LATIN AMERICA

Latin America’s history is a grand narrative full of joy and heartache, one of great ambition fulfilled and vast potential unrealized, a past that includes both undeniable devastation and a consistent ability to face adversity upon adversity and live on.

From a 1492 “stumble-upon” by Christopher Columbus, who “discovered” a part of the world that was already full of millions of people and their many proud civilizations, waves of European colonizers, primarily from Spain and Portugal, claimed the area we now know as Latin America as their own. Some of these colonizers viewed the land with actual hope, others as only a resource to abuse. Whatever their intent, colonial governments trounced the indigenous population, brought humans from Africa as slaves and extracted as much wealth as possible from the fertile land. At the same time, as a not insignificant side-effect of their domination, the Europeans–again, mainly the Spanish and Portuguese–also brought with them their own European culture, Iberian poetry and cuisine, and most relevant to us, their melodic and passionate music.