On his first day back in office, President Trump issued an executive order to change the name of the body of water that had been known since the mid-sixteenth century as the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” The new name could be heard in different ways. Trump presumably intended the change to assert the dominance of the United States; for him and for many others in this country, “America” is synonymous with the United States. But, to Latin Americans, “America” spans all the land from Chile to Canada.

The inclusive understanding of America allowed some to read a subversive meaning into the order. Over breakfast in San Juan last month, Jorge Giovanetti, an anthropologist at the University of Puerto Rico, suggested to me that, in trying to reclaim the Gulf of Mexico for the United States, perhaps Trump has actually reclaimed it for the Americas. I had been thinking something similar. Maybe Cubans, for example, saw a silver lining? Why should the Gulf belong only to Mexico? Now it could be theirs, too. I imagined graffiti artists spraying an accent over the “e” in America whenever they came across it.

Latin Americans have seen themselves as constitutive of America for as long as Americans in the United States have cast Latin Americans as outsiders. As Greg Grandin notes in “America, América,” a new history of the Western Hemisphere, Spain and its colonists played an essential role in the success of the U.S.’s fight for independence from the British. In 1781, during the Revolutionary War, the governor of Spanish Louisiana, Bernardo de Gálvez, led troops, including free Afro-Cubans, in a successful siege of British-held Pensacola, Florida. Galveston, Texas, is named for him, and every May Pensacolans celebrate Galvez Day. The U.S. Congress made him an honorary U.S. citizen in 2014, a designation bestowed upon only seven other individuals including Winston Churchill and Mother Teresa. Even now, thousands of tourists travel to the tiny mountainside town in Spain where Gálvez was born to celebrate July 4th with a reënactment of the pivotal battle.

Simón Bolívar, who was born the same year that the treaty ending the American Revolution was signed, considered the United States to be a “singular model of political virtue and moral rectitude.” He believed that the Americas—both North and South—had an important role to play on the world stage in repudiating monarchy. Grandin opens “America, América,” with a quote that captures Bolívar’s expansive vision: “I can see America seated on liberty’s throne, wielding justice’s scepter, crowned with glory, revealing to the Old World the majesty of the New.”

Bolívar’s vision of a unified New World differed strikingly from the one held by several U.S. Founders. Neither John Adams nor Thomas Jefferson saw Spanish Americans as part of the same community, let alone as equals. Jefferson thought that the nation he had helped establish might eventually possess South America, and that the inhabitants of the Americas would all speak the same language—presumably English. Adams, for his part, found the notion that Spanish Americans might govern themselves preposterous. “The people of South America are the most ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom,” he wrote. The democratic dreams of Spanish America’s independence leaders, according to Adams, were as “absurd as similar plans would be to establish democracies among the birds, beasts and fishes.”

The difference between how United States and Latin American leaders saw the New World—as a vast territory over which the U.S. reigned supreme, or as a shared hemisphere defined by sovereignty and mutual respect—was encapsulated by the Monroe Doctrine. The doctrine, first laid out by James Monroe in his State of the Union address, in 1823, stated that, since everything that took place in the Americas affected the “peace and happiness” of the United States, the country had the right to intervene in affairs throughout the Western Hemisphere to protect its own interests. The doctrine meant that the U.S. would defend other countries in the hemisphere against European aggression. But, as Woodrow Wilson noted, almost a century later, there was “nothing in it that protected you from aggression from us.”

At first, many Spanish Americans fighting for independence from Spain praised the Monroe Doctrine, interpreting it as support for their own revolutionary struggles. “The United States of the North have solemnly declared that they would view any measures taken by continental European powers against America and in favor of Spain as a hostile act against themselves,” Bolívar declared after hearing Monroe’s speech. Over time, Bolívar came to view “our brothers to the north” with more suspicion. The United States, he wrote, “seems destined by Providence to plague America with miseries in the name of Freedom.”

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, U.S. Presidents invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify intervening in Latin American countries. After the Texas Revolution, when European powers tried to wield influence over the independent Republic of Texas, President James Polk, in his first annual message to Congress, in December, 1845, said, “The present is deemed a proper occasion to reiterate and reaffirm the principle avowed by Mr. Monroe and to state my cordial concurrence in its wisdom and sound policy.” By the end of the month, Texas had become the twenty-eighth state, and the following year the United States, led by Polk, provoked a war with Mexico which wrested more than half the country’s territory. In 1904, after the Spanish-American War, President Theodore Roosevelt issued what became known as his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The United States, he declared, would “exercise international police power” not only when European empires meddled in the Americas but when there was any sort of “wrongdoing.” His words were later cited to justify military occupations in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and elsewhere.

That different parties could impute different meanings to the Monroe Doctrine is partly what has made it such an effective piece of rhetoric. “The doctrine’s magic, and the source of its enduring influence,” Grandin writes, “is found in its ambiguity, in its ability to reconcile contradictory policy impulses.” As late as 1893, a Colombian historian, adhering to Bolívar’s interpretation, could argue that the Monroe Doctrine was “simply the application of the principle of national sovereignty to the republics of this continent.” Even after the occupation of Cuba and the annexation of Puerto Rico, the construction of the Panama Canal, and Roosevelt’s declaration of the U.S. right to intervene in Latin American affairs, it was still possible to hear something more hopeful in Monroe’s words. Just after the start of the First World War, Santiago Pérez Triana, a former Colombian Ambassador to the United Kingdom, called for a “A Monroe Doctrine of the Future” that would stand for solidarity between the United States and Latin America.

“America, América” is Grandin’s eighth book and is, in many ways, a continuation of themes he has written about for decades. It follows his Pulitzer Prize-winning “The End of the Myth,” from 2019, which argued that the frontier, as both a place and an idea, had given the United States a sense of purpose rooted in conquest and territorial expansion. As long as there was open land, the frontier served as a safety valve to alleviate domestic conflicts, most notably over the extension of slavery. The frontier’s closing, the unavailability of new lands, and the enclosure of national space by the border wall in the late twentieth century were existential crises. The United States turned inward; its citizens turned violently against immigrants and one another.

In his new book, Grandin tells the same story from the Latin American side. His account begins in the Spanish colonial period, when Spaniards and other Europeans debated the philosophical underpinnings of conquest and slavery, setting in motion an ideological battle between humanism and barbarism which, Grandin thinks, continues to this day. The book has few heroes. One of them is the Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas, whose most famous work, “A Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies,” written in 1542, recounts a litany of sins that las Casas claimed to have personally observed the Spanish commit. The conquistadors raped Indigenous women, chopped off Indians’ hands, used swords as spits to roast Indian babies over fires as their mothers watched. His account circulated throughout Europe, informing official Spanish policy toward Indians in the Americas and shaping views of the conquistadors’ cruelty for centuries to come.

The conquistadors, understandably, were not fans of las Casas’s reports. When the Spanish Crown, from thousands of miles away, ordered them to treat Indians better, they often ignored its orders. In doing so, they were buffered by other Spanish thinkers who took issue with las Casas’s arguments, primarily Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. Oviedo and Sepúlveda shared with las Casas the view that Indians were not monsters and did, in fact, have souls that could be saved (a matter of debate for much of the sixteenth century). But, Grandin writes, they argued that “Indians were lesser humans” and that therefore the “conquest of the New World was fundamentally just.”

Back in Spain, Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, told Sepúlveda that the massacres of Indians were “chastisements” for their sins. His account shaped Sepúlveda’s view that Indians were guilty of “barbarism,” as Grandin describes it. The land’s abundance had made them lazy. They sometimes resisted evangelization. They didn’t wear clothes. And, Oviedo wrote, they committed “sins against nature, and in many parts eating one another and sacrificing to the Devil and to their idols many children, men and women.”