Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. Nature and Its Enigmatic Images in American Lore
  • Nature in One of Its Manifestations: An Evil to Be Conquered, Reformed, and Exploited
  • The Mythology of Regeneration in Nature
  • The Myth of Nature as Beneficent Goddess
  • Nature Within, Nature Without, and Phenomena of Projection
  • Worlds Within, Worlds Without, and Myths of Reconciling Opposites
  • Latin America Assumes Its Place in America’s Fusion-of-Opposites Mythology
• 2. Wild People in Wild Lands: Early American Views of Latin Americans
  • Stereotyping the Other: An Overview of Nature-and-Civilization Images
  • Nineteenth-Century American Stereotyping of the Latin Other
  • Sex and Alcohol, and Latin American Primitivism
  • Anger and Passion, Rebelliousness and Anarchy: More Symptoms of Latin American Primitiveness
  • Economic Failure and Latin American Primitiveness
  • Religious “Primitivism” and Latin American “Retardation”
• 3. Latin Americans and Indians: Ambiguous Perceptions of an Alleged Connection
  • Latin Americans: Potential Saviors of an Unfulfilled Civilization?
  • Stereotypes of the Good Indian
  • The Bad Indian and the Merging of Indian and Latin American Stereotypes
  • Indians, Latin Americans, and Massacres
  • The Civilized and the Wild, and Myths of Death and Regeneration
  • Latin Resentment of American Prejudices
  • Frontier Mythology and the Poisoning of Hemispheric Relations
• 4. Our Frontier and Theirs: American Perceptions of Latin American Backwardness
  • Iberian and Anglo Approaches to New World Frontiers: Underlying Differences?
  • Frontier Experiences and Pejorative Comparisons: The United States and Latin America
  • Gospel, Glory, and Gold, and Iberian Frontiers
  • Waves of Frontier Settlement in America, and the Missing Waves in Latin America
  • Cowboys and Vaqueros and Comparative Frontier Experiences
  • Indians and Comparative American-Latin American Frontier Perspectives
  • African Americans, Palenques, and Quilombos, and Frontier Differences
  • Comparative Frontiers: Our Racial Purity, Their Mestizaje
  • Positive and Ambiguous Perceptions of Mestizaje among Americans
• 5. America in the Age cf the New Imperialism
  • The Alleged End of the American Frontier
  • The American Quest for New Frontiers
  • Soft and/or Hard Inducements to U.S. Penetration of the Latin American Frontier
  • The Uplift of Colonials
  • The Indian Background to Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century U.S. Latin American Policy
  • Immigrants, Indians, and Latins: The American Quest to Control the Other
  • American Racism Intensifies Contempt for the Other
  • Racism, Imperialism, and American Fairs
  • Americans at Fairs: The Midway, the White Way, or Both Ways?
• 6. From Arielism to Modernism: Hemispheric Visions in the Age of Roosevelt and Wilson
  • Arielism, North and South of the Border
  • Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Hemispheric Visions
  • Racism, Once More, as an Issue in Internal and External Colonialism
  • Modernism’s Revolt against Modernity
• 7. The Twenties: Normalcy, Counterculture, and Clashing Perceptions of Latin America
  • American Breaks in Two
  • Communism as the New Primitivism Sparks American Divisiveness
  • New Questers after New Frontiers: The Reemergence of a Counterculture
  • Counterculture and the Cult of the Natural
  • Exploring the African American Frontier in the 1920s
  • Exploring America’s Indian and Hispanic Frontiers in the 1920s
  • Latin America’s Lure as an Alternative and Complement to American Civilization
  • Variations on Arielism Challenged by Waldo Frank’s Variations on Modernism
  • Waldo Frank, Franz Boas, and the Background to the Good Neighbor Policy
• 8. The Quest for Equilibrium with Nature: The Good Neighbor Policy, 1933-1945
  • The Failure of Uplift
  • Cultural Pluralism Abets the Rejection of Uplift
  • The New Deal and the Quest to Live More Respectfully with Nature
  • Goodwill toward Latin America: Counterculture Values Enter the Establishment
  • Goodwill toward Latin America: American Music, Classical and Popular
  • Spanish Republicans Eclipse the Attraction of Latin American Revolutionaries
  • The Late Good Neighbor Policy: Normalcy Triumphs over Utopianism
  • Might-Have-Beens in Hemispheric Relations Yield to Old, and New, Realities
• 9. America’s Postwar Generation: New Variations on Old Themes
  • Civilization Cleansed, Civilization Triumphant
  • Civilization Threatened
  • Classical and Popular Music and the Reemergence of an Adversary Culture
  • The Counterculture, the Establishment, and John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier
  • Third Worldism and the Issues of Cuba, Vietnam, and Nicaragua
  • The Advent of a New Generation
• 10. Change and Permanence in Myths and Stereotypes: Civilization and Nature toward Century’s End
  • The Balance Shifts in Civilization’s War on Nature
  • A “New History” Begins as a Century Ends
  • Latin America in the Context of Changing American Perceptions of the Natural World
  • Embourgeoisement: The Counterculture’s Loss of Illusions about Latin America
  • Latin America: Still in a State of Nature?
  • The State of Nature Spreads to America
  • Drugs and the Struggle of Civilization with Nature
  • The Latin Americanization of America
  • Popular Music and New Life for the Cult of the Natural
  • Rock Music and the Displacement of External by the Internal Primitive
  • In a Dark Time, the Eye Begins to See
• Notes
• Index