A title can speak volumes.
Yale historian Greg Grandin’s panoramic, gorgeously crafted “America, América” announces its thesis in a repetition of a single word, with one subtle difference (check out the second “e”). That accent alludes to the fusion of capital and religion as European empires staked their flags in the New World, Indigenous peoples be damned.
The author delves deep into our hemisphere’s primary colonial tension: Spain vs. Britain (and later its heir, the United States), Catholicism vs. Reformation-era Protestantism, with Native people and enslaved Africans mowed down in the crossfire. In Grandin’s estimation, this “magpie rivalry” gave birth to modern geopolitics.
Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas dominates the early chapters; upon his 16th century arrival in Hispaniola he recoiled from the gory brutality of the conquistadores and called on his fellow Spaniards to cease slaughtering natives and dispossessing them of their lands. His writings inspired latter-day liberators, among them Thomas Jefferson and Simón Bolívar.
After subjugating the Aztecs and Incas, Spain consolidated widespread control, eventually challenged by British colonists along the eastern coast of North America. The hemisphere became a pawn in the game of great powers as shifting alliances between monarchies shaped events. Grandin lacquers his book with gritty detail — battles and beheadings, earthquakes and religious strife — yet beneath his textured narrative he metes out a compelling argument: America, in open conflict with América.
Enter the United States, the first republic in the New World. John Jay bargained for an ambitious western boundary, “the pulling out of a sketchy map, the tracing of a line with a finger, the partitioning of the earth as if it were cake.”
Although wise to the young country’s vices, Venezuelan patrician Bolívar modeled his vision of Latin American self-government on the U.S., quickening anti-royalist sentiment from Quito to Caracas, the angels and demons of human nature jousting amid the stage of nation-building.
“There’s a sense, reading the public and private writings of independence leaders, that the Spanish Empire had driven them mad, that it had entered their dreams like some kind of minotaur,” Grandin notes. “The half-human, or humanist, part pulled along a mountain of law books and philosophical treaties insisting that all existence, all humanity, was one. The other monstrous half rampaged through history, leaving corpses in its wake.”
