In a sweeping and ambitious work, Greg Grandin’s America, América offers a cohesive vantage on the Western Hemisphere over a 500-year history. The book is an impressive achievement. Despite stretching to some 700 pages, the narrative rarely drags. The underlying research is deep and broad. Compelling capsule biographies, choice quotations, and tremendous writing keep the reader moving across chapters and centuries. Given these merits—and the prominence of its Pulitzer-Prize-winning author—the book is likely to stand as a leading introduction to the history of Latin America for years to come, especially for a US audience.

There is a certain irony in that, however. For the book is not really a history of Latin America—at least, that is not its primary objective. Instead, the deeper purpose of Latin American history in America, América is to hold a mirror to the United States, by foregrounding Latin America’s “magpie rivalry, its immanent critique” of the United States (p. xxv). Reassessing the United States in juxtaposition with its southern neighbors has value. However, in this reflection, the history of Latin America is distorted.

In brief, Grandin contrasts the United States’ history of racism, slavery, and imperial expansion with the rejection of these evils from Latin America. Later, the United States’ far-flung unilateral wars and covert interference are set against Latin America’s anti-interventionism and solidarity. Grandin correctly credits Latin Americans with a positive social and international vision that is more than a defensive reaction to US power.

This divergence begins well before independence. In a recurring motif, Grandin emphasizes Spanish friar Bartolomé de las Casas’ damning indictments of the illegitimacy and genocidal violence of Spain’s colonial project. British colonists and their US revolutionary grandsons had no such figure, Grandin asserts. Centuries later, Latin American revolutionary leaders such as Francisco de Miranda and Simón Bolívar built on Las Casas’ legacy by denouncing slavery and conquest. US founding fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slavers, whose national project and personal fortunes demanded the ever-expanding expropriation of indigenous lands. In contrast, the new Latin American republics, Grandin claims, had no frontier. Instead, they rejected conquest and discovery in favor of uti possidetis, a doctrine that set post-independence boundaries along colonial administrative lines.

There is no doubt that war, slavery, and the violent capture of indigenous lands must be central to any history of the United States’ founding and growth. But Grandin variously denies, ignores, and underplays the role of fundamentally similar processes in Latin American state-making. Brazilian slavery gets only passing attention, even though it lasted longer and was the single largest destination for the transatlantic slave trade. Violence against indigenous people was fundamental to the nineteenth-century expansion and consolidation of Latin American states in ways that paralleled the expanding US frontier. Yet, Grandin consigns these conflicts to a footnote (p. 280). Elsewhere, Grandin claims that indigenous dispossession “wasn’t integral to territorial aggrandizement nor a requirement for the realization of national sovereignty” (p. 230). Campaigns of expansion and pacification from the north of Mexico, into the Amazonian interior, and in the southern reaches of Patagonia suggest otherwise.

Much of Grandin’s argument rests on Latin America’s pioneering development of international law, stretching from the 1826 Congress of Panama to the present. Grandin repeatedly pairs Latin American jurists’ denunciations of “the doctrines of discovery and conquest” (p. 232). Here, he errs. Latin American jurists denounced external intervention and conquest but understood that their own territorial claims—and “right” to rule indigenous inhabitants—were inherited from Spanish and Portuguese claims of discovery. These jurists include some of Grandin’s anti-imperial heroes, such as Carlos Calvo (p. 313). As my own recent research with Carsten-Andreas Schulz shows, at the infamous 1884–85 Berlin Conference, the famed legal expert defended Portuguese rights to colonize West Africa because he understood that those colonial prerogatives had the same origins as Argentina’s claims to rule Patagonia and the South Atlantic islands. Grandin mentions Berlin as occupying “the opposite [end] of the moral spectrum” from Latin American diplomacy (p. 325), but in fact, several Latin American states recognized the Belgian imperial claims in Africa that resulted from that congress. Furthermore, Calvo supported the violent dispossession of indigenous people so that Argentina’s interior could be populated by white settler colonists, extending state authority into the lands it claimed under uti possidetis.

The differential treatment of interstate violence suffers from similar gaps. European interventions, often of greater consequence in the nineteenth century, are lost to the focus on the United States. There, episodes such as the Texas annexation, the US war against Mexico, William Walker’s filibustering, the usurpation of Cuban independence, and Cold War interventionism understandably play a major role. Even the vengeful US punitive expedition against Paraguay in 1858–59 receives two paragraphs (p. 285). In a startling contrast, the most devastating episode of interstate violence in nineteenth-century South America, the war between Paraguay and the expansionist triple alliance of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, is passed over in half a sentence; the conflict is mentioned only to preface Juan Batista Alberdi’s The Crime of War. Other intraregional wars are largely blamed on external interference. It is easier to sustain a heroic narrative about Latin America’s pacific tradition when one chooses to omit the bloodiest chapters of the region’s history.

Moving into the twentieth century, the book holds up the Mexican Revolution and its social constitution as a key example of the region’s progressive sentiments. This vision converges with the most favorable chapters on the United States: Grandin’s praise for the New Deal and Good Neighbor Policy of Franklin Roosevelt and, especially, his vice president Henry Wallace. Grandin correctly shows how an end to US intervention both placated the region and brought strategic benefits during wartime. Unfortunately, the ingrained anticommunism of US economic elites and politicians reverted the United States to its interventionist impulses. The study of fascist and falangist influences on this shift offers some of the book’s most fascinating pages. Grandin gives a deep dive on the rightward post-World War II turn across the Americas, using the 1948 killing of the Colombian radical liberal Jorge Eliécer Gaitán as a compelling climax—although any more causal links between the tragedy and nascent Cold War dynamics are tenuous.

The account of the Cold War focuses mostly on US intervention and overreach. The Latin American mirror here is Liberation Theology, dependency theory, and magical realism (pp. 588–594). The contrasts are fascinating, but the violent reaction to them was in many ways just as innately Latin American as the emancipatory currents. The region’s progressive impulses, from Mexico’s revolutionaries to Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, too often morphed into a repression that resembled that of their right-wing opponents. In the book, the dynamics behind these turns are secondary to the critiques made by tragic heroes such as the Colombian revolutionary priest Camilo Torres (pp. 581–583). During the Cold War, however, it was the reactionaries who ultimately and tragically exercised much greater sway. Usually, they enjoyed support at home as well as from the United States.

This suggests, in short, the trouble with the book’s premise. Grandin needs a heroic narrative about Latin America to serve as a foil for the flaws of the United States. US rhetoric of equality is denounced as a fig leaf. Fair enough: US hypocrisies were legion. Latin America’s appeals to international law and social justice are treated as reflecting the true character of the region. In making this divergence the core of his argument, Grandin misses something deeper. Latin America’s international arguments could be a crucial facet of frequently violent state-building projects: claims for equal status abroad often justified elite projects of rule, repression, and dispossession. Held in the looking glass, the reflection of America and América shows more commonality than Grandin’s contrast suggests.