Nikkilude #1: “Latin America”

So what’s the deal with the quotation marks? I won’t post my 20 page senior thesis here (but if you really wanna read it, just drop me a message…), however I think it’s important to explain the knowledge I gained about this phrase after researching it for 6 months that changed my perspective on it. If I tell you right now to think of Latin America, you can probably visualize the basic geographic layout in your mind starting with Mexico all the way down to the “end of the world” in Argentina. You might think of Spanish-speaking people that look and dress a certain way and share a colonial history in addition to problems with drugs, corruption and violence. In a way, you are right. But on the other hand, this is a terrible simplification that continues to disservice the continent. 

The “Latin” part of “Latin America” clearly would not exist without European colonization so automatically if you’re talking about “Latin American” history, you preclude the discussion of cultures and civilizations that were there thousands of years before Europeans even knew they sail across the ocean without falling off the Earth. Cultures that in many cases still have influence and importance today—yet continue to be marginalized and glossed over. Though because of this, many postmodern “Latin America” scholars argue that if the peoples of this continent share nothing else, they do share what Gloria Anzaldúa brilliantly calls the “colonial wound”, which is the disempowering legacy created by colonization that justified the violence, marginalization, invasion and dependency in the region in the name of “progress”. The themes relevant to these issues are obvious and prevalent in many of the cultural pieces generated by peoples from this region, thus allowing us to group them together via the phrase “Latin American”. But I have a problem with this phrase because I think it glosses over the huge diversity of peoples, ideas, cultures and perspectives present, allowing us to condense it down into Spanish, dirty wars and Gabriel García Márquez. And yet despite being such a terrible name for a place, it still serves as a discursive space for any type of “Latin American” person to explore this identity—an identity of many I’s and many contradictions. “Latin America” is playing Hotel California on an Andean pan flute at the market; is colonial architecture painted bright orange; is Teatro Colón and Machu Picchu all at the same time and that’s what we love about it. I don’t know what else we would call it, but by putting it into quotation marks, it reminds me to think outside the box and dig deeper beyond stereotypes, racism and Eurocentrism. So maybe you will too. Henceforth why you see “Latin America” in this blog from now on.

For more on this topic, see Walter Mignolo’s The Idea of Latin America! Or my thesis.