1 - Neglect of Central America and the Latin Caribbean

Summary

Thomas Skidmore and Peter Smith, well-known historians of Latin America, characterized the minimal attention that Central America has received from scholars. From their perspective, neglect of Central America:

is partly due to the relative paucity of archives, libraries, and research centers in the nations of the isthmus. It is partly due to the smallness of the individual countries, which makes them appear less significant than Argentina, Brazil, or Mexico. And it is also due to the common assumption that the countries of Central America are backward: the least developed area in a developing world. Dominated by dictators, the ‘banana republics’ of the isthmus were viewed as sleepy relics of the past. (Skidmore and Smith, 2001, p 316)

Though their comments were directed at the lack of attention from US scholars, this argument is at least (if not more) relevant for scholars from other regions that are even farther removed (geographically, economically, etc.) than North America. And though these comments do not name the countries and colonial territories of the Latin Caribbean, they are no less applicable there. Indeed, as Allahar argues with regard to the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, not only is this region neglected by academics, but this neglect ‘is synonymous with erasure and constitutes a major obstacle for anyone wishing to develop a truly comprehensive understanding of the entire region’ (2005, p 126). As will be further explained later on, the present volume seeks to make a contribution to the scholarship on these regions – Central America and the Latin Caribbean (CALC) – by drawing attention to the global and local forces that influence the relationship between education and development.

First, however, it is important to underscore the fact that, despite relative academic neglect, the region has been, and continues to be, important in numerous ways. In other words, while ‘Central America was [historically] not a source of great wealth’ and while it ‘received correspondingly little attention from the Spanish crown’, its perception as a source of wealth changed in the 19th century, as further explained in Chapter 2 of this volume (Skidmore and Smith, 2001, p 319).