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Conclusion Surveying the state of Latin American studies in the United States in 1966,Lewis Hanke described the current expansion as “staggering”: “Never before have so many libraries been able to strengthen their collections on both Brazil and Spanish America. . . . Never before has the academic marketplace been so attractive to graduate students; never before have so many professors and students been able to study and visit Latin America for such prolonged periods; never before have our research facilities and salaries been able to pull to our faculties so many scholars from Latin America as to constitute a kind of ‘brain drain’ from these countries.”1 Even though the expansionist wave had ebbed by the mid1970s , its sheer size meant that in subsequent years the academic study of Latin America would exhibit greater vitality than in the post–World War II era of “drought.” Even so, throughout its vicissitudes—from its gestation in the nineteenth century through its florescence in the twentieth century—the field of Latin American studies was characterized as much by continuity as by change. U.S. scholarship on Latin America was always shaped by domestic concerns, as can be seen in early efforts to study the culture of North American Indians by studying those to the south and in the attention given to the “borderlands” by Herbert E. Bolton and others. By the early twentieth century the linkage with state interests became more clearly identifiable as a“boomlet”occurred with the U.S. establishment of protectorates in the Caribbean Basin and efforts to promote trade and investment throughout the region. A second boomlet occurred in the context of the deteriorating international situation of the 1930s and the need to encourage hemispheric solidarity with the United States before and during World War II.The rise of Fidel Castro and the subsequent interjection of the cold war into the region set the stage for the greatest boom of all. Indeed, some have argued that the cold war itself created the area studies concept, regardless of region. In the case of Latin America, earlier chapters have shown that sup- Conclusion 185 port for area studies existed as far back as the 1930s when the American Council of Learned Societies organized the first Latin American Studies Committee and that the discipline-based study of the region began long before that. Another example of continuity lies in the dependence of scholars and their institutions on funding from external sources,especially the federal government and the foundations. The Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, among others, provided funding throughout the period whereas the federal contribution to the study of Latin America peaked during times of perceived emergency, such as World War II and the cold war. Thus the 1940s yielded Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs , and the 1960s brought the Title VI area centers; foundation aid was also high during these periods. When necessary, academics also turned for funding directly to wealthy individuals and corporations, such as Edward Harkness and the United Fruit Company. Only rarely, as in the Camelot episode, did the source of funding arouse ethical concerns. Dependence on external funding inevitably raises questions about the extent to which sponsors influenced scholars’ choices of topics and interpretations . The issue rarely arose during the first half of the twentieth century, but radical scholars of the 1960s, it will be recalled, asserted that the scholarship of their establishment colleagues had traditionally been subservient to the dictates of U.S. policy makers and their corporate backers. For confirmation they merely had to point to the many academics who served in government, if only in an advisory capacity. Gilbert Merkx has asserted, by contrast, that the location of the federally funded Title VI centers in the universities assured their independence :“The relationship of the area studies community to U.S. cold-war policy was therefore not marked by dependence and support but rather by autonomy and even confrontation, as demonstrated by the long history of resolutions denouncing U.S. foreign policy passed by the Latin American Studies Association and other foreign area associations. Foreign area studies served as an independent alternative to information from government agencies, which helped to widen debate over foreign policy alternatives and to fuel opposition to cold war policies.”2 Merkx goes on to state that “the content of area studies came almost entirely from overseas research by U.S. scholars and their foreign colleagues.” He is referring to the product of the...

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