Latin America: from geographical expression to historical real

For a long time the term ‘Latin America’, popularised in the United States, was used only in a geographical sense to designate the countries situated south of the Rio Grande. Far from showing any interest in what they had in common, the nations that emerged from the Iberian colonisation of the Americas sought to emphasise their distinctive characteristics in an effort to define their own national personalities. With the exception of Brazil, colonised by Portugal, and Haiti, colonised by France, the remaining Latin American republics share much of their colonial history and, in Spanish, a common language. Nevertheless, the fact that the pre-Columbian cultural heritage contributed in such widely diverse ways to the formation of the present national personalities makes the differences between countries such as Argentina and Mexico as great as the similarities. The same can be said of the African ethnico-cultural contribution, which is no less unevenly distributed. Even leaving aside the case of Haiti, whose African-French origins place it in a category of its own, the differences between the countries of the Caribbean region, where there is a marked African ethnico-cultural influence, and the Andean countries, where indigenous ethnico-cultural elements predominate, are as marked as is possible for countries sharing part of their history. None the less, the emphasis on diversity was less a reflexion of the real extent of the differences between the Latin American countries than of their awareness of a common origin.