Many Latin-American authors and intellectuals have tried to define ‘Our America’, i.e. Latin-American identity, against the growing political and economic pressure of the ‘Other America’, the USA. At the same time the USA have projected their own ethno-cultural conflicts onto their relation with Latin America. In this way the image of Latin America played also an indirect role for the construction of US American identity. Each phase in the history of the US/Latin-American relation link up with a re-definition of both identities. This essay follows the history of these (self-)reflections, with specific reference to policies of translation between the USA and Latin America (mainly of technical and economic texts, from English into Spanish).