Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this essay from 2004, the Mexico-based Argentinean art theoretician and anthropologist Néstor García Canclini traces the decline of Latin America through [recent times] and examines three styles of Latin Americanism beginning in the mid- [...]

Lope de Aguirre, a Spanish conquistador from the Basque region, is best remembered for his extreme brutality and treachery in colonial Spanish America and for being one of the first to identify himself as an American. He wrote this letter to King [...]

In this text, Marta Traba rejects the notion that Latin American art exists as a distinct form of expression. She begins her essay by explaining that the global culture generated by the industrialized nations move within certain established [...]

In this article, “La unidad de Latinoamérica. Batalla diplomática en San Francisco” that appeared in Mañana [(Mexico City), no. 92 (June 2, 1945), pp. 12–13, 15], Mexican poet and Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz ( [...]

This suite of documents includes Charles (Carlos) Calvo’s (1824–1906) letter to Napoleon III, the response from M. Thouvenel, Minister of the French Foreign Office, and the introduction to Calvo’s book, Recueil complet des traités, conventions [...]

In this chapter from América Latina en sus artes Jorge Alberto Manrique begins by describing the artistic movements of the 1920s and comparing this period to a giant hinge that moved backward to the nineteenth century and forward to the twentieth [...]

André Siegfried’s introduction to Amérique latine (1934) begins with the term “the Americas,” used to conceptually reference the New World. The essay begins by pointing out that the term “North America” evokes a geographical personality [...]

This selection of documents begins with Raymond Poincaré’s—the future president of France (1913-20)—preface to Francisco García-Calderón’s book, Les démocraties latines d’Amérique. Poincaré praises Calderón’s book and traces the [...]