Sao Paulo, Brazil -- Just as Americans have begun to recognize, even fear, Latin America's significance for their future, more and more Latin Americans are wondering whether Latin America even exists.
As the Summit of the Americas convenes in Miami, the media still conjure up images of a single, homogeneous "Latin American" region watched over by a friendly "good neighbor," the United States.
Yet new global trade links and growing cultural diversity are pulling the region into radically different directions.
"Once the idea of Latin America may have made sense in a historical context," says Brazilian scholar Helio Jaguaribe. "But it makes no operational sense in today's politics or the global economy."
Like so many other political constructs in the region, the term "Latin America" was imposed from abroad. Bent on greater influence in the Americas during the mid-19th century, the French coined the term as a marketing ploy to draw attention to the common heritage of Romance-language speaking peoples.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt reinforced the idea of a single, homogeneous region even further with his World War II "Good Neighbor Policy."
Many North Americans even now see Latin America as just an extension of Mexico. "North Americans are always looking for Mexican hats in South American paintings," complains Jorge Helft, Buenos Aires' leading collector of contemporary art. But Latin Americans were never just Latin.
Indeed, throughout the region, indigenous cultures with their XTC own languages -- Aztec, Mayan, Guarani and many others -- co-exist with Hispano-Portuguese cultures imposed by colonizers.
The African cultures brought to Brazil and Cuba through forced migrations have created cultural bonds between these two distant countries that are not at all evident between Brazil and neighboring Bolivia with its large Indian population.
Portuguese-speaking Brazilians, unlike some of their Hispanic neighbors, never entirely accepted the Latin American label.
"Brazil sits with its back to Latin America," went the old saying. Today, Brazilian immigrants in the U.S., bewildered by the catch-all characterizations for themselves as "Latin," for U.S.-born Latins as "Latinos," and the officialese "Hispanic," exchange messages over e-mail about which box to check on official forms.
Meanwhile, as some of these immigrants return home with their new-found American ways, they whittle away at whatever uniquely hemispheric characteristics once comprised a "Latin" identity.
