A Note on the Latin/Anglo Distinction
2 July 2009
Thursday
The Rio Grande serves as a natural border separating Texas and Mexico. North of the Rio Grande is Anglo civilization; south of the Rio Grande is Latino civilization.
North Americans north of the Rio Grande river (known as the Río Bravo del Norte in Mexico) are generically referred to as “Anglos” by Latinos, or, in slightly less friendly circumstances, as “Gringos.” But “Gringo” doesn’t seem to carry any strong negative connotation with it, and I can remember walking through an overwhelmingly local market in Iquitos, Peru and having the vendors shout “Hey, Gringo!” at me to try to get my attention. I don’t believe any offense was intended, and of course none was taken. But “Anglo” seems to be the polite — or, at least, neutral — term for North American Caucasians north of the Rio Grande, and it is better than the awkward “European-American.”
Recently I have touched on the Latin/Anglo distinction (though not in those terms) in this forum, especially in American Civilization, where I wrote: “…the nebulous term ‘Latin America’ can be given meaning and unity in relation to the place the Latin church holds in the life of Latin America — and this is a unity that it does not otherwise possess, as linguistically distinct Brazil and the ethnically distinct Andes and the cultural distinction between indigenous and creole peoples bears witness.”
Another way to give unity and meaning to the nebulous term “Latin America” as well as giving a complementary meaning to “Anglo” was suggested to me today from an unlikely source. At present I am listening to Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey: A Biography, by Alberto Manguel. This book is one of the series “Books that Changed the World” published by Grove/Atlantic, and in audio format by Tantor Audio.
In previous posts to this forum I have mentioned the books in this series on Paine’s Rights of Man, Clausewitz’s On War, and Marx’s Das Kapital. All have been enjoyable, and this book on Homer is as well. It also, as suggested above, had an unexpected relevance to the Latino/Anglo distinction.
After acknowledging the indebtedness of Virgil’s Aeneid to Homer’s earlier epics, and tracing the relative fortunes of these books in different parts of Europe, with the Latin countries of Europe, mostly Catholic, studying Virgil and the Aeneid, while the non-Latin countries of Europe (sometimes called the Germanic countries), mostly Protestant, studied Homer and his epics, Manguel observes that this distinction has been largely preserved in the new world, with Anglo North America north of the Rio Grande being Homeric territory while Latino America south of the Rio Grande is Virgilian territory. Of course such distinctions aren’t absolute, and indeed Manguel opens his book on Homer with an anecdote of the currency of Homer in a rural South American village. Nevertheless, while the distinction is not absolute, it is worth noting.
How shall we understand the division, if not the gulf, between Homer and Virgil? Homer, of course, comes first, and Virgil presupposes Homer. Homer is the model for Virgil, and to the extent that Homer is Virgil’s model, Virgil is derivative. Virgil’s Aeneid is to Homer as Gounod’s Faust is to Goethe’s Faust — but there are those who prefer opera to poetry. Moreover, Homer celebrates the vanquished and the defeated at least as equals to the triumphant, whereas the raison d’etre for Virgil’s epic is the founding of Rome, and therefore (in the minds of many) the Aeneid represents a paean to Roman triumphalism in the age of Augustus — a triumphalism that is sometimes taken as fundamentally foreign to the nature of poetry, and which demonstrates that that which was greatest in Homer was lost on Virgil.
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