Latin American Nationalism Analysis

With revolutions coming to and Spain no longer having control in was a start of a new age in Latin American domestic policy. It was time for all those countries that had achieved independence to make it on their own. That was the point of those bloody revolutions, to finally get autonomy from the governments like Spain that used countries like Columbia to enrich themselves while paying no attention to the peoples of those countries. Things did not go as planned as the newly independent countries were financially drained and did not have the ability to jumpstart their economies, thus they had to turn to countries like the US to help them. This resulted in countries like the US from controlling parts of the economies from countries that welcomed their capital investment. This resulted in a different type of colonialism where the United States was able to receive large amounts of …show more content…
Chasteen classifies them as, “The nationalist very often were urban, middle-class people, recent immigrants or of racially mixed heritage”(Chasteen 217). Nationalists tried to remove themselves from the image of how Latin America should emulate Europe and told people that Latin America was, in fact, unique. Nationalist were also against the ideas of Europe and the US that Latin America should be whitened in order for Latin America to progress. They believed in a different form of nationalism, which Chasteen describes as, “Latin America nationalist, on the other hand, emphasizes mixed-race, mestizo identities”(Chasteen 219). Racist ideas of what race was were no longer in the minds of the people. Nationalist were more interested in how they could help the country as a whole even helping the peasants go to school or helping them own land of their own, they embraced the fact that Latin America was made up of different groups of people. Integrating the whole country is better than just allowing the rich to