The Latino Imaginary: The Imagined Community Spanish Colonization and Geographical Displacement Built
This chapter grapples with the definition of “community.”
Scholars writing on the topic of the Latino imaginary dissect the meaning of terms such as “Latina/Latino, Latin@ and LatinX. And, they also focus on the power of producing ideas about the lands and places LatinX populations dream about—the myths of historical homelands for example. Scholars also focus on the influence that these ideas about LatinX populations as being an identifiable “people” that have historically been within a specific geography have in forming the imagined notions of community.
Two examples of such as imagined communities are: the concept of Aztlan (for Chicanos/Mexicanos), and Borninquen (for Puerto Rican Communities).
We will be exploring the concept of imagined community during this module as a way to analyze the influence that the idea of community has within Latin American and LatinX cultural production.
Introduction to the Theory of Imagined Community
The theory of imagined community was developed by a scholar named Benedict Anderson. It is a concept used to describe the ways that belonging to a “people” or to a nation, as a community, is socially constructed—in essence it is much more psychological than biological.
Anderson wanted to communicate that notions of belonging are produced by our imagination, and as such they are imagined by individuals who perceive themselves as part of a particular group.
Unlike earlier understandings of the ways that people belong to ‘the nation’ which bordered on distinguishing belonging based on biological connection, phenotype, and language. And, depends on nations being defined by “divine rule” or a king.
Anderson’s book, Imagined Communities, defined a nation in ways that we today may take for granted, but which is still an important departure from the more biological/linguistic definitions of belonging.
Three different ideas about nations have been theorized as historically emerging out of the ordeals of a triple revolution; the first begins with a notion of nations as demanding loyalty to a King, or to the Pope, or to a main leader (usually holding both religious and political authority) and that idea was overthrown by a second revolution in thought. In the 1700s traditional understandings of what made up a nation were revised when with the eruption of the enlightenment in Europe and in the Western Hemisphere the idea of a King associated with the concept of a nation was replaced by the notion of a republic as a nation.
The idea of a republic provided political, economic and cultural power to the segment of the population that had, often via violent means, ripped power from the hands of Kings. Think here of the French Revolution, of the American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution and of the many nationalist revolutions across Latin America between 1800s and 1900s which were successful in kicking out the Spanish King and Spanish colonial rule. Interestingly enough current states, such as California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas were freed of Spanish colonial rule by Mexican nationalist revolutionaries fighting the Spanish crown. These territories would later be incorporated into the U.S. nation state in the middle of the 19th Century.
The third revolution in the idea and approach to the concept of ‘the nation’ is one that is best connected with globalization. During the 20th Century nations were less about holding more and more land, or about creating more and more citizens (either by absorbing territory or by increasing immigration). Nations during the 20th Century were transformed into corporations, with various economic systems, that trade, sell, and manage resources, territories and populations.
With the development of neoliberalism and bureaucratic and cultural centralization notions of what it means to belong to a nation have solidified via what Anderson called the power of imagined communities: For Anderson the best way to create a notion of community was through the use of media (newspapers and books at first, and later as media evolved, the use of television, and today social media).
