What in reality, in its relationship with other parts of the world, is that part of America usually called Latin? On the socio-cultural level, in what way does it form a homogeneous sociological complex permitting it to be considered entirely Latin—quite apart from its geographical unity—and, at the same time, part of an American whole within whose sociological framework its Latinity continues to evolve in time and space?

The Spanish conquests of the Americas were not yet completed when famous Humanists already began to appear in the first generation of native-born Spanish-speaking Americans. A mestizo born in 1539 and who liked to call himself “the Indian whose mouth is full” thus published in 1590, in Madrid, the first-fruits of the Humanism of the New World. The son of an Indian woman, he succeeded in very unusual circumstances in writing a superb Castilian version of a classic work of Renaissance Neoplatonism. Its title reads: The Indian's translation of the three Dialogues of Love by Leone Ebreo, from Italian into Spanish, by Garcilaso Inca de la Vega, a native of the great city of Cuzco, capital of the Kingdoms and provinces of Peru.

On the eve of Mexican independence one of the intellectual leaders of the movement, Dr. Servando Teresa José de Mier, whom the “new despotism” had incarcerated in the prison of San Juan de Ulúa, reflected on the Idea of the Constitution Conferred upon America by the Kings of Spain before the Invasion of the Old Despotism. He evoked with fervor the epoch—at the height of the reign of Charles V—when Fray Bartolome de Las Casas introduced the new laws protecting the Indians in the Council of the Indies (1542-1543), when he imposed upon the conquest the ideal of pacific evangelization formulated in his De unico vocationis modo, and in a memorable controversy finally triumphed over the “notorious Sepúlveda, advocate of war and slavery” (1550). “It was,” Mier maintained, “the most significant epoch of American history, for it marked the termination of America's major misfortunes and laid the foundation of her fundamental laws or true constitution.”

Although the problems of the Indian communities of Mexico are not identical with those of other Latin American countries, they are nevertheless similar, and I am sure that the solutions that have been tried in Mexico can also be used in other countries on that continent.

The present territory of the Republic of Mexico was divided, in the period prior to the Spanish conquest, into two great cultural provinces: There was on the one hand the Northern region which was generally inhabited by nomadic tribes—hunters and gatherers whom the Mexicans used to call by the name of chichimecas—and on the other hand the central region of the country which extended towards the North-West as far as Sinaloa along the Western Sierra Madre and towards the North-East as far as Soto la Marina along the Eastern Sierra—a province which is now called Mesoamerica—and which then comprised various native peoples with a plurality of languages and characteristic cultural features, whose manner of life was based essentially on the cultivation of corn, beans and other edible plants and who lived without exception in cities organized already according to a political system which was essentially monarchical and theocratic.

The colonial period left no fertile seeds for a culture in the soil of South America. As Ricardo Rojas assures us, “We do not find a single imaginative work in prose in these three hundred years.” “All of our colonial literature is confined within the limits of the historical genre…everything in it is the unfolding of a chronicle. To fix the memory of social facts, memorials were written to military conquests and hagiographies of spiritual ones, poems on the English invasions and the emancipation of America. Even the brief erotic and religious poems are only monuments in verse, and so are Tejeda's works whose autobiographical character cannot be denied.” (La Literatura Argentina)

Starting from certain intuitions—which I would like to suppose are well founded—I shall try to discover if it is possible to speak of the visual arts characteristic of the American continent throughout the centuries.

A meridional American space, a brief history, a rapid rythm of change and finally a specific time element, these are perhaps the fundamental elements of American history. These fundamental elements determine a conjucture. America entered the mainstream of history rather late. But America has more than fully made up for this because events and economic factors, which take place there, have an amazing ability to stamp by their shifts and changes the worldwide resultant of all specific conjunctures. To the extent that, almost everywhere, the rythm of a worldwide conjuncture can be felt, whose peaks and troughs impose themselves on men and have to be forcibly taken into account by all strategies, this conjuncture, ever since America took her place in history, has borne the imprint of America. One is tempted to write that it is American.