What Exactly is Latin America?

Joel Wolfe

After a lecture I gave to my Modern Latin America survey, a student asked me how Haiti could be considered Latin America given it had been a French colony. This is a great question, but it was also a little annoying, because one of the themes I use to organize the survey is whether or not it makes sense to consider the region a region.

One point I make on the first day of class is that there is no right or wrong answer to that question. There are very strong arguments both for and against seeing Latin America as a unified whole.

Looking at the region as everything in the Western Hemisphere south of the United States can be very useful. The vast majority of the nations in this area share a common Iberian heritage. Most of them are predominantly Catholic, have large mixed race populations, and have had complex and often contested relations with the U.S.—the hemisphere’s dominant power—for more than a century. And, on many significant levels, these nations tend to see themselves as having a shared history. Sure, Haiti’s French roots complicate things (along with Jamaica’s and Belize’s ties to Great Britain), but even those countries tend to have more in common historically with the other nations of the region than not.

We can also find a great deal that differentiates one country from another, however. In the colonial era (ca. 1500-1820), Mexico City loomed as one of the world’s great cities, but the villages that became some of the great cities of the present (Buenos Aires and São Paulo, for example) were tiny backwaters. Today, life in Buenos Aires or São Paulo is more consonant with that in Barcelona or even Chicago than with that in the villages of highlands Guatemala or Bolivia or any number of other places in Latin America. It isn’t just a matter of the physical geography of these cities versus rural spaces. Many of the region’s largest cities exude a modern ethos and Western orientation. Such identities are often absent or at least contested in other, particularly rural, Latin American spaces.

This tension about Latin America’s coherence as a concept or even region has fueled more than just the ways I organize some of my classes; it has also shaped my scholarship. My first book is a study of the rise of Brazil’s industrial working class in the city of São Paulo. After writing my doctoral thesis and then revising it for publication, I realized that one of my study’s limits was São Paulo’s uniqueness. It is simultaneously the largest metropolitan area in the entire southern hemisphere and Latin America’s largest industrial complex, and yet in many ways it is atypical of Brazil. Within its own country, São Paulo (the city and the state), with its modernist ethos, large immigrant populations, devotion to both advanced agricultural and industrial production, is both unique and dominant. In other words, you can’t rationally analyze Brazil without reference to São Paulo, but you would be wrong to see Brazil through Paulista (a resident of the state) eyes.

I tried to address this issue in my new book on automobility in Brazil. Autos and Progress is a study of Brazil’s struggle to integrate the massive, often disconnected, and regionally diverse nation through the use of technology (cars, trucks, and buses). In many ways, the embrace of the technological fix by Brazilians was a Paulista idea, although autos and automobility had and have broad appeal throughout the country. The tensions among Brazilian regional identities and the very real (you can’t say “concrete” when you write about cars and road building!) struggles to physically, socially, and economically unify the nation became a central theme for the book and have become part of how I organize my History of Brazil class.

In other words, there is a great deal of utility in asking whether or not it makes sense to think of Latin America (or Brazil or Mexico, for example) as a unified whole. Thinking about what we gain and what we lose when we either split or lump regions and sub-regions in our teaching and scholarship can not only help our students make sense of a lot of complex history, it can also clarify key aspects of our research agendas.

Learning from the History We Don’t Study

Joel Wolfe

Today's post on what we can learn from other fields comes from Joel Wolfe, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Wolfe "studies the impact of modernity, industrialism, and trade on Latin American societies and their politics. His primary focus is modern Brazil. He is the author most recently of Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity (Oxford 2010). He also published Working Women, Working Men: São Paulo and the Rise of Brazil's Industrial Working Class, 1900-1955 (Duke 1993). His articles have appeared in the Latin American Research Review, Hispanic American Historical, Radical History Review, Review, Luso-Brazilian Review, and Revista Brasileira de História. He is at present working on a book tentatively titled, '100 Years of Trade in Latin America.'"

And now for something completely different. . . .

To those of us of a certain age, hearing those words meant we were about to see something absurdly funny. This isn’t so much funny as it is completely different from what’s been on this blog. Unlike most of the folks who post here, I’m a historian of Latin America. What exactly constitutes “Latin America” will be the topic of a future post, but only if people like this one.

What interests me today is our collective ignorance about the things we don’t study. I recently read Gordon Wood’s magisterial Empire of Liberty, and I had to balance the awe in which I hold Wood’s work with my panicked sense of ignorance about key aspects of American history. How deep is my ignorance? I’m just now starting Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought and I have James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom on the shelf in the “on deck circle.”

A friend and colleague expressed a similar sort of ignorance about the country that I study. She told me she had recently seen a map of South America and was truly stunned by Brazil’s enormousness. I agreed. It is big. She continued to express her extreme surprise, her complete perplexidade. So, I did something only a historian would do. I sent her a map. It shows that every country of Europe fits comfortably within Brazil’s borders. (Click to enlarge.) Neat, huh?

Brazil’s great size is important for a lot of reasons that should interest U.S. historians. Brazil, for example, has been expansionist at the expense of many of its neighbors. Indeed, Brazilians are comfortable with some aspects of U.S. notions of manifest destiny because they see themselves in a similar light. Brazil is literally the opposite of Mexico, the region’s second largest and second most populous nation, in this regard because Mexican history has been marked by invasion and annexation that led to the loss of more than half its territory to the United States.

Latin America’s geography has shaped these nations in ways much more significant than their relationship to the United States. Mexican history has long involved attempts by the center (Mexico City) to gain control over the periphery, including the northern states in the nineteenth century, Yucatán in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Chiapas more recently. Brazil, on the other hand, has been trying to move off the coast to know, claim, and control its interior spaces. The 1960 opening of Brasília, its modernist capital in the interior, is only the most obvious manifestation of a history that includes wars against far-away millenarian communities (Canudos and the Contestado) and endless schemes to control the vast Amazon from an ill-fated attempt to build a telegraph line through the jungle to Fordlândia and Belterra (Henry Ford’s modernist interventions in the jungle) to doomed settlement schemes advanced by the nation’s military dictators in the 1970s and 80s.

We can never know everything in our own fields, let alone even the basics of others. Returning to some of the activities that drew so many of us into history as children, such as playing with globes and studying maps, can help us begin to know other countries and fields. Maps are great tools for thinking about a country’s size, what region or regions it helps constitute, and how it relates to other parts of the globe. Thinking about maps, space, and place should remind us of how geography is central in history and it can help us start to bring our disparate fields a little closer together.