AyiConnect Staff, Nov 21, 2022
Latin America is one of the two great cultural regions into which the American continent can be divided. It brings together in the same group the American countries whose official language derives from Latin: Spanish, Portuguese and, to a lesser extent, French, and which have a similar history of colonial formation under European control.
Latin America is one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse regions in the West, which constitutes a challenge when looking for its own and common features.
From a geographical point of view, the Latin American region is no less complex. All the world's climates are present in it, throughout its twenty million square kilometers of surface. To this is added the Andes mountain chain, with its diversity of reliefs, the immense jungles of the Amazon, the cold plains of Patagonia and the warm coasts of the Caribbean Sea.
Characteristics of Latin America
- It has more than half the surface of the American continent, with around 650,000,000 inhabitants.
- Its predominant languages are Spanish, Portuguese and to a lesser extent French. There is also a very diverse set of surviving indigenous languages.
- The region presents high margins of miscegenation and hybridization. This means that there is an abundance of racially indeterminable individuals (mestizos), as well as spaces in which European whites, African descendants or indigenous people predominate. Adding an abundant Asian and Arab migration.
- The region has significant levels of poverty, both urban and rural, and was the scene of highly uneven industrialization throughout the 20th century.
Latin American culture
Latin American culture is extremely complex and diverse, the result of a complex process of syncretism and hybridization resulting from colonization by Spain, Portugal, and France, to a lesser extent.