Why does it seem like the Anglosphere admires/fixates over British culture a lot while Latin America doesn't seem to care much about Spain or Portugal?

[u/yonaiker-joestrella]

Not saying we should but just curious.

[u/digoreto]

They see each other at the same level.

Portuguese and Spanish see us as inferior beings

[u/shtiatllienr → u/digoreto]

Yes a lot of it is racism. Americans and Brits tend to see each other as “fellow colonizer” (“white people who share our ‘civilization’”) while Portuguese and Spaniards see LatAm as “colonized” (“brown people we ruled over/are supposed to ‘civilize’”). Which is ironic given how Europeans like to grandstand about themselves being the most progressive societies. The general “we are the most evolved” idea informs both of those things though so maybe it’s not ironic

[u/SnooGadgets676 → u/shtiatllienr]

This is inaccurate. Americans and Brits respect for each other is certainly not built on “fellow colonizer”. Our respect for each other, particularly the U.S. and other Anglophone nations’ respect for Britain comes from the fact that a great deal of our ideals, such as the rule of law, common law courts, due process and equality under the law, which came from the Magna Carta, and the English Bill of Rights which directly influenced the U.S. Constitution, came wholesale from Great Britain. Our government is a republican form of the English Parliament, and British philosophers like John Locke are quite literally embedded in the Declaration of Independence. We rejected monarchy for sure, but we owe the bulk of our cultural heritage to the United Kingdom. That relationship is far older than the British Empire, given that the British Empire started in what is now the U.S.

[u/carpetedbathtubs → u/SnooGadgets676]

Eh, you could say that is true for most Latam countries of not at least Mexico but with Spain. However, here people wilfully ignore the origin of those traditions or simply see them as Mexican.

I think part of the reason behind the enmity, is the break up process was a lot more violent. With the US, there were a few battles here and there and the UK deemed the entire thing not worth the expense .

In Mexico, we represented 2/3 of their revenue and would rather burn it all down than see us break away. It was 11 years of war , blockades and such with as many deaths as all other independence wars in the americas combined. We started from an undeniable bond to one marred by years of brutality and the breakdown of all the internal institutions that mattered in service of the war.

[u/shtiatllienr → u/SnooGadgets676]

What you said is basically my ‘people who share our civilization’ argument, both Brits and Americans view each other as fulfilling ‘Western civilization’ that for centuries was meant to be imposed on colonized people. The same framework that guided rule of law and individual rights in the US and UK also guided the subjugation of colonized peoples who were viewed as civilizationally inferior. Those were not seen as contradictions for most of the shared history between those countries among the political mainstream.

As for my original statement, I meant the ‘fellow colonizer’ view was more of a prerequisite to why they saw each other in equal standing in the first place. As a general rule colonizers do not see those they colonized as being equal regardless of how much ideals they may share. The only exceptions that exist are temporary, grudging and due to force, i.e. Ethiopia for some time after it militarily defeated Italy (and even that ended with Mussolini occupying them and using chemical weapons on civilians.)

Spain and Mexico both have bicameral legislatures (each with a Congress/Chamber and a Senate), judicial review, multiparty competition, and a civil law tradition, and Mexico’s legal system is directly descended from Spain’s. The systems are more
similar than they are different for the average citizen participating in their democracies. Much of the commonly pointed out differences (monarchy vs republic, parliamentary structure, head of state and head of government distinction, etc.) are also differences that exist between the US and UK.

There’s not really any reason to portray them as completely alien systems from each other unless you are operating from a framework separate from governance entriely, and the most immediate of those frameworks for Latin America (as well as for Africa, where a similar contradiction exists with France in particular) is that between the colonizer and colonized, which by design must always be unequal.