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The Idea of Latin America
The Idea of Latin America is a geo-political manifesto which insists on the need to leave behind an idea which belonged to the nation-building mentality of nineteenth-century Europe.
Charts the history of the concept of Latin America from its emergence in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century through various permutations to the present day.
Asks what is at stake in the survival of an idea which subdivides the Americas.
Reinstates the indigenous peoples and migrations excluded by the image of a homogenous Latin America with defined borders.
Insists on the pressing need to leave behind an idea which belonged to the nation-building mentality of nineteenth-century Europe.
Charts the history of the concept of Latin America from its emergence in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century through various permutations to the present day.
Asks what is at stake in the survival of an idea which subdivides the Americas.
Reinstates the indigenous peoples and migrations excluded by the image of a homogenous Latin America with defined borders.
Insists on the pressing need to leave behind an idea which belonged to the nation-building mentality of nineteenth-century Europe.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 16, 1991
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382 people want to read
About the author
Walter D. Mignolo
65 books92 followersWalter D. Mignolo is an Argentine semiotician (École des Hautes Études) and professor at Duke University, who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 12, 2015
The focus of Mignolo’s work is to demonstrate how the “idea” of Latin America was produced through discourse and the impact it had on various identities. He pinpoints three historical eras: entry of America into the European consciousness (Renaissance); entry of Latinidad and the double identity of imperial and colonial (Enlightenment); and the questioning of the Latin/Anglo divide (post Cold War). He uses various non-European theorists to contend that a decolonization shift is occurring. He states, "[I]f we...stop seeing 'modernity' as a goal rather than seeing it as a European construction of history in Europe’s own interests" than the essence of a decolonial shift could occur. (xix) For example, if "Latin" America is "the political project of Creole-Mextizo/a elites", then undoing the Latin is an important part of the process. (59)
In reengaging with this book after having read it several years ago, there are elements that I find problematic with Mignolo's argument.
How is it possible to de-colonize? Is fighting oppression and unequal power dynamics based on undoing what has been done? To undo is to mend a past mistake or revert to a priori moment. Is that possible, could the mark of damage will always remain? Many scholars whose work has become the never ending deconstruction of x,y and z, they argue that the process of deconstruction allows one to identifying silences and new questions. But I ask, what good does a four hundred year deconstruction of how Latin America came to being will help the current subaltern actor? Is the starting point removing all those words and modes of thinking that is rooted in the European colonization of the continent? If we look at the faces of our neighbors, we will see that we are all products of the colonial/modern product. Is it really about undoing oneself? We cannot undo what has been done and what marks our daily lives. We can recognize the impact of colonization, as well as the racialist, classist, patriarchal, and capitalistic order we live under today and attempt to offer something less oppressive, more horizontal.
Lastly, in order to root ourselves in lasting change, we need to move from discourse to the material. The idea of Latin America was not just created by maps, letters, and stories. It was constructed on the ground through blood and conquest. We need to challenge how capitalism has constructed sociability and the algorithm of daily life and survival. If we have something worth offering besides words then maybe, just maybe, can we speak tangentially of countering the historical impact of colonialism.
In reengaging with this book after having read it several years ago, there are elements that I find problematic with Mignolo's argument.
How is it possible to de-colonize? Is fighting oppression and unequal power dynamics based on undoing what has been done? To undo is to mend a past mistake or revert to a priori moment. Is that possible, could the mark of damage will always remain? Many scholars whose work has become the never ending deconstruction of x,y and z, they argue that the process of deconstruction allows one to identifying silences and new questions. But I ask, what good does a four hundred year deconstruction of how Latin America came to being will help the current subaltern actor? Is the starting point removing all those words and modes of thinking that is rooted in the European colonization of the continent? If we look at the faces of our neighbors, we will see that we are all products of the colonial/modern product. Is it really about undoing oneself? We cannot undo what has been done and what marks our daily lives. We can recognize the impact of colonization, as well as the racialist, classist, patriarchal, and capitalistic order we live under today and attempt to offer something less oppressive, more horizontal.
Lastly, in order to root ourselves in lasting change, we need to move from discourse to the material. The idea of Latin America was not just created by maps, letters, and stories. It was constructed on the ground through blood and conquest. We need to challenge how capitalism has constructed sociability and the algorithm of daily life and survival. If we have something worth offering besides words then maybe, just maybe, can we speak tangentially of countering the historical impact of colonialism.
March 16, 2018
Mignolo es uno de los grandes pensadores de los últimos años. Las ideas que presenta en esta pequeñísima obra son un interesante punto de partida para empezar a explorar que significa América Latina en el siglo XX y XXI o si una etiqueta como esa sigue siendo relevante. El único problema es que aunque sus ideas son bastante poderosas, su estilo es bastante repetitivo y acaba creando la sensación de estar dándole vueltas continuamente al mismo concepto.
September 25, 2011
Nice book. Far too fond of Hugo Chavez for my taste, though.
November 12, 2025
I saw a meme poking fun at Bolivar and Washington's claims to be breaking the colonial chains in comparison to the Haitian Revolution, which was a far more radical event than the American Wars of Independence. It had that meme in mind while reading this.
First off this is full of superfluous and verbose academic jargon that is just a complete headache to read. Maybe it's just because I am not used to this type of language because I am not usually immersed in this sort of modernist discourse.
At times the use of language seemed pretentious to me as well. We see the words Tawantinsuyu and Anahuac over and over. Why not just say Mexico and Peru? We see other words like Abya-Yala, and Pachakuti. I mean fair enough to introduce and define these terms, but it seems a bit excessive to repeat them so frequently.
There's a lot to unpack from this book, and it got my mind thinking along a lot of different lines. The author argues that the division between a poor south and rich north that characterizes post-Enlightenment Europe was reproduced in the Americans. It is interesting that he notes the Northern Europeans consider Southern Europeans as darker and somehow inferior, which is much the same thing that North Americans think of Latin Americans.
I had decided to read this book because I was interested in the idea of Latin America being a French concept. The intellectuals in the era of Napoleon III sought to create a counterbalance to the Anglo-American global imperium, with France as the leader, and the Mexican invasion was part and parcel of this ambitious project.
Of course, failure in Mexico and then crushing defeat by Prussia ended any such French aspirations, but Mignolo does not touch upon this aspect very much. Though he does point out that the intellectual bankruptcy of Spain had led to France becoming the leader of the so-called 'Latin nations.'
The core of this work and the one that I wished to get a better grasp on is the fact that when the Latin American states became independent, the basic hierarchical structure erected by Spain remained mostly intact.
That is to say that the white Spanish-speaking Creoles retained most of the political and economic power. The European Spaniards were driven out, but this did not result in the liberation of Natives and Africans, who remained a disenfranchised class under the new rule of the Creoles (except in Haiti).
This then is the idea of Latin America. The Creoles in their zeal to build new nation-states in the Americas adopted European concepts and European norms. Mignolo says that the Americas are a European invention. First they were the Indies, and then the Americas, and then Latin America and Anglo-America.
Having read Karen Wigen and Martin Lewis's Myth of Continents I was on familiar ground. Europeans named all of the continents and created the schematic of the globe, so it is entirely true that America is a European concept and Latin America obviously a subset of that.
So the tragedy becomes that the Natives and Africans who live in Latin America are somewhat obscured. The national projects of the Creoles were based on the European, primarily Spanish, tradition. They wanted to create New Spains in the Western Hemisphere. Or the New World, which is again another European imposition on the Americas. The idea of youthful vitality.
While reading this I thought a lot about Marx's assertion that the ideas that dominate every society are the ideas of the ruling class, for they dominate the intellectual means of production just as they dominate the physical means of production. One thinks here too of Gramsci's hegemonic theory.
So clearly the ideas of the Creoles dominate Latin America. Their vision and desire to create a homogeneous, insofar as that's possible, state embracing Catholicism and Hispanophonia.
Another major insight is that the intellectual leadership remains in Europe and the United States. Mignolo notes that the major universities and publishing houses are located here, and it is here that history is 'made,' so to speak. As in, academic debates decide what version of history to popularize based on the traditions and paradigms of the West.
Here one might make a side note that, as Kishore Mahbubani informs us, Europeans and Americans dominate all of the 'international' institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, the G-8, the UN. There could be something like a neo-imperialism of an intellectual variety where the decisions and perspectives of these powerful Western societies are imposed on all the others.
Clearly, then, Latin America is an adjunct to this world-view and this is what Mignolo is setting out to explain and to criticize.
On the other hand, I had some problems with this. Maybe because I'm not in academia I've never taken Huntington very seriously. He, and others of his nature like Fukuyama, etc, strike me as a sort of new generation representing the ideas of men like Spengler and Toynbee. They paint their brushes too broad, their universal assertions don't stand up to closer examination and I didn't think specialized cared all that much about their prognostications. But Huntington is repeatedly invoked here.
In a similar way it's hard to see figures like Hegel or Kant or Aristotle quoted in a modern context. I can't say I'm too well-versed in philosophy, but it would surprise me if historians paid much attention to what Kant thought of human categories for example. He's not an anthropologist, and even if he was, that was more than two centuries ago. His views on the subject of something like race cannot be very useful for anyone alive today. Banishing the specter of Kant is like fighting a corpse. Nobody is basing their views on his philosophy.
Or, at least, so I assume. Maybe Kant and Hegel are taken seriously in historical academia, though God knows why or how.
Another problem I had was that the author made numerous assertions on faith that we are just supposed to accept uncritically. Such as that the Renaissance and capitalism emerged together.
This is hard to imagine. There couldn't have been much capital in Europe, and what existed was in the more developed urbanized areas like Northern Italy and the Southern Netherlands. In addition, if anybody was capitalist at the time it was China. But certainly not Spain. Mignolo cites dependency theory a few times, but the interesting thing is that Spain was herself in a position of economic dependency on the more developed parts of Europe.
To talk of Spain as capitalist in the sixteenth century is ridiculous. As Hispanists like Kamen have argued, there was no Spanish decline because Spain was always poor. There was no economic rise, Spain started off poor and ended poor.
This problematic for the colonialism narrative because advanced economic regions like Northern Italy and China were precisely those areas that were *not* participating in colonizing. Spain and Portugal were peripheral to the European economy even in their heyday, so capitalism is a poor explanation for colonial impulses in this era.
The author also made several strange and seemingly irrelevant references to Iraq, and to Chicanos still not being 'American enough' despite voting Republican, presumably as Huntington would have wanted. I didn't understand the point of these forays.
A lot of this reads like an extended rant where the author is trying to demonstrate his own cleverness, and a lot of the points I felt I couldn't follow. The book was not quite what I thought it was going to be, or what I had hoped it would be, but I did glean some useful insights.
One phrase I did like was that Mignolo said the United States is no longer a melting pot and is more akin to a multicultural salad. He rightly argues that the melting pot narrative was made in the context of primarily European immigration. It was less of a melting pot than we perhaps think, since the cultures and traditions were all firmly rooted in the European tradition and European experience.
The more modern immigration has resulted in many more cultural traditions coming to the United States which are perhaps not as congruous with the national ethos as the earlier European settlers were. It is something to ponder.
I believe the author missed an opportunity while he was discussing Huntington, for he noted with justification that Europe did not emerge so much from its own merits as in contradistinction to Islam. I believe it was Fredrik Barth who argued that a key component of nationalist identity is opposition to an-other, so for example hostility towards the Napoleonic French invaders was a crucial aspect of early German nationalism.
Mignolo, I felt, could have dug into this theme to explain much of Latin American identity as being in opposition to the United States, whose overbearing presence is something everyone in this hemisphere has to grapple with in one way or another. Granted, he does this to an extent, but never very explicitly or clearly.
My biggest problem is that Mignolo makes frequent reference to different ways of seeing things and different traditions, quoting Anzaldua and other scholars trying to 'delink and disengage' with European hegemonic discourse, but he doesn't really offer any alternatives.
He says Latin America is insufficient to capture the lives and experiences of those who don't speak Spanish or who are not Creoles, that they don't 'live' in Latin America in the sense that it was a concept created without their participation and whose vision regards them as something of a nuisance or alien presence.
This is all fair and convincing, but what does he offer instead? Clearly most people are not going to read this book, so whatever convoluted nuances are contained in it are not a basis for anything. Things like Abya-Yala are unlikely to catch on.
Mignolo says that these concepts can coexist as only the Europeans consider terminology exclusionary, e.g. that Latin America rules out any other monikers. But even if terms like Abya-Yala are not actively suppressed, it is unlikely anybody will use them. Latin America is here to stay, I'm afraid, with all of the attendant problems. We will have to find some other way to make the African and Native legacies more visible than saying Latin America isn't a valid term.
Mignolo said he had contemplated a fourth chapter but the editors desired a slimmer volume, and I'll end by saying thank God there's no fourth chapter because the book is dry enough as it is.
First off this is full of superfluous and verbose academic jargon that is just a complete headache to read. Maybe it's just because I am not used to this type of language because I am not usually immersed in this sort of modernist discourse.
At times the use of language seemed pretentious to me as well. We see the words Tawantinsuyu and Anahuac over and over. Why not just say Mexico and Peru? We see other words like Abya-Yala, and Pachakuti. I mean fair enough to introduce and define these terms, but it seems a bit excessive to repeat them so frequently.
There's a lot to unpack from this book, and it got my mind thinking along a lot of different lines. The author argues that the division between a poor south and rich north that characterizes post-Enlightenment Europe was reproduced in the Americans. It is interesting that he notes the Northern Europeans consider Southern Europeans as darker and somehow inferior, which is much the same thing that North Americans think of Latin Americans.
I had decided to read this book because I was interested in the idea of Latin America being a French concept. The intellectuals in the era of Napoleon III sought to create a counterbalance to the Anglo-American global imperium, with France as the leader, and the Mexican invasion was part and parcel of this ambitious project.
Of course, failure in Mexico and then crushing defeat by Prussia ended any such French aspirations, but Mignolo does not touch upon this aspect very much. Though he does point out that the intellectual bankruptcy of Spain had led to France becoming the leader of the so-called 'Latin nations.'
The core of this work and the one that I wished to get a better grasp on is the fact that when the Latin American states became independent, the basic hierarchical structure erected by Spain remained mostly intact.
That is to say that the white Spanish-speaking Creoles retained most of the political and economic power. The European Spaniards were driven out, but this did not result in the liberation of Natives and Africans, who remained a disenfranchised class under the new rule of the Creoles (except in Haiti).
This then is the idea of Latin America. The Creoles in their zeal to build new nation-states in the Americas adopted European concepts and European norms. Mignolo says that the Americas are a European invention. First they were the Indies, and then the Americas, and then Latin America and Anglo-America.
Having read Karen Wigen and Martin Lewis's Myth of Continents I was on familiar ground. Europeans named all of the continents and created the schematic of the globe, so it is entirely true that America is a European concept and Latin America obviously a subset of that.
So the tragedy becomes that the Natives and Africans who live in Latin America are somewhat obscured. The national projects of the Creoles were based on the European, primarily Spanish, tradition. They wanted to create New Spains in the Western Hemisphere. Or the New World, which is again another European imposition on the Americas. The idea of youthful vitality.
While reading this I thought a lot about Marx's assertion that the ideas that dominate every society are the ideas of the ruling class, for they dominate the intellectual means of production just as they dominate the physical means of production. One thinks here too of Gramsci's hegemonic theory.
So clearly the ideas of the Creoles dominate Latin America. Their vision and desire to create a homogeneous, insofar as that's possible, state embracing Catholicism and Hispanophonia.
Another major insight is that the intellectual leadership remains in Europe and the United States. Mignolo notes that the major universities and publishing houses are located here, and it is here that history is 'made,' so to speak. As in, academic debates decide what version of history to popularize based on the traditions and paradigms of the West.
Here one might make a side note that, as Kishore Mahbubani informs us, Europeans and Americans dominate all of the 'international' institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, the G-8, the UN. There could be something like a neo-imperialism of an intellectual variety where the decisions and perspectives of these powerful Western societies are imposed on all the others.
Clearly, then, Latin America is an adjunct to this world-view and this is what Mignolo is setting out to explain and to criticize.
On the other hand, I had some problems with this. Maybe because I'm not in academia I've never taken Huntington very seriously. He, and others of his nature like Fukuyama, etc, strike me as a sort of new generation representing the ideas of men like Spengler and Toynbee. They paint their brushes too broad, their universal assertions don't stand up to closer examination and I didn't think specialized cared all that much about their prognostications. But Huntington is repeatedly invoked here.
In a similar way it's hard to see figures like Hegel or Kant or Aristotle quoted in a modern context. I can't say I'm too well-versed in philosophy, but it would surprise me if historians paid much attention to what Kant thought of human categories for example. He's not an anthropologist, and even if he was, that was more than two centuries ago. His views on the subject of something like race cannot be very useful for anyone alive today. Banishing the specter of Kant is like fighting a corpse. Nobody is basing their views on his philosophy.
Or, at least, so I assume. Maybe Kant and Hegel are taken seriously in historical academia, though God knows why or how.
Another problem I had was that the author made numerous assertions on faith that we are just supposed to accept uncritically. Such as that the Renaissance and capitalism emerged together.
This is hard to imagine. There couldn't have been much capital in Europe, and what existed was in the more developed urbanized areas like Northern Italy and the Southern Netherlands. In addition, if anybody was capitalist at the time it was China. But certainly not Spain. Mignolo cites dependency theory a few times, but the interesting thing is that Spain was herself in a position of economic dependency on the more developed parts of Europe.
To talk of Spain as capitalist in the sixteenth century is ridiculous. As Hispanists like Kamen have argued, there was no Spanish decline because Spain was always poor. There was no economic rise, Spain started off poor and ended poor.
This problematic for the colonialism narrative because advanced economic regions like Northern Italy and China were precisely those areas that were *not* participating in colonizing. Spain and Portugal were peripheral to the European economy even in their heyday, so capitalism is a poor explanation for colonial impulses in this era.
The author also made several strange and seemingly irrelevant references to Iraq, and to Chicanos still not being 'American enough' despite voting Republican, presumably as Huntington would have wanted. I didn't understand the point of these forays.
A lot of this reads like an extended rant where the author is trying to demonstrate his own cleverness, and a lot of the points I felt I couldn't follow. The book was not quite what I thought it was going to be, or what I had hoped it would be, but I did glean some useful insights.
One phrase I did like was that Mignolo said the United States is no longer a melting pot and is more akin to a multicultural salad. He rightly argues that the melting pot narrative was made in the context of primarily European immigration. It was less of a melting pot than we perhaps think, since the cultures and traditions were all firmly rooted in the European tradition and European experience.
The more modern immigration has resulted in many more cultural traditions coming to the United States which are perhaps not as congruous with the national ethos as the earlier European settlers were. It is something to ponder.
I believe the author missed an opportunity while he was discussing Huntington, for he noted with justification that Europe did not emerge so much from its own merits as in contradistinction to Islam. I believe it was Fredrik Barth who argued that a key component of nationalist identity is opposition to an-other, so for example hostility towards the Napoleonic French invaders was a crucial aspect of early German nationalism.
Mignolo, I felt, could have dug into this theme to explain much of Latin American identity as being in opposition to the United States, whose overbearing presence is something everyone in this hemisphere has to grapple with in one way or another. Granted, he does this to an extent, but never very explicitly or clearly.
My biggest problem is that Mignolo makes frequent reference to different ways of seeing things and different traditions, quoting Anzaldua and other scholars trying to 'delink and disengage' with European hegemonic discourse, but he doesn't really offer any alternatives.
He says Latin America is insufficient to capture the lives and experiences of those who don't speak Spanish or who are not Creoles, that they don't 'live' in Latin America in the sense that it was a concept created without their participation and whose vision regards them as something of a nuisance or alien presence.
This is all fair and convincing, but what does he offer instead? Clearly most people are not going to read this book, so whatever convoluted nuances are contained in it are not a basis for anything. Things like Abya-Yala are unlikely to catch on.
Mignolo says that these concepts can coexist as only the Europeans consider terminology exclusionary, e.g. that Latin America rules out any other monikers. But even if terms like Abya-Yala are not actively suppressed, it is unlikely anybody will use them. Latin America is here to stay, I'm afraid, with all of the attendant problems. We will have to find some other way to make the African and Native legacies more visible than saying Latin America isn't a valid term.
Mignolo said he had contemplated a fourth chapter but the editors desired a slimmer volume, and I'll end by saying thank God there's no fourth chapter because the book is dry enough as it is.
August 26, 2020
O livro aponta que a ideia de América Latina que temos consolidada no senso comum é uma criação do ocidental - somos o outro, somos cidadãos de segunda escala, somos menos humanos. Sob densas retrospectivas históricas (que me perdi bastante) e articulação politizada calorosa, o Mignolo propõe uma desconstrução diferente do multiculturalismo ocidental - o interculturalismo. O argumento é espetacular e necessário, o livro sofre um pouco pela linguagem críptica (posso ser burro ou ter encontrado uma versão com uma tradução estranha) pois saiu 15 anos atrás e algumas passagens dos seus capítulos finais sentem
January 20, 2021
Te muita coisa interessante aqui dentro, principalmente nos resgates históricos. O que me deixou meio cabreiro foi o claro desconhecimento do autor sobre história e cultura do Brasil. Ao mesmo tempo que ele tentava sempre inserir o Brasil, essa tentativa era sempre feita depois que o argumento tava pronto.
Super imagino ele depois de escrever o livro todo pensando "ih carajo, esqueci de falar do Brasil" e adicionando uns "o brasil também" e "na américa portuguesa também, claro" pra não pegar mal.
Super imagino ele depois de escrever o livro todo pensando "ih carajo, esqueci de falar do Brasil" e adicionando uns "o brasil também" e "na américa portuguesa também, claro" pra não pegar mal.
April 24, 2022
Mignolo é esquerdo-macho.
O livro oferece um panorama bastante didático nos dois primeiros capítulos sobre a sua tese principal. Contudo, no terceiro capítulo, Mignolo apresenta uma abordagem "nova política", "nem esquerda nem direita" que 1) não só não enxerga que a sua decolonialidade de fato não quebra o paradigma que supõe e perpetua uma epistemologia "moderna" como 2) em momento nenhum o autor cis branco que escreve em inglês para interlocutores ocidentais faz algum tipo de auto crítica ou percebe a hipocrisia das suas colocações.
O livro oferece um panorama bastante didático nos dois primeiros capítulos sobre a sua tese principal. Contudo, no terceiro capítulo, Mignolo apresenta uma abordagem "nova política", "nem esquerda nem direita" que 1) não só não enxerga que a sua decolonialidade de fato não quebra o paradigma que supõe e perpetua uma epistemologia "moderna" como 2) em momento nenhum o autor cis branco que escreve em inglês para interlocutores ocidentais faz algum tipo de auto crítica ou percebe a hipocrisia das suas colocações.
November 22, 2024
There are a lot of interesting ideas in this. Most of the book is about how "the idea" of Latin America was created by European or U.S. scholars, and needs to be defined by Latin Americans, particularly women and Indigenous groups. It is a short book, some parts of it are repetitive. Heavily influenced by Said, Fanon, and Anzaldúa.
December 22, 2019
This book is amazing. “Is anti-american” people said. But deconiality is a different way to construct the Latin American reality.
“El giro decolonial” is something that everyone must consider.
“El giro decolonial” is something that everyone must consider.
December 14, 2020
Decolonial theory.
July 18, 2024
The main thesis of this text seems true enough, if seemingly obvious, and the engagement with figures such as Anzaldúa helps expand the scope to gender issues in a helpful way.
January 28, 2025
Un libro estupendo para decolonizar la mente
June 14, 2011
this book was hard to read very boring and a bit anti -American did not like it one bit
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews