Definitions of "America"

Gruesz discusses the term "America" and looks at the many etymological meanings of the word in an attempt to gage a better understanding of the true meaning of the term. She looks at the ambiguities surrounding the origins of the term and discusses how how whilst America was once understood as stretching from "Yukon to Patagonia", it has now become more synonomous with referring to the USA. She also looks at the other ways in which "America" has gained different meanings over time, for example, she uses Edmundo O'Gorman's argument that "America was invented before it was discovered", an idea that Europeans had long imagined a new world before it was inhabited. She also looks at America as a land of "Historylessness", again showing how the term is understood to mean a "New" land.

She concludes by discussing NAFTA, and argues that whilst nowadays "America" is widely understood to be the USA, NAFTA offers a way of uniting all of the American continent through trade, thus showing how "America" can still be used to describe the distance from Latin America to Canada. However, the fact that America is used to describe the USA shows how America is a global hegemon, and the most powerful and dominant within the continent.