ABSTRACT
When pre-Columbian societies came face to face with the European Renaissance societies of Spain and Portugal, a long history of cultural relations was set in motion. These cultural relations have been expounded in poetry and literature, realised through politics and economics, and grounded in space. This primarily racial encounter has been extended into other diverse encounters that have been established and resisted within the Latin American continent during the subsequent 500 years. These include encounters of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and age (see Radcliffe and Westwood, 1993).1 Together, they comprise the complex web of connections that have helped to construct group identities throughout the continent. The spatial organisation of these groups and their activities contributes to the constructions of Latin American political geographies in terms of the power and space
relations within and between distinct social groups. These relations of culture and power within Latin American society can be highlighted at the expense of the traditional focus on state institutional power, as Daniel Levine (1993, 14) suggests:
The role of institutions is often painted in mostly negative terms, with attention to repression, exile, purges, and censorship. These are important but by themselves fail to capture the full range and dynamic of culture and power.
