Seven years after the publication of my book El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America, I did not expect to see parts of it come to life on the set of the extraordinary halftime show at Super Bowl LX staged by Puerto Rican musical sensation Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known to the world as Bad Bunny.  

For any of you who have not seen the performance, which was a 13-minute tour of Puerto Rican history, you can watch it on YouTube. You may have also read a lot of the takes decoding its symbolism, not least a set of sparking power lines that were a reminder of the island’s beleaguered electrical grid after Hurricane Maria in 2017.*  

However, there was one moment that put a lump in my throat. At the end of the performance, Bad Bunny grabs an American football and says ‘God bless América’ before carrying it through a field of sugar cane while roll-calling the countries of the Americas: 

Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolívia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Panamá, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Republica Dominica, Jamaica, Haiti, Antillas [the smaller Caribbean islands], United States, Canadá, Puerto Rico. 

While he’s doing this, members of his retinue parade behind, holding aloft flags from all the nations. After leaving his beloved Puerto Rico, Isla del Encanto, for last, he holds out the football, which reads:  

‘Together. We are America’.

It was an argument, broadly speaking, that had been made nearly 100 years earlier by the historian Herbert Bolton, at the rather less glamourous annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), of which he was president. 

A gathering of historians is far less a pop-culture sensation than a Super Bowl, but the 1932 event — the first time the AHA’s annual meeting had been held in Canada — nevertheless generated a flurry of excitement that included front-page photos in the Toronto Globe with the strapline: ‘Continent’s historians throng University of Toronto Campus’. Some 400 delegates attended the meeting during the final week of December, which was unseasonably warm. Bolton told a reporter ‘last week when I left San Francisco they were throwing snowballs’ but that in Toronto he did not even need to wear his coat. The following day he was quoted on more serious matters, under the front-page headline ‘Boom is forecast in South America by Dr H.E. Bolton’, which is one way of interpreting his presidential address, and makes sense for a newspaper looking for an angle. But what was really at the heart of his speech was a plea for a different, more expansive story of the Americas. 

Bolton criticised the state of history in the US, saying that ‘the study of thirteen English colonies and the United States in isolation has obscured many of the larger factors in their development, and helped to raise up a nation of chauvinists.’  Not only was a larger view ‘desirable from the standpoint of correct historiography’, it also had ‘present day political and commercial implications’. In the talk, he outlined what that wider, interconnected history might look like, leading him at the conclusion to call for the writing of an Epic of Greater America, riffing off the title of a history published in 1931 called Epic of America — with ‘America’ meaning the US — by James Truslow Adams, who, as it happens, had a grandmother from Venezuela.* Beyond the border of the US or the myths of the nation-state more widely, is a bigger, more inclusive, and, dare I say it, more interesting story. One that could put both the histories of Venezuela and the US under the banner of ‘epic’. 

Bolton had to travel his own path through the Americas to arrive at this point. He was born in 1870 in Wisconsin and mostly grew up there. He studied at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, where he met Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, who was teaching there and who in that year would present at that year’s AHA conference his paper, The Significance of the Frontier in American History. The ‘Turner thesis’, as it became known, was very influential, and it has an afterlife that stretches to the present day. At its core was the argument that the identity of the US — and its very democracy — were formed by the march of settlers to the West. The character of the pioneers ultimately shaped the national character. 

Turner was an important influence in Bolton’s trajectory, and a mentor who helped him get to the University of Pennsylvania for his PhD, the University of Texas and then the University of California by 1911. It was in the West that Bolton began seriously investigating what he called the ‘Spanish borderlands’, dedicating the next part of his career to excavating archives in Mexico and writing about California, Texas, the rest of the West, and, later, Florida, through the lens of the Spanish past. It also meant that his work diverged quite significantly from that of Turner. It was difficult to make the case, looking up from the borderlands, that the US character had not been formed, at least in part, by the people who had long been living there before the pioneers showed up. 

In 1919, Bolton started offering a course at the University of California Berkeley, where he was then teaching, about the history of the Americas, rather than only that of the US. It proved immediately popular with students, with hundreds signing up for the initial survey class. It was a prescient turn. 

His AHA address came more than a decade later and a year before another significant speech — President Franklin D Roosevelt’s inaugural address on March 4, 1933, in which he outlined what would become known as the Good Neighbor Policy, saying:  ‘I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor — the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others’.*

FDR’s words came after a disruptive start to the 20^th century which saw US involvement or occupation in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Panamá, Mexico, and Nicaragua before the onset of the Second World War. More would follow. But in the interlude, there was a push for trade and some soft power production, such as Disney’s tour of South America in Saludos Amigos (1942).

After the war, the ‘good neighbour’ became meddlesome once again, harassing many of its neighbours. There were also larger, more positive changes afoot within academia in the post-war period, where Bolton’s work remained influential. Later generations of scholars continued his borderlands research or worked towards larger hemispheric projects. I stumbled upon Bolton when I was a PhD student  in the early 2000s and was minded to return to him again when I began El Norte. His words continue to resonate, because the idea of the Greater America still has not come to pass. If anything, it feels further away than ever. The chauvinism that Bolton spoke of is at perhaps its highest-ever ebb. There may have been significant changes in the academy, but there is a much longer way to go in shifting the wider public imagination and convincing people that the US is, indeed, a Latin American country.

In the conclusion to El Norte, I wrote: 

The long and complex history of the Spanish and Hispanics is inescapably entwined with that of the United States; it is not a separate history of outsiders or interlopers, but one that is central to how the United States has developed and will continue to develop. The United States is part of the Americas and likewise the people of the Americas are part of the United States.

This was in the context of the book about the Spanish past, but it applies to all the pasts of the Western Hemisphere – British, Dutch, Danish, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Indigenous, and African. Bad Bunny’s performance was a much-needed reminder that our history binds us. I like to think that Herbert Bolton would have approved. 

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* For anyone wanting to read more about Puerto Rico and the fallout from Hurricane Maria, I highly recommend When the Sky Fell, by journalist Michael Deibert, who lived on the island.

* Adams is credited with coining the phrase ‘American dream’. 

* This is also where FDR said the often-quoted line: ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’.

Further reading:  

Bannon, John Francis. ‘Herbert Eugene Bolton – Western Historian’. The Western Historical Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1971): 260. https://doi.org/10.2307/967834.

Bolton, Herbert Eugene. ‘The Epic of Greater America’. The American Historical Review 38, no. 3 (1933).

Hurtado, Albert L. ‘Bolton and Turner: The Borderlands and American Exceptionalism’. The Western Historical Quarterly 44, no. 1 (2013): 4–20. https://doi.org/10.2307/westhistquar.44.1.0004.

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What I’m …. not doing

This past fortnight has been one of very little cultural engagement because we moved house within Seoul, though the move was a sort of learning experience in itself. We used the firm who moved us in when our things arrived via ship in 2024, as their prices seemed reasonable and they had been efficient. Well, for a complete in-town relocation they showed up with a small army of seven people, including one older lady who donned an apron and was in charge of the kitchen. They had our 3-bed flat packed up and ready to go before lunch, and unpacked with the boxes taken away by 2pm. I’m not sure this sort of service would even be available in London, no matter how much money you offered. It has been a learning curve about what it means to be truly efficient. It also meant that instead of tearfully looking at a flat full of boxes, we could put our feet up in our lovely new sitting room and enjoy a glass of wine, which really should be how every house move ends.