Representations and Misconceptions

Throughout the years, literature about Latin America has had a huge impact on its image.  Early on, travel accounts written by Europeans who visited Latin America helped shape outsiders view on the region.  As Jones discusses in the Companion to Latin American Studies, these travel writings more often than not depicted Latin America as an exotic place of grandeur where the landscape was portrayed as vast and untamed.  While not entirely inaccurate (Latin America is home to a number of breath-taking places), the accounts tend to exaggerate about untamed wilderness and would depict the indigenous peoples as primitive and barbaric, as wild as the land, or entirely absent from the picture.  These misrepresentations often lead to the minimization of important aspects of Latin America’s culture…a culture shaped and bound to its land.