Modern Latin America

During the past two weeks we have explore the Neocolonial period in Latin America.  As the political atmosphere throughout the region entered a period of “peace”, the leaders of the Latin American republics began to utilized scientific racism to explain the short comings their nations experience during the 19th century.

In the late nineteenth century, the Latin American elite made racial regeneration one of their primary objectives.  The project was based on crossing the people of their nations, in which imagination prevails, with those virile ones of the North.  Elites preoccupation with African and Indian-based cultures was part of a larger project that called for the whitening of their societies.

For the elites the regeneration of their nations economy only can function if the population is also regenerated.  Immigration was one of the proposed solutions to economic and social ills, and the Argentine dictum poblar es gobernar became a commonplace among Latin American policy setters.

Elite distrusted blacks and blames the 19th century violence to inability of blacks and the multiraces to comprehend a democratic system.  To achieve their objective, scholars wanted all non-whites members of society to be incorporated into an increasingly white racial and cultural body, which they often referred to as a new race.

Yet , within the hostile environment pushed by pro-European/North American elites, Afro-Latin Americans were able to find spaces where their culture thrive, even expanded as the local economies increased the number of new blacks coming to particular nations to work in the expanding economies.