In this text, Jean Casimir considers what unifies Latin American countries, ultimately arguing that they should seek a sense of unified purpose in resistance to the dominance of the United States. He begins by asking if the countries south of the “Rio Grande” have enough in common to speak as one, and if they do, if these commonalities are “Latin” in nature. Casimir argues that Latin American countries do not really share a Latin culture. Culturally, the region is extremely diverse—what he calls “bastardized”—possessing, even in its most modern iterations, the “secret” presence of mestizo cultures of both African and indigenous origin. The preservation of Latino culture has, according to Casimir, resulted from the self-conscious effort of the elite to maintain ties with the Latin capitals of Europe. Instead, he argues that the term “Latin America” mirrors the growing socio-political dominance of the U.S. and Europe throughout the continent. It is a term that has been imposed from the exterior, so that it reflects how the group of disparate and conflicted nations that make up the region are increasingly organized according to the economic and political interests of the center. The solution, Casimir writes, is for nations in Latin America to come together in order to resist how exterior forces have shaped them, and to reclaim their rights to determine their own politics and economies. Thus, he concludes, Latin America should be conceived as such in order to politically unify itself with the mission of liberating itself from North America.

Jean Casimir, the sociologist and researcher from Haiti who lived a long time in Mexico, wrote this text in 1969 for the magazine, Mundo Nuevo. From 1966 until 1971, Mundo Nuevo published new literature by Latin American writers and critical texts about Latin American culture and politics under the editorial care of Emir Rodríguez Monegal. Funded by the Ford Foundation and published in Paris, the magazine was part of what became known as the publishing “boom” in Latin American literature of the mid- to late- sixties, and was responsible for introducing an international audience to works by writers such as Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez, among others. Casimir’s text begins by considering the question of what unifies Latin American countries? All sources of Latin America as culturally unified have been rooted, he argues, in the need to resist Anglo-Saxon dominance. In reality, he explains, Latin American culture is extremely diverse, and unified only by its impurity and its oppositional stance. Instead, Latin America should be considered unified, he states, by its political position within a framework of economic and political relations that are always determined by North American interests. Without using the term, Casimir essentially describes how Latin American countries have been subjected to North American dominance during the second half of the twentieth century in a system of globalization. Adjacent regions and countries in Latin America share little or no contact, he writes, whereas interests in Washington, D.C., make Guatemala and Chile “neighbors.” Casimir ultimately calls on his readers (an international community of Latin American intellectuals and artists) to conceive of Latin America as a politically radicalized and culturally independent entity with the shared purpose of resisting North American dominance.