ABSTRACT
Much of the history of the Latin American nations may be understood as a struggle to replace strong regional identities and weak class identities with weak regional identities and strong class identities. This may be seen as key to the process of economic growth and modernization inasmuch as industrialization and urbanization, for example, imply a developing class structure (greater spatial and social concentration in the means of production and wealth). Strong regional differentiation in modern nations, on the other hand-the historical claims of large parts of a country to political, economic, and/or cultural autonomy from the center or the nation-state as a whole-are often seen as signs of archaism and backwardness, though what may be termed a “region” to a centralizing bureaucrat may be an ancient homeland to someone else. Regionalism and the centrifugal tendencies it represents are certainly not unique to Latin America; Basque and Catalan separatism in Spain, or the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, represent European variations on the theme. Nor is Latin America marked by a uniform history in this regard; Mexico has on the whole been racked by regional conflict more often than Brazil, for example. Nonetheless, it seems fair to say that the creation and maintenance of viable nation-states and national identities in this area of the world has been made much more problematic than in some others by the survival and assertion of strong geographic and cultural regions and the political loyalties attached to them.
