Since the European invasion of the American continent in the fifteenth century, Latin America has been constructed as a space of monstrosity, of radical Otherness. Columbus projected on the continent and its inhabitants’ European medieval images of Cynocephalus and cyclops, asserting that there were present in the recently “discovered” territories. In addition, he coined the word and the idea of the American cannibal, a phantasm that still haunts the imaginary of the Caribbean. As stated by scholar Carlos Jáuregui, “since the first encounters, Europeans reported cannibals all over the place, creating a sort of semantic affinity between cannibalism and America. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century the New World was culturally, religiously, and geographically constructed as some sort of Canibalia” (14, my translation). Despite the centuries that passed between Columbus's assumptions and fantasies and the present, the American continent (mainly from the Rio Grande downwards) is still considered in many respects a Canibalia. That is, Latin America continues to be regarded from the outside as a chaotic, less developed space (or “in development” for the most progressive), where nature runs rampant (and therefore, the only possible form of tourism is ecotourism), and inhabited by poor masses of monstrous behavior (e.g., imagined as all drug traffickers, pickpockets, swindlers, etc.) We just have to remember the depictions of Mexican immigrants, and Mexico, given by former president Trump in his 2016 campaign: “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists” (Scott). Despite the widespread rejection of Trump's statements in much of the U.S. and international media, images of Latin America as a violent, disorderly, sexually primitive, and even monstrous space remain prevalent both in the United States and in Europe.

These misrepresentations have been (and are) recognized by Latin American scholars, writers, and artists, who have approached them in various ways. On one side are those who have firmly rejected these representations and reflected them, transforming the colonial/imperial power into a monster as well. One of the most important examples of this positioning in Latin America was the Cuban politician and revolutionary José Martí, who in an 1895 letter to his friend Manuel Mercado wrote, “I lived in the monster and I know its entrails.”