Wagner Moura is the Brazilian actor who plays Colombian drug trafficker Pablo Escobar in the Netflix TV series Narcos.
Yes. A Brazilian actor playing a Colombia drug trafficker.
Moura said he felt Latin American for the first time because of his role in the series.
“I never felt in ‘Narcos’ I was telling a story that was foreign to me,” Moura said in an interview for the Spanish newspaper El País. “It was my story too, as a Latin American. Narcos shows how we are part of the same space and we have many things in common.”
If you’re not Brazilian, you are probably wondering why Moura didn’t feel Latin American before acting in the show.
After all, Brazil is part of Latin America, right?
Yes and no.
The situation is so confusing that we decided to interview an expert on the subject: Robert Patrick Newcomb, professor of Luso-Brazilian studies at the University of California, Davis, and author of the book “Nossa and Nuestra América: Inter-American Dialogues.”
What is the book about?
“Nossa and Nuestra América” discusses the tense and productive relationship between Brazil, where people speak Portuguese, and other American countries where Spanish is the dominant language.
The four 20th century Latin American writers Newcomb references are Uruguayan critic José Enrique Rodó, Brazilian writer-diplomat Joaquim Nabuco, Mexican humanist Alfonso Reyes and Brazilian historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda.
“I did not come to a conclusion whether Brazil is or is not part of Latin America, because for me, the whole idea of Latin America is a construction, an idea that can be traced back to a particular list of writers and philosophers in Europe and then later in Latin America itself,” Newcomb said in an interview for Gistory.
“I believe that one thing that the book exposes is that if you focus on Brazil specifically as a Latin American country then that angle on the question itself exposes the weakness of the idea of Latin America.”
What are Newcomb’s arguments for Brazil not being a part of Latin America?
The concept of Latin America, Newcomb said, is based on a shared colonial history and on the ubiquitous use of Spanish. Brazil, on the other hand, is a Portuguese-speaking country, with a different colonial history than most of Latin America.
That being said, Brazil is enormous, Newcomb said. When you’re trying to define Latin America, and you look at a map, you can’t ignore Brazil, Newcomb said.
“On one hand, as I say in my book, Brazil is a necessary part of Latin America if the idea of Latin America is going to have any weight behind it,” Newcomb explains. “But it is also an immediately problematic part of Latin America if you base your notions of Latin America on language and colonial history.”
Why does the relationship between Brazil and Latin America matter?
Brazil is the largest country in South America and the Latin American region, and the world’s fifth largest by land area. Brazil also has the largest economy in Latin America, the second largest in North and South America (behind the U.S.) and the seventh largest in the world — both nominally and in purchasing power parity — according to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
“If you look at the investments that Brazil is making in Bolivia and other countries in South America, you see that Brazil has a great economic influence in Latin America,” Newcomb said.
Beyond its economic strength and size, Brazil’s relationship with Latin America could change the way Americans and Europeans look at the region.
“If Latin America is able to present itself to the world as a sovereign and independent region with countries that collaborate in a number of projects, then the region can have a great deal of impact, both politically and economically in the world,” Newcomb
