Background to Latin American History PDF

BACKGROUND TO LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE THE EXPLORATION OF THE NEW WORLD BY EUROPEANS AT THE END OF THE 15THC A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF LATIN AMERICA ON THE EVE OF EUROPEAN EXPLORATION The Land Geographically, Latin America includes the landmarks extending f...

BACKGROUND TO LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE THE EXPLORATION OF THE NEW WORLD BY EUROPEANS AT THE END OF THE 15THC A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF LATIN AMERICA ON THE EVE OF EUROPEAN EXPLORATION The Land Geographically, Latin America includes the landmarks extending from part of North America, that is, from the Rio Grande borders between Texas and Mexico, to the southern tip of South America and some Caribbean islands. The region today encompasses eighteen Spanish-speaking republics, Portuguese-speaking Brazil, and French-speaking Haiti, a total of approximately eight million square miles. It is a region of geographic extremes. The Andes, the highest continuous mountain barrier on earth, spans 4,400 miles and has at least three dozen peaks that are taller than Mount McKinley. The Amazon River has the greatest discharge volume, drainage basin, and length of navigable waterways on the planet. Yet Latin America also contains the driest region on earth, the Atacama Desert. Half of Latin America is forested, comprising one quarter of the world‟s total forest area, which has led to its description as “lungs of the world”. Latin America often seems a tragic victim of its climate, rocked by frequent earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, punishing hurricanes, and deadly avalanches. Indeed, Latin America sits atop five active tectonic plates- Caribbean, Cocos, Nazca, Scotia, and South American. In addition, part of South America‟s Pacific coast lies along the “ring of fire”, the region where 80 percent of the seismic and volcanic activity of the earth takes place. Most of Latin America lies within the tropics, which prompted Europeans to speculate that the hot steamy climate made people lazy. However, as many Latin Americans gradually lost access to the best lands and were forced to eke out a living on poor soils or work on the large landholdings of elites, it became clear that the climate was no drawback to hard work. Uruguay is the only Latin American country with no territory in the tropics. South America reaches its widest point, 3,200 miles, just a few degrees south of the Equator. Most of the west coast of Latin America is refreshed by the cold Pacific Ocean currents and the altitudes of the mountains and highlands offer a wide range of temperatures that belie the latitude. For centuries, and long before the Europeans arrived, many of the region‟s most advanced civilisations flourished in the mountain plateaus and valleys. Today many of Latin America‟s largest cities are in the mountains or on mountain plateaus, e.g. Mexico City, Guatemala City, Bogota, Quito, and Sao Paulo, to mention a few. Much of Latin America‟s population, particularly in Middle America and along west coast of South America, concentrates in the highland areas. Four major river networks, the Magdalena, Orinoco, Amazon, and La Plata, flow into the Caribbean or Atlantic, providing access into the interior that is missing on the west coast. The Amazon ranks as one of the world‟s most impressive river style. It is the largest river in volume in the world, exceeding that of the Mississippi fourteen times. Running eastward from its source 18,000 feet up in the Andes, it is joined from both the north and south by more than 200 tributaries. Together this imposing river and its tributaries provide 25,000 miles of navigable water. Farther to the south, the Plata network flows through some of the world‟s richest soil, the Pampas, a vast flat area shared by Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. The river system includes the Uruguay, Paraguay, and Parana rivers, but it gets its name from the Rio de la Plata, a 180-mile-long estuary separating Uruguay and the Argentine province of Buenos Aires. The system drains a basin of more than 1.5 million square miles. Shallow in depth, it provides a vital communication and transportation link between the Atlantic coast and the southern interior of the continent. Source: Googlemap.com The Peoples Different theories have been advanced to explain the presence of human life in the Western Hemisphere. The one now accepted is that the hemisphere was settled in a series of migrations across the Bering Strait from Asia. There is no consensus about when these migrations took place. Moving slowly southward, they dispersed throughout North and South America. Over the millennia, at an even rate, some advanced through hunting and fishing cultures to take up agriculture. At the same time they fragmented into many cultural and linguistic groups, with up to 2,200 different languages, although they maintained certain general physical features in common. The indigenous groups can best be understood by grouping them as non-sedentary, semi sedentary and sedentary societies. Non-sedentary societies were gathering and hunting groups that followed a seasonal cycle of moving through a delimited territory in search of food; they were mostly found in the area that now encompasses the northern Mexico frontier, the Argentine Pampas, and the interior of Brazil. In semi sedentary societies, hunting was still important, but they had also developed slash-and-burn agriculture, which shifted sites within their region. They populated much of Latin America and were often found on the fringes of fully sedentary peoples. Fully sedentary peoples had settled communities based on intensive agriculture, which provided enough surpluses to support a hierarchical society with specialised classes. They were found in central Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. These complex civilisations were located only in Mesoamerica and western South America. The social organization of various indigenous groups was shaped by their environments, which shaped particular material cultures. In addition, the early American cultures were varied, but a majority shared enough traits to permit a few generalisations. Family or clan units served as the basic social organization. All displayed profound faith in supernatural forces that they believed shaped, influenced, and guided their lives. For that reason, the shamans, those intimate with the supernatural, played important roles. They provided the contact between the mortal and immortal, between the human and the spirit, and they served as healers. In the more complex and highly stratified societies, there was a differentiation between the more extensive landholdings of the nobility and that of the commoners. But in all sedentary indigenous societies, land was provided to everyone on the basis of membership in the community. The land furnished fruits, berries, nuts, and roots. Tilling the soil produced other foods, such as corn and potatoes. Many artifacts, instruments, and implements were similar. For instance, spears, bows and arrows, and clubs were the common weapons of warfare or the hunt. Although these similarities were significant, the differences among the many cultures were enormous and impressive. By the end of the fifteenth century, between 9 million and 100 million people inhabited the Western Hemisphere. Scholars still heatedly debate the figures, and there are forceful arguments to support the each extreme; a commonly used figure now is 54 million. Inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere belonged to myriad cultural groups, none of which had a word in their language that grouped together all the indigenous people of the hemisphere. They were as differentiated as the ancestral tribes of Europe, and their identities were locally based. The most prominent indigenous groups were the Mexica of the Aztec empire and the Mayas of Mexico and Central America; the Carib and the Arawak of the Caribbean area; the Chibcha of Columbia; the Inca Empire of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia; the Araucanian of Chile; the Guarani of Paraguay; and the Tupi of Brazil. Of these, the Aztec, Maya, and Inca exemplify the most complex cultural achievements, with fully sedentary and imperial societies. Many differences separated these three high indigenous civilisations, but some impressive similarities existed. Society was highly structured. The hierarchy of nobles, priests, warriors, artisans, farmers, and slaves was ordinarily inflexible, although occasionally some mobility did occur. At the pinnacle of that hierarchy stood the omnipotent emperor, the object of the greatest respect and veneration. In the words of the sixteenth century chronicler Pedro de Cieza de Leon, “All men so feared the king, that they did not dare speak evil of his shadow”. Little or no distinction existed between civil and religious authority, hence, for all intent and purposes Church and State were one. The Incan and Aztec emperors were both as the representatives of the sun on earth and thus as deities, a position probably held by the rulers of the Mayan city-states as well. Royal judges impartially administered the laws of the empires and apparently enjoyed a reputation of fairness. It was more certain that those who did evil would receive punishment without fail and that neither prayers nor bribes would avert it. To the first Europeans who observed them, these people seemed to live an idyllic life. The tropic required little or no clothing. Generally nude, the Tupi developed the art of body ornamentation and painted elaborate and ornate geometric designs on themselves. Into their noses, lips, and ears they inserted stones and wooden artifacts. Feathers from the colourful forest birds provided an additional decorative touch. Their appearance prompted the Europeans to think of them as innocent children of nature. However, as competition for land and resources increased, chroniclers would later tell quite a different tale, one in which the indigenous emerged as „wicked villains, brutes who desperately needed the civilizing of Europe‟. DEFINITION OF LATIN AMERICA Origins of Latin America Latin America covers a variety of people and places. Geographically, Latin America includes the landmarks extending from part of North America, that is, from the Rio Grande borders between Texas and Mexico, to the southern tip of South America and some Caribbean islands. The people of Latin America contain elements and mixtures of three racial groups namely; native Indians, white Europeans and Africans. However, the term Latin America resists facial categorization. This is because Latin America is not a geographical unit. Latin America does not exist as a region until the 19th Century. Before then it was known by the Iberians as the New World, Indies and the colonies interchangeably. It is important to note, however, that the region was a “New World” only to Europeans and obviously not to those who lived there. It became „Americas‟ after the voyage of Italian navigator, Amerigo Vespucci. The Conceptual Interpretation of Latin America The idea of a Latin American people and region originated with the French author, Michel Chevalier who theorised in the 1830s that the world was increasingly dominated by people whose roots were Anglo- Saxons in contrast to the sensibilities of people like the French whose roots, at least linguistically, were Latin. In 1833, Chevalier was sent by the French government to the U.S.A and Mexico where he developed the idea that the Spanish and Portuguese speaking Americans shared the culture of the Latin Europe. Chevalier‟s idea was transformed into Latin America by two South Americans living in Europe at that time, namely, Francisco Bilbao and Joseph Maria Caisedo. Bilbao used the term „Latin America‟ in his writings in the 1850s and most notably at a conference in Paris in 1856. Both writers used the term to differentiate between parts of Americas colonized by the Iberians and North America. In his 1857 poem “Las dos America” Caisedo contends that the Latin American race shared origins and a mission to confront the Anglo-Saxon race. In determining which countries qualify as Latin America, there are two major parameters that must be satisfied, namely; cultural heritage and geographical variables. Geographically, Latin America is not a unit because it stretches from parts of North America to South and Central America, the Caribbean Basin and West India Islands. There is however a fundamental weakness in either of these criteria because there are a number of countries within these geographical boundaries that were not assimilated into the Roman culture. In other words, there are countries in the Americas that had nothing to do with the Iberians and were not influenced by Roman culture. Examples of such countries include Belize in Central America (Anglophone), French Guiana in Central America (Francophone), British Guyana and Suriname (Dutch speaking). These countries therefore, fail the cultural heritage test, and even though they satisfy the geographical requirement, they do not quality to be referred to as Latin American countries. This brings us to the second variable, namely cultural heritage. A Latin American country must, of necessity, share elements of historical experience and culture with the Iberians on the one hand and with one another in many aspects and respects than they do with the likes of Canada, Suriname and Belize which are located on the same American continent. Latin America countries were all colonized by the Iberians hence; they possessed a shared historical experience of colonialism. Similarly, they all speak either the Spanish or Portuguese language (both languages derived from Latin). It is important to note however, that neither cultural nor geographical criterion alone is adequate in determining what areas constitute Latin America. For instance, African countries like Angola, Mozambique and Equatorial Guinea that were colonized and influenced by the Portuguese cultural heritage might qualify as Latin America, if only the cultural heritage is adopted. These countries must therefore, be distinguished from Latin American countries due to the fact that they do not satisfy the geographical requirement, even though they qualify culturally In the same vein, French speaking Canada and Guyana would qualify since the French language is also derived from Latin. In summary Latin America must be understood as that part of Americas colonized by the Iberians power and peopled by the indigenous, the Africans and Europeans. It is a region that since the movement of conquest has been characterized by change, continuity, conflict and cooperative multi-culturalism and hybridity.