Viaje a las entrañas de un pueblo-continente...La teoría civilizadora y el pensamiento identitario latinoamericano del siglo XIX
A Journey into the Depths of a People-Continent... The Latin American Civilizing Theory and Identitary Thinking of the 19th Century

Summary/Abstract: The fruit of a commingled essentialist-constructivist process, Latin American identity can only be thought of in terms of the dialectics I ≠ Other, geographically and ideologically transposed into the antinomies Europe ≠ America and civilization ≠ barbarism. In this paper, I aim to demonstrate briefly that, despite the efforts to qualify it as purist, the racial-ethnic identity, in particular, suffers from an equally profound influence of both the indigenous factor and the European one. There is undoubtedly an Indo-Iberian-African substrate at the basis of identity, which certainly cannot be excluded or ignored; nevertheless, I believe that European ethnic and racial elements (other than Hispanic) also had a significant contribution to its crystallization. In this context, I refer to the civilizing theory of the 19th century, a thesis defended by the enlightened positivists, which proposes a reassessment, in the genuine Western spirit, of the Latin American cultural paradigm by eradicating retrograde and barbaric traits from the continent and by incorporating an allogeneous value system of Anglo-French origin

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