Nations and Regions in Latin America
The European expansion into the American continent, from the end of the fifteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century, was conducted primarily by the Spanish, Portuguese, British, and French and resulted in an array of diverse institutional, religious, commercial, political, and military assemblages. It was an expansion that also resulted in the transformation of food and food habits across the world (Sokolov 1991). The American War of Independence and the French Revolution inspired independence claims in some of the Caribbean islands and continental mainlands. Recognizing the differences that resulted from different forms of colonial-imperial domination, Rodríguez O. (1996) has examined the movements for independence in Spanish-speaking Latin American countries. In general terms, he locates the origins of Creole discontent as arising from three different sources: first, a colonial structure that prioritized the appointment of newly arrived Europeans into positions of authority over the rights of those born of European parents on American soil; second, the Bourbon Reforms, which created a system of intendancies that, while improving tax collection, encouraged the emergence of regional interests and regionalism; and third, the French invasion of Spain, which made the Creoles unsure about who in Spain (i.e., the Iberian authorities or the French) was actually in charge of the American territories. Regionalism emerged within the different colonized regions of the continent that were governed as autonomous (and sometimes rival) administrative entities. In this sense, Cuba, New Spain, Peru, Yucatán, and Argentina, for example, constituted different recognizable regions wherein local elites consolidated positions of power and developed different political and economic interests that were often at odds with those of the elites in other regions.
In declaring their autonomy from Spain, at least some of the leaders were acting strategically, swearing allegiance to the king, on the one hand, while affirming their autonomy during the French occupation of Spain, on the other. By the early nineteenth century, affirmations of autonomy had transformed into declarations of independence. In 1810, Argentina, Colombia, and New Spain began their struggles to obtain independence. Chile did so in 1818, and Peru delayed until 1821 its declaration of independence from Spain. Yucatán never requested independence. The short-lived republic of Gran Colombia at that time included Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Ecuador (portions of which are still in dispute between Ecuador and Peru), while Argentina then encompassed what are today Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia. New Spain included much of today's Mexico, plus the present-day US states of Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Yucatán, in turn, included the entire peninsula plus, at different times, parts of today's Guatemala and Belize, as well as portions of today's states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Eventually, following internecine wars, those territories succeeded in separating from the emerging countries to which they were administratively subordinated, and in each case the governing elites devised different strategies to construct distinctive nations (Acree and González Espitia 2009; Castro-Klarén and Chasteen 2003; Radcliffe and Westwood 1996; Rodríguez O. 1996). In contrast to these new emerging nations, regional Yucatecan elites were comfortable with the Constitution of Cadiz (1812) and the fiscal privileges that they gained from it, as it encompassed the main trade ports (Campeche and Sisal) located between Havana in the Caribbean Sea and the port of Veracruz, where most goods were imported into New Spain (Reid 1979).
During the construction of new independent nations, regionally dominant groups—and the intelligentsia that supported them—disregarded the fact that the territories they claimed as nation-states encompassed multiple ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious groups that provided other regional groups with the certitude that they possessed meaningful cultural differences that distinguished them from the dominant groups located in the new seats of power (Gómez-Moriana and Durán-Cogan 2001). As several authors have argued (following, and sometimes diverging from, Benedict Anderson's concept of ‘imagined communities’), in each new nation, the print media and the discussions that they encouraged in the public sphere contributed to the creation of a consciousness of belonging to distinct nations. They also disseminated the conviction that each nation was made up of only one distinct culture. As Chasteen (2003: xvii) suggests, the different Latin American nations invested lots of energy in creating nativist images in fiction, history, music, dance, and poetry and also originated ‘typical dishes' in support of their distinctiveness. In many cases, such as those mentioned above, different regions managed to separate themselves from the encompassing administrative units into which Spain had placed them. In contrast to this experience, despite initial hints of support from the Republic of Texas and the US Congress, in the end the Yucatecan government failed to garner the necessary international support and recognition in order to become an independent nation (Williams 1929).
There are diverging interpretations regarding the meaning of regional identities at the time of independence. Some suggest that they responded to specific local economic interests and were not yet ‘national' identities (e.g., Guerra 2003: 7). That is, in New Spain, the newly independent elites sought to protect their central highland regional, political, and economic interests, but they had not yet developed the common consciousness of a nation. From its origin as an independent state, Mexico was ruled by competing elites from the center and northern states, each seeking to privilege the interests of the regional group of which they were constituents. Arguably, this tendency continued after the twentieth-century Mexican Revolution (Drake 1970). The same can be said of Yucatecan elites in the territory of post-independence Yucatán, where, in the cities of Campeche, Mérida, and Valladolid, they were vying for the domination of the region's resources, commerce, and political power. In this historical context, alternative regional affiliations and interests permitted ex-centric groups to defy the power and authority of central Mexican elites. This tug-of-war happened in several Latin American countries: in Mexico, as the examples of Texans and Yucatecans illustrate (Careaga Viliesid 2000); in Argentina, where regional provincial elites challenged the authority of the Buenos Aires elite (Donghi 2003: 38), leading to the independence of some regions; and in Brazil, where Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro elites diverged on the grounds of their pro- or anti-slavery positions (Needell 1987). The need to establish homogeneous nation-states also explains the regional and national efforts to conceal from the memory of the nation the part played by indigenous or African groups in the independence struggles in places such as today's Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Argentina (González-Stephan 2009; Huner 2009; Needell 1987; Radcliffe and Westwood 1996; Verdesio 2003).4
This strong tie between the economic, political, religious, or military interests of different regions has generated different explanatory frameworks for the existence of regions and for the need to theorize about them. These explanations range from essentialist positions that tie the identity of a people to the geography and ecology of the place in a foundational fashion (Fabregas Puig 1992)—so that it becomes possible to write about Mexico as if it existed 5,000 years ago (which it did not—not even as an idea; e.g., see Long-Solís and Vargas 2005)—to explanations that reduce the region to economic or political networks and connections (Liverman and Cravey 1992; C. Smith 1976a, 1976b). There have been, however, attempts to introduce the cultural dimension into the analysis of regionalism as a phenomenon. For example, Van Young (1992: 2) distinguishes between ‘regionality', or the condition of being a region, and ‘regionalism', “the self-conscious identification—cultural, political, and sentimental—that large groups of people develop over time within certain geographical spaces.” For him, there is a close relationship between regional and class systems that share attributes, underscoring the multi-dimensionality of regionalism: first, both of these systems show internal differentiation among the different groups encompassed by a region; second, they reveal a hierarchical structure of power among these groups; and, third, they show articulation in the form of an organized relation among the elements constitutive of the system (ibid.: 4-5). Nonetheless, during the development of the modern nation, regionalist feelings have often been dismissed as archaic remains that pre-date the nation (ibid.: 9) or as pre-modern inclinations that obstruct the formation of the modern nation-state (Drake 1970).
Within this cultural perspective, Lomnitz (1992) privileges the relationship between region and hegemony as an inherent association—that is, he is not worried about unpacking the relationship between
