While surfing the Net recently, I came across a website entitled “Latin America: Western or Non-Western?” Though the site did not give a definitive answer to the question, it discussed some of the reasons why people might or might not consider Latin America part of the Western world.

The term “West” itself is somewhat problematic. It seems to have joined the ranks of those words such as “Creole,” “humanist,” and “liberal” whose meaning varies according to where, when, and by whom they are spoken. Most people would agree that Western Europe, Canada, the United States, and Australia are part of the West. However, they might disagree on how to classify East Germany, for instance, which until the fall of the Berlin Wall belonged to the Communist Eastern bloc but which has strong historical and cultural ties to Western Europe (and which has now reunited with West Germany). Latin America’s status as part of the so-called Occident is also ambiguous. On one hand, a writer for Canada’s National Post Magazine described Colombia as the “most dangerous country in the West.” An Ecuadorian friend similarly tells me that of course his homeland is Western; after all, it was colonized by Europeans long before many areas of the United States were. Others, though, would hesitate to include Latin America in the Western fold. Some leftists, in the hope of creating a sense of Third World solidarity, lump the region together with Africa, Asia and the Middle East rather than with Europe and North America. Ironically, many right-wingers too would place Latin America outside the Western pale. Not only is the region not industrialized, they say, but the majority of its inhabitants are not “white” (that is, of unmixed European descent).

My answer to the website’s question is that yes, Latin America is part of the West. Saying that Latin America is not Western is to my mind a bit like saying that cats are not mammals. In other words, what else could they be? Just as cats possess all the physical features of mammals (hair, the ability to produce milk for their young, and so on), Latin America’s culture is largely based on that of Western Europe, more specifically Spain’s and, in the case of Brazil, Portugal’s.

The first objection to classifying Latin American countries as Western is that they are not industrialized, at least not to the same degree as those of Europe and North America. But industrialization is not the exclusive domain of the West. Japan is one of the most industrialized nations in the world, yet it is certainly not Western. The much less technologically developed Philippines is far more Westernized than Japan, due to its three hundred years as a Spanish colony. While the wish to promote solidarity between Latin America and the rest of the Third World is commendable, those who do so sometimes forget (or prefer to ignore) that culturally, even if not politically or technologically, the former resembles Europe more than it does Asia or Africa, for example.

Another reason often cited for not including Latin America in the West stems from the fact that most of its people are not “white.” However, a “white” population does not a Western country make. Eastern European nations such as Lithuania and Estonia, for example, are almost entirely “white,” but they have never been seen as part of the Occident. Others might argue that large portions of Latin America, such as Bolivia and Guatemala, are inhabited by individuals with no European ancestry whatsoever. But the same thing could be said of Canada, where the most northerly areas of the country are populated mainly by Aboriginals and Inuit.

Moreover, most Latin Americans have at least some European ancestry. The populations of Argentina, Uruguay and Costa Rica, in fact, are over 80% “white,” and many other countries possess substantial European minorities (including some people with no Spanish or Portuguese blood; my last “white” boyfriend, for instance, was born in Peru to a German-Northern Italian couple). Nonetheless, even setting aside the region’s “white” inhabitants, the average mestizo¹ or mulatto^2, has more in common with his or her European than Indian and/or African forbears. He or she in all likelihood a.) speaks a European language - Spanish in most places and Portuguese in Brazil - as his or her mother tongue; b.) practises a religion that while not originally from Europe, took root on that continent more widely than on any other in the Old World; and c.) leads a lifestyle similar to that of people in Spain, Portugal and to a lesser extent other European nations. From this standpoint, it’s hard to claim that Latin Americans are any less Western than Americans or Australians are. The difference of course is that the latter two groups derive their culture from Britain whereas the former trace theirs to Spain or Portugal.

That’s not to deny that Native American and African customs have influenced Latin American life. It’s also understandable that countries like Mexico, which broke away forcefully from the “motherland,” Spain, are now stressing their Indian over their European roots. Other nations are emphasizing their “mestizaje” - the Spanish term for “race mixing” - in an attempt to recognize their dual (or in the case of places like Brazil with a strong African component, triple) heritages. But the reality is that for most mixed-race Latin Americans, who form the majority of the area’s population, their European background has played the greatest role in shaping their world views, social attitudes, and daily lives.

Indeed, the fact that race mixing played such an important role in Latin American history is probably the main reason for that region’s Western character. It should be pointed out as well that not all Spanish and Portuguese colonies joined the ranks of the West. Three centuries of Spanish rule in the Philippines, for example, did not transform that group of islands into a Latin nation. Though Spain had considerable influence on the Philippines - converting the bulk of the population to Catholicism, providing loan words to the local languages, and giving the people Spanish first and/or last names - for the most part the Filipinos’ pre-colonial Asian culture remained intact. Incidentally, miscegenation between Spaniards and Filipinas³ occurred on a fairly limited scale, since very few of the former settled in the islands. As historian John Phelan explains, the Philippines failed to become a Latin nation in the same way, say, Mexico did in part because the former lacked a significant mixed-race population to help Hispanicize the country.

A friend from Nicaragua, a man of mixed Spanish and Native American descent who could never have passed for “white” in the United States, admitted to me that he felt “at home” on a visit to Italy because Italy is a Latin country - like Spain and Portugal. Obviously Latin America is not a carbon copy of Iberia.⁴ But neither is the United States a replica of England. And just as no one would ever classify my three cats as fish, amphibians, reptiles or birds, Latin America cannot be described as anything but Western.

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