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EPILOGUE
Several key themes that have been traced through Latin America's modern history continue to define Latin American life today, in ways that echo old patterns while highlighting new progress and new challenges.
Latin Americans' relationship to their environment is becoming increasingly urgent. Having long treated nature as a wilderness to be tamed or a resource to be exploited, Latin Americans now seek "sustainable development" amid a growing vulnerability to environmental challenges like earthquakes, pollution, and climate change.
Having long been integrated into the global economy as exporters of commodities, Latin Americans continue to export agricultural and mineral products and to import high technology from the global North. As before, however, Latin Americans quickly adopt and adapt new technologies, such as mobile phones and the internet, technologies that in turn create new opportunities for commodity exports, such as the lithium mined in Andean deserts for use in the rechargeable batteries of mobile phones, laptops, and electric vehicles.
The struggle for equality, justice, and inclusion by vulnerable and marginalized people in Latin American society continues. With struggles for socio-economic, gender, ethnic, and racial equality still unresolved, a new campaign for equality has made progress with surprising speed: the movement for LGBT rights.
Latin America's global connections – particularly to the United States – remain central to its future, as to its history. These connections are not always benign. Since the 1980s, a transnational cycle of insecurity, migration, gang violence, and deportation has linked Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and the United States. Central American immigrants constitute but one current of the roughly 55 million people of Hispanic or Latino heritage who now shape – largely for the better – life in the United States. The people of the Americas – North, Central, and South – share a common history and increasingly converge on common patterns, common challenges, and a common future.