Cultured Travel Guide Books - Ten keys to Latin America |
![Ten keys to Latin America]() |
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Binding: Unknown Binding
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Publication Date: 1962
Publisher: Knopf
Studio: Knopf |
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Summary: Good book, too bad its outdated
Comment: Latin America, despite being our southern neighbor, remains a giant gap in our knowledge. When Americans think of Latin America, their image is of a number countries that are miniature, less civilized clones of the United States. That is definitely not the case and, until recently, this misunderstanding of Latin America has been one of the causes of our poor relations with Latin America. Frank Tannenbaum's "Ten Keys to Latin America" gives its readers a solid base of knowledge about Latin America to build from and dispels many myths about Latin American countries. Each of ten keys in "Ten Keys to Latin America" is a chapter in the book. His first chapter is titled "The Land and The People." It contains this outdated quote on DDT, "A doctor with a few assistants, goes up and down the river, bringing the benefit of DDT to the river towns." (pg. 15 "Ten Keys to Latin America" Tannenbaum, Frank) Fortunately, this was one of the only times that Mr. Tannenbaum's book seemed that hopelessly outdated. A few pages before, though, his prediction of the size of the Mexican population by the end of the century is right on the money. Latin American countries are radically different from the U.S. Mr. Tannenbaum uses his personal experiences and his vast array of knowledge about Latin America to describe the differences between the U.S. and Latin America. In the U.S. we are connected to people all around the world via the internet and other forms of communication. Even as this is written, live techno music is playing on my computer's speakers transmitted on the internet from across the Atlantic Ocean. High School students in Latin America do not generally have this luxury. "Ten Keys to Latin America" describes Mr. Tannenbaum meeting some Native Americans who had never left their village. The regionalism that develops from this isolation is one of the "Ten Keys to Latin America" and is key to understanding the difficulties Latin America has had in modernizing. How can a country where 95 percent of the population lives in rural areas industrialize overnight? This is especially true when the people of that country do not feel their loyalty to a country but rather to their own town or region. A whole chapter in "Ten Keys to Latin America" is devoted to the hacienda, a remnant of the feudal system. A hacienda is a large almost self-sufficient with a owner or haciendero who rents land to the peons who work it for him. The hacienda "set the tone and determined the quality of Latin American culture during the nineteenth century and until the First World War." (pg. 76) Yet, in "Latin American intellectual life...the hacienda, which is so all-embracing in its influence is, except in an occasional novel, never written about or studied." (pg. 80) Mr. Tannenbaum writes an interesting, insightful and sometimes scary commentary on hacienda life. He tells of an advertisement he saw in an Ecuadorian paper advertising a hacienda with 50 horses and 20 peons. The peons generally stay on the hacienda all through their life working on rented land. This system is so firmly entrenched that most people do not want it to change. These problems and many others are the difficulties that face Latin America today, according to Mr. Tannenbaum. To help fix these difficulties, he contends the U.S. should shift its policy toward Latin America. He makes competent but not irrefutable points against the U.S. foreign policy of non-intervention and anti-communism in Latin America. He calls these policies negative in nature. He says that the U.S. should have a positive policy of pro-democracy because that is what our policy of trading with these countries amounts to anyway. He says by bringing American materialism in the form of our products to Latin America we are also, in effect, bringing our democratic government and capitalist system. Mr. Tannenbaum's book is well worth reading for anyone and should be required reading for any American, Latin or otherwise, who does business or is involved in politics in Latin America. He slowly and craftily builds his arguments, which are common sense, but have not been adopted to the detriment of the United States' appearance in Latin America.
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