The changing interpretation of Spanish Geography regarding Latin America:

between paternalism, brotherhood and indifference

Abstract

For some decades, there has been agreement on the need to deepen studies on the cultural and scientific relations between the old European metropolises and their former colonies. For this reason, it was necessary to carry out a first review of how Spanish academic geography has approached the Latin American question. Which authors have tried to study it, from which theories and works focused on territorial analysis. In this approach, two ways in which Spanish geographers have approached Latin America are discovered: the first, through general discourses ranging from paternalism, the justification of the colonial period or the denunciation of the plundering of the riches of the territories; the second, from a direct experience in some Latin American countries and universities. The resulting interpretations have been highly conditioned by the different stages that the recent history of Spain has gone through. In recent times, they respond to an economic interest in projecting a friendly image of the former colonial power, home to important multinational companies interested in the transatlantic business. The need to recover this link between the Hispanic or the Ibero-American constitutes the final argument of a work framed in history and the theory of Geography.