The culture of Latin America is the formal or informal expression of the people of Latin America and includes both high culture (literature and high art) and popular culture (music, folk art, and dance), as well as religion and other customary practices. These are generally of Western origin, but have various degrees of Native American, African and Asian influence.
Definitions of Latin America vary. From a cultural perspective,Sérgio Campos Gonçalves, “Cultura popular e suas representações: caminhos possíveis de reflexão”, Revista História em Reflexão - Programa de Pós-graduação em História – Faculdade de Ciências Humanas – UFGD (Dourados), v. 2, p. 1-19, 2008. Latin America generally refers to those parts of the Americas whose cultural, religious and linguistic heritage can be traced to the Latin culture of the late Roman Empire. This would include areas where Spanish, Portuguese, and various other Romance languages, which can trace their origin to the Vulgar Latin spoken in the late Roman Empire, are natively spoken. Such territories include almost all of Mexico, Central America and South America, with the exception of English or Dutch speaking territories. Culturally, it could also encompass the French derived culture in the Caribbean and North America, as it ultimately derives from Latin Roman influence as well. There is also an important Latin American cultural presence in the United States since the 16th century in areas such as California, Texas, and Florida, which were part of the Spanish Empire. More recently, in cities such as New York, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Miami.
The richness of Latin American culture is the product of many influences, including:
Spanish and Portuguese culture, owing to the region's history of colonization, settlement and continued immigration from Spain and Portugal. All the core elements of Latin American culture are of Iberian origin, which is ultimately related to Western culture. Pre-Columbian cultures, whose importance is today particularly notable in countries such as Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay. These cultures are central to Indigenous communities such as the Quechua, Maya, and Aymara. 19th- and 20th-century European immigration from Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, France, and Eastern Europe; which transformed the region and had an impact in countries such as Argentina, Peru, Uruguay, Brazil (particular the southeast and southern regions), Colombia, Cuba, Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador (particularly in the southwest coast), Paraguay, Dominican Republic (specifically the northern region), and Mexico (particularly the northern and western regions). Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Lebanese and other Arab, Armenian and various other Asian groups. Mostly immigrants and indentured laborers who arrived from the coolie trade and influenced the culture of Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Peru in areas such as food, art, and cultural trade. The culture of Africa brought by Africans in the Trans-Atlantic former slave trade has influenced various parts of Latin America. Influences are particularly strong in dance, music, cuisine, and some syncretic religions of Cuba, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Northwest Ecuador, coastal Colombia, and Honduras.
Ethnic groups
The population of Latin America is very diverse with many ethnic groups and different ancestries. Most of the Amerindian descendants are of mixed race ancestry.
In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries there was a flow of Spanish and Portuguese emigrants who left for Latin America. It was never a large movement of people, but over the long period of time it had a major impact on Latin American populations: the Portuguese left for Brazil and the Spaniards left for Central and South America. Of the European immigrants, men greatly outnumbered women and many married Natives. This resulted in a mixing of the Amerindians and Europeans and today their descendants are known as mestizos. Even Latin American criollos, of mainly European ancestry, usually have some Native ancestry. Today, mestizos make up the majority of Latin America's population.
Starting in the late 16th century, a large number of former African slaves were brought to Latin America, especially to Brazil and the Caribbean. Nowadays, blacks make up the majority of the population in most Caribbean countries. Many of the former African slaves in Latin America mixed with the Europeans and their descendants (known as mulattoes) make up the majority of the population in some countries, such as the Dominican Republic, and large percentages in Brazil, Colombia, and Honduras. Mixes between the blacks and Amerindians also occurred, and their descendants are known as zambos. Many Latin American countries also have a substantial tri-racial population known as pardos, whose ancestry is a mix of Amerindians, Europeans and Africans.
Large numbers of European immigrants arrived in Latin America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most of them settling in the Southern Cone (Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil). Nowadays the Southern Cone has a majority of people of largely European descent and in all more than 80% of Latin America's European population, which is mostly descended from six groups of immigrants: Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, French, Germans, Jews (both Ashkenazi and Sephardic) and, to a lesser extent, Irish, Poles, Greeks, Croats, Russians, Welsh, Ukrainians, etc.
In this same period, immigrants came from the Middle East and Asia, including Indians, Lebanese, Syrians, Armenians, and, more recently, Koreans, Chinese and Japanese, mainly to Brazil. These people only make up a small percentage of Latin America's population but they have communities in the major cities.
This diversity has profoundly influenced religion, music and politics. This cultural heritage is called Latino in American English.
Language
Spanish is spoken in Puerto Rico and eighteen sovereign nations (See Spanish language in the Americas). Portuguese is spoken primarily in Brazil (See Brazilian Portuguese). Amerindian languages are spoken in many Latin American nations, mainly Peru, Chile, Panama, Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala, Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, and Mexico. Nahuatl has more than a million speakers in Mexico. Although Mexico has almost 80 native languages across the country, neither the government nor the constitution specifies an official language (not even Spanish). Guaraní is, along with Spanish, the official language of Paraguay, and is spoken by a majority of the population. Furthermore, there are about 10 million Quechua speakers in South America and Spain, but more than half of them live in Bolivia and Peru (approximately 6,700,800 individuals).
Other European languages spoken include Italian in Brazil and Uruguay, German in southern Brazil and southern Chile, and Welsh in southern Argentina.
Religion
The primary religion throughout Latin America is Christianity (90%), mostly Roman Catholicism. Latin America, and in particular Brazil, were active in developing the quasi-socialist Roman Catholic movement known as Liberation Theology. Practitioners of the Protestant, Pentecostal, Evangelical, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormon, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Baháʼí, and indigenous denominations and religions exist. Various Afro-Latin American traditions, such as Santería, and Macumba, a tribal- voodoo religion, are also practiced. Evangelicalism in particular is increasing in popularity. Latin America constitute in absolute terms the second world's largest Christian population, after Europe.
Folklore
Arts and leisure
In long-term perspective, Britain's influence in Latin America was enormous after independence came in the 1820s. Britain deliberately sought to replace the Spanish and Portuguese in economic and cultural affairs. Military issues and colonization were minor factors. The influence was exerted through diplomacy, trade, banking, and investment in railways and mines. The English language and British cultural norms were transmitted by energetic young British business agents on temporary assignment in the major commercial centers, where they invited locals into the British leisure activities, such as organized sports, and into their transplanted cultural institutions such as schools and clubs. The British role never disappeared, but it faded rapidly after 1914 as the British cashed in their investments to pay for the Great War, and the United States, another Anglophone power, moved into the region with overwhelming force and similar cultural norms.Oliver Marshall, ed. English-Speaking Communities in Latin America (2000).
Sports
The British impact on sports was overwhelming, as Latin America took up football (called fútbol in Spanish and futebol in Portuguese). In Argentina, rugby, polo, tennis and golf became important middle-class leisure pastimes.
In some parts of the Caribbean and Central America baseball outshined soccer in terms of popularity. The sport started in the late 19th century when sugar companies imported cane cutters from the British Caribbean. During their free time, the workers would play cricket, but later, during the long period of US military occupation, cricket gave way to baseball, which rapidly assumed widespread popularity, although cricket remains the favorite in the British Caribbean. Baseball had the greatest following in those nations occupied at length by the US military, especially the Dominican Republic and Cuba, as well as Nicaragua, Panama, and Puerto Rico. Even Venezuela, which wasn't occupied by the US military during this time period, still became a popular baseball destination. All of these countries have emerged as sources of baseball talent, since many players hone their skills on local teams, or in “academies” managed by the US Major Leagues to cultivate the most promising young men for their own teams.Teresa A. Meade, History of Modern Latin America: 1800 to the Present (2016), pp. 21–21. Baseball5, an official variation of baseball, was inspired in 2017 by Latin American street variations of baseball as well.
Literature
Pre-Columbian cultures were primarily oral, though the Aztecs and Mayans, for instance, produced elaborate codices. Oral accounts of mythological and religious beliefs were also sometimes recorded after the arrival of European colonizers, as was the case with the Popol Vuh. Moreover, a tradition of oral narrative survives to this day, for instance among the Quechua-speaking population of Peru and the Quiché of Guatemala.
From the very moment of Europe's "discovery" of the continent, early explorers and conquistadores produced written accounts and crónicas of their experience—such as Columbus's letters or Bernal Díaz del Castillo's description of the conquest of New Spain. During the colonial period, written culture was often in the hands of the church, within which context Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz wrote memorable poetry and philosophical essays. Towards the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, a distinctive criollo literary tradition emerged, including the first novels such as Lizardi's El Periquillo Sarniento (1816).
The 19th century was a period of "foundational fictions" (in critic Doris Sommer's words), novels in the Romantic or Naturalist traditions that attempted to establish a sense of national identity, and which often focussed on the indigenous question or the dichotomy of "civilization or barbarism" (for which see, say, Domingo Sarmiento's Facundo (1845), Juan León Mera's Cumandá (1879), or Euclides da Cunha's Os Sertões (1902)).