Introduction

Abstract

The Encyclopedia Britannica tells us that Latin America is “generally understood to consist of” South America, Mexico, Central America, and the islands of the Caribbean, whose inhabitants speak a Romance language (Bushnell). Before being a geopolitical entity, the Latin America I am interested in is an idea, part of the geography of imagination that distinguishes “the worst architect from the best of bees” (Marx, 198) and has engaged Latin Americans’ desire to know and their power to create, combining the sensible and the purely subjective in the process of confronting their existence. This idea of Latin America contrasts sharply with the one João Feres Jr. described as “the opposite of a self-glorifying image” (Feres, 10)¹ in his persuasive account of the negative connotations the term has “Latin America” has acquired in the United States. Feres Jr. goes so far as treating América Latina (in Spanish/Portuguese) and Latin America (in English) as two separate entities, but the Britannica’s emphasis on a rather vague “general understanding” is a revealing trace of the discrepancies in the meaning of the place, and in the use of the term moves beyond conflicting interpretations/interests in different cultures/languages. Latin America is one of “a hundred names” that overlap in attempting to describe what Miguel Rojas Mix calls América, “that thing which Columbus discovered.”²