“The Epic of Greater America”: The Origin and Future of Latin American Studies
By Olivia O’Brien
April 28th, 1965 marks an unforgettable day in Dominican history. On that day, President Lyndon Johnson sent 42,000 American troops to invade the island. 3,000 Dominicans died in the bloodshed. Prior to the invasion, the Dominican Republic was embroiled in conflict concerning the political trajectory of the island. President Juan Bosch, who was elected in the first free election in 30 years, had been overthrown and replaced by a three-man military junta two years prior. Despite this disruption, many Dominicans sought a return to a Bosch presidency. The political desires of these people eventually proved inconsequential. The arrival of the U.S. Marines to the Dominican Republic sealed the fate of the island. Joaquin Balaguer, a successor of the notorious Trujillo regime, was returned to power with the support of the United States.
The unforgettable story of the April 28th invasion, in the United States context, may be, quite paradoxically, forgettable. The violence of the story is completely unremarkable given the period in which it occurred. The so-called fight against communism framed and justified most US behavior during the Cold War. Rather than erased from history, this event blurs into the numerous other United States interventions in Latin America. Value judgments aside: the invasion of the Dominican Republic is generally agreed to be emblematic of US military behavior in the 20th century. What is less known, however, is how the mobilization of academia in the US mirrored the mobilization of the military apparatus on the island, particularly during the Cold War. In 1965, the same year of the invasion, US scholars formed the Latin American Studies Association, or LASA. LASA, still in operation today, brought together experts on Latin America to discuss research goals and teaching on the region.
The relationship between United States Latin American studies programs and its military imperatives in Latin America is a complicated one. Belonging to the same long history, they are undeniably connected. Quite often they operate in tandem, yet sometimes they operate in seemingly antagonistic ways. Regardless, it is this shared history that has continued implications in conversations surrounding Latin American studies.
In 2020, the Empedocles European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication produced a Special Issue focused on Latin American studies. The Special Issue includes seven articles, the majority of which were presented at the international seminar “Latin America in perspective” hosted at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University and at the Real Harvard Complutense College in 2019. In his introduction to the Special Issue, “Image, power and peripheries: Current perspectives on Latin American studies,” Miguel E. Vásquez frames the articles within larger themes and discussions within Latin Studies circles.
For Vásquez, context is everything. Rather than delving into the content of the articles, Vásquez calls into question the very discipline from which they emerge. His interrogation immediately distinguishes between Latin American studies and Latin American thought. Whereas Latin American studies is inherently delimited by academia and the university, he envisions Latin American thought as expansive and dynamic, by way of multidisciplinary perspective. For Vásquez, a cohesive introduction to the Issue in itself is paradoxical: “Latin American studies today,” he proclaims, “beyond its transversality, is characterized by its irreducibility to a specific terminology, to one methodology or a single topic.”
Vásquez’s anxious assertion of the “irreducibility” of Latin American studies is historically rooted. The very existence of the term “Latin America” as a geographically meaningful place has its origins in the geopolitical motivations of Europe and the United States. The same holds true for academic study of Latin America, particularly in the United States context. Centers of knowledge are seldom free from influences of power. Yet despite the historical distortion and manipulation of Latin American studies, the Special Issue indicates a value in continuing to expand, amplify, and contest Latin American thought. Rather than abandoning the project altogether, Latin America studies, rooted in Latin American thought, can respond to its at times ugly past, and be a site for agency.
The Ethnogeographic Board, created during the Second World War, provides context for the emphasized considerations of the 2020 Special Issue. The outbreak and cessation of the war required a rearticulation of the United States’ power within the new global order. Hemispheric division and definition served as tools for post-war United States economic and military policy. The Ethnogeographic Board gathered specialists from the National Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council and the Smithsonian Institution with the aim of structuring the world that made sense in the US vision. These centers of knowledge became responsible for the very makeup of the globe: the language of a United States-Latin American split prevailed over that of North and South America.
Brazil’s status under the Ethnogeographic Board illuminates the fundamental instability of the Latin American designation in the mid-twentieth century context. Prior to the Second World War, Brazil’s inclusion in larger “Spanish America” was debated both internally and externally. Brazil’s distinct linguistic makeup and long-lasting monarchical government in part contributed to this separation. Brazil’s relationship with the United States was also generally understood to be more amicable. According to Leslie Bethell, this begs the question: “When did Brazil finally become part of ‘América Latina’?” She answers: “When ‘América Latina’ became ‘Latin America’ – that is to say, when the United States, and by extension Europe and the rest of the world, began to regard Brazil as an integral part of a region called Latin America.” Brazil found itself surprised and slighted, when at the end of the World War Two, it was given no preferences or distinctions from the 20 other Latin American republics. The Ethnogeographic Board neatly tucked Brazil within the amalgamation of Latin America, without even a permanent UN Security Council seat to spare. The case of Brazil shows how the idea of Latin America itself—and the academic inquiry and research surrounding it—is historically produced by and associated with imperial power.
The very idea of Latin America was further defined and reinforced with the emergence of area studies in the United States. Area studies assumed an interdisciplinary approach—combining history, economics, politics and language study, to understand the non-Western world. Professor of Sociology Biray Kolluoglu-Kirli argues that area studies in the United States must be understood in relation to Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism. In his 1978 book, Orientalism—a foundational work in postcolonial theory—Said articulates the historical construction of “the Orient” by writers, artists and other cultural workers. While no such geographical location exists today, Said explains that no such region ever existed. Rather the orientalists served to define and encapsulate an expansive, non-cohesive region into the category of “the Orient.” The orientalists, who largely self-identified as pertaining to the “West,” attempted to study the “East” and its differences, and in doing so, made an otherwise empty term a politically meaningful region. At the core of orientalism is an essentialized understanding of the East as backwards and unchanging.
Orientalism is adjacent to area studies in the United States. Reductive and exotic portrayals of the non-Western world had been in existence for centuries in the European context. However, in the 19th and 20th century, orientalism and oriental studies became formally institutionalized to justify European capitalist expansion. The mobilization of knowledge production explicitly served an imperialist end. Kolluoglu-Kirli argues that origins of area studies operated on a similar logic. By way of regional study, the United States capitalized on unequal power relations to achieve particular geopolitical considerations. Latin American studies, a branch of area studies, developed specifically in relation to the motivations and anxieties inspired by the Cold War.
Advocates of area studies during the Cold War subscribed to a particular theory of modernization. According to these modernization theorists, all nations follow a “natural” progression of development. Based on this logic, differences in conditions amongst nations are attributed to the varying stages each nation finds itself. Immanuel Wallerstein, an American sociologist, elucidates the damaging results of “modernization theory” in his discussion of world-systems analysis–which demonstrates the inherently exploitative nature of the global economic system. In the Cold War context, Wallerstein argues that “modernization theory” offered nations only two pathways: either nations could follow the model of the United States or that of the USSR.
The power of “modernization theory” did not reside solely in the classrooms and academic circles of area studies. Within area studies, this world view was developed and studied, to the point where it was presented as uncontested truth. Money was funneled to social scientists believed to be working in the name of development. Apart from government support, the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie Foundations contributed significant sums of money to the development of area studies. From 1950 to 1973 alone, the Ford Foundation contributed $278 million. As the discipline grew in size and funds, so did the United States’ control over the political and economic direction of other nations. With the support of this theory, the US offered policy “suggestions” to other governments and justified intervention. Area studies, as it was first conceived, was a geopolitical tool of the United States. Power relations and power imbalances became codified, maintained and ultimately justified through academic study.
McGeorge Bundy, an idealized figure in the American imagination, provides an overt example of the dual orchestration of academia and international policy in the United States. Bundy, also called “Mac,” is largely known for his political presence throughout the majority of the 20th century–serving as National Security Advisor under both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Since his days as a member of the Skull and Bones society at Yale University, Bundy found himself in the inner circle holding positions of prestige and power.
The JFK Presidential Library chronicles the prolific past of Bundy in painstaking detail: from 1950 to 2000 Bundy served as Professor of Government and Dean of Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, Special Assistant to the President on Foreign Affairs, President of the the Ford Foundation, Professor at New York University, and Scholar-in-Residence at the Carnegie Corporation. This timeline of Bundy’s extensive career obscures the sinister implications of the individual positions when considered in relation to one another. His various positions, viewed simultaneously, expose area studies as explicitly an arm of the US military apparatus.
Bundy is the very personification of what Khosrowjah describes as the “triangle” of area studies. Khosrowjah maps out the three sides of the triangle: “in addition to universities and state military and intelligence agencies, foundations such as Ford (through the mediation of the so-called independent non-governmental organization Social Science Research Council, SSRC) constitute the third side of the area studies triangle.” Apart from these positions, Bundy is also known for his role in the implementation of the Marshall Plan, Cuban Missile Crisis, Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam War. Bundy recognizes: knowledge is power. Bundy extends this logic to deduce: knowledge ought to be weaponized to gain geopolitical power.
The 2020 Special Issue of the Empedocles European Journal raises the question of the relevance of actors like McGeorge Bundy and other Cold War influences in the current architecture of Latin American studies. David C. Engerman, who has written in defense of area studies, warns against the over-emphasization of the Cold War in shaping Latin American studies. Engerman argues that during the second half of the 20th century, participants of Latin American studies were not solely motivated by anti-communist sentiment. Then and now, he argues, many scholars of Latin America were driven by cultural and linguistic curiosity. Moreover, “sweeping condemnations of academic-government relations” serve to erase the agency of individual scholars and researchers motivated by intellectual innovation. While the Cold War context is inextricable from the formation of Latin American studies, perhaps Engerman’s sentiment supports the value of Latin American studies in its contemporary format.
Engerman’s argument echoes a core idea from Herbert E. Bolton’s 1933 piece “The Epic of Greater America.” Although written prior to the Cold War, Bolton similarly argues for the value of studying the entirety of the Western Hemisphere for intellectual purposes. According to Bolton, the historical investigation of “America,” up until that time, focused solely on the United States–excluding how the entirety of the Americas has grown and been shaped by its bordering regions. Bolton insists, “we need an Adams to sketch the highlights and the significant developments of the Western Hemisphere as a whole.”
Close to a century has elapsed since the time of Bolton’s writing, yet the act of studying Latin America continues to present challenges to scholars. Today, Latin American studies programs still face restrictions within academic institutions. Title VI funding often prohibits scholars from pursuing particular lines of research. At the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan, for example, Title VI prevents scholars from obtaining funding for work related to Puerto Rico, because it is considered a part of the United States and separate from Latin America. Such barriers reveal the continued effects of United States hegemony and imperialism on the construction of Latin America and how it can and should be understood.
Bolton’s words of caution on the study of “Greater America” apply to the contemporary challenges of scholars of Latin America: “perhaps the person who undertakes the task, as a guarantee of objectivity ought to be an inhabitant of the moon.” Yet despite the potential pitfalls Latin Americanists face, as Bolton would likely agree, there is value in the continuation of the project. Critical Latinamericanists center their methodology on the imperialist history of their very discipline, as well as the social movements within Latin America. In the Special Issue, Váquez suggests art and visual studies as expansive mechanisms to break away from one-dimensional understandings of the region. Regardless of the ultimate destination of Latin American studies, the immediate direction of the study of the region requires an intergenerational reflection of and dialogue with proto-Latin American studies departments and scholars of the region.
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