[Marxism] America, the misnamed

[Nestor Gorojovsky]

Re: the e-mail I have just sent on Bolívar and his conception of term 
limits.

When I speak of the _American_ Emancipation, I use the word "American"
the way _the fighters in that Emancipation_ used it: as a name for the
_former colonies of Spain (and Portugal, witness General Abreu e Lima
under the lead of Bolívar) in the Western Continent, with wholesome
exclusion of lands formerly under British rule, and with a grey zone as
regards the West Indies. You may have noticed that when I refer to USA I
always say USAmerican. This is important, and although I have already
explained it once and again, it is never unimportant to stress a couple
of reasons behind this seemingly "ethnocentric" stance. It has nothing
to do with ethnocentrism.

San Martín, Bolívar, Morelos, Artigas, whoever you look for at the
starting point of our Wars of emancipation, never considered themselves
anything but _American_ (of course, they were also Venezuelan, Mexican
and so on, in a limited sense, but only because USAmericans can also be
New Yorkers, Californian or Hawaiian -which State lies OUTSIDE the
Western Continent BTW).

I agree in that usage for two reasons.

a) Originality:

The word was predicated on what was -and certainly remains- the single
social formation that can claim itself to be the one _original_ human
creation on the Western Hemisphere and not a piece of Western Europe
grafted onto the Western Hemisphere by sweeping away  the original
populations.

While the Anglo colonies in the Western Hemisphere were just a copy of
Europe on new soil, a "settler state" in many senses, and this applies
particularly to the New England cultural and political core of what was
to become the Union by the 1860s, what today is broadly defined as
"Latin" America was an original creation, where both European, African
and local "races", institutions and cultures were mixed and blended into
something conflictive and exploiting, of course, but not ignoble and
certainly without anything resembling it anywhere in the globe.

That is why the Generation of the Emancipation included people born in
Spain, American creoles, Black people, "Indians" and of course, and
mostly, "half-castes". They did not consider themselves anything but
Americans in this sense, no matter their birthplace or ethnic (???)
background.

The most striking example is that of those who, born or brought up in
Spain, struggled for America. Allow me to give you some examples, which
I will post on still another e-mail.

But what I really want to stress is that the peculiar formations that
were bred in Ibero-colonized Western Hemisphere were and IMHO still are
the single "American" social formation worthy of that name in any sense
that is more than simple geography. They are not "Europe in the Western
Hemisphere", nor are they "Original societies overrunning an alien wave
of migrants", as many racist-minded USAmerican ideologues would like to
have it. They are, in the deepest sense, a "half-caste formation", a
particular formation in its own right, not exceptional of course, but
with its own peculiarities which allow any serious observer to watch it
as a _new_ creation, a "dialectical whole" integrating in a new historic
and cultural synthesis (which is still to take root, and IMHO will only
do so through socialism) its complex history of miscigenation at ALL levels.

b) Precedence in time:

It is agreed that the history of what can be termed "Anglo America" can
be traced back to 1620.

By that time, what _I_ call _America_ had a whole and intense century of
history behind it. By 1620 the processes that created America in the
sense I speak of it were already in place, and had been working for at
least fifty (if not eighty) years.