and France (Haiti). (Panama, of course, is an oddity here, having gained its independence as a part of New Granada in the 1820s and then again in 1903 as an “independent” republic. Cuba did not leave the Spanish empire until 1898 and then experienced U.S. occupation until 1902.) From the earliest texts of the founders of the field of Latin American history (such as William Spence Robertson and Percy Alvin Martin, founders of the Hispanic American Historical Review) to the journalist Hubert Herring’s A History of Latin America (1955, 1961, 1968), this was the standard approach. These books were nearly always diplomatic, political, and military history, with only the occasional nod toward society and culture. Even the noted journalist John Gunther, in his wide-ranging travels, did not bother to look beyond the standard twenty republics.7
Some of the very first synthetic texts on the region focused solely on Spain in the Americas and went no farther than the colonial period. Charles Edward Chapman, in Colonial Hispanic America: A History (1933), includes Brazil, and he rejects the “incorrect term ‘Latin America’” in favor of “Hispanic America.” The major synthetic surveys in the 1940s and 1950s took as their domain the twenty independent republics. Dana G. Munro, J. Fred Rippy, Donald E. Worcester and Wendell G. Schaeffer all produced encyclopedic surveys. Munro (a former State Department diplomat) covers the colonial period in just over a hundred pages and then takes another 450 to cover the political histories of each of the twenty nations! Much like Herring, Rippy focuses mainly on politics and economics, but with the occasional section on “intellectual life.” Worcester and Schaeffer’s massive survey (at more than 900 pages) offers a very straightforward political history with little effort to frame the issues or the region. It is classic history as “one damn thing after another.” The greatest publishing success of this era is easily John A. Crow’s The Epic of Latin America, which was first published in 1946. Trained as a scholar of Spanish literature, Crow taught for decades (1937–74) at UCLA. Despite its size (nearly a thousand pages in the last edition), The Epic of Latin America has been a huge commercial success, going through four editions over fifty years (1946, 1971, 1980, 1992).8
The decolonization of the Caribbean (including here the Guianas) in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s clouded the traditional picture, and this can be seen easily in the textbooks published after 1970. One of the biggest selling volumes has been E. Bradford Burns’s Latin America: A Concise Interpretive History. In the first edition (1972), Burns takes as his subject the “traditional 20,” saying that “Geopolitically the region encompasses 18 Spanish-speaking republics, French-speaking Haiti, and Portuguese-speaking Brazil,” yet his statistical tables include Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. By the sixth edition (1994) this definition has shifted to include “five English-speaking Caribbean nations” (with the Bahamas joining the other four above). Despite the book’s title, the statistical tables cover “Latin America and the Caribbean.”9
Benjamin Keen’s A History of Latin America, probably the bestselling comprehensive history of Latin America over the last quarter of the twentieth century, covers the “twenty Latin American republics.” The very popular recent history of Latin America since independence, John Chasteen’s Born in Blood and Fire, also takes as its focus the twenty nation-states. What must be the most widely used volume on post-colonial Latin America, Thomas Skidmore and Peter Smith’s Modern Latin America avoids the thorny problem of definition in its prologue. Yet, the first edition (1984) includes individual chapters on Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Cuba, and Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama). In the second edition (1989), Skidmore and Smith added a chapter on the Caribbean that included Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the Lesser Antilles, but they do not provide a rationale for their choice of countries. In contrast, Edwin Williamson’s The Penguin History of Latin America (1992) and Lawrence Clayton and Michael Conniff’s A History of Modern Latin America (1999) stick to the traditional political definition.10
The influential and authoritative Cambridge History of Latin America (eleven volumes, 1984–2009) takes Latin America
to comprise the predominantly Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking areas of continental America south of the United States – Mexico, Central America and South America – together with the Spanish-speaking Caribbean – Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic – and, by convention, Haiti. (The vast territories in North America lost to the United States by treaty and war, first by Spain, then by Mexico, during the first half of the nineteenth century are for the most part excluded. Neither the British, French and Dutch Caribbean islands nor the Guianas are included even though Jamaica and Trinidad, for example, have early Hispanic antecedents …)11
With the exception of Puerto Rico, this definition could easily come from the Munro volume in 1942!
All these definitions hinge on an analysis of some set of common historical processes among nations in the Americas that make them part of something called Latin America, as well as their differences from the United States. With the prominent exception of the traditionalists – and their use of the independent nation-state – very rarely do the authors of histories of Latin America provide an explicit rationale for the areas included in the text. Nevertheless, at the heart of the matter is the notion of what binds these peoples and countries together, a common history that is, at the same time, not shared with the peoples of the United States (or Canada).
At the core of that common history are the processes of invasion, conquest, and colonialism over three centuries, beginning with the “Columbian moment” in 1492. The collision of three peoples – Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans – gave birth to the region we now call Latin America. The moment of conception was the arrival of Columbus and his crew on that warm Caribbean morning in October 1492. Columbus unwittingly brought together two worlds and three peoples, initiating a violent and fertile series of cultural and biological clashes lasting centuries. The histories of the native peoples of the Americas (the New World) and the peoples of Africa and Europe (the Old World) before 1492 took shape in isolation from each other. The history of Latin America begins with the European explorations and invasions and the forced migration of millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas. These conquests and collisions took shape under Spanish and Portuguese colonialism and imperialism. The history of the United States and Canada (and the islands of the Caribbean) is also defined by invasion, conquest, and colonialism. The argument for a common history for what we call Latin America hinges on the belief that Spanish and Portuguese colonialism were similar enough to include Brazil in a region with Spanish America, and different enough from British colonialism to distinguish them from the United States and Canada (and the non-Iberian Caribbean). If one can write and argue for a common history for Latin America, it has its foundations in that colonial heritage of Iberian monarchies subjugating Native Americans and Africans as a labor force to produce agricultural and mining wealth for the European and Euro-American landholding and commercial elites.
With the emergence of transnational studies over the last generation or so, and the increasing importance of migration from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean to the United States, the old model of Latin America defined by nation-states has become less viable and harder to defend. What should the historian of Latin America do with the southwestern and southeastern regions of the United States in writing or teaching about the history of Latin America? Are they part of Latin America until the early nineteenth century, and then not after? What about all the Caribbean islands that formed part of the Spanish empire for a century or two before the British, Dutch, and French seized them in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Even more complicated, what about Puerto Rico? By all indicators (history, language, culture), Puerto Rico is Latin American, but it is politically part of the United States (the only “free associated state”). As millions of immigrants from south of its current political border have flowed into the United States in the last fifty years, the longstanding cultural and historical ties across both sides of the border have been reinforced. The second largest urban population of Salvadorans, for example, is in Los Angeles. The concentration of Mexican immigrants in several major U.S. cities makes them some of the largest Mexican cities, but outside of Mexico. In short, using the political, nation-state definition of Latin America excludes large sections of North America that are culturally and