The descriptor Latina had the advantage of appealing to various constituencies. To use a Bilbaoian idea, América Latina was a “new synthesis,” one that spoke not just to liberals and radicals opposed to Anglo supremacy but conservatives as well. Elites in Spanish America and even Brazil, with their Parisian tastes, were fine calling themselves Latin. Those obsessed with racial and cultural degeneration, now that they no longer had Spain or Portugal to issue chits proving the purity of their bloodline, might hide behind the idea that they were Latin to distinguish themselves from, as an adopter of the term put it, “apaches, comanches or lipanes.” The Argentine jurist Juan Bautista Alberdi understood Latin and Saxon not in opposition but in unity: “Everyone who is not Latin or Saxon, that is, European, is a barbarian.” Many, though, used América Latina to set themselves off from Saxon America, to promote an inclusive, egalitarian republicanism that could encompass the broadest humanity possible.

— America, América by Greg Grandin