Latin Identity
What is the character of Latin-ness in Latin America?
Keen
and Haynes, Imperialism's origins and extent
William E. Burghardt Dubois, The Negro,
Octacio Paz , The Labyrinth of Solitude
Spanish heritage in the transformation of the America's
- Medieval legacy of the Moors, unification and conquistadors
- Aristotle's worldview categories of experience
- Roman Catholicism, the hierarchy of conservative faith
- Arabic invasions, the scientific learning of Asia and Greek ideas
- France, the Bourbon dynastic claims and Napoleon's subjugation
- Austria-Hungary, the Hapsburg dynastic claims and conservatism
- Mongol invasions, pressed the visigoths and ostrogoths west
- Russia, Austria as examples of conservative empires comprised of many diverse nationalities
- Renaissance, the belief in the identity and honor of human life
- Geography the science of mapping the world to divide it up
- Learning, classical education and Aristotelian logic
- Architecture & art the neoclassical revival, baroque and Vitruvious
- Mathematics, Euclidean geometry, Arabic/Hindu numerals
- Economy, mercantilism and the the role of the metropolis
Latin is defiined as speakers of ancient Latin based languages but primariliy the Ibero-american, that is Portuguese and Spanish speaking, peoples and their dominant cultural areas in Asia and the Americas.
Ethnocentric qualities
"The inequities of the area's income distribution remain staggering."
Political prejudice - immature democracies, power of persistent oligarchies.
Religious prejudice - authoritarian Catholicism
Identity issue
of mixed race and
multiple ethnicity
Humiliation of
Conquest
Slavery
Dependency Theory
"The economy of certain countries is conditioned by the development and expansion of another dominant economy."
- Europe 1492-1917
- USA 1917 - 1980
- Globalization 1980s - now\
The fascination of urban Europe and later north America with the exotic peoples of the earth has been fed, no less by the Caribbean isles and the South American mainland, than by Asian and African remoteness. Latin America holds for us both a deep fascination and an appalling horror. Indeed the "Spanish manifest destiny" has clashed historically with the United State's eagerness to possess the continent's vast resources time and again from Florida (1820s) to Texas (1840s) and California, to Cuba (1850s) and ultimately the entire Caribbean (1896). In this long rivalry from 1783 until today the blindness of the United States to the true conditions of the Americas has hampered the furtherance of US interests in the West Indies, Mexico and South America. Far from the siblings of democracy and the enlightenment that the America's are, an inherent xenophobia in the United States has caused us to assume a mistaken superiority with respect to Latin American peoples. In our failure to look beneath the latin-ness we miss the multiracial character and diverse conditions of the dominant indigenous, Afro-American and minority communities that comprise the Americas. The cruelty with which the Caribbean was settled, occupied, subdued and controlled in some ways lingers, despite our democratic values, in part because of our national aversion to Iberian culture.
J. Siry
Date: 19 March 2008
