Science and Technology Production
Book Chapter
Authorship
Date
2022
Publishing House and Editing Place
Cambridge University Press
Book
Transitions in Latin American Literature: 1870-1930, vol. III
(pp. 105-120)
Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press
ISBN
9781108976367
Summary
Information provided by the agent in
SIGEVA
Latin Americanism was a topic of intense intellectual scrutiny and politicaland social activism at the turn of the twentieth century. Discussionsconcerning the definition of Latin America as a single transnational entityemerged immediately after the dismembering of the Spanish Empire, mostprominently in the “Carta de Jamaica” [“Letter from Jamaica”] (1815) ofVenezuelan liberator Simón Bolívar (1783–1830). In the mid-nineteenthcentury, Chilean Francisc...
Latin Americanism was a topic of intense intellectual scrutiny and politicaland social activism at the turn of the twentieth century. Discussionsconcerning the definition of Latin America as a single transnational entityemerged immediately after the dismembering of the Spanish Empire, mostprominently in the “Carta de Jamaica” [“Letter from Jamaica”] (1815) ofVenezuelan liberator Simón Bolívar (1783–1830). In the mid-nineteenthcentury, Chilean Francisco Bilbao (1823–1865) and Colombian José MaríaTorres Caicedo (1830–1889) were the first to discuss at length the issue ofcontinental unity vis-à-vis the hemispheric consequences of the Mexican–American War (1846–1848), as a result of which Mexico lost one-third of itsterritory. But it was not until the launching of the Pan American movementby US Secretary of State James Blaine in the late 1880s that the topicstarted to be systematically addressed by a wide range of intellectuals andpolitical and cultural organizers.Emerging at a time of rapid consolidation of the state and increasednationalism, I argue that turn-of-the-century Latin Americanism was never aboutreviving Bolívar’s idea of continental unity under a single common governmentor promoting armed resistance against the United States. Instead,it was an attempt to foster a more just way of life based on the expansion ofdemocratic capitalism under the political and cultural leadership ofa growing social actor looking for wider representation in positions of power: the middle-class university youth, a group defined not just by agebut by a specific set of ideological commitments, including the need tobring down oligarchic privilege and transform time-honored political,social, and cultural hierarchies.
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Key Words
Cultural HierarchiesLatin American CulturesLatin American StudiesLatin Americanisms