“But in regard to these (the American) continents”: U.S. National Rhetorics and the Figure of Latin America

Abstract

This essay draws attention to the vital role that the “other” America has played in the creation of (U.S.) American rhetorics. It examines how U.S. presidential invocations of the Monroe Doctrine make use of the figure of Latin America to imagine the United States and its role in the world. In 1823, when James Monroe articulated what became the “Monroe Doctrine,” the idea that the United States had a two-continent sphere of influence was novel at best. Over time, however, U.S. public discourse developed a ubiquitous common sense in which U.S. strength, security, and even national being have a hemispheric basis. From Monroe’s assertion that actions against any American state would manifest “an unfriendly disposition toward the United States” to Theodore Roosevelt’s lionized national virility and into the present moment, the figure of Latin America—present and absent—has become powerfully definitive for U.S. national image.

Notes

¹ The complex history of the term “Latin America” is beyond the scope of this essay. The region receives many names from U.S. rhetors—Spanish America, South America, Latin America—but serves consistently as foil, counterpart, and mirror for the United States’ American self. I use the term here with the caveat that it is as often the idea of another America that is powerful in U.S. rhetorics. That idea often obscures the actual activity of Latin Americans (for more, see Mignolo; O’Gorman).

² See René Agustín De los Santos, this issue, for reflection on how presidential influence differs across national contexts.

³ The absolute monarchies of France, Austria, Russia, and Prussia who feared the rise of republicanism in Europe and the Americas.

⁴ It should not be shocking that the United States plays the masculine role in these relations. That paradigmatic feature of U.S. national rhetoric is fundamentally authorized by an assumed feminine Latin America. It is palpable here in Polk’s message and explicit in Theodore Roosevelt’s language discussed below.

⁵ For more on the history of violence and exclusion that Polk omits, see José Angel Hernández, Lars Schoultz, and Andrés Tijerina.

⁶ Technically, a claim to North America includes all of Mexico, but the history of that omission is too long to tackle here. In Polk’s day (and today) the fact that Mexico is part of North America was easily subsumed to assumptions about a Spanish South and an Anglo North.

⁷ Roosevelt’s first written use of the phrase refers to his role as governor of New York (“Letter”). However, his stint with the “Rough Riders” famously established his particularly interventionist approach to foreign affairs.

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Notes on contributors

Christa J. Olson

Christa J. Olson is Assistant Professor of Composition and Rhetoric in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, 600 North Park Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA.