THE HISTORY OF LATIN AMERICA

The History of Latin America: Collision of Cultures

The History of Latin America: Collision of Cultures

Introduction

Latin America includes more than twenty-five countries with different histories, languages, cultures, and political realities. The collision of peoples and cultures living elsewhere in the world to lump together large, industrialized, and prosperous nations such as Brazil and Mexico with small, very poor countries such as Belize, despite their manifest differences. Marshall C. Eakin approaches the topic bearing this in mind. There is a long history of intentional communities in Latin America, and a rapidly growing contemporary movement. In what has been one of Latin America's most conservative societies, cultural change has swept away at least some vestiges of patriarchal architecture, enabling that society to elect the first female president of a Latin American country to have won the position independently. Finally, future directions for women's leadership in Latin America will be assessed (Marshall, 2007).

Discussion

As is the case in many parts of the world, in Latin America, women historically have held few leadership positions in government or economy. As Latin America is a largely Roman Catholic region, the tradition held that female leadership in religious affairs was strictly prohibited, thereby precluding significant roles for women in other public spheres of society as well. Long termed a machista, or sexist, culture, one characterized by the dominance of men over women, Latin America historically saw few women rise to positions of political or economic importance. In a landmark analysis of gender roles in Latin America, Elsa Chaney (1979) observed in her study, Supermadre, Women in Politics in Latin America, that when women were in the public eye, serving in government or in other organizations of civil society, their activities were almost always extensions of their family responsibilities. Although women, especially those of the narrow middle and upper classes, enjoyed authority within the family, this power was circumscribed in many important ways by educational background and even economic disadvantage compared to male members of the household and extended family. Opportunities for women's leadership with respect to family responsibilities that in other societies might have been exercised through organizations within civil society were quite limited as civil society itself has been comparatively underdeveloped in Latin America (Marshall, 2007).

Owing to the social position occupied by women in Latin America, women across the region were still seeking the right to vote as late as the mid-1950s. Women ...