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at this time in Latin America (central and south America), many countries have achieved their indepindents and freedom themselfts 

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at this time in Latin America (central and south America), many countries have achieved their indepindents and freedom themselfts 

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the U.S was concern about European having involvement with Latin American would have negative consequences 

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the U.S was concern about European having involvement with Latin American would have negative consequences 

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They were concerned about spain and how the  south central america achieved their independents and stated to free themselves from european . Reclaiming colonies they wont have no INDEPENDENCE.

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They were concerned about spain and how the  south central america achieved their independents and stated to free themselves from european . Reclaiming colonies they wont have no INDEPENDENCE.

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they had achieved their independence and they were all free but they thought if they reclaimed their colonies they wouldn't be independent anymore or that there would be bad consequences

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Latin America would have negative consequences for the U.S, won't be independent anymore might want to take over U.S

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Latin America would have negative consequences for the U.S, won't be independent anymore might want to take over U.S

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many countries have achieved their independence and freed themselves from European colonial rule  

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many countries have achieved their independence and freed themselves from European colonial rule  

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They were concerned that the latin would have pessimistic results for the U.S. They might try and take the U.S from the Americans.

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they were concerned about the negative consequences for the U.S and interfere with the independence of these nations. They won't be independent anymore and  they might colonize the United States.

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they were concerned about the negative consequences for the U.S and interfere with the independence of these nations. They won't be independent anymore and  they might colonize the United States.

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they would have negative consequences for the U.S. and interfere with the independence of the nations

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they would have negative consequences for the U.S. and interfere with the independence of the nations

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the countries got their independence, european wants to reclaim america, monroe feared their would be negative consequences.

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they where going to have negative consequences and take over their land 

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they where going to have negative consequences and take over their land 

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monroe feared that European involvement didn't have consequences and that they will be independent and have freedom 

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monroe feared that European involvement didn't have consequences and that they will be independent and have freedom 

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would have negative consequences and they wont be independence

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meanwhile,the European power finally defeated Napoleon and wanted to claim their colonies in Latin American.

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Monroe that that the european involvement in latin America would have a negative effect

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latin America would have negative consequences for the u.s and interfere with the indepence and they want it.

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Monroe thought they weren't going to be independent because they were part of latin america

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The European didn't want the Latin the be free and the U.S knows that it will be bad for them

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countries have achieved their independence and freed themselves.

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countries have achieved their independence and freed themselves.

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Latin America achieved their independence and U.S. was concerned that Latin America would try to claim land in the U.S.

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monroe feared european involvement in latin american would have negative consequences for the

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With the publication of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities in 1983, it has become commonplace among scholars to view nations no longer as things natural but as historical inventions. Far less ink has been spilled concerning the formation of larger geopolitical entities such as continents. Many still take their origins for granted. Yet as some scholars have shown, the terms "Africa," "America," "Asia," and "Europe" resulted from complex historical processes. The concept of the continent emerged in ancient Greece and guided Europeans in their efforts to dominate other areas of the world, especially from the fourteenth century onward. Non-European societies certainly conceptualized their own geopolitical spaces, but the massive spread of European imperialism in the nineteenth century ensured that the European schema of dividing the world into continents would predominate by the twentieth century.

To understand how a "race" became the basis for a geopolitical entity, we first need to explore why Latin American elites came to identify themselves with the Latin race. What did it mean to be "Latin"? As various scholars have shown, the term emerged in Europe in the early nineteenth century, when the rise of romantic nationalism and scientific racism led Europeans to identify their nations with races and languages. The Latin race was first linked with countries where much of the population spoke a Romance language and practiced Catholicism (those nations in turn formed "Latin Europe"). In the 1830s, French intellectuals popularized the term to refer to peoples living in the former Iberian colonies of the Western Hemisphere. They sought to justify France's imperial ambitions in the New World by stressing that Mexicans, Central Americans, and South Americans, as members of the Latin race, had a natural affinity with the French; and that the Latin races on both sides of the Atlantic were locked in a global struggle against the expansionist Anglo-Saxons of Great Britain and the United States.

In the early nineteenth century, however, elites in the Southern Hemisphere rarely identified themselves and the continent with the Latin race. Initially, their preferred terms were americanos and América. As John Chasteen shows, these centuries-old terms became prevalent in the 1810s and 1820s, when the region waged wars of independence against Spain. With this struggle, americano took on an anticolonial meaning and no longer encompassed only people of European descent, but also those of indigenous, African, and mixed-race descent. As U.S. expansionists began to threaten Mexico in the 1830s, elites in Central and South America increasingly adopted the term Hispano-América to differentiate their societies from the United States, which was claiming "America" all for itself. They also came to identify themselves with the "Hispanic American race," which was constructed primarily against the U.S. "Anglo-Saxon race." This was a two-way process, as U.S. expansion into Mexico (especially Texas) led U.S. citizens to use "Anglo-Saxon" in a racial sense and to denigrate Spanish Americans as "mongrels." But if the U.S. belief in an innately superior Anglo-Saxon race invoked a more biological definition of race and was associated with whiteness, Spanish American elites tended to identify the Hispanic American race with a shared cultural heritage so that it could include Spanish-speaking non-whites. For this reason, some also constructed Hispano-América against Portuguese-speaking Brazil. Ever since independence, Spanish American relations with the South American hegemon had been tense. This was not just because of cultural differences but also due to Brazil's expansionist policy and its adherence to monarchical rule, which clashed with the republicanism of Spanish America.

It was also in the late 1840s that elites in the Southern Hemisphere began to identify themselves with the Latin race. Among the first were liberal émigrés in Paris, who were influenced by French utopian-socialist proponents of the idea. One such émigré was the Chilean Francisco Bilbao, who during his Parisian sojourn of 1844-1850 befriended Félicité Robert de Lamennais. This leading figure of the French Revolution of 1848 exhorted Bilbao to promote the unity of South America with Europe's "Latin nations." Thanks to émigrés such as Bilbao, the concept of the Latin race spread quickly across the Atlantic. As Tomás Pérez Vejo notes, the term was used in Spanish America as early as 1845, when the editors of Mexico's El Siglo XIX stressed that they belonged to the Latin race after a rival paper had charged that they were nothing but "apaches, comanches or lipanes." By 1853 the term had even made its way to the Bolivian city of Sucre, perhaps the most isolated capital in the hemisphere. The concept of the Latin race was also circulating in Brazil by the early 1850s. This reflected the belief of elite Brazilians that their country was "destined to be the France of South America." Yet some also used the concept to highlight their affinity with Spanish Americans.

While the term appealed to elites across the political spectrum, it meant different things to different people. Most constructed the Latin race in opposition to U.S. "Anglo-Saxons" and believed that it could include the non-white masses as long as they were Catholic and Spanish/Portuguese speakers. This belief in cultural assimilation was weaker among those who explicitly identified the Latin race with whiteness. A famous exponent was the Argentine intellectual Juan Bautista Alberdi, who claimed that "in America, everyone who is not Latin or Saxon, that is, European, is a barbarian." Alberdi's anti-assimilationist stance reflected the efforts of Argentine liberals to build, as Nicolas Shumway argues, an "ideological framework for a political system that would exclude, persecute, dispossess, and often kill the 'racially inferior' gauchos, Indians, and mixed-bloods"-a process that would culminate in Argentina's genocidal "Conquest of the Desert" of the 1870s. These Argentines were hardly outliers, as their views were shared by proponents of the Latin race hailing from other regions. The Cuban Francisco Muñoz del Monte, for example, claimed in an influential essay that the New World could dispense with the non-white races, "the indigenous and African, whose physical and intellectual inferiority inherently subordinates them to the more powerful and civilizing action" of the "Latin" and "Anglo-German" races.

Why, then, did Spanish American elites come to prefer the term "Latin race" over "Hispanic American race"? Most embraced it not because they supported French imperialism, but rather out of concern about the post-1848 turn in U.S. expansionism toward the Southern Hemisphere. In the Caribbean basin, this change was noticeable in the proliferation of U.S. filibuster expeditions. In South America, U.S. expansion was more varied. In addition to filibuster invasions, there were attempts to annex Peru's valuable guano islands, plans to create settler colonies in the Amazon basin, and an 1854 effort to turn Ecuador into a U.S. protectorate. Underpinning this expansion was the belief that it was the "manifest destiny" of Anglo-Saxons to dominate the "inferior" races of the hemisphere. In consequence, Spanish American intellectuals, politicians, and diplomats increasingly viewed their relations with the United States in terms of a race war. If they had already associated the United States with an aggressive Anglo-Saxon race, they now came to identify their own continent with a besieged Latin race.

But the concept of a Latin race also helped elites separate their class from the non-white masses within their own societies. This partly explains why some of the strongest advocates of the Latin race came from regions where non-white groups were fiercely challenging the power of local elites, who were identified as white. At times, the challenge was economic. This was the case even in Cuba, where elites benefited greatly from the sugar boom. As George Reid Andrews writes, in 1854 the governor of Havana criticized "the continuing 'ambitious pretensions' of the free blacks and 'the propensity of this race to excel the white' in economic and professional achievement." More threatening to elite power were popular uprisings such as the Caste War of Mexico (1847-1855). For a leading Mexican newspaper, this indigenous revolt confirmed that "the colored race seeks to attack the white race whenever the occasion presents itself." Anti-elite rebellions elsewhere in the region similarly targeted the "white race," such as in Venezuela, where black and mulatto insurgents went to battle crying "Death to the whites!" Powerful challenges also came from anti-oligarchic military rulers who enjoyed strong support among the lower classes. The regime of Bolivian president Manuel Belzu (1848-1855), for example, waged a crusade against an allegedly white "aristocracy" in the name of non-whites, especially urban cholos of indigenous descent.

Given these challenges, Spanish American elites often sought to defend their power by claiming that "white" people were better fit for republican rule than those of color. Such a "republican racism" was strongly espoused by liberal proponents of a Latin race. However loudly these elites supported democracy, they tended to believe that the reins of power should remain in the hands of the "white race." Thus a leading promoter of the Latin race, Mexico's El Siglo XIX, asserted that the "white race" was "destined to rule on earth." To these liberals, the concept of a Latin race surely represented a clearer mark of whiteness than did the idea of a Hispanic American race. If the former highlighted "blood" ties with modern white Europeans, the latter implied racial mixing with allegedly inferior non-white groups. Elites' growing concern with whiteness was also noticeable in the way they stopped identifying their nations with pre-conquest indigenous cultures, such as the Aztec and Inca empires. In sum, fear of U.S. expansion alone did not push elites to embrace the identity of a Latin race. They were also driven by their own fragile sense of whiteness.

For the "Latin race" to become the basis of a geopolitical entity-Latin America-would take an extraordinary act: the decision by the U.S. government to recognize William Walker's filibuster regime in May 1856. This decision occurred after a long series of well-publicized incidents that Spanish Americans deemed acts of U.S. aggression. The most recent was the riot that drunken U.S. travelers had provoked in Panama City in April 1856. Given the volatile state of U.S.-Latin American relations, an event other than U.S. recognition of the filibuster regime in Nicaragua might have triggered the rise of "Latin America." Yet it is no coincidence that this recognition so profoundly impacted Spanish Americans, for it posed an unprecedented threat to the sovereignty of their nation-states.

Now a minor figure in U.S. history, Walker was in the 1850s perhaps the world's best-known agent of Manifest Destiny. Like other U.S. expansionists, he was attracted to Central America because the Gold Rush had turned the isthmus into a major transit for North Americans navigating between the two U.S. coasts. He also shared the belief of Napoleon III and others that the isthmus was destined to become the center of global trade. In April 1855, Walker and fifty-seven filibusters sailed from San Francisco at the behest of Nicaragua's Liberal Party, which was embroiled in a civil war against the ruling Conservatives. Within five months, his group had seized control of the country. This was the first-and only-time a U.S. filibuster expedition succeeded in Latin America. Walker's exploits electrified the U.S. public and were celebrated onstage from New York to San Francisco-in the Broadway musical Nicaragua, or General Walker's Victories and in the minstrel show Nicaraguan State Secrets. The U.S. press deemed his conquest a testimony to Anglo-American racial superiority. In reality, Walker's men triumphed because they were supported by many ordinary Nicaraguans who viewed them as harbingers of "democracy" and "progress." Once in power, Walker did not seek Nicaragua's annexation to the United States. Instead, he and his men went about building a self-styled empire that would be independent of the United States but controlled by U.S. settler colonists. They also sought to expand their empire by waging war against the other Central America states.

South American officials worried above all that Pierce's recognition had intensified U.S. calls to invade their own countries. Many feared that the southward march of U.S. expansion by sea would not stop until, as the Peruvian foreign minister said, "the New World would be left with only one nation-the American Union." Since Democrats vehemently supported southward expansion, their sweeping victory in the U.S. elections of November 1856 only intensified South American fears. So it was not Pierce's recognition of the Walker regime per se but rather filibusterism's mass appeal in the United States that led South American politicians and intellectuals to identify with Central Americans' plight and demand the creation of a continental alliance against U.S. expansion.

Following the signing of the Washington treaty in November 1856, governmental and non-governmental actors in Central and South America undertook a diplomatic and public campaign on behalf of the anti-Walker alliance. This now-forgotten campaign consolidated the idea of Latin America throughout the hemisphere, for it was one thing to call for an anti-U.S. alliance, and another to realize it. Above all, the envoys needed the legislatures in their own countries to ratify the Washington treaty. The envoys-and their superiors-also sought to strengthen the alliance by reaching out to South American states without a representative in Washington. Central American officials, in turn, wanted to ensure that ratification would lead South American governments to provide them with concrete support for the war against Walker.

The concept of Latin America that took hold among Spanish American elites was defined mainly in opposition to a Protestant "Anglo-Saxon America" perceived to be bent on exterminating its Latin neighbors. Some elites also echoed French pan-Latinists by claiming that "Latin America" exuded a noble spiritualism against the crass materialism and individualism that allegedly imbued "Anglo-Saxon America"-a contrast that would be echoed later by José Enrique Rodó in his influential book Ariel (1900). But "Latin America" also stood for a form of democratic republicanism perceived to be threatened by European imperialism. This explains why most Spanish American elites of the mid-nineteenth century did not consider the American colonies of Spain and France (Cuba, Puerto Rico, French Guiana, Martinique, and Guadeloupe) to be part of "Latin America." Finally, as Torres Caicedo's "Las dos Américas" underscores, the idea of Latin America was driven not just by fear of North Atlantic imperialism, but also by positive emotions such as Spanish Americans' pride in their struggle for independence, their admiration for the region's landscape, and their deep attachment to a "common language, religion ... [and] traditions."

That most elites of the era associated "Latin America" not just with a Latin-based culture but also with democracy and whiteness is apparent in the way the concept was attacked by other Spanish Americans. Among the fiercest critics of the ideas animating "Latin America" were the Cuban exiles who participated in Walker's Nicaraguan enterprise in the hope that the filibuster would help liberate their island from Spanish rule. Like Walker's Nicaraguan followers, these Cubans insisted that U.S. expansion only strengthened democracy in the Southern Hemisphere. They rejected an emphasis on racial differences between North and South America. What really separated the two entities, they claimed, were competing political systems-popular democracy versus oligarchic despotism-that were rooted in distinct colonial legacies. For these Cubans, the "racial question" played up by Walker's Latin American foes represented a nefarious ploy on the part of monarchical Spain to block the spread of democracy in the Southern Hemisphere. The "racial question" undergirding the idea of Latin America also came under attack from South Americans who backed the anti-Walker alliance. The New Granadan intellectual José María Samper, for example, criticized many proponents of "Latin America" for linking democracy with whiteness. In his view, it was the "crossing" of the European, indigenous, and African races-not whiteness in the form of the Latin race-that made "Latin America" (a term he used sporadically) more democratic than it had been in the past. Samper was hardly the only Latin American intellectual of the era to defend a political project of racial mixture that came to be known as mestizaje. Yet his views did not prevail among his peers, who typically identified "Latin America" with whiteness.

Yet the concept of "Latin America" remained highly elitist. This elitism was especially noticeable in the language the Costa Rican government used to rally the country's peasants, artisans, and indigenous communities to take up arms against Walker's filibusters. Even though Costa Rican officials were advocates of a Latin race and eventually of "Latin America," these were never the concepts they used to mobilize the masses-not even in 1860, in the face of the last major filibuster threat. Rather, they stressed the need to defend their nation's Catholicism against the Protestant "barbarians." And in fact, as was surely the case elsewhere in Spanish America, Catholic nationalism had greater appeal among the Costa Rican masses than the elitist concept of a Latin race. So although "Latin America" was linked with anti-imperialism and democracy, the concept gained widespread popularity only after it had shed its identification with whiteness. This did not occur until the early twentieth century, when the resurgence of U.S. interventionism led proponents of "Latin America" to increasingly associate the concept with the defense of the continent's mixed races.

Without President Pierce's recognition of the Walker regime and the subsequent Spanish American call for a continental alliance against U.S. overseas colonialism, the idea of Latin America might have met the same fate as the now-forgotten concept of Latin Africa. Both terms had racialized beginnings, yet only "Latin America" sprang from an anti-imperial impulse. This difference helps explain not only the staying power of "Latin America" but also why the idea has had global consequences, for example, in international law (especially the principle of non-intervention). Another key factor is the pro-democracy discourse that underpinned "Latin America." True, the idea initially helped elites defend their fragile sense of whiteness and an exclusionary form of democracy. Hence they embraced the concept of Latin America and not that of a " mestizo America," which José Martí would invoke in his celebrated essay "Our America" (1891). Yet the concept of Latin America was malleable enough that it eventually became identified with mestizaje, and thus with the myth of racial democracy. For much of the twentieth century, but especially after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the concept was closely identified with leftist, anti-imperialist movements struggling for democracy and social justice.

One way to decolonize Latin America might indeed be to erase the term from the global map. But it is also true that an anti-imperial and democratic ethos undergirded this geopolitical entity from the start. That this spirit is still alive is evident not just in the passionate latinoamericanismo of leftist leaders such as Venezuela's recently deceased Hugo Chávez, but also in the efforts of some Latina/o activists to remap the U.S.-Mexican borderlands-and perhaps the entire United States-as Latina/o America. If nothing else, then, the current debate about the future of "Latin America" shows that geopolitical entities-just like nations-are historical constructs forged in the crucible of political struggle. Such entities are anything but static. Given the vast movement of Latina/os and Latin Americans between North and South America, perhaps it is not preposterous to imagine, as the image created by Pedro Lasch suggests, that one day the entire Western Hemisphere may be remapped as Latina/o America.

I am very grateful to Víctor Hugo Acuña Ortega, Laura Gotkowitz, Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Diane Miliotes, Jennifer Sessions, the AHR editors, and the anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments. I also greatly appreciate the valuable feedback I received from audiences at the X Congreso Centroamericano de Historia (Managua, Nicaragua), the University of Iowa History Department Faculty Workshop, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois, and the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh, where I presented earlier versions of this essay. Special thanks also go to Pedro Lasch for permitting me to reproduce an image from his LATINO/A AMERICA series. Funding for this project was generously provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities (FA-54152-0) and the University of Iowa Faculty Scholar Program. As always, my greatest thanks go to Laura.

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The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy, and Race

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With the publication of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities in 1983, it has become commonplace among scholars to view nations no longer as things natural b

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do not colonize and if you don't mess with us we wont mess with you. 

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do not colonize and if you don't mess with us we wont mess with you. 

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They told them not to go to the western Hemisphere 

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They told them not to go to the western Hemisphere 

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It told th European countries to not colonize or make new colonies because it can cause issues and cause danger to america, she said U.S will not get involved with Europeans.

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Don't come mess with us and we won't mess with you, wanted to protect the western hemisphere from the europeans.

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Don't come mess with us and we won't mess with you, wanted to protect the western hemisphere from the europeans.

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he warned them about to consider the dangerous to there peace and safety and to not mess with them.

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he warned them about to consider the dangerous to there peace and safety and to not mess with them.

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do not mess with the western hemisphere do not try to overpower them

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do not try to make new colonize

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The monroe doctrine warned the european countries to not go near the western hemisphere (which is where north and south America is at)

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The monroe doctrine warned the european countries to not go near the western hemisphere (which is where north and south America is at)

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Don't make new colonies and don't overthrow new independent republicans

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told them not to mess with the western hemisphere  

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told them not to mess with the western hemisphere  

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he told them not to interfere or colonize with the western hemisphere

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he told them not to interfere or colonize with the western hemisphere

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to leave latin America alone and not to colonize around latin america

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try not to cloniesthem

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wanted to protect the western hemisphere

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Likewise,the us would not get involved in European affair or interfere in existing colonies

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to not colonies and just over throw weak and new independent republican

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Monroe told the western powers to not interfere with the western hemisphere while the US would not get involved with European affairs.

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no because the other would of been upset

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he warned them to consider the danger to their peace and safety and they don't need to mess with them

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No they would've been upset because they did't have the whole land

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no because the don't own the whole land an the outhers fell like it not fair

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no because the don't own the whole land an the outhers fell like it not fair

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No not really because the europeans probably felt mad about not being able to go to the western hemisphere but they didn't own it but yet Monroe was trying to protect them

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No not really because the europeans probably felt mad about not being able to go to the western hemisphere but they didn't own it but yet Monroe was trying to protect them

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yes because they just wanted to protect their land and others from colonizing and not make it more complicated then it could've already been

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yes because they just wanted to protect their land and others from colonizing and not make it more complicated then it could've already been

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Yes because there just protecting there land and the Europeanwould feel like that isn't ok but it shouldn't matter because the U.S isn't completely banishing them from the western

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Yes because there just protecting there land and the Europeanwould feel like that isn't ok but it shouldn't matter because the U.S isn't completely banishing them from the western

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Yes it is a good thing because america is protecting their country and peace and the Europeans would feel like it isn't fair but it shouldn't really matter because U.S started it first.

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Yes it is a good thing because america is protecting their country and peace and the Europeans would feel like it isn't fair but it shouldn't really matter because U.S started it first.

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I think it was not right because they don't own all the land so it wouldn't be fair.

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the American should have too the bold stance and the Europeans know to back down

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NO the europeans would fell mad due to the land because its not all the americans land and if they take all the land then the American would be mad

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yes, I personally think it was bold but he wanted to just protect the western. The europeans probably got mad

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No because they don't own all of the land and they didn't ask the other countries for their opinion