditions and consequences” of economic and social
change.60 This increased contact between historians and social scientists definitively changed

54It should be noted that while the driving idea behind modernization theory was t hat Latin America could
and should replicate U.S. development, modernization theory was n ot based in the same (neo-)liberal
economic theory that drives U .S. policy toward Latin America (and the world) in the 1990s. Structuralism
called for an explicit and leading role for the state in economic affairs.

55The Alliance for Progress w as a $22.3 billion program launched by the Kennedy administration to attack
the social ills ( poverty, illiteracy, inequality) which might breed support for communism in the region. See
Tony Smith, “The Alliance for Progress: the 1960s,” in Abraham F. Lowenthal, Exporting Democracy:
The U.S. and Latin America (Baltimore: Johns H opkins U niversity Press, 1991), 71-89.

56Lourdes A rizpe, “Anthropology in Latin America: Old Boundaries, New Contexts,” in Christopher
Mitchell, ed., Changing Perspectives i n Latin American Studies (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1988): 143-161 at 145 and 156.

57Fishlow, “Latin American Economics,” 92.

58Valenzuela, “Political Science and the Study of Latin America,” 67-68.

59Alejandro Portes, “Latin American Sociology in the Mid-1980’s: Learning from Hard Experience,” in
Christopher Mitchell, ed., Changing Perspectives i n Latin American Studies (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1988): 121-142, at 123 and 131.

60Tulio Halperín Donghi, “The State of Latin American History,” in Christopher Mitchell, ed., Changing
Perspectives i n Latin American Studies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988): 13-62, at 13. On
historians’ participation in the modernization school, see Cristóbal Kay, Latin American Theories o f
Development and Underdevelopment (London: Routledge, 1989) and Frederick Cooper et al., Confronting
Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).

https://change.60

https://countries.56

https://values.54

the study of Latin American history, as historians were exposed to and increasingly embraced the
methodological and analytical tools of social science.61

Quickly, however, critics assailed the main tenets of modernization theory based on
evidence and perspectives from Latin America itself. Economic growth in most countries did not
meet expectations, social inequalities were rarely reduced, and military dictatorships became the
norm in the region. Scholars thus began to take issue with many of the underlying assumptions
of modernization theory. They challenged the idea of a linear, evolutionary developmental
continuum, the conception of preindustrial societies as homogeneous and static, the assumption
of the Western European capitalist experience as generalizable and desirable, the faith that new
urban social sectors would be democratic and progressive, and the neglect of constraining factors
exogenous to Third World societies.

While alternative theories were advanced to explain Latin American patterns,62 the
primary challenge to modernization theory, and that which bridged all the disciplines within
Latin American studies, was the dependency approach. The dependency school accepted
modernization’s economic determinism, but turned it on its head: The adoption of U.S. and
European-style economic policies had not and would not lead to healthy economic and political
development, but rather to skewed and highly limited development, or “underdevelopment.”
Rather than the cure for underdevelopment, capitalism was seen as the cause. The dependency
approach, developed mainly by Latin Americans but also by foreign Latin Americanists, and
highly influential outside the region, “called for a broad inter-disciplinary perspective to explain
the major themes of Latin American reality: economic underdevelopment, social inequality,
political instability, and authoritarianism.”63 It emphasized the need to go beyond the

61Bergquist, “Recent U.S. Studies,” 4.

62One holistic theory developed to explain Latin American development patterns w as c orporatism, which
held that Latin American societies h ad inherited a distinct Iberian tradition, featuring feudalistic social
relations, anti-capitalist preferences a nd incentives, patrimonial extended families, hierarchical Roman
Catholic religious a ffinities, corporatist and organic links b etween the state and society, and authoritarian,
verticalist governing structures. From this p erspective, such characteristics w ere not necessarily
undesirable or destined to vanish with economic development, as m odernization theorists w ould have it,
but were part of Latin America’s u nique developmental path. Accordingly, powerful, activist, and
interventionist states w ithin the essentially Catholic cultural and philosophical framework of the Latin
American tradition would direct Latin American societies o n a noncapitalist, non-Marxist path to
modernity and development. (See Klarén, “Lost Promise,” 26-8.) The most influential works o n the
corporatist tradition were Richard M. Morse, “The Heritage of Latin America,” in Louis H artz, ed., The
Founding of New Societies (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964); Howard J. Wiarda, ed., Politics
and Social Change in Latin America: The Distinct Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts P ress,
1974); and Claudio Veliz, The Centralist Tradition of Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1979). It should be noted that other analysts o f Latin America had employed the concept of
corporatism to describe the monopolistic, hierarchical, state-structured form of interest group politics
common in the region, but did not accept the broader cultural explanation developed therefrom. See for
example Philippe C. Schmitter, Interest Conflict and Political Change in Brazil (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1971) and “Still the Century of Corporatism?” The Review of Politics 36:1 (January
1974): 85-132. For an excellent summary of the literature on corporatism in Latin America, see David
Collier, “Trajectory of a Concept: “Corporatism” in the Study of Latin American Politics,” in Peter H.
Smith, Latin America in Comparative Perspective (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 135-162. We do
not discuss c orporatism further in this e ssay because it did not have as b road an interdisciplinary impact as
did modernization and dependency.

63Valenzuela, “Political Science and the Study of Latin America,” 71.

https://science.61

examination of individual societies to understand the international historical process of
development.

Within the dependency paradigm, economists, sociologists, and political scientists argued
that a country’s “position within the international system is determinant of internal class
behavior.”64 Because Latin American countries occupied an inferior position in the international
division of labor, producing mainly raw materials and cheap workers, they were the victims of
unequal terms of trade and exploitation by foreign investors.65 Local entrepreneurial classes and
political leaders were captives of the international market and had only limited opportunities to
steer the development of their own economies and societies. In addition, the copying of
consumption patterns characteristic of the advanced industrialized countries led to severe
distortions within Latin American economies. According to the more radical dependency
writers, foreign and national capitalists siphoned off Latin America’s surplus, leaving the vast
majority of people sunk in poverty and oppressed by authoritarian regimes.

By implication, the solution to inequality between the center and the periphery was to
break out of the capitalist network, or at least renegotiate the terms of participation, for example
raising taxes on or expropriating multinational corporations. The first solution was touted by
radical dependentistas who extrapolated from Marxist ideas to conceptualize the international
division of labor as a struggle between bourgeois and proletarian nations, pointing to the Cuban
revolution as an attractive alternative.66 The second solution was advocated by economists
identified with ECLA who contended that unequal exchange could be overcome through
protected industrialization and controls on foreign capital. Dependency ideas spread throughout
the third world and beyond.67 For example, an influential global vision of center-periphery
relations was elaborated by an Africanist, Immanuel Wallerstein, who added the concept of a
semi-periphery of middle-income countries between the rich and the poor, not unlike the
Marxian category of the petty bourgeoisie.68

64Fishlow, “Latin American Economics,” 97-8. See for example Paul Baran, The Political Economy of
Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957); Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto,
Dependencia y Desarrollo en América Latina (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1969); Theotonio dos
Santos, Dependencia y Cambio Social (Santiago: CESO, Universidad de Chile, 1970); Andre Gunder
Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967);
Celso Furtado, Economic Development of Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970);
Osvaldo Sunkel, “Transnational Capitalism and National Disintegration in Latin America,” Social and
Economic Studies 22:1 (March 1973): 132-76.

65See Raúl Prebisch, The Economic Development of Latin America and Its P rinciple Problems (New York:
United Nations, 1950), placed in historical context in Joseph L. Love, “Raúl Prebisch and the Origins o f the
Doctrine of Unequal Exchange,” Latin American Research Review 15:1 (1980): 45-72.

66Baran, The Political Economy of Growth; Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America.

67See Samir Amin, Imperialism and Unequal Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977);
Cardoso, “Consumption of Dependency Theory;” Love, Crafting the Third World; Packenham,
Dependency Movement;. Most economists i n the United States d id not subscribe to dependency thinking,
however.

68See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1979),The Politics o f the World-Economy: The States, the Movements, and the Civilizations (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), and The Modern World-System III: the Second Era of Great
Expansion of the Capitalist World Economy, 1730-1840s (New York: Academic Press, 1989).

https://bourgeoisie.68

https://beyond.67

https://alternative.66

https://investors.65

Building on the these general points, anthropologists developed the theory of internal
colonialism, focusing particularly on the relation of domination between the European/mestizo
elites and indigenous peoples.69 Meanwhile, historians began to critique the methods and
concepts which many had adopted in the heyday of modernization theory. They thus shifted
their perspective to economic and social history, and began to examine the role of external
exploiters and subordinate sectors in both the colonial and post-independence periods. Some
historians argued that capitalist relations of production stretched all the way back to the conquest
and accounted for Latin America’s inferior position in the world system. Others focused on
disadvantaged groups, a research agenda which eventually fed into the international interest in
subaltern studies.70

Within Political Science, the most important theoretical contribution to come out of the
dependency paradigm was bureaucratic-authoritarianism.71 This theory argued that the
bureaucratic-authoritarian state which emerged in the most economically advanced Latin
American countries was “a necessary political stage, dictated by an alliance of political forces
intent on overcoming economic stagnation with a strategy of deepening industrialization in
alliance with foreign capital.”72 In other words, continued economic growth depended on the
repression of the working classes, whose demand for higher wages and other guarantees would
otherwise fuel inflation and drive out foreign investment. Contrary to the explanation offered by
modernization theorists, then, “repressive regimes did not emerge despite Latin America’s
economic development; they emerged because of it.”73

Dependency arguments held sway into the late 1970s, when Latin American countries
began a wave of transitions to formally democratic regimes. Already, dependency-related
economic theories had been displaced by international monetarism in many countries,
increasingly so as the 1980s unfolded. Both import substituting industrialization and socialism
seemed to have failed to overcome underdevelopment. Governments began slashing trade
barriers and encouraging comparative advantage, while they pruned the bloated public sector.
Moreover, foreign investment and loans were “welcomed to compensate for the scarcity of
national capital and to bring domestic interest rates into parity with international levels,”
particularly in the wake of the debt crisis.74 These changes towards a model of export-led
growth were supported by historical research, which showed that growth, structural changes like
urbanization and industrialization, social mobility, and political liberalization could occur during
periods of great reliance on the international market, such as the 1880s-1920s heyday of laissez-

69Arizpe, “Anthropology in Latin America.”

70For example, see Stanley J. and Barbara H. Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America; Essays o n
Economic Dependence in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

71See Guillermo O’Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies i n South
American Politics (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California 1973), and David
Collier, ed., The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

72Valenzuela, “Political Science and the Study of Latin America,” 72.

73Peter H. Smith, “The Changing Agenda for Social Science Research on Latin America,” in Peter H.
Smith, Latin America in Comparative Perspective (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995): 1-29, at 9.

74Fishlow, “Latin American Economics,” 101.

https://crisis.74

https://bureaucratic-authoritarianism.71

https://studies.70

https://peoples.69

faire.75 The examples of export-led development in East Asia, namely South Korea and Taiwan,
also cast heavy doubt on the pessimistic tenets of the dependentistas.76

By the 1980s, sociologists in Latin America had been hard hit by authoritarian
persecution and were thus “compelled to aim at increasingly more modest goals” than rapid
modernization or revolution.77 Instead of engaging in broad ideological and philosophical
debates characteristic of the dependency era, they began to focus on more practical problems,
such as household strategies for economic survival among low-income groups, the position of
women in the family and society, and the emergence and dynamics of grass-roots organizations
in poor urban settlements. “High hopes for egalitarian and anti-imperialist processes of change”
were abandoned, and focused field research became the norm. Just as the Latin American middle
classes had failed to carry out the progressive transformations expected by the modernization
theorists, so the workers and peasants had failed to bring about the revolutions awaited by some
dependency thinkers.78

Also in the 1980s, political scientists turned their attention to the analysis of the politics
of liberalization and transition from authoritarian regimes.79 Like their counterparts in
Sociology, they gradually abandoned the grand theorizing and structural determinism which had
characterized both the modernization and dependency eras. Instead, they focused on the
dynamics of agency, the role of ideology, the issue of political will, and the application of game
theory. “Democracy came to be viewed as the achievement of courageous leaders and/or civil
society, rather than an automatic consequence of economic performance.”80

Meanwhile, many anthropologists and historians were challenging the totalizing logic of
both modernization and dependency theories, which they claimed “subsumed difference into the
service of a greater machinery that set limits, extracted surpluses, established hierarchies, and
shaped identities.” Like political scientists, these scholars sought to “break down reifications and
restore agency to the historical narrative.” However, in contrast to political scientists, who
tended to focus on the agency of the political elite within formal state structures, these

75Jonathan Brown, A Socioeconomic History of Argentina, 1776-1860 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1979); Paul Drake, The Money Doctor i n the Andes : The Kemmerer M issions, 1923-1933 (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1989); Joseph L. Love and Nils J acobsen, eds., Guiding the Invisible Hand:
Economic Liberalism and the State in Latin American History (New York: Praeger, 1988).

76See articles o n this t opic in Frederic C. Deyo, ed., The Political Economy of the New Asian Industrialism
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).

77Portes, “Latin American Sociology,” 123. As P ortes f urther explains, “Military regimes, in particular
those of the Southern Cone countries, took aim at the discipline as o ne of their major intellectual
adversaries. The career of sociology was a bolished in several universities . .. [and] many of the best
thinkers a nd researchers w ere compelled to seek refuge either abroad or in private centers s upported by
foreign foundations.”

78Ibid, 125.

79See for example Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions f rom Authoritarian Rule:
Tentative Conclusions a bout Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns H opkins U niversity Press, 1986);
Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms i n Eastern Europe and
Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

80Smith, “Changing Agenda,” 9.

https://regimes.79

https://thinkers.78

https://revolution.77

https://dependentistas.76

https://faire.75

anthropologists and historians sought to expand notions of the political. Under the influence of
neo-Gramscian theory, they began to examine the intersection of culture and power, and to
emphasize the social construction of political life. They advanced gendered, ethnic, and
linguistic analyses of imperial-subaltern encounters, and highlighted the contributions to
community and national life of traditionally marginalized groups.

All of this does not mean that either modernization or dependency was swept definitively
into the dustbin of history. Like most good theories in the social sciences, both bequeathed a
legacy of important lessons and middle-level hypotheses, shorn of their more grandiose
pretensions. Both theories contributed an abiding concern with underlying structural conditions,
especially with dependency’s emphasis on historical structuralism, although most social scientists
now insist that we must focus on institutions, agents, identities and/or choices as well as
structures. Dependency thinking was moderated and adapted to explain persuasively instances of
“dependent development,” not only in Latin America but in other regions of the globe as well. In
addition, it left its mark in terms of a general awareness of the important role of external factors
to the internal economic and political systems of Latin America.81 Remnants of modernization
theory are evident in some recent analyses which attempt to establish pre-requisites, economic
and/or cultural, of political democracy.82

Many Latin Americanists are now analyzing, if not celebrating, the current coincidence of
liberal economics and politics in the region. Economists are hailing the growth achieved by free-
market models, though some worry about the lack of equity. Political scientists are studying the
potential for consolidation and/or the quality of the new democracies, the functioning of new
institutions, and the trend toward decentralization; many of them believe that the challenge today
is to synchronize and sustain relatively free economic and political markets, while realizing that
progress may not be linear, that structural conditions are not sufficient for success, and that
fortuitous combinations of agents, institutions, and actions will be required. Sociologists and
anthropologists are concerned about the fate of disadvantaged groups as the state pulls back from
social welfare and about the ability of new actors –such as social movements and non-
governmental organizations– to fill the gap. Historians draw parallels with previous periods of
market-oriented economics and elitist democracies with low levels of participation and
contestation. Few scholars are venturing predictions about the future.

81Political-economists s pecializing in Latin America produced noteworthy and enduring works e xplaining
the variable patterns o f development that had occurred in peripheral countries. See for example Peter
Evans, Dependent Development: The Alliance of Multinational, State, and Local Capital in Brazil
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) and Embedded Autonomy: States a nd Industrial
Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995; Gary Gereffi and Donald L. Wyman,
Manufacturing Miracles: Paths o f Industrialization in Latin America and East Asia (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990); Stephan Haggard, Pathways f rom the Periphery: The Politics o f Growth in the
Newly Industrializing Countries (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Stephan Haggard and Robert R.
Kaufman, eds., The Politics o f Economic Adjustment: International Constraints, Distributive Conflicts,
and the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

82See for example Kenneth Bollen and Robert W Jackman, “Political Democracy and the Size Distribution
of Income,” American Sociological Review 50 (1985): 438-57; Francis F ukuyama, The End of History and
the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992);Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the
Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Mitchell A. Seligson,
“Democratization in Latin America: The Current Cycle,” in James M . Malloy and Mitchell A. Seligson,
eds., Authoritarians a nd Democrats: Regime Transition in Latin America (Pittsburgh, PA: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1987).

https://democracy.82

https://America.81

In the 1980s and 1990s, despite the cross-disciplinary attention to the resurgence of
classical liberalism, Latin American studies has been characterized by the absence of a
prevailing paradigm.83 From the perspective of many, the resultant eclecticism is healthy and
promising. As one prominent political scientist has put it, “In the absence of an overarching
conceptual framework, scholars may [now] turn their focus toward empirical hypothesis-testing
and examination of questions at the so-called middle range of social science theory.” The same
could be said for sociologists and anthropologists, and many historians are more comfortable not
having to prove or disprove some all-encompassing theory of development.84 This is important
because “[t]he resilient pillars of development studies are not works of grand theory, but rather
detailed studies of historical and contemporary processes.”85

Of course, Latin American studies has not been unaffected by the more recent trends
toward theory-driven analysis, whether shaped by world-systems theory (mainly in Sociology),
rational choice theory (Economics and Political Science), or post-modernism (Literature,
Anthropology, and History). However, for the time being, studies within these paradigms must
share the intellectual terrain with an abundance of middle-level theories. In Political Science,
such theories have emerged on topics ranging from the specific forms that democracy has
assumed in Latin America, to the sources and political effects of different institutional structures,
to the emergence and effectiveness of social movements, to changing constructions of gender and
citizenship.86 In the realm of Economics, nearly everyone emphasizes market mechanisms and
free trade more than in the past, but not everyone embraces the canon of neoliberal, Chicago-
school orthodoxy. In Latin America, despite the apparent hegemony of neoliberalism, “a
pragmatic neostructuralism appears to be gaining influence throughout the region,” with
emphasis on a reduced but flexible and non-negligible role for the state in economic
development.87 In Anthropology, recent studies examine such subjects as ethnohistory, workers,
women, the middle class, urban social movements, Indian ethnic militancy, and communities

83Portes, “Latin American Sociology in the Mid-1980’s,” 127, speaking specifically of Sociology, but this
can surely be applied to Political Science and Anthropology, as w ell. See Daniel H. Levine, “Paradigm
Lost: Dependence to Democracy,” World Politics 40 (April 1988): 377-95.

84Smith, “Changing Agenda,” 10; Halperín, “Latin American History.”

85Alejandro Portes a nd A. Douglas K incaid, “Sociology and Development in the 1990s: Critical
Challenges a nd Empirical Trends,” Sociological Forum 4:4 (1989): 479-503 at 499.

86For examples, see Guillermo O’Donnell, “Delegative Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 5:1 (January
1994): 55-69; Linz and Stepan, Problems o f Democratic Transition and Consolidation; David Collier and
Ruth Berins C ollier, Shaping the Political Arena (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Scott
Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully, Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems i n Latin America
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Scott Mainwaring and Matthew S. Shugart, Presidentialism
and Democracy in Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Joe Foweraker and Ann
L. Craig, eds., Popular M ovements a nd Political Change in Mexico (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1990);
Arturo Escobar and Sonia E. Alvarez, The Making of Social Movements i n Latin America (Boulder:
Westview Press, 1992); Sonia E. Alvarez, Engendering Democracy in Brazil: Women’s M ovements i n
Transition Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Jane S. Jacquette, The Women’s
Movement in Latin America: Participation and Democracy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994); Elizabeth
Jelín and Eric Hershberg, eds., Constructing Democracy: Human Rights, Citizenship, and Society in Latin
America (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).

87Fishlow, “Latin American Economics,” 111.

https://development.87

https://citizenship.86

https://development.84

https://paradigm.83

participating in international migration.88 And in Sociology, thematic comparative studies have
emerged on the flow of capital and technology across the center-periphery divide, the
reproduction of cultural forms on a global scale, the elaboration of social networks, the causes of
rebellion and revolution, the evolution of social movements, and the uses and control of labor in
different parts of the world economy.89 While no overarching paradigms link these studies
today, fruitful cooperation continues on themes which cross both disciplinary and geographic
boundaries, such as political economy, social movements, gender, and immigration. Throughout
the social sciences, scholars are studying the interactions between globalizing forces and local
conditions.

This boundary-crossing trend is also evident in the bridging, or even merging, of Latin
American and Latina/o Studies. An increasing number of scholars and institutions are now
combining approaches from these two intellectual traditions in creative ways, building a new
curriculum and pursuing research on the “Latin/oAmericas.”

A survey of the main area journals confirms the general topical and theoretical
developments discussed above. To complement our narrative account of the intellectual
trajectory of Latin American studies since the 1960s, we surveyed all the issues (through 1996)
of the five most important interdisciplinary Latin American studies journals: the Latin American
Research Review, the Journal of Latin American Studies, Latin American Perspectives, the
Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs, and The Americas. While there were
numerous important journals published in Latin America and consulted frequently by Latin
Americanists, it would be a monumental task to appropriately survey all of them. We have thus
limited ourselves to the main inter-disciplinary area journals published in the United States and
Great Britain.

The Latin American Research Review, as noted above, began publication in 1965.
During the first five years (1965-69), it featured mainly “state of research” articles on such grand
themes of modernization as urbanization, agrarian problems and change, and sources of political
instability. Such articles tended to be interdisciplinary in focus, and largely social scientific. In
the next five years (1970-74), central issues were students, guerrillas, and political violence,
topics in social history, and the quantitative history debate. The first article on women, entitled
“The Female in Ibero-America,” appeared in 1972. During the 1975-79 period, the influence of
the dependency approach was fully evident as articles focused on issues such as U.S. policy
towards Latin America, foreign investment, and income distribution. Urban and rural social
relations and problems were still a focus and two articles on women appeared. Analyses of Chile
spiked following the 1973 military coup, and the journal offered a greater representation of
articles from literature and the arts. From 1980-84, critiques and modifications of dependency
theory appeared, but many articles continued to focus on issues of political economy, both
international and national. In the wake of the triumph of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua,

88For specifics s ee Arizpe, “Anthropology in Latin America.”

89See Portes, “Latin American Sociology,” pp. 136-7 and related citations; Peter Evans, Embedded
Autonomy; Susan Eckstein, ed., Power a nd Popular P rotest: Latin American Social Movements (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988); Elizabeth Jelin, ed., Los n uevos m ovimientos s ociales (Buenos A ires:
Centro Editor de America Latina, 1985); Elizabeth Jelin, ed., Women and Social Change in Latin America
(London: Zed, 1990); Alejandro Portes, The Economic Sociology of Immigration: Essays o n Networks,
Ethnicity, and Entrepreneurship (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1995); Alejandro Portes, Manuel
Castells, and Lauren A. Benton, eds., The Informal Economy: Studies i n Advanced and Less D eveloped
Countries (Baltimore: Johns H opkins U niversity Press, 1989).

https://economy.89

https://migration.88

revolutions, both the recent Nicaraguan (1979) and the earlier Mexican (1910), became a focus
topic. Gender received increased attention, and Literature and the Arts maintained a steady
representation. In the late 1980s (1985-89), the journal featured a marked diversity of articles,
with debt, democratization, and policy making in specific areas as leading subjects. In the 1990s,
this diversity has continued, with articles ranging from the examination of changing patterns of
religiosity in the region, dissections of the effects of neoliberal economics, globalization, and
democratization, discourse analyses, and histories of agrarian relations and peasant rebellion.
Gender and ethnicity, and more generally, identity, have become central analytical categories.

The Journal of Latin American Studies, surveyed from 1969-1995, was more heavily
dominated by articles in History, especially social history. From the start, the journal
emphasized topics on foreign influences in the region, both military and economic. From 1969
to 1983,90 entries on political organizations and movements, topics in economics, and militarism
and military institutions appeared most frequently after articles in history and social history.
From 1984-1995, common subjects were economic history, especially the history of particular
sectors and/or industries, foreign relations, urban and rural labor history, and the Church or
religion. Gender received only limited treatment, appearing as a central category in only three
articles over both periods. Literature and the arts remained completely outside the purview of the
journal.

Latin American Perspectives began publication in 1974. Its first issue made clear its
leftist mission: “While the many bourgeois journals and scholarly associations dealing with
Latin America prefer to disguise their support of the capitalist system behind a facade of
‘academic neutrality,’ Latin American Perspectives has no such abstract pretensions. We
explicitly declare that nothing academic can ever be neutral and that all scholarship has a
political function.”91 The development of leftist thought on the region can be traced through the
issue titles and themes. In the 1970s, these included dependency, imperialism, the process of
underdevelopment, class struggle, and revolution. Interestingly, significant attention was paid to
issues of gender in these early issues, albeit in the context of class analysis.92 In the 1980s, while
class remained a central organizational category, race and ethnicity, along with gender, also
received attention. The state, hegemony, and popular protest and resistance became the main
themes in articles on most countries, although revolution was still the focus for the many articles
on Nicaragua and Central America. In the 1990s, several issues have been devoted to the Left in
the post-Marxist era, and ethnicity and gender have become central categories of analysis. As in
other journals, global restructuring, social movements, and democratization have received
significant attention. Over the years, Literature and the Arts received some, albeit limited,
attention within the context of the journal’s political focus.

The Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs began publication in 1959
under an editorial policy which embraced all aspects of Latin American culture and life,
including Literature and the Arts. Until 1971, it featured inter-disciplinary articles in Spanish,
Portuguese, and French as well as English, and while these articles covered history as far back as
the colonial period, the emphasis was on the post-World War II era. From 1971-83, the journal
became increasingly social scientific in orientation, and in 1983 began focusing exclusively on

90A useful cumulative index was p ublished in 1984 for these years.

91Latin American Perspectives 1:1 (1974), 2.

92In 1977, for example, an entire double issue was d evoted to women and class s truggle.

https://analysis.92

issues relevant to contemporary international relations, especially U.S.-Latin American relations.
From 1959-1989, then, the journal’s major focus topics, in order of frequency, were politics and
political violence, international relations, developmental economics, demographic issues,
intellectual thought, literature, and culture and society.93 Since 1989, almost all the articles
appearing in the journal have been on topics in international relations, political economy, and
democratization, with special focus on such issues as NAFTA and the drug trade.

Finally, the oldest of the inter-disciplinary area journals, The Americas , deserves
mention. A publication of the Academy of American Franciscan History, the quarterly journal
first went to press in 1944. Early issues were devoted almost exclusively to the history of the
Franciscan order, the Church, and religion. However, over time, the journal’s subtitle, “A
Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History,” took on broader meaning, with featured
articles covering intellectual history, literary analysis, some political and economic history, and
in the 1970s and 80s, increasing social history. Many essays traced the historical influence of
political and economic concepts and/or the impact of a given individual on events of a given
period. Articles on U.S.-Latin American relations and on contributions of Indians and Afro-
Americans to the region’s cultural history also appeared quite frequently. And as noted in the
forward to the 1991 cumulative index, the most notable change in the journal’s content over time
was the increased number of contributions by and on women, a trend which began in the 1980s.

Contemporary Challenges to Latin American Studies

Despite all of the noteworthy contributions discussed above, Latin American studies still
comes under attack, as do most area studies, for “ghettoizing” itself from the disciplines of the
North American academy. This is particularly the case within Economics, Political Science, and
Sociology, which tend to be the boldest in making universal claims about human behavior based
on United States and European observations. Sociologist Alejandro Portes notes that “sociology
in the United States has never regarded the Third World studies as a priority area or particularly
encouraged its practitioners.” 94 Sociologists specializing in Latin America have thus foregone
economic and professional rewards. Economists, for their part, have in general steered clear of
all inter-disciplinary endeavors, “both fearing the anarchy that (doubtless) reigns there and
cherishing how much has been learned by pushing ahead with the canonical principles. [W]hat
trade in ideas there has been between economics and the other social sciences has largely been
one way, through missions established to sociology, political science, and the academic
discipline of law.”95

Within Political Science, few articles on Latin America (or on other “developing
regions”) have graced the pages of disciplinary journals, and we suspect that the same is true in
the leading venues in the other disciplines. As John Martz has shown, from 1960-1987, only
2.3% of the articles appearing in the top five U.S. Political Science journals dealt with Latin
American politics.96 Instead, most of the works mentioned above were published as chapters in

93See the cumulative index for 1959-1989.

94Portes, “Latin American Sociology,” 126.

95David M. Kreps, “Economics–The Current Position,” Daedalus 126:1 (Winter 1997): 59-85 at 59-60.

96Martz, “Political Science and Latin American Studies,” 69.

https://politics.96

https://society.93

edited volumes, as collaborative multi-authored books, and/or as articles in area or alternative
thematic journals. Perhaps as a result, a debate has been raging in the pages of major Political
Science journals and newsletters regarding the quality of contributions by area specialists.97

This is not to say, however, that Latin America area scholars are somehow second-rate.
The paucity of area-studies articles in the most prestigious disciplinary journals could
conceivably be a reflection of the parochialism or even low quality of those journals. An SSRC
survey of its 1970-1985 JCLAS postdoctoral grantees revealed that the 220 respondents (in a
variety of disciplines) “had published a total of 866 books, 5,527 articles and book chapters, and
5,774 other works including reports, papers published in conference proceedings, and the like.”98
In addition, “they enjoyed a large measure of success in their careers, as measured by the large
proportion of the non-tenured who achieved tenured positions after receiving the award.”99 Thus,
while there may be a gulf between some Latin Americanists and the agenda-setters of their
respective disciplines, it is clearly not a gulf of competence, creativity, or productivity. Why,
then, the assault on area studies?

Probably the most basic characteristic of all area studies is that, in emphasizing extensive
knowledge of cases gained through field work, they group social scientists and humanists
together and encourage cross-fertilization. Although “the heavy disciplinary focus of much of
American graduate education” means that “few students [including area specialists] actually
distribute the courses in their training very far from their major discipline,” and while even “the
set of scholars who have a long-term professional concern with a particular part of the world”
tend to have a “perspective bound by [their] discipline,” area specialists will often choose topics
in “domains where the methodological and conceptual superstructure of disciplines is less
intrusive.”100 Because “area specialists who are in the social sciences are likely to have a great
deal more contact and shared intellectual activity [via field work and conferences] with
humanists than do most of their non area-oriented disciplinary colleagues,” their work tends to be
at the non-technical or so-called “soft” end of the social scientific spectrum.101 While this is
viewed as “immensely enriching” by area scholars themselves, for those social scientists “at the
‘hard’ end of the spectrum, the close ties of area studies with the humanities reinforces their
perception that area studies is not a scientific activity.”102

The latest such critique has been launched by Harvard political scientist and noted
Africanist Robert Bates, who argues that comparative political scientists should follow the lead

97For a summary of this d ebate, see Christopher Shea, “Political Scientists C lash Over Value of Area
Studies,” Chronicle of Higher E ducation , January 10, 1997, A13.

98Coatsworth, “International Collaboration,” 38.

99Ibid, 39.

100Lambert, “Blurring Disciplinary Boundaries,” 718, 727, and 729. Lambert notes t hat the core
disciplines i n area studies a re Anthropology, History, Literature, and Political Science, and that “it is
precisely at their juncture point — a kind of historically informed political anthropology, using materials i n
the local languages — that much of the genuinely interdisciplinary work in area studies o ccurs. History
operates a s a swing discipline, facing both the humanities a nd the social sciences, and the principal thrust
of a particular research theme determines w here in the spectrum it will lie” (p. 730).

101Ibid, 731.

102Ibid.

https://specialists.97

of many specialists in U.S. politics who use rational choice and game theoretic models to
produce testable hypotheses and strive for universalizable conclusions. He and those who share
his convictions view area studies in the same way their behavioralist predecessors did: as
primarily descriptive, largely atheoretical, and (above all), methodologically soft and hence
unanalytical or unscientific.103 Given that Political Science has become one of the dominant
disciplines within Latin American studies, this latest attack is particularly troubling for Latin
Americanists.

Moreover, this iteration of the “war on area studies” is complicated by the emergence of a
comprehensive critique of area studies from within the humanities as well, specifically from the
postmodernist (or “cultural studies”) camp. In an attempt to challenge prevailing terms and
categories, and to “decenter” the Western, white, male, colonialist/imperialist subject,
postmodernist analysts pose such questions as: Why are “areas” our objects? What defines an
“area?” How can “we” presume to understand “them” given our cultural biases and the politics
that drive theorizing? Who, really, are “we” and “them?”104 Such a critique is usually driven by
empathy with historically subordinated and marginalized groups, and is often part of a more
general attack on positivist social science which has objectified these groups and defined the
terms by which they are studied by scholars and understood by society at large (the state, the
nation, development, modernity, nature, etc.).105

This postmodernist critique is also connected to what Immanuel Wallerstein identifies as
the emergence of a “new form of ‘area studies’,” namely of women’s studies and ethnic studies
programs.106 “Women’s studies and the multiple variants of ‘ethnic’ studies had bottom-up
origins. The represented the (largely post-1969) revolt of those whom the university had
‘forgotten.’ Theirs was a claim to be heard, and to be heard not merely as describers of particular
groups that were marginal, but as revisers of the central theoretical premises of social
science.”107

While these movements and the programs they produced represent a welcome and
necessary innovation within the university, they add a new dynamic to the debate over area
studies. On the one hand, they pose a challenge to the traditional disciplines in terms of
theoretical and epistemological differences. Their interdisciplinary thrust and methodological
openness thus render them in many ways intellectual allies of more traditional area studies

103See Robert H. Bates, “Area Studies a nd Political Science: Rupture and Possible Synthesis,” Ms. 1997
and “Letter from the President: Area Studies a nd the Discipline,” APSA-CP: Newsletter o f the APSA
Organized Section in Comparative Politics 7:1 (Winter 1996): 1-2, as w ell as C hristopher Shea, “Political
Scientists C lash.”

104For an example, see Rafael, “Cultures of Area Studies.”

105As F ernando Coronil explains, these scholars ” reject…master narratives o f modernism and opt for the
more modest goal of illuminating social reality through partial glimpses, attentiveness t o localized context,
and sensitivity to multiple stories a nd protean symbolic systems” (“Foreword,” Joseph et al., Close
Encounters o f Empire, 3). See for example Florencia E. Mallon, “The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern
Studies: Perspectives f rom Latin American History,” American Historical Review 99 (Dec. 1995): 1491-
1515; Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

106Wallerstein, “Unintended Consequences,” p.227.

107Ibid.

scholars. Indeed, it could be argued that the vigor of the present attacks from the hardcore
disciplinary specialists is a reaction to the critiques made by postmodernists and the threat that
the “new form” of area studies poses to the mainstream of the disciplines. On the other hand, the
more extreme postmodern critiques of scientific inquiry and academic standards frequently do
not sit well with more traditional area experts, who maintain extensive interests in and loyalties
to their respective disciplines.
Moreover, it remains unclear what effect the expansion of the new programs will have on
traditional area studies in the competition for university resources. For example, as more
students become interested in Latino studies, demand for more traditional Latin American studies
may decline; on the other hand, as we suggested above, synergies with ethnic studies might cause
it to rise. Indeed, in some places, the melding of Latina/o Studies and Latin American Studies is
arguably succeeding at revitalizing and reshaping the field for the 21st century.

This may be a crucial development, since traditional area studies is facing strong
challenges from outside the academy. The end of the Cold War has meant the demise of the
general “national interest” justification for funding area studies programs. The issues that affect
U.S. security interests are increasingly understood as global problems, better handled by issue
experts rather than area experts.108 In such a scenario, Latin American studies may be
particularly vulnerable, given the low tendency of Latin Americanists to pursue studies with clear
policy relevance, or, perhaps more accurately, the (not undeserved) association of Latin
American specialists with causes often at odds with those of the Washington policy
community.109

Relatedly, the global expansion of U.S. power in the 1990s, both economic and political,
as well as the great leaps in communications technology of the last decade, have fed the notion
that the world is becoming increasingly homogeneous. English has become the lingua franca of
the international business and political worlds, and more and more countries have accepted and
even embraced the “Washington consensus” on neoliberal economics and procedural democracy.
As a result, emphasizing dissimilarities and urging an understanding of differences among the
cultures, histories, and languages of the countries that make up “the global village” is regarded as
passé in many powerful circles in the United States. More appropriate, from this perspective, is
the development and exportation of universal theories and “tool-kits” which can be applied
uniformly around the globe, irrespective of historical and cultural differences.110
In Defense of Area Studies

Despite these challenges, we contend that there are still strong intellectual and practical
reasons to nurture area studies. To begin, the kind of mid-level theorizing111 which has become

108See Heilbrunn, “News f rom Everywhere,” 50.

109One study revealed that Latin Americanists, of all area specialists, authored the lowest percentage of
publications w ith any clear policy relevance: 11% compared to a high typically of 22% among East Asian
scholars. (Lambert, Beyond, 156-167, 363-364.)

110Such an attitude is p articularly salient within the international economic and financial community. See
discussions i n Paul Drake, ed., Money Doctors, Foreign Debts, and Economic Reforms i n Latin America
from the 1890s t o the Present (Wilmington: SR Books, 1994); Adam Przeworski et al., Sustainable
Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); J. Sirowiecki, “Dr. Shock: Jeffrey Sachs
has a cure for every sick economy. Is h e coming to a country near you?” Lingua Franca 7:5 (Jun-Jul
1997): 61-73.

111On mid-level theorizing, see Rogers S mith, “Still Blowing in the Wind: A Quest for a Democratic,
Scientific Political Science,” Daedalus 126:1 (Winter 1997): 253-287.

the hallmark of Latin American and most area studies should not become the victim of “social
science wars.”112 As noted above, the present round of attacks on area studies from within the
Academy comes from two sides: from the hard social science camp which views area studies as
overly ideographic, on the one hand; and from the post-modern camp which sees area studies as
too closely tied to the totalizing and (falsely) “scientific” discourse of the traditional disciplines,
on the other. The former lauds abstract, deductive models and large cross-national studies, while
the latter “doubt[s] the value of causal explanations altogether and thus of conventional social
science theorizing….”113 For opposite reasons, then, both perspectives dismiss (and at times
disparage) the kind of analysis most common to area studies scholars: a mid-level, theoretically
informed empirical study of one or more countries.

It is precisely such analysis, however, which is the great strength and contribution of
research fostered by area studies programs and/or area specialization. Within Latin American
studies, for example, it was the familiarity of Latin Americanists with particular historical and
structural features of Latin American societies which allowed the universalist assumptions of
modernization theory to be challenged and produced the highly influential dependency approach
in the 1970s. As dependency itself came under fire, it was a close empirical analysis by Latin
America area experts which produced the concept of “dependent development” and led to the
elaboration of theories of state-led development around the world. In the fields of
democratization and social movement theory, it has been transcontinental and transdisciplinary
cooperation by Latin America experts which have produced some of the most significant recent
works.

For those who believe in science, then, we would argue that area studies is fully
justifiable on its scientific merits. Area studies is not an agenda of research; rather it is an
intellectual and institutional construct which supports deep knowledge of cases through field
work and encourages inter-disciplinary cross-fertilization. As noted above, most “area studies”
scholars are strongly anchored in their respective disciplines. Without area studies, however, we
could not capture the universe of cases to test the validity of discipline-specific theories. In
addition, we would lose sight of new empirical puzzles that require theoretical explanations and
that generate hypotheses. Exhaustive data collection and comparative analysis are at the heart of
the scientific method, since in their absence, generalizations are difficult to make and hard to
sustain. For those who are suspicious of the scientific project, we ask simply whether channeling
resources away from language-learning, field research, and transnational cooperation is really the
solution to promoting better understanding of and empathy with the “other?” Indeed, if the
fruitful ties established over the past thirty years between U.S. and Latin American scholars are
not nourished, we risk returning to the kind of isolated and parochial theorizing which is so much
the subject of postmodernist critique.

112Here we make reference to an analogous d ebate currently raging over the study of the (hard) sciences.
See for example Paul R. Gross a nd Norman Levitt, Higher S uperstition: The Academic Left and Its
Quarrels w ith Science (Baltimore, MD: Johns H opkins U niversity Press, 1994); Alan Sokal,
“Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics o f Quantum
Gravity,” Social Text 46/47 (Spring/Summer 1996): 217-252; and Andrew Ross, ed., Science Wars
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).

113Atul Kohli, in his i ntroduction to the symposium, “The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics,” World
Politics 48 (October 1995): 1-49 at 1.

As regards the broader challenge posed by a change in the priorities of funding agencies
in the post Cold War era, we contend that support for area specialization is still a good
investment. While globalization may mean that many different countries face similar problems,
it does not mean that similar solutions will work everywhere. Local and regional traditions and
politics will continue to influence events and outcomes in all parts of the world, and knowledge
of those traditions and politics will continue to be essential for policy makers and academic
theorists. In acquiring such knowledge, we should not allow nativism and xenophobia to blind
and deafen us to alternative ways of viewing the world, nor can we expect foreign scholars to
cooperate in data collection on international cases while refusing to let them question or “pollute”
our models. If we honestly believe in “the global village,” then U.S.-based institutions must
accept and encourage the participation of foreigners on an equal basis and foster, ideologically
and financially, a true exchange of ideas. Only this way will we produce a global community of
scholars, whose perspectives can be respected and embraced both in the United States and
abroad.

The great advantages of such programs as Title VI and Fulbright, as well as many of the
leading private endeavors, have been their support for basic research and teaching. They have
nourished a broad, heterogeneous array of area expertise, thus democratizing the marketplace of
ideas. All scientific inquiry is enriched by having a multitude of competing researchers and
perspectives. In contrast, more specific or targeted research programs, especially for security or
corporate purposes, are arguably at greater risk of manipulation, bias, and perversion and can
thus breed mistrust among researchers and between researchers and their subjects. As manifest
in “Operation Camelot,” as well as in debates surrounding more recent U.S. government
initiatives to fund area studies through security agencies, international cooperation in research of
questionable scientific intent is difficult to come by.

Moreover, the end of the Cold War actually presents an excellent opportunity for less
politicized, less policy-driven, or less ethnocentric research. Scholars no longer operate in a
climate in which their work tends to be categorized by many colleagues as serving either right-
wing or left-wing purposes. Instead, they are freer to re-examine methodological and theoretical
issues and make decisions based more on intellectual than political grounds.114 In addition, area
studies associations and journals have come of age, such that their professional norms and
criteria are much clearer than they were in the 1960s and 70s.115 As noted in the intellectual
history section above, most scholars of Latin America have abandoned the grandiose theories of
the past, have become more methodologically sophisticated, and have grown closer to the
mainstream of their disciplines.

All of this is not to say that scholars should be required to limit their studies to one area,
or that foundations should not encourage cross-regional studies. In fact, it is entirely reasonable
for some funding institutions to switch their focus to topic areas, such as democratization/regime
change, economic development, ethnic conflict, citizenship, gender relations, social movements,
diasporic literatures, popular culture, etc. However, it would then be necessary and important to
ensure the fair representation of diverse societies of the world (i.e., making sure that entire
continents or sub-continents were not systematically excluded), to provide sufficient support to

114Gabriel A. Almond, “The Political Culture of Foreign Area Research: Methodological Reflections,” in
Richard J. Samuels a nd Myron Weiner, eds., The Political Culture of Foreign Area and International
Studies (New York: Brassey’s, 1992), 205-6.

115Ibid, 212.

allow those studying one or more foreign countries to learn the relevant language(s) well and to
conduct thorough field research, and to continue to encourage and support cross-national
cooperation.116

For if there is not a somewhat ‘level playing field’ in terms of case selection and
professional rewards, resource-poor students and scholars will seldom choose those cases which
require a greater investment and/or sacrifice, and many cases will go unstudied, if not by the
generation of established scholars, then certainly by their successors. This would be most
troublesome, for as political scientist Gabriel Almond has argued, “The depth and distribution of
detailed and accurate knowledge of foreign countries and cultures around the world is the best
single indicator of our capacity to confront and solve our urgent international problems
constructively. Knowledge does not guarantee that we will solve them constructively, but lack of
it makes it likely that we will not.” 117

116Similar concerns a re noted in Coatsworth, “International Collaboration,” at 50.

117Almond, “Political Culture of Foreign Area Research,” 200.

mp_thepolitics
02_latinamerican

Does Latin America Have a Common History?

Marshall C. Eakin
Vanderbilt University

“Nothing more than a geographical reality? And yet it
moves. In actions, unimportant at times, Latin America
reveals each day its fellowship as well as its
contradictions; we Latin Americans share a common
space, and not only on the map. . . Whatever our skin color
or language, aren’t we all made of assorted clays from the
same multiple earth?” Eduardo Galeano1

Nearly forty years ago Lewis Hanke edited a volume titled Do the

Americas Have a Common History? This book of essays sought to revive
discussion of Herbert Eugene Bolton’s call for the writing of a “history of
the Americas” in his 1932 presidential address to the American Historical
Association.2 In his writing and his teaching over a half-century, Bolton
promoted an approach that sees all of the Americas as part of a common set
of historical processes.3 Although few historians have chosen to follow
Bolton’s entreaty, and most historians of the Americas probably do not
believe that we should try to write a history of all the Americas, Bolton’s
controversial essay does force us to think about the commonalities (and
dissimilarities) in the colonization, conquest, and development of all the
Americas. I would like to pose a similar question that compels us to think
hard about an enormous part of the Americas that we do generally assume to
have a common history. I want to pose the question: Does Latin American
have a common history? And, if it does, what exactly is that common
history? I want us to take a hard look at Latin American history and rethink

1. “Ten Frequent Lies or Mistakes about Latin American Literature and Culture,” from
Eduardo Galeano, We Say No: Chronicles, 1963/91, trans. Mark Fried (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1992), 162 and 164.
2. Lewis Hanke, Do the Americas Have a Common History? A Critique of the Bolton
Theory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964). Bolton’s address was delivered a meeting
in Toronto, Canada. It was then published in The American Historical Review, 38:3
(April 1933), 448-74 under the title, “The Epic of Greater America.” The essay is
reprinted in the Hanke volume.
3. For a full biography of Bolton see John Francis Bannon, Herbert Eugene Bolton: The
Historian and the Man, 1870-1953 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1978). Bolton
trained more than 100 (!) Ph.D.s at Stanford and Berkeley from 1909 to 1953.

our assumptions about the very notion of “Latin America.”
Now, to cut to the chase and give you the bottom line up front so you

will not be kept waiting breathlessly for my conclusion, the answer is yes,
Latin America does have a common history . . . but . . . and all the
importance of this essay is in that pesky conjunction. As I will argue,
although historians (as well as others) have long operated on the widespread
assumption that Latin America has a common history, when pressed hard,
they have a very difficult time specifying what that common history is
beyond very broad general processes, and most of those took shape in the
colonial period. Even more important, historians are often hardpressed to
specify precisely which pieces of the American landscape should be
included into that common history. In this essay, I will briefly set out what I
think that common history consists of, how common it really is, who shares
it, and, most importantly, when it is no longer common. As we shall see, it
is that last point that I regard as the most important. Before doing that,
however, we need first to take a look at what we mean by the term “Latin
America.”

Common Assumptions

Where do we get this notion of “Latin America” in the first place? As
David Brading has shown, it is not until the early seventeenth century that
peoples of Spanish descent in the Americas begin to see themselves as some
sort of collective entity defined by the geography of the New World. An
emergent “creole identity, a collective consciousness that separated
Spaniards born in the New World from their European ancestors and
cousins” was taking shape within a century after the Columbian voyages.4
By the mid-seventeenth century, the conquest and early process of
colonization had been completed and the population of “Spanish”
Americans had been in place long enough and had reached sufficient levels
in what James Lockhart would call the “central areas” (New Spain, Peru, the
Caribbean) to create some nascent sense of rootedness.5 Small pockets or

4. D. A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the
Liberal State, 1492-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 293.
5. In the mid-seventeenth century there were perhaps 500,000 Spaniards in the
Americas, more than half of those born in the New World. The majority of the Spaniards
were concentrated in Mexico and Peru. Brazil, in contrast, had a “white” population of
less than 50,000. Despite the demographic catastrophe produced by conquest and
disease in the sixteenth century, the Native American population of New Spain and Peru
still numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The African slave populations of the
Caribbean and Brazil were in the tens of thousands and (in the case of Brazil) growing
rapidly. Mark A. Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson, Colonial Latin America, 4th ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 108-15. James Lockhart, “Social

enclaves of neo-Spains (to steal and twist a term coined by Alfred Crosby)
had taken root in the Americas.6

Yet these enclaves were just that, small islands of Europeans in a vast
sea of Indians and Africans. Quite clearly the native peoples of the
Americas did not see themselves as part of a larger society or culture
(Indian or European) across the growing regions of the Spanish American
and Portuguese colonies. The Africans, mainly concentrated in the islands
of the Caribbean and on the northeastern coast of Brazil, had even less of a
sense of belonging given their traumatic dislocation from their homelands in
Africa to strange lands, cultures, and languages in the New World. Some of
these Indian and African peoples, and their descendants, were slowly being
drawn into the cultural and linguistic world of the neo-Spains (and neo-
Portugals) by the end of the seventeenth century. From the first moments of
conquest, racial and cultural mixture had begun to produce intermediate
groups who did not fit the “ideal types” of the racial hierarchy. Their very
presence and influence, in fact, meant that the neo-Spaniards were forced to
define themselves and their newly-emerging societies as distinct from (even
though very strongly identified with) Spain. To complicate matters further,
the very tiny Portuguese presence in Brazil, even in the late seventeenth
century, meant that the development of a neo-Portuguese sensibility was
even weaker than the process taking shape in the Spanish colonies. Any
sense of connectedness with their Spanish American counterparts was also
very weak, and to some extent the experience of the so-called “Babylonian
Captivity” (1580-1640) had possibly even heightened a sense of difference.7

By the late eighteenth century this sense of creole identity, of Spaniards
in the New World had been spurred forward both by the growth of creole
populations in Spanish America, but also by the impact of the Bourbon
Reforms. Ironically, these imperial reforms spurred on creole “nationalism”
and helped create a stronger sense of connectedness among the creole elites
from Mexico to Argentina.8 This sense of common identity, promoted and

Organization and Social Change in Colonial Spanish America,” in Leslie Bethell, ed.,
The Cambridge History of Latin America, volume II, Colonial Latin America
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 265-319, esp. 314. Lockhart develops
the notion of “central areas” in James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin
America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983).
6. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe,
900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. p. 2.
7. See Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Formation of Colonial Identity in Brazil,” in Nicholas
Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
8. Brading, 467-91, “The New State.”

spurred on by creole elites, played a powerful role in the wars for
independence in Spanish America. (Perhaps its greatest statement is
Bolívar’s “Jamaica Letter”.) Yet, as Bolívar himself learned so bitterly,
local and regional roots in the collapsing Spanish colonies too often were
more powerful in their attraction than any greater sense of identity as
Americans or Spanish Americans. Trying to unite these similar, yet
disparate, peoples—Peruvians, Mexicans, Chileans—into a single
community exhausted even the extraordinary talents of Bolívar leading to
his famous despairing quote about “ploughing the seas.”9

The term “Latin America” only emerges in the mid-nineteenth century
in the aftermath of the wars for independence. Apparently first used by the
Colombian, José María Caicedo in 1856, it was quickly adopted by the
French under Napoleon III to provide ideological cover for his imperial and
colonial ambitions in the Americas.10 This subtle but important shift from
Spanish, Hispanic, or Ibero America to Latin America had (and continues to
have) powerful implications for defining a field and a region. It moved the
sense of the collective from neo-Spaniards to include not only neo-
Portuguese, but also the neo-French. (Ironically, most of the inhabitants of
the most important French possession were hundreds of thousands of
Africans and neo-Africans on the western side of Hispaniola.)11

The wars for independence and the processes of nation-building in the
nineteenth century helped forge a sense of a collective past and present
throughout the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies. In the midst of the
bloody struggle, Simón Bolívar could speak of “the hearts of all the peoples
of Spanish America.”12 By the 1890s José Martí could speak of “our
America” and José Enrique Rodó, writing from the other end of Latin
America, could address the “youth of America” in 1900, both clearly
speaking of Spanish or Hispano America.13 Ironically, this collective

9. The original quote is “America is ungovernable. He who serves the revolution
ploughs the sea . . .” Brading, 618.
10. Arturo Ardao, Génesis de la idea y el nombre de América Latina (Caracas: 1980),
83. See also, Arturo Ardao, España en el origen del nombre América Latina
(Montevideo: Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, Facultad de
Ciencias Sociales, 1992).
11. At the outbreak of rebellion in Saint Domingue in the 1790s the colony probably had
some 450,000 slaves, 40,000 free people of color, and 40,000 whites. Two-thirds of the
slaves were African-born. Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue
Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 25 and 278.
12. Simón Bolívar, The Hope of the Universe (Paris: UNESCO, 1983), 85. The date of
the statement was 28 April 1814.
13. José Martí, Nuestra América (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1980) [originally published in
1891] and José Enrique Rodó, Ariel (Madrid: Cátedra, 2000) [originally published in
1900].

identity would arise partly in response to the growing power of the United
States throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the writings of
both Martí and Rodó this was quite conscious and deliberate. Both saw the
construction of a Latin American identity as a means to combat the growing
imperial power of “América del Norte” and a way to avoid the
“delatinization” of “Hispano-América.”14

Latin American intellectuals like Martí and Rodó were reacting to the
efforts of the United States to extend its sphere of influence throughout the
hemisphere. In many ways, the “creation” of “Latin America” in the minds
of citizens of the United States takes place at the end of the nineteenth
century. The Pan American movement, despite its efforts to forge a
hemispheric alliance of nations, did so by identifying the U.S. as a nation
with a heritage and history distinct from the “other” America. From the
“gentlemen scholars” such as William Hickling Prescott and Hubert Howe
Bancroft in the nineteenth century, to the modernization theorists of the late
twentieth century, much of the discussion of hemispheric solidarity has been
built upon a discussion of how to “overcome” the differences between the
United States and Latin America.15 In this long tradition, the “problem” has
been how to overcome Latin America’s history (read culture) by making its
people more like U.S. citizens (i.e., having them adopt “our” values).

Throughout much of the twentieth century, especially after 1945, Latin
Americans developed their sense of collective identity in opposition to U.S.
power and imperialism in the region, and scholars in the United States too
often defined Latin America out of an experience shaped by the Cold War
and government funding efforts designed to fight that war in the academic
arena. This oppositional approach has been fuzzy from both directions, and
the linguistic terminology has contributed to the fuzziness. Citizens of the
United States, calling themselves “Americans,” have never been very clear
on what exactly is to the south, and the term “Latin America” has been left
vague and poorly defined. Those who have consciously taken on the identity
of “Latin Americans” (usually from Brazil and Spanish-speaking nations)
have often taken to calling those from the U.S. “North Americans” a vague
term that should include Mexicans and Canadians. From my perspective,
both perspectives tend to leave out or avoid those areas of the Americas that
make definitions the most problematic and interesting: most of the islands

14. See, for example, Rodó, 196.
15. For an important discussion of this topic see Mark T. Berger, Under Northern Eyes:
Latin American Studies and US Hegemony in the Americas, 1898-1990 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1995), esp. 16-17. See also Marshall C. Eakin, “Latin
American History in the United States: From Gentlemen Scholars to Academic
Specialists,” The History Teacher, 31:4 (August 1998), 539-61.

of the Caribbean (especially those where Spanish is not the principal
language), Belize, the Guianas, and regions of “overlap” (what Bolton
called the Spanish Borderlands). (One could also include much of the
Caribbean coastal zone of Central America.) It is precisely in these
“transitional zones” that the definition of Latin America and the United
States becomes most difficult and challenging.

Our current conception of Latin America has its most powerful 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 in 1958, academia
in the United States carved up the world into regions or areas and
universities scrambled to build “area studies” centers. Latin America was
one of the most clearly coherent world regions with its dominant Iberian
linguistic, political, and cultural traditions. In many ways, it is a more
coherent region than “Europe” or “Southeast Asia” with their multiple
languages and ethnicities. Yet, again, the area studies programs faced
dilemmas from their inception in how to deal with “non-Latin” regions,
especially in the Caribbean basin.16

The tendency has been to ignore these areas. In the U.S., standard
textbooks on Latin America throughout the first half of the twentieth
century took a very neat political approach to defining Latin America as the
twenty republics that gained their independence from Spain (18 countries),
Portugal (Brazil), and France (Haiti) in the nineteenth century.17 U.S.
foreign policy powerfully shaped the definition of the region including only
independent nations, and excluding or ignoring those areas of the Caribbean
and northern South America that remained under colonial rule (British,
French, U.S.). From the earliest texts of the founders of the field of Latin
American history (such as William Spence Robertson and Percy A. Martin,
founders of the Hispanic American Historical Review) to Hubert Herring’s
A History of Latin America (1955, 1961, 1968), this was the standard
approach. These books were nearly always diplomatic, political, and
military history with only the occasional nod toward society and culture.
Even the noted journalist, John Gunther, in his wide-ranging travels did not

16. For a fascinating analysis of the “invention” of world regions see Martin W. Lewis
and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997), esp. 162-82.
17. Panama, of course, is the oddity here gaining its independence as a part of New
Granada in the 1820s, and then again in 1903 as an “independent” republic.

bother to look beyond the standard twenty republics.18
The decolonization of the Caribbean (including here the Guianas) in the

1960s, 1970s, and 1980s clouded the traditional picture, and this can be
seen easily in the textbooks published after 1970. One of biggest selling
volumes has been E. Bradford Burns’ Latin America: A Concise Interpretive
History. In the first edition (1972), Burns takes as his subject the
“traditional 20″ saying that “Geopolitically the region encompasses 18
Spanish-speaking republics, French-speaking Haiti, and Portuguese-
speaking Brazil,” yet his statistical tables include Barbados, Guyana,
Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago.19 By the sixth edition (1994) this definition
has shifted to include “five English-speaking Caribbean nations” (with the
Bahamas joining the other four above). Despite the book’s title, the
statistical tables cover “Latin America and the Caribbean.”20 Benjamin
Keen’s A History of Latin America, possibly the bestselling, comprehensive
history of Latin America over the last twenty years, covers the “twenty
Latin American republics.”21 What must be the most widely selling volume
on post-colonial Latin America, Skidmore and Smith’s Modern Latin
America avoids the thorny problem of definition in its prologue, yet the first
edition (1984) includes individual chapters on Argentina, Chile, Brazil,
Peru, Mexico, Cuba, and Central America—Guatemala, El Salvador,
Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama.22 In the second edition
(1989) Skidmore and Smith added a chapter on the Caribbean that included
Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the Lesser Antilles.23 In contrast, Edwin

18. William Spence Robinson, Rise of the Spanish-American Republics as Told in the
Lives of Their Liberators (New York: D. Appleton and Company,1921); Herman G.
James and Percy A. Martin, The Republics of Latin America: Their History,
Governments and Economic Conditions (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923); Hubert
Herring, A History of Latin America from the Beginnings to the Present, 3rd ed. (New
York: Knopf, 1968); John Gunther, Inside Latin America (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1941).
19. E. Bradford Burns, Latin America: A Concise Interpretive History (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 3 and 239-44.
20. E. Bradford Burns, Latin America: A Concise Interpretive History, 6th ed.
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1994), 2 and 347-8.
21. The first edition appeared in 1980 as A Short History of Latin America (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin) with Mark Wasserman as the co-author. Wasserman had dropped off
the title page by the fourth edition (1992) and the sixth edition is co-authored with Keith
Haynes A History of Latin America (2000). The quote comes from p. xii of the 2000
edition.
22. Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1984). All countries in the appendixes at the end of the book come
from the traditional twenty.
23. Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America, 2nd ed. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Williamson’s The Penguin History of Latin America (1992) and Clayton and
Conniff’s A History of Modern Latin America (1999) stick to the traditional
definition.24 The influential and authoritative Cambridge History of Latin
America (11 volumes, 1984-95 ) takes Latin America “to comprise the
predominantly Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking areas of continental
America south of the United States—Mexico, Central America and South
America—together with the Spanish-speaking Caribbean—Cuba, Puerto
Rico, the Dominican Republic—and, by convention, Haiti. (The vast
territories in North America lost to the United States by treaty and war, first
by Spain, then by Mexico, during the first half of the nineteenth century are
for the most part excluded. Neither the British, French and Dutch Caribbean
islands nor the Guianas are included even though Jamaica and Trinidad, for
example, have early Hispanic antecedents . . .)”25 With the exception of
Puerto Rico, this definition could easily come from the James and Martin
volume in 1923!

All of these definitions hinge on an analysis of some set of
commonalities among nations in Americas that make them part of
something called Latin America, as well as their differences from the United
States. At the heart of the matter, then, is the notion of what binds these
peoples and countries together, a common history that is, at the same time,
not shared with the peoples of the United States. So what are the major
features of that common history that binds the peoples of so many countries
together into a unit that we can call Latin America?

A ‘Common’ History?
I believe that the very essence of any notion of Latin America emerges

primarily out of the view that the region and peoples arose out of the
process of conquest and colonization by European powers, primarily the
Spanish and Portuguese. The “Latin” in Latin America derives primarily
from this vision of the creation out of European conquest. These processes
of conquest and colonization, the complex struggles between conqueror and
colonized, are at the very essence of any definition of Latin America. This
is, if you will, the touchstone of Latin American history. This perspective
has been around for centuries. Brading’s colonial creole “first Americans”
defined themselves out of this process of conquest and colonization in the

24. Williamson’s statistical tables, in fact, do not even include all twenty! Edwin
Williamson, The Penguin History of Latin America (London: Penguin, 1992). Lawrence
A. Clayton and Michael L. Conniff, A History of Modern Latin America (Fort Worth:
Harcourt Brace, 1999).
25. Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America, volume I, Colonial
Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), xiv.

sixteenth century. In the nineteenth century, the first wave of historians
wrote about the drive to create new nations in Latin America as the
triumphal struggle of European civilization over the barbarism of native
peoples and Africans. (Sarmiento, of course, is the foundational text in this
genre.)26 The so-called “second conquest” of the late nineteenth century was
rationalized by many Latin American intellectuals and elites as the final
stage of the “first conquest” in the sixteenth century.27

This tale of European conquest and colonization was a reductionist tale
from its beginnings. It was really the story of the conquest of James
Lockhart’s “central areas”—the Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru. By the end of
the sixteenth century the fringes of the two Spanish viceroyalties were just
that—frontiers sparsely settled by Europeans (or by anyone else in many
places). In the case of Brazil, it is even difficult to speak of a “conquest” of
the small enclaves on the Atlantic coast. More than 98 percent of what is
now Brazil lay beyond the pale of European conquest and colonization.28
When creole identity began to emerge in the Spanish American colonies in
the seventeenth century, the vast majority of what we would include today
in any definition of Latin America lay beyond the reach of European power
and control. Most of the lands remained fragmented pieces of an indigenous
America. Even in the central areas, the Spaniards and Portuguese
constituted small islands of Europeans in a sea of non-European peoples.

In these central areas, what I call the “core regions,” we see unfold the
basic elements of the features that most historians today would employ in
their definition of Latin America: the imposition of European (1) political
and legal structures, (2) languages, (3) religions, and (4) cultures (to use a
very broad and amorphous term). Until the 1960s, traditional historians
generally saw this process as unilinear, often inevitable, and desirable.
(There were important dissenters such as Juan Bautista Alberdi.)29 Much of
the “story” of the field of Latin American history since the 1960s has been

26. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: civilización y barbarie, vida de Juan
Facundo Quiroga, 7a ed. (México: Editorial Porrúa, 1989) [first published in 1845].
27. See, for example, Steven C. Topik and Allen Wells, eds., The Second Conquest of
Latin America: Coffee, Henequen, and Oil during the Export Boom, 1850-1930 (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1998) and E. Bradford Burns, The Poverty of Progress: Latin
America in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
28. See, for example, H. B. Johnson, “ Portuguese Settlement, 1500-1580,” and Stuart B.
Schwartz, “ Plantations and Peripheries, c. 1580-c. 1750,” in Leslie Bethell, ed.,
Colonial Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1-38 and 67-144; and,
James Lang, Portuguese Brazil: The King’s Plantation (New York: Academic Press,
1979), esp. Chapter 1.
29. For a discussion of Alberdi and his denunciation of the perspective of his
contemporary Sarmiento, see Burns, 51-3.

challenges to this powerful and enduring paradigm. Although many today
would probably acknowledge that the process of Europeanization has been
overwhelming and ongoing, the approach over the past forty years has been
to emphasize the resistance of non-European peoples to the juggernaut of
Europeanization, and to highlight the give-and-take in the process.30
Conquest and colonization, to put it another way, was not a unilineal and
complete process, but rather a bitter struggle among Europeans and non-
Europeans that has produced a complex cultural mix that defines
contemporary Latin America. Rather than emphasize the role of elites,
political, military, and diplomatic history, historians in recent generations
have placed more emphasis on racial and social mixture, culture, and non-
elites, especially peasants, slaves, workers, and women.31

The history of Latin America then emerges out of the collision of
peoples that begins with the “Columbian Moment” in October 1492. Before
the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the “New World” there was no Latin
America. On that warm Caribbean morning in October 1492, Columbus
unwittingly brought together two worlds and three peoples in a violent and
fertile series of cultural and biological clashes that continue today. A
common process of conquest, colonization, resistance, and accommodation
across the region provides the unity that allows us to speak of something so
mislabeled as “Latin” America. Five hundred years after that moment of
conception the descendants of the “Columbian Moment” bear the highly
visible reminders of this common process: they live in nation-states formed
out of western and southern European political and legal traditions; speak
Romance languages as the dominant tongues; overwhelmingly they practice
varieties of Christianity (especially Roman Catholicism); and they are
integrated into the capitalist system that arose out of the North Atlantic
world.32

These common processes provide historians with a framework for
defining and demarcating Latin America for the sixteenth century, and much
of the seventeenth century. The appearance of serious European competitors

30. An important critique of the traditional paradigm is Steve J. Stern, “Paradigms of
Conquest: History, Historiography, and Politics,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 24
(1992), 1-34.
31.William B. Taylor, “Global Processes and Local History,” in Olivier Zunz, ed.,
Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina, 1985), .
32. The classic text on the creation of a notion of “America” is, of course, Edmundo
O’Gorman, La idea del descubrimiento de América (México: Centro de Estudios
Filosóficos, 1951) translated as The Invention of America (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1961).

in the Americas after 1600, and especially by 1650, begins to complicate the
task of definition. When the English, Dutch, and French enter into the
region, especially the Caribbean basin (broadly defined), the Iberian
monopoly on conquest and colonization ends. These three nations stake out
territories that had once been (even if only nominally) under Spanish
control, areas that had been part of “early” Latin America. One of the great
stumbling blocks in defining Latin America after 1650 is what to do with
these regions. For most traditional textbooks, these areas generally
disappear from discussion after they slip from Spanish control. In many
surveys (and in some areas studies centers) an attempt has been made to
avoid the definitional problems by speaking of “Latin America and the
Caribbean.”33 By including everyone, we do not have to define what we
mean for either term. The inclusion of some non-Spanish-speaking
Caribbean nations in recent textbooks is a variation on this approach. Bring
them in, but do not worry about explaining the rationale. This approach,
however, avoids the tough question of the nature of the relationship of these
regions to Latin America. Are the English-speaking islands too “English” to
count. Why include Haiti and not Quebec?

After the mid-seventeenth century, and even more so after the early
nineteenth century, it becomes harder and harder to speak of a common
experience for Latin America. The difficulties arise out of both the
multiplication of European colonizing powers and the even greater diversity
of “colonized” peoples. In Mexico, Central America, and the Andean world
(especially Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia) the presence of large, dense Indian
populations has produced a racial and cultural mixture that, on closer
scrutiny, makes these countries very unlike Europe and distinct from the rest
of Latin America. In the Caribbean and Brazil, the massive importation of
millions of Africans from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries makes
these countries very different from “Indo-America.” The absence of large
Indian or African populations, and the massive immigration of Europeans to
Argentina and Uruguay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
has produced yet another major variation on the Latin American heritage.34

It is precisely the multiplication of political and administrative units
that complicates the task of the historian of Latin America, especially after

33. Of the 29 federally funded Latin American Studies centers, 7 are centers for Latin
American and Caribbean studies (New York University, Florida International
University, University of Illinois, Indiana University, Duke University, Michigan State
University, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee).
34. Only in an overwhelmingly “European” Uruguay at the turn of the century could a
“Latin American” intellectual have produced a manifesto like Ariel that defines the
heritage of Latin America as not even “Hispanic” but, in truth, Greek in its origins with
France as its shining exemplar.

the wars for independence in the early nineteenth century. In the late
eighteenth century the two Spanish American viceroyalties fission into four
in recognition of the growth of significant population centers over the
previous two centuries. The Brazilian colony (although less developed than
Spanish America) had developed a series of administrative and political
centers by 1800. In many ways, the wars for independence provide the
historian with yet another common process, but one that ultimately
complicates the story dramatically.35 Although Brazil manages to remain
intact, the Spanish American colonies split into ten independent nations by
1830, and the fragmentation of New Granada and Central America produces
another six nations by mid-century. As if the problems of defining sixteen
national histories as pieces of one larger region were not enough, politics
and shifting political boundaries would now further complicate any
definition of Latin America.

Cuba, for example, does not gain its independence until 1898, and even
then, its “independence” is questionable. The Dominican Republic, perhaps
the most complicated political story of the nineteenth century, gains and
lose its independence, becomes part of Haiti, and even tries to join the
United States.36 If annexation had taken place, would we now see the
Dominican Republic as simply another state like California or Texas? Both
these cases indicate some of the problems with defining Latin America
using political criteria, but they are simple compared to Puerto Rico. Here is
a place that nearly everyone would agree is a part of Latin America, yet the
Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is a free associated state, and Puerto Ricans
are U.S. citizens. The tortured political status of Puerto Rico has led most
historians to avoid even discussing it as part of Latin America in their
textbooks, except in the colonial period.37

Despite the political fragmentation and the definitional problems that
produces, all of the regions south of the Rio Grande do continue to face

35. Key synthetic works on the period include: Leslie Bethell, ed., The Independence of
Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); David Bushnell and
Neill Macaulay, The Emergence of Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988); Richard Graham, Independence in Latin America: A
Comparative Approach, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994); and, Jay Kinsbruner,
Independence in Spanish America: Civil Wars, Revolutions, and Underdevelopment
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994).
36. Frank Moya Pons, The Dominican Republic: A National History (Princeton: Markus
Weiner, 1998).
37. For a recent volume that grapples with the legal implications from the perspective of
U.S. law and identity, see Christina Duffy Barnett and Burke Marshall, eds., Foreign in
a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2001).

similar cultural, social, and economic problems and processes in the
nineteenth century. Whether in Brazil, Central America, or Jamaica, the rise
of export-oriented economies; conflicts over the continually diversifying
racial mix and hierarchy; and literary and artistic trends all offer enough
similarities that we can continue to speak of the common economic, social,
and cultural processes in regions south of the United States. It is in fact, the
shifting political boundaries that perhaps exert the most influence on the
growing differences in these economic, social, and cultural processes. For
example, the conquest and inclusion of Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and much
of the Southwest into the United States between 1803 and 18

fundamentally alters these processes. Property rights, race relations, and
economic activity (to name three key issues) move in profoundly different
directions after U.S. control. Spanish elites, slaves, and the racially-mixed
will experience a world very different from their counterparts who live in
the newly-independent nations of Latin America in the nineteenth century.
Politics does make a difference, and an enormous one.38

The differences produced by the differing political experiences of the
former colonial regions increase dramatically throughout the twentieth
century. In politics we see a range from decades of dictatorship and
authoritarianism in much of Central America, Cuba, and Haiti, to the more
open and democratic systems of Costa Rica, Argentina, and Chile. Yet,
despite this wide range of differences, political scientists have been able to
continue to see the traditional twenty countries as a coherent region for
comparative purposes. This is possible, however, by ignoring most of the
Caribbean. It is not possible to include Belize, Guyana, and Jamaica (to
name a few cases) in this comparative regional analysis because of the much
longer colonial experience of the British, Dutch, and French Caribbean.
Once again, the exceptional case of Puerto Rico makes it the problematic
stepchild in any comparative political analysis of Latin America. Much of
comparative political analysis reinforces the notion of Latin America as the
twenty traditional republics, by definition leaving out all the most
problematic cases.39

The economic history of Latin America after 1870 also has powerful
similarities that many standard surveys have analyzed. The rise of export-
oriented growth in the late nineteenth century built on monoculture, the
shock of the Great Depression and the so-called “inward turn” after 1930,
and the end of the era of “import substitution industrialization” in the 1970s

38. For a fine example of the impact of changing legal and political regimes see Jane
Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
39. See, for example, Gary W. Wynia, The Politics of Latin American Development, 3rd
ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

with the subsequent rise of neo-liberalism are powerful processes common
to much of the region. Like the political processes, these commonalities
have allowed economists and historians to look at the traditional twenty
nations in a comparative framework.40 This framework, however, becomes
even more complicated than the political analysis as the region enters the
twentieth century. Is it still reasonable to include Brazil, with its enormous
industrial economy, in the same analysis with Haiti, Honduras, or
Guatemala? As in the case of the political scientists, the economists face
problems even if they attempt to incorporate the British, French, and Dutch
Caribbean into their analysis. Despite many similarities, these small nations
remain under colonial control until late in the twentieth century, and do not
experience the standard phases described above precisely because they are
not independent nations.

Perhaps the strongest areas for continuing similarities, across the
traditional twenty countries and the “problematic” regions, are in race
relations, social organization, and culture. Despite very different political
histories over the twentieth century, the evolving mixture of Africans,
Native Americans, and Europeans (supplemented now by a growing
population of peoples from Asia and the Middle East) continues to provide
historians with comparative possibilities that allow us to see the region as a
whole. This, however, does not define the region of Latin America, since
one of the most fruitful pieces of the comparison is with the experiences of
racial mixture and race relations in the United States. Here again, the feature
that differentiates the experiences (despite common beginnings) is the
impact of differing political regimes. The same could be said of social
organization as well. The racial and social hierarchies all across the
Americas have been profoundly shaped by differing political regimes.41 The
good news is that this provides us with a framework for seeing all of Latin

40. Some notable examples of this comparative tradition are John H. Coatsworth and
Alan M. Taylor, eds., Latin America and the World Economy Since 1800 (Cambridge,
MA: The David Rockefeller Center Series on Latin American Studies, Harvard
University, 1998); Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin American
Since Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Celso Furtado,
Formação econômica da América Latina (Rio de Janeiro: Lia, 1969); Osvaldo Sunkel
and Pedro Paz, El subdesarrollo latinoamericano y la teoría del desarrollo (México:
Siglo XXI, 1970).
41. The comparative tradition in the study of hemispheric race relations and slavery is
long and highly developed dating back at least to Frank Tannenbaum’s classic Slave and
Citizen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946). A couple of recent examples that focus on
the impact of politics on race are Anthony W. Marx, Making Race and Nation: A
Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998) and Melissa Nobles, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the
Census in Modern Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

America as a region. The bad news is that it does not clearly set it apart
from the rest of the Americas.

Culture (both elite and popular) offers perhaps the most interesting
angle on defining Latin America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Some of the strongest parallel processes since the moment of conquest and
early colonization have been in the cultural developments in Latin America.
Writers and scholars of literature have been some of the strongest
proponents (whether they knew it or not) of the existence of a place we
could label Latin America. Literary histories of Latin America generally
follow the traditional history surveys. They primarily focus on the Spanish-
speaking nations and Brazil. The nature of the discipline has often produced
literary histories of Spanish America (to the exclusion of Brazil).42 The only
real definitional problem here has been what to do with Puerto Rico and,
more recently, what to do with writers in the United States who write in
Spanish or (more problematically) what do with “Hispanic” or “Latino”
writers in the U.S. who write in English.43 Generally speaking, the literary
historians of the Spanish language in the Americas have generally been very
open about the geographical location of writers. No one, for example,
questions if José Martí is part of the literary history of Latin America even
though he lived and wrote for much of his adult life in the United States.
The same is true of Rubén Darío who spent so much of his life in Europe.44

Literary scholars, in fact, are at the forefront of the move to break down
the traditional political and linguistic boundaries of the regional definitions.
The move toward a comparative inter-american literature in recent years, for
example, has been motivated by a desire to move away from the traditional
regional specializations that have tended to operate as academic enclaves.

Inter-american literature attempts to engage specialists in all the traditional
enclaves in a common discussion of literatures of all the Americas.
Nonetheless, the very notion of comparison is built upon the assumption
that there are clearly identifiable regions and regional literatures to
compare. How can one compare “Latin American literature” with “southern
literature” (to cite but one example) unless one has an idea of a set of

42. Some examples, old and new, are Enrique Anderson-Imbert, Spanish-American
Literature: A History, 2 v., trans. John V. Falconieri (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1963) and Giuseppe Bellini, Nueva historia de la literatura hispanoamericana, 3a
ed. (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1997).
43. See, for example, William Luis, Dance Between Two Cultures: Latino Caribbean
Literature Written in the United States (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997).
44. Cathy L. Jrade, Modernismo, Modernity, and the Development of Spanish American
Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998).
45. See, for example, Earl E. Fitz, Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American
Literature in a Comparative Context (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991).

common characteristics that define Latin America and its literature?46 The
presence of large numbers of Spanish-speakers in the United States since
the mid-nineteenth century, and the massive immigration of peoples from all
over Latin America and the Caribbean into the U.S. since the 1960s have
made the cultural and linguistic definition of Latin America ever more
problematic. As studies of literature and culture demonstrate, the traditional
political boundaries of Latin America and the United States break down
completely when one attempts to define both regions.

Shifting Borders and Boundaries
If Latin America was born out of the collision of European and non-

European peoples in the late fifteenth century, then the key dilemma in
attempting to define the region is tracing the ongoing struggles and
combinations of those peoples. The collision of Native Americans,
Europeans, and Africans was like three powerful streams converging to
produce a roaring river that mixed these three peoples into a dazzling
variety of combinations producing something new and unique in world
history. As the decades and centuries passed, the turbulent river gradually
diverged into many different streams, but all had their origins in the great
waterway formed by the initial clash of these three peoples. I see two
crucial questions: (1) What was the nature of the river once the collision had
taken place? and, (2) How far do those streams need to diverge from the
river before they should no longer be considered to have enough in common
to be considered a single unit? In more concrete terms, when did places like
Trinidad and Belize diverge enough to no longer be considered a part of
Latin America, and how far do regions like Brazil and Guatemala have to
diverge no longer to be seen as part of the world region?

The clearest answers to these questions have been from the angle of
political history. The nineteen Iberoamerican nations that achieved their
independence in the nineteenth century (and in 1903 in the case of Panama)
and Haiti qualify. Post-colonial history, from this perspective, was a
continuation and evolution from the Spanish, Portuguese, and French
political cultures implanted after conquest. As we have already seen, this is
nice and neat, but still not unproblematic. Why include Haiti when it was
not an Iberian colony? Why exclude Quebec? Have we somehow bought the
napoleonic argument for a “Latin” America? Why simply exclude Puerto
Rico when it is clearly Latin American culturally and linguistically? The
political definition of the region is the most clearcut and definitive, but it
fails miserably when one looks at Latin America as more than simply a

46. See, for example, Deborah N. Cohn, History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent
Southern and Spanish American Fiction (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999).

conglomeration of independent nations.
Even with this seemingly neat definition, one has to be very wary, as

the Puerto Rican case illustrates. If one holds a definition of Latin America
strictly to political boundaries not only does it leave out much of the
Caribbean, it also raises serious questions about the old “borderlands”
region. When the United States annexes what I call the “southern tier” states
in the first half of the nineteenth century, do the regions suddenly drop out
of Latin America? Do the peoples who populated the region before
annexation stop being Latin American? As immigration from south of the
border continues—especially in recent decades-are not some sections of
California, Texas, and Florida arguably still part of Latin America, at least
in a cultural sense. Finally, even without these cultural questions we have to
recognize the political boundaries of Latin America have been constantly
shifting for more than five hundred years. In 1500 Latin America consisted
of a few isolated pockets of Spaniards in the islands of the Caribbean. By
1600 it also included the core regions of Mexico and Peru and pieces of the
Brazilian coastline. Yet, it was still a small part of the total area that we
today consider Latin America. By 1700, the political boundaries had
contracted with the losses to England, the Netherlands, and France in the
Caribbean. The boundaries contracted further by 1850 with the losses of
territory to the United States. In political terms, Latin America expanded
and then contracted across centuries.

While the political boundaries (despite some problems) may appear to
be the most clearcut measure of the limits of Latin America, and the cultural
boundaries may be the most difficult to define, the economic range of Latin
America is somewhere in between as a definitional instrument. Perhaps one
of the oldest assumptions about Latin America, an assumption that became
more explicit with modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960, is that Latin
America was created and defined out of the the expansion of the European
economy and its penetration into the Americas. (A similar assumption has
guided the writing of the history of the United States.)47 The expansion of
capitalism (even if a backward Iberian form of it) accompanied the political
conquest and has continued to spread across greater geographical spaces for
five centuries. In the nineteenth century, Sarmiento and others portrayed
this as one aspect of the advance of “civilization” (while Rodó feared it). In
the oft-quoted words of the Brazilian intellectual Euclides da Cunha, “We
are condemned to civilization. Either we shall progress or we shall perish.
So much is certain, and our choice is clear.”48 This advance of “modernity”

47. The same set of assumptions has also been true of theories of dependency and world
systems analysis.
48. Euclides da Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands (Os sertões), trans. Samuel Putnam

in the nineteenth century has returned in a new form as the “triumph” of
capitalism, neo-liberalism, and globalization at the end of the twentieth
century and the beginning of the twenty-first.49

Unlike the expansion and contraction of political boundaries, this story
of the expansion of modern capitalism in the region has long been portrayed
by its proponents as one of the inevitable expansion of “European” control
and civilization over the interior of the nascent nation-states. Following this
reasoning, the countries of Latin America only become true nation-states in
the late twentieth century with the complete penetration of the interior
through roads, railways, telecommunications—especially radio and
television. Since at least the nineteenth century, the disappearance of
“traditional” society has been a counter-narrative to this liberal
triumphalism. Influential writers have lamented the deculturation of Indians,
African, and the “folk” in the face of the juggernaut of the modern European
state.50 The contemporary version of this narrative has been the critique of
the cultural impact of globalization (“coca-colanization”). In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries José Hernández and Ricardo
Güiraldes wrote nostalgically about the vanishing life of the gaucho
threatened by the railroad.51 Today, Eduardo Galeano objects to the
replacement of mate with McDonald’s and the power of multinational
capitalism.52

If the expansion of capitalism in the ninteenth century served to define
Latin America more clearly, the latest stage of capitalism serves to
obliterate differences within Latin America and between Latin America and
the United States. Imagine that the complete economic integration of the
Americas does eventually take place. The nation-states and their previous
common problems of monoculture, underdevelopment, import-substitution
industrialization, and the like would blend into one enormous economy
(albeit regionalized). Would we then begin to see the Americas as a group
of regions characterized by different socio-economic indices (somewhat the
way we now see the United States)? It would certainly be difficult to see

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944 [originally published in 1902]), 54.
49. For two recent works in that emphasize the need for Latin American to adopt
“modern” values see Lawrence E. Harrison, Underdevelopment is a State of Mind: The
Latin American Case (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 2000), and, Hernando de Soto,
The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere
Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
50. Burns, Chapter 4, “An Intellectual Counterpoint,” 51-71.
51. Ricardo Güiraldes, Don Segundo Sombra, 2a ed. (Bueno Aires: Editorial Losada,
1940 [originally published in 1926] ), José Hernández, Martín Fierro, ed. Ángel J.
Battistessa (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1994 [originally published in 1872] ).
52. See, for example, “To Be Like Them,” in We Say No, 286-97.

Brazil and Mexico, for example, as regions that fit into the same category as
Honduras, Haiti, or Guatemala. Economic integration would make the task
of definition Latin America in traditional terms very difficult as capitalism
increasingly ignores and erodes the political boundaries of nation-states.

So What Is Latin America Then?
If political, cultural, and economic boundaries have been constantly

shifting since 1492, how then do we pin down this elusive notion of
something called Latin America. To put it simply, who’s in and who’s out,
and when? Here I come back full circle to the moments of origin and my
image of the river, of converging and diverging streams. At its most basic,
we must begin any definition of the region out of the initial collisions and
convergences. Few would disagree with that assertion. For the first century
of its existence, Latin America was Ibero America, with Spain and Portugal
as the driving forces in the collision of peoples. The commonality, it seems
to me, is in the Iberian heritage and its transformation through struggles
with non-Iberian peoples in the Americas. When the French, English, and
Dutch appear on the scene in the seventeenth century they also become part
of the non-Iberian collisions and mixtures. In this sense, Saint Domingue
continues (for a while) to be a part of Latin America, but so does the rest of
the Caribbean. Politically they may fall under the sway of the British,
French, and Dutch, but culturally and socially these islands and enclaves
will carry with them a powerful Iberoamerican tradition: the spiritual
conquest of the Catholic Church, racial mixture, profound social inequities,
slavery, and the cultural mix of Iberian, Native American and African
peoples. As time passes, the cultural and political influences of the British,
French, and the Dutch eventually overwhelmed the Iberoamerican heritage.
The societies continue to be racially and culturally mixed, slavery persists,
as do the profound social inequities, but the influence of different political
and cultural traditions reshaped these former regions of Latin America. (In
the case of the British colonies, the different political tradition makes a
profound difference in their evolution.)

This means that there are no easy dates that demarcate the entry and exit
of regions into and out of Latin America. Instead, there are gradual
transitions, and this complicates the task of the historian. Latin America has
an ever evolving set of core characteristics and each country or region must
be measured on a sort of continuum to gauge its convergence or divergence
from the set of characteristics. Jamaica does not suddenly stop being Latin
American in 1655 with the English conquest, but gradually evolves away
under the demographic, political, and cultural influences from England.
Conversely, the borderlands of northern Mexico only gradually are drawn
into Latin America, and (after 1848) gradually drawn out. The non-Spanish-

speaking Caribbean then gradually evolves away from Latin America,
despite the strong similarities (slavery, social structure, racial and cultural
mixture). Puerto Rico, and even more so, places like California, Texas, and
Florida also evolve away (in varying degrees) from their Latin American
cousins under the influence of U.S. political culture, economic
development, and new types of cultural and linguistic mixtures.

My approach takes me away from the mainstream of traditional
approaches while maintaining some of their key assumptions. Given my
evolutionary approach and emphasis on Iberian heritage, I would argue that
not only Puerto Rico but also Haiti have been evolving out of Latin
America. Both, especially Haiti, have evolved for more than a century under
political and economic influences profoundly different than the Latin
American nations. Although I do think that, ultimately, politics makes an
enormous difference in the definition, I do not see it in such rigid and
clearcut terms as the traditional historians. Political boundaries matter, but
culture takes a long time to respond to those political demarcations. When
we write the history of Latin America we should not suddenly stop talking
about the non-Hispanic Caribbean when the other Europeans conquer
islands and enclaves on the mainland. Equally, we should not drop the
borderlands or Puerto Rico from our domain after U.S. annexation. Both
regions continue to receive powerful demographic influences from Latin
America. Their departure from the region is not as farreaching as that of
Guyana, Jamaica, or Curação.

If we are to speak of something called Latin America it must have some
common core elements that allow us to group different geographies together
into a single unit. There must be a core, but we also must recognize that the
core elements continually evolve. (The only constant in history is change!)
That core is not static, nor uniform. The enormous variety of collisions
across Latin America produces multiple hybrids (to appropriate,
misappropriate? a post-modern term). The beauty of Latin America is that
there is enough unity of features that we can, in fact, define the region, yet
there is enough diversity that we are always watching the pieces of that
region diverge from their origins. Geographically, Latin America has had
four core regions—Mexico, Peru, Brazil, and the Caribbean—and a
constantly shifting series of peripheries (U.S. borderlands, much of the
Caribbean). If there is a “classic” moment in Latin American history it is in
the core regions in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, before
the arrival of the other European powers, yet long enough after the initial
conquest to have create societies that are not European, Native American,
nor African. They are truly American. After roughly 1700 the great roaring
river of collisions begins to spin off a series of streams. By the twentieth
century the non-Hispanic Caribbean has diverged enough that it no longer

has many connections with its (distant) Iberoamerican cousins.
In the twenty-first century some of the nations that have long been a

part of Latin America may diverge enough that historians in the twenty-
second century will no longer include them in Latin America. In fact, the
divergences from the cultural core may have become so profound by the
sextacentennial that we may no longer be able to speak of a Latin America,
except in the past tense. Latin America may have a common history, but not
a common future.

The greatest irony of economic integration, should it prove successful
over the long haul, is that it may bring all the Americas back toward
convergence and greater unity. If this does happen, the proper question may
no longer be “do the Americas have a common history,” but rather “do we
have a common future?”

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