O Brasil na América Latina: reflexões sobre a construção da identidade latino-americana

Abstract

Geographically, it is evident that Brazil is part of Latin America, but when one is in the scope of the analysis of the Latin American identity one can perceive the distance between Brazil and the Hispanic American countries. The Brazilian society is reluctant to assume a Latin American identity (s). This difficulty is historical and is linked both to its colonial period - which, unlike the other countries of the subcontinent, passed through a Lusitanian colonization, marked by the extraction of primary products and by African slavery - and postcolonial as the denomination of the territory as America Latina. The baptism of the region with this name, Latin America, succumbed to denominations given by the original peoples, a way of silencing the antiquity of the place. For Celso Furtado, this designation had only a spatial meaning, without a concern for similarities and differences between countries; while for Anibal Quijano, this denomination is a form of coloniality of the power. Brazil has always found it difficult to connect with its neighbors, either by the difference of the colonial regime implanted or by the preferences in the political and economic relations. According to Darcy Ribeiro, despite the geographical unity, the different colonialsettlements, from which Latin American societies were born, coexisted withoutsocializing and this "near-far" happened for centuries. The construction of a Latin American identity on the part of the Brazilians, which in this study will be treated as a "feeling of belonging", has its difficulties rooted in the history of formation of this subcontinent, as well as in the current politicaleconomic decisions. An idea that is beyond the integration of the infrastructure or economy of these countries, which takes into account the similarities behind the historical and cultural realities of each Latin American country. Therefore, the objective of this article is to investigate this feeling, with the problematization of the concept "Latin America" and the construction of a Latin American identity (s). It seeks to identify the similarities between the countries of the subcontinent that are ignored by the Brazilian society and the aspects that help in the maintenance of this context. In order to fulfill the proposed objective, this study will use the contributions of Porto-Gonçalves and Quental, Héctor Bruit, Enrique Dussel, Darcy Ribeiro, Símon Bolívar and Celso Furtado among other authors.