The History of Latin American Identity

However, because Latin American nations were defaulting on loans to European powers, Roosevelt expanded the reach of the Monroe Doctrine. Known as a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the expanded docu manpowert asserted: "Chronic wrongdoing?whitethorn in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention?and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the U.S. to the Monroe Doctrine may coerce the U.S., however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power" (Roosevelt's 1).

With the wounds of civil wars and Spanish imperialism still fresh in the minds of many Latin Americans, non-political poet Ruben Dario was go to pen a poem entitled To Roosevelt. In this poem, we apprehend the fledgling struggle for national identity expressed by Dario against what he saw as an ungodly, imperialistic, invader, "You are the United States,/you are the emerging invader/of the nanve America that has Indian blood,/that still prays to messiah Christ and still speaks Spanish" (Dario 1). In the poem, Dario portrays Latin American identity as one that embodies Christianity, Spanish heritage, exists on live, and is analogous to nature: "that America/that trembles in hurricanes and lives on love,/it lives, you men of Saxon eyes and barbarous soul./And it dreams. And it loves, and it vibrates, and it is the daughter of the Sun" (Dario 2).

As with Dario's poem, the dance and music attempt known as trip the light fantastic toe also conveys elements of the Latin American national identity. After a number of civil wars and independency from Spain, Buenos Aires because the "indisputable center of the Argentinean economy and cultural development" (Fernandez 1). Inhabitants of Buenos Aires were coupled by Italian, Spanish, and European immigrants that forged a new purification known as portenos, "the man and woman whose lives were centered slightly the docks, the place where people both arrived and found work" (Fernandez 1). It was in this port town and amid this newly forged culture that the tango was born.

Fernandez, E. El tango at a glance. (1999).

Viewed on Aug 10, 2004: hypertext transfer protocol://www.tango.spb.ru/eng/history.phtml, 1-4.

Initially, the tango was compete with only instruments, with lyrics being added much later. Of the operative class, with moves known only to members of the working class, the tango began as a cheerful kind of music and dance that was close to ofttimes heard in the slums and bordellos. Eventually, single instruments and music only tangos evolved into tangos with lyrics played by full orchestras, as the tango moved from the slums into the most respectable venues and homes. The tango is a tightly cinched dance whose main focus is love, typically a doomed love that ends in heartbreak. Having experienced love and hostility through various wars, the dance symbolizes the duality of the Latin American identity. As Johnson writes, "It's our identity. The anger is there. The inclination is there. Everything is there" (1).

acts as both a denial and a warning of American right to imperialism, particularly Latin American imperialism. Dario informs the U.S. that it thinks that "life is fire,/progress is eruption,/that wherever you shoot/you hit the future" (1). Dario's answer is simple and o
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