Latin America and Caribbean: Geography, History, and Politics

What is a region and why can it change over time?

An area defined by shared characteristics (physical, cultural, economic, political). Regions are socially constructed, so boundaries shift as economic ties, military/geopolitical alignments, and cultural identities change.

Price and Cooper: four principles used to construct Latin America as a world region (VERIFY in Bosco pp. 7-16)

Commonly: (1) physical geography, (2) shared Iberian colonial history, (3) language/culture, (4) geopolitics/economic position (relationship to the U.S. and development).

Where did the term "Latin America" come from?

Mid-1800s (1850s). Popularized by French (Napoleon III, Michel Chevalier) and Latin American intellectuals to distinguish "Latin" lands from Anglo-America and justify French influence (e.g., Mexico); not only a French effort to separate from Spain.

What is geopolitics and why is it a complicated way to define the region?

How geography and power shape politics and international relations. Complicated because borders/alignments change with who holds power, the U.S. role blurs what counts as "Latin America," and the region includes non-Iberian places (Haiti, Caribbean, Belize).

Three most advanced civilizations when Europeans arrived

Aztec/Mexica (Tenochtitlan, tribute empire, chinampas); Maya (city-states, writing, calendar, astronomy); Inca (Cusco, Andean empire, road system, mit'a labor, quipu, terraces).

Treaty of Tordesillas

Signed 1494. Spain and Portugal divided newly claimed lands along a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands; Spain got most of the Americas, Portugal got Brazil.

Administrative structures in Spanish America and their responsibilities

Viceroyalties (New Spain, Peru; later New Granada, Rio de la Plata) = Crown's representative, governing; audiencias = courts and advisory governing bodies; cabildos = town councils; Council of the Indies = oversight in Spain; corregidores/intendants = local administration, tribute, taxes.

How important was Central America in the Spanish empire?

Peripheral. Few mines or dense wealthy populations compared with Mexico and Peru; Captaincy General of Guatemala produced cacao and indigo and served as a buffer/administrative region.

What were Caribbean economies like?

Plantation monoculture (especially sugar) using enslaved African labor after Indigenous populations collapsed; also tobacco and cattle; export-oriented and tied to the Atlantic trade.

Encomienda system

Crown grant giving a Spanish colonist (encomendero) the right to Indigenous tribute and labor in exchange for protection and Christian instruction; often abusive. Limited by the New Laws of 1542.

When did Haiti gain independence?

1804 (revolution began 1791).

When did the wars of independence begin on the mainland?

1808-1810 (Napoleon's invasion of Spain 1808; Hidalgo's Grito de Dolores in Mexico 1810; most ended by the 1820s).

Mexican-American War: when and outcome

1846-1848. U.S. victory; Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (Feb 2, 1848): Mexico ceded about 55% of its territory (CA, NV, UT, most of AZ/NM, parts of CO) and recognized the Rio Grande; U.S. paid $15 million.

Monroe Doctrine and year

1823 (President James Monroe): European powers should not colonize or interfere in the Western Hemisphere; U.S. stays out of European affairs.

Roosevelt Corollary and year

1904 (Theodore Roosevelt): U.S. claimed the right to intervene in Latin America as an "international police power" when countries seemed unstable or unable to pay debts.

When did the U.S. replace Great Britain as the most significant foreign influence?

Around the turn of the 20th century (after the 1898 Spanish-American War), solidified by WWI and the 1920s.

What drove U.S. involvement and how did it change?

Early: security and territorial expansion. Later: trade, investment, canal and strategic interests. Cold War: anti-communism. Recently: drugs, migration, trade.

Why did Spanish conquest shrink the Indigenous population?

Mainly Old World disease (smallpox, measles, typhus, influenza; no immunity), compounded by violence, forced labor, tribute, and disruption of agriculture and social order. Central Mexico: tens of millions to about 1-2 million by early 1600s.

How were sedentary Indigenous communities affected by the Spanish?

Easier to conquer administratively; Spain co-opted existing tribute/labor systems (encomienda, repartimiento, mita) and elites as intermediaries.

How were non-sedentary Indigenous communities affected by the Spanish?

No existing tribute system to seize; mobile groups could retreat or raid; harder to subdue (Chichimeca, Mapuche, Chaco groups). Mountains and deserts preserved long-term autonomy.

Racial hierarchy (sistema de castas)

Peninsulares (Spanish-born), Criollos (American-born Spanish), mixed groups (mestizo, castizo, mulato, etc.), then indios and enslaved Africans. Indigenous people held an ambiguous middle position.

Why did Afro-descendants sometimes rank above Indigenous people informally?

Closer, more sustained contact with Spanish cities, language, and Christianity; Indigenous people had separate legal status (protections plus tribute obligations).

Legal protections vs. disabilities of Indigenous people

Protections: Crown protection, communal land, special courts, Inquisition exemption. Disabilities: tribute obligations and restricted legal capacity.

How flexible was the caste system?

Rigid in law, porous in practice. Status depended on ancestry, appearance, language, dress, occupation, and reputation; people could reclassify over generations.

What did people have to show to move up in castes?

Spanish language, dress, and comportment; real or performed Catholic piety; "limpieza de sangre" (purity of blood) claims; wealth, literacy, and urban residence could open access to lower colonial offices.

Casta paintings

18th-century paintings depicting mixed-race family combinations; show elite anxiety about unstable categories and tried to visually fix them. Any Spanish classification was seen as better.

How did Indigenous people lose status?

Losing land and wealth led to reclassification downward (noble/cacique to commoner).

Indigenous community structures in the colonial period

New institutions layered on old hierarchies: cabildos (town councils), caciques/gobernadores (co-opted nobility as intermediaries), tribute and labor quotas. Cooperating elites kept status and land; commoners lost ground.

Indigenous communities after independence

In theory citizens with equal rights; in practice lost communal land protections and special courts, lacked resources and literacy to compete, faced land privatization and violent suppression (Caste War of Yucatan, Mapuche wars). Often treated as second-class citizens.

Gender in Indigenous societies (Nahua, Andean)

Gender complementarity: parallel, valued spheres of labor and ritual authority (agriculture, weaving, religious office).

Gender in Spanish colonial society

Rigid patriarchal hierarchy; women had limited legal personhood, were excluded from cabildos and clergy, and Indigenous women had limited convent access. Women could act as executors of wills but not fully represent themselves in court. Colonial rule eroded Indigenous women's public/ritual authority.

How did Indigenous societies respond to assimilation efforts?

Often nominal or forced conversion; syncretism rather than full acceptance or resistance: local deities mapped onto Catholic saints, cofradias sustained communal ritual, saints petitioned like deities. Spanish tolerated hybrid Catholicism because full conversion was hard to enforce.

How did Spain and Portugal justify empire?

Papal bulls (Inter Caetera 1493), Tordesillas (1494), the Requerimiento (1513), and a civilizing/evangelizing mission to bring "barbarous" peoples to Christianity.

The Requerimiento (1513)

Formal document read to Indigenous people demanding submission to Crown and Church or face "just war."

Role of the Church in the colonial project

Central arm of administration: mass conversion campaigns, marriage/family law, education and record-keeping, major landholder, Inquisition (Indigenous people largely exempt). Missionary orders: Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, Augustinians; mission towns controlled labor and assimilation.

How did the Church police sexuality?

Imposed monogamous, indissoluble sacramental marriage over flexible Indigenous kinship (e.g., elite polygyny); prosecuted concubinage, bigamy, and same-sex relations through church courts; caste depended on legitimacy and parents' union, so controlling marriage meant controlling social boundaries.

Martinez's main framing

Religion, caste, and race were intertwined tools of imperial rule, not separate projects.

Dominican Republic film: why use the term "Indio"?

Allows Dominicans to describe skin color and identity as Indigenous/mixed rather than Black, distancing themselves from blackness and Haiti. It is unique to the DR, even though no native (Taino) people remain.

Dominican Republic independence in 1844 was from whom?

Haiti (Feb 27, 1844). (Your notes say 1884, which is a typo.)

Years Haiti occupied the Dominican Republic

1822-1844 (about 22 years).

Dates of Trujillo's dictatorship

1930-1961.

What did Trujillo cultivate?

An anti-Haitian, "white"/Hispanic national identity (antihaitianismo) and a cult of personality; used racism to build a stronger state after chaos (he used makeup to look whiter).

Parsley/Massacre River massacre

1937: Trujillo ordered troops to kill Haitians in the northern border region; about 15,000+ killed.

When was the island formally divided?

1697, Treaty of Ryswick: Spain ceded the western third (Saint-Domingue/Haiti) to France.

What happened in the wake of the Haitian Revolution?

Haiti became the first Black independent nation (1804); slavery abolished; planter class fled or was removed; France and the U.S. isolated Haiti; slaveholding powers feared rebellion; Haiti occupied Santo Domingo.

What did Haiti's new leaders do with the sugar plantations?

Dessalines and Christophe tried to keep plantations running with forced paid labor to preserve exports; later land was split into small peasant plots (Petion) and sugar output collapsed because former slaves rejected plantation labor.

How did the U.S. and France respond to Haitian independence?

France refused recognition until 1825 when it forced Haiti to pay a huge indemnity (150 million francs, later reduced) under naval threat. The U.S. withheld recognition until 1862 and imposed isolation (Southern slaveholder opposition).

Why was Haiti the richest colony?

Sugar plantations using enslaved labor (about half the world's sugar); known as the Pearl of the Antilles.

Who was the first colony / when was Santo Domingo founded?

Santo Domingo (1496): first cathedral, first sugar plantation, first import of enslaved Africans. Colony later declined and shifted to cattle ranching.

Haitian vs Dominican culture contrasts

Haiti: French/Creole, African musical heritage. DR: Spanish, proud of Spanish heritage, often denies Black identity. Race ideas shaped by tension and propaganda.

Haitian migrant workers in the DR

1916 onward, extending the sugar industry; low wages; tens of thousands of Haitians; Dominicans made themselves a superior class.

When did Latin American megachurches first emerge?

1970s.

Classical Pentecostals vs neo-Pentecostals

Classical: otherworldly, holiness-focused, less concerned with material goods and politics. Neo-Pentecostals: emphasize material prosperity, spiritual warfare, media, and political engagement.

What is prosperity theology?

Belief that faith and giving (tithes, "seed offerings") bring wealth and health.

Prosperity theology and neoliberalism in common

Both stress individual responsibility, entrepreneurship, and success as personal achievement, minimizing structural/state solutions to poverty.

What do most neo-Pentecostals focus on and not focus on?

Focus: personal wealth, health, deliverance from demons. Do not focus on: structural poverty, social justice, asceticism, or formal doctrine.

What do neo-Pentecostal churches encourage?

Tithing and giving, entrepreneurship, positive confession, spiritual warfare, and political engagement.

Dominion theology

Belief that Christians should take control of government and society before Christ's return; emerged 1970s-80s in the U.S. and spread to Latin American neo-Pentecostalism.

IURD (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God)

Brazilian neo-Pentecostal church founded 1977 by Edir Macedo; expanded to the U.S. among Latin American migrants (VERIFY the two marketing reasons from your reading).

What does the IURD promise?

Health, wealth, and liberation from demons/spiritual attack.

Backlash to LGBT rights expansion

2010s onward, led by evangelical and Catholic leaders and conservative politicians ("gender ideology" campaigns, "Con mis hijos no te metas," Bolsonaro); organized via coalitions, protests, referendums, and lobbying.

Corrales: public opinion and LGBT rights

In Latin America, rights expanded via courts and elites, often ahead of public opinion and with weaker movement pressure; in the U.S. change mostly followed shifts in public opinion (VERIFY with reading).

Why did women take to the streets (Ni Una Menos, green wave)?

Femicide, gender violence, impunity, abortion restrictions, and economic inequality.

Post-independence political systems in Central America

After 1821, republican constitutions, elections, and legislatures coexisted with patron-client rule by caudillos, landowners, and family networks: neopatrimonialism.

Holden: origin of public violence

Patrimonial, patron-client institutions from the colonial era, not inherent culture. Cycle: patronage, rivalry, fear, preparation for violence, violence, retaliation.

Why couldn't states non-violently maintain compliance?

Improvisational state: authority rebuilt through personal bargains with local strongmen, with no impersonal, universally accepted authority or reliable coercive institutions; rivals kept armed forces.

Why was opposition demonized?

Politics was a zero-sum struggle among personal networks for the state, so opponents threatened access to power and resources.

Nature of political parties (Holden)

Weak, personalistic, factional extensions of caudillo and elite networks, not ideological mass parties.

When did national armies emerge?

Gradually in the 19th and early 20th centuries, consolidating caudillo-led bands and militias into centralized armies; timing differed by country.

National armed forces in the 1930s

More centralized but still tied to personalistic power; supported regimes, suppressed opposition, and became political actors.

"Armies without nations"

Armies legally national but not representing a cohesive national community; they emerged from fragmented, patrimonial politics.

When did democratic reform movements emerge in Central America?

1920s and early 1930s (Costa Rica electoral reforms, El Salvador under Romero Bosque, Guatemala after Estrada Cabrera in 1920).

What happened to these reform movements?

Mostly crushed by military/authoritarian reaction in the 1930s (Martinez in El Salvador, Ubico in Guatemala, Carias in Honduras, Somoza in Nicaragua); Costa Rica was the exception.

Guatemala early 20th century economy

Agricultural exports: coffee (Guatemalan and foreign elites) and bananas (United Fruit Company); UFCO also controlled railways and shipping.

Concessions UFCO got in Guatemala

Large land grants, tax exemptions, control of transport and shipping infrastructure, and freedom from government interference.

Guatemala's democratic system established

1944 Revolution toppled Ubico; Arevalo elected and took office 1945.

Policies of Arevalo (1945-51)

Education expansion, social security, labor code, support for unions.

Policies of Arbenz (1951-54)

Continued reforms; Decree 900 (1952) agrarian reform redistributing unused land, including 200,000+ acres of UFCO land.

Guatemalan coup of 1954

Triggered by land reform and UFCO interests; U.S. portrayed Arbenz as communist; CIA backed Castillo Armas's invasion from Honduras (June 1954); Arbenz resigned June 27. Afterward reforms were reversed, repression followed, and military rule led to the 36-year civil war.

How did the Cold War shape the U.S. response in Guatemala?

Reform was framed as communism vs. capitalism; the U.S. feared a Soviet-aligned state, harm to U.S. business interests, and a model for others.

"El Pulpo"

Nickname for United Fruit (the Octopus) due to control of land, rail, port, and communications.

Under the Shadow Ep 1 Monroe Doctrine shift

From opposing European colonization to justifying U.S. dominance and intervention, extended by the Roosevelt Corollary.

Under the Shadow: migration argument

Historical U.S. intervention contributed to instability, inequality, and violence that later fueled migration.

Tapachula and the Darien Gap

Tapachula (Mexico) is a transit hub with long bureaucratic delays; Darien Gap is a dangerous jungle crossing between Colombia and Panama.

What discontent arose under Diaz in Mexico?

Land concentration in haciendas, low wages, foreign privileges, repression, manipulated elections, and modernization that benefited elites and foreign investors.

Diaz's response to opposition

Repression: army and rural police, suppressed strikes and rebellions, manipulated elections, controlled regional elites.

What happened when Madero came to power?

Led the 1911 overthrow of Diaz; favored constitutional democracy but didn't deliver land reform; opposed by Zapata and by conservatives; overthrown and assassinated in 1913.

What was Zapata fighting for?

Land and local autonomy ("Tierra y Libertad"); Plan de Ayala demanded land redistribution.

After the Mexican Revolution

1917 Constitution (social, labor, land rights; state control of resources; limits on the Church); old elite displaced; revolutionary state became institutionalized (PRI).

Why Marxism appealed in Latin America after the 1950s

Explained poverty, inequality, land concentration, exploitation, foreign domination; Cuba 1959 showed revolution was possible.

Anti-imperialist focus in the 1950s

Opposition to U.S. economic and political domination and dependence on raw-material exports; Guatemala 1954 was a key example.

Early Castro policies

Agrarian reform, nationalization of foreign businesses, rent cuts, more education and health, greater state economic control.

U.S. response to Castro

Cut Cuba's sugar quota, severed relations (Jan 1961), Bay of Pigs (1961), embargo, covert efforts to oust him.

Cuban Missile Crisis (Oct 1962)

Soviet missiles found in Cuba; closest nuclear brink. Outcome: USSR removed missiles; U.S. pledged not to invade Cuba and secretly removed Jupiter missiles from Turkey.

Che's economic vision and late 1960s outcome

Rapid shift to state-owned socialist economy and a "new man" motivated by moral rather than material incentives. 1968 Revolutionary Offensive eliminated small private business; focus on the 1970 sugar harvest.

Nueva Cancion (New Song)

1960s-70s movement mixing folk music with political protest; Violeta Parra, Mercedes Sosa, Victor Jara; Nueva Trova in Cuba.

Why was the Cuban Revolution inspiring?

A small movement beat a dictatorship, defied the U.S., enacted reforms, and survived.

What did the Cuban Revolution not offer?

Liberal multiparty democracy; prioritized equality, independence, and revolutionary unity over pluralism.

How did U.S. anti-communists view Cuba?

As Soviet-aligned expansion, a security threat, and a model for other revolutions.

1968 Latin American bishops' conference (Medellin)

Discussed poverty, inequality, injustice, and repression; applied Vatican II to Latin America; "preferential option for the poor."