As Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera describes in Decolonizing American Spanish, the rise of Latin American Studies decentralized the Eurocentric nature of scholarship across several fields: "At once a radical and democratizing thrust, the move localized a hemispheric shift in intellectual focus and had profound influences on the central tenets of the disciplines, on the institutions involved (departments, universities, publications, professional associations, and so on), on the structural presumptions that organize knowledge-production, and on the latitude of subjectivities that may be conceptualized and institutionalized.
While many of the pre–Latin American studies methodologies remain (including the centrality of literature, foregrounding the national/transnational as a meaningful container of culture, and periodization exigencies), the move toward Latin America localized the themes and subjects that appeared in US classrooms, deconstructing some of the Eurocentric supremacy of the traditional model.
For example, the Latin American Centre of the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies (SIAS) at the University of Oxford heavily focuses on the social sciences, such as the economics, politics, and development of the region.
In a pre-digital era, the compilation of annotated bibliographic references in the humanities and social science organized by subject and country was a vital tool for scholars in the field.
[7] With the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the US government began seriously focusing on Latin America as Cuba and the hemisphere was seen to be an integral element of Cold War politics.
[9] In Canada, York University in Toronto established the first Latin American center, "in part thanks to the inflow of exiled intellectuals from South America.