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| Area | 20,111,457 km2 (7,765,077 sq mi)[1] |
|---|---|
| Population | 656,098,097 (2021 est.)[2][3][a] |
| Population density | 31/km2 (80/sq mi) |
| Ethnic groups |
|
| Demonym | Latin American |
| Countries | 20[b] |
| Dependencies | 14 |
| Languages | Romance languages Others: Quechua, Mayan languages, Haitian Creole, Antillean Creole, Guaraní, Caribbean Hindustani, Aymara, Nahuatl, English, German, Dutch, Mapudungun, Yiddish, Welsh, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Greek, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, other languages |
| Time zones | UTC−02:00 to UTC−08:00 |
| Largest cities | Largest urban areas: 1. São Paulo 2. Mexico City 3. Buenos Aires 4. Rio de Janeiro 5. Bogotá 6. Lima 7. Santiago 8. Guadalajara 9. Monterrey 10. Belo Horizonte |
| UN M49 code | 419 – Latin America and the Caribbean019 – Americas001 – World |
Latin America[c] is a collective region of the Americas where Romance languages—languages derived from Latin—are predominantly spoken.[4] The term was coined in France in the mid-19th century to refer to regions in the Americas that were ruled by the Spanish, Portuguese, and French empires.
The term does not have a precise definition, but it is "commonly used to describe South America, Central America, Mexico, and the islands of the Caribbean".[5] In a narrow sense, it refers to Spanish America and Brazil (Portuguese America).[6] The term "Latin America" is broader than Hispanic America, which specifically refers to Spanish-speaking countries, and categories such as Ibero-America, a term that refers to both Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries from the Americas, and sometimes from Europe.
The term Latin America was first used in Paris at a conference in 1856 called "Initiative of America: Idea for a Federal Congress of the Republics" (Iniciativa de la América. Idea de un Congreso Federal de las Repúblicas),[7] by the Chilean politician Francisco Bilbao. The term was further popularized by French emperor Napoleon III's government of political strongman that in the 1860s as Amérique latine to justify France's military involvement in the Second Mexican Empire and to include French-speaking territories in the Americas, such as French Canada, Haiti, French Louisiana, French Guiana, Martinique, Guadeloupe and the French Antillean Creole Caribbean islands Saint Lucia, and Dominica, in the larger group of countries where Spanish and Portuguese languages prevailed.[8]
The region covers an area that stretches from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego and includes much of the Caribbean. It has an area of approximately 19,197,000 km2 (7,412,000 sq mi),[1] almost 13% of the Earth's land surface area. In 2019, Latin America had a combined nominal GDP of US$5,188,250 trillion[9] and a GDP PPP of US$10,284,588 trillion.[9][10]
Etymology and definitions
Origins
The concept and term came into use in the mid-nineteenth century. Gobat states, "the idea did stem from the French concept of a “Latin race,” which Latin American émigrés in Europe helped spread to the other side of the Atlantic."[11] It was popularized in 1860s France during the reign of Napoleon III. The term Latin America was a part of his attempt to create a French empire in the Americas.[12] Research has shown that the idea that a part of the Americas has a linguistic and cultural affinity with the Romance cultures as a whole can be traced back to the 1830s, in the writing of the French Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier, who postulated that a part of the Americas was inhabited by people of a "Latin race", and that it could, therefore, ally itself with "Latin Europe", ultimately overlapping the Latin Church, in a struggle with "Teutonic Europe" and "Anglo-Saxon America" with its Anglo-Saxonism, as well as "Slavic Europe" with its Pan-Slavism.[13]
Historian John Leddy Phelan located the popularity of the term Latin America to be from the French occupation of Mexico. His argument is that French imperialists used the concept of "Latin" America as a way to counter British imperialism, as well as to challenge the German threat to France.[14] The idea of a "Latin race" was then taken up by Latin American intellectuals and political leaders of the mid-and late-nineteenth century, who no longer looked to Spain or Portugal as cultural models, but rather to France.[15] Napoleon III had a strong interest in extending French commercial and political power in the region. He and his business promoter Felix Belly called it "Latin America" to emphasize the shared Latin background of France with the former viceroyalties of Spain and colonies of Portugal. This led to Napoleon III's failed attempt to take military control of Mexico in the 1860s.[8]
Scholarship has political origins of the term. Two Latin American historians, Uruguayan Arturo Ardao and Chilean Miguel Rojas Mix, found evidence that the term "Latin America" was used earlier than Phelan claimed, and the first use of the term was in fact in opposition to imperialist projects in the Americas. Ardao wrote about this subject in his book Génesis de la idea y el nombre de América latina (Genesis of the Idea and the Name of Latin America, 1980),[16] and Miguel Rojas Mix in his article "Bilbao y el hallazgo de América latina: Unión continental, socialista y libertaria" (Bilbao and the Finding of Latin America: a Continental, Socialist, and Libertarian Union, 1986).[17] As Michel Gobat points out in his article "The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy, and Race", "Arturo Ardao, Miguel Rojas Mix, and Aims McGuinness have revealed the term 'Latin America' had already been used in 1856 by Central Americans and South Americans protesting US expansion into the Southern Hemisphere".[18] Edward Shawcross summarizes Ardao's and Rojas Mix's findings in the following way: "Ardao identified the term in a poem by a Colombian diplomat and intellectual resident in France, José María Torres Caicedo, published on 15 February 1857 in a French based Spanish-language newspaper, while Rojas Mix located it in a speech delivered in France by the radical liberal Chilean politician Francisco Bilbao in June 1856".[19]
By the late 1850s, the term was being used in California (which had become a part of the United States), in local newspapers such as El Clamor Público by Californios writing about América latina and latinoamérica, and identifying as Latinos as the abbreviated term for their "hemispheric membership in la raza latina".[20]
The words "Latin" and "America" were first found to be combined in a printed work to produce the term "Latin America" in 1856 at a conference by the Chilean politician Francisco Bilbao in Paris.[21] The conference had the title "Initiative of the America. The idea for a Federal Congress of Republics."[7] The following year, Colombian writer José María Torres Caicedo also used the term in his poem "The Two Americas".[22] Two events related with the United States played a central role in both works. The first event happened less than a decade before the publication of Bilbao's and Torres Caicedo's works: the Invasion of Mexico or, in the US, the Mexican–American War, after which Mexico lost a third of its territory. The second event, the Walker affair, which happened the same year that both works were written: the decision by US president Franklin Pierce to recognize the regime recently established in Nicaragua by American William Walker and his band of filibusters who ruled Nicaragua for nearly a year (1856–57) and attempted to reinstate slavery there, where it had been already abolished for three decades[citation needed]
In both Bilbao's and Torres Caicedo's works, the Mexican–American War (1846–48) and William Walker's expedition to Nicaragua are explicitly mentioned as examples of dangers for the region. For Bilbao, "Latin America" was not a geographical concept, as he excluded Brazil, Paraguay, and Mexico. Both authors also asked for the union of all Latin American countries as the only way to defend their territories against further foreign US interventions. Both also rejected European imperialism, claiming that the return of European countries to non-democratic forms of government was another danger for Latin American countries, and used the same word to describe the state of European politics at the time: "despotism." Several years later, during the French invasion of Mexico, Bilbao wrote another work, "Emancipation of the Spirit in America", where he asked all Latin American countries to support the Mexican cause against France, and rejected French imperialism in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. He asked Latin American intellectuals to search for their "intellectual emancipation" by abandoning all French ideas, claiming that France was: "Hypocrite, because she calls herself protector of the Latin race just to subject it to her exploitation regime; treacherous, because she speaks of freedom and nationality, when, unable to conquer freedom for herself, she enslaves others instead!" Therefore, as Michel Gobat puts it, the term Latin America itself had an "anti-imperial genesis," and their creators were far from supporting any form of imperialism in the region, or in any other place of the globe.[23]
In France, the term Latin America was used with the opposite intention. It was employed by the French Empire of Napoleon III during the French invasion of Mexico as a way to include France among countries with influence in the Americas and to exclude Anglophone countries. It played a role in his campaign to imply cultural kinship of the region with France, transform France into a cultural and political leader of the area, and install Maximilian of Habsburg as emperor of the Second Mexican Empire.[24] The term was also used in 1861 by French scholars in La revue des races Latines, a magazine dedicated to the Pan-Latinism movement.[25]
Contemporary definitions
- Latin America is often used synonymously with Ibero-America ("Iberian America"), where the populations speak Spanish or Portuguese and the dominant religion is Roman Catholic. Puerto Rico, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean territory of the United States, acquired from the Spanish Empire following its defeat in the 1898 Spanish American War, is usually included. This definition excludes the predominantly Protestant English-speaking and Dutch-speaking regions, as well as French-speaking predominantly Catholic regions. Belize, Guyana and Suriname, as well as several French overseas departments, are excluded from the definition.[26]
- In another definition, Latin America designates the set of countries in the Americas where a Romance language (a language derived from Latin) predominates: Spanish, Portuguese, or French. Thus, it includes Mexico; most of Central and South America; and in the Caribbean, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. Latin America then comprises all of the countries in the Americas that were once part of the Spanish, Portuguese, and French Empires.[27][28] Puerto Rico, although not a sovereign nation, is often included.
- The term is sometimes used more broadly to refer to all of the Americas south of the United States,[28] thus including the Guianas (French Guiana, Guyana, and Suriname); the Anglophone Caribbean (and Belize); the Francophone Caribbean; and the Dutch Caribbean. This definition emphasizes a similar socioeconomic history of the region, which was characterized by formal or informal colonialism, rather than cultural aspects (see, for example, dependency theory).[29] Some sources avoid this simplification by using the alternative phrase "Latin America and the Caribbean", as in the United Nations geoscheme for the Americas.[30][31][32] A number of academic area-studies programs and centers of Latin American studies are titled "Latin American and Caribbean" studies, such as the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of Michigan, New York University Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), and University of Washington's Latin American and Caribbean Studies, The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Although the U.S. acquired a large swath of territory from the Spanish Empire and called Spanish borderlands and nearly 20% of the U.S. population identifies as "Hispanic" (or "Latino"), the U.S. is generally not classified as being part of Latin America. However, the significant demographic is sometimes brought under the umbrella of Latin American studies, such as at University of Albany.
The distinction between Latin America and Anglo-America is a convention based on the predominant languages in the Americas by which Romance language- and English-speaking cultures are distinguished. Neither area is culturally or linguistically homogeneous; in substantial portions of Latin America (e.g., highland Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, Guatemala), Native American cultures and, to a lesser extent, Amerindian languages, are predominant, and in other areas, the influence of African cultures is strong (e.g., the Caribbean basin – including parts of Colombia and Venezuela).
The term's meaning is contested and not without controversy. Historian Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo explores at length the "allure and power" of the idea of Latin America. He remarks at the outset, "The idea of 'Latin America' ought to have vanished with the obsolescence of racial theory... But it is not easy to declare something dead when it can hardly be said to have existed," going on to say, "The term is here to stay, and it is important."[33] Following in the tradition of Chilean writer Francisco Bilbao, who excluded Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay from his early conceptualization of Latin America,[34] Chilean historian Jaime Eyzaguirre has criticized the term Latin America for "disguising" and "diluting" the Spanish character of a region (i.e. Hispanic America) with the inclusion of nations that, according to him, do not share the same pattern of conquest and colonization.[35]
The Francophone part of North America which includes Quebec and Acadia is generally excluded from the definition of Latin America.[36]
Subregions and countries
Latin America can be subdivided into several subregions based on geography, politics, democracy, demographics and culture. The basic geographical subregions are North America, Central America, the Caribbean and South America; the latter contains further politico-geographical subdivisions such as the Southern Cone, the Guianas and the Andean states. It may be subdivided on linguistic grounds into Spanish America, Portuguese America, and French America.[37]
The term "Latin America" is defined to mean parts of Americas south of USA mainland where a Romance language (a language derived from Latin) predominates, that is, a language of Spanish, Portuguese or French. As is customary, Puerto Rico is included and Dominica, Grenada, and Saint Lucia (where French is spoken but not official language) are excluded from Latin America.
