ABSTRACT
This chapter provides readers with a brief yet comprehensive overview of LatinAmerica and the Caribbean. It reviews various criteria used to delimit Latin Americaand the Caribbean, explores how this area emerged in the imagination of Europeans and Latin American elites in the nineteenth century, and then provides this book’s rationale for considering this area as a single space of teaching and research. A brief survey of countries, population, languages, and migration patterns then follows. The bulk of the chapter surveys major landscapes, structural zones, and physiographic regions, and it considers debates on pre-and post-European landscape transformations. The final section critically re-examines how the concept of culture area-long wedded to landscapes-may still be useful in today’s rapidly changing world.
