Integration processes in Latin America and Caribbean basin have been traditionally provoking strong research interest. Over the past decades, Latin American integration has tested plethora of institutional designs, ranging from relatively uniform subregional trade blocs - CACM, LAFTA, etc. to multifunctional partnerships with an identity-forming component, like Unasur or CELAC. This paper is an attempt to show how the Latin American academic community itself analyzes the integration in the “domestic” region. Forming the literature review, the authors, firstly, show how Latin American integrationism has transformed with the successive change of the phases of the “old”, “open” and “post-liberal” regionalism. Despite the fact that the types of integration in each of the periods differ significantly, scientists approach them in quite a similar way. They have been engineering the region socially and have been using such basic concepts as globalización , soberanía and desarrollo . The theory and practice of Latin A