Unit 1: Intro to Modern Latin America

Despite perceptions of Latin America as a mostly rural and impoverished region, it is heavily urbanized. Mexico City and the surrounding area is one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world--at about 21.5 million people based on 2015 estimates. Caracas, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Rio De Janeiro, Santiago, São Paulo, and many other cities also testify to the urban nature of Latin America's twenty-six sovereign nations.

Beginning in the mid-1800s, European and North American (Latin Americans' term for citizens of the Unites States) observers principally considered Latin America to be a storehouse of natural resources to feed their growing patterns of capitalist growth and industrialization. In the early twentieth century, nationalist impulses based on real and stereotypical notions of indigenous cultures were employed to carve out a measure of independence for Latin American nations. The latter portion of the twentieth century saw the rise of a new paradigm known as dependency theory which cast Latin America as an area that was systematically made dependent on the United States and Europe in terms of economic and political capital. Most recently, culture and identity politics have come to define scholarly understandings of the region.

Even with all of its contradictions, struggles, and faults, Latin American history and culture have much to teach other people across the globe--both positive and negative. This semester we will work together to better understand the people who reside throughout the Americas.