The Parc de l'Amérique-Latine in Quebec City, the capital of a French speaking province in Canada, celebrates the cultural ties between Quebec and the other people who speak a Romance language in the Americas.
The idea that a part of the Americas has a linguistic affinity with the Romance cultures as a whole can be traced back to the 1830s, in the writing of the French Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier, who postulated that this part of the Americas was inhabited by people of a "Latin race", and that it could, therefore, ally itself with "Latin Europe" in a struggle with "Teutonic Europe", "Anglo-Saxon America" and "Slavic Europe".[8] The idea was later taken up by Latin American intellectuals and political leaders of the mid- and late-nineteenth century, who no longer looked to Spain or Portugal as cultural models, but rather to France.[9] The term was first used in Paris in an 1856 conference by the Chilean politician Francisco Bilbao[10] and the same year by the Colombian writer José María Torres Caicedo in his poem "Two Americas.[11] The term Latin America was supported by the French Empire of Napoleon III during the French invasion of Mexico as a way to include France among countries with influence in America and to exclude Anglophone countries and played a role in his campaign to imply cultural kinship of the region with France, transform France into a cultural and political leader of the area, and install Maximilian of Habsburg as emperor of the Second Mexican Empire.[12] This term was also christened in 1861 by French scholars in La revue des races Latines, a magazine dedicated to the Pan-Latinism movement.[13]
In contemporary usage:
In one sense, Latin America refers to territories in America where the Spanish or Portuguese languages prevail: Mexico, most of Central and South America, and in the Caribbean, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico – in summary, Hispanic America and Brazil. Latin America is, therefore, defined as all those parts of the Americas that were once part of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires.[14] By this definition, Latin America is coterminous with Ibero-america ("Iberian America").[15] Particularly in the United States, the term more broadly refers to all of the Americas south of the United States,[citation needed] thus including English-speaking countries such as Belize, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Lucia, Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and the Bahamas; French-speaking Haiti and Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana; and Dutch-speaking Curaçao, Aruba, St. Maarten, and Suriname. (In the former Curaçao and Aruba, Papiamento – a predominantly Iberian-derived creole language – is spoken by the majority of the population.) This definition emphasizes a similar socioeconomic history of the region, which was