Latin America and Europe in the twentieth century: looking to The Americas Archives

There is a marked tendency to view Latin America’s twentieth-century international history through the lens of US hegemony, and Europe has been particularly impacted by this historiographical trend. On the basis of a review of 41 articles published in The Americas over the past 81 years, this essay explores The Americas’ important role in promoting scholarship on the variety of connections between Latin America and Europe. By bringing together two temporal currents—the chronology of history and the chronology of historiography—it traces how scholarship on Latin America’s twentieth-century relationship with the wider world has evolved. During the Cold War years, the majority of articles focused on Latin America as an arena for great power/superpower rivalry, but from the end of the previous century, scholars publishing in the journal made increasing use of different scales of analysis to uncover the multidimensional flows across the Atlantic. Ultimately, work published in The Americas on twentieth-century transnational relations has shown that Latin America and Latin Americans are important actors on the global stage with significant agency in drawing upon separate international influences and alliances to best suit their own domestic purposes, sometimes with significant consequences for the wider world.