THE SEMANTICS OF ASYMMETRIC COUNTERCONCEPTS: THE CASE OF “LATIN AMERICA ” IN THE US

This article focuses on a crucial aspect of the history of the concept of Latin America in the United States: the ways in which representations of Spanish Americans and Brazilians are constructed as typically Latin America. The guiding hypothesis here is that the concept of Latin America acquires coherence in North American attributes texts, speeches and images that were not originally meant to convey them. A testimony of a Brazilian rural worker, a painting of a Mexican muralist, the thoughts of a Colombian writer, all these communicative acts, are thus appropriated and become pregnant with other meanings. This work aims at exposing those ascribed meanings as well the ones that were hidden by the synecdochical operation