“Latinity” as Colonial Ideology. The Travel Writing of Italian Journalists in Mexico in the 1920s

Pan-Latinism is a political ideology conceived and shaped in France in the second half of the nineteenth century with the aim of countering Anglo-Saxon hegemony in Latin America. The concept managed to survive in spite of the disastrous failure of Napoleon III’s military intervention in Mexico in the 1860s, an attempt to instate Maximilian of Habsburg as Emperor of Mexico. While in Latin America the ideology of Pan-Latinism found particular resonance in the writings of José Enrique Rodó and the birth of Arielism, in Europe it would first find a home in the cultural sphere in France and Spain, and later in the political sphere in 1920s Italy with the rise of fascism.