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Latin America is a conundrum, a statement that applies to both the region and the name. The dimensions of the region are unclear, the name a misnomer, and, for some, the place does not even exist. Thousands of scholars on several continents study Latin America. In the United States, the broader field of Latin American studies has been vibrant and growing for decades. Every four years, the U.S. Department of Education awards millions of dollars to about fifteen “national resource centers” in Latin American studies. Yet, no one seems to like the name for this region of the world, and a growing number of academics have even declared that the very idea of Latin America is a fiction invented by European and American elites. If they are correct, the field of Latin American history is an illusion. Even those who argue for the usefulness of the term (despite its flaws) cannot agree on a definition of just what it encompasses. Moreover, as the many nations in the region continue to develop in the twenty-first century, it will be increasingly difficult to discern strong similarities that hold them together as a coherent and meaningful regional unit. In short, we may be able to speak of Latin America’s history, but it may not have much of a future.

The name Latin America, or, more precisely in Spanish and Portuguese, América Latina, does not even appear in print until the mid-nineteenth century. Three hundred and fifty years earlier, when Christopher Columbus came ashore on the islands of what he called El Mar Caribe (the Caribbean Sea), he firmly believed that he had arrived on the eastern shores of the Indies (Japan and China). A German cartographer, Martin Waldseemüller, produced one of the first maps of the region in 1507. He had read the accounts of Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci’s transatlantic voyages, believed he had discovered this new world, and proceeded to designate this “new” landmass America in his honor. The great cartographer later regretted his error and removed the designation from his maps, but the name has stuck with us now for more than five centuries.

The lands and peoples of the Americas presented a major intellectual challenge for Europeans. They did not appear in the two most important authorities in Western civilization, the Bible and the classical writings of the Greeks and Romans. For many decades after the “Columbian Moment” the Europeans would puzzle over how to explain their absence from these foundational sources and how to fit them into their worldview.¹ Were these “Indians” descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel? Were they humans? Did they have souls? Europeans often referred to the Americas as the “New World” to differentiate it from the “Old World” of Europe, Africa, and Asia, continents they had long known. The Spanish crown gradually created a vast bureaucracy to govern their new colonies as they took shape and, following Columbus, called the region the Indies (las Indias).

This vast geographical region of North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean was home to possibly 75 million or more native peoples in 1492, peoples Columbus (mistakenly) called Indians (indios), another name that stuck. The Native American population declined dramatically, possibly by as much as 75 to 90 percent in the sixteenth century, largely from diseases that arrived from Europe and Africa (smallpox, measles, influenza, plague, malaria, yellow fever). The populations of indigenous peoples began slowly to recover from this staggering demographic catastrophe in the seventeenth century. During four centuries of conquest and colonial rule, Europeans brought at least 12 million Africans across the Atlantic in chains to provide enslaved labor on plantations and in mines, and to work in nearly every aspect of colonial life. Slave traders shipped the vast majority of these Africans (around 80 to 85 percent) into the Caribbean basin and eastern Brazil. Probably fewer than 1,500 Spaniards and Portuguese per year arrived in the region over the course of the sixteenth century and during the remainder of the colonial period. Consequently, when the wars for independence erupted in the early nineteenth century, the estimated 25 million inhabitants of the region probably consisted of about 15 million Native Americans, about 3 million people of European descent, 2 million enslaved people of African descent, and about 5 million people of racially mixed heritage. Even after three centuries of colonialism and exploitation, more than half the inhabitants of what we now call Latin America were Native Americans, and only a little over 10 percent were persons who claimed European (or Latin) ancestry. The vast lands the Spanish and Portuguese claimed stretched from what today is the southern tier of the United States (California to Florida) to Tierra del Fuego. With the rise of the French, English, and Dutch empires after 1600, these European powers seized control of many Caribbean islands (such as Jamaica, Barbados, Saint-Domingue, and Curação) and enclaves on the American mainland (such as the Guianas, Belize, and, eventually, Louisiana).

By the eighteenth century, those of Spanish descent born in the Americas increasingly referred to themselves as creoles (criollos) to distinguish themselves from Spaniards born in Spain but residing in the Americas (peninsulares). Although those of Portuguese descent in Brazil were cognizant of their differences with those born in Portugal, the social distinctions were less pronounced than those between the criollos and peninsulares. Europeans and Euro-Americans sometimes referred to their regions as América española or América portuguesa. As the Euro-Americans fought to break with their colonial masters in the early nineteenth century, they contrasted themselves with the Europeans and began to call themselves americanos or, in the case of the Spanish colonies, hispano-americanos.

The violent break with Spain and Portugal, and the fitful emergence of about fifteen new nations by the 1840s, confronted the leaders of the wars for independence with the need to construct names, symbols, and rituals for the nations and nationalities they sought to create out of the fragments of the collapsing colonial empires. Simón Bolívar, the great liberator of northern South America, dreamed of forging a confederation of the former colonies as one great American nation. Disillusioned, dying, and heading off into exile in late 1830, he could see that his dream had failed, and he concluded that “America is ungovernable” and that “He who serves the revolution ploughs the sea.” When he spoke of America, he clearly meant the former Spanish colonies as a whole (and not the United States or Brazil). While most of the new leaders focused on constructing their own nation-states, some intellectuals took Bolívar’s larger view and envisioned a region with a common cultural identity, if not a political one.

The first documented usage of the term Latin America (in Spanish and French), ironically, emerges in France in the 1850s and 1860s in a series of essays by French, Colombian, and Chilean intellectuals.² In part, the term served to contrast Spanish (and sometimes French and Portuguese) America from the growing power of the United States, what these intellectuals called Anglo-Saxon America. Intellectuals and diplomats in the region envisioned a Latin race defined by its cultural heritage of languages (derived from Latin) and religion (Catholicism) opposed to the aggressive and increasingly imperialist, Protestant Anglo-Saxons in the United States. From the French perspective, the effort to stress common cultural bonds between the old Spanish, French, and Portuguese colonies (“Latin” peoples) also served to help justify Napoleon III’s imperial ambitions in the Americas, especially his invasion of Mexico in the 1860s. France had also become, by the mid-nineteenth century, the most important cultural influence on the newly ascendant national elites, and that cultural captivation helped to bolster the rationale among intellectuals in the region for adopting the name.

Multiple ironies permeated the creation and then gradual adoption of the name Latin America. First, and most striking, the vast majority of peoples living in the region in the mid-nineteenth century were Native Americans (especially in Mexico, Central America, and the Andes), Afrodescendants (especially in the Caribbean basin and Brazil), and the racially and culturally mixed. In places such as Mexico, Central America, and the Andes, the indigenous majority did not even speak a “Latin” language. Euro-American elites created the Latin modifier as the politically and culturally hegemonic group, but it represented an aspiration, not a reality on the ground. These intellectuals created “Latin” America as a contrast to “Anglo-Saxon” America (the United States), another term that is also deeply ironic. Despite the massive influx of Europeans into North America, even in the 1850s, nearly one in seven inhabitants of the United States was an enslaved person of African descent, native peoples were numerous, and large percentages of the Euro-Americans were neither Anglo-Saxons nor Protestants! As immigration accelerated in the late nineteenth century, the largest waves of immigrants came not from England but from the European continent, especially Southern and Eastern Europe. The misguided creole elites who sought to create Latin American nations had mislabeled both their own region and the United States. It was a false and flawed dichotomy from its inception, but one that would have a long life.

As a small but vibrant scholarly community developed in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, the term Latin America began to appear in book titles and essays. When this group of scholars created their own journal during the First World War, Latin America remained but one possible term for the region. They debated among themselves and finally settled on the Hispanic American Historical Review (not the Latin American Historical Review), arguing that the term “Hispanic” also encompassed Portuguese Brazil. It was not until the end of the Second World War that the term Latin America became the most common for the region south of the United States. In the aftermath of the world war and the emergence of the Cold War, for strategic purposes, the U.S. defense and security community divided up the globe. Much of this terminology became standardized in the National Defense Education Act of 1958, a direct response to the perceived threat of the Soviet Union and the launching (in 1957) of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to circle the Earth. The Act aimed to build up U.S. higher education (especially in math and science) to confront the challenges of the Cold War, especially from the Soviet Union. The legislation led to the creation of “national resource centers” and “area studies” fellowships funded by the federal government to develop expertise in the various regions of the world. Along with centers for the study of Russia and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and other world regions, the government began funding centers for Latin American studies.³

Our current conception of Latin America has its strongest 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, (as with the intelligence and defense communities) academia in the United States carved up the world into regions or areas and universities scrambled to organize “area studies” centers. Latin America, with its seemingly dominant Iberian linguistic, political, and cultural traditions, was one of the most clearly coherent world regions. In many ways, it is a more coherent region than “Europe” or “Southeast Asia,” with their multiple languages and ethnicities. In the words of José Moya, the region is “the largest contingent area in the world bound by similar legal practices, language, religion, naming patterns, and the arrangement of urban space.”⁴ Latin American area studies programs faced dilemmas from their inception in how to deal with “non-Latin” regions and populations, especially in the Caribbean basin (particularly the British West Indies and U.S. territories) and areas that once formed part of the Spanish empire in the Americas, but eventually came under control of the British, the French, the Dutch, and the United States.⁵

The confusion about the boundaries and scope of the region can be seen in the variety of names for Latin American centers in the United States. Some are simply Latin American centers or institutes. Others have been centers for Iberoamerican studies or Latin American and Caribbean studies or centers for Latino and Latin American studies (to include those of Latin American heritage in the United States). At times, some of these centers have been broad enough to be centers for the Americas (as a whole) or transatlantic (Latin American and Iberian studies). Those fifteen or so “national resource centers” receiving government funding are required by law (whatever their name may be) to spend their funds only on “Latin American” programming, that is, not on Latin Americans and their descendants in the U.S. or on the English- or French-speaking Caribbean. The U.S. government very specifically defines the region as the Spanish-speaking nation-states south of the United States (thus excluding Puerto Rico), Brazil, and Haiti.

As government funding and influence shaped the use and definition of Latin America in the United States, the enormous power and presence of the latter, ironically, helped spur a sense of solidarity among the peoples of the region to see themselves as Latin Americans. During the Cold War, Mexicans, Chileans, Brazilians, and the like increasingly spoke of themselves as Latin Americans (latinoamericanos) as a means of contrasting themselves with the imperialist power to the north. As with Anglo-Saxons in the nineteenth century, in the postwar struggle Latin Americans often referred to the citizens of the United States as North Americans (norteamericanos), another misnomer that should technically include Canadians and Mexicans. Although U.S. citizens like to refer to themselves in English as Americans, the term really encompasses everyone from Arctic Canada to Tierra del Fuego. Understandably, many Latin Americans refuse to use the term and resort to norteamericanos, leaving both groups with dubious terminology.

One of the first institutions in the region to apply the terminology was the Comisión Económica para América Latina [CEPAL] (Economic Commission for Latin America, or ECLA), created by the United Nations in 1948 and located in Santiago, Chile. Its principal task has been to encourage economic cooperation, especially through the gathering and analysis of data on Latin American economies. In the 1980s, it added the Caribbean to its title (becoming ECLAC and CEPALC). By their count, there are twenty Latin American nations (eighteen Spanish speaking, plus Brazil and Haiti). Over the decades other regional organizations took on the terminology, such as the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales [FLACSO] (Latin American Social Sciences Faculty), created in the 1950s by UNESCO to promote the teaching and influence of the social sciences in the region. Unlike the United States or Europe, Latin American countries rarely have created strong and enduring centers for the study of Latin America or, for that matter, centers for the study of the United States.

As Latin American studies boomed in the 1960s, new professional organizations began to take shape in Europe and the United States, and they adopted the terminology, reinforcing its linguistic dominance. U.S. scholars founded the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in 1965 along with its own journal, the Latin American Research Review. Originally an association primarily for academics in the United States, in the last two decades it has become a truly international organization of more than 12,000 members, two-thirds of them residing outside the United States. Similarly, the Society for Latin American Studies was founded in the United Kingdom in 1964 with its own journal, the Bulletin of Latin American Research. The institutional and professional associations, centers, and agencies in the United States, Europe, and Latin America had overwhelmingly adopted the terminology of “Latin America” by the 1970s.

The recent critiques of the term Latin America have roots at least back to the early twentieth century. Intellectuals in regions with indigenous or Afrodescendant majorities in the 1920s and 1930s spoke of Indo America or Afro America. In Mexico and Brazil, the largest countries in the region (and with half the population), intellectuals consciously spurned the Eurocentric visions that had dominated in the nineteenth century and began to emphasize the racially and culturally mixed heritage of Mexicans and Brazilians. They embraced the African and Native American contributions to national culture along with the European (or Latin) heritage. Despite these critiques, the majority of these intellectuals were themselves primarily of European descent, and rarely did they reject the increasingly awkward term Latin America.

The systematic critique of the terminology has taken shape over the last three decades among academics across the Americas and Europe. Much of this discussion has focused on how the terminology emerged among the Europeanized elites in the nineteenth century, together with the role of the U.S. security and defense communities in promoting it. Walter Mignolo, an Argentine cultural theorist who taught for many years at Duke University, was one of the earliest and most vocal critics, arguing that the terminology was flawed and that Latin America, in fact, did not even exist.⁶ The emergence of a powerful wave of identity politics across the Americas has deconstructed the notion of a Latin American identity and has also called into question national identities. Despite regular calls among a wide variety of groups across the Americas for solidarity in the face of the cultural imperialism of the United States, these groups emphasize the multiplicity of identities (especially ethnoracial ones) and de-emphasize national and Latin American identity. The result of the intense conversation about identity over the past three decades has been to leave us in a quandary. Very few would rise today to defend the adequacy of the modifier “Latin” in front of America, yet no one has put forward another label for the region that has gained traction. For the moment, we continue to use this inadequate terminology with an awareness of its limitations, but without a more acceptable name.

Further complicating the conundrum is a lack of consensus on something as seemingly simple as who we should include in the region that we cannot adequately name! A brief survey of the major English-language textbooks on the history of Latin America across the twentieth century quickly reveals the range of definitions. In the U.S., textbooks on Latin America throughout the first half of the twentieth century took a very simple political approach to defining Latin America as the twenty republics that gained their independence in the nineteenth century, from Spain (eighteen countries), Portugal (Brazil), and France (Haiti). (Panama, of course, is an oddity here, having gained its independence as a part of New Granada in the 1820s and then again in 1903 as an “independent” republic. Cuba did not leave the Spanish empire until 1898 and then experienced U.S. occupation until 1902.) From the earliest texts of the founders of the field of Latin American history (such as William Spence Robertson and Percy Alvin Martin, founders of the Hispanic American Historical Review) to the journalist 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 bother to look beyond the standard twenty republics.⁷

Some of the very first synthetic texts on the region focused solely on Spain in the Americas and went no farther than the colonial period. Charles Edward Chapman, in Colonial Hispanic America: A History (1933), includes Brazil, and he rejects the “incorrect term ‘Latin America’” in favor of “Hispanic America.” The major synthetic surveys in the 1940s and 1950s took as their domain the twenty independent republics. Dana G. Munro, J. Fred Rippy, Donald E. Worcester and Wendell G. Schaeffer all produced encyclopedic surveys. Munro (a former State Department diplomat) covers the colonial period in just over a hundred pages and then takes another 450 to cover the political histories of each of the twenty nations! Much like Herring, Rippy focuses mainly on politics and economics, but with the occasional section on “intellectual life.” Worcester and Schaeffer’s massive survey (at more than 900 pages) offers a very straightforward political history with little effort to frame the issues or the region. It is classic history as “one damn thing after another.” The greatest publishing success of this era is easily John A. Crow’s The Epic of Latin America, which was first published in 1946. Trained as a scholar of Spanish literature, Crow taught for decades (1937–74) at UCLA. Despite its size (nearly a thousand pages in the last edition), The Epic of Latin America has been a huge commercial success, going through four editions over fifty years (1946, 1971, 1980, 1992).⁸

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 the biggest selling volumes has been E. Bradford Burns’s 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, and Trinidad and Tobago. 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.”⁹

Benjamin Keen’s A History of Latin America, probably the bestselling comprehensive history of Latin America over the last quarter of the twentieth century, covers the “twenty Latin American republics.” The very popular recent history of Latin America since independence, John Chasteen’s Born in Blood and Fire, also takes as its focus the twenty nation-states. What must be the most widely used volume on post-colonial Latin America, Thomas Skidmore and Peter 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). In the second edition (1989), Skidmore and Smith added a chapter on the Caribbean that included Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the Lesser Antilles, but they do not provide a rationale for their choice of countries. In contrast, Edwin Williamson’s The Penguin History of Latin America (1992) and Lawrence Clayton and Michael Conniff’s A History of Modern Latin America (1999) stick to the traditional political definition.¹⁰

The influential and authoritative Cambridge History of Latin America (eleven volumes, 1984–2009) 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 …)¹¹

With the exception of Puerto Rico, this definition could easily come from the Munro volume in 1942!

All these definitions hinge on an analysis of some set of common historical processes among nations in the Americas that make them part of something called Latin America, as well as their differences from the United States. With the prominent exception of the traditionalists – and their use of the independent nation-state – very rarely do the authors of histories of Latin America provide an explicit rationale for the areas included in the text. Nevertheless, at the heart of the matter 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 (or Canada).

At the core of that common history are the processes of invasion, conquest, and colonialism over three centuries, beginning with the “Columbian moment” in 1492. The collision of three peoples – Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans – gave birth to the region we now call Latin America. The moment of conception was the arrival of Columbus and his crew on that warm Caribbean morning in October 1492. Columbus unwittingly brought together two worlds and three peoples, initiating a violent and fertile series of cultural and biological clashes lasting centuries. The histories of the native peoples of the Americas (the New World) and the peoples of Africa and Europe (the Old World) before 1492 took shape in isolation from each other. The history of Latin America begins with the European explorations and invasions and the forced migration of millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas. These conquests and collisions took shape under Spanish and Portuguese colonialism and imperialism. The history of the United States and Canada (and the islands of the Caribbean) is also defined by invasion, conquest, and colonialism. The argument for a common history for what we call Latin America hinges on the belief that Spanish and Portuguese colonialism were similar enough to include Brazil in a region with Spanish America, and different enough from British colonialism to distinguish them from the United States and Canada (and the non-Iberian Caribbean). If one can write and argue for a common history for Latin America, it has its foundations in that colonial heritage of Iberian monarchies subjugating Native Americans and Africans as a labor force to produce agricultural and mining wealth for the European and Euro-American landholding and commercial elites.

With the emergence of transnational studies over the last generation or so, and the increasing importance of migration from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean to the United States, the old model of Latin America defined by nation-states has become less viable and harder to defend. What should the historian of Latin America do with the southwestern and southeastern regions of the United States in writing or teaching about the history of Latin America? Are they part of Latin America until the early nineteenth century, and then not after? What about all the Caribbean islands that formed part of the Spanish empire for a century or two before the British, Dutch, and French seized them in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Even more complicated, what about Puerto Rico? By all indicators (history, language, culture), Puerto Rico is Latin American, but it is politically part of the United States (the only “free associated state”). As millions of immigrants from south of its current political border have flowed into the United States in the last fifty years, the longstanding cultural and historical ties across both sides of the border have been reinforced. The second largest urban population of Salvadorans, for example, is in Los Angeles. The concentration of Mexican immigrants in several major U.S. cities makes them some of the largest Mexican cities, but outside of Mexico. In short, using the political, nation-state definition of Latin America excludes large sections of North America that are culturally and linguistically Latin American.

The history of the region since independence in the early nineteenth century has been one of increasing diversity and divergence. As each of the nation-states, territories, and adjacent regions has taken its own historical path, they have each reshaped, transformed, and discarded more and more of their common colonial heritage. That shared past of conquest, colonization, and Iberian control recedes into the past after two centuries of separation from the European metropolis. Guatemala, for example, has less and less in common with, say, Argentina and Brazil. Cuba and Bolivia become increasingly distinct and distant from their shared history. In short, even if we can argue (and I believe we can) that what makes Latin America a coherent region is a common history over several centuries, the shared heritage forged in that colonial past is less and less central to their present circumstances. The cultural, economic, and political processes and patterns that once defined the region have increasingly diverged over the past two centuries. In 2092, on the six-hundredth anniversary of the controversial and transformative Columbian voyage, we may find it very difficult to define Latin America as a coherent world region, either with the term Latin America or with some other name we may eventually create.