As the quincentennial of what we do not dare to call the discovery of the New World approaches, Spanish America remains impervious to the festive mood reigning in Spain. The reasons are painfully obvious: a region facing an at best uncertain future, while trying to close the wounds opened by a quarter-century of acute sociopolitical confrontation, and still reeling under the blows inflicted to its economy during the unlamented ‘lost decade’ just closed, has good reason to wonder whether it has anything to celebrate.

Justified as it may be, the despondency caused by recent misfortunes does not offer the best inspiration to achieve a fair and balanced view of a five-centuries long historical experience. It is enough to compare the assessments inspired by the current centennial milestone with those of one century ago to discover how dangerous it is to pass judgement on such an experience by projecting onto it the dominant features of the immediate present.

Yet in 1892 the times were not much more brilliant than today; several among the largest neo-hispanic countries were suffering the devastating impact of the worst economic crisis in their history: these circumstances did not, however, seriously undermine the optimism with which they looked at their future, an optimism that encouraged the founding fathers of their national historiographies to take in their stride the sombre aspects of the national past. If today a very different approach seems in order, it is not only because the atrocious history of our century has all but killed the faith nineteenth-century historians deposited in all kinds of manifest destinies, but perhaps also because of the justified suspicion that what Latin America faces today is different in kind from the streaks of bad luck all too frequent in its short history, that the world-wide transformations that reached spectacular culmination in the breakdown of the ‘really existing socialism’ are full of menace for the region, and the practical wisdom distilled from the experience of the past five centuries cannot offer any valid guidance for the challenges of the ‘new world order’ that is currently striving to be born.