Latin America: Its Rise and Progress

by Francisco García Calderón

Emigrants from Estremadura and Galicia, Andalusians and Castilians, many-hued men of Spain and Portugal, were all concerned in the first interbreeding with the vanquished races; they were Iberians, in whom the anthropologists discover moral analogies with the Berbers of North Africa. The Basques, rude and virile, who emigrated from Spain to dominate America, did not come of Latin stock; the Andalusian element, from Seville or Cadiz, was of Oriental origin. A Spain that was half African and half Germanic colonised the vast territories of America; two heredities, Visigoth and Arab, were united in its strange genius.

The French and Italian colonists have not the importance of the Spaniards and Portuguese; they are inferior in numbers and in wealth. The Iberians have jealously defended their racial prerogative in these isolated transatlantic colonies. After three centuries, when once the continent was opened to the outside world and to European commerce, the Italians invaded the rich plains of the Argentine; there they contributed to the formation of a new race, which is more Latin than Spanish.

But we must not forget the innumerable Anglo-Saxons who have founded families in the Argentine and in Chili, and have brought wealth to those countries; nor the Germans in Southern Brazil, nor the Asiatics of the Peruvian seaboard. Iberians, Indians, Latins, Anglo-Saxons, and Orientals all mingle in America; a babel of races, so mixed that it is impossible to discover the definite outlines of the future type.

It is useless to look for unity of race in such a country. And even in the United States the confused invasion of Russian Jews and Southern Italians is little by little undermining the primitive Anglo-Saxon unity.

This confusion of races in the North and the South leaves two traditions, the Anglo-Saxon and the Iberian. By force of assimilation these traditions are transforming the new races. Englishmen and Spaniards disappear, but the two moral inheritances survive.

The Latin tradition is not far to seek in the Americans of the South. They are not exclusively either Spanish or Portuguese; the legacy received from Spain is modified by persistent influences of French and Italian origin.

From Mexico to La Plata, by long continued and extensive action, the Roman laws, Catholicism, and the ideas of France have given a uniform aspect to the American conscience.

Laws of Spanish origin prevail in South America; they have formed the rigid framework of civil life. These laws, in spite of strong feudal elements, are of Roman origin. Under the influence of Roman law Alfonso X. unified Spanish legislation, during the first half of the thirteenth century; three centuries later the Spaniards colonised America. The Partidas, that vast encyclopædia of law and collection of Castilian laws in particular, is a Roman code. It confirmed the individualist sense of property as against the Spanish forms of collectivism; it reinforced the power of the paterfamilias in the austere Iberian family; it consecrated equality, authorising marriage between free men and the serfs formerly banished from the State; and it adopted the Roman formalism.

Politically, after the downfall of the feudal system, ambitious princes, from the time of Alfonso X. to that of the Catholic Kings and of Charles V., enforced their royal authority in the Roman sense. These monarchs were Cæsars; they concentrated all the powers of the State in themselves; they centralised, unified, and legislated. This royal absolutism destroyed privilege and levelled mankind. A vast Spanish democracy was formed, subject to Cæsar, after the manner of the Roman people. The Latin sense of authority and law prevailed in the Spanish colonies; property was individual and absolute; civil equality obtained; in spite of racial differences, Indians and Spaniards were theoretically on the same plane; the family, like the Roman gens, united slaves and children under the gloomy paternal power. The distant monarch was a formidable overlord, to whom viceroys and chapters, courts, judicial and ecclesiastical, addressed themselves to demand laws and regulations, penalties and sanctions.

Catholicism was indissolubly bound up with the Roman authority of the laws; in Spain and America the prince was at the same time the shepherd of the Church. Religion was an instrument of political domination; it was an imperial force, a legacy of the Latin genius. It multiplied forms and rites; it disciplined the colonists, demanding outward obedience and uniformity of belief and manners. "The Roman Church," says Harnack, "is a juridical institution." Catholicism is also a social religion. In America it created the Brazilian nation in opposition to the Dutch peril; it founded republics among Indians inimical to all forms of organised social life; it extended the field of Latin endeavour, and from North to South favoured the constitution of new governments and societies.