The "Invention" of America

The Invention of America

            In 1502 Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci was sailing south along the coast of Brazil on a Portuguese ship when he noticed that the stars were different than what he was accustomed to in the northern hemisphere. He realized that they were sailing alongside a ‘new’ continent and named it after the feminine Latin version of his own name: America. According to Walter D. Mignolo in The Idea of Latin America, Amerigo feminized his name so that it would match the names of the three known continents, Asia, Africa and Europa. Now, with America, there were four continents.

America was not discovered, it was not conquered, America was invented.

Amerigo Vespucci was unaware of the existence of mighty indigenous civilizations in South and Meso America. These indigenous empires already had named themselves. The Aztecs called their territory Anáhuac, in what would come to be known as modern Mexico. In South America, the Inka called their vast empire Tawatinsuyu. The Inkas ruled an empire as extensive and as populous as the Romans or the Han Chinese.

Medieval Europeans believed that world was composed of three continents; Africa, Asia and Europe, despite the fact that Europe gradually blends into Asia with no particular boundary to form one land mass, Eurasia. The reason that they believed this was the story of Noah in the Bible. Noah had three sons, Ham, Shem and Japeth. It was believed that Africans were descended from Ham and his son Canaan. Asians were descendants of Shem. Europeans were descended from Japeth. Since medieval Europeans implicitly and literally believed the story of the flood in Genesis, a certain kind of logic dictated that there must be three continents to match each of the three sons of Noah.

Most world maps during the medieval period took on a cruciform shape, showing Europe as West, Asia as East and Africa as South with Jerusalem at the center. Thus, when the Italian Amerigo Vespucci suddenly realized that he was sailing along the coast of a new continent (not a large Island), the medieval world view was upended. The world was not divided into three continents (and by extension into three racial groups) but four; so who were these indigenous people and where did they come from? How did they fit into the Biblical narrative? 

It never occurred to Vespucci, Christopher Columbus, Hernan Cortez or Francisco Pissarro to ask the indigenous people what they called themselves. Since Adam and Eve, naming rights implied power and authority over the thing being named. As soon as Europeans began to glimpse the implications of their arrival in an unfamiliar land, they began to give names such as Santa Fe, Holy Cross, and Trinidad as they conquered, butchered and exploited.

This was the invention of America.

Mignolo asserts the thesis in his book that this naming of America represents the beginning of coloniality, which he calls the darker side of modernity. “Modernity is enter tangled with coloniality … one cannot exist without the other.”

So, the question to consider is, who is an American?

Obviously, citizens of the United States have appropriated the name American for themselves. But it was not always that way. The Spanish and Portuguese Creoles at the time of independence began to think of themselves as “Americanos” The Cuban poet, Jose Marti famously wrote a poem called “Nuestro America” (Our America).

Are indigenous Aztecs in Mexico who barely speak Spanish, Mexican? Are they Americanos? Latino Americanos? Hispanics? (Meaning tracing their roots to Spain and Spanish culture and language?). Are Afro-Cubans with Yoruban ancestry “Americanos”? Are they Cubanos? Afro-cubanos?

What about we Estadounidenses? (United Statesians) How did we manage to appropriate the name “American” for ourselves?

Conclusion: The “idea of America” is a modern European invention and is limited to European’s view of the world and a European view of history. Descendants of Europeans (the Creoles) appropriated the term “Americanos” for themselves (but not for indigenes or Africans). Eventually, Anglo-Americans managed to exclude Hispano-Americans from the use of the word Americans and applied it exclusively to citizens of the United States. After Vespucci called the coast of Brazil “America” there were four continents. In the nineteenth century, after Anglos appropriated the term “American” for the United States, the four continents became five (North AND South America).

Definitions:[i]

Modernity: refers to a period in world history that can be traced back either to the European Renaissance and the “discovery” of America (a view that is favored by scholars from Southern Europe: Spain, Italy or Portugal) or To the European Enlightenment (a view favored by scholars from Anglo-Saxon countries; England, Germany and Holland)

Colonialism: refers to specific historical periods of imperial domination of such powers as the Spanish, British, Dutch and the United States in the twentieth century.

Coloniality: refers to the “logical structure of colonial domination underlying the Spanish, Dutch, British and U.S. control of the Atlantic economy and politics, and by extension, control of the entire planet. Coloniality is the logic of domination in the modern/colonial world.

Racism: the hegemonic discourse of that questions the humanity of those who do not belong to the hegemonic group, or those who assign the standards of classification and assign to themselves the right to classify the outsider groups.

            Conclusion: The “idea of America” is a modern European invention and is limited to European’s view of the world and a European view of history.

---

[i] Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, Blackwell Publishing, 2005.