Abstract
Having spent a significant part of my career editing the two major interdisciplinary journals on Latin America published in the United Kingdom, I have thought for years about what our role as editors should be in terms of linking different traditions of Latin American studies—North American, European (in all their various national guises), and Latin American (again, in all their various national guises). There were clear differences between the two journals. The Bulletin of Latin American Research was the journal of the (UK) Society for Latin American Studies, so one could envisage the “typical” reader as one of the 200 or so who attended annual conferences; the Journal of Latin American Studies, one of the two or three leaders internationally in the field, presented different challenges, since its readership was much broader and its reach much more global, evident in the fact that roughly 40 percent of submissions came from North America. (I should emphasize here that what follows is my personal view, not that of my editorial colleagues or the publisher of either journal.)
In the end I would hope that the Journal of Latin American Studies was positioned—metaphorically—somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, allowing Latin American scholars to speak to U.S. and European debates in history and the social sciences and contributing ourselves, as North American and European specialists in the region, both to those debates and to the often different research conversations prevalent in Latin America (for example, the postmodernist turn in history departments in the United States, which marginalized economic history there, never had an equivalent impact in Latin America). It does seem to me very important that monolingual U.S. and European scholars in fields other than Latin American studies should have access to the work and perspectives of scholars from the region, but this should not mean that the latter should slavishly adopt U.S. approaches.
We were thus keen to offer Latin American academics an outlet in English, knowing that the details and abstracts of their papers would be picked up by the major English-language bibliographical platforms, and to help them by processing their papers in Spanish or Portuguese up to the point of final acceptance. This is not to defend the hegemony of English in global academic discourse but simply to be realistic about it. Latin American scholars have to be able to publish in English if they are to have an impact outside the region; indeed, they may often need to do so to have an impact outside their own country, given the relatively limited circulation of many journals published within Latin America.
Latin American awareness of academic debates in the North Atlantic has certainly improved considerably in the past 15 years because of Internet access to journals, often via Latin American research councils and consortia, and there are many scholars based in universities and research institutes there who could (and should) have an impact outside their own country. The welcome result, for the Journal, was a marked increase in article submissions from the region itself. However, it was sometimes difficult to persuade a Latin American scholar writing on his/her own country that the appeal of the paper would be rather broader—and as editors this was one of our objectives—if he or she framed it, at least partially, in terms of the international literature on the wide theme rather than pitching it just to a national audience. For example, in my own field, business history, there is exciting work being published in various Latin American countries on topics such as family business groups, development banks, and other state-owned enterprises in the import-substitution-industrialization era, but it is not well known outside the region in the international community of business historians because relatively little has appeared in English and much of it tends not to be comparative. Publishing in English, I recognize, is a particular problem for excellent scholars in Latin America who have not been through doctoral training in the North: this is a group that I really think deserves as much editorial support as we can offer in order to make their work accessible to a non–Latin Americanist audience and thus broaden its international impact.
On the other side of the coin, I do believe that it is totally unforgivable for a U.S. scholar to submit a paper to an area studies journal that cites nothing but English-language literature: the most egregious example in my experience was a paper we once received on the 2000 Mexican presidential election directed at debates in U.S. political science from whose citations one could not help but infer that the author believed that no Mexican scholar had ever published anything of significance on the most important election in the country’s history. It dismays me also that, particularly in economics and to some extent in political science, Latin American scholars feel, for reasons of promotion or prestige, that they must show themselves to be using the methodologies and language that dominate the parallel departments in leading U.S. universities (though not so much in Europe, where there is much more diversity of approach, in political science at least). The result is often unreadable and of interest only to a very narrow audience.
The essence of an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary journal published in the global North, in my view, therefore, is that papers should be readable and interesting across disciplines, and the essence of a Latin American studies journal should be that the articles are of interest to scholars in all parts of the Atlantic basin (and beyond), not just to those in the country where the author works, whether that is the United States of America or the Estados Unidos Mexicanos.