Semester Long Journal (50%)

Does Latin America Have a Common History?

Marshall C. Eakin
Vanderbilt University

“Nothing more than a geographical reality? And yet it
moves. In actions, unimportant at times, Latin America
reveals each day its fellowship as well as its
contradictions; we Latin Americans share a common
space, and not only on the map. . . Whatever our skin color
or language, aren’t we all made of assorted clays from the
same multiple earth?” Eduardo Galeano1

Nearly forty years ago Lewis Hanke edited a volume titled Do the

Americas Have a Common History? This book of essays sought to revive
discussion of Herbert Eugene Bolton’s call for the writing of a “history of
the Americas” in his 1932 presidential address to the American Historical
Association.2 In his writing and his teaching over a half-century, Bolton
promoted an approach that sees all of the Americas as part of a common set
of historical processes.3 Although few historians have chosen to follow
Bolton’s entreaty, and most historians of the Americas probably do not
believe that we should try to write a history of all the Americas, Bolton’s
controversial essay does force us to think about the commonalities (and
dissimilarities) in the colonization, conquest, and development of all the
Americas. I would like to pose a similar question that compels us to think
hard about an enormous part of the Americas that we do generally assume to
have a common history. I want to pose the question: Does Latin American
have a common history? And, if it does, what exactly is that common
history? I want us to take a hard look at Latin American history and rethink

1. “Ten Frequent Lies or Mistakes about Latin American and Culture,” from
Eduardo Galeano, We Say No: Chronicles, 1963/91, trans. Mark Fried (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1992), 162 and 164.
2. Lewis Hanke, Do the Americas Have a Common History? A Critique of the Bolton
Theory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964). Bolton’s address was delivered a meeting
in Toronto, Canada. It was then published in The American Historical Review, 38:3
(April 1933), 448-74 under the title, “The Epic of Greater America.” The essay is
reprinted in the Hanke volume.
3. For a full biography of Bolton see John Francis Bannon, Herbert Eugene Bolton: The
Historian and the Man, 1870-1953 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1978). Bolton
trained more than 100 (!) Ph.D.s at Stanford and Berkeley from 1909 to 1953.

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our assumptions about the very notion of “Latin America.”
Now, to cut to the chase and give you the bottom line up front so you

will not be kept waiting breathlessly for my conclusion, the answer is yes,
Latin America does have a common history . . . but . . . and all the
importance of this essay is in that pesky conjunction. As I will argue,
although historians (as well as others) have long operated on the widespread
assumption that Latin America has a common history, when pressed hard,
they have a very difficult time specifying what that common history is
beyond very broad general processes, and most of those took shape in the
colonial period. Even more important, historians are often hardpressed to
specify precisely which pieces of the American landscape should be
included into that common history. In this essay, I will briefly set out what I
think that common history consists of, how common it really is, who shares
it, and, most importantly, when it is no longer common. As we shall see, it
is that last point that I regard as the most important. Before doing that,
however, we need first to take a look at what we mean by the term “Latin
America.”

Common Assumptions

Where do we get this notion of “Latin America” in the first place? As
David Brading has shown, it is not until the early seventeenth century that
peoples of Spanish descent in the Americas begin to see themselves as some
sort of collective entity defined by the geography of the New World. An
emergent “creole identity, a collective consciousness that separated
Spaniards born in the New World from their European ancestors and
cousins” was taking shape within a century after the Columbian voyages.4
By the mid-seventeenth century, the conquest and early process of
colonization had been completed and the population of “Spanish”
Americans had been in place long enough and had reached sufficient levels
in what James Lockhart would call the “central areas” (New Spain, Peru, the
Caribbean) to create some nascent sense of rootedness.5 Small pockets or

4. D. A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the
Liberal State, 1492-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 293.
5. In the mid-seventeenth century there were perhaps 500,000 Spaniards in the
Americas, more than half of those born in the New World. The majority of the Spaniards
were concentrated in Mexico and Peru. Brazil, in contrast, had a “white” population of
less than 50,000. Despite the demographic catastrophe produced by conquest and
disease in the sixteenth century, the Native American population of New Spain and Peru
still numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The African slave populations of the
Caribbean and Brazil were in the tens of thousands and (in the case of Brazil) growing
rapidly. Mark A. Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson, Colonial Latin America, 4th ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 108-15. James Lockhart, “Social

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enclaves of neo-Spains (to steal and twist a term coined by Alfred Crosby)
had taken root in the Americas.6

Yet these enclaves were just that, small islands of Europeans in a vast
sea of Indians and Africans. Quite clearly the native peoples of the
Americas did not see themselves as part of a larger society or culture
(Indian or European) across the growing regions of the Spanish American
and Portuguese colonies. The Africans, mainly concentrated in the islands
of the Caribbean and on the northeastern coast of Brazil, had even less of a
sense of belonging given their traumatic dislocation from their homelands in
Africa to strange lands, cultures, and languages in the New World. Some of
these Indian and African peoples, and their descendants, were slowly being
drawn into the cultural and linguistic world of the neo-Spains (and neo-
Portugals) by the end of the seventeenth century. From the first moments of
conquest, racial and cultural mixture had begun to produce intermediate
groups who did not fit the “ideal types” of the racial hierarchy. Their very
presence and influence, in fact, meant that the neo-Spaniards were forced to
define themselves and their newly-emerging societies as distinct from (even
though very strongly identified with) Spain. To complicate matters further,
the very tiny Portuguese presence in Brazil, even in the late seventeenth
century, meant that the development of a neo-Portuguese sensibility was
even weaker than the process taking shape in the Spanish colonies. Any
sense of connectedness with their Spanish American counterparts was also
very weak, and to some extent the experience of the so-called “Babylonian
Captivity” (1580-1640) had possibly even heightened a sense of difference.7

By the late eighteenth century this sense of creole identity, of Spaniards
in the New World had been spurred forward both by the growth of creole
populations in Spanish America, but also by the impact of the Bourbon
Reforms. Ironically, these imperial reforms spurred on creole “nationalism”
and helped create a stronger sense of connectedness among the creole elites
from Mexico to Argentina.8 This sense of common identity, promoted and

Organization and Social Change in Colonial Spanish America,” in Leslie Bethell, ed.,
The Cambridge History of Latin America, volume II, Colonial Latin America
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 265-319, esp. 314. Lockhart develops
the notion of “central areas” in James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin
America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983).
6. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe,
900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. p. 2.
7. See Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Formation of Colonial Identity in Brazil,” in Nicholas
Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
8. Brading, 467-91, “The New State.”

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spurred on by creole elites, played a powerful role in the wars for
independence in Spanish America. (Perhaps its greatest statement is
Bolívar’s “Jamaica Letter”.) Yet, as Bolívar himself learned so bitterly,
local and regional roots in the collapsing Spanish colonies too often were
more powerful in their attraction than any greater sense of identity as
Americans or Spanish Americans. Trying to unite these similar, yet
disparate, peoples—Peruvians, Mexicans, Chileans—into a single
community exhausted even the extraordinary talents of Bolívar leading to
his famous despairing quote about “ploughing the seas.”9

The term “Latin America” only emerges in the mid-nineteenth century
in the aftermath of the wars for independence. Apparently first used by the
Colombian, José María Caicedo in 1856, it was quickly adopted by the
French under Napoleon III to provide ideological cover for his imperial and
colonial ambitions in the Americas.10 This subtle but important shift from
Spanish, Hispanic, or Ibero America to Latin America had (and continues to
have) powerful implications for defining a field and a region. It moved the
sense of the collective from neo-Spaniards to include not only neo-
Portuguese, but also the neo-French. (Ironically, most of the inhabitants of
the most important French possession were hundreds of thousands of
Africans and neo-Africans on the western side of Hispaniola.)11

The wars for independence and the processes of nation-building in the
nineteenth century helped forge a sense of a collective past and present
throughout the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies. In the midst of the
bloody struggle, Simón Bolívar could speak of “the hearts of all the peoples
of Spanish America.”12 By the 1890s José Martí could speak of “our
America” and José Enrique Rodó, writing from the other end of Latin
America, could address the “youth of America” in 1900, both clearly
speaking of Spanish or Hispano America.13 Ironically, this collective

9. The original quote is “America is ungovernable. He who serves the revolution
ploughs the sea . . .” Brading, 618.
10. Arturo Ardao, Génesis de la idea y el nombre de América Latina (Caracas: 1980),
83. See also, Arturo Ardao, España en el origen del nombre América Latina
(Montevideo: Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, Facultad de
Ciencias Sociales, 1992).
11. At the outbreak of rebellion in Saint Domingue in the 1790s the colony probably had
some 450,000 slaves, 40,000 free people of color, and 40,000 whites. Two-thirds of the
slaves were African-born. Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue
Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 25 and 278.
12. Simón Bolívar, The Hope of the Universe (Paris: UNESCO, 1983), 85. The date of
the statement was 28 April 1814.
13. José Martí, Nuestra América (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1980) [originally published in
1891] and José Enrique Rodó, Ariel (Madrid: Cátedra, 2000) [originally published in
1900].

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identity would arise partly in response to the growing power of the United
States throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the writings of
both Martí and Rodó this was quite conscious and deliberate. Both saw the
construction of a Latin American identity as a means to combat the growing
imperial power of “América del Norte” and a way to avoid the
“delatinization” of “Hispano-América.”14

Latin American intellectuals like Martí and Rodó were reacting to the
efforts of the United States to extend its sphere of influence throughout the
hemisphere. In many ways, the “creation” of “Latin America” in the minds
of citizens of the United States takes place at the end of the nineteenth
century. The Pan American movement, despite its efforts to forge a
hemispheric alliance of nations, did so by identifying the U.S. as a nation
with a heritage and history distinct from the “other” America. From the
“gentlemen scholars” such as William Hickling Prescott and Hubert Howe
Bancroft in the nineteenth century, to the modernization theorists of the late
twentieth century, much of the discussion of hemispheric solidarity has been
built upon a discussion of how to “overcome” the differences between the
United States and Latin America.15 In this long tradition, the “problem” has
been how to overcome Latin America’s history (read culture) by making its
people more like U.S. citizens (i.e., having them adopt “our” values).

Throughout much of the twentieth century, especially after 1945, Latin
Americans developed their sense of collective identity in opposition to U.S.
power and imperialism in the region, and scholars in the United States too
often defined Latin America out of an experience shaped by the Cold War
and government funding efforts designed to fight that war in the academic
arena. This oppositional approach has been fuzzy from both directions, and
the linguistic terminology has contributed to the fuzziness. Citizens of the
United States, calling themselves “Americans,” have never been very clear
on what exactly is to the south, and the term “Latin America” has been left
vague and poorly defined. Those who have consciously taken on the identity
of “Latin Americans” (usually from Brazil and Spanish-speaking nations)
have often taken to calling those from the U.S. “North Americans” a vague
term that should include Mexicans and Canadians. From my perspective,
both perspectives tend to leave out or avoid those areas of the Americas that
make definitions the most problematic and interesting: most of the islands

14. See, for example, Rodó, 196.
15. For an important discussion of this topic see Mark T. Berger, Under Northern Eyes:
Latin American Studies and US Hegemony in the Americas, 1898-1990 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1995), esp. 16-17. See also Marshall C. Eakin, “Latin
American History in the United States: From Gentlemen Scholars to Academic
Specialists,” The History Teacher, 31:4 (August 1998), 539-61.

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of the Caribbean (especially those where Spanish is not the principal
language), Belize, the Guianas, and regions of “overlap” (what Bolton
called the Spanish Borderlands). (One could also include much of the
Caribbean coastal zone of Central America.) It is precisely in these
“transitional zones” that the definition of Latin America and the United
States becomes most difficult and challenging.

Our current conception of Latin America has its most powerful 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 in 1958, academia
in the United States carved up the world into regions or areas and
universities scrambled to build “area studies” centers. Latin America was
one of the most clearly coherent world regions with its dominant Iberian
linguistic, political, and cultural traditions. In many ways, it is a more
coherent region than “Europe” or “Southeast Asia” with their multiple
languages and ethnicities. Yet, again, the area studies programs faced
dilemmas from their inception in how to deal with “non-Latin” regions,
especially in the Caribbean basin.16

The tendency has been to ignore these areas. In the U.S., standard
textbooks on Latin America throughout the first half of the twentieth
century took a very neat political approach to defining Latin America as the
twenty republics that gained their independence from Spain (18 countries),
Portugal (Brazil), and France (Haiti) in the nineteenth century.17 U.S.
foreign policy powerfully shaped the definition of the region including only
independent nations, and excluding or ignoring those areas of the Caribbean
and northern South America that remained under colonial rule (British,
French, U.S.). From the earliest texts of the founders of the field of Latin
American history (such as William Spence Robertson and Percy A. Martin,
founders of the Hispanic American Historical Review) to 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

16. 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. 162-82.
17. Panama, of course, is the oddity here gaining its independence as a part of New
Granada in the 1820s, and then again in 1903 as an “independent” republic.

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bother to look beyond the standard twenty republics.18
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 biggest selling
volumes has been E. Bradford Burns’ 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, Trinidad and Tobago.19 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.”20 Benjamin
Keen’s A History of Latin America, possibly the bestselling, comprehensive
history of Latin America over the last twenty years, covers the “twenty
Latin American republics.”21 What must be the most widely selling volume
on post-colonial Latin America, Skidmore and 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.22 In the second edition
(1989) Skidmore and Smith added a chapter on the Caribbean that included
Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the Lesser Antilles.23 In contrast, Edwin

18. William Spence Robinson, Rise of the Spanish-American Republics as Told in the
Lives of Their Liberators (New York: D. Appleton and Company,1921); Herman G.
James and Percy A. Martin, The Republics of Latin America: Their History,
Governments and Economic Conditions (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923); Hubert
Herring, A History of Latin America from the Beginnings to the Present, 3rd ed. (New
York: Knopf, 1968); John Gunther, Inside Latin America (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1941).
19. E. Bradford Burns, Latin America: A Concise Interpretive History (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 3 and 239-44.
20. E. Bradford Burns, Latin America: A Concise Interpretive History, 6th ed.
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1994), 2 and 347-8.
21. The first edition appeared in 1980 as A Short History of Latin America (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin) with Mark Wasserman as the co-author. Wasserman had dropped off
the title page by the fourth edition (1992) and the sixth edition is co-authored with Keith
Haynes A History of Latin America (2000). The quote comes from p. xii of the 2000
edition.
22. Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1984). All countries in the appendixes at the end of the book come
from the traditional twenty.
23. Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America, 2nd ed. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

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Williamson’s The Penguin History of Latin America (1992) and Clayton and
Conniff’s A History of Modern Latin America (1999) stick to the traditional
definition.24 The influential and authoritative Cambridge History of Latin
America (11 volumes, 1984-95 ) 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 . . .)”25 With the exception of
Puerto Rico, this definition could easily come from the James and Martin
volume in 1923!

All of these definitions hinge on an analysis of some set of
commonalities among nations in Americas that make them part of
something called Latin America, as well as their differences from the United
States. At the heart of the matter, then, 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. So what are the major
features of that common history that binds the peoples of so many countries
together into a unit that we can call Latin America?

A ‘Common’ History?
I believe that the very essence of any notion of Latin America emerges

primarily out of the view that the region and peoples arose out of the
process of conquest and colonization by European powers, primarily the
Spanish and Portuguese. The “Latin” in Latin America derives primarily
from this vision of the creation out of European conquest. These processes
of conquest and colonization, the complex struggles between conqueror and
colonized, are at the very essence of any definition of Latin America. This
is, if you will, the touchstone of Latin American history. This perspective
has been around for centuries. Brading’s colonial creole “first Americans”
defined themselves out of this process of conquest and colonization in the

24. Williamson’s statistical tables, in fact, do not even include all twenty! Edwin
Williamson, The Penguin History of Latin America (London: Penguin, 1992). rence
A. Clayton and Michael L. Conniff, A History of Modern Latin America (Fort Worth:
Harcourt Brace, 1999).
25. Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America, volume I, Colonial
Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), xiv.

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sixteenth century. In the nineteenth century, the first wave of historians
wrote about the drive to create new nations in Latin America as the
triumphal struggle of European civilization over the barbarism of native
peoples and Africans. (Sarmiento, of course, is the foundational text in this
genre.)26 The so-called “second conquest” of the late nineteenth century was
rationalized by many Latin American intellectuals and elites as the final
stage of the “first conquest” in the sixteenth century.27

This tale of European conquest and colonization was a reductionist tale
from its beginnings. It was really the story of the conquest of James
Lockhart’s “central areas”—the Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru. By the end of
the sixteenth century the fringes of the two Spanish viceroyalties were just
that—frontiers sparsely settled by Europeans (or by anyone else in many
places). In the case of Brazil, it is even difficult to speak of a “conquest” of
the small enclaves on the Atlantic coast. More than 98 percent of what is
now Brazil lay beyond the pale of European conquest and colonization.28
When creole identity began to emerge in the Spanish American colonies in
the seventeenth century, the vast majority of what we would include today
in any definition of Latin America lay beyond the reach of European power
and control. Most of the lands remained fragmented pieces of an indigenous
America. Even in the central areas, the Spaniards and Portuguese
constituted small islands of Europeans in a sea of non-European peoples.

In these central areas, what I call the “core regions,” we see unfold the
basic elements of the features that most historians today would employ in
their definition of Latin America: the imposition of European (1) political
and legal structures, (2) languages, (3) religions, and (4) cultures (to use a
very broad and amorphous term). Until the 1960s, traditional historians
generally saw this process as unilinear, often inevitable, and desirable.
(There were important dissenters such as Juan Bautista Alberdi.)29 Much of
the “story” of the field of Latin American history since the 1960s has been

26. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: civilización y barbarie, vida de Juan
Facundo Quiroga, 7a ed. (México: Editorial Porrúa, 1989) [first published in 1845].
27. See, for example, Steven C. Topik and Allen Wells, eds., The Second Conquest of
Latin America: Coffee, Henequen, and Oil during the Export Boom, 1850-1930 (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1998) and E. Bradford Burns, The Poverty of Progress: Latin
America in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
28. See, for example, H. B. Johnson, “ Portuguese Settlement, 1500-1580,” and Stuart B.
Schwartz, “ Plantations and Peripheries, c. 1580-c. 1750,” in Leslie Bethell, ed.,
Colonial Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1-38 and 67-144; and,
James Lang, Portuguese Brazil: The King’s Plantation (New York: Academic Press,
1979), esp. Chapter 1.
29. For a discussion of Alberdi and his denunciation of the perspective of his
contemporary Sarmiento, see Burns, 51-3.

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challenges to this powerful and enduring paradigm. Although many today
would probably acknowledge that the process of Europeanization has been
overwhelming and ongoing, the approach over the past forty years has been
to emphasize the resistance of non-European peoples to the juggernaut of
Europeanization, and to highlight the give-and-take in the process.30
Conquest and colonization, to put it another way, was not a unilineal and
complete process, but rather a bitter struggle among Europeans and non-
Europeans that has produced a complex cultural mix that defines
contemporary Latin America. Rather than emphasize the role of elites,
political, military, and diplomatic history, historians in recent generations
have placed more emphasis on racial and social mixture, culture, and non-
elites, especially peasants, slaves, workers, and women.31

The history of Latin America then emerges out of the collision of
peoples that begins with the “Columbian Moment” in October 1492. Before
the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the “New World” there was no Latin
America. On that warm Caribbean morning in October 1492, Columbus
unwittingly brought together two worlds and three peoples in a violent and
fertile series of cultural and biological clashes that continue today. A
common process of conquest, colonization, resistance, and accommodation
across the region provides the unity that allows us to speak of something so
mislabeled as “Latin” America. Five …