Borders and Borderlands of Interpretation

Abstract

THE CUBAN NATIONALIST LEADER Jose Marti invoked barricades of ideas as a defense against the imperial pretensions of the United States. Our imagined by Marti, was Latin America, an with a common history and culture that transcended borders while respecting national differences. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron simultaneously challenge and reinforce that vision of the Americas. Like Marti, they look beyond political borders at deeper connections and commonalties that borders often obscure. In contrast, Adelman and Aron cast their gaze beyond Latin America, including the United States and its origins in the clashes between rival empires and emerging nation-states on the North American continent. The affinity with and distinction from Marti's view of Our America raises two related questions. First, Marti wrote his essay more than one hundred years ago against the backdrop of numerous Cuban and Latin American essays and historical studies in a similar vein. His work suggests that English-speaking historians and intellectuals were not alone in theorizing the history of empire and cultural connections in the Americas; Herbert Bolton and Frederick Jackson Turner (and then William Cronon, Richard White, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and David J. Weber) are not the only sources of this historical project, even though the predominance of English-language social-science monographs in Adelman and Aron's scholarly apparatus might inadvertently lead one to believe otherwise. Second, Marti's perspective implies a relationship between historical vision and political sovereignty. What would Adelman and Aron's model mean for historians in other American countries? In other words, how would a distinct political and institutional context alter the transnational model theorized by Adelman and Aron? In this short response, I do not pretend to answer these questions. Rather, I raise them to ask how Adelman and Aron's encompassing historical vision might also reflect on the broad history of interpretation intertwined with the events and processes it seeks to comprehend. Rivalries among empires, states, and peoples manifest themselves not only through trade and warfare but also through the interpretation of those struggles. Along with their counterparts in the United States