“All of the Republics of the Immense American Continent”: The Contested Meanings of América in the 19th-Century Americas

In 1862, La Voz Nacional of Guanajuato, Mexico considered the looming invasion of French armies, coming to install a European monarch.  The paper assured its readers that Mexico would stand firm and guard American interests, which included those of the United States, against European aggression.   The paper, like so many in mid-century Spanish America, imagined that a shared identity of sister republics in the American hemisphere was more important than divisions of language, religion or race. While scholars, such as Michel Gobat and Aims McGuinness, have written revealing exegeses on the emergence of “Latin America” as an identity and imagined space, less work has been done on the almost simultaneous insistence on an American identity.  This imagination of “América” occurred throughout Spanish America, but especially in Mexico with the French Invasion.  However, around mid-century a more inclusive vision of the Americas flourished across the western hemisphere, in Colombia and Uruguay, but also in the United States.  While U.S. racism and exceptionalism often worked to draw lines of divisions between north and south, some residents of the United States had a more inclusive spatial identity.  After the defeat of the French, over two hundred “radical Germans” in Toledo, Ohio wrote the Mexican president to praise his victory for securing “American liberty.” More than just identifying how and when this American identity was employed, I will explore its meanings, especially in regard to republicanism and universalism.  Finally, I hope to briefly suggest why such an identity began to falter late in the century, replaced with notions of “Latin America,” “Anglo America,” hispanismo, and the idea of a “West” that excluded most of the former societies of la América.