The Spanish Language in Latin America since Independence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilan Stavans
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish Language ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Jose Marti ◽  
Ruben Dario ◽  
Fernando Ortiz ◽  
Invaluable Tool ◽  
Andres Bello

The Spanish language arrived in Latin America as a tool of Iberian colonization. Indigenous languages struggled to survive under the implacable presence of an imperial tongue serving not only to make all subjects part of the Spanish Empire but also, and primarily, as a mechanism to evangelize a population considered by the conquistadors, soldiers, missionaries, and entrepreneurs as barbaric. During the age of independence (1810–1910), defined by bloody armed movements, the emerging republics in Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean Basin declared their autonomy by seceding politically, economically, and legally from Spain while pushing for a vigorous nationalist agenda that shaped them as nations. Spanish was an agglutinating force toward a new collective identity, regionally and locally. Important figures like Venezuelan philologist, lexicographer, and diplomat Andrés Bello established an agenda that helped define the cultural parameters of the young republics in terms of grammar, syntax, and morphology. Followers include Rufino José Cuervo. Various aesthetic movements, such as modernismo, led by figures like Rubén Darío and José Martí, helped consolidate a transnational sense of linguistic unity. During the 20th century, the nationalist fever spread throughout Latin America, encouraging educators to establish pedagogical patterns that emphasized the uniqueness of the language within the country’s context. The effort was supported by ethnographers, anthropologists, and sociolinguists like the Cuban Fernando Ortiz and Venezuelan Ángel Rosenblat intent on finding what was local in the language. Simultaneously, each nation developed its own idiosyncratic media, which, again, allowed for verbal peculiarities to be included while also driving toward a standardized form. In this atmosphere, the Spanish language has been used as an organ of control by the state. It is also an invaluable tool through which to understand regional, national, and cultural differences. By the end of the millennium, a new phenomenon emerged, not in Latin America per se yet intimately linked to it: Spanglish. It is a hybrid tongue used by millions of immigrants in the United States, whose power is increasing as time goes by. Spanglish has the potential of reconfiguring the way the Spanish language is understood in the future.

scholarly journals Is "Latino" useful? Diversity, commonality, and politics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ricardo Licea
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Classification System ◽  
Geographical Origin ◽  
Physical Appearance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Ultimate Cause ◽  
The Creation

The Latino classification is distinct from all other racial or ethnic classifications employed in the United States as it is not based on shared physical appearance or geographical origin, instead Latinos are those who hail from a portion of the territories that once belonged to the Spanish Empire regardless of their ancestry or physical appearance. The diversity within the Latino classification means that it is unclear what is being measured when the Latino classification is used to conduct science. Regardless of the Latino classification's usefulness for science the Latino classification has been defended for its usefulness in helping redress the consequences of racism against Latinos. However, the ultimate cause of this discrimination is that most Latinos have a non‐White appearance making the Latino classification a poor proxy for any effort to address racism. The solution is not to return to the classification system that existed prior to the creation of the Latino classification but to instead adopt more granular classifications employed in Latin America such as Mestizo and Mulatto. This will allow for a more detailed study of discrimination and the redirection of resources to those most in need.

Screenings

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 72-76
Author(s):  
Paul Julian Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish Language ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
Women In Prison ◽  
Tv Shows ◽  
Streaming Service

Italian television scholar Milly Buonanno has often complained that, in this second Golden Age of TV, academic attention is focused almost exclusively on the United States. Even in a country like Spain, newspapers dutifully recap each episode of American premium-cable and streaming-service series while ignoring their own local productions. Hence, the importance of Buonanno's new collection Television Antiheroines: Women Behaving Badly in Crime and Prison Drama, which tracks its female figures on screens from Italy and France to Australia and Brazil. Smith examines two prominent Spanish language TV shows featuring women in prison and concludes that Buonanno's invaluable book shows it is no longer necessary to ask where the female Tony Sopranos or Walter Whites may be. And, thanks to the compelling examples of Capadocia (HBO Latin America, 2008–12) and Spain's Vis a vis (Antena 3/Fox, 2015–), it is now clear that difficult women can speak Spanish as well as English on global TV screens, even as they are confined within them to the smallest of prison cells.

scholarly journals La Industria Cultural y la crítica educativa en América Latina: una perspectiva histórica

Alteridad ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 155
Author(s):  
Miguel Ángel Soto Sandoval
Keyword(s):  
Jose Marti ◽  
Ruben Dario ◽  
Siglo Xix ◽  
America Latina ◽  
Siglo Xx ◽  
Andres Bello ◽  
Medios De Comunicacion

<p>El presente artículo tiene como objetivo examinar a tres autores que desde sus propios campos disciplinarios académicos aportaron para el desarrollo de un saber educativo en América latina en los temas de cultura, comunicación y educación. Para ello y en su un primer momento, se entregará una reflexión histórica sobre la importancia que ha jugado la Industria Cultural en América Latina a partir de los aportes académico de Andrés Bello, cuyo accionar intelectual estuvo enfocado a cohesionar la unidad nacional de los recientes estados latinoamericanos del siglo XIX. Será a través del lenguaje escrito y oral, proveniente de la llamada cultura ilustrada, y con el apoyo de los medios de comunicación de la época en que el proyecto bellista se convertirá en la primera estrategia comunicativa y educativa que buscó plasmar las nuevas y variadas dimensiones de la naciente Cultura Sudamericana.</p><p>De igual manera, y en el mismo sentido, revisaremos las posiciones de los escritores y periodistas José Martí y Rubén Darío, quienes se ven confrontados con una Modernidad que comienza a reemplazar a la Cultura Ilustrada por la Cultura de Masas. Sus poemas y escritos en los periódicos de la época instalaron por vez primera, una impronta académica ligada a la crítica y la educación como es el cuestionamiento a la industria cultural y sus narrativas mediáticas que opera a fines del siglo XIX desde los diversos medios de comunicación.</p><p>Finalmente, se analizará cómo surge la crítica comunicativa en Latinoamérica frente a los procesos de dominación, que no solo provienen desde lo económico, sino también, desde las llamadas industrias culturales que emergen con mucha fuerza a mediados del siglo XX. Dichos medios de comunicación proyectan los procesos culturales como un producto mercantil, diluyendo con esta acción comunicativa y mediática, las auténticas dimensiones de la cultura.</p>

Jose Marti and Social Revolution in Cuba

1963 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B. Gray
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Miguel De Unamuno ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Social Revolution ◽  
Jose Marti ◽  
Ruben Dario ◽  
Gabriela Mistral ◽  
The Social ◽  
Simon Bolivar ◽  
Amado Nervo

To understand the social revolution in Cuba today one must be at once anthropologist, historian, sociologist, political scientist, scientist, economist, writer, philosopher, and something of a rebel oneself. In other words, one must be a Universal Man. Who of us today, however, would pretend to such all-encompassing knowledge? The Cuban Revolution in the nineteenth century, however, did produce such a man, José Martí. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that such a man produced the Revolution, at least in the sense that Marti was the main publicist for the revolutionary Cuban exiles, co-ordinator of the emigrant groups, money collector, and author of its major political documents.Although Marti ranks with Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín as a liberator, he is relatively unknown in the United States. Yet his collected works fill seventy-four volumes. One bibliography lists over 10,000 items, including more than a hundred books and more than 200 monographs written about him. Marti was first and last a revolutionist, but he was also a poet, one of the best, and highly praised by such authorities as Gabriela Mistral, Rubén Darío, Miguel de Unamuno, Fernando de los Ríos, Rufino Blanco Fombona, and Amado Nervo.

An American Language

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosina Lozano
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish Language ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Language Recognition ◽  
Political Language ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
History Of ◽  
The U.S

An American Language is a political history of the Spanish language in the United States. The nation has always been multilingual and the Spanish language in particular has remained as an important political issue into the present. After the U.S.-Mexican War, the Spanish language became a language of politics as Spanish speakers in the U.S. Southwest used it to build territorial and state governments. In the twentieth century, Spanish became a political language where speakers and those opposed to its use clashed over what Spanish's presence in the United States meant. This book recovers this story by using evidence that includes Spanish language newspapers, letters, state and territorial session laws, and federal archives to profile the struggle and resilience of Spanish speakers who advocated for their language rights as U.S. citizens. Comparing Spanish as a language of politics and as a political language across the Southwest and noncontiguous territories provides an opportunity to measure shifts in allegiance to the nation and exposes differing forms of nationalism. Language concessions and continued use of Spanish is a measure of power. Official language recognition by federal or state officials validates Spanish speakers' claims to US citizenship. The long history of policies relating to language in the United States provides a way to measure how U.S. visions of itself have shifted due to continuous migration from Latin America. Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens are crucial arbiters of Spanish language politics and their successes have broader implications on national policy and our understanding of Americans.

Civil sphere and democracy in Latin America

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-40
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Ch. Alexander ◽  
Carlo Tognato
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
The United States ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Class Stratification ◽  
Civil Sphere ◽  
The Everyday

The purpose of the article is to demonstrate that the civil spheres of Latin America remain in force, even when under threat, and to expand the method of theorizing democracy, understanding it not only as a state form, but also as a way of life. Moreover, the task of the authors goes beyond the purely application of the theory of the civil sphere in order to emphasize the relevance not only in practice, but also in the theory of democratic culture and institutions of Latin America. This task requires decolonizing the arrogant attitude of North theorists towards democratic processes outside the United States and Europe. The peculiarities of civil spheres in Latin America are emphasized. It is argued that over the course of the nineteenth century the non-civil institutions and value spheres that surrounded civil spheres deeply compromised them. The problems of development that pockmarked Latin America — lagging economies, racial and ethnic and class stratification, religious strife — were invariably filtered through the cultural aspirations and institutional patterns of civil spheres. The appeal of the theory of the civil sphere to the experience of Latin America reveals the ambitious nature of civil society and democracy on new and stronger foundations. Civil spheres had extended significantly as citizens confronted uncomfortable facts, collectively searched for solutions, and envisioned new courses of collective action. However when populism and authoritarianism advance, civil understandings of legitimacy come under pressure from alternative, anti-democratic conceptions of motives, social relations, and political institutions. In these times, a fine-grained understanding of the competitive dynamics between civil, non-civil, and anti-civil becomes particularly critical. Such a vision is constructively applied not only to the realities of Latin America, but also in a wider global context. The authors argue that in order to understand the realities and the limits of populism and polarization, civil sphere scholars need to dive straight into the everyday life of civil communities, setting the civil sphere theory (CST) in a more ethnographic, “anthropological” mode.

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy C. Offner
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
New Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Associations ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
The Road ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The New Deal

In the years after 1945, a flood of U.S. advisors swept into Latin America with dreams of building a new economic order and lifting the Third World out of poverty. These businessmen, economists, community workers, and architects went south with the gospel of the New Deal on their lips, but Latin American realities soon revealed unexpected possibilities within the New Deal itself. In Colombia, Latin Americans and U.S. advisors ended up decentralizing the state, privatizing public functions, and launching austere social welfare programs. By the 1960s, they had remade the country's housing projects, river valleys, and universities. They had also generated new lessons for the United States itself. When the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty, U.S. social movements, business associations, and government agencies all promised to repatriate the lessons of development, and they did so by multiplying the uses of austerity and for-profit contracting within their own welfare state. A decade later, ascendant right-wing movements seeking to dismantle the midcentury state did not need to reach for entirely new ideas: they redeployed policies already at hand. This book brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, the book also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism.

An Inter-American Episode

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Pablo Neruda ◽  
Jose Marti ◽  
The South ◽  
American Reader ◽  
The North ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
The Us

This chapter focuses on a paradigmatic misencounter between an American experiencer and a Latin American reader. Examining an implicit debate about the sources of Walt Whitman’s poetry and vision of the Americas, I argue that Waldo Frank, one of the twentieth century’s main literary ambassadors from the US to Latin America, positioned Whitman as the representative US writer whose antibookish experiential aesthetics could serve as a model for “American” writers both in the North and in the South. I show how Frank’s framework provided a foil for Borges’s idiosyncratic view that Whitman’s poetry about America derived entirely from his readings of European and US writers. Although much of the best scholarship on Whitman’s reception in Latin America has concentrated on poets like José Martí and Pablo Neruda, who adapted Whitman’s naturalism, I contend that Borges’s iconoclastic portrait of Whitman as a reader profoundly influenced a range of anti-experiential literary theories and practices in Latin America.

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