Latin America is a collective region of the Americas where Romance languages—languages derived from Latin—are predominantly spoken. The term was coined in France in the mid-19th century to refer to regions in the Americas that were ruled by the Spanish, Portuguese, and French empires.
The term does not have a precise definition, but it is "commonly used to describe South America, Central America, Mexico, and the islands of the Caribbean". In a narrow sense, it refers to Spanish America and Brazil (Portuguese America). The term "Latin America" is broader than Hispanic America, which specifically refers to Spanish-speaking countries, and categories such as Ibero-America, a term that refers to both Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries from the Americas, and sometimes from Europe.
The term Latin America was first used in Paris at a conference in 1856 called "Initiative of America: Idea for a Federal Congress of the Republics" (Iniciativa de la América. Idea de un Congreso Federal de las Repúblicas), by the Chilean politician Francisco Bilbao. The term was further popularized by French emperor Napoleon III's government of political strongman that in the 1860s as Amérique latine to justify France's military involvement in the Second Mexican Empire and to include French-speaking territories in the Americas, such as French Canada, Haiti, French Louisiana, French Guiana, Martinique, Guadeloupe and the French Antillean Creole Caribbean islands Saint Lucia, and Dominica, in the larger group of countries where Spanish and Portuguese languages prevailed.
The region covers an area that stretches from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego and includes much of the Caribbean. It has an area of approximately 19,197,000 km2 (7,412,000 sq mi), almost 13% of the Earth's land surface area. In 2019, Latin America had a combined nominal GDP of US$5,188,250 trillion and a GDP PPP of US$10,284,588 trillion. (Full article...)
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Sarmiento in c. 1874
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (Spanish:[doˈmiŋɡosaɾˈmjento]; born Domingo Faustino Fidel Valentín Sarmiento y Albarracín; 15 February 1811 – 11 September 1888) was an Argentine activist, intellectual, writer, statesman and President of Argentina. His writing spanned a wide range of genres and topics, from journalism to autobiography, to political philosophy and history. He was a member of a group of intellectuals, known as the Generation of 1837, who had a great influence on 19th-century Argentina. He was particularly concerned with educational issues and was also an important influence on the region's literature.
Sarmiento grew up in a poor but politically active family that paved the way for many of his future accomplishments. Between 1843 and 1850, he was frequently in exile, and wrote in both Chile and in Argentina. His greatest literary achievement was Facundo, a critique of Juan Manuel de Rosas, that Sarmiento wrote while working for the newspaper El Progreso during his exile in Chile. The book brought him far more than just literary recognition; he expended his efforts and energy on the war against dictatorships, specifically that of Rosas, and contrasted enlightened Europe—a world where, in his eyes, democracy, social services, and intelligent thought were valued—with the barbarism of the gaucho and especially the caudillo, the ruthless strongmen of nineteenth-century Argentina. (Full article...)
A casta painting of a Spanish man and an Indigenous woman with a Mestizo child
Mestizo (/mɛsˈtiːzoʊ,mɪs-/mess-TEE-zoh, mis-; Spanish:[mesˈtiθo]; fem. mestiza) is a person of mixed European and Amerindian ancestry in the Spanish Empire. In Latin America, mestizo also denotes, identifies, and refers to culturally European people of indigenous ancestry. The Spanish Empire used the terms mestizo and mestiza as ethno-racial exonyms for the graded castas that classified peoples of mixed race, and identified men and women as such in official documents, such as the census, the parish register, and the trial records of the Spanish Inquisition.
In the 20th century, from the adjective mestizo, researchers derived the noun mestizaje, as the term that describes miscegenation (racial mixing) of the colonial era of Latin America.
In Latin America, mestizo is a cultural term that opposes the term indio that identifies, describes, and denotes Indian natives who did not mix with the Spanish and did not assimilate to the mestizo culture of mainstream civil society and speak an indigenous language and live in a tribal community. In late 19th- and early 20th-century Peru, mestizaje denoted those peoples with evidence of Euro-indigenous ethno-racial "descent" and access—usually monetary access, but not always—to secondary educational institutions. Similarly, well before the 20th century, Euramerican "descent" did not necessarily denote Iberian American ancestry or solely Spanish American ancestry (distinct Portuguese administrative classification: mestiço), especially in Andean regions re-infrastructured by Euramerican "modernities" and buffeted by mining labor practices. This conception changed by the 1920s, especially after the national advancement and cultural economics of indigenismo. (Full article...)
... that despite an attempted "extermination" of homosexuals in the 1960s and 1970s, the LGBT community in Argentina is now the most accepted in Latin America?
... that Brazilian computer science researcher and internet pioneer Tadao Takahashi negotiated with drug lords to install internet equipment in his country?
... that the Latin American travesti gender identity has been considered to be a third gender, akin to the hijras of India and the muxe of Mexico?
Image 2Intermediate level international-style Latin dancing at the 2006 MIT ballroom dance competition. A judge stands in the foreground. (from Culture of Latin America)
Image 3In blue countries under right-wing governments and in red countries under left-wing and centre-left governments as of 2023 (from History of Latin America)
Alpamayo, one of the most conspicuous peaks in the Cordillera Blanca mountain range of the PeruvianAndes. It is a steep, almost perfect pyramid of ice, one of a number of peaks that compose the northernmost massif of the Cordillera Blanca..
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Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina
Aruba
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Belize
Bolivia
Brazil
Chile
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Costa Rica
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Dominican Republic
French Guiana
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Nicaragua
Panama
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