Here in Texas, it goes without saying that our history is tightly bound up with Latin America – particularly with our neighbor Mexico to the south.
But in telling the origin story of the United States as a whole, that relationship isn’t always as apparent, with the U.S. political and philosophical roots often linked more to a European influence.
A new history book looks to reexamine that.
In “America, América: A New History of the New World,” Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Yale University professor Greg Grandin draws on decades of research to take a closer look at the relationship between the U.S. and Latin America – highlighting some of the ways our hemispheric neighbors have not only shaped our history, but the entire world’s, as well.
Grandin joined Texas Standard to talk about the book. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Your book covers a substantial amount of ground starting from the beginnings of Spanish colonization all the way up to the present. And we should say from the top, we’re not gonna even scratch the surface of all that in this interview.
But to start, can you give us a summary of your thesis? What is it about how the histories of North and South America have been traditionally told that influenced how you approached your book?
Greg Grandin: Well, Latin America is often described as a place in which the U.S. intervenes and the U.S. shapes and controls the destiny of Latin America. And, without downplaying all of the coups and regime changes and interventions of the United States over the years – going back to taking Texas and Florida and half of Mexico and so on – I wanted to write a book that showed how the relationship was more dialogic, that Latin America was just as influential in shaping not just the United States, but also what was known after World War II as the liberal international order.
So the the argument starts with the conquest – the brutality of the conquest – but it also focuses on a critique within Catholicism that was as consequential as the Reformation, which was a critique, of course, outside of Catholicism, breaking away from Catholicism. These moralists, most of them are Dominicans, who were repelled by the horror and violence of the Spanish conquest, developed a critique that was powerful and long-lasting, and it continued on through the independence movements of Spanish America.
Two things, I think, sum up the way to think of the book. One is, you know, the United States came into the world, a singular nation, which its leaders imagined to be on an empty continent. Of course, it wasn’t an empty content. It was filled up with Native Americans and Spanish and French and British. But there was a sense that the United States was going to soon encompass, manifest the whole of the continent.
And Latin America, you know, when it came into independence, it came to independence as a concert of nations, a league of nations. Seven independent nations, plus Brazil – which was a monarchy, but independent, so eight – that had to learn how to live with each other. And they developed a theory of international relations, a challenge to international law, which was really kind of “the strong do what they will, the poor do what they can, the weak do what they can.”
And they came up with a challenge to the international law that said, no, international law has to be based on cooperation. I mean, because if not, they themselves would devour each other. What’s to stop Argentina from saying, you know, “we want the Pacific just like the United States wants the Pacific. What’s stopping us from rolling over the Andes into Chile?”
So they came up with a theory of international law in which all of the elements, an end to aggressive wars, a rejection of the doctrine of discovery and the doctrine of conquest, and a premise that international relations should be based on cooperation and nations that shared interests rather than confrontation and conflict. And basically, all of those principles are what goes into, first, the attempt to create a League of Nations, which fails, but ultimately the United Nations in 1945.
The second point is that independence leaders in Latin America, people like Simón Bolívar, but others, inherited that powerful critique that Dominicans and the emancipationists within the Catholic Church leveled at Spain rejecting the conquest, rejecting the violence. And once these independence leaders broke free of Spain and established their own states, they had to confront another empire, an empire that was moving across North America like a whirligig, reaching the Pacific. And so these leaders already had a critique what they had used against Spain and they applied it to the United States.
Basically the argument of the book is Latin America taught the United States how to socialize itself. And the irony, of course, is that this served the U.S. enormously well because it taught U.S. leaders how to use its power much more effectively and much more focused.
You know, the book, it doesn’t argue on an abstract level. It tells this story through stories, through people. I think it’s very readable book, people tell me.
Simón Bolívar, the celebrated Latin American independence leader. Ricardo Acevedo Bernal, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Well, let me ask you about those people. You mentioned Simón Bolívar, and FDR is a name, of course, people will recognize. But you also found some other lesser-known characters that you introduce us to. Could you mention a couple of those?
Well, of course, there’s Father Bartolomé de las Casas that people might know of as a defender of the Indians – one of the first people to level a very stinging critique of Spanish conquest. I mean, he’s usually taken as the father of human rights, but pigeonholed.
I go into it, I elaborate, I kind of develop him more fully as a much more coherent and deep philosophical thinker about human equality. I mean, if we talk about the slow creation of humanity, the idea that all human beings are equal, de las Casas really is in some ways the starting point of that long, long evolution.
And then, of course, there’s critics, José Martí and Chile’s Francisco Bilbao. It was Bilbao that coined the phrase “Latin America” after William Walker from Tennessee invaded in Nicaragua in 1855 and declared himself president. He was acting on behalf of the Southern slavers, and he proclaimed that slavery was back in effect, even though Nicaragua had abolished it 30 years earlier.
So Francisco Bilbao, a young reformer in the kind of Bolívar sense – that jettisoned all of the kind of racism of Bolívar and was much more egalitarian – was the first kind of documented person to label Spanish America “Latin America,” and he contrasted it with a “Saxon America.” You know, that there were two Americas: The Saxon America was conquering, instrumental, mercantile, and Latin America was diaphanous, and spiritual, and humanist, and emancipationist.
And that divide – that kind of notion of Latin America as hewing more closely to the kind of universal humanism of the Enlightenment – continues in the way many Latin Americans think of themselves.
Well, you also wanted to outline the seldom-told ways that Latin America has not only influenced the U.S., but helped shape the modern world. What are a couple of the main points on that front?
Well, the main thing is the creation of the liberal international order. And the United Nations was founded in 1945. And basically, if you look at the structure of the United Nations and you look at the principles of the United Nations, they are indistinguishable from ideas that were formatted in Latin America. Latin America came into the world already a League of Nations, already a United Nations.
I also make the argument that Latin America is the kind of birthplace of a comprehensive vision of social rights, economic rights. And this is a tension that runs through the book.
The United States is famous for individual rights, political rights. And its vision of a virtuous state is a state that draws back and allows individuals the greatest range of liberty. And its constitution is very mosaic in its prescriptions – “thou shalt not, thou shalt not.”
But social rights demand that the state act in a modern society – that it act to mitigate the extremes of inequality and powerlessness, that it has to take action … That has to help direct capitalist development in a way that creates surplus value, that then can be used to be distributed through an active program of social rights, meaning the right to education, the right to healthcare, the right to a decent, dignified old age.
These are all rights that are distinct from the rights that we think about in the Bill of Rights, which demand that the state do nothing or as little as possible. These rights demand that the state actually take action.
There’s a lot of reasons why this is. It comes out of the Catholic tradition, this kind of social nature of society, a vision that the common good is transcendent. It is made up of something higher than just the pursuit of individual interests.
And the very first constitution that had a slate of social rights was the Mexican constitution in 1917 – before Weimar in Germany, and before India, and before the social rights that were embedded in post-World War II constitutions. It was the Mexican Revolution which gave us a constitution in 1917 that guaranteed the right to health care, the right to education, the rights to a dignified life, the right to form labor unions. And so this balance between individual rights and social rights really come out of Latin America.
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That said, the reality often doesn’t meet the ideal, as in the United States as well, you know. One of the questions that I set out to ask is what accounts not for Latin America’s weakness in democracy, which is a kind of standard social science question – like “why do they have so many coups? Why do they have so many revolutions? Why can’t they establish stable government?” It’s “what accounts for the endurance of the social democratic ideal, at least an ideal if not as institutionally organized?”
I mean, think about other countries that went through the economic… The kind of violence of the Cold War, the terror of the Cold War, the death squads, the disappearances, the massacres, followed by the economic restructuring of neoliberalism or Reaganism or whatever you want to call it – the Washington Consensus.
Other nations come out of that with a very toxic view of nationalism, right? Whether we’re talking about India with the rise of the Hindu nationalists, or whether we talk about Turkey, or about the Philippines, or we’re talking the United States. You know, Latin America still holds on to this vision of democracy means social democracy, not just the right to vote, and not just due process, but it means the right have a kind of dignified life. That definition still holds on.
So my book is an attempt to try to explain that, and also to try to explain why Latin America, in Latin America nationalism, it very rarely devolved in the kind of toxic nativism that in many countries – whether it be fascism in Germany or what’s going on now in the United States – nationalism in Latin America was always a step towards universalism. They saw nationalism as existing in harmony with a broader vision of human equality. And so it’s a pitch for Latin American exceptionalism.
