Gulf of América

Esther Allen reviews Greg Grandin’s “America, América: A New History of the New World.”

By Esther AllenApril 23, 2025

• History

HALF A MILLENNIUM AGO, a German scholar created a map that represented for the first time a landmass Europeans had just come across. Martin Waldseemüller’s map, published in France, shows the landmass as two separate bodies, the northernmost being a smallish hook of land with a chain of islands trailing below, labelled “Parias.” To the south, a far larger area marked “America” is designated as property of the king of Castile. Thirty-five nations now occupy that landmass, and historian Greg Grandin’s audacious new book weaves them into a narrative that will, for many readers, upend conceptions of the hemisphere. Grandin wisely refrains from including much about present trends in the area formerly known as “Parias,” but each day’s headlines further confirm the deep-rooted patterns that his brilliant and urgently needed history traces.

His title, America, América, echoes the chorus of a familiar patriotic hymn and disrupts it with a single accent mark. Is it a repetition of the same word, with the same meaning, in two languages? No, and that’s Grandin’s point—though his aim, he says, is “not to fuss” over words. As a translator, my métier consists mainly in that, and I can’t help noting that his point is underscored by the dictionaries of the two empires whose New World progeny—the United States and the nations of Latin America—are his primary focus. The Real Academia Española’s dictionary of the Spanish language has no entry for the proper noun “América” but defines “americano” as “native of América,” offering hispanoamericano, latinoamericano, centroamericano, suramericano, sudamericano, and latino as synonyms. Other meanings include someone who returned to Spain rich from its American colonies (also known as an Indiano); a kind of coffee drink; a kind of jacket; and “estadounidense,” a common Spanish demonym equivalent to “United Statesian,” a term coined in 1845 and rarely used since, even in Canada.

The Oxford English Dictionary, for its part, initially defines “American” as an Indigenous inhabitant of the Americas. Its second definition concludes, “Now chiefly: a native or citizen of the United States.” (Grandin notes the date—1847—when Webster’s added a similar qualifier.) The OED does have an entry for “America,” a primarily poetic and literary term meaning “a place which one longs to reach; an ultimate or idealized destination or aim.” Pity the poor word, devalued from John Donne’s wondering gasp of “O my America! my new-found-land” to a convicted sex-abuser president’s new name for the Gulf of Mexico. Chinese, a friend tells me, has the advantage of two separate expressions: 美國 (mei guo), or America-country; and 美洲 (mei zhou), or America-continent—the latter synonymous with América in Spanish and in Grandin’s book. Last we checked, Google’s Chinese-language map was still using 美洲 (mei zhou), America-continent, in its now-mandatory alternative to “Gulf of Mexico,” transforming a megalomaniac diktat into an expanded association of that central body of water with all the Americas.

The United States cannot be understood outside the larger, longer history of the Americas, yet its all-engulfing exceptionalism continually impedes that broader perspective. Grandin’s latest book breaches conceptual barriers wider and more deeply entrenched than the US-Mexico border wall, which, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (2019), he diagnosed as a symptom of the final fizzling-out of the US frontier, once identified as the vital, decisive force in our national character. The current White House occupant appears to agree with Grandin’s diagnosis. As he promotes the border wall and the attendant frenzy of mass deportations, he simultaneously promises new frontiers to come: Greenland, Panama, Canada, the Gulf of Mexico, Gaza, Mars.

This “new history of the New World,” as the book’s subtitle promises, doesn’t start with Christopher Columbus but with Bartolomé de Las Casas, eight years old when Columbus returned to Seville in early 1493, jubilant with the discovery of an all-water route to India. Young Bartolomé had particular reason to celebrate; his father and two uncles were part of Columbus’s crew, and wealth from the voyage paid for his education. He grew up to become a priest and venture across the Atlantic in turn, to find himself implicated in and witness to (in Grandin’s words) “a new kind of mass murder carried out with a new kind of cruelty.” Within just two decades, the Spanish conquest had decimated the population in areas that, when Columbus arrived, had teemed with people like “leaves of grass.” Grandin, a word-fusser of high order, finds that phrase in a letter by a Spanish priest bemoaning mass death in Hispaniola, three centuries before Walt Whitman made it emblematic of US individuality, vitality, and democracy. In the Cuban village of Caonao, Las Casas watched as Spanish soldiers slaughtered and disemboweled thousands of men, women, children, and elderly people who knelt before them silently, with bowed heads. It was, he wrote, “an ocean of evil.” He devoted his life to trying to stop it.

One of the means he used was a book, the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies), which documented the horror. Grandin, who deftly incorporates philosophy and legal theory throughout, credits Las Casas with offering, a century before Descartes, an alternate model of modern self-awareness, as someone who was “mindful not only of his own existence but of the agony of others.” The Brevísima relación instigated long and searing debate within the expanding Spanish Empire. Some scholars at the University of Salamanca agreed that the inhabitants of the Indies had human souls. Others said they were inferior beings—natural slaves, something base that resulted from “the putrefaction of the earth,” or a monstrous species of animal. Continually at a loss to explain the mindless, brutal extermination going on all around him, Las Casas wished the Spaniards would treat the Indians like domestic animals: “If they did, there wouldn’t be so many corpses, so much death.”

The empire’s internal moral crisis brought the slaughter to the attention of Castile’s neighbors. Translations of Las Casas’s book found particularly avid support among Spain’s Protestant rivals. There ensued one of history’s most massive and enduring cases of projection. “The English,” Grandin dryly observes, “confirmed their own goodness by reading Las Casas on Spanish badness. […] Against Spanish avariciousness and excess, England saw itself as moderate. Against Catholic decadence and superstition, Protestants were modern and rational. Cruel Spain. Just England.” The United States has an enduring habit of comparing itself to Latin America along precisely those lines. The notion of Anglo moral superiority gained and maintained such a hold on the West that the 1992 press release from the Swedish Academy announcing the Nobel Peace Prize for Guatemalan Indigenous activist Rigoberta Menchu explained, “Like many other countries in South and Central America, Guatemala has experienced great tension between the descendants of European immigrants and the native Indian population.” No tensions at all in the landmass’s northern regions?

The English did not confine their brutality to their American colonies. Grandin points out that England used the pretext of avenging the “twenty millions of the souls of the slaughter’d Indians” Spain had killed in the Americas to perpetrate atrocities of its own against the Catholic Irish. He also notes that the treatment of the Indigenous inhabitants of England’s New World colonies—established more than a century after Spain’s—was at first tempered by influential ideas of social justice developed by jurists of the Salamanca School such as Francisco de Vitoria, who argued that the conquest of America did not meet the criteria for “just war” and was therefore illegal. Those noble ideas went out the window in 1622 when the Powhatan attacked Jamestown. One settler celebrated the bloodbath as an opportunity: now the English could set aside earlier restraints to “invade the Country, and destroy them who sought to destroy us.”

The destruction has continued ever since. As America, América pursues its course across the centuries with verve, superb pacing, and impressive delicacy of touch, it sometimes pauses to consider varying notions of “progress.” In the United States, progress came to be equated with “territorial enlargement”—the constant, violent conquest of new lands and the inexorable outward movement of settlement upon them. Hegel, in far-off Germany, justified it as “the march of God in the world.” Grandin has the endearing quirk of placing some of the most telling context for his narrative in footnotes. One such note gives a quick account of works by several historians that show how the US frontier served as inspiration for the Nazis in their quest for “Lebensraum,” or “living space.”

While a few US writers such as Margaret Fuller and Helen Hunt Jackson spoke out against it, the decimation of the peoples who once inhabited the territories that became the United States triggered no particular moral crisis among those who carried it out. The enslavement of people transported from Africa and the gradual, systematic elimination of people who had dwelled on the continent for millennia both sprang from what Grandin calls the “pariah-craft” of Anglo-Saxon racism, with its horror of miscegenation and emphasis on pale skin. But centuries of ethnic cleansing gave rise to nothing like the moral crisis over slavery that eventually erupted into the US Civil War. The removal of Indians and Mexicans was simply the Manifest Destiny of a racially superior people. Art historian Erin L. Thompson begins her terrific recent book on the reevaluation of US historic monuments with a quick primer on “The Rescue,” a statue by Horatio Greenough that stood at the east facade of the US Capitol for more than a century. The massive white marble composition is dominated by a hulking frontiersman who is subduing from behind a half-naked, tomahawk-wielding Native man. On either side, far below, are a barking dog and a cowering female figure clutching a child. Greenough said his work showed “the triumph of the whites over the savage tribes.” It is visible in photographs of Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration and was not removed until 1958. Twenty years later, it was shattered in a crane accident, so it can’t be reinstalled at the Capitol or included in the “Garden of American Heroes,” the patriotic sculpture park to which funds from cancelled National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts grants have now been redirected.

The countries that wrested their independence from Spain in the early 19th century did not primarily equate progress with conquest and expansion. In 1837, the Argentine writer Esteban Echeverría defined “progress” as “the desire to improve, to hope, and to take creative action.” There was nothing inevitable or inexorable about it. The Chilean philosopher and liberal politician Francisco Bilbao, a pivotal figure in Grandin’s analysis, spent the summer of 1848 in Europe, witness to revolution. He rejected the fatalism of “charlatan professors of progress” who excused the horrors of enslavement and genocide as necessary elements of God’s plan. Bilbao declared, instead, that “justice can be defeated.” Constant political struggle was necessary to overcome a “monarchical, theocratic, patriarchal worldview.” Bilbao is sometimes credited as the first person to use the phrase “Latin America,” in an 1856 speech delivered in Paris. The region, he said, belonged not to one race but to “the spirit of a common community.” Latin America would be “the meeting place of all the elements of humanity, north and south, east and west, the Black, the Indian, the White.”

“America for humanity” is how Grandin sums up Latin America’s ultimate response to the sinister double entendres of the Monroe Doctrine—or “Donroe Doctrine,” as recent headlines have renamed it—with its rallying cry of “America for Americans.” The major factor that, in Grandin’s account, distinguishes Latin American postcolonial independence from that of the United States is summed up in a concept taken from Roman law—“uti possidetis,” or “as you possess.” This principle, formulated in 1822 by Colombian diplomat Pedro Gual, held that the borders of the former administrative divisions of Spain’s colonies were to be retained and respected as those colonies became separate nations. Latin America went through some border disputes during the 19th century, but on the whole, the principle held.

This meant that, along with their own sovereign countries, Latin America’s independence leaders created what Grandin describes as a kind of prototype League of Nations. Each country’s nationalism developed alongside a feeling of participation in a larger entity, a sense of being argentino, peruano, mexicano—and, at the same time, americano. Spaniards, Swedes, and Poles who now also consider themselves Europeans are embracing the Latin American principle that “nationalism need not vitiate internationalism.” That the United States did not respect uti possidetis or the sovereignty of the other independent nations in its hemisphere became clear beyond a shadow of doubt when it invaded Mexico in 1846 and took half of its territory.

For the US, the frontier is uninhabited terra nullius—barren wilderness, “shithole country,” there for the taking by anyone in a position to do so. Whatever human group may happen to be living there is always at once weak, lazy, unworthy—and a violent threat. Even the fact of such peoples’ existence is debatable, cloaked in fantastical ignorance or expunged by denial. Within 80 years of the Mayflower’s landing, a group of New England theologians fixated on Mexico as the site of Christ’s imminent Second Coming. They considered Indigenous Mexicans to be the lost tribes of Israel, and believed those tribes would soon be reunited with the Jews of Europe, whereupon all would convert to Protestant Christianity and the New Jerusalem would arise on the site of Mexico City. A century or so later, during a 1783 tour of the United States, Venezuelan statesman Francisco de Miranda, who worked with Spain to help the US secure its independence, had a chat with Commodore Esek Hopkins, commander in chief of the Continental Navy during the independence war. When Miranda mentioned Mexico City, Hopkins declared his categorical certainty that no such city existed.

Miranda went on to rally support among political leaders across the world, including Alexander Hamilton, for his “multinational plan” for the liberation of South America. He died without seeing it happen, but by 1825, much of South and Central America had won independence. The inhabitants of those regions saw themselves as having become americanos. Their northern neighbors thought otherwise. In 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the US incursion into Mexico and forced the cession of its territories, a substantial group of European-descended, literate, landowning Californios became “treaty citizens” of the United States. They soon realized that the rights this ostensibly granted them weren’t going to be respected by the waves of invading settlers. They also realized that when those settlers referred to themselves as Americans in their loud, sibilant, nasal language, they used the term to differentiate themselves from and exclude the Indigenous people who had been living in California for more than 10,000 years, as well as the Californios who had only been there for generations.

In an 1891 essay titled “Nuestra América” (“Our América”), published simultaneously in New York and Mexico City, Cuban journalist, poet, and revolutionary José Martí, another pivotal figure in Grandin’s narrative, warned that “the disdain of the formidable neighbor who does not know her is the greatest danger that faces our América.” Based in New York, the exiled Martí was working to unify the many American nations that had already gained their independence from Spain around support for the belated independence of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Such a united front would, he hoped, keep the United States from intervening in the islands’ wars for independence, create a regional balance of power within the Americas, and ensure the future equilibrium of the world.

Instead, the US wrested those islands and other territories from Spain in 1898, stretching its dominion past the North American continent and making itself an overseas empire. Grandin’s 2007 book, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, explores how the US has used the nations to its south as a proving ground for its imperial ambitions. Such actions are often spun domestically the same way the events of 1898 were—as a noble, self-sacrificing gift of freedom and a lesson in civic virtue to backward and undemocratic regions. The lessons actually taught are not those advertised: mass incarceration for profit is one of the things El Salvador has picked up from the United States in recent years.

America, América builds a strong case in support of Martí’s idea of Latin America as a potential counterbalance to unbridled US military and economic might. During the 19th century, America’s newly independent nations held a series of regional gatherings, starting with the Congress of Panama convened by Simón Bolívar in 1826. President John Quincy Adams wanted the United States to send a representative but was met with fierce opposition. Here again, Grandin puts particularly salient context in a footnote: Latin American revolutionaries often equated colonialism with slavery and abolished slavery as they won independence. At the Congress of Panama, abolition was on the agenda. The United States did not attend.

In subsequent multilateral meetings, Latin Americans developed a set of principles of international law sustaining that no terra nullius existed in the Americas; calling for respect for uti possidetis; holding that all nations are equal under law, regardless of size and wealth; and seeking impartial arbitration treaties to avoid recourse to force of arms. In 1844, the Argentine jurist Juan Bautista Alberdi named this complex of ideas Derecho Internacional Americano (American International Law); it became fundamental in the evolution of what is today known simply as international law. Diplomats from across the hemisphere, summoned to Washington, DC, in 1889 for what the US called the First Pan-American Conference, arrived armed in advance with these principles. To the joy and astonishment of Martí, whose coverage of the conference appeared in newspapers across the hemisphere, the Latin Americans maintained an impressively united front when voting on a resolution that outlawed conquest. The United States, which hadn’t yet managed to grant itself a veto on such matters, registered the only “no” vote, and the US representatives stormed out of the room. Thus began “a long tradition of Washington standing against the majority in multilateral meetings.”

Nevertheless, the first half of the 20th century was, Grandin argues, the period when the United States was best served by the “restraining function” of Latin America. It was a coalition of American countries that made Woodrow Wilson’s ambition for a League of Nations possible. FDR cultivated improved relations with the world and the hemisphere via the “Good Neighbor Policy,” announced during his first inaugural address in 1933, and sustained by his envoy to the Montevideo Convention later that year. A 1934 New York Times headline cheerily announced: “Our Era of ‘Imperialism’ Nears Its End.” Once fascism in Europe had been defeated, however, the strong inter-American alliance that had enabled its defeat was quickly trashed.

There would be no postwar Marshall Plan for Latin America. Grandin’s final section takes as focal point the still unsolved 1948 assassination of Jorge Gaitán, a mestizo former mayor of Bogotá and front-running presidential candidate. In the aftermath of world war, citizens everywhere were demanding higher pay, stronger social welfare, and expanded civil rights. Leaders like Gaitán supported these demands. A month before his untimely death, Gaitán led a silent march across Bogotá. Gabriel García Márquez, who was there, estimated that 100,000 people participated, all maintaining an absolute hush, and even refraining from applause after Gaitán had delivered a kind of funeral oration “for the victims of state and capitalist violence.”

“El negro Gaitán,” as he was called, was killed just days after the Bogotá Conference had convened representatives from across the Americas, with US Secretary of State George C. Marshall himself presiding. As protests set the city aflame, the Colombian military, trained and supported by the United States under the Good Neighbor Policy, sped the visiting diplomats to secure locations. This was a godsend for Marshall, who used the “besieged camaraderie” of the situation to convince his counterparts that what Latin America needed was not a development and recovery plan similar to the one offered Europe but a united security front with the US against the menace of global communism. The chaos in Bogotá set off by Gaitán’s assassination became part of the Cold War narrative, a prime example of the horror that the enemy ideology would unleash and that US intervention would stave off. Imperialism was back. And that imperialism, reborn in part from the US victory over fascism in Europe, began to view fascism’s rise in Latin America with approving eyes. “Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed,” Henry Kissinger told the Argentine foreign minister in 1976 during the state terror campaign later known as the Dirty War.

The nations of America-continent know all too well that fascism can and does happen here, and with some regularity. “Latin Americans know,” Grandin writes, “that the way to beat fascism is [by] welding liberalism to a forceful agenda of social rights.” The past decade has made it abundantly clear that the disdain José Martí identified as the major threat to Latin America threatens the United States as well—or those among us who aspire to equality under law, freedom of speech, and generally shared well-being. America, América demonstrates again and again that the hemisphere’s crucial line of demarcation does not snake along the Rio Grande but separates those struggling for democratic governance and shared prosperity from those who support neo-feudal oligarchic authoritarianism. Across Latin America today, Grandin tallies, more than 480 million people, out of a total population of 625 million, currently “live under some kind of social-democratic government.” While our leaders decry the region, eye it for potential future conquest, eliminate the Spanish language from government websites, and ship whomever they like off to Salvadoran gulags without due process or hope of return, the rest of us can look at that clear majority and hope one day to be part of it.