Looking South: The Evolution of Latin Americanist Scholarship in the United States, 1850–1975 (review)

The rapid development of the U.S. university system from a collection of finishing schools to the research behemoths that had become a primary platform for research about Latin America by the time of the Vietnam War is one of the important chapters in the cultural history of the Americas. That development provides the basis for two important questions that Helen Delpar asks here: What were the key turning points in the history of academic scholarship about Latin America as U.S. universities expanded into their modern form? How did those universities articulate knowledge about the communities collectively known as "Latin America" ?

The context of Delpar's work is lightly treated in the preface but should not be overlooked. First, where her influential previous work has described a wide spectrum of relationships of U.S. travelers, journalists, and diplomats to Mexico in the mid-twentieth century, her focus here is solely on university-based specialists who made Latin America the focus of their academic careers. Hence, Delpar also intends her inquiry to serve as an original contribution to our knowledge about a higher education system that had grown into the world's largest by 1950.

In Delpar's analysis, the disciplines of history, anthropology, and geography represented the central axes of university scholarship on Latin America. Part I of her book considers these fields through 1935, as they grew within research universities whose capacities were increasing at the same moment that the U.S. was expanding overseas after the Spanish American War. The study of history was especially prominent at the Universities of California and Texas, while the archaeology of Mesoamerica and Peru was pursued actively at Columbia, Harvard, and Yale. A major contribution to Latin Americanist scholarship was anthropology's development of the community study model in and after the early 1930s; conversely, political science, sociology, and economics were notably absent.

One of Delpar's early surprises is that very few Latin Americanists were employees of the U.S. federal government through the mid-1930s, a discovery that sharpens our understanding of the hemispheric path of U.S. hegemony that Greg Grandin and others have elsewhere charted. Quite the contrary was true. While academics were often "supportive of U.S. actions in the region" (p. 107), they were also advocates for points of view from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Mexico that had been left out of public discussion. Hiram Bingham criticized the Monroe Doctrine, for example, and Fred Rippy and Herbert Priestley both offered explanations for the Mexican Revolution that went beyond the clichéd rationales.

Part II offers another surprise: the key moment in the rise of Latin Americanist scholarship after 1935 was not World War II but the decade before it, when growing awareness of Germany's threat to Europe was translated into increased funding for new scholarship on U.S. relationships to the rest of the hemisphere. Scholarship that had been dominated by academics in the American West and the New York-Boston axis suddenly blossomed elsewhere in the United States under public funding from the Roosevelt administration and private initiatives by the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. Reordered priorities after the defeat of the Axis powers resulted in a period of slow growth in the decade after 1945, but the emergence of area studies programs during the Cold War presaged the boom years that characterized the institutionalization of Latin Americanist scholarship into its contemporary form across the United States in the two decades after the Cuban Revolution.

Curiously, the second half of the book occupies 20 pages fewer than the first, undercutting Delpar's argument that today's structure of Latin Americanist scholarship in U.S. universities was primarily a product of post-1945 society. In addition, two important issues deserve more attention than Delpar gives them. First, it is difficult to discern from the book the discrete...