Latin Americans have seen themselves as constitutive of America for as long as Americans in the United States have cast Latin Americans as outsiders. As Greg Grandin notes in “America, América,” a new history of the Western Hemisphere, Spain and its colonists played an essential role in the success of the U.S.’s fight for independence from the British. In 1781, during the Revolutionary War, the governor of Spanish Louisiana, Bernardo de Gálvez, led troops, including free Afro-Cubans, in a successful siege of British-held Pensacola, Florida. Galveston, Texas, is named for him, and every May Pensacolans celebrate Galvez Day. The U.S. Congress made him an honorary U.S. citizen in 2014, a designation bestowed upon only seven other individuals including Winston Churchill and Mother Teresa. Even now, thousands of tourists travel to the tiny mountainside town in Spain where Gálvez was born to celebrate July 4th with a reënactment of the pivotal battle.
Simón Bolívar, who was born the same year that the treaty ending the American Revolution was signed, considered the United States to be a “singular model of political virtue and moral rectitude.” He believed that the Americas—both North and South—had an important role to play on the world stage in repudiating monarchy. Grandin opens “America, América,” with a quote that captures Bolívar's expansive vision: “I can see America seated on liberty’s throne, wielding justice’s scepter, crowned with glory, revealing to the Old World the majesty of the New.”
Bolívar’s vision of a unified New World differed strikingly from the one held by several U.S. Founders. Neither John Adams nor Thomas Jefferson saw Spanish Americans as part of the same community, let alone as equals. Jefferson thought that the nation he had helped establish might eventually possess South America, and that the inhabitants of the Americas would all speak the same language—presumably English. Adams, for his part, found the notion that Spanish Americans might govern themselves preposterous. “The people of South America are the most ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom,” he wrote. The democratic dreams of Spanish America’s independence leaders, according to Adams, were as “absurd as similar plans would be to establish democracies among the birds, beasts and fishes.”