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.

More on Deep History and Prehistory

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This guest post comes from Randall Foote, who emailed me last week regarding an earlier post on Deep History. Foote has graciously allowed me to post his note. Retired from business, Foote is now an adjunct history professor at Roxbury Community College. (In the coming days I'll also post Foote's letter to historian John Lukacs on prehistory and history.)

"But is it History? III"
Randall Foote

I read with interest your post of 9/16 on the Historical Society blog regarding Deep History, and I felt I should comment on the question you asked:

“. . . . But, as Heather asked earlier on a different topic, is it history? How can we understand preliterate humans and societies in a historical sense? Can historians add to our understanding of prehistoric humans in ways that anthropologists and archeologists cannot? Historians inside and outside of the guild will have to figure those questions out for themselves.”

How we understand history is constantly changing. It was not very long ago – say, 200 years – when Sumer, Egypt, Troy, Babylon et al were seen as either mythical and/or biblical. Europeans saw two threads of history: the Classical, which began with Herodotus, and the Biblical, which began with Moses. Other cultures had even less historical horizon. No culture had a truly global historical sense before the modern Western European. It was archaeology that opened the doors to a larger view. Yes, writings were discovered, but the larger picture – which is still very much evolving – came from “the testimony of the spade."

Historians follow upon archaeologists to form a larger picture, with broad interconnections. Absolutely there is a place – indeed a necessity -- for applying historical sense every step of the way. After all, History is in essence the science and art of humanity. Certainly, there are now many more "non-historical" tools to gather information for historical understanding of pre-literate cultures, including genetics, linguistics and highly developed archaeological techniques. We should use them all as a part of developing a broader (and deeper) History. An interesting first step of applying the genetic point of view to “deep history” was L. L. Cavalli-Sforza’s History and Geography of Human Genes. Cavalli-Sforza is a geneticist who is more adventurous and ambitious than are most historians. There is much history yet to be written.

I think future historians will view the European Aurignacian and Magdalenian (similarly the Australian Dream-time, Archaic Native American, Chinese Yang Shao and others) as every bit historical as we now view Troy and Sumer. It was not long ago (indeed, in my own school years) that the Ancient/Medieval/Modern triptych was the basic academic framework. I think that the Prehistoric/Historic dichotomy is as limited a mindset as both that one and the Biblical chronology.

Relegating preliterate man to the backwater of “Prehistory” is to miss out on some of the most interesting and creative elements of human history. After all, what is more fascinating than beginnings – our own beginnings.

Historians, like scientists, need to maintain a certain humility about how much we still do not know, but that is really most of all a great challenge and opportunity. There is always so much more to be discovered. In this time of increasing specialization and insularity in academic history departments, what we really need is more history with the long view, even when there is so much uncertainty and likelihood for contradiction as new discoveries are made. The rapid change in understanding prehistory and man's origins is a real case in point: when I was young it was a given that the Five Races evolved separately on their own continents (with the Caucasian Race being of course the most highly evolved). Seems like an eon ago.

Kaiser Wilhelm: Out of the Spotlight

Randall Stephens

What happened to Kaiser Wilhelm (1859-1941) after Germany lost World War I in 1918?

I'd never given that a thought until I read a witty, sprawling chapter in Ian Buruma's Anglomania: A European Love Affair. (A great read. Highly recommended.) Would the Kaiser fall on his sword? Attempt one last suicidal advance? March on Berlin to crush the revolution? Start a mustache grooming college?

No. "Instead," says Buruma, "the kaiser and his entourage, twelve military officers and thirty servants, including his barber, his chambermaids, his butler, his cooks, his doctor, his equerry, and his old cloakroom attendant, 'Father' Schulz, crossed the Dutch border, bound for the hospitality of Count Godard Bentinck's castle at Amerongen. The kaiser's first request, upon his arrival, was to have 'a cup of real good English tea.' He got his tea, served with English scones."

The fallen Prussian leader did more than work on his Rococo mustache, which, upturned, always looked like it was ready to take flight. He liked to dress up in various uniforms. He spent a great deal of time felling trees, a sort of compulsive hobby of his called "hackeritis." And he railed against the Jews and the English. Sometimes, he imagined them as one in the same. The kaiser was a comic, tragic, repulsive figure.

He kept a very tightly organized schedule. He spent the remainder of his life with his crew, venting, storming, and musing on current events and the future of the Aryan race. His was a toxic brew of race hatred and paranoia. (In Buruma's telling, the kaiser carried a bundle of grudges, fears, and troubles. Not least of those, his arm, paralyzed from birth, gave him a sense of physical inadequacy that he never quite overcame.)

Buruma zeros in on Wilhelm's tortured relationship with the English, and especially his English mother, "Vicky," and his grandmother, Queen Victoria. He vacillated between Anglophile and Anglophobe. Wilhelm was drawn to and repelled by the English and Englishness. In Buruma's estimation, he suffered from a Freudian sense of inferiority. Wilhelm built up the German navy to best his rival across the channel. He thundered against the effete English aristocracy and it's liberal shopkeepers. They were no match for the proud, uniformed, manly, Prussian military man.

Powerless, the kaiser could only dream about teutonic Wagnerian glory from his Dutch exile. His ravings became more maniacal with the passing years. (Surely someone has written a novel, a play, or a short story about his Dutch years? Exile on Kaiserstraße?)

The whole account would be far more comic if the kaiser's bizarre, super-charged bigotry wasn't shared by so many others in the years before his death. Reading Buruma's chapter gave me a new appreciation for Hannah Arendt's coinage "the banality of evil."