In stark contrast to this, Brazil appears more as a country of adventurers. Today, the involvement of Mexicans towards their nation’s common fate is very noticeable. Porfirio Diaz is probably the emblematic example of this paradigm shift, and is often referred to as the Founder of the “Mexican project” (His “utopia” was heavily modelled after France). However, Mexico, in the 19 th Century, started developing a pioneering project. To some extent, both the Spanish and the Portuguese colonisations started off as “adventurer” enterprises, where the goal was, for centuries, to extract revenue from the American territories to be sent back to the mainland. Buarque claims that whilst North Americans looked at their new territories as pioneers, and were keen to create utopias in the new lands they had conquered, the adventurer mentality prevailed in Brazil. Sergio Buarque de Holanda developed an explanation frame of colonial Latin America that proves very useful to understand the origin of such deep differences.īuarque, in his 1936 Raízes do Brasil, opposes adventurers, who conquered new worlds to extract profits from the “conquista”, and pioneers, who saw new worlds as opportunities to create new and better societies. We have been involved extensively in projects across Latin America Latin America is a world in its own right: there is an abyss, for example, between Mexican and Brazilian cultures.
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