In Spain, it is normal to signify Latin America by the word America. If the United States of America is meant and the official name is not used, the name in Castilian is usually América del Norte or Norteamérica and in Catalan, Amèrica del Nord or Nordamèrica. This is of course a geographically inexact usage, since North America also embraces Mexico and Canada. But the preference in Spanish and Catalan seems most often to reserve that term for the United States. For the purposes of this book it is important to arrive at a consistent practice in designating all these places, and one as internationally intelligible as possible; the everyday usage of Spain does not meet these requirements, since it does not correspond to the practice of English-, French-, and German-speakers, among many others and would not be intelligible to them. Thus, the internationally common usage, will be employed in this book: viz., what English-speakers call “the Americas” are divided — both in the main text and in translations from Catalan or Castilian — into North, Central, and South America; countries in North America will be called by their legal names (or the commonly-accepted shortened form, e.g., Mexico for the United States of Mexico). It is not denied that there are political implications in these differences of usage, but there seems to be no alternative but to employ what amounts to the almost universal practice, the misfortune being that the exception to this is the hispanic one, otherwise privileged in this context.

Other, less strictly geographical, reasons for choosing the most nuanced usage will be clear if we think of such common Englishlanguage terms as “African American,” used with great deliberateness to refer to descendants of African-import slavery of the United States. There is currently no other generally accepted term for the people of this culture, which is not used in this sense in connection with Africadescended people in other countries of the Americas.

Quotations from non-Iberian languages that use the common terms American, américain, Amerikaner, etc. to indicate a person or thing belonging to the United States are retained without comment.