H340 Final Exam Flash Cards
The basin of the Amazon River, containing the world’s largest rain forest, covering parts of Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and especially Brazil.
Amazonia
The nativist term used during the wars of independence that suggested a natural alliance between all people born in the New World.
Americanos
A Mesoamerican empire that united numerous, small, independent states under a single monarch. The population was near 25 million people. In 1521, they were conquered by Hernan Cortes.
Aztecs
A failed CIA operation by the US that, in April 1961, trained, financed, and deployed a group of Cuban exiles to overthrow the Communist regime in Cuba.
Bay of Pigs
A Brazilian singer, dancer, and actress who eventually became a “hot Latin” stereotype in Hollywood. She starred in Musicals featuring Brazilian dance and wore an iconic headpiece made of fruit. The headpiece was derived from Afro-Brazilian carnival-kitsch.
Carmen Miranda
A social hierarchy encoded in law and based on inherited characteristics, real or imagined, as opposed to socioeconomic factors. The system in Latin America corresponded more or less to race.
Caste System
A mass rebellion by the Mayan people that was inspired by prophetic messages spoken by a talking cross which told them to cleanse their land of white and mestizo rulers.
Caste War of the Yucatan
A strong political leader who commanded the personal loyalty of many followers in postcolonial Latin America.
Caudillo
People of European descent who were born in the New World.
Creoles
The Latin American revolutionary that was Fidel Castro’s right hand man during the Cuban Revolution
Che Guevara
A two-week standoff between the US and USSR in October 1962, sparked by the discovery of Soviet missile sites in Cuba. This was the closest the world had come to all-out nuclear war.
Cuban Missile Crisis
Led by Fidel Castro, this was the most influential revolutionary movement in 20th-century Latin America. It made an enemy of the United States for the next half-century.
Cuban Revolution
The result of years of psychological conditioning similar to brainwashing that convinces entire populations of their inferiority.
Culture of Victimization
A village in El Salvador that the US mistakenly thought was a guerrilla base. The US advised anticommunist troops to move in and it resulted in a massacre of the villagers.
El Mozote
An institution whereby groups of indigenous people were legally “entrusted” to a Spanish conqueror with the duty of paying him labor and/or tribute. In return the Spaniard was to provide instruction in Catholicism.
Encomiendo
A Spanish conquistador who led the expedition that conquered the Inca Empire in the 1530s.
Francisco Pizarro
US President Franklin Roosevelt’s non-interventionist approach to Latin America during the 1930s & World War II.
Good Neighbor Policy
Used by the Incas as fertilizer, this product–seabird manure that had accumulated on offshore islands for thousands of years–became the core of the Peruvian export economy in the 1840s.
Guano
The slave uprising that turned into a war for independence and created the first black republic in the New World.
Haitian Revolution
A basic principle of social control, in which a ruling class dominates others ideologically, with a minimum of physical force, by making its dominance seem natural and inevitable.
Hegemony
