Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.

You may think to yourself, why study Latin America? Nobody even knows where it is right? They’re not a powerhouse like America, Europe and China right?

Latin America is often whittled down to being Mexico. When you think of Latin America, images of  immigrants, farmers, and dancing indigenous people chanting in a circle come to mind.

Latin America is Defined as the 20 independent countries in the Western Hemisphere that are south  of the United States, with Spanish, French, or Portuguese as their official languages (Boston University 42). This includes countries like Brazil, Portugal, and Guatemala, which are the more known countries of Latin America. 

Now that we know where we’re talking about, why does it matter? 

An estimated 18.3% of the US population is Hispanic or Latino, compared to 13.4% being African American (US census), yet our education systems do not represent this. In 2010, Arizona passed a bill that banned Mexican American studies from the curriculum. They described these Mexican American studies to be ones that “promoted the overthrow of the United States government or resentment toward a race or class of people” (HB22891). The state government believed that teaching the students about indigenous people is the same as teaching them to overthrow the government, as if the sole purpose of Mexican people, is to overthrow our government and takeover our country. This is the common assumption amongst Latin Americans, the assumption that they want to steal American’s money, jobs, and opportunities. These assumptions then paint immigrants in this negative light that then justifies the enforcement of inhumane policies.

In a different lens, however, Latin America is just as beneficial to North America as any other country. Since prehistoric times, the two continents have been linked through migration, colonization, slave trading, and even current trade policies such as NAFTA (wgbh pg 23). “American” history (no such thing) can be traced back to so many different cultures. Our physical structures and buildings, irrigation systems, fashion patterns etc, comes from a long line of history deriving from the O.G. civilizations of the Mayans and Incas who originally settled in modern day Mexico and Peru, and this is just the surface.

So after all this, why?

The answer is this; understanding Latin America and the Caribbean through a non-biased, educated lens is beneficial to understanding world culture. So many “why’s” and “how comes” surrounding the very existence of so many things in our country like agriculture, climate, economy, politics, territory etc, can be traced back to Latin American culture. We must explore the origin in order to understand the present, and Latin America is just that.