Choosing a name to stand for 580m Latin Americans

By M.R. | LIMA

At The Economist, we sometimes make life difficult for ourselves. Ever since 1843 we have eschewed bylines. The veil of anonymity may have become gossamer-thin in an era of blogs, tweets and media directories. But it serves us well: it makes for more consistent quality of writing, as well as a more collegial culture.

One consequence of this policy is that we have to find pseudonyms for our columns. Finding a name for the first one, begun in the 1980s about British politics, was easy: Walter Bagehot was not just a former editor of The Economist, but an authority on the British constitution and much else besides. The fact that his name is unpronounceable—“BADGE-ott” is an approximation—is a minor inconvenience. Other columns on the United States (Lexington), Europe (Charlemagne), business (Schumpeter) and so forth followed. But finding a name for columns that are about large and diverse continents or regions is difficult.

This was the task that faced us when we decided to start a Latin American column. The obvious name was Bolívar, for Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan-born liberator of northern South America, whose name is often invoked as a symbol of Latin American integration (never mind that he admired the United States, even while he was wary of it). So why did we reject him? Because he was irrelevant in Brazil, Mexico and the Southern Cone, and because his political legacy was a conservative one (only recently did Hugo Chávez, for his own purposes, create a “socialist” Bolívar). Great leader and general though he was, Bolívar’s belief in unbridled executive power, expressed in his short-lived constitution of Bolivia, opened the way to rule by caudillos less principled than he.

If not Bolívar, what? América (with an accent) would have neatly made the point that there’s more than one, but might have confused our, er, American readers (in the United States). We liked (Alexander von) Humboldt, the great explorer, naturalist and chronicler of Latin America around 1800, but he was German and is remembered for other things too. (Francisco de) Miranda was the precursor of independence—but to English ears is simply a girl’s name. Labyrinth makes neat allusions to Octavio Paz, Gabriel García Márquez and Borges, but is Greek and invites the reader to get lost. A couple of us were tempted by Bochini, in homage to the languid genius of the Independiente midfielder, but that would have been an insult to Brazil.

We asked for your suggestions—and thank you for them. Many of you urged us to choose Macondo, the fictional town of García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. But that would give an air of folkloric caricature to our column at odds with modern Latin America. There was support for several navigators and conquistadores (Columbus, Magellan, Vespucci) or for indigenous names such as Tahuantinsuyu (the Quechua word for the Inca Empire). We eschewed both groups: the history of the past 500 years in Latin America is overwhelmingly of mestizaje.

One of your best suggestions was maracuyá (or maracujá in Portuguese). The passion fruit is endemic to Brazil and the Mercosur countries, it conjures up the Latin American flair for fiesta, has a sharp edge and nods to the region’s Catholicism (its scientific name of passiflora was bestowed by Catholic missionaries who thought the flower resembled elements of Christ’s passion, a scholarly reader told us). But much though we enjoy partying and Latin American lifestyles, in the end we thought maracuyá just a touch frivolous.

That left two sober 19th century thinkers and statesmen. Joaquim Nabuco (1849-1910) was a Brazilian writer and Liberal politician who led the popular campaign to abolish slavery in his country, and was a great admirer of Bagehot. But he showed little interest in Spanish America; his mental compass was set firmly to the North Atlantic. So we opted for Andrés Bello, for the reasons we explain in this week’s inaugural column. Readers interested in knowing more about Bello, whose name is undeservedly forgotten today outside Chile and Venezuela, can turn to Ivan Jaksíc’s superb biography, “Andrés Bello: Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Latin America” (Cambridge University Press), on which this week’s column draws.

Latin America remains a project under construction. We don’t expect everyone to agree with our choice. At least we hope that you find the column stimulating.