The Understanding of other Cultures: Latin America

Extract

A POPULAR RADIO SERIES a dozen years ago, dealing broadly with the important area that is the subject of my talk tonight, was called (borrowing its title from Shakespeare) “Brave New World.” Braver still, in the modern sense, is the commentator who tries in a brief talk like this to deal with even one phase of the vast area, of some eight million square miles, and constituting about one-fifth of the world’s inhabited continents, that lies South of the continental United States. But I am what is called in Spanish an “Old Christian” in these matters, which may be roughly interpreted as the opposite of a “Johnny-Come-Lately,” as our own phrase has it. I have been a student of this area for nearly fifty years, a teacher of one of its languages, Spanish, and of the literature and other written materials published in that language, for more than forty years. During the past four years I have spent my summer vacations on educational missions that took me to all of the American republics except two—Bolivia and Paraguay. In some instances I have made two or three visits to individual countries during that period, supplementing a number of earlier trips, the first of which was in 1916. So I must be as “brave” as the fascinating and to us tremendously important complex of nations that make up the New World outside of the United States and Canada, which for want of a really accurate term we call Latin America.