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Angela Pérez-Mejía. A Geography of Hard Times: Narratives about Travel to South America, 1780-1849. Trans. Dick Cluster. Albany: SUNY P, 2004. 167 pp. ISBN 0-791-6013-4, $40.00.
For many years we have had a monolithic notion of what "Latin America" was all about, a generic term that includes twenty countries, each with its own characteristics, idiosyncrasies, history, and ethnic constituencies. We have also had the presumptuous idea that there is such a thing as an "expert" in what we call "Latin American Studies" in the United States-an idea that is not only false, but arrogant and paternalistic. In a well-written research work, Angela Pérez-Mejía puts on display examples of European men and women, from different backgrounds, who defined "Latin America" during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before the French term existed. Voyages by the botanist José Celestino Mutis, the geographer Alexander von Humboldt, the historian Maria Graham, and the French feminist and activist Flora Tristan outline the parameters of Pérez-Mejía's work.
A Geography of Hard Times also displays the harsh reality of the independence struggles in Spanish America, a convulsive period when, with the aid of Native Americans and "enlightened" European countries with economic interests in the Spanish colonies, Spanish American patricians fought for independence against their parents from the Iberian peninsula. PérezMejía analyzes the representations of South America offered by the narratives, illustrations, and maps produced by the four voyagers, and the effect that South America had on the narrators' self-representations. In short, she seeks "to analyze geographic text as a liminal territoiy in which it is possible...