The Genesis of the Term “Latin America”: Historiographical Debate and the Birth of an Idea

บทคัดย่อ

This article aims to review the historiographical discussion surrounding the individual authorship of the idea and the name “Latin America”, revisiting the main authors on the subject: John Leddy Phelan, Arturo Ardao, and Miguel Rojas Mix. All three scholars situate the emergence of the adjective “Latin” within a historical context marked by French imperialism—presented as benevolence through the ideology of Pan-Latinism—in Spanish-speaking America. Although they agree on the time and place of the birth of both the idea and the name (France under Napoleon III), they diverge on who was responsible for its creation. Phelan views the label as a unilateral product of French imperialism, later adopted by Spanish-speaking Americans. In contrast, Ardao and Rojas Mix argue that Latin Americans living in France coined the expression. However, while Ardao attributes the creation of the term to the Colombian journalist José María Torres Caicedo (1830–1889), Rojas Mix contests this, claiming that the Chilean Francisco Bilbao (1823–1865) was the first to use “Latin America.” Still, Rojas Mix’s critique—that Ardao ignored Bilbao—is insufficient to invalidate Ardao’s thesis, as Bilbao employed the term “latina” merely as an adjective, not as a noun. Moreover, it was Caicedo who both popularized the expression and contributed to establishing its meaning in the form that prevails today.