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The initiative of Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton to forge a Western Hemisphere community has been staggered by Mexico's economic and political crisis. Is this latest grand design for the hemisphere destined to follow John Kennedy's Alliance for Progress and Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy into the cemetery of frustrated Pan-American dreams? The United States and Canada are prosperous first-world countries with centuries-old democratic institutions; Latin America's countries are poor and, in most cases, experimenting with democratic capitalism for the first time. Can a coherent, durable community like the European Union be constructed with building blocks so different?Why are the United States and Canada so much more prosperous, so much more democratic than is Latin America? Why has it taken so long for Latin America to conclude that democratic capitalism and good relations with the United States are in its best interest? And what might be done to enhance the prospects for a dynamic community in the Western Hemisphere?These are the questions Lawrence Harrison addresses in The Pan-American Dream. Central to the contrasts between Latin America and the United States and Canada are the fundamental differences between the Ibero-Catholic and Anglo-Protestant cultures, reflected in contrasting views of work, education, merit, community, ethics, and authority, among others. But, as he stresses, cultural values and attitudes change, and Pan-Americanism can be more than a dream.A Pan-American community depends on shared values and institutions, as the community now embracing the United States and Canada demonstrates. Experiments with democracy and the free market in Latin America will help strengthen the values that lie behind the success of the United States and Canada, Western Europe, and East Asia. But if Latin America's political and intellectual leaders do not confront the traditional values and attitudes largely responsible for the region's underdevelopment?with sweeping reforms in education and child-rearing practices, for example?realization of the Pan-American dream will be painfully slow and uncertain.
In Improvised Continent, Richard Cándida Smith synthesizes over seventy years of Pan-American cultural activity in the United States and shows how Latin American artists and writers challenged U.S. citizens about their place in the world and about the kind of global relations the country's interests could allow.
In the history of the early twentieth-century Americas, visions of hemispheric unity flourished, and the notion of a transnational American identity was embraced by artists, intellectuals, and government institutions. In The Pan American Imagination, Stephen Park explores the work of several Pan American modernists who challenged the body of knowledge being produced about Latin America, crossing the disciplinary boundaries of academia as well as the formal boundaries of artistic expression—from literary texts and travel writing to photography, painting, and dance. Park invests in an interdisciplinary approach, which he frames as a politically resistant intellectual practice, using it not only to examine the historical phenomenon of Pan Americanism but also to explore the implications for current transnational scholarship.
Making Art Panamerican situates the ambitious visual arts programs of the Pan American Union within the context of hemispheric cultural relations during the cold war. Challenging the U.S. bias of conventional narratives about Panamericanism and the postwar shift in values from realism to abstraction, Claire F. Fox illuminates the institutional dynamics that helped shape aesthetic movements following World War II.
Coinciding with the centennial of the Pan American Union (now the Organization of American States), González explores how nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. architects and their clients built a visionary Pan-America to promote commerce and cultural exchange between United States and Latin America. Late in the nineteenth century, U.S. commercial and political interests began eyeing the countries of Latin America as plantations, farms, and mines to be accessed by new shipping lines and railroads. As their desire to dominate commerce and trade in the Western Hemisphere grew, these U.S. interests promoted the concept of "Pan-Americanism" to link the United States and Latin America and called on U.S. architects to help set the stage for Pan-Americanism's development. Through international expositions, monuments, and institution building, U.S. architects translated the concept of a united Pan-American sensibility into architectural or built form. In the process, they also constructed an artificial ideological identity—a fictional Pan-America peopled with imaginary Pan-American citizens, the hemispheric loyalists who would support these projects and who were the presumed benefactors of this presumed architecture of unification. Designing Pan-America presents the first examination of the architectural expressions of Pan-Americanism. Concentrating on U.S. architects and their clients, Robert Alexander González demonstrates how they proposed designs reflecting U.S. presumptions and projections about the relationship between the United States and Latin America. This forgotten chapter of American architecture unfolds over the course of a number of international expositions, ranging from the North, Central, and South American Exposition of 1885–1886 in New Orleans to Miami's unrealized Interama fair and San Antonio's HemisFair '68 and encompassing the Pan American Union headquarters building in Washington, D.C. and the creation of the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse in the Dominican Republic.