Living standards are relatively low on the whole, at least compared to ours. In every country there are at least a few extremely well-educated individuals who speak several languages fluently and who are at home in the world of European culture. The tiny Central American republic of Costa Rica has long prided itself upon having more teachers than soldiers. In some countries illiteracy runs as high as 75 per cent, while in others the majority of people are literate. The social and cultural achievements of the twenty nations are likewise varied. Americans who used to hoot at Englishmen looking for Indians on Broadway will understand this feeling. Latin Americans are sensitive on this point, and tourists who wear tropical helmets in temperate cities like Lima, Peru, will be met with reserve.
Most of the countries have some tropical or semitropical areas, but there are many temperate regions. Nor is all this great expanse of territory a tangled jungle steaming under a tropical sun. All of South America, incidently, is east of Detroit, and nearly all is east of New York City. Moreover, some of the countries of South America are not neighbors of ours, geographically speaking, because they are closer to Europe than to us. On the other hand, El Salvador is about the size of Maryland, and Costa Rica has a population smaller than that of Washington, D. could be dropped into it and still leave room for a second Texas. One country, Brazil, is so large that the entire U. Distances are vast, for their territory is three times the size of the United States.
Geographically these nations differ greatly from one another too. A Haitian is just as surprised at being called “Latin American” as our Virginia and Texas soldiers are today when hailed abroad as “Yankees.” Latin Americans dislike being lumped together indiscriminately, just as we should dislike it if they called all the people between the Rio Grande and Hudson Bay “English Americans.” Above all, these twenty countries are strongly nationalistic and do not think of themselves as Latin Americans at all, but as Mexicans, Peruvians, Cubans, Costa Ricans, and so on. Each country must be considered by itself, and all generalizations should be avoided or carefully qualified when applied to a single country.Ī considerable number of the total population of 120 million people in “Latin America” are not in the least Latin in origin or culture but are Indians, Negroes, and people of mixed blood. Most of these units differ greatly in size, composition of population, social structure, type of government, and degree of economic development. But the convenient term “Latin America” should not mislead anyone into assuming that the area is a uniform political or economic whole. True, they all speak Spanish except Haiti, which uses French, and Brazil, whose 44 million inhabitants (one-third of all Latin Americans) speak Portuguese. We have come to understand that “Latin America” is a very loose and inaccurate name for a highly diversified continent of twenty nations. If a honeymoon is an educational period in which you learn about your partner, then the war has indeed been a honeymoon in inter-American relations.
0 kommentar(er)
