Latin America

from the Macalester Public Knowledge Base

c4tvirozelch Latin America is the geopolitical name given to the grouping of nation-states, often with a dominant population that could be mestizo, black or indio, and which generally share a romance national language (french, spanish and portuguese), given a history of white european colonial legacy.

The term Latin American refers to the populations from within these national boundaries.

1 Problems of Perspective
2 Race and Ethnicity
3 Language
4 Culture
5 General Introduction to Latin America
6 Latin American Nations
7 Links
8 Further reading

[edit] Problems of Perspective

Adelante! is a student organization based in a college in the United States, and this frames the conversation in many fronts.

This article does not aim to be a neutral perspective on Latin American nation-states nor its people - this is the reason why wikipedia is given a low priority in the reference list. Instead, political inclination undergirds various analyses herein presented.

[edit] Race and Ethnicity

Nationalistic dicourses from within Latin American nations often claim the country's population to be entirely mestizo, or destined to head towards mestizaje; this is the case of MÃ©xico and Chile, for example.

Being mestizo is oft celebrated as a sign of native authenticity in relation to the U.S. gringo. This ethos is spotlighted in JosÃ© Vasconcelo's La Raza CÃ³smica (1925; link to full article in spanish), where he argues that various human races evolve through a continuous process of miscegenation (mestizaje). Vasconcelo's analysis has since received criticism that it actually encourages a whitening of the races.

Many Central American and Andean nations, such as Guatemala, PerÃº, Bolivia, have a majority indio population that is generally oppressed by racial and class-based structures of domination. Analyzing the phenomenon in terms of national boundaries also has its limits, as many indio populations cohabit the informal economy and are less bound by national

[edit] in the Southern Cone

[edit] in Brasil

[edit] Further reading

Marjorie Becker, "Torching La PurÃsima, Dancing at the Altar: The Construction of Revolutionary Hegemony in Michoacan, 1934-1940," in Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 247-264.
Rick A. Lopez, "The India Bonita Contest of 1921 and the Ethnicization of Mexican National Culture," Hispanic American Historical review 82(2) (2002): 291-328.