Envisioning Latin America: Intellectual Practices of Difference in America’s Fin de Siècle

In early nineteenth-century, “America,” a promising contrast to “old” and monarchic Europe, became the preferred concept to describe the hemisphere.  This paper shows how, as the century unfolded, a curious mixture of diplomats, intellectuals, and merchants created a grammar of two—Latin and Anglo Saxon—Americas.  Dissimilar aims and agents converged in the discussion of the Latin and Hispanic adjective: Paris-based intellectuals such as José M. Torres Caicedo promoted it as a means to counteract the burden of the Spanish past and the growing threat the U.S. posed to the southern part of the continent, while the Second French Empire’s ideologues used it to justify the 1861 intervention in Mexico as a quest for creating a “pan Latin” empire.  In the late nineteenth century, a growing number of intellectuals began to embrace the once-rejected Spanish heritage of America.  This paper argues that a fervent debate between these conflicting visions, aiming to describe the space South of the Rio Grande, took place in the turn-of-the-century United States.

Conceiving U.S. universities as key locales in the production of hemispheric differences, the paper shows the central role of both U.S. and Latin American intellectuals in the complex practices of hemispheric definition and differentiation.  Beyond ideas of U.S. imposition or Latin America naïveté, it looks at South and North American intellectuals forging a grammar of the “two Americas,” a process through which Anglo Saxon and Latin became a natural continental divide of long-lasting consequences.