Latin American Nation-states Research Articles

Anti-Black Racism in Latin America

This article address the racialization phenomenon of the African population and their descendants, born in America from a socio-historical perspective; including: their kidnapping, transfer and slavery in the American continent during the colonial period. Also the article address the construction of imaginaries and narratives that allowed their exploitation, favored rejection and resistance to the abolition of slavery, and excluded the black population from the process of construction of the emerging Latin American Nation-States. The research investigates the role of Latin American blacks in the independence processes and problematizes the phenomenon of structural racism from a critical sociological perspective, as a factor for the physical and symbolic annihilation of the black and Afro-descendant population in the past and in Latin America today.

Lo indígena en las Declaraciones de Barbados: construcción simbólica e imaginario político de igualdad

Las tres declaraciones de Barbados –promulgadas entre 1970 y 1990– articularon un conjunto de demandas por el reconocimiento y la inclusión de las poblaciones indígenas de América Latina. Su promulgación trajo consigo al menos dos implicaciones. Por un lado, urgió la reconfiguración política de los Estados nación latinoamericanos; y por el otro, les permitió desarrollar perspectivas (Pérez-Ruiz, 2009), modelos y enfoques diferenciados de Educación Intercultural (Dietz y Mateos, 2013) para atender tales demandas. En este artículo analizo la configuración discursiva de las tres declaraciones de Barbados poniendo énfasis en la construcción simbólica de lo indígena y en el imaginario político de igualdad. Para lograr lo anterior, primero me apoyé en el análisis enunciativo de Benveniste (1997) y, segundo, en la revitalización de tres categorías analíticas posestructuralistas. Según mis hallazgos, en las tres declaraciones de Barbados existe una relación antagónica entre lo indígena (los defendibles, sectores poblacionales que encarnaron la lucha por el derecho de todos) y lo no indígena (lugar de plenitud envidiable, al que se aspira llevar a los sectores indígenas). Sin embargo, tal imaginario político de igualdad no ha sido exitoso porque persiste la idea de que lo indígena es un sector abyecto respecto de lo no indígena.

De las fronteras coloniales del imperio hispánico en América a los límites internacionales entre Estados latinoamericanos independientes: génesis de la imposibilidad de un mapa político de Sudamérica consensuado = From the colonial borders of the Hispanic Empire in America to the international borders between independent Latin American states: the genesis of the impossibility of a consensual political map of South

Resumen: Los límites coloniales de América Latina habían sido definidos vagamente durante siglos: eran límites administrativos que organizaban la administración de un extenso territorio (para los cánones europeos), ocupado efectivamente de manera dispersa e irregular, con un archipiélago de enclaves urbanos conectados por el Camino Real.Desde las guerras de independencia (1800 - 1860), muchos territorios nacionales quedaron definidos, jurídicamente, a partir del principio del utis possidetis (la aceptación de antiguas unidades administrativas coloniales para los nuevos estados independientes) pero, de facto, el establecimiento efectivo de los límites territoriales se convirtió en uno de los problemas más difíciles de resolver para los nuevos estados latinoamericanos, en primer lugar debido a los constantes desacuerdos entre las partes y también debido la debilidad de los aparatos institucionales burocráticos que no disponían de medios materiales, instrumentales y recursos humanos para zanjar las disputas territoriales.Además, a lo largo del siglo XIX, al mismo tiempo que se constituían los estados nuevos en América latina y configuraban sus propios territorios se estaba reconceptualizando la propia idea de límite territorial, tanto en el terreno de la jurisprudencia internacional como en la teoría política: mientras que durante mucho tiempo los límites podían ser zonas o franjas de bordes difusos, los procesos de formación territorial modernos requirieron límites que pudieran escribirse en forma de líneas sobre los mapas. En la práctica los límites antiguos y nuevos fueron dibujados y rediseñados a lo largo del siglo XX durante complejas negociaciones, alianzas inestables y contiendas militares, e incluso algunos de ellos no pudieron resolverse y continúan sin encontrar solución.A las dificultades técnicas y jurídicas intrínsecas la demarcación de los límites, hay que agregar que las tradiciones historiográficas nacionales (y nacionalistas) que elaboraron relatos de formación territorial y argumentaciones para sostener sus reclamos territoriales que hicieron literalmente imposible que el montaje de los mapas de los nuevos estados nacionales latinoamericanos elaborados por cada país diera por resultado un mismo mapa político coherente de América latina (por el contrario, cada país latinoamericano produjo mapas de Sudamérica demarcando las fronteras de maneras diferentes).Este artículo explora la variedad de situaciones que se generaron para resolver el quimérico mapa político de Sudamérica y cómo los relatos que los propios estados nacionales crearon para narrar sus historias territoriales tendieron a construir historiografías autocentradas que prefirieron ignorar o desdibujar el proceso de formación territorial en el nivel regional de América latina concebido como un asunto de conjunto.Palabras clave: Mapa político, América latina, nación, límites, demarcación territorialAbstract: For centuries colonial boundaries in Latin America had been defined vaguely: they were administrative boundaries organising the administration of an extensive territory (for European canons), effectively occupied in a dispersed and irregular manner, with an archipelago of urban enclaves connected by the Camino Real (Royal Road).Since the wars of independence (1800 - 1860), many national territories were, de jure, defined from the principle of utis possidetis (the acceptance of old colonial administrative units for the new independent states) but, de facto, not effectively established as having territorial limits, giving rise to one of the greatest challenges for the nascent Latin American States. This was first due to the constant disagreement between the parties and second to the weaknesses in bureaucratic institutions lacking the materials, instruments and human resources to settle disputes.In addition, throughout the 19th century, hand-in-hand with the territorial formation of these modern states, there was a progressive reconceptualisation of the idea of the territorial limit, shifting from a strip or zone to a discrete, cartographic line. In practice, the 20th century saw old and new boundaries drawn and redrawn through complex negotiations, unstable alliances and military strife, some never settling and remaining today unresolved.Added to the technical and legal difficulties intrinsic to the demarcation of borders are national (and nationalist) historiographic traditions narrating stories of territorial formation and constructing arguments to sustain their territorial claims, making it literally impossible for the assembly of maps drawn up by the new Latin American nation states ever to result in a coherent political picture of Latin America.This article explores the variety of situations that were generated to solve the chimerical political map of South America and how the stories that the nation states created to narrate their territorial histories tended to build self-centred historiographies that ignored or blurred the global process of territorial formation in Latin America.Key words: Political map, Latin America, nation, borders, territorial demarcation.

Strategies in dispute: higher education and indigenous populations in the construction of the Latin American nation-states

El presente artículo da cuenta de las formas como las poblaciones indígenas en América Latina han sido excluidas/incluidas en los procesos de diseño e implementación de la educación superior como campo en permanente disputa desde donde se construye el proyecto hegemónico de Estado-nación en la modernidad. Para ello, el documento sitúa las relaciones entre modernidad, educación y Estado-nación en América Latina y explica en qué consiste la crisis contemporánea de la educación superior como punto de partida para la reflexión. Posteriormente, el documento se concentra en analizar cómo se han ido transformando los modos a través de los cuáles pueblos y comunidades indígenas han participado en la disputa por el proyecto de educación nacional, colocando especial atención en la educación superior; en este marco, se profundiza en la comprensión del mestizaje homogenizador, el multiculturalismo neoliberal y la interculturalidad en construcción como tendencias históricas y dispositivos para administrar las diferencias en clave étnico-racial/étnico-cultural, modelos que han implicado el desarrollo de proyectos educativos entre el “asimilacionismo”, la inclusión y la construcción dialogada como promesa de transformación

Articulating Rapa Nui: Polynesian Cultural Politics in a Latin American Nation-State by Riet Delsing

Articulating Rapa Nui: Polynesian Cultural Politics in a Latin American Nation-State by Riet Delsing

Articulating Rapa Nui: Polynesian cultural politics in a Latin American nation-state

Articulating Rapa Nui: Polynesian cultural politics in a Latin American nation-state

Articulating Rapa Nui: Polynesian cultural politics in a Latin American nation state by Riet Delsing

Articulating Rapa Nui: Polynesian cultural politics in a Latin American nation state by Riet Delsing

Cristóbal Colón como puente trasatlántico en el imaginario de Eugenio María de Hostos

Since Eugenio Maria de Hostos’ publication in 1863 of La peregrinacion de Bayoan until 1892, Columbus occupies a central space in his writings. The transformation of Columbus from a Romantic to a Positivist hero serves to exhibit the ideological, historical and political tensions of a colonial Puerto Rican subject questioning his historical and political legacy. It also triggers the examination not only of the figure of Columbus, Spain and the conquest, but of the Nineteenth century complex reality of the American, Caribbean and Latin American nation states.

Knowledge Production in Non-European Spaces of Modernity: The Society of Jesus and the Circulation of Darwinian Ideas in Postcolonial Ecuador, 1860–1890

This article is based on a perspective on circulation of knowledge that allows the consideration of science as the result of the encounter between diverse communities. We tell a story that constantly changes places, scales, and cultures in order to stress the importance of networks as an alternative to the centre/periphery trope, which entangles world histories of science. The result is a picture much more complex and intertwined than the one suggested by these simplifying dichotomies. We focus on a case study that illuminates the process of knowledge production in non-European spaces of modernity. The return of the Society of Jesus to the newly independent nation-states of Latin America is the point of departure to analyse the circulation of a specific scientific idea in Ecuador: Darwin’s theory of biological evolution through natural selection. The article follows the paths of three different knowledge makers whose encounters are seen as sites of knowledge production: a religious order, a Latin American nation-state, and a Western European Jesuit-scientist.

REFLECTIONS ON <i>PORTUNHOL SELVAGEM</i>. FROM TEACHERS’ HORROR TO A “PURE LANGUAGE”

Latin American nation states were founded by creole elites based on a monolingual ideology that should also organize national literatures. In opposition to this principle, literatures produced in areas of cultural and linguistic transit have recently begun to gain visibility questioning those colonial orders. This study highlights the importance of literature produced on the border between Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay and demonstrates how its emergence, having caused the regulatory agencies spokesmen’s reaction, problematizes cultural and commercial interests.

Articulating Rapa Nui. Polynesian Cultural Politics in a Latin American Nation-State by Riet Delsing

Articulating Rapa Nui. Polynesian Cultural Politics in a Latin American Nation-State by Riet Delsing

Intercultural Practices in Latin American Nation States

Intercultural Practices in Latin American Nation States

EpiCentro: The Emergence of a New Central American-American Literature

This article explores the emergence of Central American-American discursive and performance poetic art that, written bilingually and occasionally incorporating Portuguese or an indigenous language, has been present in the United States since the mid-1980s, but bloomed in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It analyzes three of the poems in the EpiCentro anthology — by Gustavo Guerra Vásquez, Karina Alvarado, and Marlon Morales — that have in common multiple and ongoing negotiations and renegotiations of identity, compounding a fusionary process that problematizes traditional identities associated with Latinoness and questions the stability of this very concept, changing in the process fundamental assumptions about the field. It also explores the work and impact of Maya Chinchilla, one of the founders of the group and editor of the anthology. The article attempts to place the anthology within what Aníbal Quijano has called the “coloniality of power,” a term deployed to move thinking beyond Western and Eurocentric conceptualizations. This approach provides a new way of framing the issues of cultural production and agency in order to transcend identities originally associated with any given Latin American nation-state. It is a reminder that we need to seek alternative epistemologies that encompass newer approaches to our understanding of the flux of Latin American diasporas to and within the U.S. We can no longer conceive of Latinidad as a trope under which hyphenated nationalities seek refuge, in a side-by-side nature, from the racist storm of white Christian fundamentalism, without losing their singular self-defining traits.

Bringing the Economic Back In: Andean Indians and the Construction of the Nation-State in Nineteenth-Century Bolivia

AbstractUsing the example of nineteenth-century Bolivia, this article argues that economic motivations need to be taken into account in understanding the role of peasants in constructing Latin American nation-states, especially in the Andes. Based on local archives, it considers the case of the altiplano region of Oruro-Poopó. From this perspective, during the half-century that followed independence, Andean communities were mostly in favour of a free-trade regime. They were integrated into the nation-state, but in a subordinate position. By the 1850s there was such prosperity in trading activities that community members refused to participate as authorities in their communities due to the time it would consume. However, the assault on community lands that began in the 1860s impoverished the Indians and marginalised them as peasants, turning them into a threat to the new, racist nation-state.

Nightmares of the lettered city: banditry and literature in Latin America, 1816-1929

Nightmares of the Lettered City presents an original study of the popular theme of banditry in works of literature, essays, poetry, and drama, and banditry's pivotal role during the conceptualization and formation of the Latin American nation-state. Juan Pablo Dabove examines writings over a broad time period, from the early nineteenth century to the 1920s, and while Nightmares of the Lettered City focuses on four crucial countries (Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela), it is the first book to address the depiction of banditry in Latin America as a whole. The work offers close reading of Facundo, Dona Barbara, Os Sertoes, and Martin Fierro, among other works, illuminating the ever-changing and often contradictory political agendas of the literary elite in their portrayals of the forms of peasant insurgency labeled banditry. Banditry has haunted the Latin American literary imagination. As a cultural trope, banditry has always been an uneasy compromise between desire and anxiety (a nightmare), and Dabove isolates three main representational strategies. He analyzes the bandit as radical other, a figure through which the elites depicted the threats posed to them by various sectors outside the lettered city. Further, he considers the bandit as a trope used in elite internecine struggles. In this case, rural insurgency was a means to legitimize or refute an opposing sector or faction within the lettered city. Finally, Dabove shows how, in certain cases, the bandit was used as an image of the nonstate violence that the nation state has to suppress as a historical force and simultaneously exalt as a memory in order to achieve cultural coherence and actual sovereignty. As Dabove convincingly demonstrates, the elite's construction of the bandit is essential to our understanding of the development of the Latin American nation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Latin American Indigenous Geographies of Fear: Living in the Shadow of Racism, Lack of Development, and Antiterror Measures

U.S.-dominated geographies of fear after 11 September 2001 represent indigenous peoples as potential security threats and destabilizing influences on Latin American nation-states. This article contextualizes these narratives by outlining the geographies of fear to which Latin American indigenous populations have been subjected in nation-building, resulting in restricted development opportunities and insecure livelihoods. As recent neoliberal development restructures indigenous rights, indigenous geographies of hope remain only unevenly realized. Yet, as a proclaimed alternative to development, postdevelopment approaches only partially capture the nature of indigenous geographies of hope. By critically evaluating neoliberal and postdevelopment approaches, the article ends by outlining the specific perspective geography brings to development.

Whither equity in health? The state of the poor in Latin America

Abstract As Latin American nation states define their public health agendas, the notion of public re-sponsibility for health has slowly dissipated, and inclinations towards neoliberalism have led to an increasing privatization of health care. When it comes to the privatization of health, Haiti has many similarities to other parts of Latin Ameri-ca, from the Guatemalan highlands to the urban slums of Lima. Even in Chile, where health indi-cators rank amongst the best in Latin America, there is a growing equity gap in health outcomes. Although in health care the application of mar-ket forces cannot yield optimal results, health professionals have to increasingly work within the paradigm of market forces and defensively prove that their interventions are effective and inexpensive. Unless the poor are accorded some right to health care, water, food, and education, their lives will inevitably be short, desperate and unfree; these are not indicators by which we will want to be judged. Equity; Delivery of Health Care; Privatization

Immigrant Positioning in Twentieth-Century Mexico: Middle Easterners, Foreign Citizens, and Multiculturalism

Immigrant Positioning in Twentieth-Century Mexico: Middle Easterners, Foreign Citizens, and Multiculturalism

The Politics of Development in Indigenous Panama

Since the Conquest, competition for control of natural resources between the conquerors and the conquered has largely shaped the fate of millions of indigenous people and thousands of indigenous communities across the Americas. As Latin American nations achieved independence from the Spanish Empire, they began to formulate policies that would allow national governments and their allies to prosper from wealth taken from indigenous peoples. Control of resources has bought the allegiance of a majority of the nonnative populations of Latin American nations and given nation-states the power to repress those who disagree with or are disadvantaged by national development plans. Latin American nation-states have dealt with indigenous peoples in a variety of ways. While the Guatemalan state, for example, has formulated various attempts to exterminate indigenous communities over the decades, Panama has mostly attempted to encapsulate and assimilate them. Different governing regimes have taken different approaches to putting these dominant strategies to work. Since the days of the Torrijos regime, indigenous communities and organizations have been more directly engaged in negotiating their control over resource management with the state. The current president of Panama, Mireya Moscoso, seems to be a master at speaking the language of indigenous rights and sustainable development while not doing much to empower indigenous peoples or protect Panama's ecosystems against devastating overexploitation. Nonetheless, it seems fair to note that under the Moscoso regime, indigenous communities do not seem as disadvantaged as they might be if a president less interested in rendering lip-service to indigenous rights were at the helm.

The ends of literature: the Latin American "boom" in the neoliberal marketplace

The Ends of Literature analyzes the part played by within contemporary Latin American thought and politics, above all the politics of neoliberalism. The why? of contemporary Latin American is the book's overarching concern. Its wide range includes close readings of the prose of Cortazar, Carpentier, Paz, Valenzuela, Piglia, and Las Casas; of the relationship of the Boom movement and its aftermath; of testimonial narrative; and of contemporary Chilean and Chicano film. The work also investigates in detail various theoretical projects as they intersect with and emerge from Latin American scholarship: cultural studies, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial studies.Latin American literature, both as a vehicle of conservatism and as an agent of subversion, is bound from its inception to the rise of the state. Literature's nature, role, and status are therefore altered when the Latin American nation-state succumbs to the process of neoliberalism: as the too-strong (dictatorship) yields to the too-weak (the market), and as the various practices of civil society and public life are replaced by private or privatized endeavors.However, neither the of literature nor the of the state can be assumed. The end of in Latin America is in fact the call for more literature; it is the call of literature, in particular that of the Boom. The end of the state, likewise, is the demand upon this state. The book, then, analyzes the ends in question as at once their purpose, direction, future, and conclusion.Also key to the study is the notion of transition. Within much recent Latin American political discussion la transicion refers to the passage from dictatorship to democracy, as well as to the failure of this shift, the failure of post-dictatorship. The author argues that the movement from literary to cultural studies, while issuing from intellectual and aesthetic circles, is an integral component of this same transition. The thematization of the bind between these two displacements-hence of Latin America's voyage into post-transition-forms a fundamental portion of the text.