Latin American Culture

Enrique Tamés, Ph.D.

An idea of culture

• Culture is hard to be defined because it represents a multidimensional reality. However, for the purposes of this course, we will understand culture as:

• The conformation of values, behaviors, and activities that a group of people adopts in order to live in community

throughout time.

Latin American Culture

• Latin American Culture is the result of the confrontation of several cultures.

Europeantraditions

Ameridiantraditions

Africantraditions

LatinAmerican

Culture

Own and imposed cultures

• Own cultures: arise from the necessities that exist within the relationships of a community. Members adopt the culture by convenience and not by inducement.

• Imposed cultures: result from the encounter with another culture, in which one culture dominates the other.

Elements of culture

• Traditions: diverse social agents tend to create everyday activities that have a defined origin and a reason for being. Traditions are capable of creating identity links between the members of a community.

• Customs: Customs become obvious when they are compared between two or more societies. It is much easier to recognize others customs than the own because differences are evident when one’s culture is the benchmark.

• Beliefs: people base much of their cultural traditions in beliefs, mainly religious. And religions may shape other social spheres such as politics or economics.

• Values: not understanding the inherent values of a dissimilar culture will unquestionably create difficulties when trying to create intercultural links.

Cultural integration…or disintegration

• Latin America is an example of both. Indigenous cultures have taken two main paths:

o Integration with the European culture.

o Non-integration.

• Both paths lead to:o The destruction of the indigenous cultures or the denial

of their historical existence.

Cultural destruction

Do dominant cultures have the right to marginalize native cultures?

Or

Should dominant cultures lead native cultures to modern ways of living?

• The solution:o Let the indigenous cultures progress without having

to adopt modern ideologies.

Ethnic coexistence

• Cultures can coexist but inevitably a particular culture will try to dominate the alien, the different.

• This is the reason why Latin America faces cultural identity problems: the region can’t differentiate between what is own and what is alien.

Cultures change over time

• Cultures are not static, they have a natural inertia to change. History shows that surviving cultures are not the ones that isolate, but those that can transform according to the circumstances. Even if this means to adopt alien cultural elements.

Cultural encounters

• Latin American cultures have arisen as a result from the encounters with different cultures, which for historical reasons came to occupy the same territory.

• Subsequently, during the colonial period the new mestizo culture gradually acquired self-identity up to the stage of wanting their independence from their conquerors.

African and Asian influence

• The Americas, for five centuries, has steadily and almost uninterrupted received flows of immigrants from East Asia and Africa.

• African cultures brought not only their color but also their manners, their beliefs; and even when they lived in slavery.

• By 1650 there were 380 thousand blacks, located only in South America, and by 1820 the whole region housed approximately 6 million 400 thousand Africans.

• As a comparison, in 1810 white population in the region was conformed by 3 million 276 thousand.

• Social instability forced many Chinese communities to settle in México and Central America, but especially in Peru and Cuba.

• The Japanese, at different times of the XIX and XX Century fled to Brazil and Peru.

Latin American Culture

• As you can tell, the plurality of cultures, ethnicities, and different historical moments of encounters make the Latin American complex to be full of particularities.

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