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.
Notes
1 1 See, for example, J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
2 2 Thomas H. Holloway, “Introduction,” in Thomas H. Holloway, ed., A Companion to Latin American History (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 1–9; Michel Gobat, “The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy, and Race,” American Historical Review, 118/5 (2013): 1345–75.
3 3 For an important discussion of this topic, see Mark T. Berger, Under Northern Eyes: Latin American Studies and U.S. Hegemony in the Americas, 1898–1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 16–17. See also Richard D. Lambert, et al., ed., Beyond Growth: The Next Stages in Language and Area Studies (Washington, DC: Association of American Universities, 1984); David Szanton, ed., The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), esp. Paul W. Drake and Lisa Hilbink, “Latin American Studies: Theory and Practice,” pp. 34–73; Helen Delpar, Looking South: The Evolution of Latin Americanist Scholarship in the United States, 1850–1975 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008); Ricardo Donato Salvatore, Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
4 4 José Moya, “Introduction,” in José Moya, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 18.
5 5 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. pp. 162–82. The U.S. Department of Education defines Latin American Studies as “A program that focuses on the history, society, politics, culture, and economics of one or more of the Hispanic peoples of the North and South American Continents outside Canada and the United States, including the study of the Pre-Columbian period and the flow of immigrants from other societies” (http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cipcode/cipdetail.aspx?y=55&cipid=88024).
6 6 Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005).
7 7 William Spence Robertson, Rise of the Spanish-American Republics as Told in the Lives of Their Liberators (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1921); Herman G. James and Percy A. Martin, The Republics of Latin America: Their History, Governments and Economic
