Looking South: The Evolution of Latin Americanist Scholarship in the United States, 1850–1975

Abstract

Helen Delpar’s goal in this succinct, well-organized, and timely book is both a survey and analysis of the work and views of U.S. historians and social scientists about Latin America from the nineteenth-century precursors to about 1975. She modestly describes her offering as an introduction to a continually evolving scholarship and a follow-up of earlier studies by Howard Cline, Lewis Hanke, and Carl Berger. Happily, she offers much more than a survey of the major trends and setbacks affecting the training, development, and influence of Latin Americanists in the twentieth century. The result is a superb assessment of the state of the field, measured not only by its growth and status in the twentieth-century university but also by the role and views of Latin Americanists at critical times — in the heyday of U.S. empire in the first third of the century, in both world wars (especially in the decade 1935 – 45), in the tumultuous years following the triumph of Fidel Castro, and in the sometimes vitriolic debates about Latin American dependency in the 1960s and 1970s.Each chapter not only details the major changes and development of the field during a particular era but also explains how and why some practitioners in specific disciplines forged ahead while others lagged behind. Delpar reminds us that Latin Americanists in this country have always been alert to the impacts of domestic issues on those who labor in this multifaceted field, and disagreements among them in the past have often been as sharp and vitriolic as those since 1975. The earliest practitioners were also mindful of the prejudices of their readers and the interests of government officials and institutions who used their services or funded their projects.A few examples may suffice. In his detailed accounts of the conquest of Mexico and Peru, William H. Prescott was mindful of the anti-Spanish prejudices of his readers. And there is more of a hint of Anglophobia in the Central American offerings of John Lloyd Stephens and Ephraim G. Squier, who wrote at a time of increasing U.S.-British rivalry in the isthmian region. In the first third of the twentieth century, as the field struggled to gain respectability, some Latin Americanist pioneers carried out not only institutional but public roles: Bernard Moses, who was appointed to the Second Philip-pine Commission and became a delegate to the first Pan-American Scientific Congress; Leo Rowe, who advised President Woodrow Wilson on Latin American affairs; and Dana Gardner Munro, who embarked on a career in the State Department after publishing his history of Central America. Hiram Bingham, famous for his expeditions to Peru, became an outspoken critic of the Monroe Doctrine.During World War II, a generation of budding Latin Americanists — economists, cultural officers, historians, and political scientists, among others — benefited from a dramatic increase of official involvement and interest in the region. Some, such as Lewis Hanke and Frank Tannenbaum, became troubled about the impact of the shifting postwar political winds in U.S. politics on the study of Latin America. Their fears were justified, as every student of U.S. involvement in the region during the Cold War knows. What revived the field, of course, was the launching of Sputnik and the parallel concern about U.S. education, the Cuban revolution, and the growing intensity of the debate over U.S. policy in the hemisphere in the 1960s and early 1970s. Delpar tells this story, as well as the flourishing expansion and development of Latin American studies and the accompanying concerns that official and institutional support for individual research became increasingly dependent on the willingness of the scholar to look at specific topics — social revolution or dependence, among others. In the process, the racialist discourse of the nineteenth century became muted, if it did not disappear altogether, but so, too, did the old Boltonian notion of a “common history” of the Americas.Delpar has little to say about the years after 1975, save for summing up what has happened to area studies — cuts in funding, a growing sense that the “Two Americas” are divided by such different cultural heritages that no north-south unity or commonality, no “intellectual” bridge will ever unite them. Contrarily, one could make the case that Latin American and Caribbean migration into this country since 1975, the dramatic escalation of remittances of these migrants to their home countries, the laudable efforts to frame statements of human rights, hemispheric summitry, and the push for economic integration, among other modern trends, are forging new bonds.Delpar is too good a scholar to plunge into these uncertain waters. Instead, she has given us something far worthier, a biographical assessment and a guidebook to unraveling the problems and issues that confronted Latin Americanists over a century and a half. This book will have a long “shelf life.”