On his first day back in office, President Trump issued an executive order to change the name of the body of water that had been known since the mid-sixteenth century as the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” The new name could be heard in different ways. Trump presumably intended the change to assert the dominance of the United States; for him and for many others in this country, “America” is synonymous with the United States. But, to Latin Americans, “America” spans all the land from Chile to Canada.
The inclusive understanding of America allowed some to read a subversive meaning into the order. Over breakfast in San Juan last month, Jorge Giovanetti, an anthropologist at the University of Puerto Rico, suggested to me that, in trying to reclaim the Gulf of Mexico for the United States, perhaps Trump has actually reclaimed it for the Americas. I had been thinking something similar. Maybe Cubans, for example, saw a silver lining? Why should the Gulf belong only to Mexico? Now it could be theirs, too. I imagined graffiti artists spraying an accent over the “e” in America whenever they came across it.
Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Latin Americans have seen themselves as constitutive of America for as long as Americans in the United States have cast Latin Americans as outsiders. As Greg Grandin notes in “America, América,” a new history of the Western Hemisphere, Spain and its colonists played an essential role in the success of the U.S.’s fight for independence from the British. In 1781, during the Revolutionary War, the governor of Spanish Louisiana, Bernardo de Gálvez, led troops, including free Afro-Cubans, in a successful siege of British-held Pensacola, Florida. Galveston, Texas, is named for him, and every May Pensacolans celebrate Galvez Day. The U.S. Congress made him an honorary U.S. citizen in 2014, a designation bestowed upon only seven other individuals including Winston Churchill and Mother Teresa. Even now, thousands of tourists travel to the tiny mountainside town in Spain where Gálvez was born to celebrate July 4th with a reënactment of the pivotal battle.
Simón Bolívar, who was born the same year that the treaty ending the American Revolution was signed, considered the United States to be a “singular model of political virtue and moral rectitude.” He believed that the Americas—both North and South—had an important role to play on the world stage in repudiating monarchy. Grandin opens “America, América,” with a quote that captures Bolívar's expansive vision: “I can see America seated on liberty’s throne, wielding justice’s scepter, crowned with glory, revealing to the Old World the majesty of the New.”
Bolívar’s vision of a unified New World differed strikingly from the one held by several U.S. Founders. Neither John Adams nor Thomas Jefferson saw Spanish Americans as part of the same community, let alone as equals. Jefferson thought that the nation he had helped establish might eventually possess South America, and that the inhabitants of the Americas would all speak the same language—presumably English. Adams, for his part, found the notion that Spanish Americans might govern themselves preposterous. “The people of South America are the most ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom,” he wrote. The democratic dreams of Spanish America’s independence leaders, according to Adams, were as “absurd as similar plans would be to establish democracies among the birds, beasts and fishes.”
The difference between how United States and Latin American leaders saw the New World—as a vast territory over which the U.S. reigned supreme, or as a shared hemisphere defined by sovereignty and mutual respect—was encapsulated by the Monroe Doctrine. The doctrine, first laid out by James Monroe in his State of the Union address, in 1823, stated that, since everything that took place in the Americas affected the “peace and happiness” of the United States, the country had the right to intervene in affairs throughout the Western Hemisphere to protect its own interests. The doctrine meant that the U.S. would defend other countries in the hemisphere against European aggression. But, as Woodrow Wilson noted, almost a century later, there was “nothing in it that protected you from aggression from us.”
At first, many Spanish Americans fighting for independence from Spain praised the Monroe Doctrine, interpreting it as support for their own revolutionary struggles. “The United States of the North have solemnly declared that they would view any measures taken by continental European powers against America and in favor of Spain as a hostile act against themselves,” Bolívar declared after hearing Monroe’s speech. Over time, Bolívar came to view “our brothers to the north” with more suspicion. The United States, he wrote, “seems destined by Providence to plague America with miseries in the name of Freedom.”
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, U.S. Presidents invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify intervening in Latin American countries. After the Texas Revolution, when European powers tried to wield influence over the independent Republic of Texas, President James Polk, in his first annual message to Congress, in December, 1845, said, “The present is deemed a proper occasion to reiterate and reaffirm the principle avowed by Mr. Monroe and to state my cordial concurrence in its wisdom and sound policy.” By the end of the month, Texas had become the twenty-eighth state, and the following year the United States, led by Polk, provoked a war with Mexico which wrested more than half the country’s territory. In 1904, after the Spanish-American War, President Theodore Roosevelt issued what became known as his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The United States, he declared, would “exercise international police power” not only when European empires meddled in the Americas but when there was any sort of “wrongdoing.” His words were later cited to justify military occupations in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and elsewhere.
That different parties could impute different meanings to the Monroe Doctrine is partly what has made it such an effective piece of rhetoric. “The doctrine’s magic, and the source of its enduring influence,” Grandin writes, “is found in its ambiguity, in its ability to reconcile contradictory policy impulses.” As late as 1893, a Colombian historian, adhering to Bolívar’s interpretation, could argue that the Monroe Doctrine was “simply the application of the principle of national sovereignty to the republics of this continent.” Even after the occupation of Cuba and the annexation of Puerto Rico, the construction of the Panama Canal, and Roosevelt’s declaration of the U.S. right to intervene in Latin American affairs, it was still possible to hear something more hopeful in Monroe’s words. Just after the start of the First World War, Santiago Pérez Triana, a former Colombian Ambassador to the United Kingdom, called for a “A Monroe Doctrine of the Future” that would stand for solidarity between the United States and Latin America.
“America, América” is Grandin’s eighth book and is, in many ways, a continuation of themes he has written about for decades. It follows his Pulitzer Prize-winning “The End of the Myth,” from 2019, which argued that the frontier, as both a place and an idea, had given the United States a sense of purpose rooted in conquest and territorial expansion. As long as there was open land, the frontier served as a safety valve to alleviate domestic conflicts, most notably over the extension of slavery. The frontier’s closing, the unavailability of new lands, and the enclosure of national space by the border wall in the late twentieth century were existential crises. The United States turned inward; its citizens turned violently against immigrants and one another.
In his new book, Grandin tells the same story from the Latin American side. His account begins in the Spanish colonial period, when Spaniards and other Europeans debated the philosophical underpinnings of conquest and slavery, setting in motion an ideological battle between humanism and barbarism which, Grandin thinks, continues to this day. The book has few heroes. One of them is the Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas, whose most famous work, “A Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies,” written in 1542, recounts a litany of sins that las Casas claimed to have personally observed the Spanish commit. The conquistadors raped Indigenous women, chopped off Indians’ hands, used swords as spits to roast Indian babies over fires as their mothers watched. His account circulated throughout Europe, informing official Spanish policy toward Indians in the Americas and shaping views of the conquistadors’ cruelty for centuries to come.
The conquistadors, understandably, were not fans of las Casas’s reports. When the Spanish Crown, from thousands of miles away, ordered them to treat Indians better, they often ignored its orders. In doing so, they were buffered by other Spanish thinkers who took issue with las Casas’s arguments, primarily Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. Oviedo and Sepúlveda shared with las Casas the view that Indians were not monsters and did, in fact, have souls that could be saved (a matter of debate for much of the sixteenth century). But, Grandin writes, they argued that “Indians were lesser humans” and that therefore the “conquest of the New World was fundamentally just.”
Back in Spain, Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, told Sepúlveda that the massacres of Indians were “chastisements” for their sins. His account shaped Sepúlveda’s view that Indians were guilty of “barbarism,” as Grandin describes it. The land’s abundance had made them lazy. They sometimes resisted evangelization. They didn’t wear clothes. And, Oviedo wrote, they committed “sins against nature, and in many parts eating one another and sacrificing to the Devil and to their idols many children, men and women.”
Las Casas thought that the real barbarians weren’t the Indians but the Spaniards. The conquistadors, he wrote, were “like fierce wolves and tigers and lions who have gone many days without food or nourishment,” and “no other thing have they done for forty years until this day, and still today see fit to do, but dismember, slay, perturb, afflict, torment, and destroy the Indians by all manner of cruelty.”
Grandin makes a persuasive case that las Casas’s humanistic vision became the basis of international law in the Americas and beyond, and eventually informed the governing principles of President Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations and of the United Nations. In the nineteenth century, inheritors of las Casas’s legacy—Grandin names, among others, Bolívar and the Chilean statesman Francisco Bilbao—supported human equality, the abolition of slavery, and the sovereignty of individuals and states. In the twentieth century, Latin American leaders such as Lázaro Cárdenas of Mexico and another Chilean, Salvador Allende, fought for economic and social justice, and the right to basic needs such as health care and social security. Meanwhile, Oviedo and Sepúlveda’s claims that Indians were inferior were echoed in the pronouncements of any number of U.S. Presidents, who argued that the country’s expansion across the continent was justified by Indian or Mexican barbarism.
Since Trump’s first Presidential campaign, historians have reached for comparisons to the rise of European fascism in the nineteen-thirties. Grandin’s framing of history allows us to see Trump differently—as a successor to the conquistadors, who amassed wealth and glory through the subordination of racial others, and to a line of U.S. Presidents, who trampled the sovereignty of other peoples and nations whenever doing so benefitted perceived national interests.
If “The End of the Myth” helped make sense of the first Trump Administration, “America, América” sheds light on the expansionist ambitions Trump has voiced during his second term. Upon his return to the Oval Office, the President hung a portrait of Polk, whose war against Mexico Ulysses Grant later denounced as “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Trump, explaining his admiration of Polk, said, “He got a lot of land.” The border remains a metaphor for how many in the United States want to close the nation to the rest of the world, but we also seem to be at the beginning of what Trump is thinking of as a new age of empire. It’s as if Trump has intuited Grandin’s thesis in “The End of the Myth,” that the closing of the American frontier shut off a pressure-release valve, and decided that the only way to relieve that pressure is by opening the frontier again, by taking over Greenland, or Canada, or reasserting U.S. dominance over Latin America.
“The End of the Myth,” published just a month after Bernie Sanders launched his second campaign for President, could be read as an endorsement of Sanders-style social democracy. “Coming generations will face a stark choice,” Grandin writes in that book’s epilogue, “the choice between barbarism and socialism, or at least social democracy.” In “America, América,” he argues that, if the promise of social-democratic movements is to be realized, it will be because North and South Americans come together to believe in our shared fate as Americans. He quotes the Argentinean politician Roque Sáenz Peña’s 1889 declaration “¡Sea la América para la humanidad!” (“Let America be for humanity!”)
Grandin suggests that historical struggles for social democracy across Latin America might serve as a model for a social-democratic movement of the future. According to his own calculation, some three-quarters of Latin Americans live in countries with social-democratic governments, a figure he uses to argue that Latin Americans are more committed to social democracy than their counterparts in the United States. Yet, from today’s vantage point, social democracy appears less firmly planted in Latin America than Grandin allows. In Brazil’s 2023 Presidential election, Lula da Silva defeated Jair Bolsonaro by less than two percentage points. If the election had gone the other way, a majority of Latin Americans would be living under authoritarian rule.
Comparing the present to the early twentieth century, Grandin writes, “Latin Americans know that the way to beat fascism now is the same as it was then: by welding liberalism to a forceful agenda of social rights, by promising to better the material conditions of people’s lives.” But such unequivocal pronouncements feel more like wishful thinking than political analysis. Mexico’s new President, Claudia Sheinbaum, a social democrat, is tremendously popular. So, however, is Nayib Bukele, the authoritarian leader of El Salvador. Since taking office in 2019, Bukele has done little to raise the standard of living in the country. Still, more than eighty-three percent of Salvadorans approved of his job performance as of January, and other Latin American leaders have promised their voters that they will follow “El Modelo Bukele.” Changing the minds of Bukele’s supporters—and of the many Latinos in the U.S. who voted for Trump last year—might depend on convincing them of the better world that could be delivered by social democracy, as Grandin tries to do in “America, América.” But it might also require acknowledging the appeal that barbarism holds even to those who would seem to be its victims. ♦
