The Nation's Debut

In the late 19th and early 20th-centuries, Latin America sought to integrate itself into North Atlantic and European circuits of modernity. Nation-building projects throughout the region propelled countries onto the world stage alongside the affluent and powerful European and North American nations. In Brazil, for example, urban and architectural development in late 19th-century Rio de Janeiro strived to build a capital that resembled Paris, complete with wide avenues and luxurious municipal buildings.

Text and print culture provided burgeoning Latin American nations with another important avenue through which to project curated images of themselves to the rest of the world. These texts, many produced by individual nations, made explicit mention of booming national economies, agricultural industries, efficient transportation systems, and modern architecture. Through these vignettes of national achievement, countries such as Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico worked to present themselves as “modern” and “cosmopolitan”—worthy of the world stage—to the rest of the world.

Travelers’ guides, journals, encyclopedias, and national exhibitions became tools through which Latin America carefully constructed its self-image. This collection showcases a number of such texts, allowing for a fascinating glimpse into the notions of modernity and progress that animated Latin American nation-building enterprises. Texts from Argentina and Mexico, for example, reveal the importance of infrastructural development to national identities. However, these texts also reveal a darker, more uncomfortable side of this project. Texts from Brazil, for instance, reveal the nation’s problematic engagement with racial and ethnic identities, many of which were excluded or marginalized for the sake of a national debut. In total, these texts elucidate the measures taken by Latin American nations to build and strategically shape the images they marketed to the rest of the world.