A presentation on Latin America given in BBA 1st sem by Umesh & Nitin

1. Latin America
Area: 21,069,501 km²
Population: 569 million
Demonym: Latin American, American
Countries: 20
Dependencies: 10
Languages: Spanish, Portuguese, French
Time Zones: UTC-2 Brazil
UTC-8 Mexico
Largest cities: 1. Mexico City
2. São Paulo
3. Buenos Aires
4. Rio de Janeiro
5. Bogotá
6. Lima
7. Santiago
8. Belo Horizonte
9. Caracas
10. Guadalajara

3. History of Latin America
• Latin America refers to countries in the Americas where
Romance (Latin-derived) languages are spoken. These
countries generally lie south of the United States. By
extension, some writers and commentators, particularly
in the United States, apply the term to the whole region
south of the United States, including the non-Romance-
speaking countries such as Suriname, Jamaica, and
Guyana, due to similar economic, political and social
histories and present-day conditions.
• Before the arrival of Europeans in the late 15th and early
16th centuries, the region was home to many indigenous
peoples, many of which had advanced civilizations, most
notably, the Aztec, Inca and Maya. By the end of the
sixteenth century large areas of what would become Latin
America was colonized by European settlers, primarily
from Spain, Portugal and to a lesser extent, France and
the Netherlands (in Brazil).

4. Art
• Beyond the rich tradition of indigenous art, the development of Latin American
visual art owed much to the influence of Spanish, Portuguese and French Baroque
painting, which in turn often followed the trends of the Italian Masters..
• From the early twentieth century, the art of Latin America was greatly inspired by
the Constructivist Movement. The Constructivist Movement was founded in Russia
around 1913 by Vladimir Tatlin. The Movement quickly spread from Russia to
Europe and then into Latin America. An important artistic movement generated in
Latin America is muralism represented by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, José
Clemente Orozco and Rufino Tamayo in Mexico and Santiago Martinez Delgado and
Pedro Nel Gómez in Colombia. Some of the most impressive Muralista works can be
found in Mexico, Colombia, New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles and
Philadelphia.
• Painter Frida Kahlo, one of the famous Mexican artists, painted about her own life
and the Mexican culture in a style combining Realism, Symbolism and Surrealism.
Kahlo work commands the highest selling price of all Latin American .

5. Culture
• Latin American culture is a mixture of many cultural expressions worldwide. It is
the product of many diverse influences:
• Indigenous cultures of the people who inhabited the continent prior to the arrival
of the Europeans. Ancient and very advanced civilizations developed their own
political, social and religious systems.
• Western civilization, in particular the culture of Europe, was brought mainly by the
colonial powers—the Spanish, Portuguese and French—between the 16th and
19th centuries. The most enduring European colonial influence is language and
Roman Catholicism. More recently, additional cultural influences came from the
United States and Europe during the nineteenth and twentieths. The influence of
the United States is particularly strong in northern Latin America, especially Puerto
Rico, which is a United States territory. In addition, the United States held the
twenty-mile-long Panama Canal Zone in Panama from 1903 (the Panama Canal
opened to transoceanic freight traffic in 1914) to 1999, when the Torrijos-Carter
Treaties restored Panamanian control of the Canal Zone. South America
experienced waves of immigration of Europeans, especially Italians and Germans.
With the end of colonialism, French culture was also able to exert a direct
influence in Latin America, especially in the realms of high culture, science and
medicine. This can be seen in any expression of the region's artistic traditions,
including painting, literature and music, and in the realms of science and politics.
• African cultures, whose presence derives from a long history of New World slavery.
Peoples of African descent have influenced the ethno-scapes of Latin America and
the Caribbean. This is manifest for instance in dance and religion, especially in
countries such as Belize, Brazil, Honduras, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Colombia,
Panama, Haiti, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, and Cuba

6. Religion
• The vast majority of Latin Americans are
Christians, mostly Roman Catholics.[Membership
in Protestant denominations is increasing,
particularly in Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, and
Puerto Rico.

7. Population
• Latin America has a very diverse population,
with many ethnic groups and different
ancestries. Only in three countries, do the
Amerindians make up the majority of the
population. This is the case of Peru,
Guatemala and Bolivia. In the rest of the
Continent, most of the Native American
descendants are of mixed race ancestry.

8. Language
• Spanish is the predominant language in the
majority of the countries. Portuguese is
spoken primarily in Brazil, where it is both the
official and the national language. French is
also spoken in smaller countries, in the
Caribbean, and French Guiana.

9. Social Conflicts
• The central hypothesis of this paper is that high income
inequality in Latin America contributes to intense political
pressures for macroeconomic policies to raise the incomes
of lower income groups, which in turn contributes to bad
policy choices and weak economic performance. The paper
looks in detail at one common type of policy failure: the
populist policy cycle. This particular type of Latin American
policymaking, characterized by overly expansionary
macroeconomic policies which lead to high inflation and
severe balance of payments crises, has been repeated so
often, and with such common characteristics, that it plainly
reveals the linkages from social conflict to poor economic
performance.

10. LATIN AMERICAN ART AND
ARCHITECTURE
• Art and architecture produced, after the arrival there of the
Spanish and Portuguese, in South America, Central America,
Mexico, and the parts of the U.S. originally colonized by the
Spanish; more specifically called Ibero-American art and
architecture. Despite the geographic diversity and size of Latin
America, its artistic history has been unified through a common
tradition rooted in the arts of Spain and Portugal, the nations of
the Iberian Peninsula. Depending on location and historical
circumstance, this shared heritage was often enriched and made
uniquely Latin American through Spanish and Portuguese
interaction with indigenous Indian traditions, as well as with the
cultures of West African blacks, brought to the Americas in slavery.

11. • COLONIAL PERIOD
• From the 16th to the 19th century, Latin America was part of the
Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires. Art was sometimes imported
from Iberia but was more commonly created by Iberian immigrants and
indigenous artisans.. The Spanish word mestizo (“mixed”) refers to a
person descended from Indian and European parents, as well as to art
and architecture that reflects both Indian and European cultural
traditions. The term mulatto designates a similar racial and aesthetic
merger of the African and the European. Artistically, mestizo and
mulatto art have both contributed significantly to the culturally
distinctive qualities of Latin American art.
• 16th Century.
• The 16th century in Latin America was characterized by the destruction
of the old and the creation of the new. The cities and ceremonial
centers of the Indians were demolished or incorporated by the Iberian
conquerors. Churches and residences for Europeans were often
constructed from materials originally used for Indian temples and
palaces, as at Mitla, Mexico, and at Cuzco, Peru. Pre-Columbian
religious imagery was almost totally destroyed by militant Christians
and replaced with Roman Catholic liturgical objects and images. This
new religious art was created by recently converted Indian artisans,
who quickly assimilated Iberian form, content, and technology.

12. • Many pre-Columbian administrative and art centers—such as Cuzco of
the Incas and Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) of the Aztecs—retained their
prominent role in the colonial period. In addition, numerous new
cities—such as Lima or Oaxaca, Mexico—were constructed.
• 17th Century.
• Increasing numbers of Iberian artists and architects had come to the
colonies by the 17th century. Several generations of Indians had been
apprenticed to Iberian artisans and trained to adhere faithfully to
European styles, techniques, and subject matter. (Mestizo expressions
were primarily relegated to crafts.)
• The baroque style was introduced early in the century. Painting and
sculpture became dramatically realistic with an emphasis on the
emotional.
• 18th Century Creoles (called criollos in Spanish America and mazombos
in Brazil)—people of European descent born in the colonies rather than
in the homeland—formed a majority of the white population in 18th-
century Latin America. During this period, the Creoles became
increasingly assertive and competitive with Iberia. As a result, Creole
architecture and the decorative arts were generally more splendid in
effect than their Iberian counterparts

13. • 19TH CENTURY: THE ERA OF INDEPENDENCE
• Because of the almost continual socioeconomic instability that
followed independence from Spain and Portugal, architects and
artists could not easily find patronage for or interest in their work.
Not until the late 19th century did order return to most areas of
Latin America.
• The formal vitality and regional flavor of colonial art were
supplanted in the 19th century by usually competent imitations of
contemporaneous European art, especially as developed in
France. Neoclassicism, succeeded by romanticism, became the
dominant art movement in the new national capitals. In provincial
cities and rural areas, however, Latin Americans continued to be
interested in the often naive realist style that had originated with
18th-century portraits, still lifes, and genre paintings (scenes of
daily life)

14. • 20TH-CENTURY: NATIONALISM AND
MODERNISM
• Mexico became the center of the Latin American art world in the
first half of the 20th century. Such Mexican artists as Diego Rivera,
José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros painted didactic
murals asserting cultural nationalism and revolutionary politics.
Twentieth-century Latin American painting and sculpture can be
characterized as a continuing dialogue between the
representational and the abstract, the national and the
international. For the first time in its history, Latin American art
achieved international acclaim. Since pre-Columbian times Latin
Americans have been concerned with creating an environmental
art, through the integration of architecture, sculpture, painting,
and the decorative arts, that would achieve an overwhelming
multimedia effect.