Cultural Complexes of Latin America: South and the Soul explores the theory and embodied reality that cultural complexes are powerful determinants in the attitudes, behaviour, and emotional life of individuals and groups.

The contributing authors, all from several Latin American countries, present compelling historical, anthropological, sociological, mythological, psychological, and personal perspectives on a part of the world that is full of promise and despair. Latin America is a region marked with psychic "fault lines" that cause disturbances in its populations on issues of social class, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, and even geography. Many of these "fault lines" appear to have their origins in the "basic fault" that occured with the conquest and colonization of the region, primarily by the Spanish and Portuguese.

This "basic fault" and its subsequent "fault lines" reside not only in various groups that compete for status, power, wealth, and meaning but in the psyche of every Latin American individual who carries the emotional memories and scars of conflicts that have coursed through their mixed blood for generations.