A Note…
I apologize for the long delay; it has taken me quite some time to finish this post. Originally, I was going to write about the need for North America to develop an alternative to Chinese manufacturing. Shenzhen, a city forged from a collection of fishing villages into a global behemoth of innovative iteration, was going to be the focus of my analysis. However, my discussions with Twitter mutuals and engagement with various books and essays inspired me to take a different approach for my first essay. Rather than arguing for the adoption of policies that might replicate the success of Shenzhen in North America, I would prefer to lay out a social, political, and economic vision that is more bold. I hope that you enjoy this, critique it, and share it with your friends and peers.
A Brief Introduction
I feel the need to provide a quick introduction that may help you understand how my ideas on this subject have developed over time. I am the son of Venezuelan immigrants to the United States. Although my roots here are more recent than those of many of my friends and peers, my roots in the Western Hemisphere are as deep as theirs. I feel a profound connection to our side of the world and the many groups that inhabit it.
I was born and raised in Kentucky, a state located in the American heartland and one of the earliest frontier locales for citizens of the newly formed United States. When I was in middle school, my father accepted a position with his company that relocated us to Puebla, Mexico, for three years. Interspersed throughout my life are other periods in which I traveled to various European countries and lived in China for approximately a year. All of this is meant to emphasize, simply, that I have been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to see the world from a perspective many have not.
Birds of a Feather
One of the phenomena I noticed growing up in the United States and Mexico was a tendency for Americans and Mexicans to emphasize how different they were from the other. This phenomenon, which can be generalized from Mexico to the rest of Latin America, partially stems from the traditional rivalries that emerge among neighbors, especially when there is a history of shared violence among them. It also, in a sense, is a remnant of the cultural rivalry among the Iberian and British maritime empires that dominated the world from 1492-1956. Early in that period, the Portuguese and the Spanish, particularly, were able to amass the first global empires, prompting English poet Samuel Johnson to write with great envy in his poem London (1738):
"Has heaven reserved, in pity to the poor,
No pathless waste or undiscovered shore,
No secret island in the boundless main,
No peaceful desert yet unclaimed by Spain?”
As the centuries passed and gave way to British dominance of the seas, the tables were finally turned as the formerly mighty Spanish and Portuguese Empires looked upon the magnitude and unprecedented industrial capacities of the British thalassocracy in awe. Though the US and other Latin American states had since separated from their mother empires, broad cultural affinities and enmities are seldom easily shaken.
Reflecting on these ideas, I have come to realize that the divide between the United States and the broader Latin American community is, to a significant degree, the result of an almost willful ignorance and denial of the common historical forces and ideas that have shaped the various countries across the hemisphere. Frankly, I do not consider what I call the "Anglo-Iberian divide” in the Americas to be a particularly accurate way of framing the relationship between the United States and the broader Latin American world. Having experienced them both and lived in China, a country truly outside of the cultural domain of the Western Hemisphere, it is not clear to me that there are significant differences between the two regions beyond divergences in technological and industrial capabilities. Given the deindustrialization of the United States over the past twenty or so years, even those gaps are not as large as they once were in many sectors.
The history of the Americas is broadly similar regardless of where you look. After populating the continents tens of thousands of years ago, Native American civilizations flourished, conquered each other, and collapsed cyclically until first contact with the Spanish set the hemisphere on a new path. European colonization followed similar patterns in both North and South America including:
settlement by European founder populations (primarily Spanish, Portuguese, and English),
tense and often contradictory relations with Native Americans that ranged from war and cultural demolition of indigenous tribes to admiration and genetic and cultural fusion with them,
the subjugation of African slaves to power early economic expansion and their eventual liberation,
later immigration waves from other parts of Europe, Asia (especially Japan, China, India, and the Middle East), and, most recently, Africa that cemented the flexibility of the national identities developing in each country.
In both North and South America, political models were either imported from Europe or designed using European philosophical ideals and placed atop a demographic mix that was highly culturally and genetically mixed, with the exact ratio fluctuating based on your location in the hemisphere. In the United States and Canada, cultures mixed more than genes, although plenty of intermarriage was also happening here. When the colonists of New England revolted against the British Crown during the Boston Tea Party, who did they emulate? They LARPed as members of the Mohawk tribe because they saw in them, and in themselves, a vision of strength and untamed freedom. Sam Houston, the first president of the Republic of Texas, lived with the Cherokee tribe, speaking their language and marrying a Cherokee woman at one point in his life. Traditional Southern food is deeply West African in its origins. We know, historically, how much white Americans have treasured and adopted the cultural output of black Americans. But what is black American culture, if not the synthesis of West African and Scots-Irish cultures, as fascinatingly explored in Thomas Sowell’s Black Redneck, White Liberal? And we could certainly go on about the Native American names of 26 states and the Afro-European origins of the blues and rock and roll.
In Latin America, the mixture of cultures is more obvious because the population is not in denial about the multiple influences that have combined in the last 500 years. More relaxed notions of intermarriage led to extensive genetic mixing (a trend, I might add, that is now also taking off in the United States). Culturally, the emergence of various types of music such as salsa, samba, and, more recently, reggaeton and foods revolving around combinations of traditional European culinary techniques with indigenous crops such as tomatoes, cacao, and maize, allowed the formation of new syncretic cultures that one could not honestly regard as fully European, Amerindian, or African. To these hybrid cultures, further layers of Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and Middle Eastern influences have been added since the 19th century. The same can be seen in the United States.
I am not the first person to make these observations. Albert Murray, a black American scholar who wrote the eloquent essay titled The Omni Americans in 1970, commented on the historian Constance Rourke’s image of the prototypical American as being “a composite that is part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian, and part Negro” as opposed to the prototypical European who, according to the French philosopher Paul Valéry, is “Ancient Greek, Ancient Roman, and Judeo-Christian”. More recently, Portuguese author Bruno Maçães, in his book History Has Begun, drew parallels between the emergence of Western European culture at the frontier of the Roman Empire with the lands of German tribes and the formation of American culture in the vast lands encountered during the continuous westward expansion toward the Pacific. Once you notice that this same dynamic played itself out in the deserts of northern Mexico, the mountains of Peru, the rainforests of Brazil, and the plains of Argentina, you come to realize we have more in common than we thought.
What, then, is the conclusion that I am guiding our thinking towards? It can be summarized in a few sentences. It is time to recognize that the many countries of the Americas represent a singular civilization that is not an extension of the European West, but its successor. It was born in the conquests, struggles, and convergent assimilation experienced by the Native Americans, Europeans, Africans, and Asians who have made this continent their home. What we are witnessing now is only the beginning of what may emerge from our unprecedented cultural synthesis.
To be continued in Part 2…
Image from https://www.artstation.com/contests/ancient-civilizations/challenges/15