• What is Latin America?
• Characteristics of Latin America
• Culture of latin america
• Latin American countries and their capitals
• Latin America and Anglo-Saxon America

We explain what Latin America is, its culture, characteristics and internal cultural regions. In addition, the countries that compose it.

Latin America contains a great variety of climates, reliefs and ecosystems.

What is Latin America?

Latin America or Latin America It is one of the two great cultural regions into which the American continent, opposed to the so-called Anglo-Saxon America. This ethnic and geographical concept brings together in the same group the American countries whose official language derives from Latin: Spanish, Portuguese and to a lesser extent French, and which have a history similar of colonial formation under European control.

It is, however, a concept around which there is debate, since its limits are not perfectly defined, nor are they easy to define. There are even questions about the idea of ​​a "Latin" America, since that title does not contemplate African and aboriginal American heritages, none of which has anything to do with the heritage of the Roman Empire.

Other names are often used to call the region, such as Hispanic America or Hispanoamerica, which includes those countries that speak Spanish and were a colony of Spain; or Latin America, to also include Brazil, of Portuguese speech and colonial history. In any case, Latin America is one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse regions of the West, which constitutes a challenge when looking for its own and common characteristics.

From a geographical point of view, the Latin American region is no less complex. All the climates of the world, along its twenty million square kilometers of surface, which represent about 13.5% of the emerged surface of the planet, as well as an endemic and unequaled biological wealth, and some of the most important rivers in the world.

To this is added the mountain chain of Los Andes, with its diversity of reliefs, the immense jungles of the Amazon, the cold plains from Patagonia and the warm coasts of the Caribbean Sea.

Characteristics of Latin America

Indigenous cultures still manifest themselves in language and customs.

Latin America is characterized, broadly speaking, by the following:

• It corresponds to more than half of the surface of the continent American, and is home to about 650,000,000 people in about 30 nations.
• Its predominant languages ​​are Spanish, Portuguese and to a lesser extent French. There is also a very diverse set of surviving aboriginal languages, such as Quechua, Guaraní, Aymara, Wayuunaiki, Nahuatl, among many others.
• Ethnically, the region is a melting pot, that is, it presents high margins of miscegenation and hybridization. This means that there is an abundance of racially indeterminable individuals (mestizos), as well as spaces in which European whites, blacks of African descent or different indigenous typologies predominate. To this was added, throughout the 20th century, an abundant Asian and Arab migration.
• The region has significant levels of poverty, both urban and rural, and was the scene of a industrialization very uneven throughout the 20th century. Most of their economies are extractive in nature, dependent on the export of raw Materials.

Culture of latin america

The Amazon region is one of the internal cultural regions of Latin America.

Latin American culture is extremely complex and diverse, the result of a complex process of syncretism and hybridization that took place after the conquest and colonization of the continent by the Iberian empires (Spain and Portugal) in the 15th century, and to a lesser extent by France.

In addition, slaves from Africa, after the Indigenous villages were decimated by war and European disease. Thus, Latin American culture has three fundamental vertices: the European culture, the African culture of slaves and that of the original American nations.

Thus, it is an active and fundamentally Catholic region, despite the fact that traditional aboriginal cults and vestiges of African religions survive. Protestantism has also been on the rise in recent decades.

Something similar happens with the language: European languages ​​dominate, but they coexist with the surviving aborigines, especially in the Andean region, the Chaco and mesoamerican, where the most developed pre-Columbian empires were located. Similar diversity also exists in the gastronomy, folklore and traditions.

In fact, the Latin American cultural region itself can be subdivided into different internal cultural regions, such as:

• The Mesoamerican region.
• The Central American region.
• The Caribbean region.
• The Amazon region.
• The Andean region.
• The Pacific region.
• The Chaco region.
• The Rio de la Plata region.
• The Patagonian and Araucanian region.

Latin American countries and their capitals

The Panama Canal links the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific.

Depending on the delimitations of the concept, Latin America will comprise more or fewer countries and dependent territories. However, in general, the following are usually considered Latin American nations:

• Argentina. Located on the Atlantic coast of the American Southern Cone, its capital city is Buenos Aires. It is a primarily agricultural nation, with a territory of 2,780.00 km2, which makes it the largest Hispanic nation on the planet and the second largest in Latin America. His population of almost 40 million inhabitants is predominantly white.
• Bolivia. Located in the Andean highlands in South America, its capital city is La Paz. It is a plurinational State whose constitution reflects the ethnic diversity of its population, mostly indigenous, heir to various pre-Columbian cultures in the area.
• Brazil. Located in South America, its capital city is Brasilia. It is the largest nation in all of Latin America (around 8.5 million km2 of surface, equivalent to 47% of the South American continent) and the one with the largest population (210 million inhabitants), in addition to having the strongest economy in the region. It is the only country in the region whose official language is Portuguese.
• Chili. Located on the Pacific coast of the American Southern Cone, its capital city is Santiago. It has an extensive and coastal territory, 18 million inhabitants and an economy of cut neoliberal, mainly mining, wine and fishing.
• Colombia. Located in the northern region of South America, its capital city is Bogotá. It has coasts in the Caribbean Sea and in the Pacific, and is one of the most populated countries in the region, with 50.5 million inhabitants. It is also the second most biodiverse nation on the planet, but paradoxically one of the most environmentally damaging in the region.
• Costa Rica. Located in Central America, its capital city is San José. With coasts in the Caribbean Sea and in the Pacific, its territory is part of the local volcanic region. It has a traditionally stable economy, about 5,137,000 inhabitants, and since 1948 it has lacked the Armed Forces of its own accord.
• Cuba. Located in the Caribbean Sea, its capital city is Havana. Island nation with an economy dependent on the sightseeing and sugar cane, it has more than 11,600,000 million inhabitants, most of them of Afro-American descent, and it is the most populous country in the Greater Antilles.It was the scene in the 1950s of one of the most controversial political events in the region: the Cuban revolution.
• Ecuador. Located on the Pacific coast of South America, its capital city is Quito. Despite having a relatively small territory (256,370 km2), its significant number of rivers make it a hydroelectric energy power, in addition to being one of the most biodiverse countries in the world. Its population of around 17,500,000 inhabitants has a significant indigenous presence, and together with Spanish it has thirteen aboriginal languages ​​as the official language.
• The Savior. Located in Central America, its capital city is San Salvador. With a territorial extension of 21,041 km2 and almost 7 million inhabitants, it is the largest country densely populated of the continent.
• Guatemala. Located in Central America, its capital is Guatemala City. It is the most populated nation in Central America, with 16,301,286 inhabitants inheriting both the Spanish culture and the ancestral Mayan. On its surface of 108,889 km2 there is a mountainous relief of various climates, which favors a great diversity of ecosystems.
• Haiti. Located between the Caribbean Antilles, its capital city is Port-au-Prince. This French-speaking nation is located on the Island of Hispaniola, along with its Hispanic neighbor, the Dominican Republic. It was the first to become independent from the European colonial rule in all of Latin America, and its population is mainly Afro-descendant. Its economy, however, is the most disadvantaged on the continent and one of the worst on the planet.
• Honduras. Located in the north-central part of Central America, its capital city is Tegucigalpa. It is a nation of more than 9 million inhabitants dedicated primarily to the farming, of multiethnic descent composed of whites, mestizos, eight different aboriginal ethnicities and English-speaking Creoles. It is a country of important biodiversity, given its very rugged relief.
• Mexico. Located in the southern region of North America, its capital is Mexico City. With 1,964,375 km2 of territory, it is the third largest nation in Latin America, and one of the most populated in the region, with more than 126 million inhabitants. It is the main tourist destination in America and the sixth in the world, possessing more than 34 cultural or natural sites considered by UNESCO as a world heritage site. Its population is mostly mestizo, although it has numerous indigenous peoples who survived the colony more or less unscathed, and who are heirs to the great pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica, Aridoamérica and Oasisamérica.
• Nicaragua. Located in the heart of the Central American isthmus, its capital is the city of Managua. It has a territory of 130,494 km2, volcanic and tropical, and an estimated population of 6,351,956 inhabitants, mostly dedicated to agricultural work.
• Panama. Located between South and Central America, its capital is Panama City. Its territory of just 75,420 km2 is located on the isthmus of the same man, where the Panama Canal is located, a system of locks that connects the Caribbean Sea with the Pacific Ocean. With just 4 million inhabitants, it is one of the countries with the highest absolute economic growth in the region.
• Paraguay. Located in the central area of ​​South America, its capital city is Asunción. It is the fifth smallest country in South America, with 406,752 km2, separated into two regions by the Paraguay River. It is a multicultural and bilingual nation (Spanish and Guaraní), whose population of around 7,200,000 inhabitants is mostly mestizo.
• Peru. Located on the Pacific Ocean coast of South America, its capital city is Lima. Its territory of 1,265,216 km2 covers very different geographies, including jungles, deserts and the Andean peaks. It was the seat of the pre-Columbian Inca Empire, whose cultural and ethnic legacy endures. It is the nation with the most biological diversity and the largest mineral resources of the planet.
• Puerto Rico. Located in the Caribbean Sea, its capital city is San Juan. It is an associated state of the United States of America, so that its almost 3.6 million inhabitants are also citizens Americans. It is a Spanish-speaking island nation, although English also exists as a language.
• Dominican Republic. Located in the Antilles of the Caribbean Sea, its capital city is Santo Domingo. It shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, and has a population of almost 11 million, mostly mestizo or mulatto. It is the most visited tourist destination in the Caribbean.
• Uruguay. Located in the eastern part of the American Southern Cone, its capital city is Montevideo. It is the second smallest country in South America, endowed with just over 3 million inhabitants and a mainly agricultural and tourist economy. It is considered the most peaceful country in Latin America.
• Venezuela. Located on the Caribbean coast of northern South America, its capital city is Caracas. Its territory of 916,445 km2 contains the largest proven reserves of Petroleum of the planet, as well as a very high biodiversity in its different territorial regions, with climates, topographies and very different reliefs, ranging from the jungle, the moutains, the desert, the coast and the plain. A single-exporter and dependent on crude oil, it has been at the center of a regional controversy since the rise to power of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela since 1998 and subsequently to the tragic collapse of its economy as of 2013.

Latin America and Anglo-Saxon America

Although Anglo-Saxon America (colonized by the British) and Latin America (colonized by Spain and Portugal) have a colonial history in similar terms and occupy the same continent, they could not be more different from each other. These differences can be summarized as:

• While Anglo-Saxon America embraces the culture of northern Europe, with the Protestant religion, the English language and differentiated racial standards, Latin America has a strong Hispanic and Mediterranean heritage, which is manifested in its Spanish language, its Catholic religion and its mixed racial society and mestizo.
• Anglo-Saxon America has reached a high level of industrial development in the United States and Canada, while the rest of its island territories to an economy dependent on tourism. Latin American nations, on the other hand, have fragile economies and exporters of raw materials, technologically dependent on foreign countries and with significant margins of poverty and urban violence.
• In Latin America the original pre-Columbian heritage survives, in some cases autonomously and in others partially integrated into Spanish culture, in matters such as gastronomy, languages, traditions and folklore. In contrast, few Aboriginal peoples survive in Anglo-Saxon America and are not well integrated into the dominant culture. In its place, there is a significant black culture imported from Africa.
• The societies latin american They tend to have variable margins of crossbreeding and cultural hybridization, which make them a unique and novel culture on the face of the earth, the fruit of the marriage of pre-Columbian, African and Hispanic cultures. In contrast, Anglo-Saxon America did not show much racial, ethnic, or cultural mixing throughout its history. history.