One of Our Own Among Strangers, a Stranger Among Our Own: On Latin American Identity Through the Prism of the Ethnonyms latinoamericano/latin, hispanic

The article, based on the opposition «own — alien» immanent to the civilizational discourse, examines the national-cultural specificity of Latin American identity, which integrates a set of meanings that structure the value space and serve as the basis for behavioral reactions and actions. The aim of the research is to compare the cognitive-pragmatic features of the ethnonyms latinoamericano/latin, hispanic in the discursive context of the Latin American and Anglo-Saxon civilizational platforms. For a correct consideration of the conceptual and pragmatic load of ethnonyms as a reflection of the mentality and linguistic picture of the world in the conditions of opposite civilizational spaces, the author uses a systemic approach based on the methods of conceptual, linguacultural, discursive, semantic, interpretive analysis, as well as the method of historical and sociolinguistic assessment. The research findings indicate that «Unity in diversity» (unidad en la diversidad) is an essential characteristic of the national worldview of Latin American countries. Diversity as a dominant element ensures the integrity of Latin American sociality with all the richness of cultural traditions and ways of being, born from the synthesis of the Autochthonous, Iberian and African civilization matrix, including the complex factor of miscegenation. At the same time, Latin American civilizational determination is devoid of the hierarchical superiority of some patterns of thinking and perception over others. The ethnonym latinoamericano functions as a key concept of the «inclusive» type of civilizational Latin American discourse, which is based on a fundamental understanding of the alien as alien, without making it one’s own, but preserving through the dominant of diversity a deep civilizational code shared in all countries of the region. In the modern world, Latin American identity is in a state of constant transformation, which is associated, among other reasons, with migration from Latin American countries to the United States. In the context of the Anglo-Saxon civilizational paradigm, the ethnonyms Latin/Hispanic inevitably become part of the «exclusive» civilizational discourse, which contrasts one’s own with the alien, and does not integrate it into the Anglo-Saxon model of civilizational identity. The perception of a Latin American as a socially determined personality of a migrant-resident, who has different civilizational characteristics (culture, religion, language, etc.), profoundly opposite to the values and traditions of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who make up the ethno-confessional core of the US population, provides grounds for considering the «foreigner» not as an ally, but as an adversary, often an enemy (crime, drug trafficking, illegal labor). Within the framework of the Anglo-Saxon civilizational paradigm, the ethnonym latinoamericano in its Americanized variants latin/hispanic loses its universal semantic unity because the bonds of civilizational, ethnic and national-state identity lose their strength in an alien civilizational context due to their vulnerability, leading to a separation of these concepts.

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