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The One-Minute Geographer: In Search of Latin America
Do we really know what Latin America is, and is it a proper phrase to use?
When I was a geography student eons ago, I took a course called Anglo America — the same name as the textbook. “Anglo” America, covering the United States and Canada, was the northern counterpart to Latin America. This division split the geologic unit of North America along the Rio Grande, assigning Mexico to the “Latin” unit. This was largely a linguistic division: Anglo-speakers to the north, those speaking Latin-based Romance languages to the south.
Along with this division came the stereotypes. Latin Americans were brown-skinned Catholics who spoke Spanish. Fake news, as we will see in upcoming posts. Over time, the term Anglo applied to the region fell out of favor. In North America, how did Native Americans, French Canadians and African Americans feel about being called Anglos? However, the phrase Latin America remains in common use, and I will use it with some caveats, but keep in mind, how does “Latin” apply to, let’s say Jamaicans, who are primarily English-speaking Protestants of African ancestry? Or to the largest population group in Guyana: the 40% of the population made up of Asian Indians, most of whom are Hindu? As we will see, even the “Spanish” adjective isn’t true if we look at just the South American continent, where more than half of the population lives in Portuguese-speaking Brazil.
The Western Hemisphere is made up of two continents. Geologically speaking, South America begins about where Panama ends, so Central America and the Caribbean islands are generally considered part of the North American continent even though, when you look at the continental plates (map above), the Caribbean Plate is actually separate from both the North and South American plates.
