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This essay examines the way in which the Cold War shaped the use of sport as a tool of diplomacy in Latin America during the 1950s. It focuses on the Pan American Games in Argentina, Mexico, and the United States. Cultural exchanges failed to dispel suspicion of US intervention; however, athletes shared experiences beyond diplomatic agendas. Recent research has examined how international events shaped participants’ understanding of national, racial, and gender identities. By focusing on women athletes, who historically occupied precarious positions as representatives of the nation, and examining interactions among Latin American delegations, we can understand the Pan American Games as a site of grassroots diplomacy.

This chapter analyzes Frederick Douglass's responses to the U.S. empire building in Santo Domingo between 1870 and 1872 and in Haiti between 1889 and 1891. As U.S. minister to Haiti and assistant secretary of the U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant's commission to study the prospect of annexing the Dominican Republic, Douglass fully supported the virtues of the U.S. expansion and the U.S. Pan Americanism as long as these ideologies promoted effective and egalitarian development in Caribbean and Latin American nations. Douglass opposed the U.S. empire if it perpetuated U.S. notions of racial domination. His ideas on these subjects shifted over time and proved to be linked to the progress and hardships of U.S. African American life in the U.S. South. The chapter also highlights the political challenges and contradictions of Frederick Douglass, a committed abolitionist, intellectual, and diplomat who fought to remain loyal to race and nation.

Chapter 3 studies the way in which the debates over the existence and nature of an American international law drew on discussions about the Monroe Doctrine and its legitimacy and redefinition as a Pan-American and hemispheric principle of international law, focusing on Alejandro Alvarez, who was the most eloquent promoter of this approach. Both Latin American and US international lawyers, diplomats, politicians, and intellectuals took an active part in these debates, notably Alvarez, Luis María Drago, Baltasar Brum, Elihu Root, Charles Evans Hughes, Theodore Roosevelt, Hiram Bingham, James Brown Scott, and Woodrow Wilson, among others. The chapter examines how a US national, political and unilateral doctrine of the nineteenth century began to be conceived as a continental and multilateral principle of international law in the early twentieth century.

This chapter turns to Miami and discusses the role of Cubans and Cuban popular culture in the city. It examines the social clubs Círculo Cubano and Juventud Cubana, and the nightclubs Tropicana and Barra Guys and Dolls, whose events and activities illustrate the early emergence of “Cuban Miami” in the context of the ideology and racialized practices of Pan-Americanism, and against the backdrop of the Cuban Revolution. Through the Spanish-language press, the Cuban groups in the city also demonstrated an early instance of pan-Lantino/a unity in the struggle for social justice. During their stay in Miami, many black Cuban artists found themselves in a Jim Crow city that was protective of its black-white model of racial classification but inconsistent in its treatment and categorization of Cubans and Latino/as of color.

What do we in the United States know about Latin American art music, and how do we know it? From the 1920s until the end of World War II, U.S. critics applauded this repertory as universalist. During the cold war, however, Latin American music was represented as “exotic” or “nationalist” in the United States; that is, it was seen through a filter of difference. This chapter introduces the concept of Pan Americanism and how it has influenced the way we in the United States have represented Latin American art music.

This chapter surveys north-south relations apropos the 1891 essay Nuestra América (Our America) by the Cuban patriot José Martí, who defended a broader, more equitable concept of “America” and rejected the social Darwinist roots of late nineteenth-century Pan Americanism, and apropos U.S. political and commercial interventionism in Latin America. Just as incensed as Martí was the Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó, whose widely read essay Ariel of 1900 compared the muscle and materialism of the United States to Caliban, the formless monster of Shakespeare’s Tempest. The Great War, however, prompted U.S. intellectuals such as Waldo Frank to reject European culture and look south. U.S. composers, then debating the identity of “American” music, idealized the South, with many believing that the North should imbibe its values and thus erase difference vaunted in the political sphere. Thus the premises of Martí’s “our America” were ripe for testing in musical circles north and south.

This chapter demonstrates that a significant shift in identity politics took place at CLAEM when a younger generation of composers advantageously adopted a regional identification as “Latin American avant-garde composers” in an art world that was largely European and U.S.-centric. The discourse of musical Latin Americanism that emerged among these composers shared ideas with earlier proponents of hemispheric solidarity but with a renewed, critical, and much more strategic regional identification, solidified by the social networks nurtured at CLAEM. This chapter explores the emergence of a shared discourse of Latin Americanism as a professional strategy and as musical style among the graduates of the Center and the short and long-term consequences that this had for the contemporary music scene in the region.

This chapter examines the cultural manifestations of Pan Americanism through the development of Haitian folkloric dance by the Haitian-born dance director Jean-Leon Destine and the U.S. African American dance educator Lavinia Williams. As early as the mid-1930s, the Haitian government began to support the advancement and consumption of Haitian cultural arts to increase tourism to the country. The work of Destine and Williams sought to modernize Haitian dance or, rather, to discipline it, classify it, and theatricalize it so Haiti's original art form could be exhibited on the world stage and educate audiences about Haitian history and culture. The establishment of cultural institutions and the training of Haitian dancers by a U.S. African American choreographer affirmed not only the spirit of Pan Americanism's cultural exchange programs, but also the creation of an alternative world by black dancers in which African-based art forms were celebrated and in consistent dialogue with Western culture.

The focus here is on the political relationship between the USA and the Hispanic countries to its south. US victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898 provided an obvious turning point, but the defeat of Mexico in 1848 had alerted the rest of the continent to US ambitions, territorial as well as commercial, buttressed by the Monroe Doctrine and the ideology of Manifest Destiny. Of particular importance was the presidential recognition of William Walker’s filibustering regime in Nicaragua, which prompted the elaboration of a common Latin American identity in opposition to the USA. Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy is sketched, particular attention being paid to Venezuela, Panama, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. Consideration is given both to the official Pan-American movement and to the Latin American response to the southern extension of US interests. Against this background Salomón de la Selva developed his own pan-American ideas for meaningful cultural exchange.

This chapter discusses the historical roles of women from the 1880s to the 1940s. It shows a world of activism across national boundaries. The invocation of the ideals of Pan-Americanism by the feminists working at the international level added a new dimension to the inter-American conferences of the 1920s. The themes of equal rights and peace, both of which were believed to be within the special province of women, mark their efforts. The women's work for gender equity did not diminish their commitment to the cause of international peace. The women were acting within the historical context of a half century of a feminist, pacifist tradition, established by the women of the Americas from the Latin American Scientific Congresses of the 1890s to the Primer Congreso Femenino in 1910 to the creation of the IACW in 1928.

This chapter explores the music of Walt Disney's animated feature Saludos Amigos (1942). It first surveys the principal trends in music and Pan Americanism during the Good Neighbor period. It then analyzes the music, folkloric and otherwise, and relates it to the film's visual and narrative elements, connecting it to broader themes in Pan Americanist discourse. In addition, it reflects on authenticity in terms of Pan Americanism, that is, a yearning for a “genuine culture of the Americas.” It is argued that, whatever authenticity Saludos Amigos proffered through its music, the film as a whole served mainly as a tool of strictly one-sided propaganda in favor of the United States and the war effort. Authenticity, always an elastic term, becomes even more so when paired with the tools of propaganda, especially as fashioned by Hollywood.

This chapter introduces the unlikely roles poets played at the center of hemispheric cultural diplomacy initiatives in 1938–1945, the years when Good Neighbor diplomacy was motivated by a broad antifascist coalition. The chapter discusses major diplomat-poets like William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, Archibald MacLeish, and Langston Hughes, and compares these writers to Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, Ecuadorian Consul General Jorge Carrera Andrade, soldier-poet Lysander Kemp, and others who coalesced around the anthologies, translations, and congresses of Good Neighbor initiatives. Borrowing metaphors of bridging and broadcasting from new infrastructures of hemispheric modernization, and invoking strategies of apostrophic address to an impossibly large hemispheric public, Good Neighbor poetry promoted Popular Front antifascism, but also enabled advocates of decolonial politics, racial democracy, and international feminism.

The introduction offers a critical history of writings about the “poetry of the Americas,” with emphases on the poetics of Octavio Paz, and on poetry by José Martí, Salomón de la Selva, Charles Olson, Pablo Neruda, and others. It presents a method for understanding this hemispheric literary history in relation to the inequities of the inter-American political system, braiding together hemispheric geopolitics in the Good Neighbor era and the early Cold War with formalist interpretation and “integrationist” ideas of literary community. The introduction defines an “era of inter-American cultural diplomacy” as a literary-historical moment in which the poetry of the Americas invested heavily in the project of critiquing as well as organizing American states, and it closes with synopses of the book’s six chapters, charting the inter-American poetry of World War II, the abandonment of inter-Americanism in the early Cold War, and its reconfigurations and renewals in the 1960s.

This first chapter considers how indigenous music was used to create national and even continental art music. It begins by discussing scholarly descriptions of nation and continent, including terms such as “Americanism,” “Pan Americanism,” and “Latin-Americanism,” depending on the inclusion or exclusion of North America, and geared toward the construction of art forms that could represent both the nation and the continent as a whole. These terms have had (and still have) different meanings and implications for Latin American and European/North American readers. At the same time, this chapter explores the contingencies that arise inside each Latin American country between cosmopolitan capitals and the traditional provinces in which the indigenous perspective was appropriated or negated. It then develops the particular case of Inca civilization viewed from the early twentieth-century perspective (and the resulting tensions between the idealized Inca and the real plight of indigenous peoples) and its importance for Andean scholars and composers of art music. By following the models of positivism that claim European music’s “evolution” and the transition from the pentatonic to the diatonic scales in the greatest civilizations of the past (from Egypt and Greece to Western Europe), Latin American art music composers staked a claim for their old grandiose civilization, as an authentically “evolved” national music.

The chapter explores how tensions over Doris Stevens’s leadership exploded at the 1933 Seventh International Conference of American States in Montevideo, where Bertha Lutz launched serious challenges against her. There, Lutz allied with representatives from the U.S. State Department and U.S. Women’s and Children’s Bureaus in the new administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, including Sophonisba Breckinridge, who also opposed Stevens’s leadership of the Commission. The conflict between Stevens’s “equal rights” feminism, focused on political and civil rights, versus an inter-American feminism that also encompassed social and economic justice, became even more pronounced in the wake of the Great Depression, Chaco War, and revolutions throughout Latin America. Feminist debates took center stage in Montevideo. There, Lutz promoted women’s social and economic concerns. But her assumptions of U.S./Brazilian exceptionalism prevented her from effectively allying with growing numbers of Spanish-speaking Latin American feminists who opposed Stevens’s vision. The 1933 conference pushed forward the Commission’s treaties for women’s rights, and four Latin American countries signed the Equal Rights Treaty. It also inspired more behind-the-scenes organizing by various Latin American feminists and statesmen, including the formation of a new group, the Unión de Mujeres Americanas, that would later bear fruit.

This introductory chapter outlines the critical role black and white Cuban musicians played in shaping Cuban ethnic and broader Hispano/a and Latino/a identity in the 1940s and 1950s. During this period, nearly 90,000 black and white Cubans migrated to New York and Florida, two of the most concentrated areas of Cuban settlement. Among the migrants were numerous musicians and entertainers whose stories and perspectives reveal both shared understandings and significant differences in their migration experiences, their participation in the professional entertainment industries, and their construction of white, brown, and black racial identities. The chapter briefly discusses their experiences and uses them as a window into a broader experience of Cuban ethnic identity. It examines how this identity took shape in a “Jim Crow city”—against the backdrop of politics characterized by a constant cycle of reform and revolution, as well as increasingly dominant ideologies and racialized practices of Pan-Americanism.

Chapter 1 traces the increasing involvement of Dominican women in national politics through the 1920s and 1930s from the U.S. Occupation to the first decade of the Trujillo regime. During this period, Dominican women used the Pan-American arena to press for changes at the local level and they employed the rhetoric of egalitarian rule to assert their place in the theatre of democracy that Trujillo had begun to act out locally for the international stage. By proving themselves as skilled, networked, and non-threatening agents, the women active prior to and during the first decade of the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo made themselves central to a carefully orchestrated national and international reputation, garnered concrete political gains like suffrage, and allowed for their continued engagement with the politics of the Dominican state through an intense period of transition.