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Iracema voou
para América
Just as Iracema is an anagram of America, in the lyrics of Chico Buarque's song Calibán is an anagram of cannibal. These poetic ways of using words create new meaning. The lyrics of the song read, Iracema voou para a América (Iracema flew to America, where America refers to the United States), even though the character in the song was already in America. For us in the Southern Hemisphere, there are two Americas, namely, the United States of America, which is usually called America, and Latin America, which is the one that interests us here. Calibán is a journal published by the Latin American psychoanalytic societies, and there are different countries grouped under this designation. For many years we have witnessed efforts to bring together and organize Latin American countries. Brazilians tend to say that we know very little about our region despite being part of it; our language, Portuguese, is only ours, which hinders direct communication.
The origin of the name Latin America is controversial. According to one school of thought, the French coined it in an attempt to highlight the region's Latin identity. This move would have been prompted by France's ambitions in relation to the continent, against Anglo-Saxon prevalence in North America. Since France was the most important Latin nation, the name Latin America created a kinship between the colonizers and the new lands. Another interpretation has shown, instead, that the first one to use the term was a Colombian writer, José María Torres Caicedo. Caicedo used it in a poem written in 1857 and titled ‘Las dos Américas’ (The two Americas'), which was intended to help develop a Latin American identity. Such origin reveals an attempt to bring together nations that were singular, fragmented, and detached, yet also united.
Everything leads us to believe that due to the ambiguity of the name, to the dialectic mark of origin (a designation that may have been