* Chapter 1 Introduction
Comparisons between the Americas are salted through a
wide variety of literature on the western hemisphere. They
may be the result of methodical comparative research. They
may come out of the field experience of "old hands." Some are
imaginative, even poetic; many show unfortunate biases and
contain misjudgments. They may be sustained through a lengthy
analysis or thrown in as asides. Almost invariably. however,
they are intriguing invitations to probe a subject. Whether
they are persuasive or preposterous, they make good research
topics -- and examination questions. They can seldom be shown
to have a geographic pedigree, but they often have geographic
significance.
The Double Purpose of This Book
How did the two major culture realms of the western
hemisphere, so similar in many respects, develop as
differently as they did? This key question in human geography
can be easily elaborated. Latin America has a series of
natural environments similar to those of North America and an
abundance of a variety of natural resources. Its population
is no less industrious than that of North America. After all,
it has a considerable number of people of "good European
stock"! Then why did it not reach North American levels of
socioeconomic development? One is led quickly into a complex
consideration of timing and circumstance. Perhaps what was
considered desirable by way of development in the one context
was undesirable in the other. In any case, much is not what it
seems.
Little reflection is needed in order to recognize the
comparison as a basic learning mechanism. It is to be
manipulated in the following pages for two complementary
purposes. The intention will be, first of all, to introduce
people who have their homes in North America and who know at
least parts of it reasonably well to comparable regions of
Latin America as well as some essentials of both cultural
realms. At the same time and perhaps more fundamentally, the
comparative approach will be used to stimulate an
experimentation with geography, for which it seems well suited
indeed.
The pursuit of our double purpose will lead through the
richness and intricacy of many actual places. However, it
will center again and again around some concepts that should
be useful in the understanding of a discipline -- and of two
culture realms. No attempt will be made to cover the one or
the other comprehensively.
FIGURE 1.1. Striking mountains of volcanic origin punctuate
the North American Cordillera. Mount St. Helens, Washington,
shows the typical snow-covered cone and the lines left by lava
flows. It was last active between AD 1600 and 1700. Photo
courtesy of U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Geological Survey.
FIGURE 1.2. Mt. Villarrica, Chile, a long-extinguished
volcano, similar in location, origin, and form to many peaks
in the North American West such as Mount St. Helenes. Photo
courtesy of Lan-Chile Airlines.
FIGURE 1.3. The two major cultural realms of the Americas.
The boundary between these two realms is one of the most
distinct cultural divides in the world. (Base from Goode's
World Atlas, (c) Rand McNally, 1974.)
Stimuli for Comparison
A Mexican philosopher, Octavio Paz, compares Mexicans and
North Americans in his book The Labyrinth of Solitude [12].
It is a contribution to thought about man in the Americas, and
just possibly a useful background for the investigation of the
reasons for the technological, economic, and other differences
readily apparent to anyone crossing the U.S.-Mexico boundary.
It is arguable on various grounds and could stand
qualification here and there, but it does make good reading:
The North Americans love fairy tales and detective
stories and we love myths and legends. The Mexican
tells lies because he delights in fantasy, or
because he is desperate, or because he wants to rise
above the sordid facts of his life; a North American
does not tell lies, but he substitutes social truth
with the real truth, which is always disagreeable.
We get drunk in order to confess; they get drunk in
order to forget. They are optimists and we are
nihilists.... We are suspicious and they are
trusting. We are sorrowful and sarcastic and they
are happy and full of jokes. North Americans want to
understand and we want to contemplate. They are
activists and we are quietists; we enjoy our wounds
and they enjoy their inventions. They believe in
hygiene, health, work and contentment and perhaps
they never experienced true joy, which is an
intoxication, a whirlwind [12, pp. 23, 24].
A look at Figure 1.4 and 1.5, an actual scan of people's
faces in the streets of the major cities of the Americas, or
material on races such as will be presented later in this
book, indicates quickly that one can put the races and ethnic
groups of North and Latin America in essentially the same
categories. In both there are Indians, whites, blacks,
orientals, and mixtures of various kinds, but how similar are
the ratios and the components, really? Where similarities are
plausible, one is tempted to ask whether the respective races
played similar roles in the settlement and socioeconomic
development of the two culture realms.
Regarding the relationships between races, one author has
some drastic things to say: "The Anglo-American's policy
toward the Indian was to kill him and take his land, and
perhaps make a razorstrop of his hide. The Spaniard's policy
was to baptize him, take his land, enslave him, and
appropriate his women" [6, p. 250].
In the Americas, as elsewhere, the marks left by people
on the landscape are influenced to a large extent by their
attitude toward it, Edmundo O'Gorman, a distinguished Mexican
historian, contrasts the two major colonizing powers in this
respect:
Spanish colonization is animated by a medieval
spirit; whatever it contains that is modern is a
blemish in it. Anglo-American colonization is of
pure modern inspiration; whatever it contains that
is medieval is, in it and for it, an unjustified
limitation. The puritan, the man whose defect in
his time was that of being too modern, saw in
America, literally and vitally, a golden land of
promise, of liberation; for the Spaniards, America
is without hyperbole an unredeemed and black land,
the vast empire of the Devil [in 7, pp. 25-26].
O'Gorman was countering a serious attempt by a North
American historian, Herbert Eugene Bolton, to stimulate
comparison of the Americas:
There is a need for a broader treatment of American
history, to supplement the purely nationalistic
presentation to which we are accustomed.... It is my
purpose, by a few bold strokes, to suggest that the
broad phases of U.S. history are but phases common
to most portions of the entire western hemisphere;
that each local story will have clearer meaning when
studied in the light of the others; and that much of
what has been written of each national history is
but a thread out of a larger strand [cited in 7, pp.
3, 4].
This idea was and still is frequently referred to with
interest, but it never really took hold as an analytical
guideline. It was, or at least was seen to be, highly biased
toward a search for similarities and not sufficiently attuned
to differences.
FIGURE 1.4. A scan of peoples' faces on any busy street
quickly shows the different races and ethnic groups found in
the large cities of North and Latin America. Photo by Rogers
from Monkmeyer Press Photo Service.
It had grown out of "The Western Hemisphere Idea," the
view that North and Latin America stood in special
relationship, united above all else against European meddling
in the western hemisphere [15]. The "idea" lapsed as the
United States turned its attention more and more from Latin
America to Europe and Asia. Echoes remain in organizations
such as the Pan American Union and the Organization of
American States.
The Americas have sometimes been seen as strongly united
by their European cultural roots [7, pp. 141-164]. O'Gorman
saw the Americas as worlds apart, so far apart that they
couldn't even begin to comprehend each other. Any common
elements, such as European background and location in the
western hemisphere, he considered so general as to be
meaningless.
Someone else eventually and perhaps sensibly observed
that the differences were chronological and not fundamental.
The Americas do have a common history -- and, we might add, a
common geography -- but it is only a part of the picture [7,
pp. 264-269]. The similarities seem just substantial enough
to make the differences interesting.
FIGURE 1.5. Indians on a street in Silvia, Columbia. Photo
courtesy of United Nations.
Out of the story of the actual "opening up" of North
America comes a parade of colorful "types." We've all seen at
least some of them in the movies. The gold-miner pans the
river gravels of the West, hears a rumor, and moves on. The
bushwise frontiersman paddles northern rivers and raises havoc
among the Indian women. The pioneer farmer, the hillbilly, the
southern planter, the city slicker. the migrant worker, the
cowboy -- all helped to shape or misshape their habitat.
(Typical women have not yet been nearly so well defined!) It
is remarkable how many of these types have their approximate
equals in Latin America, but the emphasis must be on the word
approximate. Art and historical literature suggest certain
strong parallels between the South American gaucho and the
North American cowboy, for example, but a closer look shows
them to be different in important respects.
Out of essentially the same literature emerge certain
prominent attitudes toward the physical environment. European
settlers in North America and in the parts of Latin America
that were colonized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
tended to take an aggressive approach toward the wilderness.
Forests were cleared and the land was made arable. Throughout
the post-Columbian history of the Americas European immigrants
and their descendants took a highly pragmatic if not greedy
view of resources generally. These were meant to be
appropriated by them. The Spaniards have often been shown as
crazed by gold; the northern Europeans might well have fallen
ill as well had they found what the Spaniards did.
FIGURE 1.6. The coniferous forests of western North America
have their parallels in western South America. The tropical
forests are quite different. National Park Service photo by
George Grant.
Many of us can, no doubt, remember the colored maps of
the countries of the world that stared at us from the
schoolroom wall. In the western hemisphere they showed the
two substantial states in the north and the multiplicity of
smaller Spanish American states surrounding a giant, Brazil.
We may have wondered about the reasons for this pattern. A
partial explanation lies in the way the Americas achieved
independence. Some rather categorical contrasts have been
pointed out:
In the United States we see all the elements of
their history united in a move toward greater
liberty. In the disunited states we see the
impotent efforts of liberty, falling and rising
again, always threatened, never secure, living
through all the vicissitudes of a terrible
alternation between despotism and attempts at
freedom [13, p. 112].
Tourism is probably a more common impetus to comparison
within the Americas than is the literature we have cited. The
shallow and inaccurate impressions that often result are
serious, considering the high volume and the multiplier
effect.
A crossing by road from the United States to Mexico still
leads over one of the sharpest cultural divides in the world -
- despite the substantial migration of people and the
diffusion of ideas in both directions. Minor things may give
important first impressions. North American automobile
insurance policies end here; the Mexican ones are several
times as expensive, a fact that is not particularly
reassuring. Tourists going northward may be taken aback by a
no-nonsense official who refers to the huge, standard doomsday
book in which are inscribed the names of those who for one
reason or another aren't to be allowed in. The process
continues with much stamping, scribbling, stapling, and then a
very deliberate search through boxes and luggage. Many Latin
American tourists aren't tourists at all, and Uncle Sam feels
he must protect himself.
Unfortunate impressions may be gained from travel in the
other direction too. North Americans often misread the Latin
American city. Its "slums" may not be as squalid as they
appear; in fact, they may well be places of hope, to which
people have come for betterment of their condition, in which
they establish efficient community organization, and where
there is hard work for civic improvement. Unfamiliar farming
practices noticed along the roads may represent wisdom and not
necessarily backwardness.
A Fundamental Problem in the North American's View of Latin
America
A basic impediment to the understanding of Latin America
in North America is the strong tendency to see Latin America
as different, to stress contrasts in any comparison of the two
regions. This has led many, insofar as they know anything at
all about Latin American countries, to dismiss them as
inconsequential neighbors, whose condition and evolution are
irrelevant to the North American experience. It comes as a
bit of a surprise to many Canadians, for example, to realize
that they have something in common with Mexicans: the problems
of close proximity to a powerful neighbor.
The nature of North American news coverage is partly at
fault. Latin America is largely ignored except in times of
crisis; we are preoccupied with European, Near Eastern, and
Asian affairs. Cuba's problems, a Peruvian earthquake, a
Brazilian drought, the latest Bolivian coup, and certainly the
latest expropriation of a North American company's assets are
reported. The conditions of lasting importance behind these
crises are likely to be left out. It is, admittedly,
difficult to sell more than the bare facts because Latin
America is seldom studied in high school or even college. Few
North Americans have fought there; few have ethnic or
ancestral ties southward.
Hubert Humphrey put it well in the year after John F.
Kennedy's death, a time when North and Latin American
relations were under active review:
...Most adults in this country were educated in
schools where the overwhelming majority of textbooks
and reference books either ignored Latin America or
reflected a condescending attitude toward Latin
Americans. Written chiefly by authors sympathetic
to a northern European cultural inheritance, which
historically has been fundamentally unsympathetic to
Latin culture, these books have been all too
important an influence in shaping the attitude of
generations of Americans [9].
FIGURE 1.7. Flowers and fruit for sale in a Santiago market.
A superseded phase in North American marketing? Photo
courtesy of United Nations.
Certain poorly based and arguable ideas about Latin
America have long been common currency in North America and
elsewhere. In years past there was the myth of "El Dorado,"
the notion that somewhere in South America's northern interior
were fabulous deposits of gold. The term has since been
generalized and applied to any place that attracts fortune-
seekers, who still push off south every so often in search of
agricultural land, Indian relics, oil, or whatever.
Protestants have long nursed the "black legend," a conviction
that what is done in the predominantly Roman Catholic Latin
realm is suspect and probably evil. Such misconceptions, plus
the usual cliches about the Latin American's laziness and the
instability of his politics, have given the North American a
feeling of superiority. He does a much better job of things
and thanks God he is not like his neighbor.
The fallacies that persist in serious thought and
research on Latin American conditions represent distortions on
another level. Rodolfo Stavenhagen, a noted Mexican social
scientist. has identified at least seven of them. He ends his
critical essay on the subject thus:
Thoughtful people are less and less concerned with
single factors such as "lack of resources,"
"traditionalism of the peasantry," "overpopulation,"
and "cultural and racial heterogeneity," which are
still current among some scholars. They are
increasingly conscious of the internal structure and
dynamics of the total society and, of course, of the
relation of dependence this society has with respect
to the industrial metropolis, i.e., the phenomenon
of imperialism and neocolonialism. Such awareness
can only lead to deeper and more refined analysis of
the Latin American situation and to newer and more
correct courses of action [14, p. 35].
FIGURE 1.8. A caricature of some controversial themes in the
history of the Americas. Courtesy of a vendor in La
Lagunilla, Mexico City's flea market.
The View from the Other Direction
Latin Americans are amazed and hurt by the North American
ignorance of their part of the world, as well as the
persistence of misconceptions and the readiness to generalize.
They resent the indifference, the tendency to characterize
their culture lightly and sentimentally. They particularly
dislike being thought of as losers and having the label
underdeveloped pasted indiscriminately across their world from
end to end.
How do Latin Americans see North America? It may be that
the educated and reasonably articulate Latin American has more
information about the United States or even Canada than his
North American counterpart, although his information is
probably no less cliche-ridden, his imagery just as flawed,
and his tendency to judge unfavorably just as strong. This
same Latin American may also be rather nervously preoccupied
with what goes on to the north. A great deal depends on how a
United States president treats a visiting Latin dignitary or
what Congress does to trading policies. The dependence of
Latin America has long been clear -- and annoying. By the
same token, the increasing political clout of raw material
producers in the Americas and elsewhere is a source of
satisfaction.
Thoughtful Latin Americans notice and are concerned by
those aspects of North America that forecast what may soon
become critical in their own area. The problems of North
American cities, the "gringo's" attitudes toward sex, the
latest statistics on crime and violence fascinate him because
he sees all this taking shape with a time lag in Latin America
too. The North American does not generally feel that he has
the same reasons for watching what goes on to the south.
FIGURE 1.9. A young man back from the city. Photo by Antonio
Mendoza.
The Latin American media portray a generous North
American. friendly (sometimes too friendly with dictators),
affluent, competent, but also hurried, arrogant,
materialistic. and too gauche for words. Into this balance the
Latin American puts the counterweight of his own spiritual
superiority and criticizes his northern neighbor for being
shallow and without inner resources. The latter may be
advanced technologically and economically but he is
spiritually underdeveloped.
A Chilean writer, Francisco Bilbao, said it by
implication many years ago, and the passage still bears
reflection:
In our Latin American lands there survives something
of that ancient and divine hospitality, in our
breasts there is room for the love of mankind. We
have not lost the tradition of the spiritual destiny
of man. We believe and love all that unites; we
prefer the social to the individual, beauty to
wealth, justice to power, art to commerce, poetry to
industry, philosophy to textbooks, pure spirit to
calculation, duty to self-interest [3, p. 459].
In the Latin American's view northward, mania has
alternated with phobia. The admiration for John F. Kennedy,
whose name is now on streets and schools and monuments from
Mexico to Chile, was the last major surge of the one. The
very mixed receptions given prominent North American travelers
since then reveal the other. It is a love-hate relationship.
but a one-sided one, because the North American usually
doesn't care much either way.
As biased as all these differentiations may be, they are
useful and even realistic. The Latin American needs to set
himself apart from the North American for the sake of his
personal pride as well as the integrity of his nation and his
culture realm. He must somehow neutralize at least a fraction
of the economic dependency. Canadians often find it necessary
to do something similar vis-a-vis the United States. They
take great pains to define differences and are taken aback
when listeners have a hard time following them. For Canadians
and citizens of the United States the dismissal of Latin
America fits with the realities of trade and foreign policy.
And, of course, foreignness helps to feed the travel industry
in both directions.
A Need for Care
Don Quixote's admonition that all comparisons are hateful
is repeated frequently throughout the literature of the
Western world. Like many old sayings it is as absurd as it is
wise [4]. People do compare and must in order to learn about
the world. The warning should be to compare carefully -- that
is, with attention to nuance, and to similarities as well as
differences, certainly without snap judgments as to "better"
or "worse." This may be what Cervantes meant anyway.
By means of such comparison one can move easily from the
well known to the less well known or poorly appreciated, from
the relatively simple to the more complex, from the rather
naive to the more realistic, and from the small scale to the
large scale. "If not pushed too far or elaborated too much,
compared reference can illuminate a discussion after the
manner of an imaginative and disciplined use of simile,
metaphor, or analogy" [16].
Plan of the Following Chapters
Play begins in Part 1, a series of five comparisons
between North American regions and their approximate Latin
American counterparts. as Figure 1.11 shows. The people,
environments, and characteristic man-land relationships of
each of the ten regions are discussed in turn and spun into a
net of North-South relationships. The principal points in
each chapter of Part I relate to some particularly striking
human imprint or some dominant trend in landscape evolution
(Figs. 1.12, 1.13).
FIGURE 1.10. An American encounter. The Kennedys at a
ceremony during which titles were given to recipients of re-
distributed land, Venezuela, 1963. Photo courtesy of O.A.S.
With Part II the lens is changed. We shift from a fairly
large scale to a small scale -- that is, from regional close-
ups to continental and sometimes even hemispheric
perspectives. Chapter 7 expands on the physical environments
of the Americas. Chapter 8 explores the similarities and
differences between the peoples of the Americas. Chapter 9
brings the discussion again to relationships between people
and the land, but on a larger canvas, showing comparable
trends in the occupancy and use of the Americas. Chapter 10, a
concluding reflection, makes the geographic intimations of the
book explicit and puts them into their disciplinary context.
FIGURE 1.11. Comparable regions. An overview of the regional
comparisons to be made in Part I. (Base from Goode's World
Atlas, (c) Rand McNally, 1974.
FIGURE 1.12. Christian and Moorish echoes in the architecture
of a wealthy home in Cartagena, Colombia. Photo by Antonio
Mendoza.
FIGURE 1.13. The Mediterranean echoes are fainter, but still
to be detected in British Columbia, Canada. North American
home building fashions are widely represented in the wealthier
suburbs of Latin American cities.
References
1. Augelli, John P. "The Controversial Image of Latin
America: A Geographer's View." In Dohrs. Fred E., and Sommers,
Lawrence M., Cultural Geography: Selected Readings. New York:
T. Y. Crowell, 1967. Pp. 208-219.
2. Barnes, Peter. "The Wire Services in Latin America."
Nieman Reports 17 (1964): 3-8.
3. Bilbao, Francisco. "The Two Americas." In Keen. Benjamin,
Readings in Latin American Civilization: 1492 to the Present
(2nd ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967. Pp. 457-460.
4. Cervantes, Miguel de. The Adventures of Don Quixote.
Translated by J.M. Cohen. London: Penguin, 1954. P. 619.
5. Chaplin, George. "Latin America News in the U.S. Press."
Nieman Reports 9 (1955) 3-5.
6. Dobie, J. Frank. Quoted by Griffin, Charles., "Unity and
Variety in American History." In Hanke, Lewis. Do the Americas
Have a Common History? New York: Knopf, 1964. Pp. 250-269.
7. Hanke, Lewis. Do the Americas Have a Common History? New
York Knopf. 1964. Pp. 3-4.
8. Howe, Marvine. "A New Sense of Worth in Latin America."
New York Times. February 24, 1974, p. E3.
9. Humphrey, Hubert. "U.S. Policy in Latin America." Foreign
Affairs 62 (1964): 601.
10. Lawrence, D. H. Mornings in Mexico. Harmondsworth.
Middlesex. England: Penguin, 1960.
11. Merrill, John C,. "The Image of the United States in the
Mexican Dailies." Journalism Quarterly 39 (1962): 302-309.
12. Paz. Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. New York: Grove.
1961. Pp. 23-24.
13. Pike, Frederick B., ed. The Conflict Between Church and
State in Latin America. New York: Knopf, 1964.
14. Stavenhagen, Rodolfo. "Seven Fallacies about Latin
America." In Heath, Dwight B., Contemporary Cultures and
Societies in Latin America. New York: Random House, 1974. Pp.
22-35.
15. Whitaker, Arthur P. The Western Hemisphere Idea. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1954.16.
16. Woodward, C. Vann, ed. The Comparative Approach to
American History. New York: Basic Books, 1968. P. 15.
17. Wolfe, Waye. "Images of the United States in the Latin
American Press." Journalism Quarterly 41 (1964): 79-86.
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