Sub-continents Second continent by the surface, America extends along a meridian axis. Divided into two most of similar dimensions, connected by the mountainous arc of the Central America, this continent knows all the climates, of most extreme with softest. From Alaska to the Earth of Fire, it is bordered, along its peaceful frontage, by an immense cordillera, long 22 ' 000 km. This vigorous barrier limits great zones of plains and plates, open on the Atlantic Ocean.
The XIX E century sees taking shape a continent divided in three linguistic units: english-speaking (North America), Spanish-speaking (of the Earth of Fire in Mexico) and Portuguese-speaking (Brazil). On the other hand, the French-speaking contribution is majority only in Quebec.
If three “giants” dissociate themselves by their surface (Brazil, Canada and the United States), there exists also a mosaic of States much smaller, like Honduras, El Salvador and Paraguay. Their capitals, hypertrophied, which often gather one the third of the population, illustrate the urban explosion and the extent of the migrations of the campaigns towards the cities.
On the whole, three nations in North America, including two very rich, eighteen in Central America and of the South, often very poor, testify to the differences between the two linguistic parts of the continent. One developed, the other in the process of development, one made up by large countries, the other of a mosaic of States, sometimes rival. The men made American continent, in spite of its often close physical features, a space with the multiple facets.
The myth of America
America is a nondesired continent, a world in excess, which emerged suddenly on the road of the European navigators of the end of the XV E century, who sought, in the west, the shortest way towards gold and the spices of the East.
If the conquistadores resembled curiously to the divinities whose mythologies melancholic persons of the Indian empires announced the arrival at the end of times, the inhabitants of the New World did not answer any waiting of the Spanish, Italian or Portuguese discoverers. Europeans transfer thus in America minus the field of an original civilization that a ground favourable with the culture of their phantasms: the New World seemed the image, in hollow, of Old; the Indians were equipped at the same time with all the virtues lost by Christendom (it is the topic of the “good savage”) and with all the monstrosities which make indistinct the dividing line between the man and the animal (it is the topic of the “cannibal”).
Before being a continent, America was thus a dream, the territory of imaginary European, where the representatives of an exhausted and perverted civilization could find the golden age of the world, the primitive company in its state of innocence, and have virgin space at the same time where to build of all parts a new company.
Right from the start, America appears thus under its double face: the most authentic nature and the place of the artificial creations most daring.
They are the most elaborate cultures of America, those of Aztec, the Mayas and Incas, which underwent the first shock - and more the violent one - colonization: their ruin is contemporary of their discovery. Having thus erased its historical origins, America recomposed a mythical birth: it is the pioneer who creates America. Less in the highlands of the Andean zone where writers and anthropologists indigenists still seek to bore the enigma of the Indian faces “to the pupils without glare”, less in the tropical forests and equatorial of Brazil or Paraguay where the tiny communities guaranis hopelessly try to find “Ground without evil” where the directing Ancestor of the world took refuge, less in the disinherited extents of the Pampa and the Earth of Fire, which have lived again for one century in the epopee of the gauchos.
The mythical axis of America, it is that which crosses of is in west the north of the continent, and according to which the “Border moves gradually”, to the rhythm of successive immigrations: those which chose the exile to preserve their religious faith (French Protestants of Villegaignon in Brazil, English puritans of Mayflower in New England) or their social illusions (fourierists of Texas); those which, pushed by misery, gave up the ungrateful grounds of Ireland and Italy or the slums of the Central Europe; those which, formed in the old European schools, found in the laboratories of the universities and the companies of the first industrial State the means of concluding their research.
The emblematic figures of America remain the trapper, the trapper, the gold digger, the cowboy. But also the outlaw. America lives of this double movement: that which creates a world, organizes a company, and that which disputes this company and lives in its margins - of the philosopher transcendantalist to the beatnik.
The democratic optimism of America is based on the exorcism of a double original fault: the murder of the Indian, the slavery of the Black. And the continent which is diluted on an immense space, between the fields of ice of the Far North and the haciendas Argentinas, concentrates its population in megalopoles, reserves and ghettos.
More than one crucible, America is a patchwork - this expensive assembly of rags to the women of the pioneers -, a ground of contrasts which lived until now this formidable potential difference between populations of horizons and visions of the world heterogeneous. And this contrast is reinforced today by the diffuse but obstinate confrontation between the Anglo-Saxon part of the continent, which thinks from now on of defending its values and its language, and its Latin-American component, which operates a melting-pot of a new kind between Spanish, English and the quechua, Catholicism and the voodoo, the heirs to Don Quichotte and those of Mark Twain.