Latin America

The Allure and Power of an Idea

Bibliographic Data

ID2772301
AuthorsGeorge Reid-Andrews (0000-0002-5510-2456, University of Pittsburgh, corresponding author), George Reid Andrews (University of Pittsburgh)
Year2018
Volume98
Issue2
Pages369-371
Publication date2018-05-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-4380015
OpenAlexW2803887401
LanguageEN
Citations received6

Once every three or four years, I offer a graduate seminar called Latin American Readings. The purpose of the course is to introduce students to works that try to think about Latin America as a region: for example, Tulio Halperin Donghi's Historia contemporánea de América Latina (1969), or Shawn Miller's An Environmental History of Latin America (2007), or Luis Bértola and José Antonio Ocampo's The Economic Development of Latin America since Independence (2012). At the end of the term I ask the students to discuss how useful the concept of Latin America is for historians and whether we should continue to use it in our work. They almost always conclude that we should.Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo appears to be on board with that. While he spends most of his new book denouncing the concept of Latin America, he concludes, somewhat surprisingly, with a chapter explaining why we should nevertheless continue to use it. Most of his readers, I believe, will be receptive to his analysis of the concept's shortcomings: its historical origins in Iberian, European, and US imperialism; its deep connections to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century racism; its inability to capture the immense variations in the region's ecologies, politics, economies, and societies; its insistence on a false and misconceived cultural authenticity. For these reasons and others, he argues, the term has never enjoyed great acceptance in Spanish America and even less in Brazil, where in 2014 less than 4 percent of survey respondents identified themselves as Latin American (p. 15). Today the idea of Latin America finds its primary home in US universities and in US and international government agencies.Most of us who offer courses on Latin American history will readily acknowledge the concept's limits and shortcomings. Why, then, continue to use it? Partly because, at least in the United States, the idea of Latin America “will endure for the foreseeable future” and is not going away (p. 164). Since students come into our courses thinking that Latin America in fact exists as a region, it is incumbent on historians to try to clarify and explain the terms of that existence. This in turn requires that we approach the region with “plebeian specificity,” paying close attention to local particularities and rejecting unsustainably broad generalizations (p. 168).The concept of Latin America is also quite compatible with current transnational approaches and can help us identify “historical connections and interactions that are unreachable through mere national histories” (p. 168). Those connections apply both within the region (see Brazilian historian Maria Ligia Prado's comments on the concept's utility for connecting Brazil to Spanish America [p. 75]) and beyond it, to Europe, Africa, and the United States.All these points, and others as well, are made in a passionate, impressively erudite, and occasionally playful manner. I found especially engaging a chapter on popular music that, with the exception of the Nueva Canción movement of the 1970s and 1980s, finds the idea of Latin America almost completely absent from popular songs and musical genres in the region.The book does have some rough spots, however, and points that are simply wrong. For example, it predicts that 40 percent of the US population will “soon be classified as Latino/a,” a term that, like Latin America, Tenorio-Trillo does not much like (p. 77). According to the US Census Bureau, 19 percent of the US population currently identifies as Latino or Hispanic; the bureau projects that that percentage will rise to 29 percent in 2060. In contrast to Tenorio-Trillo's claim that “year after year US statistics show that the great majority of [US] Latinos/as do not speak any Latino language” (p. 84), the US Census Bureau reports (in the document “Language Use in the United States: 2011”) that three-quarters of self-identified Latinos speak Spanish at home. The statement that “starting in Argentina in the late 1970s, the entire region [of Latin America] began to assume democratic features of government” will come as a surprise to Argentines who lived through the brutal dictatorship and dirty war of those years (p. 125).Finally, Tenorio-Trillo suggests that “‘Afro-Latin America’ . . . , as an academic trend and as a social movement, is also disintegrating the very concept of Latin America” through its focus on issues of race at the national level (p. 18). As the book elsewhere acknowledges, attention to national issues is perfectly compatible with—indeed, a necessary component of—close attention to the region as a whole. And Afro-Latin America—a term invented by black journalists and activists in São Paulo in the mid-1970s—builds directly on the concept of Latin America. Beginning in 1977 and continuing through the present, national black movements have convened a series of international congresses that have further cemented those movements' regional orientation. Far from “disintegrating” the concept of Latin America, the idea of Afro-Latin America reconfirms it.Those caveats aside, this is an engaging and lucidly argued book on a topic of central importance to all historians of the region

Economic history · Independence (probability theory) · Latin American studies · Latin Americans · Miller · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · History · International Relations in Latin America · Law

Tools

Open DOI