Is the hispanic world really in "USA's backyard" ?

In the North American collective imagination, the Spanish speaking countries are often thought as located in the natural extension of north America, an immediate neighbor anchored squarely within their continental sphere of influence. The hispanic world is often thought as the "countries south of the border".

This viewpoint fosters a certain geographical paternalism, assuming that Hispanic America is, by definition, "right on their doorstep.", and often assuming, in contrast, that Europe is located far away from any part of the hispanic world.

I wanted to write this article in memory to an old anecdotic discussion I had a few years ago with an American student when I was travelling in Costa Rica: I was speaking with an American traveler, she expressed a genuine astonishment upon learning that me, a European, was learning Spanish, exclaiming with candor that she could not understand the point of studying the language while " you are European, you live so far from the Hispanic world." I had similar comments many times when chatting in online forums.

I then realized that to many Americans, the Spanish speaking world is often over-focussed on USA's southern Neighbour, Mexico. As such, the rest of the spanish speaking countries feels somehow blurred or even totally missed. As a consequence, the whole of Europe is somehow though in USA-based global medias, viewed as a homogeneous, distant cultural bloc, thought as completely cut off from Hispanic cultures.

It is precisely this inconcious illusion that needs to be deconstructed, demonstrating not only that Hispanic culture is obviouly intrinsic to Europe because its origins lies here, but also that even outside of Spain, a vast portion of spanish speaking South America has historically been structurally, and even geographically closer to Europe, and especially southern Europe than to the United States.

Hispanicity : An Intrinsically European Reality

Firstly, let's remind us some obvious evidences that mith be sometimes overlooked in modern global representation : that before being a distant sub-continent, the Hispanic world finds its geographical, historical, and cultural roots at the very heart of Western Europe. Spain is the original matrix of this civilization, and the European Union itself enshrines Spanish as one of its major official languages, institutionalizing its presence at the core of the Old Continent's institutions. In Europe, Spanish language is not an immigrant language, not a "global south" language, it is a major cultural, economical and cultural languages of Europe, on pair with french, english or german.

Also, due to the compact size of Europe, any part of western Europe is never very far from spanish speaking lands. There is a striking paradox in how distances are perceived :

Paris, for exemple is only 670 km away from the Spanish-speaking world, located just down below the pyrenees. This is closer than the distance between San Francisco and the Mexican Border. Proportionally speaking, this is roughly the distance between Dallas and the Mexican border in Texas—yet Texas or California are constantly presented as the epitome of proximity to the Hispanic world from a USA point of view.

The distances to Spain of the major french cities such as Marseille, Toulouse or Bordeaux are significatively closer than the distances of Austin or San Antonio.

Paris is actually lot closer to a spanish speaking capital (Madrid in that case) than is Los Angeles (to mexico), and by very far. Only 1050 km separate Paris with Madrid, while Los Angeles, often seen as the gateway of Mexico and latin America, is located at 2 500 km to the Mexican capital… less than 10 hour easy driving are needed to go from Paris to Madrid without any real border control, while going from Los Angeles to Mexico is a more than day days driving in difficult conditions and a hard border crossing.

In the follwing maps, we mesured the distances of 7 of the major Spanish spaking cities of the world with North America or European cities : those cities are Mexico, Buenos Aires, Bogota, Madrid, Lima, Santiago and Barcelona.

From Los Angeles, the closest is Mexico, at 2480 km, which is, at European scale, already quite far (2 480 km from Paris and we are in the middle of the Sahara desert). The other big spanish speaking cities are way farther, Bogota at 4950 km, Lima at 5 950 km, Santiago at 8 980 km. The idea that Los Angeles is at the door of latin America feels totally meaningless when we realize that LA is actually avec a little "closer" to Madrid and Barcelona than it is to Buenos Aires...

From the french capital Paris, two major Spanish speaking cities are in around 1000 km. Barcelona is even a little bit less at 815 km of distance, that can be easily made driving by car or by high speed train in a few hours from city center to city center. Obviously, the spanish speaking cities of the new world are way farther, but for most of them not much than they are from Los Angeles. most big hispanish American cities are about at the same distance from Paris as Santiago is to LA. Mexico City and Bogota are even a bit "closer" to Paris than Buenos Aires is to Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, deeply anchored in an Anglo-Saxon prism, American public opinion persists in viewing Paris as a "northern" capital disconnected from any spanish speaking culture, even though France shares an immediate geographical, cultural, historic and linguistic intimacy with the Iberian space.

Reversing the preconcieved idea : When even Latin America can be geographically "Closer" to Europe Than to North America

When we move away from traditional flat maps (such as the Mercator projection, which distorts our perception of landmasses) to analyze orthodromic distances (great-circle lines measured across the surface of the globe), the geodesic truth shatters the myth of a unified Pan-American bloc.

The Immensity of the Subcontinent: Latin America is not a small, contiguous neighbor of the USA. Mexico might be a neighbor, but the stretching of the Central American isthmus and the sheer expanse of the South American space act as massive distance-amplifiers.

The Kilometric Abyss of the Southern Cone: Metropolises like Buenos Aires lie at colossal distances from New York (over 8,300 to 8,500 km) or Los Angeles (over 10,040 km). For a huge portion of South American populations and territories, the "great northern neighbor" is in reality farther away than the latin-European capitals of south-Western Europe.

Despite being located in the Americas, Buenos Aires is actually a bit closer to Madrid in Europe than it is to Los Angeles.

The Surprise of Transatlantic Equivalences: When measuring routes from Europe to South America, we realize that the Atlantic Ocean is not an impassable barrier, but a direct maritime bridge. The distances linking Europe to southern metropolises rival—and sometimes surpass in proximity, those connecting those same regions to North American decision-making centers.

Rethinking Atlantic Centrality

Ultimately, the cartography of distances restores a historical truth often obscured by contemporary geopolitical discourses. Latin America does not form a block mechanically turned toward Washington or subservient to its immediate continental sphere.

Through the relentless geometry of geodesy, a large part of South America has historically shared a space of much closer proximity with Europe than with the United States. The Atlantic Ocean, far from isolating the Old Continent from its southern counterpart, redraws the contours of a true Atlantic community where Latinity, whether European or American, shares a common space of exchange since more than 500 years.

When In Buenos Aires, by looking at the architecture, language, urbanity, cafe culture, one think easily much more being way « closer » fo the latin European capitals like Paris, Madrid or Rome than to the far away metropolises of north America. Not only culturally, but even on a pure geographical point of view, despite being far away from Europe.

Buenos Aires, also said "the Paris of south America" :

Carlos Gardel, born Charles Gardès in Toulouse, the mythical Franco-Argentinean singer that popularized Tango-based singing was part of this cultural Bridge from France to the southern Cone.