1 Nationalism in Latin America. Francisco Colom González The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz (Editors-in-Chief) http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1444334980.html *** The relationship between nationhood and nationalism has been a divisive issue among the specialists in the field. Whereas modernist theorists (Anderson 1991; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1990; Deutsch 1953) have a conception of the nation as a political construct whose cultural meaning was brought about by modern social change, ethno-cultural approaches on the other hand (Smith 1986; Connor 1994) have insisted on the symbolic patrimony inherited from the past as a prerequisite for the emergence of modern nations. This discrepancy is less significant than it might seem. After all, both views accept that a national community cannot be arbitrarily imagined, and both concede that ethnic structures need some kind of cultural representation to gain a subjective meaning. The conventional literature on nationalism has paid scarce attention to Latin America. Even if the Latin American states belong to the earliest wave of constitutional polities that emerged from the Atlantic revolutions, the political instability of the region, the lingering coloniality of its social structures, and the parochial character of its academic institutions have coalesced to push the study in this field to the background. Current interpretations generally agree that nationalism did not create the first Latin American nations. Independence was the eventual result of a crisis at the core of the Spanish Monarchy provoked by the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, but national identity and sentiment were politically induced processes that extended throughout the nineteenth century and later. The commonplace that imagines a series of pre-existing American nations struggling to emancipate from the imperial yoke is therefore an implausible ideological construction (Pérez Vejo 2010). As François- Xavier Guerra has stated, “If, at the end of the wars of independence, the new states of Spanish America may be considered nations in the sense of sovereign collectivities, they were very far from possessing other essential imaginative attributes of a modern nation: a history and ancestral territory, common heroes and ancestors, and a national character and destiny. Spanish American elites dedicated themselves to creating that discursive infrastructure of nationhood only after independence was won” (Guerra 2003, 32). At the turn of the twentieth century many Latin American countries had accrued an established sense of nationhood, but nationalism was altogether a new phenomenon for them. The work of Benedict Anderson (Anderson 1991) signals a turning point in this field. It is however debatable, that national imagination in Latin America was derived