In the 1930’s and ‘40’s the Spanish Civil war and the crisis brought upon by WWII in Europe resulted in the migration of Spanish-language publishing activities from Spain to Latin America. In this context, the continent and its literary production found themselves for the first time at the centre of editorial preoccupations, as evidenced by the proliferation of series showcasing American Classics. This article examines one such series, the Colección Panamericana of W. M. Jackson (1945), arguing that, although the series explicitly promotes a discourse of Pan-Americanism, the translation practices evidenced in the texts chosen to represent Brazil, Canada, Haiti and the United States thoroughly abide by a pan-hispanism which forbids the use of American varieties of Spanish. We explore the characteristics of the Jackson publishing company–its transnationalism, its intellectual distance from Hispanic America as a U.S. publisher, and its exclusive publication of series in order to guarantee high-volume sales. We then look at those volumes of the Colección Panamericana that consist of translations in light of the style guide provided by the company for its editors and translators, which emphasizes the importance of providing material that is linguistically accessible to all Spanish speakers. Finally, we take examples from the translations to illustrate the contradiction between the representation of American reality/ies contained in the texts and its/their expression in a supposedly neutral Spanish.