Descripción:
This article will focus on cognitive and mental borders that find expression in perceptions of the foreign other. Perceptions and mental images demonstrate the exchange function of borders. Borders – whether political or cultural – are constructed on the basis of concepts of alterity. For historians of Latin America, the main pole of alterity has been Europe; historians have traditionally concentrated on processes of perception in relation to the “Old World”. From a European perspective, America – at the point of its discovery – constituted a monolithic “New World”.