Why are those Latin Americans so backward? Why are they still underdeveloped or why so slow to develop? Why can’t they be like us? These are questions asked by both the informed and misinformed in the United States ever since the early years of the nineteenth century. Two basic beliefs underlie such questions. First, the United States has done everything “just right,” as reflected in its social progress, economic prosperity, and political stability. Second, something must be wrong with Latin Americans, or they would not have failed so badly to develop when presumably they had both the resources and potential.
Over the course of almost two centuries, attempts to explain Latin America’s lack of development—defined by the author as the failure to keep pace with the United States in achieving political stability within a democratic framework, balanced economic growth, and social integration—have produced a wide range of perceptions. The purpose of this work is to identify and analyze these perceptions, organize them chronologically from 1870 to 1965, and track their consistencies and differences within the context of specific periods in the history of United States-Latin American relations.
Although this book focuses on the years 1870 to 1965, an initial chapter provides a sweeping overview of perspectives during the years prior to 1870. As the reader comes to realize, the perspectives held by the United States were not pretty ones and the author does not shrink from what may seem as harsh descriptions. From the early part of the nineteenth century, North Americans perceived Latin Americans as essentially a “slothful, priest-ridden population of inferior, mixed breeds perpetuating the nonproductive ways of the colonial era and stagnating in tropical languor amid underdeveloped abundance.” Why start with 1870? The author explains that 1870 was the year in which the debate over the proposed treaty to annex the Dominican Republic “provided an opportunity for extended commentary about Latin America without the distorting passions associated with the Mexican-American and Spanish-American War.” This study concludes in 1965, when the United States was in the midst of implementing the Alliance for Progress program and when there was the greatest degree of consensus on the nature of Latin American underdevelopment.
This is a unique work of scholarship. To the best of my knowledge no one has ever tried to cover such a large body of literature in an effort to find and characterize expressed perceptions of Latin America over such a long period, almost two centuries. Seemingly, no piece of information or documentary material was left out in the search for what the United States thought of Latin America relative to its developmental problems. From popular magazines to scholarly journals; from personal accounts and memoirs of travelers, missionaries, U.S. diplomats, and businessmen to journalistic reports and academic studies; the author reviews them all. The perceptions he finds are not surprising since they have always been part of American popular culture.
Latin American Underdevelopment is particularly interesting and valuable for the clearly laid out evidence that certain perceptions, rooted in the climatic conditions of Latin America and in its racial and cultural legacy, persisted for a very long, long time. It was not until the 1960s, when the United States embarked on a plan to carry out the modernization of Latin America in the hopes that this would prevent other countries of the Western Hemisphere from following Cuba’s footsteps into communism, that the concepts of climate, racial mixture, and the inherited Spanish culture (relics of European medievalism, as someone called it) were no longer factors used to explain why Latin America had not developed. Unfortunately, as the author concludes, the contemporary literature on Latin American development shows no current consensus on what continues to cause its social and economic dysfunctions and backwardness.
While this work was probably not written to be used as a textbook, it is certainly to be recommended for courses on United States-Latin American relations. Even better, it should be used in every general course on Latin American civilization or culture. Although analytical and scholarly, the reading is far from complex and is, in fact, quite easy to follow.