On the homogeneity and heterogeneity of Latin America as a region and the notion of discourse history

There is no question that the existence of a region called “Latin America” is a “reality,” and one which is indeed both acknowledged from the inside of the region and from its outside. What is debatable, of course, is the ontological character of this “reality.” No one – and most definitely no historian – would try, in the 21^st century, to seriously argue for a continental spirit, soul or essence based on transcendental forces or on biology that could exhaustively, or even to a significant extent, explain the Latin American condition. It is self-evident, or so it seems, that historical processes and very contingent – but also very powerful – cultural formations have shaped, and are constantly shaping, what we have come to see as a unified region, giving its existence the appearance of a natural fact that is, however, ultimately a compelling fiction.[1]

Some authors, however, take the “constructedness” of Latin America more into account than others. In their introduction to The Other Mirror, for instance, Miguel Angel Centeno and Fernando López-Alves do not even see the need to clarify the concept – a rather significant lack in the context of a book on “grand theory through the lens of Latin America,” to quote the volume’s subtitle. For his part, Victor Bulmer-Thomas, in The Economic History of Latin America, starts his “overview” with a short discussion of the term (he even provides a distinct date [1856] when it was coined – 1) and in fact goes as far as proposing a restrictive definition from which, for example, “Puerto Rico is often excluded […] in the twentieth century” (2). Finally, in Afro-Latinoamérica, George Reid Andrews states from the outset what he means when he writes about “Latin America,” namely “el grupo de países americanos gobernados desde el siglo XVI al XIX por España o Portugal” (18) – a definition which, by the way, would probably appeal, in its succinctness and practicality, the likes of James Lockhart and Stuart Schwartz (Early Latin America) or Tulio Halperín-Donghi (Contemporary History of Latin America), but maybe repel David Weber (Bárbaros) and Ann Twinam (Public Lives, Private Secrets), who prefer referring to “Spanish America” instead of “Latin America” in order, perhaps, to reduce their object of study’s diversity and thus deliver apparently more stringent, if less ambitious, work.

This is important inasmuch as that all these works have to somehow come to terms with the fundamental implausibility of such a vast expanse of land (as emphasized in Pedro Cunill Grau’s La geohistoria, for instance [15]) and such a proliferation of independent countries constituting a single region and, still, being considered one. In other words, one of the most crucial questions that emerge in some of these books (most especially, and for fairly obvious reasons, in the ones that pretend to be general histories of Latin America as a whole) is precisely what it is that holds the different parts of the region together.

Needless to say, and as mentioned in Andrews’ definition quoted above, the decisive factor seems to be, quite clearly, the colonial experience under the rule of the two Iberian powers. While this conclusion might strike as commonsensical, it is the object of many debates as to what differentiates this particular colonial experience from the one of, say, the Philippines; as to what could possibly be the weight of the common experience after almost two hundred years of independence, and especially considering the vastness of the subcontinent and its relative historic lack of inter-connectedness; and as to what is particular to Iberian colonialism in contradistinction to French, English or Dutch colonialism; among other questions.

To deal with this last issue, namely with the distinctiveness of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, Lockhart and Schwartz emphasize what they call “Iberian ways,” i.e. pre-Conquest demographic, social, cultural, institutional, economic, and ideological structures that, given the quite compact character of the peninsula, as well as its common history and traditions of cultural and commercial exchange, were relatively homogeneous. These structures, they suggest, were exported to the New World and, while they were differently applied and adapted depending on local conditions and on their class with “indigenous ways,” they nevertheless constituted a common referent that explains the remarkable uniformity of Latin America.

This uniformity manifests itself in similar responses to stimuli, in similar institutional formations and in similar cultural fabrics. In The Hour of Eugenics, for instance, Nancy Leys Stepan is concerned only with a very concrete historical phenomenon (the rise of a clearly native eugenics tradition in Latin America) in very concrete geographical coordinates (Argentina, Brazil and Mexico), but her study shows nonetheless that “a Latin family likeness in eugenics existed” (15) that, in all its intrinsic heterogeneity, was different to the world of eugenics outside the subcontinent. As for David de Ferranti’s report to the World Bank “Inequality in Latin America,” as well as Kelly Hoffman and Miguel Angel Centeno’s article “The Lopsided Continent,” both rather impressively show that Latin America is a coherent, unified region, if only because of its degree of endemic inequality (interestingly, the single most unequal country of all, Brazil, which in both texts is presented as being almost an exception in its extreme character, is also the one that was colonized by the Portuguese and not by the Spaniards, perhaps accounting for a nuance in the “Iberian ways”). Finally, Néstor García Canclini offers, in his book Culturas híbridas, a model based on the concept of “hybridization” as the socio-cultural processes by which “estructuras o prácticas discretas, que existían en forma separadas, se combinan para generar nuevas estructuras, objetos y prácticas” (14), therefore creating a kind of cultural unity, however unstable, out of disorder and diversity.

García Canclini’s stress on diversity and on the ways it is negotiated and hybridized is consistent with his anthropology and cultural studies background, but it is also symptomatic of one of the main preoccupations of virtually all the readings we had for the class and, arguably, of any imaginable attempt to seriously talk about Latin America, namely the subcontinent’s stunning heterogeneity in spite of its relative uniformity. Quite literally, there is no way to not see that the region is actually not unified at all but plural and, in fact, that the “region” seems to be better represented as a multiplicity of regions (or cultures) whose sum, moreover, is much larger than its parts.

Once again, Lockhart and Schwartz provide us with a synthetic concept that can help us deal with this fundamental diversity. If there were, in their view, “Iberian ways” that explained the region’s coherence, there were also “indigenous ways” that decisively determined the settlement and colonization in the different parts of the continent and, hence, influenced the historical processes that ended up in the myriad of different cultures and republics that constitute Latin America. Thus, it made a difference if the different areas were populated, in pre-Conquest America, by nomadic, semi-sedentary or sedentary peoples (34ff), and the interaction and constant conflicts between “Iberian ways” and “indigenous ways” created different outcomes in different places. Indeed, they go as far as postulating that “Indian peoples and the resources of their lands were the primary determinants of regional differentiation” (59).

In a similar fashion, albeit in one more focused on geographical and natural peculiarities, Cunill Grau studies the history of the subcontinent as one in which different peoples – no matter if native or foreign – fought against the constrictions imposed onto them by different habitats (mountains, tropical forests, lowlands and deserts, for instance) and, in so doing, created distinctive responses that, once added up, amounted to distinctive societies. In An Environmental History of Latin America, for his part, Shawn Miller also addressed the interactions between human populations and the natural settings on which their history took place, and which their history profoundly modified, always insisting, however, on the notion of sustainability (his main concern) and how it is attained, or not, by the combination of four different but interrelated aspects of the human/nature equation: population, technology, attitudes toward nature and attitudes toward consumption (4).

Other authors are more interested in how diversity manifests itself in institutional and structural ways or, to put it somehow differently, in the realms of the political and the economical. Halperín-Donghi, for example, writes an extensive history of the subcontinent as one in which different historical processes, implicitly conceptualized as national histories, coexist. He does not often, if ever, resort to generalizations other than the most obvious ones concerning the historical periods (Independence, for instance, or the period of emergence of the neocolonial order), and in fact one possible criticism of his book is that there is a hiatus between the general points he is trying to make at the beginning of each chapter and the painstaking recount of apparently disconnected national developments.

In his own aforementioned study about the economic history of the region, for his part, Bulmer-Thomas goes deep into detail to show how a series of factors affected the way each independent nation is now, including natural resources, immigration and, most especially, policies toward economic diversification and transfer of resources to the non-export sectors (policies which, he concludes, never amounted to much in Latin America as a whole, anyway, and not even in the exceptional cases of Uruguay and Argentina). His economic history, thus, reflects on the causes and results of the segmentation between regions and countries, making it difficult to simply take for granted that, say, Honduras is even in the same world as Chile, let alone in the same region. For different reasons (not the least of which is the simultaneous adoption of similar economic paradigms at specific times, as in the inward looking period after World War II), however, he, just like all other authors mentioned, accepts the basic commonality of all parts of the region, even while highlighting some major differences within it.

In a different way, Andrews’ already quoted study contributes to the conceptualization of the region as diverse and fragmented by showing that the lines of division between the multiple components of Latin America run not only along geographical, political or economic axes, but along racial ones, too. Calling one constitutive element of the subcontinent “Afro-Latinoamérica,” after all, is tantamount to acknowledging the distinctiveness of the African diaspora’s experience in a given context, and therefore the existence of “another” Latin America. The importance of this for the notion of the region as not being a single, coherent and unified one is twofold. On the one hand, this “other” Latin America is explicitly a reality that changes and manifests itself only in certain latitudes, namely in areas with a population of African descent of 5% or more (18). On the other hand, and more fundamentally, the concept of “Afro-Latinoamérica” implies the existence of not only one but several possible Latin Americas, starting, of course, with Indian Latin America (even though, of course, one could come up with almost innumerable subdivisions here [Quechua Latin America, Nahuatl Latin America, “Savage” Latin America (a little bit like in Bárbaros), etc.]) and going on, from there, to Chinese Latin America, Japanese Latin America, Arab Latin America, Female Latin America, Queer Latin America, etc.

Mala Htun’s book Sex and the State, for instance, is an attempt to provide a gendered look at questions of sovereignty and social change, as well as of resistance under undemocratic regimes, using the issues of abortion, divorce, and attitudes toward family structures as indicators. This is, of course, a very specific approach that, moreover, is only applied to three rather similar countries of the continent (Brazil, Argentina and Chile). Nevertheless, it tells a story worth noticing, given that it is a part of the history Latin America that has traditionally been silenced (for all their exhaustiveness, neither Cunill Grau nor Halperín-Donghi even mention gender difference in their work, for example) and which, more to the point of the topic of this essay, given that it further theorizes the region as a place where different elements converge and clash, constituting not one but multiple cultures and, in a sense, not one but several “regions.”

This is also the case, of course, in Twinam’s study of the concepts of honor and illegitimacy in late eighteenth century Spanish America, and how this concepts, the debates on them, and the different legal and custom systems that delineated by these debates, created a specific order that, no matter the “artificiality” of its premises (“honor” being a concept that nowadays has almost no relevance in Latin America, or at least not in the sense it had in the times of the Bourbon reforms), constituted reality for the people imbued in it and, therefore, most definitely affected their lives and their legacy to future generations. Her book, thus, while being very specific and coming from a distinctive position (gender studies and, for lack of a better term now, historical constructivism), offers insights into an aspect of the subcontinent’s history that has been neglected, suggesting that there are different histories on different Latin Americas that remain to be told before there can even be an attempt to “synthetize” them again.

In fact, in my opinion the single most persuasive and useful approach to history is the “constructivist” one, which I will further call discourse history, as exemplified by Twinam’s book, but also by Stepan’s, García Canclini’s (even if his book hardly counts as “history”) and, to a certain extent, Weber’s. Explicitly discussed by Stepan in her introduction, constructivism in regard to science is the assumption that “science is a highly social activity and is not sealed off from the values of the society in which it is practiced” (9) as well as something that does not depict “‘reality’ in any straightforward or transparent fashion but rather as constructing or creating the objects it studies and giving them their empirical weight and meaning” (11). Translated to our own “science,” discourse history does not conceptualize history as an objective reality that can be revealed by means of scientific methods of inquire, but rather as discursive fields in which different narratives and ways to explain the world intersect and, through complex mechanisms that not merely – and not even mainly – involve economic pressures, get naturalized as truth or knowledge (or get marginalized as fiction and myth) and, thus, end up constituting what we call reality. In other words, the past is not there to be discovered, but is recreated each time we talk about it, as a result of a constant tension between the content of sources and the meaning we give them according to our own values and living conditions. Furthermore, the present is not transparent, either, and it is always the result of the more or less conflictive negotiation of narratives and ideological formations that are real, for us, but that, just like the whole notion of eugenics or (better yet, since it is less “obviously” flawed) of eighteenth century honor in Spanish America.

When taken seriously, and to its consequence, this approach is much more controversial, much more radical, and much more difficult to apply than what it looks like at first sight. If discourse is that which constitutes the thing it is pretending to talk about, it means that categories like race, gender, and sex and gender, which are ostensibly biological, do not exist in the first place, but are rather constituted by centuries of iteration. The same goes for other social realities that are more evidently constructed, like national limits, but also for our certainties concerning the scientific method itself and, most decisively in this context, the primacy of certain ranges of historical experience (say, the economy or politics) as opposed to other ones (sexual diversity and practices, body history, the making of masculinities, concepts of aging and health, models of beauty, etc.). Of course, one could say that “everyone knows” that race, for instance, is constructed, but the fact is that the agreement on this really goes only as far as accepting that “all human beings are equal, no matter their race,” without challenging the divisive categories themselves. If, however, we acknowledge that even this equality commandment is a cultural construction, exactly like – to stay at the same example – race, we will not have destroyed the fiction or its effect of reality, but we will have opened a window for the proliferation of studies on how this reality has been constructed, constantly rearticulated, and changed. This, moreover, may result in the gradual sedimentation of alternative truths and knowledge about this reality’s “constructedness” that may add up to small shiftings or breaks in its seemingly even surfaces. After all, the more or less general acceptance among social scientists and humanities scholars of the category of race as a “constructed” one is in itself a result of discursive shiftings and breaks that have taken place in the last decades, and by no means the recognition of an objective fact.

The implications of this for conceptualizing a region so heterogeneous as Latin America (and especially specific aspects of Latin America) are many, the single most important one being the one related to the term itself: When did it emerge and why, who was excluded by it, who continues to be excluded from it? What does it mean for such a diverse region to present itself, and to be considered, a region, especially in the context of globalization and transnational migration? Who are we and why, and why does it matter?

[1] This is not to say that this “fiction” does not result in an order in our practices and discourses, thus creating a “reality” that determines who we are and what we can, or even want to, do. As Michael Taussig puts it, “[w]ith good reason postmodernism has relentlessly instructed us that reality is artifice yet […] not enough surprise has been expressed as to how we nevertheless get on with living, pretending […] that we live facts, not fictions. […] If life is constructed, how come it appears so immutable?” (Mimesis and Alterity. New York: Routledge 1993, pp. xvii-xviii)

(Crédito de imagen de thumbnail: http://kr.123rf.com/photo_48120839_stock-vector-cartoon-hand-drawn-doodles-on-the-subject-of-latin-american-style-theme-seamless-pattern-colorful-ve.html. Crédito de imagen de inicio de post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-ySZqwQ1dA).