Transnational Perspectives on Latin America

Latin America is a multistate and polyglot region with diverse races, ethnicities, and cultures, yet it shares historical legacies, institutional frameworks, and political and socioeconomic challenges. Crystallized as the “farthest West” in the global expansion that started with Iberian transatlantic colonialism and forced intercivilizational encounters, shared development, and inner diversity, it is an ideal laboratory for comparative institutional analysis. This perspective has enabled enlightening processes that encompass multiple countries and affect their political, social, and cultural experiences. At various historical junctures, political figures, intellectuals, and social movements led strategies of mutual recognition and reconnection among sister nations and states. This book claims that in addition to approaching the region with a comparative lens, one should also address it from a transnational perspective that accounts for the twin processes of nation-state building and multistate linkages. The chapters follow the connections among countries and those that unfold in the transnational arena in ways that show the significance of a regional perspective, without obliterating the consciousness of distinct political development. Chapters address issues of key historical and contemporary relevance, including the belated construction of state boundaries; the interplay between state claims and transnational dynamics; political exile; international wars and conspiracy theories; regional counterinsurgency and its transnational impact on policies of transitional justice; the tension between regional principles protecting democracy and those predicating nonintervention; the emergence of social movements with a transnational vision; and processes of transnational legitimization and delegitimization of Jewish and Muslim minorities. The concluding chapter discusses transnational challenges and twenty-first-century dilemmas.