Divergent Modernities

A Book in the Series

Post-Contemporary

Interventions and

Latin America in Translation

En Traducción

Em Tradução

Sponsored by the Duke–

University of North Carolina

Program in Latin American Studies

 b Julio Ramos

MODERNITIES
Culture and Politics in

Nineteenth-Century

Latin America

Translated by John D. Blanco

Foreword by
DIVERGENT

José David Saldívar

   Durham and London 

©  Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Typeset in Quadraat by

Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper 8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data appear on the last printed page of

this book.
 Contents

Translator’s Preface vii

Foreword, José David Saldívar xi

Prologue xxxv

PART I

 The Other’s Knowledge: Writing and Orality in

Sarmiento’s Facundo 

 Knowledge-(as)-Said: Language and Politics in Andrés Bello 

 Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

 Limits of Autonomy: Journalism and Literature 

 Decorating the City: The Chronicle and Urban Experience 

PART II

Introduction: Martí and His Journey to the United States 

 Machinations: Literature and Technology 

 ‘‘This Cardboard Tabloid Life’’: Literature and the Masses 

 Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo 

  ‘‘Nuestra América’’: The Art of Good Governance 

 The Repose of Heroes: On Poetry and

War in José Marti 

 Migratories 

Appendixes
Translations of Three Texts by José Martí

Appendix  Our America 

Appendix  Prologue to Poema del Niágara 

Appendix  Coney Island 

Index 

vi Contents
Translator’s Preface

‘‘Skimmers of the printed page, halt!’’ To the Anglophone reader, as well as

the community of Latin American scholars, writers, and critics who have had
as much difficulty tracking down this book as I have had, I would like to
point out a number of words and/or phrases that indicate the limits of the
translated text before you. Taken together, they constitute a reflection on the
untranslatable—a situation undoubtedly encountered by every translator at
one point or another, as well as an aporia worthy of some of the most rigor-
ous philosophical investigations of our time. I highlight them not so much
because they came to question or interfere with the project as a whole but
rather because they formed the basis of my constant engagement and nego-
tiation with Julio in the rendering of Desencuentros de la modernidad en América
Latina: literatura y política en el siglo XIX into English.
As Ramos’s work suggests, both the promise and declared failure of
translation is intimately woven into the strategies employed by the various
groups, intellectuals, discourses, and institutions involved in the historical
conjunctures comprising Latin American society in the nineteenth century.
The translation of the seemingly transparent word Latinoamericanismo exem-
plifies this. For while it can easily be rendered as ‘‘Latin Americanism,’’ such
a move immediately divests the word of its ‘‘aura,’’ or resonance, as that un-
translatable idea belonging solely to Latin America, Latin Americans, or the
Latin American ‘‘spirit.’’ On the one hand, this aura is the very thing that
Ramos’s analysis would seek to historicize and critique. Yet while this is cer-
tainly true, others would contest that it is the literal and artifactual status
of the untranslated word—the ‘‘surface level of its inscription,’’ as Ramos
would say—by which any analysis (including his own) must in the end be
judged. Even as Divergent Modernities wrestles with the (im)possibility of speak-
ing outside that cultural tensor that has come to be known as Latinoameri-
canismo, Ramos also recognizes the inevitability of being integrated into it,
pulled along, perhaps ‘‘reterritorialized.’’ At Ramos’s request, I anglicized the
word at certain moments, yet respected its resistance to transparency when
its monumental or material quality seemed to be directly invoked.
 La escena de escritura is the Spanish rendition of a phrase made popular
by French philosophy after , particularly in the work of Jacques Derrida
and the Tel Quel group (La scene de écriture). It plays on the triple meaning of
escritura as inscription—at once an act of writing, etching letters into a solid
surface, and enlisting (as in conscription). While Julio never explicitly links
his own use of this phrase to the well-known essay of Derrida’s, ‘‘Freud and
the Scene of Writing,’’ his analyses of José Martí share certain affinities with
some of Derrida’s concerns. My suspicion, however, is that these affinities
have less to do with the likelihood of ‘‘direct’’ influence, and more to do with
the shared concern of both writers with Walter Benjamin and his fascination
with the Paris arcades project.
Conocimiento has been translated at various moments either as ‘‘knowl-
edge’’ or ‘‘the understanding.’’ While the difference between the words for
knowledge—ciencia, saber, and conocimiento—has been pointed out by transla-
tors in the past, I would merely like to add that conocimiento can also be a trans-
lation of Immanuel Kant’s Verstand: ‘‘the understanding’’ that, as a cognitive
faculty responsible for providing ‘‘categories’’ or concepts, renders objects
of intuition into objects of knowledge. This meaning of conocimiento seems
particularly salient in the passages cited herein by Andrés Bello, José de la
Luz y Caballero, and other enlightened intellectuals of the period. In these
passages, conocimiento does not so much refer to knowledge in a personal,
intuitive, or intimate sense (as one knows [conoce] a person or language), but
rather in a philosophical sense that harkens back to the Kantian system and
the project of enlightened reform. In other instances of ambiguity, I have in-
cluded the original Spanish word beside the translated text.
Finally, the translations of letrado as ‘‘man of letters’’ and literato as ‘‘mod-
ern writer’’ have proven to be wholly insufficient, although the first part of
Divergent Modernities is dedicated to clarifying both in terms of the relation-
ship of each figure to its respective configuration of institutions, discourses,
narratives of legitimation, and social processes. The letrado is characterized
by his proximity to the law; for this reason, it has been translated by Javier
Malagón Barceló and others as ‘‘lawyer.’’ 1 The letrado can be a lawmaker, law-
yer, or public statesman whose educated or enlightened opinion is capable of
intervening in matters of state legislation and administration, as well as edu-
cational policy. The literato, in contrast, is ‘‘modern’’ insofar as s/he is in every
way tied up with the social transformations introduced by modernity and
modernization in Latin America and the United States—the ‘‘two cultures’’
divide between the natural sciences and humanities, the rise of the publish-
ing market, explosion of the culture industry, and self-proclaimed autonomy
of aesthetics from other fields of inquiry. While a work like Angel Rama’s The

viii Translator’s Preface

Lettered City has emphasized the underlying continuity of the Latin American
intellectual in terms of his or her control over the means of written repre-
sentation, Professor Ramos has chosen to stress the outer extremes of their
differences in order to better demonstrate their partial overlap in the phe-
nomenon of uneven modernization.2
The original title of this book highlights the clashes and contradictions
produced in this partial overlap. The word desencuentro is especially suited to
capturing the sense with which the modern Latin American writer confronted
and responded to the struggle for legitimacy among competing authorities
and discourses in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Desencuentro, lit-
erally ‘‘dis-encounter,’’ can be translated best as ‘‘run-in,’’ although the title
leaves open the possibility that the run-ins produced by uneven modernity in
Latin America could also be reconfigured and projected as a series of run-ins
with ‘‘modernity’’ as an overall phenomenon. The genealogy of this recon-
figuration comprises one of the main themes of this book.
Last but not least, a word or two on translating Martí. I adopted a slightly
different approach in translating Martí’s poetry as opposed to his prose. The
poetic translations do not confine themselves to a strict word-by-word rendi-
tion of Martí’s verse into English. In fact, in certain instances, I weighed in
heavily on the preservation (however partial) of rhyme and meter, and thus,
have chosen to cite the original verse side by side with the translation. By
contrast, I tended to translate the occasionally exasperating convolutions of
Martí’s prose as literally as possible in order to preserve the breathtaking
sense one receives from the sheer length of certain sentences. Other sen-
tences, presented in the form of ellipses, shift the momentum of the previous
passage and prepare the reader for a new proceeding. The decision to include
these stylistic features of Martí’s prose may, at times, seem to interfere with
the semantic clarity he may have sought to convey. In this respect, the trans-
lations depart from the formal coherence of Martí’s earlier translators, whose
editions I consulted in the course of editing my own.3 The notes to ‘‘Our
America’’ and prologue to Poema del Niágara (appendices  and ) were largely
taken from a yellowed and decrepit popular edition of Martí’s prose by José
Olivio Jiminez, which I found in one of the few used bookstores in Manila.4 I
decided to include them for their usefulness in identifying Martí’s references,
many of them cryptic.
I would like to thank, first and foremost, Julio Ramos himself for the
remarkable joint experience of revising, critiquing, and otherwise engaging
with the translations of his work, as well as those of the Martí texts. I would
also like to thank Reynolds Smith, and the editorial staff at Duke University
Press for working closely with both Professor Ramos and myself at all levels

Translator’s Preface ix
of the manuscript. I gratefully acknowledge the first translation of chapter 
(‘‘Nuestra América: The Art of Good Governance’’) by Jeff Forte, as well as
Sergio Waisman’s first translation of chapter  (‘‘Migratories’’) although any
mistakes or errors in the translation of these chapters as well as every other
chapter in this book are my sole responsibility. Finally, I would like to thank
my wife, Marivi, for her insightful comments on parts of the translation, and
her endearing support and encouragement.
John D. Blanco

Notes

 For a short, concise bibliography on the figure of the letrado, see Roberto González Echevarría,
Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press, ),  ff.
 Angel Rama, The Lettered City, trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, ).
 See José Martí, The America of José Martí: Selected Writings, trans. Juan de Onís, intro. Federico de
Onís (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, ); On Art and Literature: Critical Writings, trans. and
ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Monthly Review Press, ); and Our America: Writings on Latin
America and the Struggle for Cuban Independence, ed. Philip Foner, trans. Elinor Randall (New York:
Monthly Review Press, ).
 José Martí, Prosa escogida, ed. José Olivio Jimenez (Madrid: Novelas y cuentos, ).

x Translator’s Preface
Foreword
José David Saldivar

Migratory Locations: Subaltern Modernity and

Inter-American Cultural Criticism

If we see the formation of the modern world as a unitary global process that has en-
tailed the mutual constitution of cores and peripheries, the project of provincializing
Western modernity . . . involves as well recognizing the periphery as the site of sub-
altern modernities.—Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity
in Venezuela

The task of subaltern studies [is] to conceptualize multiple possibilities of creative

political action rather than requiring a more ‘‘mature’’ political type of formation.—
José Rabasa, ‘‘Of Zapatismo,’’ The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital

How is the migratory subaltern subject, in an inter-American politics of loca-

tion, to be conceptualized as revolutionary and antimilitaristic, Latin Ameri-
can and North American at one and the same time? What are the limits of
our modern notions of citizenship, identity, and residence for activist intel-
lectuals involved in intense processes of deterritorialization? 1 How does José
Martí’s residence in New York City and the United States (–) map
out the boundaries of a ‘‘transnationally local’’ 2 genealogy of modernist dis-
cursive practices? It is on these questions that Julio Ramos’s Divergent Moder-
nities—a probing and erudite study of Latin American modernity in general,
and on Martí in particular—sheds enormous light.
Modernity, as Ramos reminds us, not only involved Martí in ‘‘a superfi-
cial, vulgar, and uproarious intimacy’’ with U.S. mass culture (as Martí criti-
cally put it in his  chronicle ‘‘Coney Island’’), but also embedded him
in an ‘‘uneven modernizing’’ constellation of forces that compelled him to
reflect on his mutual participation in and alienation from what Jürgen Haber-
mas has called the public sphere.3 Further, Martí’s crónicas from the urban,
geocultural United States of the North (where he represented his ‘‘encounter
and conflict with the technological and massified discourses of modernity’’
[p. ], telegraphed to Nuestra América’s South, allowed him to explore and
exploit what Ramos posits as ‘‘the changing, displaced situation of the writer
in the capitalist city, in a society governed by new principles of organization
that problematized the relation between literature and the predominant in-
stitutions of the public sphere’’ (this volume, p. ) that is, the sphere in
which political life is discussed openly by all the citizens.
Martí’s ruminations on modern cultures in this inter-American con-
text took many forms, including his hybrid and experimental chronicles of
daily North American life in the Escenas norteamericanas (North American Scenes); 4
his magisterial prologues, such as the one to the Poema del Niágara by the
Venezuelan poet in New York, Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde; his splendid car-
tographic poetry, written in exile in New York (‘‘Domingo triste’’ and ‘‘Dos
Patrias,’’ among others, from Versos Libres); his classic anti-imperialist essays,
such as ‘‘Nuestra América’’ (‘‘Our America’’); and his moving translations of
American sentimental literature for Appelton House (Helen Hunt Jackson’s
Ramona, for example), as well as his sober testimonio (testimony) on war and
violence, the Diario de campaña (War Journal). As an émigré in an alien Anglo-
Saxon environment, Martí often took the role of a cultural anthropologist
engaged in what James Clifford and George Marcus call the production of
‘‘writing culture.’’ 5 His scores of modern chronicles, prologues, and essays—
what Ramos refers to as Martí’s ‘‘minor writings’’ 6—from this point of view,
thematize, among other things, the unfamiliar rituals, ceremonies, and daily
practices of his host country.
While it is undeniable that Ramos’s superb book on Martí’s ‘‘minor
writings’’ has received exceptional attention and critical praise over the past
decade among Latin American studies scholars from all over the Americas—
including Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and the United
States, his book’s timely translation into English allows me the opportu-
nity to begin a contrapuntal reading of selected sections of the book so that
readers in (North) American studies can better understand the historical sig-
nificance and critical potential Ramos’s Martí has for developing a new, com-
parative, inter-American cultural criticism.7 As Fernando Coronil puts it in
his powerful introduction to Fernando Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and
Sugar, an introduction to a celebrated book must ensure ‘‘a perspective that,
while respecting the integrity of a cultural text, recognizes its provisionality
and inconclusiveness, the contrapuntal play of text against text and of reader
against author.’’ 8 This introduction follows Coronil’s sage advice by pay-
ing tribute to Ramos and engaging in transcultural counterpoint of sorts. It
explores the ways in which Martí’s vernacular knowledge produced in metro-
politan New York influenced constructions of modern Latin Americanism.
My emphasis on Martí’s subaltern modernity, his resistance to the modern

xii Foreword
rationality of the enlightened letrados (lettered elites) as well as to the com-
modification and racialization of U.S. mass culture, might also be labeled the
Martí differential—calling for an unevenly developed cultural critique—ap-
propriate to an uneven aesthetic modernity.

Subaltern Modernities

The philosophical problem of modernity, or what Habermas terms ‘‘aesthetic

modernity,’’ 9 is the point of departure for both Ramos’s rigorous exegesis
of the nineteenth-century ‘‘enlightened letrado’’ tradition—from Domingo F.
Sarmiento to Andrés Bello to José Martí—and his probing diagnosis of the
beginnings of a Latin Americanist cultural criticism. To better see why this is
so, let me begin by situating the problem of modernity both as a chronologi-
cal and qualitative concept.
‘‘Modernity,’’ as Habermas reminds us, ‘‘has a long history.’’ Although
there is a lot of room for debating modernity’s origins and its celebrated
(postmodernist) endings, Habermas starts off his view of modernity as ‘‘an
incomplete project’’ by looking at the historical contrasts between the words,
‘‘the ancients’’ and ‘‘the moderns.’’ ‘‘Modern in its Latin form ‘modernus’ was
used for the first time,’’ he writes, ‘‘in the late th-century in order to dis-
tinguish the present, which had become officially Christian, from the Roman
and pagan past.’’ For Habermas, modernity and the modern conjure up ‘‘the
consciousness of an epoch that relates itself to the past of antiquity, in order
to view itself as the result of a transition from the old to the new’’ (). Ray-
mond Williams, in Keywords, emphasizes something similar, writing that in
the English context, ‘‘A conventional contrast between ancient and mod-
ern was established before the Renaissance. . . . Modernism, modernist and
modernity,’’ he goes on to explain, followed ‘‘in the th and th-centuries,
and the majority of pre-th-century uses were unfavourable.’’ 10
If, since the nineteenth century, ‘‘the emphatically modern document
no longer borrows [the] power of being a classic from the authority of a past
epoch,’’ as Habermas suggests, for modernity ‘‘creates its own self-enclosed
canons of being classics’’ (), has the relation between the ancients (the clas-
sics) and the moderns lost its ‘‘fixed historical reference’’? What happens
when we no longer focus exclusively on Western art in our understanding
of modernity’s project? In Divergent Modernities, Ramos, like Habermas before
him, asks us to recall Max Weber’s foundational analysis of cultural moder-
nity as the separation of reason expressed in religion and metaphysics into
the three autonomous spheres of science, morality, and art.11 In other words,
as the homogeneous worldviews of religion and metaphysics broke down,

Foreword xiii
scientific discourse, paradigms of morality and jurisprudence, and the pro-
duction of art in turn became ‘‘unevenly’’ institutionalized. Consequently,
with the specialists now controlling cultural symbologies and capital, a gap
grew between the culture of the experts and that of the larger public. In the
Latin American context, Ramos argues, with its uneven division of labor,
urbanization, and the incorporation of Latin American markets into the
world system or global economy, ‘‘new regimes of specializations . . . at
once relieved the letrados of their traditional tasks in state administration
and forced writers to become professionalized’’ (p. xl). Ramos is, therefore,
interested in analyzing what ‘‘the effects of a dependent and uneven modern-
ization’’ 12 were ‘‘on the literary field’’ (p. xl). To begin such an institutional
analysis, Ramos rigorously pursues what he calls a ‘‘double articulation,’’
examining literature ‘‘as a discourse that seeks autonomization’’ and under-
taking ‘‘an analysis of the conditions that made the institutionalization of
literature impossible’’ (xli).
Few inter-American intellectuals, Ramos demonstrates, have been as
sensitive to modernity’s ‘‘uneven development’’ and its contradictory impli-
cations as Martí, who moved from the apparent enlightened ambience of
Nuestra América’s ‘‘republic of letters’’ to Anglo-America’s massified culture
industry, while most of the time feeling deeply estranged from both ver-
sions. As Martí revealingly put it in a letter to an editor in Mexico: ‘‘the mail
leaves from New York to a country of ours: I cover everything noteworthy that
has happened: political cases, social studies, theater bills, literary announce-
ments, novelties, and particular aspects of this land. . . . In sum, a Review
done in New York on all the things that might interest our impatient and
imaginative cultural readers, but done in such a way that it could be pub-
lished in the daily presses.’’ Martí’s work in New York as a foreign correspon-
dent for Buenos Aires’s La Nación, Mexico City’s El Partido Liberal, Caracas’s
La Opinión Nacional, and as a journalist for New York’s Sun, was in Ramos’s
words, ‘‘conflictive,’’ opposed to the ‘‘highest’’ and ‘‘most subjective’’ value of
poetic discourse’’ ().
Ramos begins his genealogy of an emergent Latin Americanism with an
examination of what he calls ‘‘enlightened letrados,’’ such as the Argentinean
Domingo F. Sarmiento and the Chilean Andrés Bello, and contrasts them
with the divergent subalternity of Cuban journalist, revolutionary, and poet
José Martí, who the author suggests, inaugurated ‘‘the constitution of a new
kind of intellectual subject’’ for the Americas. Part  of Divergent Modernities
explores in detail how Sarmiento’s classic Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism
() and Bello’s modern notion of ‘‘saber decir’’ (knowledge as eloquence)
brought on the destruction of what Ramos describes as (after Angel Rama)

xiv Foreword
the ‘‘republic of letters’’ 13—that is, the intimate formation of national litera-
tures and the founding of the modern nation-state. In other words, as Ramos
suggests, after independence from Spain, ‘‘a new homogeneity, a national
homogeneity that was linguistic and political’’ (p. ) took hold in Latin
America.
From the start, both modern nationalist discourse and culture turned
not only toward Europe and the West, but also toward the North and the
United States, and were used by intellectual elites like Sarmiento ‘‘to legit-
imize [their] claims to authority.’’ Especially in Facundo, Sarmiento’s writing
‘‘represents history as progress, as a modernizing process interrupted by the
catastrophe of local caudillo,’’ for to write in this Latin American enlightened
context is, as Ramos states, ‘‘to order; to modernize’’ (p. ). Throughout
Facundo, Sarmiento ‘‘positions himself,’’ according to Ramos, ‘‘between two
competing modes of knowledge’’ (p. )—what he characterizes as ‘‘proper’’
(civilized written discourse) and ‘‘foreign’’ (barbaric orality).
In contradistinction to Sarmiento, the Chilean Bello did not privilege
in his cultural criticism a romantic and undisciplined scholarship, but in-
stead, ground his views of modernity in the humanist university institution
itself, where scholarship was orderly and rationally separated into special-
izations. That is to say, in its division of the sciences from the social to the
humanities, the structure of the Western university is thoroughly modern and
Occidental,14 for it divides a ‘‘universal reason’’ into ‘‘faculties.’’ In Ramos’s
view, ‘‘Bello’s constant reflections on the task of the university and the place
of knowledge in society underlin[ed] the relative autonomy of knowledge’’
(p. ). Yet like his fellow ‘‘enlightened letrado,’’ Sarmiento, Bello envisioned
writing ‘‘as a machine of action, as a device that transforms the chaotic
‘nature’ of barbarism [in Latin America].’’ Thus, for Ramos, ‘‘in Bello we
find . . . the concept of belles lettres, which postulated ‘literary’ writing as a
paradigm of knowledge’’ (p. )—and we might also add, as a paradigm of
rationality (where writing and grammar are associated with a will to reason).
As the minority discourse theorist David Lloyd has offered in a related
context about the modern university, idealist theorists (like Sarmiento and
Bello) used theory ‘‘to furnish transcendental grounds to its concepts, and
after this fashion the university divides the objects of knowledge into the
quasi-permanent or canonical form of the disciplines.’’ 15 It is precisely in
Bello’s movement toward what we might term a ‘‘universalist rationality,’’
that is, his attempt to subsume local particulars into Western universals, that
we can better begin to understand Martí’s subaltern cultural critique against
this universalist idealism. From this perspective, Martí’s  essay, ‘‘Our
America’’ (with its hypothesis that ‘‘The European university must give way

Foreword xv
to the American university’’), can be seen as a prescient calling for ‘‘differen-
tial studies’’ of the Americas—not Bello’s integrated formation of the disci-
plines, affecting the production of knowledge in the university. For as Ramos
correctly puts it, Martí ‘‘speak[s] from the periphery’’ (p. ); his exile in
New York not only ‘‘radicalized his situation’’ (p. ), but also as a journalist
chronicling everyday life, it embedded him in a new institutional site where
he could examine ‘‘the conditions of heterogeneity in the literary subject,’’ as
opposed to Bello’s Kantian-like ‘‘unity of the manifold’’ (Lloyd, p. ). As a re-
sult, Martí’s ‘‘critique from outside the institutional power spectrum, against
the modernizing project’’ (p. ) separated him from the tradition of the
enlightened letrados in the Americas.
Thus envisaged, Ramos’s Martí is well situated to oppose what the au-
thor calls the ‘‘will to rationalization,’’ that is, what his future fellow émigrés
to the United States, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, would describe
as the enlightenment’s dialectical totalitarianism, with its well-known in-
strumentalized reasoning.16 Ramos’s Martí gives back, we might say, a ‘‘mi-
gratory mobility’’ to the ‘‘enlightened letrados’’’ unity of the manifold, refor-
mulating the constituent parts of the body of knowledge so that its content
functions ‘‘differentially.’’ 17 Martí, as a subaltern modernist in New York City,
is therefore, almost in spite of himself, a ‘‘properly modern hero precisely
because his effort to synthesize discursive roles and functions presuppose
the antitheses governed by the division of labor and the fragmentation of
the relatively integrated public sphere in which writing of the [enlightened]
letrados had operated,’’ according to Ramos (p. xliii). The spirit and discipline
of this subaltern modernity assumes clear contours, Ramos emphasizes, in
Martí’s boundary-crossing cultural work—his lateral ‘‘minor writings.’’
If modernity ‘‘revolts’’ and ‘‘lives on the experience of rebelling against
all that is normative,’’ as Habermas believes was characteristic of the aes-
thetic modernity of Charles Baudelaire, Martí emerges as one of the first U.S.
Latino anti-imperialist intellectuals who was both in Ramos’s view, ‘‘heroic’’
and a melancholy ‘‘subject profoundly divided’’ (p. ). Ramos’s ground-
breaking exploration of this ‘‘profoundly divided’’ Martí, exiled and estranged
in New York City, takes up the great bulk of part  of Divergent Modernities.
Here, Ramos gives readers not the monumentalized and ‘‘maestro’’ Martí
(championed by the letrado ‘‘vocational’’ canon in the universities of the
Americas), but the struggling revolutionary, journalist, poet, and translator
of sentimental romances trying to make-do in the major capitalist city of
North America. Martí’s pragmatic meditations on U.S. national literary and
cultural heroes (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and
George Bancroft); his horror and amazement at the emergent mass culture

xvi Foreword
industry (‘‘Coney Island’’ and ‘‘Jesse James’’), and on the United States’s sheer
technological power, engineering, and art (‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’); and his
critiques of the cultures of U.S. imperialism (‘‘Nuestra América’’), as well as
his testimony on war and death (Diario de campaña), as Ramos writes, were all
‘‘enmeshed in a complex and intense reflection on the crisis and reconfigu-
ration of modern literature’’ (p. ). If Martí’s inter-American cultural work
in general, and in ‘‘Nuestra América’’ in particular, ‘‘invert[s] the relation of
subordination between intellectuals and people, writing and orality, making
the indigenous and subaltern the basis of Latin American identity,’’ does
Martí’s own stylistic will to power also denounce ‘‘a sense of the literary as
both the adequate and necessary form of expression of Latin Americanism,’’
as John Beverley writes? 18 I will return to this question in Martí’s ‘‘Nuestra
América’’ at the end of the introduction, but first let me turn to Martí’s earlier
writings, the  prologue to Pérez Bonalde’s Poema del Niágara, and ‘‘The
Brooklyn Bridge’’ and ‘‘Coney Island’’ from North American Scenes.
For Ramos, Martí’s prologue to the Poema del Niágara is at once a pro-
found and symptomatic manifesto on the emergence of ‘‘modern poetry’’ in
the Americas, with the ‘‘nostalgia of the great deed’’ as well as the breakdown
and erasure of the social conditions that ‘‘had made possible the norma-
tive . . . contents of an epic authority in literature’’ (). In such a modernist
and modernizing life-world, Martí suggests that modernization entails ‘‘the
suffering of modern man’’ in the face of a ‘‘new social state,’’ in which ‘‘all
the images that were once revered are found stripped of their prestige, while
the images of the future are yet unknown.’’ Further, for Martí, modernity in-
augurates an epoch or consciousness characterized by what he lyrically calls
the ‘‘blinding of the sources and the obfuscating of the gods.’’ For Ramos,
Martí’s minoritized discourse (so reminiscent of Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion
of the ‘‘twilight of the gods’’ and Gabriel García Márquez’s more recently
celebrated el otoño del patriarca) ‘‘explicitly relates the new social state [in the
Americas]—linked to what Max Weber later called the ‘disenchantment of
the world’ as an effect of modern rationalization—to the dissolution of a dis-
cursive and institutional fabric of belief that, until the moment, guaranteed
the central authority of literary forms in the articulation of the constitutive
nomos of the social order’’ (p. ).
Consequently, the inter-American poet in aesthetic modernity, for Martí,
can only have ‘‘broken wings’’—a melancholic figure caged in the cruel the-
ater of solitude who can merely ‘‘present himself,’’ in Martí’s words, ‘‘armed
with all his weapons in an arena where he sees neither combatants nor spec-
tators; nor [sees] any prize.’’ Martí here demonstrates how the life-world
has become infected by modernization. All cultural representatives (even

Foreword xvii
Martí’s cherished poet) have become ‘‘rationalized’’ under the brutal pres-
sures of economic power and globalized and instrumentalized administered
forces.
If one had to conjecture the most likely source of Ramos’s insistence on
Martí’s claiming our attention, it would be his view of Martí’s ‘‘opening salvo
[in his prologue to the Poema del Niágara] to any reflection on the relative dis-
engagement of literature from the private sphere, given his reputation as a
political writer’’ (p. xlii). Indeed, Ramos argues throughout part  of Divergent
Modernities that ‘‘Martí spoke of politics and life from a specific kind of per-
spective or gaze, from a locus of [an uneven] literary speech’’ (p. xliii). As an
analyst of the emergent hegemonic mass culture in the United States, Martí’s
gaze, for Ramos, implies varied ‘‘mechanisms of authorization’’ and a set of
socially symbolic ‘‘solutions to the emergent literary field.’’
What were to become Martí’s North American Scenes recounted, in Ramos’s
words, ‘‘the multiple aspects of urban daily life . . . [for] they . . . serve[d]
as a continual reflection on the place of the one who writes—in Martí’s case,
the Latin American intellectual—in the face of modernity’’ (p. xliv). Indeed,
Ramos indicates that it is possible to say that much of Martí’s inter-American
cultural criticism itself aspired to ‘‘the defense of the ‘aesthetic’ and cultural
values of Latin America by placing them in opposition to [North] American
capitalist modernity . . . and the economic power of the North American
other’’ (p. xlv). As Martí bluntly put it in his chronicle ‘‘Coney Island,’’ ‘‘Such
people [of the United States] eat quantity; we, quality (p. ). It is precisely
Martí’s insistence on a nationalist articulation of ‘‘Latin Americanism’’ that
Ramos wishes to deconstruct.
In his contact ‘‘with the regime of the political market’’ and with ‘‘labor’’
and ‘‘urban fragmentation’’ in New York City, however, Martí’s idealist views
on aesthetics and what Ramos refers to as Martí’s ‘‘concept of the aesthetic
interior’’ undergo a sea change. On occasion, as in his  letter to his
friend and editor in Mexico City, Manuel Mercado, Martí reveals his arduous
existential struggle with exile, modernization, and urban drudgery: ‘‘I now
live by means of commercial jobs keeping secretly to myself, so that no one
will see, the terrors hidden in the soul’’ (qtd. at ). Elsewhere, in his poem
‘‘Hierro,’’ Martí adds: ‘‘I have earned the bread: let us make poetry’’ (p. ).
If Martí writes with the self-consciousness that Michel Foucault asso-
ciated with modernity (an insistence that the present represents a clear break
with the past, and the role of the poet and cultural critic alike is to reflect
on the ‘‘contemporary status of his own enterprise’’),19 Martí, like Emerson
and Whitman, as Ramos notes, articulates a self-consciously new domain ‘‘in
which the poet encounters the city as the outside’’ (p. ).

xviii Foreword
 Because Martí’s writings on art and his defense of Latin American
cultural values are connected to his career as an inter-American journalist
(indeed, in Ramos’s view, Martí ‘‘promoted himself ’’ as an intermediary be-
tween the United States and various Latin American groups in Mexico, Vene-
zuela, and Argentina), Ramos turns in the second half of Divergent Modernities
to a fascinating institutional history between  and  of Buenos Aires’s
major newspaper, La Nación, founded in  by Bartolomé Mitre, just two
years after he had completed his presidential term in Argentina. As Ramos
emphasizes, La Nación employed scores of news correspondents abroad, but
no two were more important than José Martí and Rubén Darío, ‘‘who were key
figures in the development of the early modernista chronicle’’ (p. ). Among
other things, this section of Ramos’s book explores how an uneven aesthetic
modernity became dependent on newspapers, and how such a dependence
limited what he refers to as ‘‘literature’s autonomy’’ (p. ). Ramos’s hy-
pothesis is that the Latin Americanist critique of modernity was itself ‘‘in-
corporated and promoted by the emergent cultural industry based on the
new journalism of the epoch’’ (p. ). If newspapers, as Benedict Anderson
argues, were key institutional sites ‘‘for the formation of new national sub-
jects’’ (p. ) and helped ‘‘subject orality to the law of writing,’’ newspapers,
too, paradoxically helped initiate a new literary genre ‘‘tied to the modernist
chronicle’’ (p. ).
When La Nación in  ‘‘inaugurated the telegraphic service, affiliated
with the Paris Havas Agency’’ (p. ), it at once enabled Latin America’s
‘‘community of readers to represent themselves as a nation inserted into a
‘universe,’ articulated by means of a communication network,’’ as Ramos de-
scribes it (p. ). To be sure, the telegraph in Latin America ‘‘stimulated the
specialization,’’ Ramos writes, ‘‘of a new kind of writer, the reporter, dele-
gated to a new linguistic and commercial object, the news bulletin’’ (p. ).
As Martí observed in his Poema del Niágra prologue, ‘‘It is as though we are
witnessing a decentralization of the intellect. The beautiful has come to the
realm of all people.’’
If, as Darío noted in his Autobiography, La Nación ‘‘was a workshop for
experimentation,’’ for Martí, it was also a unique institutional location for ex-
amining what Ramos calls ‘‘the conditions of literary modernity,’’ especially
its relation with new writers and ‘‘contact and cultivation of a new reader-
ship’’ (p. ). While it is undeniable that Martí (like Darío) honed his ‘‘craft
of style’’ in newspapers like La Nación, the newspaper, in Ramos’s view, was
more importantly a site where ‘‘organic intellectuals’’ 20 in the new culture in-
dustry could begin analyzing ‘‘the irreducible aporias of the will to autonomy
and the hybridity of the literary subject in Latin America’’ (p. ).

Foreword xix
 Beginning with Martí in , according to Ramos, La Nación ‘‘estab-
lishe[d] a clear precedent, transforming correspondence into the site not only
for informative discourse on foreign lands and peoples, but formal and lit-
erary experimentation as well’’ (p. ). Martí’s elder, Sarmiento, was one of
the first to recognize and champion uncritically Martí’s journalistic writing
as a place where the Cuban let ‘‘loose his howls.’’ More conventional readers,
however, like F. T. de Aldrey, editor of Caracas’s La Opinión Nacional, chastised
Martí for his propensity to experiment freely in his reportages: ‘‘readers of
this country want news briefs and political anecdotes and as little literature
as possible’’ (p. ).
In contradistinction to the more ‘‘refined’’ and ‘‘bourgeois’’ fin de siècle
chroniclers—like Gómez Carillo, who in his narrative of strolling the streets
of Buenos Aires, El encanto de Buenos Aires (The Enchantment of Buenos Aires),
sang the praises of fashion and ‘‘the charm of merchandise’’ (p. ), or Sar-
miento, who in his Travels in the U.S. () saw the urban modern city, again
in Ramos’s words, ‘‘as a utopic space’’ (p. )—Martí’s representation of the
cities of the United States of the North, as he called them, rejects what Ramos
refers to as ‘‘the logic of the fetish.’’ Thus, Martí’s capitalist city was explicitly
linked, Ramos tells us, ‘‘to the representation of disaster, of catastrophe, as
distinctive metaphors for modernity’’ (p. ). Further, for Martí, the city spa-
tialized ‘‘the fragmentation of the traditional order of discourse that the city
has brought in its wake’’ (p. ). As Martí characteristically put it, ‘‘Every-
thing [in New York] is mixed [and] melts away,’’ no doubt a reference to
what Karl Marx saw in The Communist Manifesto () as the catastrophic pro-
cess of capitalist modernization, for ‘‘All that is solid,’’ he wrote, ‘‘melts into
air.’’ 21 Against ‘‘enlightened letrados’’ like Sarmiento, Martí’s North American
Scenes resist ‘‘producing a decorative image of the city’’ and instead, ‘‘record
the misery and exploitation generated by the most advanced forms of moder-
nity . . . in the United States’’ (p. ).
Martí’s remarkable  chronicle about ‘‘El Puente de Brooklyn’’ (‘‘The
Brooklyn Bridge’’), one of the nineteenth century’s most celebrated engineer-
ing accomplishments, is emblematic of the exiled writer’s attempt ‘‘to co-
exist with and among’’ North American technology. For Martí, Washington
Roebling’s monumental bridge, one of the first to use steel in its construc-
tion, palpitates, ‘‘throbb[ing],’’ Martí writes, ‘‘a blood so magnanimously in
our day’’ (p. ). Almost a hinge between two epochs, the bridge’s cable
are also ‘‘like the teeth of a mammoth that in one bite would be capable
of decimating a mountain’’ (p. ). Although Martí sensitively ‘‘interprets
the apparatus,’’ he also sees this North American modern engineering event
as an allegory of modernity, quantification, and modernization. Its arches,

xx Foreword
Martí notes, are ‘‘like the doors to a grandiose world which uplifts the spirit,’’
and its half-stone and half-steel construction metaphorically concretizes his-
tory’s progress: ‘‘No longer will deep moats open up around walled for-
tresses; cities instead will be embraced with arms of steel’’ (p. ). If, as
Emerson insisted in his  essay Nature, technology itself is an extension of
nature, then Martí’s illuminating ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’ follows this insight
by thematizing engineering and technology as instruments to better serve
culture and society.
On a more formal and rhetorical level, however, Martí’s ‘‘The Brooklyn
Bridge’’ contrapuntally reveals what Ramos terms ‘‘an anxiety . . . concern-
ing the implications of modernization’’ (p. ). Insofar as Martí’s chronicle
‘‘works with emblems, with cultural landscapes,’’ Ramos asks, what are read-
ers to make of Martí’s allusions to the bridge as an ‘‘aerial serpent,’’ its towers
seeming ‘‘like slenderized Egyptian pyramids,’’ and to its masses of ethno-
racialized workers ‘‘the like [of ] which can be found neither in Thebes nor the
Acropolis’’? Are these Western cultural emblems precisely the very symbolo-
gies that have been ‘‘displaced by modernization’’? What exactly does Martí
(writing in and from the technological languages of the newspaper) ‘‘see’’
in his allegory? He, of course, sees many things—‘‘the resounding dredges’’;
‘‘heroic feverish workers clean[ing] the base’’ of the bridge—and activates a
deconstructive illusion of presence for his readers—‘‘By the hand we will take
our readers . . . and lead them to see up front’’ (p. ) the bridge itself.
In Ramos’s view, Martí’s ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’ allegorizes not only the
inter-American chronicler’s ‘‘relationship with technology,’’ but also the sub-
ject of ‘‘quantification,’’ a ‘‘corollary to [the] gaze that attempts to geometri-
cally rationalize space’’ (p. ). On this strictly formal level, explains Ramos,
Martí allegorizes ‘‘the asymmetry between the discourses tied to technology
and literature.’’ As a result, Martí’s ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’ uses the ‘‘struggle
of literary discourse’’ to push ‘‘its way through the ‘strong’ signs of moder-
nity’’ (p. ).
In the process of ‘‘overwriting’’ this chronicle (Martí’s writing was itself
based on the journalist William Conant’s  essay on the Brooklyn Bridge
that appeared in Harper’s), Ramos suggests that Martí’s crónica put him ‘‘in
the position of a translator’’ (), for Martí, Ramos writes, ‘‘literally seizes
a metaphor from Conant [a flying serpent], translates it literally as [sierpe
aerea], and uses it to describe a different object’’ (p. , note ). Beyond
this literal translation project, Ramos maintains that Martí’s ‘‘The Brook-
lyn Bridge’’ works ‘‘as a strategy of legitimation that takes into account the
‘idealized’ and ‘mechanical’ languages of modernity as obliterated matter
for the supposed ‘exceptionality’ of style’’ (p. ). In other words, Martí’s

Foreword xxi
literary modernist chronicle ascends (like the bridge itself ) ‘‘toward apo-
theosis,’’ Ramos lyrically writes, ‘‘articulat[ing] a spatial hierarchization’’
(p. ). Hence, Martí fantastically explains: ‘‘Seeing them conglomerate to
swarm quickly over the aerial serpent, squeezed together, the vast, clean,
ever-growing crowd—one imagines seeing seated in the middle of the sky,
with her radiant head appearing over the summit and with white hands, as
large as eagles, open, in a sign of peace over the land—Liberty’’ (p. ).
Martí’s gaze is no longer that of the traditional positivist journalist. Rather,
Martí’s hybrid, modern writing verges on what Ramos rightly calls ‘‘a hallu-
cination’’ (p. ), where the chronicler sees a ‘‘swarm,’’ a ‘‘crowd,’’ and an
‘‘aerial serpent,’’ and then immediately imagines seeing in ‘‘the middle of the
sky,’’ a ‘‘summit’’ and ‘‘eagles . . . over the land,’’ culminating in a vision of
‘‘Liberty.’’ This epiphanic writing is of great significance, Ramos argues, for
Martí’s ‘‘overwriting’’ is ‘‘founded on a model of literary discourse as a dra-
matic deviation from the linguistic norm(s) in operation,’’ and hence, resists
the logic of what we earlier called the ‘‘enlightened letrados’ ’’ universal ratio-
nality, a rationality that ‘‘imposes the value of exchange’’ (p. ) and a new
statistical reason.
Responding to critics of his overly wrought prose style, Martí in 
insisted that writers, like painters, work with concrete material (words) and
that this intellectual process of labor distinguishes the writer’s production
from other kinds of intellectual work. Thus, Martí claims that ‘‘there is no
reason that one [writer] would avail of diverse colors, and not another. The
atmosphere changes with different zones, as does language with different
themes’’ (p. ). Put differently, language too, Ramos writes, is ‘‘stratified
by the division of labor.’’ Style, for Martí, ‘‘is the medium of labor that dif-
ferentiates the writer (as the use of color does the painter) from the social,
institutional practices that also use language as a medium,’’ Ramos writes.
Literature, in Martí’s words, is itself an act of ‘‘concretizing. . . . Each para-
graph must be organized as an excellent machine, and each one of it parts
must be adjusted, inserted with such perfection among others, so that if any
one part is taken from among the ensemble, it would be as a bird without
wing[s], and the parts would not function. . . . The complexity of the machine
indicates the perfection of its make’’ (p. ). Briefly, Martí’s ‘‘The Brooklyn
Bridge’’ allegorizes not only ‘‘a literary will to style,’’ it does so precisely in
a machinelike discourse that ‘‘coexists’’ and ‘‘struggles’’ (as Ramos wryly in-
sists) ‘‘against discursive, antiaesthetic functions tied to the technologized
medium of journalism’’ (p. ). It is, therefore, ‘‘the incongruencies and
contradictions’’ (concretized in Martí’s North American Scenes) that ‘‘distin-
guish Martí’s modernity’’ (p. ) from the more famous modernistas of the

xxii Foreword
period. Martí reshapes ‘‘fragments’’ and ‘‘remains’’ and refunctionalizes his
‘‘uneven’’ inter-American modernity as a kind of schizophrenic and capitalist
‘‘desiring machine.’’ 22
While Martí’s ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’ summarizes his multiple re-
sponses to North American modernization, ‘‘Coney Island’’ () reveals his
relentless animus toward North American mass culture, which, I think, has
often led to charges (especially among his recent North American readers)
that he was a snob, or worse, an arrogant mandarin. These glib criticisms
of Martí are in my view entirely wrong, for Martí’s pointed attacks on the
emergent nineteenth-century mass culture were just as often directed against
Latin American elitists and their ‘‘enlightened letrado’’ cultures. Both North
American mass culture (and what Horkheimer and Adorno more precisely
termed the ‘‘culture industry’’) 23 and the letrados’ culture in Latin America, it
bears repeating, deserved a thorough critique.
In contrast to both the canonical letrados’ view of Martí as a clásico, above
the fray of the intense historical and political debates of his own time, and the
more hagiographic view of Martí as a ‘‘granitelike’’ hero, Ramos’s analysis of
Martí and ‘‘Coney Island’’ documents precisely the historical contradictions
and social conflicts that the North American Scenes opened up in the domain of
modern, inter-American cultural criticism. Ramos first reconstructs the en-
tire North American Scenes as ‘‘an immense urban cartography’’ (p. ), where
the capitalist North American city is not only ‘‘a decentered space’’ (p. ),
but at the same time is gendered as a ‘‘sleeping woman,’’ where women
are either ‘‘masculinized’’ by modernization or take on the role of ‘‘solitary
mothers.’’ Tellingly, Ramos writes, the figure of the father ‘‘stands out by
[his] very absence; he is nowhere to be found in Martí’s modern landscape.’’
Modernization, the very process that Ramos has been transnationally
tracing throughout Divergent Modernities (via Weber and Rama), is his short-
hand for a variety of processes and concepts that require further elaboration.
Habermas is especially helpful here, for modernization, he explains, is ‘‘a
concept . . . that refers to a bundle of processes that are cumulative and mutu-
ally reinforcing; to the formation of capital and the mobilization of resources;
to the development of the forces of production and the increase in the pro-
duction of labor; to the establishment of centralized political power and the
formation of national identities; . . . [and] to the secularization of values and
norms.’’ 24 As Ramos sees it Martí’s ‘‘Coney Island’’ thematizes many of the
‘‘bundle of processes’’ that Habermas explains are cumulative and constitu-
tive of modernization. To begin with, the subject position of the chronicler
and cultural thinker in ‘‘Coney Island’’ is, in Ramos’s words, ‘‘a displaced
subject,’’ who also happens to be simultaneously ‘‘externally exiled’’ (as a

Foreword xxiii
Cuban working in New York) and ‘‘internally exiled’’ (as a ‘‘nostalgic’’ critical
thinker from ‘‘a higher spiritual world’’ in a base life-world motivated by ‘‘the
flow of money’’) (p. ).
One of the earliest results of the United States’s nineteenth-century
culture industries, Coney Island, with its ‘‘annihilating and incomparable ex-
pansiveness,’’ with its ‘‘colossal houses, as high as mountains,’’ where coarse
‘‘peasants’’ and the ‘‘genteel’’ wealthy mix and drink ‘‘distasteful mineral
water,’’ also affords Martí a place where he can begin to look at the historical
break between high and low cultures. Interestingly, the high cultural realm
is associated with what Martí calls the ‘‘we’’ (Latin Americans), and the low
belongs to the ‘‘they’’ (the people of the United States). But Martí’s ‘‘Coney
Island,’’ at the same time, reveals the emergent U.S. culture industry to be a
place where the dispossesed are routinely commodified, ridiculed, and physi-
cally abused. As Martí writes, Coney Island is the place where crowds ‘‘ap-
plaud the skill with which a ball thrower has managed to hit the nose of a
misfortunate man of color, who in exchange for a measly day’s wage, stands
day and night with his frightened head stuck through a hole made in the can-
vass, avoiding the pitches of the ball throwers with ridiculous movements
and exaggerated faces.’’
This ridiculing of a ‘‘misfortunate man of color’’ by the socially con-
structed ‘‘white,’’ massified audiences of the culture industry is more than
just popular entertainment for Martí. Rather, it is also a form closely asso-
ciated with minstrelsy 25 and white supremacy, where even leisure and enter-
tainment are embedded in a struggle over the politics of popular culture,
race, and nation. In other words, for Martí, a radical critic of modern scien-
tific racism (as Roberto Fernández Retamar emphasizes),26 the incorporation
of art and entertainment into the marketplace implies, in Ramos’s view, ‘‘a
sense of the degradation’’ illustrated for Martí in ‘‘the figure of the abused
black performer’’ at Coney Island.
That Martí felt especially unsympathetic toward urban mass culture is
undeniable. Indeed, as Ramos consistently points out in Divergent Modernities,
Martí clearly misjudges mass culture, privileging and ‘‘ideologizing’’ terms
such as culture to mean an ‘‘abstract sense of a process of becoming cul-
tivated,’’ while simultaneously criticizing ‘‘culture’s’’ abstract rationalism.
Martí preaches, ‘‘In vain do men of foresight attempt, by means of culture and
religious sentiment, to direct this driven mass that heedlessly seeks the quick
and full satisfaction of its appetites’’ (p. ). The sources of Martí’s concept
of culture, Ramos suggests, are to be found in the author’s own experiences
with the new, anonymous mass culture in New York and its surroundings,
such as Coney Island, where Martí writes ‘‘the marvelous prosperity of the

xxiv Foreword
United States of the North’’ and its ‘‘jovial and frenetic’’ crowds extend them-
selves ‘‘with a more tumultuous order’’ (p. ).
It is from his lofty aestheticizing position above the crowds that Martí
‘‘gazes with unfamiliarity at the material baseness of the masses in North
America.’’ More significantly for Ramos, Martí in his role as a cultural critic,
‘‘in effect help[s] to formulate one of the grand narratives of legitimation for
the wide-open field of the literary enterprise (which continued to function
at least until the centennials of the Latin American Wars of Independence)’’
(p. ). By asserting in ‘‘Coney Island’’ the pitfalls of modernization in the
capitalist United States of the North and proposing the superiority ‘‘of the
aesthetic sphere’’ as a socially symbolic response, Martí’s discourses (as well
as those of Sarmiento, José Enrique Rodó, and later after the Porfiriato, the
Mexican cultural critics Alfonso Reyes, José Vasconcelos, and the Dominican
Pedro Henríquez Ureña) ‘‘from the start [were] compromised by the project
to legitimize the cultural sphere’’ (p. ). In other words, the modernist’s
uneven rhetoric of crises (what Ramos later calls their Lyotardean ‘‘narratives
of legitimation’’) 27 contributed to producing the ‘‘bundle of processes’’ of
modernization itself.
Ramos’s analysis of Martí’s ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ ‘‘Coney Island,’’
and North American Scenes leads him to ask if it was a ‘‘coincidence that in
the first decades of this century the proliferation of essays’’ by both inter-
American intellectuals like Martí and traditional Latin American letrados alike
were ‘‘concomitant to the culturalist’’ project itself ? Did the very ‘‘form of the
[modernist] essay represent the ambiguous place of the modern writer faced
with the disciplinarian will distinctive of modernity’’ (p. )? If the essay
form, as Ramos theorizes, ‘‘mediates between the interior of the beautiful
(poetry) and the demands of society’’ (p. ), was this how modern chroni-
clers ‘‘extended [their social territory as interpreters and public announcers]
of the beautiful, first in the chronicle, but later in the essay, as a privileged
form of the ‘maestro’ at the turn of the century’’ (p. ) and beyond?
Divergent Modernities concludes with a sophisticated exegesis of Martí’s
classic, modern,  essay ‘‘Our America,’’ and with two new, supplemen-
tary chapters for the Duke edition on Martí’s migratory poetry written in New
York City and on his  testimony, War Journal. As in his earlier chapters,
Ramos continues analyzing the formation of Latin Americanism, for ‘‘behind
every assertion of what is Latin Americanism, there lies a will to power exer-
cised from different positions on the map of social contradictions.’’ Ramos
is, therefore, troubled with Martí’s attempts in ‘‘Our America’’ ‘‘to defend us’’
from a ‘‘they’’ who ‘‘would divest us of our self-representation’’ (p. ). Be-
cause Martí, among other things, interpellates his Latin American (and we

Foreword xxv
might add, his U.S. Latino/a) readers within an androcentric discourse of es-
sentializing ‘‘familial homogeneity’’ and a ‘‘discourse of identity’’ (p. ),
his critique of the cultures of U.S. imperialism and everything imported to
‘‘our’’ America (especially the colonizing discourse or the ‘‘tigers within’’
Latin America) necessarily entails, for Ramos, an ideology of the aesthetic
and ‘‘the gaze of an aesthetic Latin Americanist subject’’ (p. ).
In its ‘‘intensely overwritten prose,’’ and with its saturation of ‘‘tel-
luric’’ figures of speech or tropes, Martí’s ‘‘Our America’’ ends up being, in
Ramos’s view, the Cuban’s ‘‘reflection on the discourses that could legitimize
and effectively represent the conflicting field of identity’’ (p. ). As an ob-
ject of struggle over the field of representation, however, Martí’s gaze in
the process produces a powerful defense of what we now call after Foucault
‘‘subjugated knowledges,’’ and what postcontemporary Latin Americanist
Walter Mignolo terms ‘‘subaltern border gnosis.’’ 28 In other words, Martí
offers us in ‘‘Our America’’ a rich defense of everything ‘‘excluded by the letra-
dos,’’ as Ramos emphasizes. From this perspective, Martí’s bundle of ‘‘minor
writings’’ constitutes for Ramos an alternative ‘‘Latin Americanist archive,’’
capable of not only intervening into ‘‘the enigma of identity,’’ but also inves-
tigating ‘‘the conditions of possibility for good governance’’ in the Americas.
Consequently, Martí’s ‘‘Our America’’ involves itself in an analysis of the cul-
tural politics of race, nation, and culture, for cultures that are marginalized
(relegated to ‘‘underdevelopment’’) can also contain the grounds for a sober
critique of the hegemonic Western norms by which they are judged. Further,
‘‘Our America’’ operates within what Ramos sees as ‘‘the critical intensity of a
root knowledge—a knowledge of roots’’—and we might add, as Paul Gilroy
suggests of Black British root work in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness, as an intercultural knowledge of ‘‘routes.’’

Migratory Routes

Routes begins with [an] assumption of movement, arguing that travels and contacts
are crucial sites for an unfinished modernity. The general topic, if it can be called one,
is vast: a view of human location as constituted by displacement as much as by sta-
sis.—James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century

From my position as an American studies teacher, in a comparative ethnic

studies department, I wish to conclude by approaching Divergent Modernities
as a valuable book for contributing to and expanding our emergent inter-
American cultural criticism. Ramos’s new Duke edition opens up other
spaces (like Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic has accomplished for American studies),

xxvi Foreword
and in the process, develops and brings new problems to the forefront of cul-
tural criticism. And to say this is to claim that Ramos’s remarkable study, Di-
vergent Modernities, does for José Martí what the great Black Atlantic has done for
nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American modernists like Fred-
erick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright, among others. Of
course, Ramos wrote and published his book several years before Gilroy’s
was in print, but my point in this last section is to bring both Ramos and
Gilroy’s intercultural works closer together as examples of the new, stunning,
mapping out of diasporic and migratory, transnational scholarship. Indeed,
it is undeniable that Gilroy and Ramos’s works suggest some notable meth-
odological parallels in their philosophically nuanced studies of the ‘‘counter-
cultures’’ of subaltern modernity, and they do so by focusing on specific dias-
poric and migratory intellectuals within an outer-nationalist framework.
More important, Gilroy and Ramos link together some cultural conver-
sations that in Europe, Latin America, and North America have been kept
separated by their respective specialist and nationalist gazes. The most crucial
conversation, as Gilroy acutely puts it, is about the long and often ‘‘bitter dia-
logue on the significance of slavery and emancipation in the Western hemi-
sphere. It was very seldom that these two sets of interest were able to touch
one another.’’ 29 That is, Gilroy contends that before books such as C. L. R.
James’s The Black Jacobins and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, slavery
and modernity had very little to do with each other, for the cultural conversa-
tion, he emphasizes, was ‘‘configured in a very Eurocentric way, [and] in a . . .
dubious way, because it appealed to some innocent essence of Europe’’ ().
In writing The Black Atlantic, Gilroy attempts to show how there indeed
were ‘‘a common set of problems’’ (slavery, the Middle Passage, and moder-
nity), and that these problems had been articulated by African American
intellectuals and travelers, like DuBois, who had studied in the United States
and Germany; Wright, who lived in the United States and yet wrote many
of his books about African Americans from Paris, where he was engaged in
conversations with intellectuals like Simone de Beauvoir; and those who had
founded the Presence Africaine, thus dissolving the rigid borders between
Francophone and Anglophone worlds. Consequently, as Gilroy explains, a
set of philosophical problems ‘‘was being articulated across intellectual and
scholarly as well as linguistic and political borders.’’ These subaltern mod-
ernists, in Gilroy’s view, ‘‘defied the boundaries that the nation-state puts in
its place.’’ Further, they ‘‘marked out the cracks that the nation-state intro-
duces into our thinking of our own history, and I wanted to address that
fracture’’ ().

Foreword xxvii
 Modernity, for Gilroy, thus is both a qualitative and chronological cate-
gory ‘‘that gets generated through and from the systematic and hemispheric
trade in African slaves.’’ Further (‘‘where that becomes a modern experi-
ence’’), Gilroy adds, ‘‘it’s not something that belongs exclusively to the blacks
involved or their contemporary heirs. It belongs to an expanded understand-
ing of what the modern world is and how it worked. . . . It’s not anybody’s
special ethnic property. The experience of catastrophic terror does not be-
come something that its victims can own’’ ().
Similarly, throughout Divergent Modernities (and especially in his two new
chapters on Martí, ‘‘Migratories’’ and ‘‘The Repose of Heroes: On Poetry
and War in José Martí’’), Ramos is interested in examining what it meant
for Martí, a migratory, outer-nationalist intellectual, to be one of the first
U.S. Latinos confronting modernity and the cultures of U.S. imperialism. As
Ramos asks of Martí’s posthumous collection, Versos Libres, written during the
s in New York, ‘‘What house can writing found and firmly ground be-
yond its emphatic promise to do so?’’ (p. ). Does modern writing for Martí
‘‘guarantee the residence and home of the subject’’? (p. ).
Here, Ramos focuses on Martí’s ‘‘Domingo Triste’’ (‘‘Sad Sunday’’), a
poem about the New York Latino poet’s ‘‘biographical exile’’ that also marks
the larger sense of modernity, when a society is now ‘‘governed by the new
principles of organization’’ (p. ). Martí therefore, can represent the late-
nineteenth-century migratory U.S. Latino/a subject as a kind of ‘‘residue,’’
Ramos writes, ‘‘displaced and contained in a receptacle, the shell’’; or as
Ramos quotes Martí herein, ‘‘A friend came to see me, and he asked my-
self / about me; . . . I am the shell of myself, which on a foreign soil / turns
at the wish of a wild wind, / vain, fruitless, shattered, broken.’’ For Ramos,
Martí thematizes melancholy displacement, inter-American routes, and ‘‘the
experience of migratory flux’’ (p. ), where the transnational subject pos-
sibly loses itself, becoming ‘‘the shell of myself.’’
But this nineteenth-century U.S. Latino migratory subject, to Ramos’s
mind, is also ‘‘the bearer of traces’’ (p. ). Martí’s ‘‘here of plenitude’’ (in the
capitalist city of New York) is ‘‘the there of the subject that writes’’ (Cuba)—
and vice versa. The emergent U.S. Latino/a subject, in other words, as early
as the s, writes on that edge delineated by separation and fracture, and
as Martí himself complexly put it in ‘‘Sad Sunday,’’ ‘‘I bear the pain which the
whole world observes / a rebellious pain which the verse breaks / and that is,
oh sea! the fleeting gull / passing on its way to Cuba on your waves!’’
Martí’s insistence on ruptures and fractures is, for Ramos, key for under-
standing the slippery signifying chain in ‘‘Sad Sunday.’’ Exile and migration
break the subaltern modern poet’s verse. But Martí’s poetic verse (as Ramos

xxviii Foreword
acutely phrases it) may at the same time ‘‘break the pain,’’ for poetry is meta-
phorized here as a ‘‘gull,’’ and hence, can extend ‘‘a lasso, a meeting with the
absent land’’ (p. ). Briefly, Martí’s poem, ‘‘Sad Sunday,’’ can only repeat
‘‘something’’ of the migratory poet’s ‘‘originary plenitude’’ in Cuba, for it in-
scribes in New York ‘‘an image, an echo of experience’’ (p. ). U.S. Latino/a
writing is a creature ‘‘of the wind, of echoes,’’ and an echo that is also a result
of hemispheric and global forces of terror and empire.
It is against the grain of this domestic and global terror that we can
better locate Martí’s subaltern modernity, for his ‘‘minor writings’’ is about
our modern world and our place in it. Martí’s subaltern modernity—and
here Ramos’s Divergent Modernities is especially instructive—is not that of the
enlightened letrados, with their rhetorical emphasis on ‘‘reason’’ and ‘‘ratio-
nality.’’ Martí does not express the nineteenth-century view of Latin Ameri-
can intellectuals (like Sarmiento or Rodó), who revealed the continent’s bar-
barism, its ‘‘backwater-ness’’ to its habitat, but rather, through exile, he is
forced to become more specialized—first as a news correspondent, then as a
translator for Appelton House and a kind of cultural diplomat, and finally as
a founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in .
Subaltern modernity embeds Martí in a powerful political system (what
he famously referred to as being inside ‘‘the belly of the beast’’), where he by
necessity worked through and against the various imperial centers (Spain and
the United States)—modern centers governing their subaltern peripheries
(colonies and neocolonies) primarily for economic reasons. While Spain and
the United States’s imperialism for Martí were never equivalent, he never-
theless saw the latter’s empire as implying, for Nuestra América, direct and
indirect political and military control. And, of course, in his battle against
Spain’s imperialism, he gave his life on May , , at Dos Ríos, Cuba.
For Martí, the ‘‘American empire’’ was ‘‘not a contradiction in terms,’’
as Amy Kaplan suggests it has usually been seen by popular U.S. perception
and mainline scholarly analyses.30 In his North American Scenes, Martí was par-
ticularly sensitive to the terrors and catastrophes of modernity wrought by
slavery, the American Civil War, the United States–Mexican War (–),
and the United States’s conquests of the territories and indigenous peoples
of North America. If the s mark, as Kaplan writes, ‘‘a turning point
in the history of American imperialism’’ (), it was precisely at this time
that Martí joined the public debates of his epoch between ‘‘self-avowed im-
perialists and anti-imperialists.’’ Were the acquisitions (in the aftermath of
the  Spanish-American War) of Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and
Guam, Kaplan asks, merely ‘‘aberrations’’ of U.S. history and foreign policy?
Martí’s ‘‘Nuestra América,’’ read some  years later, indeed challenges

Foreword xxix
the Anglocentric idealist and narrow definition of U.S. imperialism, espe-
cially as it was proposed by realists like George F. Kennan,31 who in Kaplan’s
words, saw ‘‘imperialism as only the formal annexation of colonies’’ ().
Further, Martí’s writings anticipate a more cultural approach to his and our
own age of U.S. empire (–), for like, say, the views of historian
Richard Drinnon,32 Martí closely links continental and transoceanic expan-
sion. Through the beliefs in the racial superiority of Anglo-Saxons, the su-
periority of Occidentalism, and the desirability of subjugating nonwhites, the
ideologies of empire, as Kaplan contends, brought together ‘‘U.S. manifest
destiny with a transoceanic passage to India’’ ().
At a time when we are pondering our  years of the cultures of U.S.
imperialism (–), we may wish to read Martí’s subaltern modernity
as a chronological and relational concept, where in anthropologist Fernando
Coronil’s dramatic terms, ‘‘heterogeneous social actors . . . appear on his-
tory’s stage as subaltern [subjects], just as there are times or places in which
they play dominant roles.’’ Subalternity, as I have been using it in this intro-
duction, ‘‘defines not the being of a subject,’’ as Coronil theorizes, ‘‘but a
subjected state of being . . . , a double vision that recognizes at one level a
common ground among diverse forms of subjection and, at another, the in-
tractable identity of subjects formed within uniquely constraining worlds.’’ 33
Martí’s ‘‘double subaltern vision’’ is nowhere more visible and moving than
in his cogent account of what Ramos calls the formation of the Cuban’s
‘‘soldier-subject’’ in the War Journal, which he kept on his routes from the
United States to the Dominican Republic and Haiti on his way to fight for
Cuba’s liberation from empire in . While Martí’s War Journal has been
a significant ‘‘literary’’ document for twentieth-century Cubans associated
with José Lezama Lima’s Orígenes group (‘‘celebrated,’’ Ramos writes, for
its ‘‘fragmentary, intense prose’’), [, n. ]), Ramos wants his readers to
see the War Journal primarily for its devastating ‘‘critique of violence.’’ And it
is precisely through ‘‘aesthetic mediation’’ that Martí believes one can begin
to contain what Ramos refers to as ‘‘the ineluctably aggressive energy of the
revolutionary forces.’’ Hence, Martí writes: ‘‘The spirit I have sown is that
which has spread, across the island; with it, and guided in accordance with
it, we will soon triumph, and with the greatest victory, and for the greatest
peace. I foresee that, for a little while at least, the force and will of the revolu-
tion will be divorced from this spirit—it will be deprived of its enchantment
and taste . . . and of its ability to prevail from this natural consortium; [it]
will be robbed of the benefit of this conjunction between the activity of the
revolutionary forces and the spirit that animates them’’ (p. ).

xxx Foreword
 The double drives of war and enchantment, for Martí, have to be medi-
ated, separated, and finally integrated. This revolutionary conjunction is the
only possibility for survival, dignity, victory, and the ‘‘greatest peace.’’ It is
from this subaltern double perspective that we can also end with Robert Fer-
nández Retamar’s contrapuntal insight that ‘‘el moderismo es el primer periódo
de la época histórica del imperialismo y de la liberación.’’ (‘‘modernism is the
first historical periodization of the epoch of imperialism and liberation’’).34
Ramos’s Divergent Modernities celebrates contrapuntally the vitality, melan-
cholic struggle and the double subaltern vision that Martí wrought as a
chronicler, soldier-revolutionary-subject, and radical critic of empire, terror,
and violence in the face of the cultures of European and U.S. imperialism.

Notes

 For an illuminating discussion of ‘‘deterritorialization,’’ see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guat-
tari, ‘‘What Is a Minor Literature?’’ in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), where they use the term to locate the
politics of exile in literature and language.
 By the ‘‘transnationally local,’’ I mean the border zone where the local and global intersect.
See Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Essays on the Coloniality of Power, Subalternity,
and Border Thinking (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ).
 Public spheres, for Habermas, are both direct and mediated ‘‘critically reasoning’’ conversa-
tions between individuals who form public opinion, and thus, influence the political system.
See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category
of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, ).
 José Martí’s North American Scenes are a series of chronicles on North American everyday life,
especially in New York City. Written between  and  for various newspapers—par-
ticularly Buenos Aires’s La Nación, Mexico City’s El Partido Liberal, and Caracas’s La Opinión
Nacional—these modern chronicles form what Ramos calls a ‘‘seldom studied’’ and ‘‘funda-
mental part of Martí’s voluminous corpus’’ (p. xiv). More significantly, Martí’s North Ameri-
can Scenes constitute, again for Ramos, ‘‘a foundational moment in the genealogy of Latin
Americanist discourse, as they deploy a series of rhetorical strategies, tropes, and subject
positions’’ (p. xlv). See also Susana Rotker, ‘‘The (Political) Exile Gaze in Martí’s Writing on
the United States,’’ in José Martí’s ‘‘Our America’’: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies, ed.
Jeffrey Belknap and Raúl Fernández (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), –.
 James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography
(Berkeley: University of California Press, ).
 Julio Ramos’s study, herein, of Martí’s ‘‘minor writings,’’ like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guat-
tari’s study of Kafka, relies on a deconstruction of the high art canonical category. Ramos
rejects this hierarchic model of the canonical paradigm and instead favors a spatial, ‘‘lateral
criticism,’’ in which poetic or minor discourses are variously ‘‘inside’’ or ‘‘outside’’ of the
dominant discursive practices of the hegemonic culture.
 For critical reviews of Ramos’s Desencuentros de la modernidad, see, for instance, the following:

Foreword xxxi
 Rubén Ríos Avila, ‘‘Hacia una crítica lateral,’’ Puerto Rico Ilustrado (cultural supplement to El
Mundo),  August , –; John Beverley, review of Desencuentros de la modernidad, Re-
vista Iberoamericana , no.  (): –; Antonio Cornejo Polar, review of Desencuentros
de la modernidad, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana , no.  (): ; Luis Millones-
Figueroa, ‘‘El surgimiento de la literatura moderna en Latinoamérica,’’ Nuevo Texto Crítico 
(): ; María Elena Rodriguez Castro, ‘‘El buen decir y la crítica,’’ Posdata , no.  ();
Karen Stoley, review of Desencuentros de la modernidad, Hispanic Review , no.  (): –
; and Oscar Terán, review of Desencuentros de la modernidad, Boletín del Instituto de Historia de
la Universidad de Buenos Aires. For an extended reading of Ramos’s work, see John Beverley,
Against Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ). For an incisive reading
of the emergence of this new inter-American criticism as a response to the limits of (North)
American cultural criticism from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Richard Rorty, see Paul Jay, Con-
tingency Blues: The Search for Foundations in American Criticism (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, ).
 Fernando Coronil, ‘‘Transculturation and the Politics of Theory: Countering the Center,
Cuban Counterpoint,’’ introduction to Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, ), xi.
 Jürgen Habermas, ‘‘Modernity—An Incomplete Project,’’ trans. Seyla Benhabib, in The Anti-
Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, ),
. All subsequent page citations appear in the text.
 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford
University Press, ), .
 See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New
York: Scribner’s, ). My views here on Weber draw on Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, ).
 Drawing on the cultural work of Angel Rama, Jean Franco, and Noé Jitrik, Ramos’s thesis on
the uneven modernity in nineteenth-century Latin America anticipates Néstor García Can-
clini’s views on twentieth-century Latin America in Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y
salir de la modernidad (Mexico City: Grijalbo, ), where García Canclini writes ‘‘that we [in
Latin America] have had an exuberant modernism with a deficient modernization’’ ().
 Angel Rama, The Lettered City, trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, ).
 For a lucid and cogent analysis of this ‘‘Occidentalism’’ for the Americas, see Roberto Fer-
nández Retamar’s foundational ‘‘Nuestra América y Occidente,’’ in Para el perfil definitivo del
hombre, d ed. (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubana: ), –.
 David Lloyd, ‘‘Foundations of Diversity: Thinking the University in a Time of Multicultural-
ism,’’ unpublished manuscript, . All subsequent page citations appear in the text.
 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New
York: Continuum, ). Originally published in Amsterdam in , a good part of the
book is based on notes of intense discussions between Adorno and Horkheimer in their
exile in Santa Monica, California.
 If, as Ramos suggests, Martí’s writings are ‘‘minoritized discourses,’’ we might also extend
this key insight by saying that Martí’s positions emerged in similar ways as U.S. ethnic and
minority positions have emerged—in David Lloyd’s words, ‘‘in differential relation to the
unifying tendencies of the state and its apparatus’’ (Lloyd, ‘‘Foundations of Diversity,’’ ).

xxxii Foreword
 Beverley, Against Literature, .
 Michel Foucault, ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New
York: Pantheon, ), .
 See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, ). As opposed to ‘‘tradi-
tional intellectuals,’’ Gramsci’s ‘‘organic intellectuals’’ are the new progressive intellectuals
needed to organize a new social class.
 See Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, in The Marx-Engels Reader, d ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker
(New York: W. W. Norton, ), . Martí’s allusion to Marx anticipates Marshall Ber-
man’s view that the twentieth century oscillates between modernization and modernism,
shattering the public sphere into a multitude of fragments and privatized languages. As Ber-
man puts it, ‘‘To be modern . . . is to experience personal and social life as maelstrom, to
find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish,
ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into
air. To be a modernist is to make oneself something at home in the maelstrom, to make its
rhythms one’s own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty,
of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows’’ (Marshall Berman, All That Is
Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity [New York: Penguin Books, ]).
 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert
Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, ).
 Instead of using terms such as mass culture or popular culture, Theodor Adorno reminds us
that, ‘‘in our drafts we spoke of ‘mass culture.’ We replaced that expression with ‘culture in-
dustry’ in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that
it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses them-
selves, the contemporary form of popular art. From the latter the culture industry must be
distinguished in the extreme’’ (Theodor Adorno, ‘‘Culture Industry Reconsidered,’’ New Ger-
man Critique  [Fall ]: ).
 Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, .
 See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford
University Press, ).
 See Roberto Fernández Retamar’s ‘‘Del anticolonialismo al antimperialismo,’’ in ‘‘Nuestra
América’’: Cien Años y otros acercamientos a Martí (Havana: Editorial SI-MAR, ), , where
he argues persuasively that Martí ‘‘fue el anti-Gobineau, y con su visión popular, defendió exacta-
mento lo opuesto que el prefascita Frances, la igualidad de las razas.’’ (‘‘was an anti-Gobineau and,
with his popular vision, exactly defended the opposite of the French prefascist, the same-
ness of races’’). Fernández Retamar, of course, is alluding here to Martí’s differential vision
of biopolitics in ‘‘Our America’’ (), where he claimed that ‘‘no hay odio de razas, porque
no hay razas’’ (‘‘there is no hatred of races because there are no races’’). I thank Fernández
Retamar for his helpful conversations with me in Havana, Cuba, in January , and for
sharing his most recently published scholarly work on Martí.
 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).
 Michel Foucault, ‘‘Two Lectures,’’ in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,
–, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon, ), –.
 See Tommy Lott, ‘‘Black Cultural Politics: An Interview with Paul Gilroy,’’ Found Object (spring
): . All subsequent page citations appear in the text.

Foreword xxxiii
 Amy Kaplan, ‘‘On Imperialism,’’ in A Companion to American Thought, ed. Richard Wightman
Fox and James T. Kloppenberg (Oxford: Blackwell, ), . All subsequent quotations
will appear in the text.
 George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, – (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
).
 Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (New York:
NAL, ).
 Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, ), . See also José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American
Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, ).
 Roberto Fernández Retamar, ‘‘Naturalidad y novedad en la literatura martiana,’’ in ‘‘Nuestra
América’’: Cien Años y otros acercamientos a Martí (Havana: Editorial SI-MAR, ), .

xxxiv Foreword
Prologue

On the subject of prologues, one may well recall a marginally classic text
by José Martí: the Prólogo to Venezuelan poet Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde’s
Poema del Niágara (). Written as a supplement to another poet’s work, this
relatively unknown prologue seems to represent nothing more than a minor
text. And yet, it constitutes one of the first Latin American reflections on the
problematic relation between literature and power in the modern age. In-
deed, could a reflection on the transformation and flux, on the vertiginous
temporality distinctive of modernity, be posed in any other way but minor,
fragmentary?
Published with the (virtually forgotten) poem by Pérez Bonalde, who
along with Martí was an exile residing in New York City, the text is quite differ-
ent from the critical reflections on literature that had been produced earlier
by Latin American intellectuals. For example, in contrast to Andrés Bello’s
rhetorical or grammatical explications, Martí’s Prólogo does not attempt to
submit the particular features of the text to any preestablished norms or un-
questionable standards of writing—rhetorical, grammatical, or ideological.
Rather, Martí’s reading consists of an intense reflection on the impossibility
and devaluation of the earlier conceptualization of literature and the literary:

There is no permanent work [obra], because works in these times of re-

shaping and remodeling are by essence mutable and unsettled; there are
no untrodden paths, one can barely glimpse the new altars, as great and
open as forests. Everywhere diverse ideas solicit the mind: and ideas
are like polyps, like the light of stars, like the waves of the sea. We un-
ceasingly long to know anything that can reassure us; or we are afraid
to know of anything that may change [our] present convictions. The
elaboration of the new social state has rendered insecure the battle for
personal existence and even more the strength for accomplishing those
daily obligations which, failing to find open venues, change form and di-
rection at every instant, agitated by the fear of a probable or near misery.
With the soul torn thus between contradictory and restless loves; the
 concept of literature alarmed at every instant by a new gospel; the once
revered images, now devalued and stripped bare, and even the future
images left unknown, it does not seem possible in this discord of the
mind—this mixed-up life with neither fixed direction, distinct charac-
ter, nor certain end, this acerbic fear at the impoverishment of the home,
and the varied and timid effort we undertake in order to escape it—to
produce those enduring and patient works, those extended histories in
verse, those imitations of Latin peoples.1

Martí’s prologue reflects on the problems of production and interpreta-

tion of literary texts in an unstable society, prone to the fluctuation of values
that, until then, had guaranteed the coherence and social authority of writ-
ing. Moreover, this text constitutes a meditation on the unfixed place of lit-
erature in a world ruled by the discourses of modernization and progress.
Is it even possible to write (and read) in such a world? What institu-
tions would guarantee the value and meaning of literary discourse in the
new society? Or would the writer flounder in dislocations that nevertheless
seemed to be (for Martí) the only stable law in the modern world?
Literature had once acted as the model for an ideal national language,
relatively homogenized; it designated the place (at times fictitious) where
models of subjectification, necessary norms for the invention of citizenship,
and symbolic boundaries were projected. Letters had sketched the imagi-
nary map of nation-states on the road to consolidation. Yet the prolifera-
tion of prologues written anxiously and obsessively by many of Martí’s con-
temporaries (above all the poets) evinces the dissolution of codes that had
previously assured the paradigmatic place of writing in the fabric of social
communication. Alien to what literature might represent for us today—a
relatively specialized field, differentiated from other discursive practices as
well as from common language—the nostalgia manifested in Martí’s Pró-
logo responds to the crisis of a cultural system wherein literature, or better
yet letters, had occupied a central place in the organization of the new Latin
American societies.
The remarkable abundance of fin de siècle prologues, many of them
marked by a nostalgia corresponding to what Rubén Darío had once called
the ‘‘loss of the kingdom,’’ reveals the crisis of the earlier cultural system.
At the same time, seen from a different angle, these prologues attest to the
proliferation of a new discourse on literature: a discourse that would project,
at the very least, the attempt of writers to specify the boundaries and limits
of a new authority, a specifically literary locus of speech that would define
the roles of an emergent literature apart from the earlier fictions generated

xxxvi Prologue
around the project of state building. In these prologues, the relation between
literature and the state above all would be problematized; not only as a con-
sequence of modernity, but as the very condition that would render literary
autonomization and modernization possible.
Martí’s Prólogo examines various fundamental aspects of the modern
crisis. He emphatically points out that the new social organization was
making the survival of poets difficult, for this organization had, in turn,
brought about a world ‘‘where the only art left to us is that of filling up
the house pantry,’’ 2 and where the institutions that had until then guaran-
teed the social weight of writing (i.e., the church and state) had withdrawn,
taking with them the charge and traditional authority once bestowed on
writers. Martí also insisted on the general divestment of rhetorical and reli-
gious codes, the ‘‘devaluation’’ of languages belonging to tradition, both of
which resulted in a ‘‘not knowing,’’ in a lack of ‘‘unbroken paths,’’ in ‘‘this
blinding of sources and this obfuscation of the gods’’ (p. ). The crisis,
concomitant with what Max Weber termed the disenchantment of the world
in the processes of rationalization 3 and secularization, had effects that Martí
directly attributed to the inefficacy of forms and the exhaustion of traditional
modes of literary representation.
The Prólogo’s form displays a remarkable verbal agility, an intense poeti-
cization of prose, quite apart from the rhetorical norms of the epoch. It is
organized around a key metaphor that represents the writer as a solitary war-
rior, with neither army nor support. This metaphor is tied to the dissolution
of the epic, collective dimensions that once defined literature. With the struc-
tures of what had been a relatively organic public space—a space that letters
had helped to configure—now disjointed and inchoate, literary practice had
become privatized, evoking what Martí called the ‘‘nostalgia for the great
deed’’ (p. ) in the poet and literature. Of course, Martí never assumed
the privatization of art to be a given; rather, he identified privatization with
an exile from the polis that he would forever attempt to supercede through
the invention of new interventions and reterritorializations. Hence we see,
for example, the affiliative and interpellative nature of his Latinoamericanismo
(Latin Americanism). Nevertheless, Martí recognized in privatization one of
the driving forces at that time redefining the very forms of literature, and
especially, the place of writers and their authority in the face of other institu-
tions and discursive practices.
And it was these transformations, in turn, that redefined the possible
positions of the writer before the law, another key word in the Prólogo. In the sys-
tem or ‘‘Republic of Letters’’ prior to Martí—the literary or lettered field that
we will see at work in D. F. Sarmiento and A. Bello—the formalization of the

Prologue xxxvii
law had been one of the essential tasks of patrician intellectuals dominated
by the model of the lettered man or letrado. This field and function of litera-
ture, which has been explored by Claudio Véliz and particularly Angel Rama,
must be set apart from the subject of the Prólogo, which postulates literature
to be a discourse critical of codes and the law. The law is here correlated with
‘‘the lessons, laws, and ordinances imposed on him by those who came be-
fore’’ (see p. ), or in other words, with the weight of a repressive tradition
that obstructed at once ‘‘political liberty’’ and ‘‘spiritual liberty.’’ For Martí,
the poet was an exile from the law, and literature was the ‘‘desperate cry of
the son of an unknown great father, who asks his mute mother [nature] to
reveal the secret of his birth.’’ As nature’s son, like the illegitimate Ishmael of
the desert whose name becomes the title of Martí’s first book of poetry (pub-
lished the same year as his Prólogo), to be a writer is to be displaced from the
paternal institution—to be an exile from the polis.
Martí’s reflection in the Prólogo cannot be read as a passive document, a
transparent testimony of the crisis. Written in a style without precedent in the
history of Latin American prose, it elaborates new strategies of legitimation.
Beyond the apparent condemnation to silence that seems to be the fate of lit-
erature, a never-silent voice gathers weight and density in its act of spelling
out the crisis. This voice marks the specificity of a gaze, of a literary authority,
that had not until that moment existed in Latin America. Modern literature
is brought into being and proliferates, paradoxically, by announcing its death
and denouncing the crisis of modernity. Thus, on one level, the prologues of
the epoch are only minor or marginal in appearance. On another level, they
satisfied a central function in the emergent literary field: not only did they
differentiate the new writers from the preceding letrados; these prologues also
formed a type of metadiscourse, a cartography wherein the emergent litera-
ture would continue to trace and remake the limits of its territory. If one
finds that a new literary concept is transformed and rewritten in every pro-
logue, it is because, in modernity, these metadiscourses could never hope to
assume the function of normative or prescriptive codes. The prologues by fin
de siècle writers are minor fictions, attentive to the conjuncture and demands
of the present moment—partial maps where writers attempt to specify provi-
sionally their authority and locus in a society bereft of any overarching code.
On the other hand, this does not mean that Martí and his contempo-
raries would take up the ‘‘exhaustion’’ of codes and the provisional nature of
values as a characteristic feature of their discourse proper. To the contrary,
before the instability and flux of the modern world, literature for Martí was
authorized as an attempt to overcome aesthetically the incertitude and the
‘‘not knowing’’ generated by modern fragmentation. Martí refused to surren-

xxxviii Prologue
der himself to the caprices of currents and flows; in fact, he proposed that
literature be a way of contesting and superseding them. Before the forms of
knowledge privileged by modern rationalization, Martí asserted the superi-
ority of an alternative ‘‘knowledge’’ found in art, capable of even imagining
a future harmony. For Martí, the authority of modern literature was rooted
precisely in its resistance to the deterritorialized flows rampant in capitalist
modernization.
What would the alternative ‘‘knowledge’’ of literature entail? What econ-
omy of meaning, what system of values, would delineate literature’s auton-
omy? What other kinds of discourse would occupy the frontiers, the outside
of the emergent literary field? For now, let it suffice to say that, in Martí’s
view, literature turns its gaze precisely ‘‘there toward what is unknown.’’ Its
economy will, at times, assume a way of granting value to materials devalued
by the utilitarian economies of rationalization—words, positions, and ex-
periences. If, for the enlightened letrados, writing was a kind of machine that
attempted to transform the ‘‘chaos’’ of a ‘‘barbaric’’ nature into value or mean-
ing subordinated to the mechanisms of the law (a proposition dealt with
primarily in chapters  through ), for Martí, literature will be defined as a cri-
tique of this dominant task of letters in the modernizing project. Literature
would look toward turbulence and irregularity, in contrast to the theoretical
and formal renditions privileged by the modernizing dream: in Martí’s words,
‘‘A tempest is more beautiful than a locomotive’’ (appendix , ). Against
the ‘‘surgeon’s scalpel’’ (appendix , ), an emblem for the official positiv-
ism of the epoch, Martí proposes the priority of a ‘‘knowledge bequeathed to
me by the gaze of children’’ (p. ). In sum, this knowledge would entail an
originary vision: as Martí will argue in ‘‘Nuestra América’’ (), this vision
would be the only one capable of representing and understanding the ‘‘pri-
meval’’ American world threatened by the effects and contradictions brought
about by modernity (see chapter ).
It would be hasty, however, to idealize any claim of literature’s mar-
ginality with respect to the state-motivated discourses of modernity and
progress. Although the new literary concept served to criticize these latter
discourses, it also implied the struggle to reclaim social legitimacy. These
strategies would later serve to consolidate the relatively institutionalized
basis for literature, beginning with the pedagogical impact of Uruguayan
intellectual José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel () following the Spanish-American
War of , and the culturalist discourses of Pedro Henríquez Ureña,
Alfonso Reyes, and others throughout the early decades of the twentieth cen-
tury (see chapter ). As we will discover, the critique that literature and its
‘‘marginality’’ would mount against modernity and (foreign) capitalism was,

Prologue xxxix
at times, abstract and essentialist; still, it did promise a certain social au-
thority, which in the end attracted even the ruling classes of Latin America,
who found themselves threatened by a modernization that brought political
and economic dependency in its wake.
The modern crisis, a ‘‘dismemberment’’ on which Martí’s Prólogo con-
tinually reflects, has been linked to what a number of Latin American critics
have called the division of intellectual labor, one of the basic processes charac-
teristic of societies at the turn of the century. At this point, then, it might
be appropriate to specify the field from which some of these critical con-
cepts arose; these concepts, to a certain degree, have made our genealogy
of nineteenth-century literary discourse possible. From important works by
P. Henríquez Ureña to more recent ones by Rama, Rafael Gutiérrez Girar-
dot, José Emilio Pacheco, David Viñas Noé Jitrik, Jean Franco, and others,
the concept of the division of labor has been used to explain the emergence
of modern Latin American literature as an effect of social modernization,
urbanization, and the incorporation of Latin American markets into the
world economy. Most important, the rise of modern literature has been seen
as a consequence of the implementation of a new regime of specializations
that at once relieved the letrados of their traditional tasks in state administra-
tion and forced writers to become professionalized.
Girardot’s invaluable essay Modernismo is exemplary in this regard: in ex-
ploring the suggestions made by critics such as Federico de Onís and Rama,
Girardot attempts to ‘‘place modernismo in a European sociohistorical and cul-
tural context,’’ which is to say, in the context of ‘‘modernity.’’ 4 His reading,
however, does presuppose a new risk. It may in fact be true that in Europe
literary modernization, which entailed the autonomization of art and the pro-
fessionalization of writers, was a primary social process, distinctive of those
societies on the threshold of advanced capitalism. Yet in Latin America, mod-
ernization in all respects was—and continues to be—an extremely uneven
phenomenon. In these societies, ‘‘modern’’ literature (if not the modern state
itself ) was not able to rely on institutional bases that would guarantee its au-
tonomy (a subject that will be treated in chapters  and ). With this concern
in mind, how would it be possible to speak of autonomy and specialization
in Latin America? What are the effects of a dependent and uneven modern-
ization on the literary field? Or is Octavio Paz indeed correct in saying that
against the grain of underdevelopment and dependency, literature comes to
be an exceptional domain where it would be possible to project a compensa-
tory modernity—a modernity to counteract the unevenness and inequalities
brought about by the development of other social institutions?
In response to this problematic, Divergent Modernities articulates a double

xl Prologue
movement: on the one hand, the exploration of literature as a discourse that
seeks autonomization or the specification of its field of social authority, and
on the other, an analysis of the conditions that made the institutionalization
of literature impossible. To put it another way, this book will explore the uneven
modernization of Latin American literature during the period of its emergence.
Such an analysis is not posed strictly along sociological lines. If the con-
cept of literature as an institution—a field that has been assigned the produc-
tion of certain discursive norms and a relative social specificity—is one of the
theoretical foundations of this analysis, it must go beyond the study of ideo-
logical ‘‘themes’’ or ‘‘contents’’ to pursue the problematic authority of literary
discourse, along with the effects of literature’s uneven modernization as they
can be gleaned from the very level of its emergent forms. Examining the ir-
reducible aporias that, until today, have confronted literary autonomization
may perhaps help to explain the formal heterogeneity of Latin American lit-
erature: the proliferation of hybrid forms that overrun the generic and func-
tional categories of literature canonized by the institution in other contexts.
For these (among other) reasons, in dealing with the primary impulses
behind literary autonomization, I will bypass the predictable point of de-
parture that would begin with the poetic or literary ‘‘interior’’ characteristic
of modernism at the turn of the century; we will, instead, proceed laterally,
by scrutinizing forms such as the chronicle, where literature would represent
(at times anxiously) its encounter and conflict with the technologized and
massified discourses of modernity. The formal heterogeneity of the chronicle
serves to portray the contradictions confronted by a literary authority and its
ever-frustrated attempt to ‘‘purify’’ and homogenize its own territory against
the pressures and interventions of other discourses limiting literature’s vir-
tual autonomy. It would thus be difficult to read the modernist chronicle (by
Ruben Darío, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Julián del Casal, Manuel Gutiérrez
Nájera, and particularly Martí) either as a merely supplementary form to
poetry or solely the modus vivendi of writers at the turn of the century; in-
deed, it seems that the heterogeneity of the chronicle, the commingling and
contact between discourses in the fabric of the chronicle’s form, constitutes
one of the distinctive features of this Latin American literary institution.
The concept of uneven modernization will also enable us to situate this
analysis in the context of certain discussions on the relationship between lit-
erature and politics that initially took shape in the nineteenth century. As
Peter Bürger has shown, the autonomization of art and literature in Europe
was a corollary of the rationalization of political functions in the relatively
autonomous territory of the state.5 In other words, the institutionalization of
art and literature presupposed their separation from the public sphere, which

Prologue xli
in nineteenth-century Europe was already developing its own ‘‘organic’’ intel-
lectuals, along with its own administrative and discursive apparatuses. Yet
in Latin America, the obstacles that confronted the institutionalization of
literature paradoxically generated a literary field whose separation from the
political sphere was incomplete and uneven—even today. An unevenly mod-
ern literature would thus frequently function as a discourse invested in the
task of proposing solutions to political enigmas that overlapped the conven-
tional borders of the institutional literary field.
Does this then mean that literature continued to exercise tasks under the
auspices of the state at the turn of the century, or that the impulses behind
literary autonomization were solely a mask over an anachronistic and tradi-
tional system? If Martí’s discourse was not validated by the law as being politi-
cal in the sense of pertaining to the state, what differentiated the political
interventions in his writing from the public authority of the letrados belonging
to the previous generations? Questions such as these will lead us through the
first chapters of the book, which explore the roles of writing throughout the
organizational process of nation-states before the last quarter of the century.
As we will see in the reading of Domingo F. Sarmiento’s Facundo, in the poli-
tics of language in Andrés Bello, and in the selective analysis of the place of
‘‘letters’’ in education and journalism, writing provided a model, a repository
of forms, for the organization of new nations. The relative formality pro-
vided by the written word was one of the privileged paradigms for envisioning
modernization. This vision would include the submission of ‘‘barbarism’’ to
the order of discourses, citizenship, the market, and the modern state. And
these initial analyses will enable us to later specify the transformations that
made possible the emergence of a fin de siècle literature; a literature that,
even in cases of public intervention (for example, journalism), displayed a
new labor on language, a new means of authorization, and a new relation-
ship with other discursive practices that seem to us irreducible to the norms
of traditional ‘‘lettered’’ communicability.
Of course, an exploration into the hybrid nature of the chronicle might
seem to be quite an ironic way to approach the will to literary autonomy,
commonly identified with the rise of modernista poetry. In a similar instance,
given Martí’s reputation as a political writer, it seems at first sight ironic that
he would be the one to initiate a reflection on the relative disengagement
of literature from the public or state sphere. For many, his ‘‘life and work’’
embody the integrity and synthesis of ethicopolitical imperatives with prop-
erly literary demands. In the history of his readings and their canonization,
Martí normally appears as an organic subject, as a ‘‘statue of solid granite’’
(as Enrique José Varona declares) who had succeeded in condensing and re-

xlii Prologue
deeming the experience of modern fragmentation. His politicization thus
seemed to make possible a discourse inseparable from life, a literature ori-
ented toward action, an aesthetic subordinated to ethical constraints, and
most important, an authority defined by the demands of the public sphere.
In this respect, Martí himself becomes a figure of an entirely modern
heroism, insofar as through a heroic will he attempts to overcome a series of
contradictions that the letrados of the preceding generations did not have to
confront. Martí is a modern hero precisely because his effort to synthesize
roles and functions of different discourses presupposes various antitheses
generated by the division of labor, on the one hand, and (on the other) the
fragmentation of what had been a relatively integrated vital sphere, where
the writing of the letrados held a public validity and a set of paradigmatic dis-
cursive functions. In Martí, the tension between literary discourse and other
areas in the fabric of social communication is the negated referent that is
to be ‘‘superseded’’ by a heroic will. That very insistence with which Martí
sought to distance himself from literary autonomization, which (to a certain
degree) determined the modernist project, exemplifies the fact that even in
Martí (as opposed to the letrados) writing had already begun to occupy a differ-
entiated place in the public sphere: a locus of speech outside the state, from
which literature would never cease to criticize the domination of political,
state-sponsored discourses. Martí’s intense politicization, his vision of be-
coming ‘‘poet in acts,’’ of bringing the poetic word into the center of collec-
tive life, seems at times strained, exacerbated.6 Nevertheless, it attempts to
respond to what he considered to be the alienation of the poet in modernity:
his exile from the polis, his estrangement from even the mother tongue. In
fact, the intensity of this vitalism belies the fragmentation and dissolution of
the traditional system of ‘‘letters’’ that had until that time been the model of
social communicability. Hence, Martí may be one of the first properly mod-
ern Latin American writers, even as the heterogeneity of his discourse and
the multiplicity of his roles reminds us of the extremely problematic status
of this category—the specialized modern writer—in Latin America.
At the same time, it would be reductive to aestheticize Martí. When we say
that Martí spoke about politics and life from a specific kind of perspective
or gaze, from a locus of (an unevenly) literary speech, we do not necessarily
negate the political impact of Martí in areas that can hardly be considered
purely literary. This study will merely try to specify those mechanisms of
authorization that such a gaze would imply: a gaze confronted by the enig-
mas presented by politics, a gaze that would envision solutions related to
the emergent literary field. Once again, Martí’s essay ‘‘Nuestra América’’ is in
this respect exemplary. In fact, Martí’s essay, which is even today considered

Prologue xliii
a classic example of Latinoamericanista political and identity writing, becomes
a privileged object of this analysis (see chapter ), insofar as it corresponds to
the double movement of the hypotheses concerning aesthetics and politics.
If this study is not restricted to the reading of more homogeneously lit-
erary materials, it is precisely because the category of literature has continued
to be a problematic one in Latin America. Hence, in exploring the modern
will to autonomization, we must also read the various types of multidiscur-
sive narratives that take on a literary authority in Martí and the fin de siècle
writers. The chronicle is one such example. Furthermore, these hybrid forms
cannot be considered as isolated and exceptional cases; rather, they high-
light the blurring of boundaries, the entirely relative nature of the separation
or division among discursive roles and functions distinguishing intellectual
production in Latin America, even in the most autonomous or ‘‘pure’’ in-
stances. Yet it would also be a mistake to read this proliferation of hybrid
roles either as the trace of an earlier, traditional, harmonious authority, or
as an instance of a premodern intellectual field. For even in the most politi-
cized writers, the tension between the demands of the public sphere and the
impulses or drives of literature toward a formal autonomy was considerable.
This tension forms one of the fundamental bases of modern Latin American
literature; it is the germinal seed of discursive forms that have never ceased to
propose resolutions to the constitutive contradiction. Without attempting to
dissolve that tension, nor accepting at face value those exhortations by many
writers for a synthesis, let us rather explore how this contradiction intensifies
writing and produces texts. Chapters  and  will deal primarily with these
issues.
Finally, a word on the second part of this book: it begins with a series
of readings around Martí’s Escenas norteamericanas (North American Scenes), then
moves toward an analysis of ‘‘Nuestra América’’ (written in New York) and
Latin Americanist ensayismo (essay writing) at the turn of the century. The
Escenas are a series of chronicles, seldom studied, on North American life—
particularly in New York City. Martí wrote them between  and  for
numerous Latin American newspapers, particularly La Nación from Buenos
Aires, El Partido Liberal from Mexico City, and La Opinión Nacional from Cara-
cas. Taken together, these chronicles form an extensive and fundamental part
of Martí’s voluminous corpus. Not only do they recount the multiple aspects
of urban daily life in an advanced capitalist society, but they also serve as a
continual reflection on the place of the one who writes—in Martí’s case, the
Latin American intellectual—in the face of modernity. Behind the represen-
tation of the city, behind its machines and crowds, Martí’s discourse at once
nurtures and is nurtured by a field of ‘‘identity’’ that emerges in opposition to

xliv Prologue
the signs of a threatening, yet at the same time desired, modernity. Despite
its subjection to the heteronomous demands of the newspaper, this field of
identity is articulated from a certain gaze and an emphatically literary voice;
and it progressively takes up the defense of the ‘‘aesthetic’’ and ‘‘cultural’’
values of Latin America by placing them in opposition to capitalist moder-
nity, the crisis of experience, materialism, and the economic power of the
North American other.
The Escenas constitute a foundational moment in the geneaology of Latin
Americanist discourse, as they deploy a series of seminal rhetorical strategies,
tropes, and subject positions. Indeed, Martí’s chronicles on North American
modernity effectively anticipate what Rodó would call ‘‘our modern litera-
ture of ideas,’’ tied to the Latin Americanist ensayismo at the beginning of the
century.7 To a certain degree, this Latinoamericanista rhetoric—which presup-
poses an authority, an aesthetic approach to ‘‘protecting’’ and selecting the
component elements of ‘‘our’’ identity—raised the possibility for Martí and
many of his contemporaries of resolving the solitude of the writer. Martí had
himself lamented this condition in the Prólogo. From the early example of
Martí’s ‘‘Nuestra América,’’ and a number of chronicles preceding it (such as
‘‘Coney Island’’), literature in the culturalist essay begins to wield authority
as an alternative and privileged mode of speaking about politics. Opposed to
the ‘‘technical’’ forms of knowledge and the ‘‘imported’’ languages of official
politics, literature is postulated as the only hermeneutic capable of resolving
the enigmas of a Latin American identity. Martí was accustomed to saying
that literature would never exist unless and until there also existed a Latin
America. If identity, for us, is never external to the discourse that names it—
and if conversely, the form, authority, and institutional weight of the subject
all determine the cut and selection of materials that will compose and repre-
sent this very identity—then perhaps we can say today, in recalling Martí,
that there can be no Latin America as long as there is no discourse authorized
to name it. Literature would be charged with the enormous and, at times, un-
bearable weight of this representativity.

One signature—it is the law of the genre—but the conditions of possibility

are always collective. I would like to thank, above all, Margherita Anna Tor-
tora for her support and company, as well as, at times, her respectful dis-
tance from this project. I am grateful for the solidarity of and suggestions
from various peers at Princeton University, who supported me in more than
one sense throughout the early stages of my research and writing. I mention
only those who read and commented on parts of the manuscript: to Antonio
Prieto, María Elena Rodríguez Castro, Edgardo Moctezuma, Antonio Vera

Prologue xlv
León, Stephanie Sieburth, and Humberto Huergo, many thanks. To Sylvia
Molloy and Josefina Ludmer, I am thankful for the rigor and generosity of
their readings, as well as for the many conversations spent trying out these
ideas. Without the stimulus from Angel Rama, this work would not have con-
tinued beyond its initial outlines. Finally, I would like to thank the friendship
and dialogue of my colleagues at Emory University, especially Emilia Navarro,
Ricardo Gutiérrez, and visiting professors Fernando Balseca, Oscar Montero,
and Rubén Ríos.
I also acknowledge the support from a fellowship given to me by the
Latin American Studies Program at Princeton, which enabled me to travel to
Argentina (in July ) for the purpose of consulting La Nación of Buenos
Aires. A summer fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humani-
ties and a semester-long leave of absence sponsored by the Emory Research
Committee in  greatly assisted me in the revision of this book.

Notes

 José Martí, Obras Completas, vol.  (Havana: Editional Lex, ), –. See appendix ,
p. .
 José Martí, Prólogo. See appendix , p. .
 In Weber’s ‘‘Science as a Vocation,’’ rationalization and/as the disenchantment of the world
are the terms he uses to replace and expand on the notion of progress and science as con-
stants over the course of human history. ‘‘[Rationalization] means that principally there are
no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather, that one can, in principle,
master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted.’’ See Max Weber,
‘‘Science as a Vocation,’’ in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. Hans H. Geth and
C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, ),  ff.
 Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot, Modernismo: supuestos históricos y culturales (Mexico City: Fondo de
Cultura Económica, ), .
 See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, ).
 José Martí, Epistolario de José Martí y Máximo Gómez, in Papeles de Martí, ed. Gonzalo de Quesada y
Miranda, vol.  (Havana: Imprenta El Siglo Veinte, ), .
 José Enrique Rodó, Ariel (), ed. Angel Rama, prologue by Carlos Real de Azira (; re-
print, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ).

xlvi Prologue
PART I
 The Other’s Knowledge: Writing and
Orality in Sarmiento’s Facundo

It has been said that during the Latin American wars of independence the
Creole elites succeeded in voicing a general consensus—a we that quickly co-
alesced and gathered momentum around a common enemy (Spain). Yet be-
hind the subsequent inauguration of new governments, fundamental contra-
dictions reemerged on the surface of social life. The new states had to be
consolidated, a project that entailed the delimitation of borders and territo-
ries, the generalization of authority under a central law capable of submit-
ting particular interests in conflict with one another to the project of a new
homogeneity, a national homogeneity that was linguistic as well as political.
La República Argentina es una e indivisible, Domingo F. Sarmiento proclaimed in
the classic text, Facundo.1 The reality, however, was otherwise: the internal
fragmentation brought about by the wars undermined the project of consoli-
dating the national subject, which had been almost always imagined through
the tracings of foreign models.
After the victory over the ancien régime the chaos had only intensified, as
the rigid colonial institutions—and the anti-Spanish consensus—lost their
force and legitimacy. Beginning with the s, the activity of writing became
a response to the necessity of overcoming the catastrophe of war, the absence
of discourse, and the annihilation of established structures in the war’s after-
math. To write, in such a world, was to forge the modernizing project; it was
to civilize, to order the randomness of American ‘‘barbarism.’’ 2
In a fundamental autobiographical text of the period, Recuerdos de provin-
cia (Provincial Memoirs), Sarmiento recalls:

The day following the revolution, we had to look all around us, search-
ing for what could fill the emptiness that the decimated inquisition, the
defeated absolute power, and an increased religious exclusion had all
left behind.3

Faced with the absence of new models to follow, Sarmiento’s discourse would
turn almost automatically to the North: ‘‘North America has separated from
England without having repudiated the history of its liberties’’ (p. ). The
intellectual, for Sarmiento, legitimizes his claim to authority by looking ‘‘all
around us, searching for what could fill the emptiness.’’ To fill the empty spaces
was to populate deserts, construct cities, navigate rivers, weave networks of
social communication. The image of transport, in particular, traverses Facundo
as a central trope in Sarmiento’s rhetoric of reconstruction: the trope con-
denses the project of subordinating the American heterogeneity to the order
of discourse, to the rationality (not only verbal) of the market, labor, and ulti-
mately meaning.4
This project, however, raised an immediate problem for Sarmiento: in
the absence of such a discursive order in Latin America, it would have to be
transported from Europe or the United States. In Sarmiento, the intellectual
would have to function as a traveler who could import discourse: he travels
to Europe or North America, ‘‘searching for what could fill the emptiness.’’
If, for Sarmiento, ‘‘There are regions too high, whose atmosphere cannot be
breathed by those who are born in the lowlands,’’ 5 then the traveler would
have to pass from the low to the high, mediating between the inequalities.
He goes with

the idea that we are on the wrong track in America, and that there are
profound and traditional causes for this tendency that must be broken,
if we do not want to be dragged into the erosion, the nothingness, and
I daresay the barbarism: the inevitable mire into which the remains of
peoples and races that cannot endure have sunken, as those primitives,
unformed creations that have since passed away from the earth, when
the environment had changed. (Facundo p. )

Significantly, the ‘‘baseness’’ (bajeza) described by Sarmiento here fig-

ures not only as an effect of the emptiness: it is also the mire of those tra-
ditional causes, primitives, unformed (creations), incapable of adjusting to
the demands of progress. Thus, in order for the intellectual to lead his people
from barbarism, he travels to the highlands. Only he can breathe in those
high regions, for he has brought readings with him. Later, he will return with
the translated word, full of value in its capacity to serve as a model. If the con-
dition of the journey in Sarmiento is that unevenness, that distance between
the high and low, his writing project would be to dissolve that imbalance: to
cover the emptiness. This project of leveling presupposes, in turn, the neces-
sity of populating the American desert with the structures of modernity:
‘‘Don’t you want, in the final instance, for us to call on science and industry
on our behalf, to call them with all our might, so that they might come to sit
among us?’’ (Facundo, p. )

    

 Of course, the transport of meaning generated new imbalances and dis-
placements. In the lucid Notas sobre ‘‘Facundo’’ (Notes on ‘‘Facundo’’)—a work deal-
ing primarily with the significance of quoting in Sarmiento—contemporary
novelist and critic Ricardo Piglia examines the epigraph, written in French,
that introduces Sarmiento’s Facundo: ‘‘On ne tue point les idées’’ (One cannot
kill ideas). Sarmiento contends that this dictum unleashed the spirit behind
his writing Facundo, widely considered the founding text of a national Argen-
tine literature. Yet Piglia’s analysis reveals the apocryphal nature of quoting,
which opens up a virtual labyrinth of questionable sources at the very root of
the Argentine (if not indeed Latin American) canon: ‘‘The most famous quote
of the book, which Sarmiento attributes to Fortoul, is according to Groussac,
taken from de Volney. But another French writer, Paul Verdevoye, later dem-
onstrates that the quote appears in neither the work of Fortoul nor de Volney,
but rather, is attributable to Denis Diderot.’’ 6 The intellectual genealogy in
this Borgesian chain of false attributions might even go beyond Verdevoye or
Piglia. In any case, Piglia’s point is to show how the mechanism of quoting,
which constantly serves to buttress the authority of the narrative voice by dis-
placing it with the voices of European authors, is Facundo’s germinal seed. Yet
although Facundo’s founding proposition, attempts to invite the reader into a
system of interlocking analogies held together by precisely those European
ideas that ‘‘one can never kill,’’ Diderot’s (Fortoul’s, de Volney’s) maxim is
nevertheless itself subject to the very same American contingency that the en-
tirety of Sarmiento’s text decries. The following passage by Sarmiento offers
a good example:

In the L’Histoire de Paris, written by G. Fouchard La Fosse, I find these sin-

gular details. . . . Put the scarlet ribbon in place of the crucifix of San
Andres, the scarlet vest in place of the red roses; mazorqueros in place of
cabochiens; in place of , the date of that society, put  in its stead,
the date of this other; in place of Paris, Buenos Aires; in place of the
Duke of Bourgogne, Rosas; and you will have the plague visited on us in
our day. (Facundo, pp. –)

Life imitates the written word. Piglia comments:

If Sarmiento was excessive, a little wild, in his passion for culture, it is

because for him to know was to compare. Everything acquires meaning
if it is possible to reconstruct the analogies between what one wants to
explain and something else that has already been evaluated and written
about. For Sarmiento to know is to decipher the secret of analogies: re-
semblance is the mysterious, invisible form, that makes meaning visible.

Writing and Orality in Facundo 

 Culture functions as a repository of examples that can be used as terms
for comparison. (‘‘Notas sobre Facundo,’’ p. )

At first sight, it might seem that authority in Sarmiento would have to

be rooted elsewhere, in the European or North American ‘‘civilization’’ to
which the traveler-intellectual turns. Hence, at certain moments, Sarmiento
will speak about barbarism in Argentina as if he has been observing it from a
distance, from a strategic speaking position located in Europe.7 This objecti-
fying position taken by Sarmiento can be discerned in his systematic use of
European rhetoric and discourses in Facundo’s representation of the Ameri-
can barbarian:

And the pastoral life leads us to unthinkingly imagine a memory of Asia,

whose plains we imagine always covered here and afar with the outdoor
stalls of the Canuck, the Cossack, or the Arab. (Facundo p. )

Here, the (European) figure of ‘‘the oriental’’ is superimposed on the

particular circumstances of America. One may observe, however, that the
knowledge (conocimiento) that attempts to produce an analogy is imagined. A
slippage occurs from the world of designated referents to what Edward Said
called an ‘‘orientalist archive.’’ More than a web of known facts about orien-
tal reality, the orientalist archive is a discourse, historically tied to nineteenth-
century expansionism and the constitution of a territory marked by European
identity. Paradoxically, this European identity is itself brought about through
the exclusion of Europe’s others and the consequent delimitation of a civi-
lized domain. According to Said, we can read such a discourse about the other
not in terms of its referentiality, but as an apparatus for the constitution of
the European subject who at once produces and is produced by the oriental-
ist discourse. The other, in this sense, is a distinctive aspect of the European
imaginary.8
Sarmiento’s recourse to orientalism is significant in that it projects his
desire to be inscribed within Western culture and creates a locus of speech,
entirely fictitious, from which the emphatically ‘‘civilized’’ subject speaks—
outside the space of barbarism (defined negatively as non-European). The
quote that indicates the presence of that European or Western identificatory
discourse thus tends to obliterate the place of writing that occurs in America,
on the West’s other side, where Facundo was in fact produced.
But the task of the citation, as Piglia shows, proves how Sarmiento’s
work displaces and, to a certain degree, undercuts the very authority of the
texts and authors cited as models, that is, exemplars of a future modernity
in Latin America. The mimetic process stimulated by the desire to become

    

that civilized other from the highlands, never carries with it the authority of
the imitated source. Sarmiento’s citations submit the work of the European
other to an inevitable decontextualization, which at times results in involun-
tary parodies. Piglia explains that

at the moment when culture sustains the emblems of civilization before

ignorance, barbarism corrodes the erudite gesture. Signs of a practice
that one would have to call (as Sarmiento in fact does) savage: these
barbarisms proliferate in erroneous attributions, false quotes. (‘‘Notas,’’
p. )

Hence, for Piglia, the distance between Sarmiento and European knowledge
is not rooted so much in the affirmation of a difference as it is in the cor-
ruption of high discourse in the mouth of the ‘‘poorly lettered’’, so to speak.
Sarmiento poorly reproduces that knowledge that he at the same time exalts.
At the same time, however, Piglia tends to represent the relation be-
tween Sarmiento and Europe, between American writing and foreign ‘‘sym-
bolic capital,’’ in strictly negative terms, that is, in terms of what Europe has
and America lacks. Piglia rightly assumes that the Sarmientine intellectual
was at the time defined by his capacity to undertake an import-journey, a jour-
ney that entailed the intellectual’s mission to import citations from foreign
sources. In this respect, Sarmiento’s status as an intellectual stemmed from
his activities as translator and importer of paradigms for modern progress.
And yet, this leads Piglia to suggest that the distance between Sarmiento and
the European library may after all be merely the question of a misquote; a
‘‘wild’’ use of models whose authority nonetheless remains unquestioned.
Such a reading operates along the lines of what we might call a binary
logic of parody, wherein what is American (or Argentine, in Sarmiento) sig-
nifies a blind spot within the Western field of knowledge. Sarmiento’s erratic
use of European knowledge would thus appear to parody (involuntarily) the
cited model’s plentitude. The logic of parody tends to represent and classify
any distinct productivity or field of signification that emerges out of the Euro-
pean model in terms of a lack, or even as an inversion of the (badly) imitated
structure, thereby reestablishing the prevalence of mimetic representation
that parody had initially sought to dismantle. The inversion of a structure
naturalizes its field of operations, reaffirming the hierarchies of the structure
in question as the horizon and limit of its critique, without going beyond
them. In the same way, parody figures in the logic of mimesis as its inverse, a
position that only reinforces the double-bind logic of the model and its other.
On the contrary, further analysis shows that Sarmiento not only occupies
a subaltern place with respect to the European library, he also manipulates

Writing and Orality in Facundo 

it. This can be seen in his response to the critical reading by Valentín Alsina
of Facundo, in which Alsina laments the lack of Sarmiento’s historiographi-
cal rigor. In response, Sarmiento insisted on the spontaneous character of
his work. For one thing, he continually refers to the book (which was ini-
tially published in periodic newspaper installments, in accordance with the
norm of the epoch) as ‘‘the material of life,’’ a collation of notes or briefs that
he would reorganize in the future. Moreover, he explains the informality of
Facundo in the following manner:

A number of inexactitudes ought necessarily to have escaped one’s at-

tention in a work made in a hurry, away from the theater of events,
and concerning a topic about which nothing had been written until the
present. . . . Perhaps there may be a moment in which, freed from the
preoccupations that have precipitated the editing of this little work, I
might return to rebuild it according to a new plan, stripping it of all acci-
dental digression and supporting it with numerous official documents,
to which I now only make passing reference. (Facundo p. )

Sarmiento’s response to Alsina, in the prologue to the  edition, re-

iterates his defense, this time appealing to the reader that Facundo be read
with all the flexibility that one assumes to be appropriate for an essay:

An essay and revelation for myself, of my ideas, Facundo grew from the
defects common to every fruit of a momentary inspiration, without the
help of documents at hand, and executed without having been well con-
ceived, far from the theater of events, and with the purpose of immedi-
ate and militant action. (p. )

Although Sarmiento concedes to Alsina’s criticisms regarding the indis-

cipline of Facundo, he responds that he will not touch up the ‘‘little work’’,
nor eliminate the defects of its civilization, ‘‘fearful that by correcting such
an unformed work its primitive physiognomy would disappear, along with
the vigorous and willful audacity of its ill-disciplined conception’’ (p. ).
It is not difficult to find these same epithets used to describe various forms
of barbarism all throughout Facundo. As Sarmiento has often declared, bar-
barism is primitive, willful, unformed, and ill-disciplined. Yet significantly,
these terms are now being used to describe Facundo. In Sarmiento’s refusal to
revise Facundo, he establishes a subaltern locus of speech, marginal with re-
spect to the European library:

Had this study, which we were not even in any condition to make for our
lack of philosophical and historical instruction, been made by compe-

    

 tent observers it would have revealed to the astonished eyes of Europe a
new world in politics. (p. )

This subaltern place assumed by Sarmiento becomes the key to autho-

rizing an alternative intellectual practice that emphasizes its difference from
European knowledge:

Oh! France, so rightly erect for your sufficiency in the historical, politi-
cal, and social sciences; England, so contemplative of your commercial
interests; those politicians of every country, those writers who may boast
of being understood! May a poor American writer present before you a
book, in order to show you how God has revealed those things that we
call evident. (p. )

Of course, Sarmiento’s humility cannot deceive us. The irony is subtle

yet evident: from the margin, the ‘‘poor writer’’ reclaims a knowledge (saber)
distinct and at times opposed to the European concept of discipline. Con-
trary to European knowledge, Sarmiento proposes the alternative task of the
American writer:

Here is an exemplary justice to make and a glory to acquire as an Argen-

tine writer: to upbraid the world and humble the sovereignty of the
mighty on the earth, be they called learned men or governments. (p. )

The ‘‘poor American writer’’ may end up undisciplined or unformed but

his spontaneity, his nearness to life, his immediate discourse would be nec-
essary in order to represent the new world still unknown to European knowl-
edge (saber). As we will see later, Sarmiento underlined the necessity of being
familiar with this entire aspect of American life—barbarism—which in the
last instance remained inaccessible to science and official documents. One
had to hear the other, the other’s voice, since the other lacked writing. It is
precisely this task that a disciplined knowledge, and its importers, had not
succeeded in doing; that alternative knowledge—the other’s knowledge—
would thus become decisive in the restoration of both order and the modern-
izing project.
For now, suffice it to say that the tendency to read Sarmiento merely as
an intellectual responsible for importing a European symbolic capital does
not do justice to his complexity as it is reflected in the many contradictions
of Facundo.9 In Sarmiento a radical mimetic ideology coexists with a critique
of the unmediated importation of European knowledge. Neither does it seem
possible to reduce Sarmiento’s difference to the displacement suffered by the
European book when it is reworked in a different context by a second hand.

Writing and Orality in Facundo 

The distance between Sarmiento and his library is not solely a blind spot, an
aporia in his Europeanized discourse. Sarmiento is capable of assuming this
distance in order to legitimize a different knowledge—half barbaric, he him-
self suggests, but perhaps for this very reason better prepared to represent
what is particular to America: the fragility of civilization in a world domi-
nated by barbarism.
In fact, Facundo does not explain the chaos of a recently emancipated
society solely in terms of the lack of European discourse. On the contrary,
in the historical fable that Sarmiento weaves, the barbarians come to power
through the interstitial gap left by the superimposition of imported European
models (of civilization and the city) on that particular reality of America, bar-
barism. Between an imported discourse and the American experience that
remained excluded from representation, there exists a space where the seed
of contradiction in Argentina takes root and blossoms:

In the Argentine Republic two distinct civilizations can be seen inhabit-

ing the same ground: one nascent, that without an understanding (cono-
cimiento) of what is held above its head, is repeating those ingenuous
and popular movements of the Middle Ages; the other, that manifests
the latest achievements of European civilization. The nineteenth and
twelfth centuries exist together: the one within the cities, the other in
the countryside. (Facundo, p. )

The antithesis, the binary logic of this discourse, proliferates: low/high,

tradition/modernity. But the place of authority, at least in this passage, is
not located in either of the two terms. If we were to spatialize this au-
thority, we would say that the subject speaks from the provincial city—between
both worlds in juxtaposition—since Sarmiento has already emphasized to us
the ignorance of urban knowledge (saber) before the local barbaric reality. He
insists that because of this ignorance and lack of mediation between two
worlds, the barbarism excluded by culture had come to invade the cities, de-
stroying the level of modernity thus far established.
Facundo represents history as progress, as a modernizing process inter-
rupted by the catastrophe of local strongman or boss politics (caudillismo)
that had disarticulated the possibilities for unity on a national level. Sar-
miento’s work thus constitutes an attempt to control the contingency, the
accidental, and the irrational that characterize barbarism, for the purpose of
reorganizing a national (and state) homogeneity. But the project of ordering
chaos could not be based strictly on either the importation of models or the
citations of the European book. A restoration on any level would entail the
need to listen to the voice of the other, of the traditions that the modernizing

    

project—initially mimetic (under former President General Bernardo Riva-
davia)—had ignored. One would have to represent what European knowledge
and its traffickers (the enlightened intellectuals) were as yet unaware of.
To write, for Sarmiento, is to order, to modernize; at the same time, it
presupposes a previous step that would serve to overdetermine the virtual
modernizing impulse. That step would be the act of writing as transcribing the
(oral) word of the other, whose exclusion from (written) knowledge had gen-
erated the discontinuity and contingency of the present. To write would entail
an act of mediation between civilization and barbarism; the restoration of
the city, of a rationalized public sphere, would not be possible without the
mutual representation of these two worlds whose friction had interrupted the
modern project, giving rise to chaos. Hence, for Sarmiento, there was a need
‘‘to reveal national customs, without which it is as impossible to understand
our political characters, as it is to comprehend the primordial and American
character of that bloody war that has torn the Argentine Republic into pieces’’
(p. ).
Accomplishing the task of reordering the public sphere task would entail
the incorporation, not the alienation, of the other. And the first step toward
this would be the representation of barbarism in discourse. One would have
to listen to the other’s stories, which had remained inaccessible to the knowl-
edge possessed by the lettered intellectual or letrado:

The facts are here consigned, classified, proven, documented; what is

missing, I tell you, is the thread that serves to bind them as a single
fact, the breath of life. . . .(And) it has been left to me to attempt to in-
terrogate the ground . . . ; to hear the revelations of those involved, the
depositions of victims, the recollections of the aged, the pained narra-
tions of mothers who see with the heart; it has been left to me to listen
to the confused echo of the people, that has seen and not understood,
that has been both executioner and victim, witness and actor; left to me
the ripeness of the accomplished fact, and the passing step from one
epoch to another, the change of destinies for the nation, to cast a glance
backward, in a time of fruition, and make of history an example and not
vengenace. (p. )

In Sarmiento, two contradictory ways of representing the past are at

work: on the one hand, the vision of the oral world of tradition as that which
had to be eliminated for modernization (or civilization) to be established;
and on the other hand, the vision of this will to rupture as a generative source
of new conflicts and anxieties.10 The contradiction between both versions of
the past is never completely resolved; hence, the fundamental ambiguity in

Writing and Orality in Facundo 

the representation of the other.11 Yet in spite of this irreducible ambiguity,
Facundo attempts to reconcile the modernizing project with the past. It seeks
to ‘‘cast a glance backward’’: to look back (not only toward the future, as in En-
lightenment teleologies) in order to give the ‘‘breath of life’’ to the discourse
of a new knowledge grounded on the voice of the people, a life that the Euro-
pean book and its forms of classification, recorded events, and documents
had not succeeded in incorporating. Sarmiento’s writing would attempt and
claim to hear the other, her confused voice, in order to weave a continuity, to
take the ‘‘step from one epoch to another’’ in order to fill the gaps in history
that obstructed national consolidation. It was precisely this transition that
had not yet been achieved in the present catastrophe that writing sought to
repair.
To hear, then, is the technique of a historiographical practice. And it
was literature, as Lionel Gossman shows with respect to European romantic
historiography, that would be the discourse most suited to that project of lis-
tening to the voice of tradition.20 Sarmiento postulates the possible role of
literature among the new nations in the following manner:

If the glint of a national literature can shine for a moment in the new
American societies, it will emerge from a description of grandiose natu-
ral scenes, and above all else from the struggle between European civili-
zation and indigenous barbarism, between the intellect and matter; a
formidable battle in America, which would take place in scenes so pecu-
liar, so characteristic, and so far outside the circle of ideas in which the
European spirit has been educated. (Facundo, p. )

Literature was the appropriate place for the necessary mediation be-
tween civilization and barbarism, modernity and tradition, writing and
orality. Therefore, the lack of discipline and documentation tied to sponta-
neity, to the nearness of life that Sarmiento correlated with literature, might
in reality lead toward another kind of intellectual authority, more readily
equipped than the learned man of European formation to represent and re-
solve the disorder.
Significantly, from Facundo’s publication onward, its literary function
has been constantly highlighted and problematized in order to contrast it
with the authority and validity of a ‘‘true’’ or historical discourse. For ex-
ample, V. Alsina correlated the defects of Facundo with its proliferating literary
slippages:

I will say that your book, notwithstanding the many things that it may
contain deserving admiration, seems to me to suffer from a general de-

    

 fect—that of exaggeration: I believe that it holds much poetry, if not in
the ideas, at least in its forms of locution. [Still, it] was not your intention
to write a romance, nor an epic, but a true social history.13 (Italics added)

The split between poetry (as well as fiction) and true social history gen-
erates a foundational tension. Toward the mid-nineteenth century, the di-
chotomy reveals a certain tendency toward the autonomization of discursive
functions. Alsina’s critique signals a new hierarchization within a utilitarian
economy of meaning, in which literature is regarded as a devalued mode of
representation and subordinated to the political authority of the more mod-
ern and efficient forms of truth.
Sarmiento’s response to Alsina is entirely ambiguous. As it has already
been mentioned, Sarmiento not only assures his critic that he will not edit
Facundo; he also assumes the defect of spontaneity, of poetry, to be comple-
mentary to his writing of history. Since Sarmiento’s mode of writing does
not rely solely on European rationality, it is thus able to listen to the alienated
voice of the other—if only to include it in the order of a new discourse. In
this regard, the informality, immediacy, and indiscipline of Facundo become
the conditions of possibility for any approach to the (oral) barbaric tradition
that had to be incorporated by means of representation:

Now, I ask: what impressions are left with the inhabitant of the Argen-
tine Republic in the simple act of fixing one’s eyes on the horizon, and
seeing . . . , not seeing anything? Because however deep the eyes sink
their gaze into that uncertain, vaporous, undefined horizon, and how-
ever far it goes, to that degree does the watcher become more fascinated,
confused, and swallowed up in contemplation and doubt. Where does
that world end, which he desires to penetrate in vain? He doesn’t know!
What lies beyond that which can be seen? Solitude, danger, the wild,
death. I give you poetry. (Facundo, p. )

The threat, the danger, that the subject (or the nation-state) confronts in
Facundo corresponds to the absence of boundaries and structures. The desert
is, in effect, the enemy, the problem for which writing seeks a solution. But
before this distinctive emptiness of the American landscape, the civilized gaze
and rational knowledge necessarily give way. The gaze and authority of poetry
begin where a world made representable by discipline ends. In this sense, lit-
erature for Sarmiento acts as an exploration of the frontier, a reflection on
the limits and outskirts of the law.
And yet, one cannot reduce the mode of representation, identified by
Alsina as well as Sarmiento as poetry, to a lyricism that at times (sporadi-

Writing and Orality in Facundo 

cally at best) prevails in Sarmiento’s descriptions. In terms of the other’s
knowledge and the representation of barbarism, the tales and narratives that
proliferate throughout Facundo are of far greater importance. One may take
as an example the remarkable history of Navarro (to be found in chapter 
in the second part of Facundo), a civilized man who, pursued by Juan Facundo
Quiroga, flees and seeks refuge in the tents of indigenous tribes, eventually
becoming an ‘‘other’’; or the tale of Quiroga’s youth and his battle with a tiger
(the animal representation of the other par excellence); or the assassination
of Quiroga by Santos Pérez in Barranca-Yaco.
These tales thematically explore the experience of the border-limit, the
ambiguity of subjects trapped between two territories of identity: civilization
and barbarism. These characters frequently recount stories of barbarization,
as in the tale of the San Luis rancher ‘‘of pure European racial stock’’ who
becomes overwhelmed by ‘‘gross native superstitions’’ and the vice of gam-
bling—another key attribute of barbarism. Even more important, these tales
are almost always taken from material that Sarmiento had heard. They are
tales of the oral tradition,14 bonfire stories that Sarmiento had gathered, col-
lected, in the course of his lifetime.
Hence, Facundo may be considered a great repository for vernacular
voices, oral tales, anecdotes, and stories of others whose words Sarmiento
transcribed and incorporated into his representation of barbarism—as if
these other-words could actually indicate the presence of the once excluded
and now powerful other, appropriated by writing, within the order of dis-
course and the rational sphere of human affairs in the city. As if Sarmiento
would effect a mediation between the two worlds; as if in the incorporation
of the word and the oral story, the writing of the voice would resolve the
contradiction that had brought about the chaos. Does this project, then, en-
tail the delimitation of a democratic, dialogic, discursive space, where the
voice of tradition would coexist with modern forms of authority? Does repre-
sentation bring with it the presence of the voice?
We must first ask how the voice of the other is represented, and what
transformations the popular sources undergo in their transcription. We
might also consider the relationship between the represented voice and the
writing subject on the formal level of writing itself (syntactical, typographi-
cal, or otherwise). The act of re-presentation can never be considered a pas-
sive process, insofar as it seeks to contain the other-word, to assimilate the
other as an object of discourse. And the insertion and formalization of the
voice in writing are ideologically fundamental to Facundo.
For Sarmiento, barbarism does not always represent an outside abso-

    

lutely devoid of sense or meaning. Although his vision of barbarism is doubt-
less riddled with contradictions, there are various key elements of Facundo
—the character sketches, most importantly—that emphasize the knowledge
of the gaucho and pastoral culture. In fact, knowledge (saber and conocer) is a
critical word in these classificatory portraits. The barbarian here possesses
the power of the word, and he does play a significant role in the production
of meaning. The gaucho ‘‘tracker’’ has ‘‘his domestic and popular knowledge
(ciencia)’’; the gaucho outlaw has his ‘‘knowledge (ciencia) of the desert’’. The
scout or ranger knows (conoce) the marshes and swamps, and only he knows
(sabe), and this knowledge is indispensable for the army. It is the bard, how-
ever, who possesses a superior traditional knowledge (saber), tied to his origi-
nal and primitive poetry:

[The bard] achieves with candor the same work of chronicling customs,
history, and biography, as the bard of the Middle Ages; his [oral] verses
will be recorded much later as documents and records on which the
future historian will have to depend. (Facundo, p. )

On the other hand, although the bard’s poetry can be considered closest
to the source of tradition, it is nevertheless ‘‘weighty, monotonous, irregu-
lar, when it is abandoned to the organization of the moment’’ (pp. –).
Thus, while the future historian (Sarmiento himself ) must listen to the voice,
he must also submit it to the higher form of regular discourse, independent
of the inspiration of the moment. Sarmiento positions himself between two
competing modes of knowledge. Between the act of ‘‘listening to the confused
echo of the people’’ (p. ) and the practice of writing emerges the figure of
a transcriber; however, his position in the hierarchized space of discourse is
never neutral.
In Facundo, the most basic instance in the representation of the other’s
‘‘discourse’’ is the incorporation of the pastoral vernacular word in writing.
Yet even in the case of these brief direct transcriptions, the pastoral word
appears with signs that mark its distance, its radical strangeness. When Sar-
miento assumes the pastoral voice, he systematically employs typographi-
cal marks, underscoring the other’s difference: ‘‘Dónde te mias-dir!’’ (p. :
‘‘where are you going?’’), ‘‘es un parejo pangare’’ (p. ), or ‘‘se provee de
los vicios’’ (p. ). Sarmiento takes pleasure in citing the vernacular, in be-
holding the alien word. The emphasis defamiliarizes the voice, placing its
currency outside of any habitual context. Sarmiento’s strategy entails the
translation of a traditional word for a reader who may not know, but ought
to be familiar with, the other: this point returns us again to the importance of

Writing and Orality in Facundo 

mediation between the two worlds in conflict. But the mediator’s practice is
never transparent, and to the contrary, projects the vernacular’s translation
and transformation, its placement, in a writerly order.
On another level, the distance between the two forms of speech, one
proper (written) and the other alien (oral), is reinscribed as the distance
between two hierarchized forms of knowledge. For Sarmiento, the other’s
knowledge is irregular, confused: it is always subject to an organization of
the moment, to a contingency, that prevents it from becoming a universal-
izing reflection capable of an abstract and general application. The subject
in Facundo takes on the oral tale as a source for writing and yet simulta-
neously displaces it, subordinating the particularity of these voices to a gen-
eral knowledge.
In effect, Sarmiento explicitly defends the necessity of listening to the
‘‘confused’’ voice of the other as it is made manifest in the realm of ver-
nacular poetry. Nevertheless it is important to remember that the utilitarian
dichotomy between ‘‘romance and true social history’’ (in Alsina’s words)
also tends to regulate and hierarchize the production of meaning in Facundo.
Although oral narratives were indispensable to the mediator-intellectual, in-
sofar as they served as alternative documents, they also constituted what one
may call a dangerous supplement. Their danger lay in their capacity to con-
taminate the authentic claim of discourse, stripping it of the rationality and
discipline that a modern economy of meaning would require. Moreover, these
stories would leave traces of a narrative knowledge in the very space of writing:
the residue of that same alien knowledge that writing as an instrument of
rationality had sought to overcome. Time and again, Sarmiento’s project to
construct an ordered (and ordering) archive of oral tradition encounters this
problem: in his attempt to incorporate the other’s knowledge into the civi-
lized or ordered discourse of his own, his history constantly runs the risk of
its own barbarization. For this reason, Sarmiento’s irrepressible tendency to
narrate—to recount the stories of others—gives rise to considerable anxiety,
an anxiety that leads him to consider Facundo a discordant chaos that would
itself have to be ordered and purified in the future so that, ‘‘purged of all
unpleasant aftertaste the history of our fatherland’’ (p. ) might leave the
chaos behind.
In response to the threat of its own dissolution, writing attempts to
systematize its ordering gesture before those social tensions that overdeter-
mine the composition of the book itself. In other words, writing reacts to the
dangerous tendency toward dispersion and the oral trace by demarcating the
boundaries of these transcribed stories through commentary. Hence, the par-

    

ticularity and ambiguity of narrative knowledge is subordinated to the gener-
alizing and universalizing function of an assumedly modern discourse.
In the chapter entitled ‘‘Infancy and Youth of Juan Facundo Quiroga,’’ we
find an interesting example of how the anecdote as a discursive supplement
is subordinated to a generalizing operation. The chapter begins with the tale
of a battle between a tiger and the young Quiroga, narrated by Quiroga him-
self: ‘‘At that moment, I knew what it was to be afraid, the General Don Juan
Facundo Quiroga said, recalling this event to a group of officers’’ (p. ).
As is common in the telling of stories, the source of the tale is not revealed
until the end, and the boundary between the place of the transcriber and the
vernacular voice is blurred by Sarmiento’s strategic use of reported speech.
At the end of the anecdote, however, Sarmiento emphasizes the division and
distance between the two:

They called him, also, the Tiger of the Plains, and in truth, this denomi-
nation sat quite well with him. After all, phrenology and comparative
anatomy have demonstrated the relationship between exterior forms
and moral dispositions. (Facundo, p. )

The passage from Quiroga’s tale to ‘‘phrenology and comparative anat-

omy,’’ or from a particularized contingent description to an abstract and gen-
eral knowledge, reinforces the distance between two distinct manifestations
of authority, placed in a hierarchical relation. The slippage can be evidenced
in the paragraphs following the tale of the tiger, when Sarmiento reads the
facial features of Quiroga, the details of his physiognomy, as nuances of
a wild landscape.16 In the ‘‘heavy shadows’’ of his brow, in the ‘‘forest of
hair,’’ in the ‘‘bushy eyebrows,’’ Sarmiento reads the landscape of barbarism.
From the particular to the tableau vivant: the proceeding is systematic, and
it becomes enmeshed with the very concept of biography that is at work
in Sarmiento. The individual, the particular, signifies only in relation to the
general picture, which at the same time, makes possible the interpretation
of the particular. Writing continually attempts to generate models that will
enable any particularity whatsoever to be interpreted—all variety, subjected
to a preestablished general idea or concept. Throughout Facundo, the distinc-
tive heterogeneity of barbarism is always subordinated to the paradigmatic
character sketches, cuadros that Sarmiento had portrayed at the beginning of
the text. ‘‘If the reader recalls what has already been said regarding the over-
seer of the wagons, s/he will deduce the character, value, and strength of the
Cowboy [Boyero]’’ (p. ). ‘‘It is the constant shooting that animates the sol-
dier with war songs, the bard [Cantor] mentioned earlier’’ (p. ). Regarding

Writing and Orality in Facundo 

Facundo himself, ‘‘where in the Argentine Republic will you find a type of
man closer to the ideal gaucho outlaw?’’ Such examples multiply, reinforcing
Sarmiento’s will to subordinate the particular to a model by means of these
tableaux vivant, character sketches, which also act as a brake on the tendency
of Sarmiento’s discourse toward dispersion, the proliferation of anecdotes,
and the particularized knowledge of oral tales, stories of others.
The tableau vivant is thus more than simply the appropriate place for
listening to the confused and irregular voice of the other; it is an effect of
an ordering practice that formally responds to the project of submitting the
heterogeneity of barbarism to the order of discourse.17 As Sarmiento would
insist, ‘‘intellect has prevailed over matter, art over numbers’’ (p. ). Inso-
far as the character sketches of the tracker, scout, gaucho outlaw, and bard prove a
certain search for originary archetypes by a subject who reflects on Argentine
origins, Sarmiento’s work asserts the rationalizing will that motivates this
writing.
The other had to be represented. But the confusion, the irregularity of
the voice was precisely the force that remained resistant to representation.
Barbarism comes into representation as representation’s other, the feared
outside of discourse. For this reason, it would not be enough to listen to the
signs of that dispersed and amorphous reality. One would have to subdue it,
exercise the expressive violence of form on the irregularity of the vernacu-
lar. For Sarmiento, representing the ‘‘barbarian’’ presupposed the desire to
include him, only to subordinate him to the general laws of civilization; the
law of a rational and productive labor under the exigencies of the emergent
market.
The formal procedure of including the spoken word of the other, only to
subordinate it to a higher authority, indicates an attempt to resolve a contra-
diction on which Facundo continually reflects: the lack of law in a society
based on the irregularity and arbitrary nature of the caudillo:

Society has disappeared completely, only the feudal family remains, iso-
lated, concentrated; and having no unified society, any kind of govern-
ment has become impossible; municipalities do not exist, the law can-
not be exercised, and civil justice has no means of reaching delinquents.
(Facundo, –)

Barbarism was, in effect, the outside of those disciplined areas of the

law. In order for the caudillo to impose his power over the city, he destroyed
‘‘all regularity in the administration. The name of Facundo filled the absence
of laws; freedom and the spirit of the city had ceased to exist’’ (p. ). ‘‘The

    

barbarian [has violated] all accepted forms, pacts, treaties, formal agree-
ments’’ (p. ). In other words, he violates the space of the written law:

What the Argentine Republic needs before all else, what Rosas will never
give, because it is no longer his to give, is for life, the property of men,
to be independent of the indiscreetly spoken word. . . . There is hardly a
country in America that has less faith in a written pact, in a constitution,
than the Argentine. (p. ; italics added)

Facundo, even as it listens to and submits the spoken word of the other, an-
ticipates this rational order, which as both Max Weber and Nicos Poulantzas
have pointed out, recognizes in the realm of the written law a condition of
possibility for the modern state’s emergence.18 In this sense, Facundo also sat-
isfies a state function of literature that Josefina Ludmer has examined in the
case of gauchesca poetry. Such a genre continually raises and polemicizes the
question of authority in the written law:

In one of its areas, the genre fulfills the function of reformulating juridi-
cal relations, of juridically and politically unifying the nation: Argentine
literature has served to satisfy this state function since the independence
up until the definitive state constitution in ; the gauchesca genre was
suited above all to the integration of rural masses. Hence, the autonomy
of literature (its separation of the political and state sphere) is an effect
of the establishment of the political and the state as separate spheres.19

Beyond the context of Argentina, the hypothesis concerning the state

function of literature seems fundamental in explaining those hybrid places of
Latin American writing before . There was a need, as Sarmiento said, to
enlighten the state: ‘‘intelligence, talent, and knowledge (saber) will be called
on once again to direct the public destiny’’ (p. ). And although Argentina
remained overrun by barbarism, and the lettered class or letrados who had
been prepared for a public life found themselves ‘‘without the profession of
law, without a press, without a tribune, without any public life’’ (p. ), in
other countries it was precisely the letrados who had taken upon themselves
(as Andrés Bello points out) ‘‘the task of [taking] the force of the law away
from tradition.’’ For, Bello adds, ‘‘many of the most civilized modern coun-
tries have felt the need to codify [their] laws,’’ and it ‘‘has become necessary
to recast this confused mass of diverse, incoherent, and contradictory ele-
ments, giving them a consistency and harmony and placing them in relation
to the living forms of social order.’’ 20
For Sarmiento, the rationalizing function of writing was not simply the-

Writing and Orality in Facundo 

matic; it also determined in the proper provisions for the word of the other,
for tradition, for contingent knowledge (saber particular), beneath the general-
izing authority that orders the law. For this reason, we might say that to write,
in Sarmiento, is to modernize. We are not dealing with a metaphor here, or
an analogy between the field of discourse and the social order ‘‘reflected’’ by
it: this ‘‘social order,’’ ‘‘the rational public sphere,’’ was created (at least in
part) by writing. If, at the time Facundo was written, modernization had sud-
denly been interrupted, if the public sphere had been found lacking and chaos
reigned throughout, then writing—by its generalizing and homogenizing
operation—remained a fundamental model for the rational(izing) project.
In the very heterogeneity of its form, Facundo demonstrates writing’s will to
modernity as well as the aporias of the rationalizing project.

Notes

 ‘‘The Argentine Republic is one and indivisible,’’ stated Domingo F. Sarmiento in Civiliza-
ción y barbarie. Vida de Facundo Quiroga (). Although an English translation of Sarmiento’s
work exists (Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants; or, Civilization and Barbarism,
trans. Mrs. Horace Mann [; reprint, New York: Hafner Publishing, ], it lacks the
introductory letters, prologue, and third part published in the  and later Spanish edi-
tions. Page numbers refer to the Editora Nacional (Madrid: ) edition. Unless otherwise
noted, all translations from the Spanish are mine.
 A general reading of the various functions of writing in the nineteenth century can be found
in Angel Rama’s La ciudad letrada (Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, ). See also Jean
Franco, ‘‘La heterogeneidad peligrosa: Escritura y control social en vísperas de la indepen-
dencia mexicana,’’ Hispamerica – (): –.
 Domingo F. Sarmiento, Recuerdos de provincia (; reprint, Buenos Aires: Editorial Sopena,
), .
 Of course, transport and networks of communication together constituted one of the ma-
terial conditions for capitalist development; hence its emphasis, not only in Sarmiento, but
in the works of all the modernizing patricians. As we will see, these conditions at the same
time took on the status of icons, or representations of coherence or structure that presented
society with a rationalizing discourse. For a semiotics of transport, see Michel de Certeau,
‘‘Railway Navigation and Incarceration,’’ in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. F. Randall
(Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –; and Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Rail-
way Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Unizen Books, ).
 Domingo F. Sarmiento, Viajes por Europa, Africa, y América, in Alberto Palcos, ed., Viajes (Buenos
Aires: Hachette, n.d.), . First published in .
 Ricardo Piglia, ‘‘Notas sobre Facundo,’’ in Punto de Vista , no.  (): . A partial transla-
tion of this paper reappears in Joseph T. Criscenti, ed., Sarmiento and His Argentina (‘‘Sarmiento’s
Vision’’) (Boulder, Colo.: L. Rienner Publishers, ).
 Regarding Western representations of the savage and barbaric, the work of Hayden White
has been of great value. See White’s ‘‘The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea,’’ in
Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press,

    

 ), –. See also Michel de Certeau, ‘‘Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals’: The Savage I,’’ in
Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), –.
 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, ).
 This point has already been raised in a lucid work by Noé Jitrik, Muerte y transfiguración de
‘‘Facundo’’ (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de America Latina, ). See also Jitrik’s introduc-
tion to Facundo (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ).
 The anxiety before change and the rupture of tradition was expressed in singular fashion by
Sarmiento’s reaction in Recuerdos de provincia when his sisters uproot a tree, the symbol of tra-
dition: ‘‘the mature age (of the tree) reminds us of all those things that surround us . . . , a
tree that we have seen in its birth, growth, and arrival at an old age, is a thing endowed with
life . . . that accuses us of ingratitude, and would leave misgivings in our conscience if we
had sacrificed it without legitimate motive’’ (p. ). Writing seeks to uproot the tree, but at
the same time, must fill the emptiness brought about by modernization.
 Regarding the ambiguity of Sarmiento concerning the past, see Tulio Halperin Donghi, pro-
logue to Campaña del ejército grande aliado de Sud América, by Domingo F. Sarmiento (Mexico
City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, ), esp. xix ff. On the representation of the other in
European romantic historiography (and literature), Lionel Gossman’s work shows how bar-
barism, external to discourse, is simultaneously the condition of possibility for historical
writing: ‘‘In many respects the tension between veneration of the Other—that is to say, not
just the primitive or alien, but the historical particular, the discontinuous act or event in its
irreducible uniqueness and untranslatableness, the very energy of ‘life’ which no concept
can encompass—and eagerness to repeat it, translate it, represent it, and thus, in a sense,
domesticate and appropriate it, can be seen as the very condition of the romantic historian’s
enterprise. For the persistence of at least a residual gap between ‘original’ and translation,
between ‘Reality’ or the Other and our interpretation of it, is what both generates and sus-
tains the historian’s activity, rather as the condition of history itself ’’ (Lionel Gossman,
‘‘History as Decipherment: Romantic Historiography and the Discovery of the Other,’’ New
Literary History  (–): .
 Gossman, ‘‘History as Decipherment.’’ See also Lionel Gossman, ‘‘The Go-Between: Jules
Michelet, –,’’ Modern Language Notes  (): –.
 Valentin Alsina, ‘‘Notas,’’ in Facundo, by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, ed. Susana Fanetti
and Nora Dottor (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), .
 See Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Storyteller (Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov),’’ in Illu-
minations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, ), –.
Benjamin’s central hypothesis here is that the oral tale embodies a type of experience and
communication that came into crisis with the emergence of modern society. For Benjamin,
narration, insofar as it had been used for the transmission of traditional knowledge, is op-
posed to information. The concept of narrative knowledge, in Jean-François Lyotard, is also
opposed to science and the discursive practices of modern knowledge. See Jean-François
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), esp. –. Regarding the
concept of narrative knowledge in Lyotard, see his The Postmodern (explained to children): Corre-
spondence, –, trans. Don Barry et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, ),
–.
 In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: ), Valentín N. Volosinov writes about the problems raised by reported
speech, as the act involves the appropriation of one source or authority and its autonomy

Writing and Orality in Facundo 

 by another: ‘‘The author’s utterance, in incorporating the other utterance, brings into play
syntactic, stylistic, and compositional norms for its partial assimilation—that is, its adap-
tation to the syntactic, compositional, and stylistic design of the author’s utterance, while
preserving (if only in rudimentary form) the initial autonomy (in syntactic, compositional,
and stylistic terms) of the reported utterance, which otherwise could not be grasped in full’’
(p. ); see also chapter , part , ‘‘Exposition of the Problem of Reported Speech.’’
 A crucial yet largely unstudied concept in the work of Deleuze and Guattari concerns the
activation of ordering or disciplinary processes, specifically significance and subjectification,
through the composition of the face and/or the landscape. Facialization effects an alliance or
conjuncture between the semiotic displacements produced by signification (that is, the gen-
eralized circuit of designated ‘‘signifiers’’ and their incommensurable ‘‘signifieds’’) and the
synthetic interpellations (toward consciousness or passion) produced by subjectification.
See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘‘Year Zero: Faciality,’’ in A Thousand Plateaus, trans.
Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).
 Regarding the tableau vivant, Michel Foucault writes: ‘‘The first of the great operations of
discipline occurred with the constitution of the tableaux vivants which would transform the
great, confused, useless or dangerous multitudes, into ordered multiplicities’’ (Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Vintage Press, ], ).
 See Max Weber, ‘‘The Nature of Modern Capitalism,’’ in Capitalism, Bureaucracy, and Religion,
ed. and trans. S. Andreski (London: George, Allen, and Unwin, ), –; and Nicos
Poulantzas, State, Power, and Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, ).
 Josefina Ludmer, ‘‘Quién educa,’’ Filología  ():  n. .
 Andrés Bello, ‘‘Exposición de motivos,’’ Código Civil de la República de Chile, Obras Completas,
vol.  (; reprint, Caracas, ), .

    

 Knowledge-(as)-Said: Language and Politics
in Andrés Bello

A common tendency among scholars has led us to frame the relation be-
tween Domingo F. Sarmiento and Andrés Bello in terms of a near absolute
contradiction. Traditional literary history and its main pedagogical tool, the
literary anthology, have insistently represented the relation between the two
writers by means of an oversimplified schema that juxtaposes a romantic Sar-
miento attached to the spirit of life with the ascetic figure of Bello, guardian
of forms. Thus have historians been able to read into their relationship a lin-
ear progress from neoclassicism to romanticism in Latin America.
Although Bello and Sarmiento were born almost thirty years apart, the
polarized representation of their thought within the categories of a (linear)
European history remains relativized by, among other things, the  pub-
lication of both Sarmiento’s Facundo and Bello’s major poetic work, Silvas
americanas, in Chile. The coincidence reminds us that Bello, a dominant figure
in the Chilean intellectual arena throughout the years of Sarmiento’s exile
in Santiago, did not simply represent a past that the Argentine sought to
overcome, thereby affirming some kind of generational succession. To the
contrary, it might be more appropriate to say that Bello was Sarmiento’s con-
temporary and, in many ways, an emblem of the disciplined intellectual whom
Sarmiento engaged as a polemical point of reference.
In fact, it is certain that Sarmiento began to distance himself from Bello
in the s, and even fostered a certain antagonism toward him. For one
thing, Sarmiento took issue with Bello’s emphasis on grammaticism in favor
of a romanticism that Bello, to a certain degree, rejected. In fact, during this
period, Sarmiento began to fashion himself as a possible alternative or other
kind of intellectual to Bello, who was then rector at the University of Chile.
In his prolific and mystifying self-representations, Sarmiento insisted on the
noninstitutional formation of his discourse composed outside the confines
of the university: a spontaneous and even undisciplined discourse that (pre-
cisely because of its spontaneity and lack of discipline) was more capable of
understanding the American ‘‘barbarism.’’ Of course, we must not be mis-
led by such a valorization of spontaneity: we have already seen in Facundo
how Sarmiento manipulates this self-fashioning in order to open up a space
within the discourses of power. In spite of Sarmiento’s insistence on the im-
portance of listening to the spontaneous and natural speech of the other, his
writing is guided by a disciplinarian will that reacts on this spontaneity as the
fundamental basis for (his) writing.
But let us not reduce the differences. More than anything, it is necessary
to show how Bello operates from within relatively institutionalized sites of
articulation, a condition that distances him from the more hybrid discourse
of Sarmiento. The heterogeneous character of Sarmiento’s writing is thus not
solely an effect of the journalistic (hence serial) distribution of his writings;
it is also the result of an encounter between multiple subjects and authorities
in the utterly uneven space of his discourse. In contrast, Bello buttresses his
reputation as a writer of ‘‘general knowledge,’’ a tradition belonging to the
encyclopedism of the Enlightenment, with the extensive use of citations that
serve to delimit and specify their respective territories, resulting in the cre-
ation of relatively homogeneous texts. In addition to this degree of formality
to be found in his writing, Bello begins to speak from a position of authority
within the university, which he himself had helped to found in Chile (in
). His locus of speech, if indeed authorized as an administrative func-
tion for the public sphere, nevertheless establishes a degree of differentiation
with respect to other areas of the polis. For Sarmiento, this polis still existed
as a lack, an absence that the order of writing sought to fill. In this sense,
Bello speaks from a projected modernity, at times idealized by Sarmiento’s
markedly uneven mode of writing.
With these differences in mind, perhaps one can argue that Bello cannot
be considered representative of the Latin American intellectual’s condition in
the nineteenth century. In fact, it could be said that the preinstitutional and
multiple positions in Sarmiento might be more representative of the intel-
lectual temper of this particular period in history. But while it is true that
Bello’s intellectual discipline cannot be taken as a norm, his project of in-
stitutionalizing an American knowledge nevertheless ties together many of
the objectives shared by Latin American intellectuals prior to Martí. Sarmiento
himself points out in Facundo:

There is one circumstance that powerfully prepares [Córdoba] for the

future. Science is the greatest of all titles for the Cordoban: two cen-
turies of the university have left in the consciousness of the people this
civilizing preoccupation, which does not exist in as deeply rooted a way
in other provinces of the interior, such that, without changing the direc-

    

 tion and content of its studies, Córdoba can account for not only a great
number of cornerstones in civilization, but also the supremacy and cul-
tivation of the understanding as its cause and effect.1

In Cuba from the s onward, we also see the preoccupation with the
discipline of intellectual production. José Antonio Saco, a man of remark-
able architectonic imagination, proposed the creation of closed spaces for
culture, which he defended as the effective antidote to vagrancy. A culture in-
stitutionalized in museums, lecture halls, or schools, would provide for the
administration of idleness, thereby establishing the grounds for the rational-
ization of labor and formation of citizenship. Already in , Saco remarks:

In order to lessen the number of slackers at the billiard halls, there

ought to be provided some places where the people can gather together
for their benefit. I cannot contemplate without the most profound sen-
timent that, despite more than three hundred years of political existence
on the island of Cuba, we still do not have one of those establishments
that are common even in newer countries, of fewer resources, than ours.
We have cause to be amazed that Havana, a populous and enlightened
city, with relations that stretch across the globe, lacks an athenaeum
[Ateneo]. . . . An institution of this sort has become urgent and neces-
sary.2

For José de la Luz y Caballero—another key figure in the Cuban intel-

lectual field prior to Martí—the project of disciplining and institutionalizing
intellectual labor was also essential:

A great step forward will have been taken among us for the betterment
of education if, with these sentiments reawakened in our hearts and the
willingness to make something of the many things that we could do, we
establish an institution of education that, founded on a solid material
base, would offer all the attractive conditions of stability and duration.3

Luz y Caballero lamented the lack of professionalization among teachers,

employing a rhetoric of Protestant history in which the disciplinarian will
carried with it a religious undertone: ‘‘In fact, the teaching profession in Cuba
is not a profession at all, and if it is not a profession, how can it be(come) a
priestly brotherhood?’’ (p. ). One must not, however, confuse this rhetoric
with a conservative, pre-Enlightenment ideology. As Max Weber has argued,
the concept of the profession as an apostolate contributed to secularization
and the consequent disenchantment of the world. The relation between ratio-
nal labor and religion reappears in the following passage by Luz y Cabellero:

Language and Politics in Bello 

 [There is] the imperious necessity of tempering, fortifying the souls of
their children so that they might redeem their debts with dignity in
their industrial, scientific, or artistic careers, so that they might live—I
will say this in one word—an eminently religious life of labor; religious,
yes, because all labor is the result of an aspiration to one’s betterment,
and all aspiration toward one’s betterment is an aspiration toward God.
(p. )

In Luz y Cabellero, moreover, religious rhetoric gives legitimacy to ideas

that would have sounded transgressive had they been said in another way
during this period, in which Cuba was a Spanish colony. In any case, the
rationalizing will is the issue at stake, even in those discourses that insisted
on a lack of rationalization. Hence, we may approach Bello’s disciplinarian
will not necessarily as an exception to the discourses of the time, but as a
paradigm for a possible and desired modernization.
Which leads us to wonder: why do we find this degree of rationalization
in Bello and not in Sarmiento? What would be the social conditions of possi-
bility for this early institutionalization of intellectual labor in Bello? Much of
it had to do with the political situation in Chile, where this Venezuelan intel-
lectual had established himself following his return from London in .
The contrast between the relative stability of the government in Chile and the
internal struggles in Argentina or Mexico until the last quarter of the century
is extreme.4
Beginning in the s, the conservative regimes in Chile promoted the
consolidation of a national state. Although this did not necessarily bring
about the emergence of a harmonic society, it did imply the existence of
a national territory where the right to violence could be centralized in the
state.5 On the other hand, up until the administrations of Porfirio Díaz (in
Mexico) and Julio A. Roca (in Argentina), the local control of provincial
strongmen or caudillos promoted the decentralization of power. Hence, the
state was not able to consolidate itself as an autonomous apparatus, serving
instead as an instrument for caudillos in semi-independent regions (as Sar-
miento had pointed out). Within this context, writing was a political, state
activity: it crystallized the attempt to produce a model or paradigm for state
consolidation. Such a project would entail the creation of a law capable of
subduing the arbitrariness of particular interests beneath the blueprint of the
emergent res publica.
Given the relative centralization and consolidation of the state in Chile,
knowledge (saber) gained a certain autonomy from its immediate adminis-
tration in the public sphere. While this autonomy does not inevitably lead

    

to the independence or pure exteriority of knowledge as a concept, there is
no doubt that, in Bello, the production of knowledge had already begun to
designate its own sites of articulation in society apart from the public and
economic spheres.6 Knowledge begins to demand and delimit its territory
in the National University of Chile from the s onward, as can be seen
from the high degree of rationalization and specification that, in turn, re-
flected the national centralization of education.
On first analysis, the relative autonomy of knowledge in the university
could be questioned in the following manner: although the intellectual pro-
duction had begun to be fragmented into specialized fields (while still con-
tained by the university’s centralization of knowledge), it had to be subordi-
nated to industrial concerns. Such would be the argument often forwarded by
Sarmiento, Saco, and even Luz y Caballero. Bello, on the other hand, would
begin his  speech on the foundation of the University of Chile with a dif-
ference in mind:

One desires to satisfy first of all the following necessity, which has been
felt more since, given our political emancipation, we have been able to
open the door to useful forms of knowledge: creating the bases of a gen-
eral plan that would embrace these forms of knowledge, inasmuch as
they pertain to our circumstances, in order to propagate them success-
fully throughout the country, and to conserve and advance their teach-
ing in a fixed and systematized way, that would permit, however, the
progressive adoption of new methods and of successive advancements
made by the sciences.7

One need not search in Bello for the idea of the university as the refuge
for a disinterested culture or ‘‘knowledge for the sake of knowledge’’—ideas
that José E. Rodó, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Alfonso Reyes, and Ricardo Rojas
all proposed throughout the early decades of the following century in oppo-
sition to positivism. For Bello, the idea of a completely autonomous knowl-
edge (as literature would come to represent itself later in the century) was not
even a concept, much less a possibility. Nevertheless, already in Bello we see
a critique of pragmatism at work that becomes significant in relation to the
emerging will to autonomy in the intellectual sphere:

Without a doubt, the university will not confuse the practical appli-
cations with the operations of a blind empiricism. And secondly, as I
said earlier, the cultivation of the contemplative understanding that has
drawn back the veil from those secrets of the physical and moral uni-
verse, is in itself a positive result and of great importance.8

Language and Politics in Bello 

The moment that this distance between the ‘‘contemplative understanding’’
and practical life is asserted, the intellectual sphere in the process of be-
coming differentiated faces the need to legitimize itself as a separate domain
in the space of the social. In other words, one of the fundamental indications
of autonomization, albeit still at an early stage, is the emergence of a meta-
discursive practice that articulates and designs strategies of legitimation for
the emergent discourse. Bello’s constant reflection on the tasks of the uni-
versity and the place of knowledge in society underline the relative autonomy
of this knowledge. In a society where knowledge was found to be institu-
tionally undifferentiated, legitimacy was grounded on the identity between
intellectual discourse and its ties to the public sphere. Regarding this point,
Jean-François Lyotard has argued:

Scientific knowledge is in this way set apart from the language-games

that combine to form the social bond. Unlike narrative knowledge, it
is no longer a direct and shared component of the bond. But it is indi-
rectly a component of it, because it develops into a profession and gives
rise to institutions, and in modern societies language-games consoli-
date themselves in the form of institutions run by qualified partners (the
professional class). The relation between knowledge and society . . . be-
comes one of mutual exteriority.9

This relation of exteriority generated the necessity for what Lyotard called
narratives of legitimation, which as we have seen in Bello, were used to con-
solidate the authority of these emergent fields of knowledge in society. Such
rationalized narratives attempt to explain, in part, the functionality of these
new immanent fields of knowledge.
Yet contemplative understanding in Bello is still represented as a precon-
dition and tool for state consolidation. Autonomy, therefore, must be under-
stood in a relative sense with respect to the creation of academic disciplines;
for even as these subdivisions of knowledge were granted their respective au-
thorities and objects of study, knowledge as a state apparatus had to act as a
supervising organ for the public sphere:

The government, the legislature, and all forms of public administration

need to call [the disciplines of knowledge] frequently to their aid; and
nothing useful or important can be understood, without which it should
first be submitted to and ordered by science.10

Intellectual labor may not be independent of the public sphere, but

neither are the two identical: intellectual labor satisfies a higher function in
the administration of the public sphere, a function that crystallizes in the

    

university as a type of metainstitution, whose task it will be to reflect on the
roles and operations of other institutions. The university claims legitimacy
in terms of the consolidation and maintenance of the national state, or in
Bello’s words: ‘‘All paths by which any member [of the university] purports
to direct his or her research, any study of the university’s alumni, must con-
verge at one center: the native land [ patria].’’ 11 But this call for functionality
in no way contradicts the degree of specification in the division of intellec-
tual labor. For this reason, one must not conflate the ideological function
that always accompanies strategies of legitimation (even the most rational-
ized forms of knowledge in Europe or the United States) with the as yet un-
differentiated position of discourse before the public sphere. Doubtless the
autonomy achieved was extremely relative, but one must nevertheless note
the degree of specification and even spatialization of intellectual labor in the
university, over and above the state.
What was the place of letters within the relative institutionalization of
knowledge? What concept of literature is at work in Bello? If a concept of
writing as a device that transforms the chaotic nature of barbarism (and gen-
erates the public sphere) prevails in Sarmiento, in Bello we find that other
dominant model of literature prior to Martí and his fin de siècle: the concept
of belles lettres that postulated literary writing as a paradigm of knowledge-
(as)-said (saber decir), an active labor on language (in its natural state) for the
transmission of any form of knowledge or understanding (conocimiento):

[T]he propagation of knowledge [saber] is one of the most important

conditions [of belles lettres], because without it letters would offer us
no more than a few points of luminosity amidst the darkest shadows.
(p. )

For Bello, literature overdetermined by rhetoric was to be a repository for

forms, a means for the production of nonliterary, nonaesthetic effects, tied
to the project of rationalizing both the public sphere and national language
(as we will later see).
Such a concept of literature as a medium for nonliterary operations is
inscribed in the intellectual sphere that Bello called the ‘‘republic of letters.’’
While it may indeed be said that a certain degree of specialization (synony-
mous, in this case, with rationalization as the division of knowledge) has
been projected onto the tasks and discourses belonging to the public sphere,
all intellectuals (doctors, scholars, tacticians, and politicians) under the re-
public of letters nevertheless share the same basic idea of language: as the
common authority of eloquence. And although there was a certain amount of
divided labor within this type of intellectual field, it was still unaware of the

Language and Politics in Bello 

fragmentation of knowledge that by the end of the nineteenth century would
differentiate, for example, the practice and authority of a poet from that of
a scholar or historian, even in Latin America. Bello had earlier conceived the
interior of the intellectual domain, already in the process of becoming differ-
entiated within the public sphere, as relatively homogeneous:

The sciences and literature bring with them compensation for the tasks
and vigilance consecrated by them. I do not speak of the glory that
illustrates the great scientific conquests; I do not speak of the aura of
immortality that crowns works of genius. At best one can only be per-
mitted to hope for these. I speak of the pleasures more or less elevated,
more or less intense, that are common to all levels of the republic of let-
ters. (p. )

There is no need to idealize the relative homogeneity of this world, in

which meaning and unity or organicity were the effect of the restrictive econ-
omy and exclusions deployed by the republic of letters. Few could enter into
this enclosure of elevated activities, clearly opposed to manual labor. Saco
makes this last point clear: ‘‘Intellectual labor must not be measured by the
same scale as mechanical labor, since the latter being almost always severe
and arduous, does not produce the pleasures of the former.’’ 12
Nevertheless, the constitution of a sphere is not produced solely as a
negative process, in this case, by means of its opposition to and exclusion of
manual labor. A sphere or field of knowledge is also consolidated by means of
incorporative, inclusive operations of identification that determine the com-
mon ground shared by each component of the field. In the republic of letters,
one such operation of identification was eloquence, evidence of an enlight-
ened mind, as an a priori condition of possibility for any type of intellectual
practice whatsoever. In this system, belles lettres did not constitute an ac-
tivity with a field of immanent authority; on the contrary, it served as the
formalization of eloquence. The association of knowledge with an exacting
form of writing and speech based on eloquence (hence, knowledge-(as)-said)
thus tied literature to grammar—a fundamental problematic in Bello.
For Bello, eloquence was one of the bases of general education. Knowl-
edge-(as)-said was the main assumption behind the project of discipline and
rationalization in the emergent society. In his explanation of the tasks of the
different faculties of the new university, Bello expounds the place of literary
study in the following manner:

[It is to be] that literary department that possesses in a peculiar and

eminent way the quality of polishing customs, which refine language,

    

 making it a dependable, admirable, diaphanous transport for ideas . . . ;
which, through the contemplation of ideal beauty and its reflections in
works of genius, purifies the taste, and reconciles the inexpressible laws
of reason with those rapt audacities of fantasy; which, while initiating
the soul in the most intense studies, [these being] a necessary aid or
supplement to beautiful literature, and an indispensable preparation for
all the sciences, for all the careers of life, forms the primary discipline of
the intellectual and moral being, [and] posits the eternal laws of under-
standing with the objective of directing and supporting the student’s
steps and peeling back the many profound layers of the heart, in order to
preserve it from the ill-fate of misdirection, to establish on solid ground
the rights and duties of man.13

Letters, hence, do not imply a private or privatized activity. Letters polish,

purify, and refine language, submitting the misdirection of fantasy—of every-
thing spontaneous, for that matter—to the regular course of reason. Above
all, letters here provide the necessary conditions for the execution of the law.
Bello never ceases to emphasize that this education for citizens is a project of
discipline and ordering through language. He is not proposing an alternative
order to that of science, as later intellectuals (beginning with Martí) will do;
he is articulating a concept of letters as a labor on language—‘‘indispensable
for all sciences.’’ Such an operation on language forms what Bello calls ‘‘the
primary discipline’’: it forms subjects contracted or conscripted to the power of
the law.14 In fact, letters would provide the necessary structure for a rational-
ized sociability, for the formation of citizens:

If general instruction were considered indispensable to all those who do

not live by mechanical labor, without the final aim resting on the literary
profession, we would not so frequently see persons of other classes who,
not having received the cultivation of their intellect beyond knowledge
of primary letters, or perhaps not having dedicated a considerable part
of their most precious time to collegial instruction, cannot be shown
decorously in light of the social contract; in a sense they tarnish it, and
neither can they exercise, as they ought, the rights of the citizen, and the
duties that they are called to do in the service of communities or in the
administration of justice.15

Underlying this text, emphatic in tone, is Bello’s polemic against the

technical or professionalist notion of education that already existed in intel-
lectual circles. Bello’s polemic entails a defense of letters (even as eloquence)
in an epoch of an emergent pragmatism, with Sarmiento as its most well-

Language and Politics in Bello 

known ideologue.16 Bello did not accept the critique that was launched par-
ticularly against poetry—which for Sarmiento, Saco, and later Eugenio María
de Hostos, came to be a luxury in a world desiring rationality.17 Although
Bello did not accept this rejection (which at once implies a certain detach-
ment of poetry from practical life), he defends the place and importance of
letters in terms of the (rationalist) project of social modernization. For Bello,
letters—as the paradigm of eloquence—were a way of adjusting language to
the necessities of the modern project. Letters provided the necessary prelimi-
nary knowledge that would form discourses to be both effective and useful.
Above all, letters were an instrument for the formation of disciplined sub-
jects; subjects of the law, subordinated to the general order and even capable
of administering it. More than a mere indication of prestige or distinction,
letters and eloquence comprised a paradigm of rationality: by their formal-
ized character, both were capable of directing the projects of a new society in
its struggle to order ‘‘chaos.’’
It may be said that we have overestimated the role of knowledge-(as)-said.
In a world that began to be ruled by productivity, it was to be expected that
eloquence would play a minor role, limited to revealing the distinction or
prestige of the speaker. This is, in effect, one of the functions that eloquence
came to satisfy from the nineteenth century onward. Bello pointed out the
importance of ‘‘that indispensable sign of culture in which, in a progres-
sive society, no individual who does not belong to the most wretched classes
should be found lacking.’’ 18 The social place of eloquence in Bello’s plan,
however, would not be limited to the ostentation of a symbolic capital to be
flaunted by the individual subject.19
Until the violent antirhetorical reaction of writers like Manuel González
Prada, Martí, Darío, and the fin de siècle literary field, eloquence was as much
a means of social authority through letters as it was a model for teaching
and learning the logic of rationality in a world where saber decir (knowledge-(as)-
said) was the condition of possibility for knowledge (saber) itself, and where
knowledge would project the consolidation of modern society.20 In contrast
to Europe, where modernization had already been incorporated into the fab-
ric of society, with rationalized discourses independent from the general
order of knowledge-(as)-said, letters in Latin America continued to func-
tion as the medium for the modern project until the final decades of the
century. The uneven dispersion of modernization in Latin America enabled
traditional, nonorganic discourses to persevere and even proliferate, at times
acquiring new functions in the greater capitalist economy, even as the new
republics sought to free themselves from Europe and Europe’s hegemony
over scientific knowledge. Such is the paradox that, to a great degree, com-

    

prises the intellectual field prior to the s. In a world that lacked a more
or less universal incorporation of rationalized discourses, where intellectu-
als had already begun to suspect the risks of dependency and importation,
letters continued to serve as the standard model of a desired modernity.
The effectiveness and importance of eloquence cannot be seen as an indi-
cation of backwardness with respect to Europe, where knowledge-(as)-said
had already lost its paradigmatic character from the beginning of the (nine-
teenth) century. Rather, knowledge-(as)-said in Latin America has to be ana-
lyzed from the perspective of an uneven and unequal deployment of moder-
nity, in which one form of traditional authority (eloquence) acquires a different
function. Eloquence, in this case, continued to work as an agent of rational-
ization—a rationalization that would eventually displace it.
One conclusion that can be derived from our analysis is that the con-
cept of the modern episteme as the fragmentation of general knowledge into
multiple fields of immanence cannot be applied to the nineteenth century in
Latin America. This does not necessarily mean that a general knowledge, or
classical episteme, remained in place either. In contrast to both, the uneven
and unequal dispersion of modernity and modernization will oftentimes lead
us necessarily to question the categories of European historiography.
To take Saco as an example, even among the most pragmatic and ratio-
nalizing intellectuals who lampooned the florid eloquence of the writing
class, one can nevertheless find in him the relation between letters and the
modernizing will. In Saco, the enlightenment provided by letters goes hand
in hand with the project of disciplining the other and rationalizing labor:

They will find in [the act of ] reading a consolation against annoyance

and a refuge against vices. . . . If we had Athenaeums and reading rooms
many people would respond to them, and instead of wasting their time,
and perhaps their money as well, they would enjoy there the purest of
pleasures, displaying their understanding and rectifying their hearts.
These examples would produce a healthy effect on the popular masses,
and with the relish for reading and study having been successfully de-
fended, many would pass from ignorance to enlightenment, from idle-
ness to work, from vice to virtue.21

Enlightenment is concomitant with the imperative to work, with pro-

ductive labor; it is a means for counteracting vagrancy, a way of incorporating
the other into the territory of rationality. Thirteen years before Sarmiento’s
Facundo, Saco wrote: ‘‘it is necessary to take the masses away from barbarism’’
(p. ) because ‘‘is there any doubt that ignorance engenders vices and crime,
even as the enlightenment represses and diminishes them?’’ (p. ).

Language and Politics in Bello 

 As I had suggested earlier, the disciplinarian will that overdetermines
Bello’s concept of literature is also tied to grammar: ‘‘The grammar of a lan-
guage is the art of speaking it correctly, that is, in a way that people who
have been instructed speak it.’’ 22 Once again, we find in Bello the key oppo-
sition between orality and writing.23 Grammar is not simply an indication of
the subject’s social class; it acts as a normative apparatus that imparts the
laws of knowledge-(as)-said, following the example of ‘‘people who have been
instructed’’ (those who have access to letters). For this reason, grammar as a
pedagogical tool would occupy an intermediary position between (nonreflex-
ive) speech and the rationality of writing. From letters, grammar abstracts the
laws capable of disciplining and rationalizing the popular use of a language.
In Bello’s  prologue to Análisis ideológico de los tiempos de la conjugación caste-
llana (Ideological Analysis of the Tenses in Castilian Spanish Conjugation) he writes:

Few things can better provide the understanding with an exercise suited
to developing one’s faculties, to make them agile and nimble, than the
philosophical study of language. It has been believed without justifica-
tion that the learning of a language is exclusively the work of memory.
One cannot construct a speech, much less translate one idiom into
another, without scrutinizing the most intimate relations of ideas, their
accidents and modifications so to speak. This type of study is not so de-
void of attraction as might think those who have never become familiar
with it past a certain point. In the subtle and fleeting analogies on which
the choice of verbal forms (and more might be said of other aspects of
language) depends, one finds a prodigious chain of metaphysical rela-
tions, linked in an order and precision that will surprise anyone who
considers that the true and only artifice of all languages is indebted en-
tirely to popular usage. The meanings in the inflections of verbs immedi-
ately present a chaos, in which all seems arbitrary, irregular, and capricious;
but in the light of analysis, this apparent disorder is made clear, and one sees
in its place a system of general laws, which are even capable of being
expressed in rigorous formulas that can be combined and broken down
like those [formulas] of an algebraic idiom.24 (Italics added)

The light of analysis abstracts a superior and totalizing order from the
apparent chaos in any given particular use of language. Thus, we have the
identification of grammar with rationality, a kind of algebraic idiom in its
ideal or optimal form. This grammar would be purified through reflection
and distanced from the arbitrariness that distinguishes illiterate orality. The
spoken usage of a language (according to Bello) is nonreflexive: hence its ten-
dency toward disorder. For this reason, the object of grammar—usage—can-

    

not act as an appropriate model: the model must instead be ‘‘the uniform and
authentic custom of the educated people,’’ that is, people formed by letters.25
The opposition between orality and writing, between the contingency
of a spontaneous usage and the rationality of discourse, is clear in Bello: ‘‘In
the footnotes I call attention to certain corrupt practices of popular speech
among Americans’’ (p. vi). Popular speech is spontaneous, which is to say ex-
ternal to the structure of discourse, and must be subordinated—as in every
instance that involves the natural—to the order of the artifice. At bottom, the
authority of the grammaticizing (as opposed to grammaticized) subject is
founded on two presuppositions: the ‘‘popular’’ as a manifestation of barba-
rism, and ‘‘natural language’’ as a contingent matter or unformed substance
that demands subjugation by the instruments of rationality. In the face of
chaos, before language in its natural state, grammar foresees the transfor-
mation of its raw material into value. Grammar submits spoken language to
the control of writing, even as technology is to consolidate the key project of
submitting natural raw material to the regime of productivity and the market
in other areas of Enlightenment ideology.
Bello’s philosophy of language became the object of an ardent polemic
that raged in Chile throughout the s, a polemic in which the Argentine
Sarmiento would eagerly participate. For Sarmiento, grammar was a retro-
grade activity, contrary to the ideal of modernization. In , in one of his
populist moments (the ambiguity of which we have already discussed), Sar-
miento points out:

The sovereignty of the people holds its entire value and prevalence in the
idiom; grammarians are like the conservative senate, created in order to
resist the people’s will, to preserve routine and traditions. In our judg-
ment, they are (if they may pardon us for the bad word) a retrograde,
stationary party, in a vocal and outspoken society.26

Later, he added:

We would have agreed much more throughout our polemic, had we

better defined our philosophical principles. We believe in progress, which
means we believe that man, society, language idioms, nature itself,
moves inexorably toward perfectibility, that for this reason it is absurd
to set our sights backward, and search in the past century for models
of language, as if it were at all conceivable that a language could have
come to its perfection during an epoch in all senses uncivilized, which
is what our antagonists claim; as if languages, the expression of ideas,
do not move along with the ideas themselves; as if in an epoch of social

Language and Politics in Bello 

 regeneration, the idiom bound to the past could escape toward innova-
tion and revolution.27

Sarmiento’s defense of a popular sovereignty is relative. We have already

seen in the earlier reading of Facundo how the ‘‘confused voice’’ of the other
is subordinated to the order of writing. In any case, Sarmiento’s attacks may
explain Bello’s oftentimes defensive tone, which occludes the fact that in his
insistence on the importance of grammar (and saber decir), Bello appeals to
that very same notion of progress that Sarmiento defends. For Bello, the stakes
on the question of orality were not only limited to academics. In the Spanish-
speaking American world, it would be necessary to control orality in order
to stop the tendency toward linguistic dispersion. What Bello feared was the
possibility that the Spanish idiom would fragment into multiple American
dialects and tongues, as had occurred with Latin following the expansion and
dissolution of the Roman Empire:

The greatest evil of all, one which, if it is not cut off, will come to de-
prive us of those unappreciated advantages of a common language, is
the flood of neologisms in [linguistic] construction that inundates and
obfuscates a great part of what has been written in America; when the
structure of the idiom is altered in the process, these neologisms tend
to transform [the idiom] into a multitude of irregular, licentious, bar-
baric dialects; embryos of future idioms, which given a length of time
for their elaboration would reproduce in America what had occurred in
Europe in the dark age, and the corruption of Latin.28

This Enlightenment intellectual responds with terror to that which lies

outside the totalizing structure. Yet Bello’s defense of grammar does not nec-
essarily presuppose a conservative force, as Sarmiento would argue. Bello
defends the unity of a language, as it would cultivate the incorporation of the
dispersed territories of America into the order of the market and other mod-
ern institutions:

Our America will reproduce in little time the confusion of languages,

dialects, and gibberish, the Babylonian chaos of the Middle Ages; and
ten regions will lose one of their most powerful ties to fraternity, one of
their most crucial instruments for correspondence and commerce.29

And again, ‘‘one of the most inconvenient obstacles to which commerce

among different regions is subjected will be diminished in proportion to the
fixity and uniformity that languages [lenguas] acquire.’’ 30 Consequently, the
knowledge-(as)-said that grammar explicates and teaches cannot be consid-

    

ered a traditional discourse proper; its function is organic in accordance with
the modern impulse, the will to incorporate the American dispersion into
an order or common currency both linguistic and mercantile. Moreover, this
modernizing function of grammar is bound to the project of consolidating
the public sphere, which as we have already seen, was the primary focus of
Sarmiento’s writings as well. According to Bello, if the dispersion of Spanish
in America had continued,

Chile, Peru, Buenos Aires, Mexico, would each speak its own tongue, or
better yet, various tongues, as had happened in Spain, Italy, and France,
where certain provincial idioms would dominate, but live side by side
with various others, hindrances opposing the diffusion of enlighten-
ment, the execution of laws, the administration of the state, the national
unity. A language is a living body: its vitality does not consist of the
constant identity of elements, but the regular uniformity of functions
employed by these elements, a uniformity from which proceed the form
and the character that distinguish the language from all the rest.31

Following the metaphor of a language-body, Bello here suggests some-

thing quite significant: language has uniform functions (at least under ideal
conditions), just like the state. In fact, for Bello, the unity of language is also
the basis for the consolidation of the nation-state. A national language regu-
lated by letters would act as more than a supplementary instrument for the
passive transmission of the law’s contents; it would trace the map where the
borders and hierarchies of the state territory are written, where the intonation
of barbarism would be subordinated to the rigor of the law. In this cleansed
language, this purified tongue that has been rationalized and administered
by grammar, subjects would move within the space of the law instituted by
the order of the letter and the power of the lettered class or letrados.32

Notes

 Domingo F. Sarmiento, Civilización y barbarie. Vida de Facundo Quiroga (Madrid: Editora Nacio-
nal, ), .
 José Antonio Saco, La vagancia en Cuba (; reprint, Havana: Cuadernos de Cultura, ),
.
 José de la Luz y Caballero, Elencos y discursos académicos, ed. Roberto Agramonte (Havana: Edi-
torial de la Universidad, ), . The text is from the s.
 On the process of the relative Chilean pacification, see Tulio Halperín Donghi, Contemporary
History of Latin America, ed. and trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univer-
sity Press, ), –; and Marcos Kaplan, Formación del Estado nacional en América Latina
(Buenos Aires: Amorrortu Editores, ).

Language and Politics in Bello 

 For Weber, the modern state is constituted as the ‘‘monopoly on the legitimate use of physi-
cal force within a given territory.’’ This centralization of violence, at the same time, gener-
ates the relative autonomy of the state from regional persons or interests within the terri-
tory. Weber adds: ‘‘Everywhere the development of the modern state is initiated through the
action of the prince. He paves the way for the expropriation of the autonomous and private
bearers of executive power. . . . The whole process is a complete parallel to the development
of the capitalist enterprise through gradual expropriation of the independent producers. In
the end, the modern state controls the total means of political organization’’ (Max Weber,
‘‘Politics as a Vocation,’’ in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and
C. Wright Mills [New York: Oxford University Press, ], ).
 Even in Bello, there are fairly clear indications of professionalization, or the representation of
knowledge as productive labor, specific to a given economy. Bello was one of the first Latin
American intellectuals to seriously reflect on intellectual property rights. He published two
texts on the rights of authors in which he defended the legislation—that is, the rational-
ization—of intellectual property: ‘‘Property of what kind? Of the personal possession kind,
probably. That is to say that the punishment of those who contravene the law by violating
literary property would be the same as that which the legislation in effect imposes on theft.
But this is still too vague. The law, in our judgment, ought to put forth the indemnifica-
tion of the perjurous person, along with a public vindication’’ (Andrés Bello, ‘‘Derechos de
autores,’’ in Antología, ed. Pedro Grases [Barcelona: Seix Barral, ], ). The concept of
originality, which for Bello is the determining variable for the economic value of a literary
work (in a wide, premodern sense), emerges long before the nineteenth century; however,
Bello’s importance lies in his project to legislate and institutionalize this concept. In this
sense, Bello anticipates the struggle for the professionalization and rationalization of intel-
lectual property (already specifically literary) that intellectuals like José Martí, Rubén Darío,
or Miguel Cané would bring to a head almost half a century later.
 Andrés Bello, ‘‘Establecimiento de la Universidad de Chile’’ in Obras completas, Opúsculos litera-
rios y críticos, ed. Comisión Editora de las Obras completas de Andrés Bello (Caracas: Ministerio
de Educación, ). First published in .
 Andrés Bello, ‘‘Discurso pronunciado en la instalación de la Universidad de Chile,’’ in Obras
completas, p. .
 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Benning-
ton and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), .
 Bello, ‘‘Establecimiento de la Universidad de Chile,’’ .
 Bello, ‘‘Discurso pronunciado en la instalación,’’ .
 Saco, La vagancia en Cuba, . For Saco, however, the exclusion of manual labor had dan-
gerous effects in Cuba; with the depreciation of manual labor among whites, blacks gained
control over the productive base of society. The paradox is significant: even if one might
indeed defend the exclusivity of higher activities, one would also have to recognize in the
workers the support of production and productivity; hence, blacks, the others for Saco, would
have too much power.
 Bello, ‘‘Discurso pronunciado en la instalación,’’ .
 In Bello, moral discipline (provided for by the study of letters) is corollary to the concept of
the good citizen, subject of the law. As Peter Bürger has shown, the French Enlightenment
does not make of literature a reflection of the moral norms of a new bourgeois order; rather,
literature produces and formalizes norms of behavior. ‘‘As philosophical critique, literature
examines the claim to the validity of norms; as belles lettres it promotes the internalization

    

 of norms’’ (Peter Bürger, ‘‘Literary Institution and Modernization,’’ Poetics  []: ).
Regarding literature as a ‘‘standard of behavior’’ as it operates in Fernández de Lizardi, see
also Jean Franco, ‘‘La heterogeneidad peligrosa,’’ Hispanoamérica – (): –.
 Bello, ‘‘Discurso en el aniversario de la Universidad de Chile en ,’’ in Obras completas,
Opúsculos literarios y críticos, .
 ‘‘In a new country, where every kind of progress has been brought to fulfillment, instead of
scholars and doctors the community needs men prepared for industry’’ (Domingo F. Sar-
miento, quoted in The Development of Education in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, by Charles Henry
Shutter [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ], ). Saco, in La vagancia en Cuba, de-
clared: ‘‘When I ask for the substitution of useless existing professorships for new ones, it
is not with the exclusive objective of forming experts. . . . This would be achieved by estab-
lishing a priori professorships in those sciences that would more closely reflect the present
condition and future prosperity of the island of Cuba: by teaching them, not abstractly, . . .
but with the intention of directing them to certain particular branches [of Cuban society],
and stripping them of all useless questions that torment the spirit, all extravagance that only
serves to brightly illuminate the classrooms and academic halls’’ (p. ).
 In Eugenio María de Hostos, after the heyday of Bello and Sarmiento, we see a more ad-
vanced degree of rationalization in pedagogical discourse: here, the notion of belles lettres
or knowledge-(as)-said as a device that endowed teaching with authority no longer applies.
Rationalization, in this later, positivist period, displaced letters from their central role in
education. See Hostos’s ‘‘El propósito de la Normal’’ (), in which he insists on scientific
education and the preparation of specialized teachers. Even in Hostos the rhetoric of the
American world as anarchy and chaos is present. But already in Hostos, in contrast to Bello,
pedagogy’s response to barbarism can be distinguished from the cultivation of belles let-
tres. As Pedro Henríquez Ureña indicates in his prologue to this edition, Hostos ‘‘resolutely
exiles the poets from his interior republic, if they will not agree to serve, to construct, to
uplift hearts’’ (Eugenio María de Hostos, Antología, ed. Eugenio Carlos de Hostos [Madrid:
Imprenta, Litografía, y Encuadernación, ], ). In the prologue to the second edition
() of the novel La peregrinación de Bayoán ()—one of Hostos’s few literary works—
Hostos speaks of the literato (now negatively specified) as ‘‘a vagabond of fantasy, corrup-
tor of sensibility, corruptor of reason, and dangerous social influence.’’ And he adds that
belles lettres are the pastime of the idle. Hence, he demonstrates how literature, already in
the s, had begun to differentiate itself from rationality, a fact made definitive in Martí’s
aesthetic ideology at the beginning of the s.
 Bello, ‘‘Discurso en el aniversario,’’ .
 Even for the Hostos of La peregrinación de Bayoán, to do literature was a way of acquiring public
authority. In his prologue of , he excuses himself from his work outside the limits of a
rational discourse (see p. ). He also adds that ‘‘For the [composition of the] work I owe
the authority of my word in my country’’ (Eugenio María de Hostos, La peregrinación de Bayoán
[San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, ],  and , respectively). This search
for public authority and power by means of letters also figures into the novel as a signifi-
cant theme.
 Foucault has shown the importance of knowledge-(as)-said in the classical episteme:
‘‘Knowledge . . . is like a language whose every word has been examined and every relation
verified. To know is to speak correctly, and as the steady progress of the mind dictates. . . .
The sciences are well-made languages, just as languages are sciences lying fallow. All lan-
guages must therefore be renewed; in other words, explained and judged according to that

Language and Politics in Bello 

 analytic order that none of them now follows exactly; and readjusted if necessary so that the
chain of knowledge may be visible in all its clarity, without any shadows or lacunae. It is
thus part of the very nature of grammar to be prescriptive, not by any means because it is an at-
tempt to impose the norms of a beautiful language obedient to the rules of taste, but because it refers to the
radical possibility of speaking the order of representation itself ’’ (Michel Foucault, The Order of Things,
trans. Alan M. Sheridan [New York: Vintage Books, ], ; translation modified and ital-
ics added).
 Saco, La vagancia en Cuba, –.
 Andrés Bello, ‘‘Gramática castellana,’’ in Obras completas, Opúsculos literarios y críticos, .
 For Bello, as for Sarmiento, the lack of writing and literature is a distinctive trait of barba-
rism. Literature, then, differentiates Latin America from Africa and Asia. In Angel Rama’s
La ciudad letrada, particularly in the chapter entitled ‘‘La ciudad escrituraria,’’ Rama shows the
importance of the opposition to orality as one of the strategies of the lettered class, or letra-
dos, in acquiring their authority. Rama studies the exceptional case of Simón Rodríguez as
an intellectual who attacks the exclusivity of a writing culture, a writerly exclusivity.
 Andrés Bello, prologue to ‘‘Análisis ideológico de los tiempos de la conjugación castellana,’’
in Obras completas, Opúsculos literarios y críticos, –.
 Andrés Bello, prologue to Gramática de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los americanos (Paris:
Andres Blot, ), ix.
 Domingo F. Sarmiento, ‘‘Ejercicios populares de la lengua castellana,’’ in Sarmiento en el des-
tierro, ed. Armando Duroio (Buenos Aires: M. Gleizer, ), . First published in .
 Domingo F. Sarmiento, ‘‘Raro descubrimiento!’’ in Sarmiento en el destierro, .
 Bello, prologue to Gramática, vii–viii.
 Bello, ‘‘Discurso pronunciado en la instalación,’’ .
 Bello, ‘‘Gramática castellana,’’ .
 Bello, prologue to Gramática, viii.
 Nicos Poulantzas shows that the modern state, which has systematized—if not discovered—
grammar and orthography, inscribes them within networks of power: ‘‘This discourse [of
the state] must always be heard and understood, even if not in a uniform manner: it is not
enough that it be uttered as an incantation. This presupposes that, in the various codes
of thinking, the state itself is overcoded: that it serves as the frame of reference within
which the various segments of reasoning and their supporting apparatuses find homoge-
neous ground for their differential functioning. Thus, the capitalist state installs a uniform
national language and eliminates all other languages’’ (Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, and
Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller [London: Verso, ], ). For Poulantzas, the relation be-
tween the national language and the consolidation of the state is not merely instrumental:
‘‘The constitution of the modern nation resides, finally, in the relation between the modern
state and language. It is sufficient to simply say that the construction of a national language
by the modern state cannot be reduced to a problem of the social and political usage of this
language, nor can it be reduced to the normalization and standardization of the language by
the state, or to the destruction of dominated languages at the heart of the nation-state that it
implies. The national language is a language profoundly reorganized by the state in its own
image and structure’’ (p. ). See also Michel de Certeau et al., Une politique de la langue: La
Révolution française et les patois (Paris: Editions Gallimard, ).

    

 Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters

In the previous chapters, we sketched out the condition of intellectuals prior

to José Martí in order to show how the rationalization of labor—including the
subdivision of general knowledge into differentiated subjects and modes of
representation—remained, at bottom, only a project. Modernization repre-
sented a utopia that, hypothetically speaking, would be brought about by the
degree of formality conveyed by writing in a world lacking (yet at the same
time desiring) scientific knowledge: a utopia where intellectuals increasingly
recognized the danger of becoming dependent on countries that monopo-
lized this modern knowledge. In the republic of letters, writing was assigned
the authority to extend its domain over the contingency and anarchy of the
represented world; it was authorized to create a system in a society where
representation meant the ordering of the chaos, orality, nature, and barba-
rism that was America. From this, we can see that between letters and the
modernizing project that found in writing a standard model for rationality
and a repository for forms, there existed a relation—not simply of reflections
or similitude, but of identity.
The city—emblem of this desired modernity—came to exist as the vir-
tual site of the future: ‘‘Futuram civitatem inquirimus’’ [We are on a search
for the future city], Cuban educator and philosopher José de la Luz y Caballero
had said, and added: ‘‘Yes, gentlemen, the future, since although by my years
I am to be considered a man of the past, by my struggles and aspirations I
live in the future and for the future.’’ 1 To be of the past, to be inscribed in a
tradition that had become objectified; and to propose a change, even radical,
with a blind hope in the future: Luz y Caballero’s self-fashioning exemplifies
the teleological vision guiding the patricians of the modern impulse in Latin
America. In this future and desired modernity, Luz y Caballero claims that

the division of labor [would be] the principal motivation behind the
march of industry and science in what is essentially a century of prog-
ress. Without a doubt the subdivision of labor has achieved prodigious
 results, particularly in the British Kingdom; and perhaps amongst the
immense advantages that it has carried along in its wake, no achieve-
ment has been more beneficial to the cause of the sciences than the
great attack on and rectification of encyclopedism, which has invaded
modern education.2
For Luz y Caballero, the future had its particular geography. To speak
from Cuba was to be situated in a past whose future had already been actual-
ized elsewhere, in England or the United States. From the perspective of the
‘‘future,’’ the intellectual’s gaze guaranteed the rectification of a deficient tra-
dition. In this instance, however, Luz y Caballero did not foresee that with the
advent of this division of labor—when encyclopedism had exploded and frag-
mented into multiple, specialized fields of immanence—his specific mode of
intellectual authority would lose its privileged place in the public sphere.
This relation with tradition and modernity would change radically with
Martí and his fin de siècle, within a cultural system where literature would
problematize its relationship with the will to rationalization. In doing so,
literature would come to legitimize its sphere along two lines: as a defense
of tradition, a tradition that it would at times invent; and as a critique of
the modernizing project. At the same time, the literary field would develop
its own discursive apparatuses, emancipating itself from the traditional con-
fines of letters and the lettered class or letrados.
In this chapter, I want to examine how knowledge-(as)-said (saber decir)
came to lose its authority, and how the intellectual field known as the repub-
lic of letters was fragmented in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The
chapter contains three parts: first, I look at how the place of letters was in a
general sense transformed in the sphere of education, precisely as literature
became autonomous from the external, overdetermining authority of rheto-
ric. Next, I examine the change in the relationships between politics, literary
discourse, and the modern writer or literato. These changes would affect even
(and most of all) Martí, who along with Manuel González Prada would seem
to be among the last public writers, closer to the hybridity of Sarmiento than
the literary purity of Darío. Finally, I try to highlight some points that will
help us chart the gradual disengagement of letters from the institutions that
had until then ensured their social authority; a crisis evidenced by the emer-
gence of literature as a modern discourse.

Literature and Education

The change suffered by letters in education throughout the last decades of
the past century is revealing. Let us recall that for Bello letters, more than an

    

autonomous discourse acted as a vehicle for the formalization and distribu-
tion of heterogeneous objects of general knowledge (conocimientos):

The propagation of knowledge [saber] is one of the most important con-

ditions [of progress], because without it letters would offer no more
than a few luminous points amidst the deepest shadows.3

Letters would thenceforth act as a paradigmatic element of education.

In accordance with Bello’s project, the College of Humanities at the Univer-
sity of Chile was charged with the task of training teachers.4 Interestingly
enough, although the study of letters had already become autonomous from
the College of Law in Chile by , it had set out toward the propagation
of knowledge, under the banner of knowledge-(as)-said, without any precise
pedagogical methodology. In response to this paradigmatic role of letters in
education, intellectuals such as Juan Bautista Alberdi, Sarmiento, and Luz y
Caballero launched their critique against encyclopedism, proposing instead
a program for rigorous and practical specialization, well before the turn of
the century. But even these critiques, inspired by a marked pragmatism, were
not articulated from a pedagogical discourse proper.
Toward the s, significant changes in the place of letters in educa-
tion began to take effect. The situation of Puerto Rican pedagogue Eugenio
María de Hostos, founder of the Normal School of the Dominican Republic
(Escuela Normal de la Republica Dominicana) in , is exemplary: in accordance
with the period in which positivism came to be the corrective ideology of
education in many areas of the continent, Hostos insisted on the rational-
ization of pedagogy, attacking the vestiges of religious education along with
encyclopedistic ‘‘eloquence.’’
Before focusing on some of the more important features of pedagogi-
cal discourse in Hostos, it might be appropriate to briefly trace the trajectory
of his intellectual development, for in many ways, Hostos would serve as a
counterpoint to the emergence of the fin de siècle writer or literato. Like Martí,
González Prada, Gutiérrez Nájera, and Eugenio Cambeceres, Hostos began
his intellectual profession as a man of letters; yet in contrast to them, Hos-
tos determinedly sought to evade literature. In the very act of articulation, his
writing will rigorously attempt to obliterate any mark or trace of literariness
whatsoever, any kind of evidence of style as the measure of value among fin
de siècle writers beginning with Martí.
Hostos’s first work, however, was a novel—La peregrinación de Bayoán
(). It was written in the form of an intimate diary, a mode of writing that
Hostos never entirely abandoned, even throughout the period of his positiv-
ist fervor.5 Behind a superficial nativism, the novel in sum follows a young

Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

colonial Caribbean writer’s itinerary of desire—a desire to inscribe himself,
by means of writing, into the ‘‘public space’’ [publicidad ] of the polis in Spain.
The writer’s ultimate aim (which the character Bayoán often emphasizes) is
to contribute to the independence of his native island, Puerto Rico. From this
brief summary, one can already gauge the investment of Hostos’s novel in the
figure of the writer. To write, in La peregrinación, is a way of assuming authority,
a way of reaching the power entrusted to the word in the republic of letters:

I saw that the conquest of a literary name is the conquest of power.

Power that I lacked that would unhesitatingly serve my forgotten, ha-
rassed, enraged country. . . .

The public judgment . . . was what I needed . . . to authorize my entrance

into active life, an arduous thrust into a difficult battle in which I longed
to become engaged.6

These words, from the prologue to the second edition of Hostos’s novel
(released in Chile in ), indicate the close relationship between letters and
politics that remained dominant until the s. Nevertheless, the prologue
as a whole represents such a concept of literature as a thing of the past. In
this same prologue, Hostos shows that La peregrinación ‘‘is the only one of my
literary works that I regard with pride and [that] I can read without the pious
sadness that I have for works of the imagination’’ (p. ). In other words, the
prologue is a kind of manifesto in which Hostos decidedly turns against his
own intellectual formation in favor of ‘‘logical men’’:

There are too many artists of the word in the world, too many adulators
of form, too many empty spirits that know only to obey the law of pro-
portions, and I did not wish to be one of so many talkers who, even as
they fill their surroundings with sonorous words, are radically incapable
of achieving what is most lacking in the world: logical men. (p. )

‘‘Artists of the word,’’ ‘‘adulators of form’’ and ‘‘proportions’’: are these

not some of the characteristics that the fin de siècle literatos, particularly the
modernists, claim as their own, in their emphasis on form and their self-
reflections? Paradoxically, Hostos’s diatribe against those involved in the lit-
erary profession only serves to foreshadow the future authenticity of a literary
subject, albeit in a negative sense. Opposite this subject a ‘‘logical man’’ is
conceived as an agent of new, properly modern, discourses of rationality. The
‘‘logical man’’ is thus a contemporary of the other, as it is the other who makes
possible the logical man’s existence; an other that the ‘‘logical man’’ will, in

    

turn, reify and delimit in the realm of ‘‘the traditional’’ and ‘‘useless’’—of
that which remains external to discipline and, hence, rationalization.
Let us examine the inscription of the subject in the above quotation—
‘‘and I did not wish to be one of so many talkers.’’ The conjunction (‘‘and’’)
syntactically joins what it semantically disjoins or distinguishes from the
subject-position—namely, ‘‘artists of the word.’’ The subject unifies and re-
affirms his identity as a separate entity by means of his emphatic disavowal
of ‘‘them,’’ the ‘‘artists of the word.’’ This proceeding is brought to its con-
clusion in the following quotation: ‘‘Letters are the business of the idle or of
those who have already finished their lives’ labor, and I had much to do (tra-
bajar)’’ (p. ). The subject-position is a product of an incision that places
the activities of letters and rationality in radical opposition. ‘‘They’’ are the
‘‘vagabonds of fantasy’’ (p. ), ‘‘corruptors of sensibility’’ (p. ), ‘‘danger-
ous social influences’’ (p. ), and ‘‘corruptors of reason’’ (p. ).
It was certainly not the first time that the writer (above all, the poet) was
figured as a ‘‘vagabond of fantasy.’’ Bello had long before suspected that cer-
tain modes of writing—poetry in particular, which he identified with eroti-
cism—ran the risk of crossing the boundaries of rationality and sociability.7
But if one were to examine Bello’s corrective reading of Cuban José María de
Heredia’s poetry, it can be shown that Bello still conceived of eloquence, ‘‘the
laws of a severe taste,’’ as a way of controlling and disciplining the dangers
of imaginative ‘‘spontaneity.’’ 8 For Hostos, however, the rationality of the
‘‘logical man’’ does not depend on a knowledge-(as)-said, saber decir; instead,
Hostos is led to emulate science as a paradigm, as much for its methodologi-
cal rigor as for its applicability.
And through a reversal or negative of the ‘‘logical man,’’ the emergence
of a literary space is brought into being, in a dialectic that distances literature
from an earlier system of letters, now dominated by the will to rationalize. It
is thus possible to think of Martí’s first book of poetry, Ismaelillo (), as
a foundational text for literary modernization—not only for its attention to
language, which entails the rewriting of notably traditional forms, but also
because Ismaelillo’s poetic practice is produced from a discursive field that
has been rendered discrete from the disciplinary discourses of rationaliza-
tion. Ismaelillo presupposes an other knowledge—that of the ‘‘child,’’ that of
the oneiric vision—as the locus of the specifically imaginary, tied to leisure,
which in this instance serves as a ‘‘refuge’’ from a ‘‘punishing’’ rationaliza-
tion. From this place, at once created and excluded by rationalization, the
new literary subject speaks; s/he upholds informality, indiscipline, and at
times, even transgression and madness as ideals. Although it would be rash
to accept, even in an abstract sense, the radicality of this other knowledge,

Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

for now let us merely point out its distinctive opposition to a rationaliza-
tion that paradoxically produced it. When Martí says, ‘‘A tempest is more
beautiful than a locomotive,’’ 9 his statement foreshadows the catastrophe of
rationality, even as it belies the exclusive apparatus, set in motion by ratio-
nalization, that had produced these new marginal zones in the first place.
Historically, then, the alternative domain of modern literature (not co-
incidentally identified with poetry since Bello, as poetry was the first literary
mode that had separated itself from ‘‘practical’’ life) 10 was not invented by
the new specialized writers or literatos. The same impetus behind rationaliza-
tion, the one that had negated the authority of letters, generated by means of
exclusion the very space devalued by Hostos: the space out of which the literary
subject would emerge. This subject would find a voice through the contra-
diction and critique of rationalization; this voice would be charged with a
‘‘spiritual’’ value precisely in a disenchanted and mercantilized world. Hence,
the ‘‘crisis’’ of literature that Martí and his contemporaries voiced is entirely
relative: one might even argue that their exhortations on behalf of the literary
domain acted as a vehicle for the legitimation and proliferation of their own
project. More than a crisis of literature, the negation of a knowledge-(as)-
said and the authority of an earlier system of letters represented the condition
of possibility for the emergence and autonomization of the modern writer.
Their paradoxically modern discourse was generated by rationalization, and
yet, authorized to be its critique. We will later see how the ‘‘margin’’ that was
literature, at least in Latin America, was not always limited in practice. The lit-
erary critique of modernization would allow literature to widen its influence
over public life, particularly after  and the emergence of Latin Ameri-
canism. Precisely by means of its claim of autonomy from economic power,
literature would become the fundamental vehicle for an anti-imperialist ide-
ology, defining the Latin American ‘‘being/identity’’ through its opposition
to the modernity of ‘‘them’’: the United States or England.
In the s, however, this power of marginality had no solid institu-
tional basis. Although the fields of rationality and literature emerge together
in the play of definitions and exclusions imposed by rationalization, insti-
tutionally speaking, they are clearly hierarchized. The ‘‘logical man’’ would
prevail in education, which would in turn continue to modernize—thus re-
lieving the family of its public duties, and opposing both the church (which
still claimed its ancient dominion over ‘‘knowledge’’) and the encyclopedism
of the enlightened letrados. This is the dual front faced by Hostos in ‘‘Proposal
for a Normal School’’ (), a speech that he delivered in the pedagogical
institute (Santo Domingo) that he had himself founded:

    

 Must we reestablish an artificial culture that scholasticism is still at-
tempting to resusticate? Must we continue to suffer owing to this mon-
strous education of human reason . . . ? Must we seek the standard that
ought to be followed in the direction that the Renaissance gave to a
moral and intellectual culture? That is none of our concern. We are to be
our own men . . . , useful men in all activities of our being, and not men
forever leaning on the form from which the Greeks and Romans derived
their necessities in their literature and science. . . . We are for thinking,
not expressing.11

The critique of the concept of letters and education inherited from Bello
(with whom Hostos, from the beginning of his residency in Chile, was no
doubt familiar) is evident here. In Bello, there is no disjunction between
thinking and expressing: saber decir, the mastery of expression, is the condi-
tion of rational activity, a condition that overdetermines even the distinction
between a ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘bad’’ idea, between a ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘bad’’ citizen.
In contrast, Hostos proposes ‘‘a true teaching: that which does away
with historical theses, partial methods, artificial proceedings. This teach-
ing would exclusively address the subject of learning, which is human rea-
son, and the object of learning, which is nature, [this teaching] favors their
interlinked articulation’’ (pp. –). Hostos suggests a scientific education,
similar to what we see in ‘‘The Scientific Education of Women,’’ where he in-
sists on the necessity of controlling and reifying the discourse of women—or
for that matter, poets—whose marginality with respect to ‘‘logical man’’ was
often feminized.12 The imagination—a feminine attribute—is for Hostos dan-
gerous, prone to barbarism.
It is important to show that Hostos continues to work from within an
Enlightenment and modernizing rhetoric whose key figure is the antithe-
sis civilization/barbarism. He continues to operate from within a discourse
about Latin America as the site of chaos; a representation, in the final in-
stance, based on the idea of an order that is assumed to have been achieved
outside or elsewhere. Latin America is portrayed as lacking that modernity
that positively defines Europe or the United States. And education, as was the
case for the Enlightenment patricians, would need to extend the domain of
‘‘civilization’’ and incorporate ‘‘barbarism’’:

Anarchy, which is not a political fact, but a social state, was in all things,
as it was in the juridical relations of the nation; and it was in teaching
and in the personal and impersonal instruments of teaching. . . . It was
an indispensable task to form an army of teachers who, in all the re-

Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

 public, would militate against ignorance, against superstition, against
cretinism, against barbarism.13

Like Sarmiento and Bello, Hostos postulates the submission of the bar-
barous ‘‘exterior’’ to the ‘‘order’’ of discourse. Yet the very ‘‘interior,’’ the
structured space of discourse, has been transformed, exploding both the will
to rationalize and the formerly state-invested task of writing into different
territories, often formed by conflicting authorities. Above all, Hostos did not
accept the undifferentiated and multiple character of the traditional letrado:

The exemplary patriots who had desired to complete the restoration of

rights of the native land . . . : or their well-merited efforts are negated in
the confusion of anarchic passions that, in the lack of an order and sys-
tem, are prevented from completely reaping the fruits of their venerated
labor. (p. )

Instead, Hostos advocates an education with ‘‘rational order in the cur-

riculum, [and] a reasoned method in teaching’’ (p. ). Distinct from the
earlier intellectual field, for Hostos, access to the order of writing does not
guarantee the authority of the didactic statement. Education was modern-
ized even as it expanded its domain in the new nations, to the point of be-
coming an ideological apparatus of already consolidated states. And with this
movement, education also becomes unhinged from the exterior authority of
rhetoric or knowledge-(as)-said, autonomizing its field and generating a spe-
cifically pedagogical method, with immanent norms of validation. In Hostos,
the figures of modernizing rhetoric continue to operate, although they are
not articulated from within the same institutional fields that constituted the
relative indifferentiation of the republic of letters.

The modernizing project would entail, in part, the professionalization of

teachers, which for many modernists would be another limit-figure of the lit-
erary subject. But of even greater significance than this professionalization
(proposed by Luz y Caballero twenty years earlier) would be the constitu-
tion of a specifically pedagogical discursive field that would enable the voice of
new ‘‘professionals’’ to be articulated and heard. This pedagogical discourse,
dominated by a positivist ideology (almost always more pragmatic than its
appeal in Hostos), would deny the emergent literary subject any entrance or
position into the scholarly apparatus, eclipsing the development of litera-
ture as an academic discipline until the first decade of the twentieth century.
Doubtless this was due to the still-pervasive identification of literature (out-
side the literary field) with the traditional system of belles lettres and rheto-

    

ric, both of which had become radically discredited for their questionable
authority and imprecise applicability.
Regarding the literary subject’s lack of authority in education at the
turn of the century, it would be helpful to recall the entirely belated estab-
lishment of literary departments in Latin America. In Mexico, for example,
the first course that can be properly called literary was not instituted until
, under the Facultad de Humanidades de la Escuela de Altos Estudios
(College of Humanities of the School of Higher Studies),14 following the de-
motion of positivism (the ideology of Porfirio Diaz’s administration) in the
first years of the revolution. After various frustrated attempts in Argentina,
the first courses of literature to be separated from the curriculum of law did
not achieve any continuity from term to term until after .
Let us briefly examine the history of the Facultad de Filosofa y Letras
de la Universidad de Buenos Aires (College of Philosophy and Letters at the
University of Buenos Aires).15 After the Rosas period, the university was re-
constructed in the s under the administration of Juan María Gutiérrez
(–). The study of letters became important within the Facultad de
Derecho y Ciencias Sociales (College of Law and Social Sciences), although it
was not until  (under the directorship of Vicente Fidel López) that an at-
tempt to create a ‘‘College of Humanities and Philosophy’’ was undertaken.
The school would offer higher degrees in letters, a category that even at that
time was still dominated by classical studies and had very little to do with the
concept of the literature-aesthetics that would begin to take shape in that
decade, outside the university.16 Rooted in the already discredited concept of
belles lettres (which López himself epitomized), the project for the depart-
ment failed that same year.
In , there was another attempt to create and organize the college,
this time including a number of specialized philologists. The initial effort,
frustrated in , proposed to institute courses in Latin American history
and literature, including sources for a national culture, which would thence
come to be reified into a professional object of reflection and study.
In , Norberto Piñero and Eduardo L. Bidau, secretaries of the uni-
versity, once again took up the project of reorganization. They wrote:

It is often repeated that the College of Philosophy and Letters is a super-

fluity, (that) it does not respond to any practical end and is opposed to
the tendencies of the country—because it would distance itself from the
forces of industry and would demand increased expenses only to render
useless a number of men, who would be found to be disoriented, outside
the general movement of society: because the future and the greatness

Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

 of the nation is in the railroads, in the colonization of lands, in cultiva-
tion on a grand scale. . . .

These are, in synthesis, the arguments brought forth in different ways

against the study of philosophy and of letters in a special department.

Precisely because wealth, the benefits of fortune, industries, the long-

ing for opulence and business transactions must all be developed . . . it
is necessary to spread the high philosophical truths [conocimientos], the
arts and letters, lest the people’s character diminish and they see the
accumulation of material interests as the final good.17

We can read Piñero and Bidau’s history not only as a transparent docu-
ment, referring strictly to the situation of literature in the university, but also
as a text that in its very documentary or descriptive format presupposes the
distinct authority of literature and its emergence in education. Once again,
we find here the opposition between literature and modernization, although
the significance it once carried in Hostos has been inverted: the division now
indicates, in , a separate place for literature within the scholarly appa-
ratus. The distance between the subject and the emblems of modernization
(‘‘industry,’’ ‘‘utility,’’ ‘‘railroads,’’ ‘‘colonization of lands’’) is marked—a re-
vealing distance, as it has everything to do with a history produced by the
university administration itself.
In opposition to ‘‘material interests,’’ the text proposes the study of lit-
erature as a compensatory function in its ability to moralize. Hence, by means
of a newly crystallized rhetoric, the defense of the aesthetic in education—
which will later be one of the basic tenets of Arielism—is announced:

With perfect reason one no longer believes (or believes very little) in
the moralizing effects of common education, of middle instruction, and
of professional instruction, because in this sense instruction is an in-
strument that can be employed now for the good, now for the bad; but
higher instruction certainly moralizes, when it has no objective other
than itself, when it signifies science for the sake of science and art for the
sake of art, when it is sought out of love for the truth and beauty. Indeed,
in such a case, a feeling as form has stopped being a utensil for it to be-
come an object of art.

They are very rare, those disinterested lovers of the beautiful and the true,
so as to hardly constitute an infinitely reduced chosen class. . . . Neverthe-
less, how important it is! The advantage of increasing or forming them
amongst ourselves is no less real. (p. ; italics added)

    

 The ‘‘disinterest’’ of ‘‘art for the sake of art’’ cannot be confused with
an asocial posture. ‘‘Disinterest,’’ art’s autonomy from ‘‘practical reason,’’ is
what guarantees literature’s authority as a new place for a moral judgment,
which has been displaced from education, now oriented toward the realiza-
tion of ‘‘practical ends.’’ Hence beauty, precisely because it is not ‘‘useful’’
(a utensil), compensates for the destabilizing (amoral) flux of money and an
‘‘empty’’ life of reigning ‘‘materialism.’’ Beauty, experienced by a select ‘‘mi-
nority,’’ redeems capitalist ‘‘massification.’’
This rhetoric anticipates the emergence of Arielismo, in which the lit-
erary subject tied to the defense of the Latin American ‘‘spirit’’ against the
‘‘material’’ power of ‘‘them’’ would succeed in displacing positivism from its
governing role in education, thereby effectively institutionalizing literature as
the ‘‘margin,’’ as a critique of modernization, particularly after the publica-
tion of José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel in .
In , however, this literary discourse, which to some degree had
already been crystallized through its rhetoric, was still subordinate to the
realm of positivist pragmatism in the university and state apparatuses. Thus,
we find one of the distinctive features of the development of Latin American
literature at the turn of the century: although the concept of autonomy in
literature—which has specified its language (‘‘style’’) and outlined its narra-
tives of legitimation (the critique of modernity)—is already in operation, its
discourse still lacks the institutional basis that would enable the social uni-
fication of its territory. Hence, the radical dependence of literature on the
press (as we will later see) at the turn of the century.
Even so, the assertions by enlightened administrators from the Univer-
sity of Buenos Aires demonstrate that the tendency toward autonomization
superseded the limited field of modernist poetics. The impulse of literature
toward autonomization was not the exclusive patrimony of a literary van-
guard; a vanguard initially distinct and radically opposed (as Noé Jitrik be-
lieved) to the most central and centralizing zones of official culture).18 One
need only mention in passing that Piñero and Bidau’s text was published in
, the same year that Darío’s Azul was published in Chile. Such a coinci-
dence shows that official culture was not, after all, a homogeneous block. If
Piñero and Bidau’s text is any indication, one would be led to wonder whether
Darío’s inscription in the Argentine scene of writing did, in fact, mark a radi-
cal rupture; that is, to what degree did it actually represent a threat to the
dominant values? 19 There were indeed debates on Darío’s ‘‘decadentism,’’
as Groussac and Rodó’s criticisms demonstrated. These were criticisms that
Darío knew well how to incorporate, beginning with Cantos de vida y esperanza
(). But one would be assuming too much to say that in the Buenos Aires

Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

of the s, the diatribes of the most conservative critics (like Calixto Oyuela
or Rafael Obligado) against the new poets could be considered representative
of the general taste of the emergent middle class.
In any case, the project of founding the school in  also failed; in
fact, it was not until  that it was finally consolidated. Doubtless we owe
its foundation to the effort of intellectuals who defended the specificity of
literature within the field that Ricardo Rojas would call the ‘‘new humani-
ties.’’ 20 Beyond its prior devotion to the study of rhetoric and ancient culture,
the ‘‘new humanities’’ was projected to be the axis of a ‘‘national reconstruc-
tion,’’ contributing to the ‘‘purification’’ of the national language and ‘‘spirit’’
in that period of intense immigratory flux.
On the other hand, the specialization of the study of law—from which
‘‘letters,’’ still burdened with the weight of oratory, had not succeeded in
emancipating itself—was a priority of the greatest importance. Hence, in
, the College of Law and Social Sciences was organized, excluding ‘‘let-
ters’’ from its field of authority. With the execution of this plan, the study of
law became autonomous from the paradigm of eloquence and knowledge-
(as)-said, stripping the traditional instruments of the letrado from authority
over legal discourse. In this respect, the disengagement of legal studies from
letters paradoxically stimulated the institutionalization of modern literary
studies as a separate domain.21 In his memorandum of , the director of
the new law school stated:

The College of Law and Social Sciences has reformed its plan of studies,
dividing into two years the teaching of the philosophy of law, which
until now had been achieved in one; this reform can only be considered
transitory, while it attains a more fundamental [one] . . .

The preparatory course of this faculty has not been able to be completed
in this year because Congress has suppressed the literature program . . .

Our greatest desire is that the creation of the College of Philosophy and Letters be
completed so that the curriculum of law may limit its teaching to those topics of its
derivation.22 (Italics added)

The discourse of law was thus rationalized, even as the state was in the
process of consolidating itself. The education of the letrados was also dis-
ciplined, reducing its sphere to what was specifically legal. Thus, the para-
digmatic role of eloquence as a means of formalization and a standard for
measuring the value of lettered discourse collapsed: ‘‘truth,’’ at least in prin-
ciple, had become independent of the mode of expression. Paradoxically, this
break between letters and the law made possible the emergence of the Fa-

    

cultad de Letras (College of Letters) in  within a reconfiguration of the
public sphere and the political as apart from literature.23 Beginning with this
split, literature emerges as an academic discipline.24

Literature and the Public Sphere

Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the relation between litera-
ture—or letters, more specifically—and the public sphere in Latin America
had, in general, never been considered problematic. In these recently emanci-
pated societies, writing was a rationalizing practice, authorized by the project
of state consolidation.
As an example of literature’s belated autonomization from legal dis-
course, it would suffice to recall that it was still possible for Martí, writing in
Guatemala in , to read a legal, ‘‘civilizing’’ document as an instance of
literary discourse:

In spirit, the legal code is modern; in definition, clear; in reforms, sober;

in style, energetic and limpid. The erudite, enthusiastic, and literary
statement will always be the example of legislative thinkers, and the
pleasure of men of letters.25

This quote indicates the validity of a concept of literature that was be-
ginning to lose its authority, even in Martí’s work. In a number of ways, this
text is a singular one, since by the end of the s, Martí had already dis-
tanced himself from the constrained quality of his first writings, profoundly
marked by a legalistic rhetoric of allegation.26 It is not by pure coincidence
that the earlier texts were written when Martí was a law student; a profes-
sion that he practically never had the opportunity to practice. Instead, Martí
almost always preferred the vicissitudes of the publishing market—particu-
larly in newspapers—over work for the state bureaucracy.
To return to the above quote, Martí’s reading of the Guatemalan ‘‘new
codes’’ allows us to recall the close relation that once existed between the law,
the administration of power, and the authority of letters. In the period prior
to the unification and autonomization of the nation-states, letters were poli-
tics. Letters foresaw the ‘‘code’’ that made it possible to distinguish ‘‘civiliza-
tion’’ from ‘‘barbarism,’’ ‘‘modernity’’ from ‘‘tradition,’’ hence marking the
boundaries of the desired res publica in opposition to American ‘‘anarchy’’
and ‘‘chaos.’’ It cannot, therefore, be considered circumstantial that in this
earlier period, the letrados were called on to write the legal codes. Letters
were not simply the vehicle for the construction of a legal, external, and re-
presentable ‘‘object’’ (like right, justice, and so forth); by means of their codi-

Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

fied character, they were precisely the model for that object’s formalization
and constitution. In their very labor on language, and their ideal of a rationally
administered language, letters were a disciplinary device. As we have seen
with Bello, they were necessary for the constitution of subjects under the law.
The relation between the public sphere and literature became problema-
tized in the last two decades of the century. As nation-states were unified,
a specifically political discursive sphere emerged, tied to government admin-
istration and legitimation, and autonomous from the relatively undifferenti-
ated ‘‘knowledge’’ (saber) of the republic of letters. P. Henríquez Ureña lucidly
remarked on this process when he referred to the importance of the division
of labor that reorganized the intellectual field at the turn of the century:

Born from peace and the application of the precepts of economic liberal-
ism, prosperity has had an easily perceptible effect on intellectual life. A
division of labor has begun. Men of intellectual professions have taken
on themselves the task that they have chosen, and have abandoned poli-
tics; lawyers less so by custom, and after the rest. The helm of the state
has passed into the hands of those who practice nothing but politics.27

In line with the concept of a new division of labor, Henríquez Ureña

explains the emergence of a ‘‘pure literature’’ in Latin America as an effect
of the rise of ‘‘intellectual professions’’ that were to be separated from state
administration. Henríquez Ureña’s thesis has come to be foundational with
respect to the literary history of modernism, insofar as the importance of
this concept of professionalization has been borne out in more recent studies
by Jean Franco, Noé Jitrik, Angel Rama, Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot, and José
Emilio Pacheco.28 Nevertheless, although the concept of the division of labor
is fundamental to our understanding of the emergence of the literary field,
we already find in Henríquez Ureña the risk (still present today) of reducing
the change in the relationship between literature and society (and the state)
to a simple question of employment. Which is to say, it is often thought that
in contrast to the ‘‘civil’’ writer or letrado, the ‘‘modern’’ writer or literato does
not work for the state, or comes to occupy a subaltern place in state admin-
istration (as David Viñas argued).29 And that, given this displacement, the
writer is incorporated into the market and becomes professionalized.
The analysis of what Rama called the ‘‘socioeconomic circumstance’’ of
modernism 30 is a necessary one, yet it does not entirely explain the process
through which an authority and a literary locus of speech emerged in the soci-
eties of the period. It is essential to recall that the incorporation of writers
into the market—initially by means of freelance journalism—was not an ex-
clusive feature of the modernists. For example, Fernández de Lizardi, in the

    

first decades of the century, had made a living by writing.31 This was also
the case for many gauchesca poets, like Hilario Ascasubi, who (while being
a political cadre) specialized in writing poetry commissioned by the politi-
cal parties.32 Sarmiento, during his years of exile and after his presidency in
Argentina, earned his keep by writing. In , Bartolomé Mitre (not long
after his presidency) wrote the following to a friend:

I’m going to become a printer to resolve the difficult problem of living.

. . . For five months out of the year I make money as a senator, and for
the rest of the year [I earn] a salary of  pesos. . . . I appeal to the labor
of the pen and of letters. . . . In any case, I have the energy to work, I
don’t feel any bitterness for beginning once again my [old] career, be-
coming in my country what I once was before exile.33

Although it is certain that incorporation of cultural goods into the mar-

ket had been systematized by the turn of the century, it is without a doubt that
from the start of the nineteenth century, with the development of journalism,
there already existed areas of intellectual labor structured by the networks of
economic exchange. Latin American capitalism was not born at the turn of
the century, and the world of ‘‘letters’’ cannot be represented by means of a
metaphor of courtly patronage, or an analogy between the nineteenth cen-
tury and European feudalism.34
More than a question of employment or professionalization and the
commercialization of writing, the emergence of a negatively derived notion
of ‘‘pure’’ literature (a notion that we will scrutinize shortly) that contrasted
with the state function of letters was the result of a restructuring in the fab-
ric of social communication. This event shook the systems of authorization on
which all literary production depended before the turn of the century. Not
only did the place of writers with regard to the state (which had begun to de-
velop its own ‘‘organic’’ administrators) fundamentally change;35 the relation
between statements, literary forms, and semiotic fields (presupposed by a lit-
erary authority and differentiated from political authority) had also undergone
a transformation. Unlike the law of the letter that held sway throughout the
republic of letters, the meaning and social function of the literary statement
was no longer guaranteed by political institutions and the political; instead,
these statements began to be produced from a site of articulation that now
possessed its own norms and authority. They were produced from the place
of literature as a social institution, which had not yet, however, consolidated
its material conditions of existence (as we saw with respect to education).
Hence, the impurity of Latin American literature in this period, given its un-
even modernization. In fact, if Henríquez Ureña did well to touch on the

Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

crucial task of explaining modernism as connected to the problematic rela-
tion between literature and politics, his notion of ‘‘purity’’ nevertheless lends
itself to misunderstandings, in part because of a generalized tendency that
associates it with the ideology of art for art’s sake. Let us examine this contrast
briefly.
The concept of literary ‘‘purity,’’ signifying the strict separation of litera-
ture from other discourses and social practices, may have had some validity in
Europe. As Peter Bürger has shown, art (literature included) reached its great-
est autonomy beginning with the aestheticism of mid-nineteenth-century
France.36 Bürger reads the history of the aesthetic sphere in relation to its
struggle to consolidate and purify a territory, eliminating from its interior any
mark of external interpellation. Although, for Bürger, the autonomy of the
aesthetic had already been conceptualized by the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury—in Immanuel Kant and Friedrich von Schiller, for example—the politi-
cal still guaranteed the aesthetic sphere’s social legitimacy. But in the French
art for art’s sake (which following Gustave Flaubert’s formula, entailed the cre-
ation of a content out of form—a style, in the modern sense), the separation
of the aesthetic from political ‘‘contents’’ designated the moment of great-
est institutional autonomy for the aesthetic. The aesthetic was then able to
achieve the complete elision of any vestige of heteronomy, thus purifying its
immanent field or territory.37 According to Bürger, the moment of ‘‘purity’’
for the aesthetic subject later became the object of a critique against the
institution of art that constituted the avant-garde movements: through the
introduction of desublimated materials into the ‘‘interior’’ space, the avant-
gardists believed they were dissolving the opposition of art to ‘‘life’’—an
opposition on which their autonomy was nonetheless founded. For Bürger,
therefore, the avant-garde’s attack on art as an institution was itself an insti-
tutionalized impulse.
Was there some degree of ‘‘purity,’’ in Bürger’s sense, that can be attrib-
uted to the rise of modern Latin American literature? To begin with, one must
admit that the will to autonomy was inescapable. More than a literary ideol-
ogy, this will was tied to the tendency toward the specification of the literary
field in general. Under this will to autonomy, we will see figures as diverse
as Julián del Casal (and later Darío) and Martí: all of whom, at first sight,
would seem to occupy irreconcilable positions. For example, in his reading of
Cuban José Fornaris’s poetry, Casal questions the possibility of writing patri-
otic texts in the style of a civil poet, even in a Spanish colony. ‘‘The modern
poet,’’ Casal writes, ‘‘is not a patriot, like Quintana or Mickievicz, who only
laments the misfortunes of the native land.’’ 38 And he adds:

    

 I believe that it is still possible to be what these writers, whom I have
just mentioned, were, as the most popular of our poets has been; but in
order for the accoutrement of ideas to have some artistic value, the form is
in every case the only thing that redeems certain extravagances, and that which
has come to its maximum degree of perfection in our day. (p. ; ital-
ics added)

It may be thought that this passage bespeaks nothing more than Casal’s
limited ideological position. Yet if that were the case, the reading that Martí
makes of José M. Heredia would remain inexplicable; here, Martí points out
that ‘‘for poetry, which is an art, one cannot be apologetic for that which is
patriotic or philosophical; [poetry] must be as resistant as bronze and must
vibrate like porcelain.’’ 39 And again, in a text by Martí about Francisco Sellén,
we are confronted with the same idea: ‘‘It is not the poet who starts the tor-
toise walking . . . nor he who puts politics and sociology into verse. . . . Poetry
is poetry, and not a putrid stew, nor is it a rehearsal of flutes, nor is it a rosary
of blue beads.’’ 40 In fact, the tendency toward autonomy is one of the im-
pulses that organizes the field at the turn of the century—even in the case of
Martí, the most ‘‘public’’ writer among them.
Yet, while the notion of ‘‘purity’’ did indeed emerge, concomitant with
a generalized will to autonomy in the nineteenth century, it nevertheless re-
mains inoperative as an overarching explanation of Latin America’s fin de
siècle, particularly with regard to the emerging yet somewhat ambiguous dis-
tinction between literature and politics. For example, Darío himself seems
to emblematize a literary ‘‘purity’’ (in opposition to the ‘‘political’’ function
of literature) in works such as Azul () and Prosas profanas (); yet he
significantly changes his concept of poetry in Cantos de vida y esperanza ().
Doubtless, he did this in response to Rodó’s criticism regarding the ‘‘artifi-
ciality’’ of his first books:41

todo ansia, todo ardor, sensación pura

y vigor natural; y sin falsía,
y sin comedia y sin literatura. . . :
si hay un alma sincera, esa es la mía.

La torre del marfil tentó mi anhelo;

quise encerrarme dentro de mí mismo,
desde las sombras de mi propio abismo.

all anxiety, all ardor, sensation pure

and natural vigor; and without falsity,

Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

 and without comedy and without literature . . . :
if there were a sincere soul, it would be mine.

The ivory tower tempted my longing;

I wanted to be enclosed within my very self,
among the shadows of my own abyss.42

At this stage of his poetic trajectory, Darío criticizes the ‘‘abyss’’ of the in-
terior. As Theodor Adorno notes, this kind of autonomy—autonomy in its
most radical form—is separated from the ‘‘human,’’ since it tends to make
of art an ethically empty object and distances the object from even the com-
municative function of language.43 Rodó himself suggested as much in his
critique of Darío. Hence, in Rodó’s opinion, the Darío of Azul or Prosas profanas
would never come to be a great representative poet. In contrast to Darío’s
aestheticism, an exemplary poet ought to give voice to the Latin American
subject, a subject for which there is no place in Darío’s early poetics. In the
cited poem (significantly dedicated to Rodó), Darío assumes Rodó’s posi-
tion by criticizing ‘‘literature,’’ now opposed to ‘‘sincerity’’—the subjective
attribute par excellence.44
Even in Darío, then, the ‘‘purist’’ aestheticism was never dominant. For
this reason, Rama in La ciudad letrada points out that

it would be fitting to revise this common place, with particular reference

to the modern writers [literatos], since it is they who have been often
imagined as withdrawing from all political activity, enclosing them-
selves in ivory towers, and devoting themselves to their artistic vocation.
They did indeed accompany the division of labor as a matter of course;
and they made of their artistic production a profession that demanded
fundamental skills and even strange technical idiosyncracies. . . .
But this concentration in the reduced sphere of their labor—lan-
guage and literature— . . . did not remove them from political life.45

This quote condenses one of the key arguments of Rama’s invaluable

work. In matters that concern the turn of the century, for Rama, the distinc-
tive aspect of the Latin American literary field (in contrast to Europe) is its
close relationship with politics, even after the relative specialization of the
modern literary writers or literatos. Although Rama maintains (from his first
readings on Darío) the concept of the division of labor, he at the same time
rejects the notion of ‘‘purity’’ in Latin American literature:

This double perspective, in which there was specialization, at times to

the point of reaching the absorbed passion of Darío, and simultaneously

    

 the generalized participation in the public forum, where personal des-
tiny was otherwise frequently played out, has not been sufficiently evalu-
ated. (p. )

The political, public participation of writers (escritores), and the ‘‘ideolo-

gizing function’’ of literature, which continued to claim authority as a pre-
scriptive discourse for society, led Rama to conclude the following:

[In] the s the political vocation of writers was alive, and in fact
boundless, through a model of literature (at first sight French) that em-
powered the long ‘‘redemptivist’’ [redentorista] tradition of the American
man of letters. (p. )

Rama’s reading takes up and eventually takes apart the false debate on
the (in)significance of modernism in Latin America: on the one hand, he de-
nies the notion of ‘‘purity’’ postulated by the heirs of modernism (beginning
with Henríquez Ureña); and on the other hand, he criticizes the diatribes
of a certain type of sociology that has tended to read modernism (in Darío,
above all) as an instance of aestheticism and purity, and that refuses to grant
any importance to modernism due to its lack of political engagement. Rama
modifies the core of both readings, which are only apparently antagonistic,
rejecting the valorizations and the very efficacy of the concept of ‘‘purity’’ or
aestheticism in Latin America.
Still, although Rama at times insists on the dialectic between the ten-
dency toward autonomization and the ethicopolitical imperatives that con-
tinued to work on literature, he also tends to reduce the discursive hetero-
geneity unleashed by this double impulse to an insistence on the prevalence
of the second term—politics—over the first—autonomization. In the historio-
graphical ‘‘narrative’’ of La ciudad letrada, the reign of politics, even at the turn
of the century, represents the viability of the ‘‘long redemptivist tradition of
the American man of letters’’; a category—that of the letrado—that forms the
conceptual base of the book. In other words, for Rama, even the fin de siècle
writer continued to be a letrado, and in this (Gramscian) sense, an organic intel-
lectual of power.46
The problem with successfully evaluating the impact and implications of
literary autonomization, with distinguishing between the civil writer (letrado)
and the modern literary writer or literato, is partly rooted in the imprecision
in conceptualizing ‘‘politics,’’ which is at times as much an ‘‘ideologizing’’
will on the part of writers as it is an activity tied to the ‘‘public forum’’ or
state administration. The concept of the letrado historically does not reduce
its semantic field to the specific activity of a lawyer or agent (writer) of the

Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

law. But in La ciudad letrada, it would seem that this is the dominant mean-
ing of the concept, which thereby comes to describe the relation between
intellectuals and bureaucracy, from the consolidation of the Spanish empire
in America up until the twentieth century. One implication of Rama’s study
is that the letrado from colonial times was an organic intellectual in a public
arena dominated by a blind cult of the authority of the letter.
Perhaps this concept of the letrado can be useful when one describes the
state function of letters in the years following formal independence from
Spain. Yet the assumption of the relation between literature, politics, and
power as the result of a continuity in a ‘‘long ‘redemptivist’ tradition of the
American’’ letrado, which Rama sees as formed in the remote colonial epoch,
registers a marked historicism that obscures the radical changes that doubt-
less occurred at the turn of the century, if not earlier. Rama’s narrative repre-
sents the field of power, the literary field, and their mutual relation in terms
of the permanence of relations and structures in a historical bloc lasting
more than two centuries.
For example, while Rama considers a variety of writers as diverse as Rodó
and Sarmiento within the category of the letrado, based on the (biographical)
fact that they occupied public positions, he downplays the transformation
of the place of the literato-intellectual before the changing configurations of
power. To believe that Rodó as well as Sarmiento were letrados because the
‘‘ideologizing function’’ was at work in both, or because both were public ser-
vants, does not take into account the different discursive fields that grounded
their respective interventions. In fact, these fields were traversed by differ-
ent subjects, different modes of authorization (even when both Rodó and
Sarmiento, as people, came to occupy public positions). In Rodó, a specifi-
cally aesthetic authority is at work, while Sarmiento speaks from a relatively
undifferentiated field, authorized in the rationalizing will and in state con-
solidation.
The aesthetic subject in Rodó, nonetheless, does satisfy an ‘‘ideolo-
gizing function.’’ It postulates a definition of a Latin American identity in
opposition to the economic rationality of an other: in this postulation, an
‘‘ideologizing function’’ unfolds. But Rodó’s critique of modernity in Ariel as-
sumes a specifically aesthetic sphere as a discursive field, a fact that at once
significantly shapes his ideology. Of course, it may be hypothesized that this
autonomy of the aesthetic in Rodó is the condition of possibility for his anti-
imperialism and concept of Latin America as a sphere of ‘‘culture,’’ autono-
mous from and opposed to ‘‘their’’ economy. In any case, Sarmiento does
not assume this differentiation between discursive fields: he speaks from the
rationalizing will that marks precisely the boundary of the aesthetic subject

    

in Rodó. This leads us to assert that between Sarmiento (and the letrados) and
the fin de siècle writers including Martí, González Prada, and most clearly
Rodó, there lies a gap, crucial to the differentiation between a literary field
and a lettered field, and consistent with a radical change in the relation be-
tween intellectuals, power, and politics.
As Arnold Hauser has noted, the category of ‘‘intellectuality,’’ a con-
cept initially tied to literature, emerged toward the middle of the century in
Europe as an effect of the depoliticization of an area of the bourgeoisie; up
until that time, letters had been tied to institutions of liberal ‘‘publicity.’’ 47 In
Latin America, the liberal polis also underwent a transformation at the turn
of the century. We are able to think of the writers of that epoch as our first
modern intellectuals, not because they were the first to work with ‘‘ideas,’’ but
because certain intellectual practices, above all those tied to literature, began
to be constituted outside the sphere of politics and frequently in opposition
to the state, which had already rationalized and autonomized its sociodis-
cursive terrain. In other words, even Martí and González Prada, insofar as
they are considered intellectuals, maintain a relation with the state quite dis-
tinct from that of Sarmiento or, more appropriately, Bello. For the latter two,
writing was still an activity tied to the law, organic in relation to the liberal
‘‘publicity’’ in the process of being formed.
At this point it might be useful to specify the problematic concept of
politics, for its tendency to signify at least two types of distinct social prac-
tices. As Nicos Poulantzas has shown, one feature of the modern state proper
is the relative autonomy of the bureaucratic and legal spheres, both of which
constitute the field of the political. The institutions that fall within these
spheres serve to centralize power in the state. This centralization of power
is distinct from social struggles that constitute politics.48 Many years before,
González Prada emphasized this distinction when he affirmed that:

[The] governmental machine does not function for the benefit of na-
tions, but for the profit of dominant factions. . . .

Given the insufficiency of politics to achieve the greatest good for the
individual, the controversies and battles over forms of government and
governers, remain relegated to the second term; or in sum, they dis-
appear. The social question subsists, the great question that the proletariat
will resolve by the only effective means—revolution.49

The social question, for González Prada, was the battle in which the
intellectual who now represented himself or herself in alliance with other

Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

areas outside dominant culture intervened against the political, conceived as
a state practice or hegemony.50

Martí and Politics

From the early s, one can easily see Martí’s attempt to distance himself
from state politics. To the intellectuals, he says: ‘‘Stop living like filthy scav-
engers, nailed to the posts of the state.’’ 51 And in Amistad funesta (), a
novel that continually reflects on the necessity and limits of art’s autonomy
in society, the narrator remarks:

[The] possessors of intellect, sterile among us because of their poor di-

rection, and who in order to survive make their intelligence abundant,
dedicate their knowledge with exclusive zeal to political combat . . . thus
producing a disequilibrium between the empty country and their exces-
sive politics. Or, pressed by the urgencies of life, they serve the strong
governor who pays and corrupts them.52

Although we would not want to reduce the transformation of the rela-

tion between literature and politics to a simple question of job positions (or
‘‘professionalization’’ in the sense of Viñas), it is necessary to recall that it
was precisely through literature’s will to autonomy from the political that
Martí was able to positively see the emergence of a literary market, separated
from the institutions of the state. In one of his extraordinary letters to his
Mexican friend Manuel A. Mercado, Martí writes in :

But nor can the idea [of instituting a publisher of Spanish American
books in New York] cease to interrupt my thoughts unbeckoned. For
this I have been made, now that the action in more vast fields has not
been given to me. For this I am prepared. In this I have force, originality,
and practice. This is my path. I have faith in it, and I enjoy it.—Every-
thing ties me to New York, at least for a few years of my life: everything
ties me to this cup of venom:—You do not know it well, because you
have not battled here as I have battled; but the truth is that every day,
as dusk arrives, I feel like food churning in a stomach that forces me to
go on, that transforms my soul into volcanoes, and urges me to escape
from myself. All that I am shatters and falls apart. . . . The day that I
might write this poem!—Well, in any case: everything ties me to New
York: the consequences of political errors of our country;—the nearness
to this my land, which knows not of me, and for which I die;—my reluc-
tance to leave in the hope of experiencing new adventures, with my life

    

 that admits of no hope slung over my shoulders;—the even greater re-
pugnance for living in countries where I bring no practical art nor even
one mechanical right to life, except a little intelligence, which in these
countries is overabundant, and which only allows me to eat when it can
be transformed into rent or sale for use by the government, a prohibited
act for a foreigner:—everything, especially the natural consequences of
five years of living around a central area, ties me for now to New York.—
As for other lands, you already know why I do not think to go there. A
literary market still does not exist in those places, nor is there any need to have one.
In the political market I have no place. In the judicial market good lawyers abound.
I already know that out of pure servitude and humility, one always has to
obtain one’s bread. But my instruments of labor, which are my tongue and my
pen, would either have to remain in the same bind in which they are here,
or they would have to be used in pro or con to local issues in which I have
neither the right nor the will to enter—issues in which, as had occurred
to me in Guatemala and in Venezuela, not even silence is allowed me.53
(Italics added)

This letter seems essential. Martí’s extended residence in New York,

from  to , is generally explained in relation to his political activism
and his work in the emigrant communities, which would in effect form the
base of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, founded in . Without detracting
from this explanation, which is entirely valid for his final years in the city
(when Martí returned to active politics, after his initial clashes with sepa-
ratist organizations), this letter allows us to elaborate on the interpretation
of Martí’s New York experience. The relationship between the subject—the
‘‘I’’ about whom Martí speaks, who longs to write his ‘‘poem’’—and the city
has changed. ‘‘All that I am shatters’’ (‘‘Todo yo estallo’’); and later, ‘‘I collect all
of my own little pieces from the ground, and I put them back together and
walk about with them as if I were alive.’’ This experience of fragmentation,
more than an expression of Martí’s actual exile, registers a radical change in
the relationship between the subject and modernity. If the city (in Sarmiento,
for example) had served as an emblem for a desired modernity, for a ratio-
nalized public sphere, in Martí, the city is the site where the ‘‘I’’ becomes
violently fragmented; the site where the poet (even in his own city) is an exile
par excellence. At this conjuncture, poetry would be a response to fragmen-
tation, as Martí will write in the prologue to Flores del destierro:

These that I offer, are not finished compositions: they are, alas! notes
of images written in haste, and lest they escape me, amidst the restless
crowd of the streets, amidst the noisy and captivating roar of the train

Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

 tracks, or in the urgent and inflexible to-do of a business and trade office
bureau—[they are] a dear refuge for the condemned.54

As we have seen in the letter, however, the city itself—the site of the ‘‘lit-
erary market’’—is preferred by Martí to dependency on the traditional world.
The city, in the very movement that generates such a ‘‘crisis,’’ an ‘‘alienation,’’
or ‘‘exile,’’ is nevertheless the condition of possibility for the intellectual’s
autonomy from traditional institutions, an autonomy that was indispensable
for the modern intellectual (in contrast to the letrado or ‘‘civil’’ writer).
We will later take up the itinerary of the subject-Martí in New York,
when we look at Escenas norteamericanas (North American Scenes) in the second
part of this book. For now, let it suffice to point out the profound change in
the relationship between the city—the space of power—and the writer, who
represents himself as (and to a certain degree was) a marginal and subaltern
figure. As a wage laborer, as a dominated subject, he will seek to affiliate him-
self with other marginal groups from the city:

As if when all suffer, when all bleed, [ . . . ] will I be like a king, with
my feet on the radiator, reading rhymes and Tyrean themes that take me
away like a magic spell, with a heap of patches, and a suit of patches,
and all of me patches, for which my peers admire me, my peers, who cry
and bleed, because I know so much about . . . ? About their sufferings:
that is what I want to know about, that I might patch, mend, and repair
them. This, my friend, is my literature, my wild [salvaje] literature.55

The writer has, in effect, been repoliticized in this knowledge of suffer-

ing. As a wage laborer, marginal with respect to the central place that the
letrado occupied at the heart of the affairs of the city and power, the intel-
lectual is repoliticized in the critique of the political. And at the very root of
his decentered place, he establishes alliances and affiliations with the mar-
gins of the dominant culture. In Martí, the poet comes to be an agent in a
savage (salvaje) practice. It is a practice tied to the devaluation implied by the
‘‘suffering,’’ the ‘‘ugliness’’ of life; a practice that, from the beginning of the
s, will yank him and his discourse to areas unforeseen or at times em-
phatically excluded by the will to autonomy. In this respect, at least one area
of Martí’s contradictory discourse can be situated on the other side of the will
to institutionalize literature—a will that, for all purposes, tended to make of
the aesthetic (as the sphere that lay at the farthest distance from life) a com-
pensatory place, a ‘‘refuge.’’ As Martí had already seen, in the final instance
this refuge would affirm and agree with the very capitalist logic from which

    

it had sought to be separated.56 To put it another way, when Martí proclaims
in , ‘‘To approach life—I have here the object of literature,’’ we must
not believe that within this statement there still dominates a traditional, un-
differentiated letrado subject, anterior to the distinctive autonomization de-
ployed by modernity. On the one hand, by , Martí (in Venezuela) was
already defending the specificity of ‘‘style,’’ a defining gesture of the literato
and the will to autonomy inasmuch as style would become a response and
critique against the dominant authority of ‘‘letters’’ at the time.57 Concurrently,
however, we find in him alliances, intersections of authorities, antiaesthetic
voices, the configuration of which comprises a critique against the tendency
to institutionalize ‘‘the beautiful.’’

Bien: yo respeto
a mi modo brutal, un modo manso
para los infelices e implacable
con los que el hambre y el dolor desdeñan,
y el sublime trabajo; yo respeto
la arruga, el callo, la joroba, la hosca
flaca palidez de los que sufren.
Respeto a la infeliz mujer de Italia,
pura como su cielo, que en la esquina
de la casa sin sol donde devoro
mis ansias de belleza, vende humilde
piñas dulces y pálidas manzanas.

Very well: I respect

in my own brutal way, a gentle way
for the unhappy; I dismiss
those who disdain hunger and pain,
and sublime labor; I respect
the wrinkle, the callus, the humpback, the sullenness
flaccid paleness of those who suffer.
I respect the unhappy Italian woman,
pure as her sky, who on the corner
of the sunless house where I devour
my anxious longings for beauty, humbly sells
sweet pineapples and pale apples.58

A civic poetry? Better yet, a disarticulation, already in the s, of the

modernist obsession with gold, a highly ornamental sense of style, a kind of

Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

symbolic capital, that literature gradually accumulates, above all in its lexi-
cal labor. It is also another Europe that appears in Martí’s poem: not that of
luxury and wealth, but of the immigrant laborer. Significantly, the subject
in the poem is constituted by means of an opposition between an interior—
the space in which he writes—and the street. The subject, in the spatial ar-
rangement of the poem itself, remains half caught by the will to autonomy:
the ‘‘anxious longings for beauty.’’ But from within this interior, which de-
limits the place of the subject, one sees precisely what is other than beauty:
‘‘the wrinkle, the callus, the humpback, the sullenness / flaccid paleness’’ and
‘‘sublime labor.’’ 59 This ‘‘labor,’’ mentioned in passing, does not remain in-
scribed in the Enlightenment rhetoric of rationalized ‘‘productivity’’: it is, in
fact, the Enlightenment’s negative, its underside. More important, the notion
of labor is also juxtaposed to the idleness of the interior where the poetic
subject sits. In other words, even as the subject writes from within the in-
terior and thus presupposes a literary logic, the mechanisms of production
for this logic are re-presented and divested of authority in the same movement.
This (self-)critique of the literary subject from within his figuratively sepa-
rate sphere of autonomy draws attention to itself in the irruption of devalued
words (again in contrast to the glitter of modernist gold) and creates a minor
tone that effectively sabotages the established machinery of style. The tone
conspires with the systematic relativization of the image’s power to seduce
or impress (‘‘flaccid paleness,’’ ‘‘pure as her sky’’) in order to obliterate its
aura. This critique, therefore, cannot be read in relation to a traditional, civil
literary practice. At the risk of being redundant, the critique presupposes the
symbolic capital of literature, if only to reject it; it presupposes an ‘‘interior’’
from which writing, even as it asserts its inevitable distance from ‘‘life,’’ at-
tempts to leave, in its proper space, traces of the other. In this way, the poem
relativizes the distance and power of literature’s autonomy, negating the ex-
clusivity of the ‘‘interior,’’ the ‘‘anxious longings for beauty,’’ both of which
nevertheless act as the poem’s field of signification.60
Given this perspective, it is neither by coincidence nor partiality that
Cintio Vitier has lucidly compared a number of Martí’s Versos libres with César
Vallejo’s avant-garde work,61 particularly with regard to their remarkable
treatment of language. Of course, in Vallejo, the critique of literature as an
institution will be a dominant impulse. Martí only offers us small fissures—
at times exceptional—where we can nonetheless identify, on the one hand,
an(other) field of (relativized) authority involving the literary subject and the
‘‘interior’’; and on the other hand, a critique of this presumed authority,
through the divestiture of its exclusive apparatuses.

    

 These small fissures enable us to identify some of the contradictions
that determine the complex of Martí’s discourse. Far from being an organic
subject—which is to say, a locus where we would be able to identify the hege-
mony of one type of authority—Martí must be seen as a convergence or co-
existence (never a synthesis) of at least three positions vying for supremacy:

. The affirmation of autonomization (in the notion and treatment of

‘‘style’’) in its opposition to traditional taste and ‘‘letters,’’ as well as to
the ‘‘logical man’’ of rationalization.
. The recognition early on, and certainly in the context of Martí’s privi-
leged position in New York, that the autonomization of the aesthetic in
its most radical form brought with it the risk of reifying and appropri-
ating literature into the very heart of the dominant culture as a prized
object (decorative in function) for the bourgeois ‘‘interior.’’
. The conflict between these two aforementioned drives is complicated
when we are forced to recognize also that in Martí’s critique of autono-
mization, he frequently employs a civil, traditional rhetoric (often con-
figured in terms of an abstract cult to ‘‘utility’’ and ‘‘action’’) in order
to criticize the detachment (or distance) that autonomy has established.
This tendency is, at times, concomitant with his critique of ‘‘develop-
mentalism’’ and social ‘‘modernization’’ when he appeals to traditional
cultures in a mélange of discourses and modes of writing that are some-
times archaic. In Martí’s critique of modernization (both literary and
socioeconomic), he works with fragments of traditional codes, which
however, do not imply their organicity with respect to their traditions
proper.

One must insist on the conflicted nature of literature, the political, and
politics in Martí, because it is perhaps this conflict—correlative to the mod-
ern distinction between life and literature—that lies at the heart of the com-
plexities surrounding his politicization, even his voluntaristic vitalism, which
demands a supplementary and accessible place for the ‘‘word’’ in ‘‘life.’’ To be
a ‘‘poet in acts’’ will be the trajectory of desire that brings Martí to a discourse
of war,62 and to the absence of both discourse and the act, in a heroic death.
Martí had himself been emphatic about this. But one must still explore the
foundations of his vitalism and cult of action.
Would such an analysis bring about a depoliticization of Martí? On the
contrary, I am interested in specifying the conditions of his politicization.
The dilemma is that when one asserts the relation between Martí and poli-
tics, it almost always serves as a stark contrast to the relation of the modern

Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

writers to politics in modernism. Martí oftentimes becomes identified or as-
sociated with the traditional intellectual field. In fact, it is the vision of a civic
Martí that prevails, as in Henríquez Ureña:

The social transformation and division of labor dissolved the traditional

bind between our public life and our literature; Martí was, of course, the
great exception; in this he was closer to the generation that preceded
him than to his very own.63

And Rama, whose work has in many ways enabled us to reevaluate the
question of ‘‘modernity’’ in Martí, adds:

And if it is true that Martí was closer to the preceding generation (and
also to those following, of this century), it was because of his peculiar
enclave: his operational field, along with the Cuban colony still orbit-
ing around the defeated and anachronistic Spanish empire, both corre-
sponded to his conception of the poet’s place. In the poet, Martí sees an
apostle of the civil cause.64

Rama’s parenthesis is significant: in some ways, Martí’s ‘‘civility’’ ap-

proximates that of the generations following him, their aesthetics of en-
gagement. But Rama does not explore this possibility. Rather, he identifies
Martí’s politics with the civil, with what Rama will later call the ‘‘redemptivist
vocation of the letrado’’: ‘‘It is Sarmiento with whom Martí can be compared
in this respect.’’ 65 Hence, we lose sight of the fragmentation of that form of
social communication once held together by the ‘‘civil.’’ Likewise, we forget
the concomitant emergence of the autonomous intellectual as the condition
of possibility for Martí’s politicization.
While critics generally accept the fragmentation of ‘‘letters’’ as the dis-
tinctive feature of modernism, they nevertheless continue to present Martí
as a kind of anachronism. This organic type of reading, since the turn of the
century, has represented Martí as a fully integrated subject, whose heroism
consisted precisely in his capacity to overcome fragmentation. As early as
, Cuban Enrique José Varona, in a speech entitled ‘‘Martí and His Politi-
cal Work,’’ asserts that Martí ‘‘spoke in order to act,’’ that ‘‘the dreamer hid a
true man of action’’:

Here is the profound chord of his soul and this constitutes the perfect
unity of his life. Martí the poet, writer, orator, professor, consular offi-
cial, journalist, agitator, conspirator, statesman, and soldier was not at
bottom ever anything other than Martí the patriot.66 (Italics added)

    

 This reading, so similar to Martí’s self-fashioning in its ability to inte-
grate fragments, exemplifies the constitutive process of the hero; a process in
which Martí himself doubtless participated. As Varona states:

Yesterday, he was seen as a conjunction of rare and juxtaposed qualities.

Today, before our eyes, his life appears to us made of a sole block of inde-
structible granite. (p. ; italics added)

Thus, the hero in modernity—characterized by what Martí termed at

various times ‘‘the nostalgia for the great deed,’’ 67 or (in other words) the loss
of a collective, epic subject—is the locus of a condensation where the atom-
ization of the social is compensated. We can call this moment the will to inte-
gration, which is at work in Martí when he privileges the immediacy of action
over the derivative character of discourse. This very same will is present in his
readers when they insist on seeing in him an equilibrium, even in the most
exasperated moments of his vitalism.68 Hence, the point cannot be under-
stated: ‘‘discourse’’ remains as the erased referent by the cult of ‘‘action,’’ lead-
ing us once again to the fragmented field in which Martí operates, and to the
conflicts that never cease to produce signification in his work.
Martí’s place in the literary field, a field from which he also distances
himself, nevertheless grounds the conditions of/for his politicization. This
implies, in turn, that in Martí’s work, the literary subject (as opposed to the
civil subject) is fundamental, be it directly as a mode of authorization (at
times, even a kind of Latinoamericanismo, or Latin Americanism), or indirectly
as the site of an ‘‘alien’’ interior presupposed and erased by his discourse of
war. But what is a discourse of war? For Martí, it was above all a response to
the inactivity of the ‘‘interior,’’ which culminates in his illuminating Diarios de
campaña. This final testament of Martí’s life documents the poet’s astonish-
ing return to his native country (from the city); to the origin, where the letter
joins the bullet to deny, if only in the dehierarchized silence of death, the dis-
tance between discourse and life.
Perhaps it is enough to recall that when Martí arrived at the highly radi-
calized tobacco centers of Key West (Cayo Hueso), already with the intention
of unifying the revolutionary movement, the artisans (many of them anar-
chists, doubtless suspicious of his intellectualism) asked him, ‘‘How could
you, a literary man [literato], lead our revolution?’’ 69 Politicization, in Martí,
is the will to overcome such a division of labor. It is the will to produce a dis-
course, a critical space, where the ‘‘interiors,’’ fields of immanence detached
from one another by rationalization, might sustain a line of flight,70 a place
for new encounters. The will, totalizing in the case of Martí, operates by means

Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

of unifying categories, frequently nostalgic. In any event, it constitutes a re-
sponse to modern fragmentation and not a kind of intellectual authority that
preceded it.

In light of that fragmentation in the field of knowledge and communication

in capitalist society, Lyotard remarks with great skepticism that the salient
feature of postmodernity is the dissolution of the distinctive nostalgia for total-
izing metanarratives 71 that characterized the modern (so emphatic in Martí).
Against the ideal of integration and communicability that Habermas pro-
poses (as a response to the colonization of the life-world),72 Lyotard argues
that any organic, unitary postulation of a discourse is always dominated ver-
tically (which is to say, hierarchically) as a terrorism of power. This assertion
belongs to an interesting debate on postmodernity, which however, remains
problematic when applied to Latin America. Perhaps it may be that the terms
of this debate around fragmentation and the specialization of discursive sub-
jects—a debate that implies an interrogation of the modern and rationaliz-
ing notion of autonomy—may not be entirely valid when applied to Latin
America. This is due, in part, to the uneven character of modernization, au-
tonomization, and the very professionalization that led to the emergence of
a Latin American literary subject.
Over the course of this chapter, we have pointed out that modernization
in Latin America had indeed brought with it both the fragmentation of the
communicative system that we have associated with ‘‘knowledge-(as)-said’’
and the republic of letters—thus giving rise to a literary subject, initially de-
fined negatively or by exclusion from the sphere of legal knowledge or the
law. Yet the ‘‘interiorization’’ of a specifically literary sphere of knowledge did
not succeed in being institutionalized.
Perhaps today, this concept of the uneven modernization of the literary
subject may help to elucidate the formal and functional hybridity of litera-
ture in Latin America, in contrast to the degree of discipline in other areas
where modernization was more systematic and consistent. In the particular
case of Martí, this heterogeneity was not premodern, especially since he at
times takes literature to be an object of his criticism. But the heterogeneity of
authorities that are at work in Martí’s discourse have everything to do with
the aporias that this ‘‘modern’’ subject confronts in the process of his in-
stitutionalization. The lack of sovereignty possessed by the literary subject
over his own territory—a subject whose hegemony over a discourse would,
in principle, indicate his point of greatest institutional participation—made
the confluence of authorities in Martí possible. This heterogeneity dissolves
in its ambiguous borders any kind of synthesis or equilibrium between the

    

demands of the emergent aesthetic subject and the ethicopolitical impera-
tives that relativize his autonomy. The heterogeneity of Martí’s discourse is
conflicted: it is characterized by struggles between emergent, or at times
residual, authorities. In either case, these authorities are irreducible to the
discursive and functional homogeneity that defines the republic of letters cut
short by modern rationalization.
In a somewhat different context and at a different conjuncture, this
heterogeneity is also a significant theme in the postmodern poetics of Europe
and the United States, which criticizes the hegemony of distinctive institu-
tionalized subjects in modernity under advanced capitalism from a variety
of diverse antidisciplinarian positions. In other words, if modernity was de-
fined (as Weber saw it) by a tendency toward the separation and bureaucra-
tization of distinct autonomized forms of knowledge, postmodernity would
come to register a critique of that rationalization; a critique, above all, by
means of a poetics (not solely literary) of contamination in the modern
fields of immanence. This contamination projects the dissolution of exclusive
power, of the ‘‘strong will,’’ through which autonomous, disciplined sub-
jects of modernity have taken shape.73 One noteworthy case would be the
entrance of ‘‘mass culture media’’ into the realm of art (and vice versa),
as these media had earlier constituted one of modern art’s exteriors par
excellence.
In various ways, Martí’s critique of the ‘‘interior,’’ his exasperated at-
tempt to overcome the limits imposed by the division of labor, actually antici-
pates some aspects of the postmodern debate. Such an overlap is possible,
partly, because the fragility of the Latin American literary subject, who was
not able to institutionalize his autonomy in the field of literature, generated
these fissures—this ‘‘weak ontology’’ (following Gianni Vattimo’s formu-
lation)—which from the origins of an uneven modernization have relativ-
ized the ‘‘purity’’ (even on a formal level) of Latin American literature. We
need to return to a fundamental fact in the history of Latin American dis-
courses: the unevenness of modernization and the displacements suffered by
discursive formations in Latin America resulted in appropriations irrepresent-
able to categories of European or North American history. This was the case
with literature as an institution in Latin America, in which the lack of ma-
terial bases, and the travel routes of Western cultural centers to their periph-
eral zones, made possible the emergence of an intensely heterogeneous dis-
course, always open to infiltration.
We must now delve deeper into the nature of this discursive hetero-
geneity in the literary journalism at the turn of the century: the modernist
chronicle.

Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

Notes

 José Luz y Caballero, Obras, vol. , Elencos y discursos académicos (Havana: Editorial de la Univer-
sidad, ), .
 José Luz y Caballero, ‘‘Informe sobre la Escuela Náutica,’’ in Obras, vol. , Escritos educativos
(Havana: Editorial de la Universidad, ), . First published in .
 Andrés Bello, ‘‘Discurso pronunciado en la instalación de la Universidad de Chile,’’ Obras
completas, vol. , Opúsculos literarios y críticos (Caracas: Ministero de Educación, ), , .
First published in .
 ‘‘The College of Humanities, not content with observing the Normal School closely and
monitoring its progress, nor with the inspection of other schools in Santiago, has be-
come dedicated to the revision of texts, lesson books, and programs’’ (Andrés Bello, ‘‘Dis-
curso pronunciado por el Rector de la Universidad de Chile en el Aniversario de ,’’ in
Obras completas, vol. , Opúsculos literarios y críticos (Caracas: Ministero de Educación, ),
.
 Hostos’s passion for autobiography, witnessed in his diaries written throughout his life, is
not to be conflated with the literary individualism of the epoch. In Hostos, to write about
the I was a mode of self-discipline, not personal ‘‘liberation.’’ Thus begins Eugenio María de
Hostos in his  Diario (Diary): ‘‘Let us moderate the imagination by directing an attentive
gaze every night or every morning to the bottom of this chaos that accompanies me; let us
exercise [the power of ] reflection once again; let us moralize. In the same way that this brief
work of the moment has calmed the neuralgia, so should the ordered task of my rationality
in my darkness calm me, so do I want it to calm my most intense sufferings’’ (in Antología
[Madrid, ], ). Here, the individualization of writing also serves as an aspect of the
rationalizing, disciplinary project: autobiographic writing as the colonization of the imagi-
nary.
 Eugenio María de Hostos, prologue to La peregrinación de Bayoán (Puerto Rico: Instituto de
Cultura Puertorrigueña, ),  and  respectively. First published in .
 ‘‘And might I, gentlemen, pause to mention in passing . . . the most magical of literary
vocations, the scent of literature itself, the Corinthian capital, if I may say so, of cultured
society? And above all, might I pause to allude to the instantaneous excitation, which has
brought forth on our horizon this constellation of brilliant youths who cultivate poetry with
such ardor? I will say with naïveté: there is error in their verses; there are things that rea-
son castigates and severely condemns’’ (Bello, ‘‘Discurso pronunciado,’’ ). Immediately
afterward, Bello quotes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: ‘‘It is essential that art be the rule of
the imagination that transforms it into poetry.’’
 Andrés Bello, ‘‘Juicio sobre las poesías de José María de Heredia,’’ Obras completas Opsculos
literarios y críticos, vol.  (Caracas, ), .
 José Martí, ‘‘Prólogo al Poema del Niágara,’’ in Obra literaria (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho,
), .
 The disengagement of poetry from practical life began long before the turn of the century,
initially through poetry’s exclusion from the ideal forms of rationalization. The devaluation
of poetry in Sarmiento or Saco are examples of this disengagement. Toward , however,
the ‘‘useless’’ space of poetry begins to be filled with certain social functions, particularly
those tied to the defense of a specific use of luxury. Regarding this development, it would
be appropriate to recall the debate between Pedro Goyena and Eduardo Wilde in Argentina
(). Goyena still defended poetry as an originary form for national consolidation, while

    

 Wilde responded to him in the following manner: ‘‘The principal reason for this poetic de-
cay is that in the market, it is not poetry but cured skins that are valued, as is proven by
the fact that leather is sold at ever more expensive prices than verses and that it better sat-
isfies the demands of the body’’ (Eduardo Wilde, ‘‘Sobre poesía,’’ in Tiempo perdido [Buenos
Aires: Ediciones Jackson, n.d.], ). Therefore, Wilde argued, ‘‘poetry, like luxury, enters into
the category of superfluous things’’ (p. ). ‘‘Poetry is a disease of the intellect, an abnormal
state of thinking; yet, like the fantastic, it retains the beauty of illusions and the use-value
of luxury’’ (p. ). Not surprisingly, the Goyena/Wilde debate revolved around Estanislao del
Campo, whose work Fausto has been analyzed by Josefina Ludmer as an example of the dis-
engagement of gauchesca poetry from its previous ‘‘state function,’’ an indication of literary
autonomization.
 Eugenio María de Hostos, ‘‘El propósito de la Normal,’’ in Antología (Madrid, ), –.
 Eugenio María de Hostos, ‘‘La educación científica de la mujer,’’ in Conciencia intelectual de Amé-
rica: Antología del ensayo hispanoamericano, ed. Carlos Ripoll (New York: Las Américas, ),
–. First published in .
 Hostos, ‘‘El propósito de la Normal,’’ .
 See Alfonso Reyes, ‘‘Pasado inmediato,’’ in Obras completas, vol.  (Mexico City: Fondo de
Cultura Económica, ),  ff. First published in . Reyes also discusses the depen-
dence of the study of law on ‘‘literature’’: ‘‘laws seemed to be an approximation to letters,
which had no academic refuge’’ (p. ). He also points out that the ‘‘scientific’’ study of
literature emerged when ‘‘Rhetoric and Poetics, understood in the traditional manner, no
longer supported the air we breathe’’ (p. ). In the section entitled ‘‘The Pedagogical Appa-
ratus’’ in chapter , we will take up this problematic on the emergence and political uses of
the new humanities in Mexico and Argentina at the turn of the century.
 On the general development of this institution, see Tulio Halperín Donghi, Contemporary His-
tory of Latin America, ed. and trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, ).
 See Ricardo Rojas, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Documentos del decanato (–) (Buenos
Aires: Imprenta de la Universidad, ),  ff.
 Norberto Piñero and Eduardo L. Bidau, Historia de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, in Anales de la
Universidad de Buenos Aires, vol.  (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Martín Biedma, ), .
 Noé Jitrik, Las contradicciones del modernismo (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, ), esp.
‘‘Ruptura y reconciliación.’’
 At the same time, it would be erroneous to suggest that Darío came to affirm the values
of the dominant culture. It would perhaps be more appropriate to say that in , there
already existed a literary field that was relatively autonomous and institutionalized, which
made the relative success of Darío in Buenos Aires possible.
 Ricardo Rojas, La restauración nacionalista (; reprint, Buenos Aires: Librería de la Facul-
tad, ). This text, commissioned by the Ministry of Education, marks the beginning of
the reform in Argentine education that would displace positivism, and establish literature
and history (both critiques of the ‘‘modernized’’ present) as dominant discourses, tied to an
emergent nationalism within the oligarchy itself.
 In Mexico as well, Reyes recalls the situation of literature in fin de siècle education when he
points out: ‘‘The men of before believed themselves to be practical; they pretended that his-
tory and literature only served to embellish juridical documents with metaphors or reminis-
cences . . . and it has yet to be said that, although the true poets (the radiant pleiad of mod-
ernism, from which the greater stars still shine) did not follow suit, the students inclined to

Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

 write verses had a propensity to confuse poetic material with oratory. And the oratory fac-
ulty came directly from the College of Law’’ (Alfonso Reyes, ‘‘Pasado inmediato,’’ –).
 Anales de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, vol.  (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Martín Biedma,
), .
 Ibid., vol.  (),  ff.
 Ironically, literature emerges as a university discipline by criticizing specialization, legiti-
mizing itself on the basis of an auratic concept of ‘‘culture’’ as a sphere wherein the ‘‘integral
man’’ who has been fragmented in modern daily life by specialization can be reconstituted.
This concept of ‘‘culture’’ is essential to Ariel, a work that would have tremendous influence
over pedagogical practices in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Although lit-
erature becomes institutionalized as a kind of antidiscipline, the emergence of a reflection
on the methodology of literary instruction becomes evident around the turn of the century.
As we will see in later chapters, this discourse set out to dismantle the instrumental-
ist notion of literature as a medium invested in the paradigm of eloquence and saber decir. In
‘‘Pasado inmediato’’ (‘‘The Recent Past’’), Alfonso Reyes mentions ‘‘scientific’’ study (as op-
posed to the study of letters as oratory), ‘‘which came to be one of the battlegrounds for the
centennial youth’’ (p. ). See also José Enrique Rodó, ‘‘La enseñanza de la literatura,’’ in
Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Antonio Zamora, ), –; and Pedro Henrí-
quez Ureña, ‘‘Aspectos de la enseñanza literaria en la escuela común,’’ in La Utopía de América
(Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), –. We will take up a further reading of these texts
in chapter .
 José Martí, ‘‘Los Códigos Nuevos,’’ in Nuestra América (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ),
. First published in .
 The reference here pertains to El presidio político en Cuba (The Political Fortress in Cuba), published
in Spain () as a memoir of Martí’s imprisonment in Cuba the year before; and also the
prevalent rhetoric of allegation throughout La República española ante la Revolución cubana (The
Spanish Republic Prior to the Cuban Revolution), a serial published in Madrid () while Martí
was studying law in Zaragoza.
 Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Las corrientes literarias en la América Hispánica (Mexico City: Fondo de
Cultura Económica, ), .
 See Angel Rama, Rubén Darío y el modernismo (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela,
) and his prologue to Poesía, by Rubén Darío (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ); José
Emilio Pacheco, prologue to Antología del modernismo (–) (Mexico City: Universidad
Nacional Autonoma de México, ); Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot, Modernismo (Barcelona:
Montesinos, ); Noé Jitrik, Las contradicciones del modernismo (Mexico City: El Colegio de
México, ); and Jean Franco, La cultura moderna en América Latina (Mexico City: Joaquín
Mortiz, ), –.
 David Viñas, ‘‘De los gentlemen-escritores a la profesionalización de la literatura,’’ in Litera-
tura argentina y realidad política (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, ),  ff.
 Rama, Rubén Darío y el modernismo.
 See Jean Franco, ‘‘La heterogeneidad peligrosa: escritura y control social en vísperas de la
independencia mexicana.’’ Hispanoamérica – (): –.
 See the letter from Hilario Ascasubi to Justo José Urquiza requesting payment for Ascasubi’s
poems. The letter is included in Jorge B. Rivera, ed., El escritor y la industria cultural (Buenos
Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, ): ‘‘In sum, general sir, I have fulfilled my prom-
ises and the command of Your Excellency to deliver ten thousand lines of my poetic verse
without having received any compensation to the day’’ (p. ).

    

 Letter from Bartolomé Mitre to Wenceslao Paunero, in La Nación: Un siglo en sus columnas, spe-
cial edition,  January , p. .
 This seems to be a key metaphor in Jaime Concha’s reading of Darío’s work (and modern-
ism) as caught up in a literary ideology tied to an ancient aristocracy. See Jaime Concha,
Rubén Darío (Madrid: Ediciones Júcar, ). A similar reading of Darío is presented in
François Perus, Literatura y sociedad en América Latina (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, ).
 For the distinction between the traditional and organic intellectual in the work of Antonio
Gramsci, see ‘‘The Intellectuals,’’ in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin
Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, ).
 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, ).
 See also Pierre Bourdieu, ‘‘Intellectual Field, Field of Power, Habitus,’’ in Field of Cultural Pro-
duction: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson, trans. Claude DuVerlie (New York:
Columbia University Press, ). On the concept of autonomy, see P. Bourdieu, ‘‘Campo in-
telectual y proyecto creador,’’ in Problemas del estructuralismo, ed. Jean Pouillon et al. (Mexico:
Siglo XXI, ), –; and P. Bourdieu, ‘‘The Field of Cultural Production, or the Eco-
nomic World Reversed,’’ Poetics  (): –.
 Julián del Casal, ‘‘José Fornaris,’’ in Crónicas habaneras, ed. Angel Augier (Santa Clara, Cuba:
Universidad Central de Las Villas), .
 José Martí, ‘‘Heredia,’’ in Obras completas, vol.  (Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, –
),  [hereafter OC, followed by volume and page number]. First published in .
 José Martí, ‘‘Francisco Sellén, poeta cubano,’’ OC, vol. , .
 ‘‘There is no doubt that refinement in the poetry of Azul and its author ‘diminishes’ both
from the human perspective’’ (José Enrique Rodó, ‘‘Rubén Darío,’’ in Obras completas de José
Enrique Rodó, ed. Alberto José Vaccaro [d ed.] [Buenos Aires: Ediciones Antonio Zamora,
], ).
 Rubén Darío, ‘‘Cantos de vida y esperanza,’’ in Poesía (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ).
 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (Boston, Mass.: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, ).
 For a detailed analysis of the relationship between Darío and Rodó, see Sylvia Molloy, ‘‘Ser-
decir: dácticas de un autorretrato,’’ in Essays on Hispanic Literature in Honor of Edmund L. King,
ed. Luis Fernández and Sylvia Molloy (London: Tamesis Books, ), –.
 Angel Rama, The Lettered City, ed. and trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, ), –.
 Once again, this distinction refers to Gramsci’s contrast between the ‘‘organic’’ intellectuals
of one system and the ‘‘traditional’’ intellectuals of a historically earlier one. See Gramsci,
‘‘The Intellectuals.’’
 ‘‘[The] cultural elite, and especially its literarily productive section . . . saw itself cut off from
the social class of which it had hitherto been the mouthpiece and it felt completely isolated
between the uneducated classes and the bourgeoisie’’ (Arnold Hauser, quoted by Jürgen
Habermas, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, th ed., trans. Thomas Burger
[Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ], ). In relation to the argument presented here, see
especially chapter , ‘‘The Social-Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.’’
 ‘‘We shall introduce at this stage the distinction between the juridico-political superstructure of
the state, which can be designated as the political, and political class practices (political class
struggle), which can be designated as politics’’ (Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social
Classes, ed. and trans. Timothy O’Hagan [London: New Left Books, ], ).

Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

 Manuel González Prada, ‘‘El intelectual y el obrero,’’ in Horas de lucha (Callao, Peru: Tipo-
grafía Lux, ), . See also his ‘‘Antipolíticos,’’ in Anarquía, th ed. (Lima: Editorial
P.T.C.M., ).
 González Prada’s article ‘‘El intelectual y el obrero,’’ in effect, conceives of the new intellec-
tual as a laborer, a concept quite distinct from the ‘‘redemptivism’’ of the civil patricians:
‘‘The same good is achieved by planting wheat in the fields as by sowing ideas in minds;
there is no hierarchical difference between the thinker who labors with the intellect and
the worker who labors with his hands.’’ He later adds: ‘‘Intellectuals serve as light; but they
must not make people blind, most importantly during these tremendous social crises where
the arm executes what has been conceived in the head’’ (p. ).
 José Martí, Cuadernos de apuntes, OC, vol. , .
 José Martí, Amistad funesta, OC, vol. , .
 José Martí, Cartas a Manuel A. Mercado (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónomo de
México, ), –. The letter is dated April , .
 José Martí, prologue to Flores del destierro, in Obra literaria (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ),
. This collection of poems was found in Martí’s notebooks (Cuadernos) and published
posthumously, although Martí had already written a prologue for publication. A number of
these texts seem to be contemporaneous with the Versos libres (also published posthumously,
although some of them had been dated from Martí’s residence in New York during the early
s) in their treatment of urban themes.
 José Martí, OC, vol. , .
 See Herbert Marcuse, ‘‘The Affirmative Character of Culture,’’ in Negations, trans. Jeremy J.
Shapiro (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, ). First published in .
 We will explore the notion of ‘‘style’’ at work in Martí at the end of chapter . For now, let
us merely note that Martí here emphatically defends ‘‘style’’ as a specifying trademark of
literariness (as opposed to the language of the cabinet) in the wake of criticism from the more
traditional intellectuals who voiced their opposition in the first edition of Revista Venezolana,
published in Caracas in . ‘‘Style’’ is the hallmark of what Foucault called a ‘‘discourse
society’’: ‘‘The uniqueness of the writer, who ceaselessly opposes himself to the activity of
any other subject who speaks or writes, the intransitive character that he concedes to his
discourse, the fundamental singularity that he has long attributed to ‘writing’ [écriture], the
asserted dysymmetry between the ‘created work’ and whatever other use one makes of lan-
guage as a linguistic system: all this is manifested (and moreover tends to be carried out
in the realm of praxis) in the affirmation of the existence of a certain ‘discourse society’ ’’
(Michel Foucault, ‘‘The Order of Discourse,’’ in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan M.
Sheridan [New York: Pantheon Books, ]; translation modified). In Martí’s case, it is
important to point out that his defense of ‘‘style’’ as the distinguishing feature of literary
specificity is carried out against a civil notion of literature that still prevailed in the more tra-
ditional areas of the literary field.
 José Martí, ‘‘Bien: yo respeto,’’ in Obra literaria (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), . The
original date of its publication is unknown, but on a thematic level, it bears a marked re-
semblance to ‘‘Estrofa nueva’’ from the Versos libres (which are dated from the early s).
 Theodor Adorno correlates the irruption of ‘‘the ugly’’ in modern art with a critical impulse
to autonomy and an attempt to desublimate art’s aesthetic ‘‘aura.’’ See Adorno, Aesthetic
Theory,  ff.
 Darío’s sonnet ‘‘De invierno’’ from Azul is a good example of the emblematic ‘‘interior’’ as-
serted by poetry in its movement toward autonomization and privatization. In Martí, the

    

 interior is already established as a locus of speech, although his poetry also insists on look-
ing outward and working with desublimated matter or materials that have precisely been
erased by the interior at work in Darío.
 Cintio Vitier, ‘‘Martí futuro,’’ in Temas martianos, ed. Cintio Vitier and Fina García Marruz (Río
Piedras, Cuba: Huracán, ),  ff.
 On Martí’s discourse of war, see chapter .
 Ureña, Las corrientes literarias, .
 Rama, Rubén Darío y el modernismo, .
 Angel Rama, ‘‘La dialéctica de la modernidad en José Martí,’’ in Estudios martianos, ed. Ivan A.
Schulman et al. (Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Universitaria, ), .
 Enrique José Varona, ‘‘Martí y su obra política,’’ in Archivo José Martí, vol. , nos. –, –
, .
 Martí, ‘‘Prólogo al Poema del Niágara,’’ . In Amistad funesta, the artistic Juan Jerez ‘‘carried
. . . in his pallid features the nostalgia for action’’ (Martí, OC, vol. , ). The problem of
(the ‘‘interior’’ subject’s) alienation from action is the driving force behind the Versos libres, as
we can glimpse from the poem ‘‘Medianoche’’ (‘‘Midnight’’): ‘‘And I, woe to me! A prisoner in
my cage/the great battle of men do I see!’’ The poem deals primarily with the progressive pri-
vatization of the literary subject, who in Martí’s work, frequently appears in a negative light.
 For example, Vitier insisted: ‘‘This dualism between art and life, which Julián del Casal repre-
sents for us, is entirely different [otra] from the antithesis that Martí overcomes’’ (Cintio
Vitier, ‘‘Martí futuro,’’ ). Martí tries to resolve the contradiction, but this conflict between
drives is the very basis of his discourse.
 Sotero Figueroa, editor of Primera jornada de José Martí en Cayo Hueso (New York: Imprenta
América, ), wrote: ‘‘The initiative of the aforementioned workers (who proposed Martí
as a possible leader of the movement) did not obtain any general consensus: some veterans
of the ten-year epic struggle admired in Martí the eminent orator, but did not consider him
as the chosen one who would lead the Cubans to the land of the free. Some factory-workers
believed that Martí was simply an extraordinary man of letters, but not the expert pilot most
suited to guiding the ship of revolution through the waters of liberty’’ (p. ).
 The term is taken from Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, and is closely related to their
concept of deterritorialization. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capi-
talism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
), esp. chapter . Trans.
 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘‘Response to the Question: What Is the Postmodern?’’ in The Post-
modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).
 ‘‘A reified everyday praxis can be cured only by creating unconstrained interaction of the
cognitive with the moral-practical and the aesthetic-expressive elements’’ (Jürgen Haber-
mas, ‘‘Modernity: An Incomplete Project,’’ in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture,
ed. Hal Foster [Washington, D.C.: Bay Press, ], –. On the debate between Lyotard
and Habermas, see Richard Rorty, ‘‘Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity,’’ in Habermas
and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Bernstein (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ), –.
 On the ‘‘weak ontologies’’ of postmodern discourses, see Gianni Vattimo, The End of Moder-
nity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press, ). See also Eduardo Subirats, ‘‘Transformaciones de la
cultura moderna,’’ in La polémica de la posmodernidad, ed. José T. Martínez (Madrid: Ediciones
Libertarias, ), –.

Fragmentation of the Republic of Letters 

 Limits of Autonomy: Journalism and Literature

If we posit the heterogeneity of the Latin American literary subject in rela-

tion to the phenomenon of uneven modernization, we expose ourselves to
various criticisms. The first problem has to do with the risk of falling into
a kind of binary logic that would tend to define Latin American difference, at
times parodic, in relation to its ability to displace European models (for in-
stance, instead of Ariel, Caliban). Such a logic would inscribe Latin American
‘‘being’’ within an ideologized margin. The problem with this kind of reading,
a common one these days, is rooted in the assumption that the European
or Western canon somehow implies the inscription of an origin, guaran-
tor, and measure of purity or homogeneity. Following this argument, what
is Latin American (or Third World for that matter) would, as an effect of its
‘‘derivativeness,’’ come to displace and dismantle the originary purity of what
is Western, even as it (voluntarily or involuntarily) represented, recited, or
simulated the logic and function of First World codes.
Would it not also be possible to think of the (European) origin, the ref-
erent displaced by a parodic (Latin American) representation, as a site forever
traversed by contradictions; where, for example, literature from its emer-
gence was never governed by an institutional homogeneity, but rather, by a
critical impulse against truth and disciplinary formation?
The first reading, as we have already indicated in the previous chap-
ter, somewhat resembles Peter Bürger’s view of the avant-garde in Europe.1
Bürger’s institutional approach enabled us to oppose the emergence of the
Latin American literary subject—through the double articulation of the will
to autonomy and the institutional impossibility of literature—to the stability
or purity of the literary subject that (particularly in France, according to
Bürger) succeeded in controlling external interpellations by instituting and
purifying an interior field. Now we ask ourselves: was such a purity given,
even in France, the degree of institutional stability of which Bürger speaks,
a stability that the avant-garde would later dismantle? Or could it be that
Bürger, in order to emphasize the critical moment of the avant-garde, elided
the contradictions of the earlier (institutional) system? Would it not be valid
to read Charles-Pierre Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal (which Bürger, curiously
enough, rarely mentions) as a fundamental fissure in the very surface of the
pure, institutionalized subject? Does not Baudelaire or (later) Arthur Rim-
baud indicate, in their schizoid fugues, a violent departure from the aesthetic
terrain: a flight from the distinct segmentations (and privatizations) mapped
out by modern discourses and institutions? Wouldn’t these ruptures assume,
from the very beginning, an insistent critique against the mutual exclusivity
of the terms art and life: the originary antithesis, for Bürger, between autono-
mization and the institutionalization of the aesthetic?
To approach the issue from another angle, perhaps one might say that
the origin itself contained salient features of a parodic or antiaesthetic deri-
vation, which would lead us to question any kind of historical, linear nar-
rative in the first place, even in Europe. For us, the distinction is crucial: it
would oblige us to reconsider the postulation of Latin American difference
as the parodic effect of a First World plentitude. The question, then, is: if it
is possible for even an inhabitant, say a writer, of the First World to produce
a ‘‘minor’’ literature—a condition that Deleuze and Guattari have certainly
postulated 2—and if every North, in the heart of its territory, betrays the scars
of its own South (its South Bronx, let’s say), then how would it be possible to
pose the question of essential difference? 3
If we recognize the heterogeneity of even the European literary subject;
if we accept and ideologize even a concept of literature, in Europe, as the
critique of truth (following other European critics),4 one is nevertheless still
confronted with the irreducible particularity of Latin American literature. For
now, let us set aside the binarism of parody and its tendency to ideologize the
margin, yet still try to specify the historical conditions of the contradictions
elided by the binarism itself.
In this chapter, we propose an analysis of the relation between journal-
ism and literature in the final decades of the nineteenth century.5 We will
explore, in particular, the transformation of the site of literature as it is played
out in one of the principal newspapers of the time, La Nación of Buenos Aires.
For it is here that we find a number of foreign correspondents—Martí and
Darío, among others—who were key figures in the development of the early
modernist chronicle. We would like to focus primarily on the conditions that led
to the dependence of literature on the newspaper, and examine how such a
dependence limited literature’s autonomy. The chronicle, in this regard, will
become a privileged site for scrutinizing the condition of heterogeneity of
the literary subject. We will later look at the function of literary discourse
in fin de siècle journalism, as well as the importance of a certain notion of

Journalism and Literature 

the aesthetic as a mode of representing, decorating, and domesticating the
changing nature of cities at the turn of the century. Such a notion reveals the
process by which the marginality and critique of the modernization deployed
by literary forms were incorporated and promoted by the emergent cultural
industry, based on the new journalism of the epoch.

The Problem of the Reading Public

Notwithstanding the considerations we have given to the contradictions and

marginality of even European literature, it is evident that, in Europe, literary
discourse was founded on institutional supports, particularly in education
and the publishing market. In Latin America, this development was again
uneven, limiting the will to autonomy in literature and promoting the depen-
dency of literature on other institutions. For example, the development of
the novel in England and France from the end of the eighteenth century (a
period of increasing democratization in writing) was concomitant with the
emergence of a literate sphere or reading public—public in the modern sense,
that is, tied to the market. This public was initially cultivated by the press and
later by a publishing industry whose growing autonomy from the newspaper
was consolidated in the book market (in the second half of the nineteenth
century). But in Latin America, even up until the beginning of the twenti-
eth century, no such publishing market had as yet been established. Hence,
some functions of the novel in Europe—for instance, its representation (and
domestication) of a new urban space—would only appear in Latin America
by means of (literary) forms considered marginal or minor in Europe. An
example of this is the chronicle, tied in a general sense to the journalistic
medium.
The lack of a reading public constituted a fundamental preoccupation
in the literary field at the turn of the century. In Amistad funesta, a newspaper
serial novel written by Martí for New York’s El Latino-Americano (), the
narrator points out the following:

To use spoken and written language: that is what they teach them, as
the only method of survival, in societies where the delicate arts, which
are born from the cultivation of the idiom, do not have the sufficient
number of consumers, much less connoiseurs, who might compensate
for the fair price of these exquisite undertakings, the intellectual labor
of our privileged spirits.6

How could there be a literary subject if the subject’s society did not rec-
ognize the specificity of his or her authority? Given this situation, it is not

    

entirely coincidental that Martí himself, while in New York, would manifest
a constant interest in the development of the publishing market (even for
poetry), as well as in other means of subsistence practiced by North Ameri-
can intellectuals, many of them already professionalized:

And what an immense variety of materials the well-read remark on—

and what an honest way of life they have given to those peoples of let-
ters—and what an abundant and remarkable reward is obtained from
the lectures by the audience! Well might they accomplish such a thing in
Caracas, the arrogant poets, diligent men of letters [letrados], and severe
critics; and people would go to hear them, because at such little cost
would they acquire useful knowledge.7

In order to understand the growth of the reading public, and the merce-
nary and professionalist response that the new writers or literatos frequently
proposed, one must situate the writers within the intellectual field in which
they operated. Many of the new writers arose from the new middle classes,
without any symbolic capital, which was otherwise guaranteed by oligarchic
filiation. These fin de siècle writers (Martí, Gutiérrez Nájera, and Casal, in the
s), who defended the market and professionalization, were set in oppo-
sition to the most conservative sector of the field, which insisted on a civil
concept of literature. A good example of the more conservative writers, in the
Argentine context, can be found in Calixto Oyuela, whose criticism of profes-
sionalization indicates a predominant ideology at the turn of the century:

The writer, the artist, the man of science, if such is what we can truly call
them . . . ought to etch in their hearts, above all, the musarum sacerdos of
Horace, entirely opposed to the vulgar tendencies of the literary mob. . . .
Far from denying what legitimacy exists in the vigilance and de-
fense of the rights and interests of authors, I believe that such asso-
ciations with that one exclusive professional goal in mind, will result
(through the natural tendency of things) in a degeneration and adul-
teration of the ideal and of intellectual labors, as well as the disastrous
propagation of a detestable modern plague: industrial literature. . . .
[The] true artist must always profoundly distinguish between the muse
and the business deal.8

Of course, Martí, Gutiérrez Nájera, and later Darío would emphatically

distance themselves from the other key position in the fin de siècle field: what
could properly be called industrial literature, which many of the new writers
would identify with the emergence of a new kind of journalism, dominated
by reporters and serial writers. To take an example, while Julián del Casal

Journalism and Literature 

rejected this other kind of media intellectual, dominated by an orientation
toward industry, even he recognized the market as an inevitable means of
subsistence for the new writer:

Modern artists are divided into two large groups. The first is formed by
those who cultivate their faculties, as the laborers their fields, in order to
speculate with their products, selling them always to the highest bidder.
These are the false artists, courtesans to the crowds, a type of hypocriti-
cal vendor merchant, which posterity—a new Jesus—will one day cast
from the temple of art with blows. The second is composed of those
who deliver their productions to the public, not for the sake of earning
their applause, but their money, with the objective of taking shelter from
the miseries of existence and conserving a certain amount of [their] un-
tamed independence, which they need in order to live and create. Far
from adapting themselves to the tastes of the majority, they strive even
harder for the majority to adapt itself to the tastes that are their own.9

Thus, the professionalist position presents itself as a dual front: it dis-

tances itself from the strictly mercenary journalist, and at the same time,
recognizes in the market both a means of subsistence, and the possibility
of founding a new locus of speech. Thus, the modern artist would acquire a
certain intellectual legitimacy that would not be subordinated to the exclusive,
traditional apparatuses of the republic of letters.
Still, this alternative locus of speech, concomitant with the emergence
of a new type of intellectual authority, was as yet quite unstable in the early
s. In Mexico, for example, Gutiérrez Nájera complains in  that:

In Europe, literature is a career entirely formed, as disciplined as the

military career, since in it one ascends through a rigorous ranking, from
the private onward, with the exception of those in the militia. The same
can be said of those in letters, [as] they assume the blue ribbon. Their
writings, like all merchandise, suffer the law of supply and demand.10

For Gutiérrez Nájera, given the lack of a public capable of sustaining the
‘‘demand’’ of the new ‘‘merchandise,’’ ‘‘it [was] essential that government at-
tend to the development of the sciences and letters with just and discrete
measures’’ (p. ). It is perhaps fitting to add that the plea for protection was
directed to the authoritarian government of Porfirio Díaz.
Such testimonies multiplied toward the end of the century out of the
desire for a publishing market, even with a recognition of the market’s limi-
tations.11 Once again, although we cannot reduce the problematic of the
emergence of the literary subject (as well as a discursive field) to a question of

    

jobs, it would be equally reductive to deny the impact that the market—or its
absence—exercised on the very constitution of literary discourse. Sylvia Mol-
loy has suggested as much with respect to the image of the general public
that is at work in Darío’s poetry, conditioning his self-fashioning and labor
on language.12

Martí in New York: The Writing Market

With regard to the problematic of the reading public, the significance of

Martí’s situation in New York (in particular, during the early s) merits
some attention. Let us recall his letter to Manuel A. Mercado, in which Martí
explains his reasons for remaining in New York:

Everything ties me to New York. . . . As for other lands, you know why
I don’t even think of going there. No literary market exists in any of
them, nor are there reasons to have them. . . . [My] instruments of labor,
my tongue and my quill, would either remain in the same [state of ]
trepidation that they experience here, or they would have to be used for
or against local issues that I have neither right nor will to enter. . . .13

One cannot understate this mundane aspect of living for Martí. Martí’s
representation as a hero—the creation of an aura that he himself cultivated—
frequently prevents us from an understanding of his own life. And more im-
portant for us, the heroic aura that surrounds Martí precludes an explication
of what made his discourse and its politicization possible. This politiciza-
tion, as we have already seen, presupposes Martí’s contact with the regime of
the market, with labor, with an urban fragmentation that would at times lead
him to ally himself with marginal zones of capitalist culture and to change
his concept of the aesthetic interior.
The occupations that Martí took up in New York were many and varied.
Especially in the first years after his arrival in , until approximately ,
when his work for newspapers was already sufficiently established so as to
guarantee him a salary, the daily struggle of the exiled writer was arduous.
Martí’s displacement in New York, his relative proletarianization even, can be
explained only partially by the condition of exile. In fact, both Gutiérrez
Nájera and Julián del Casal, while living in their respective countries, felt con-
fronted with a similar dilemma and often represented themselves as exiles.
Still, it is quite certain that Martí’s New York exile radicalized his situa-
tion: in contrast to Gutiérrez Nájera or Casal, Martí could not live by writing
alone. In , he pens the following letter to Mercado, his correspondent in

Journalism and Literature 

Mexico, who would later obtain a slot for Martí in the official newspaper of
Porfirio Díaz, El Partido Liberal:

       ’ —

         —lest I be de-
livered into the wretchedness of exile without occupation and in order
to alleviate the bitter task of being a cultivator of Spanish letters. (p. )

In another letter, he adds:

I don’t know if I have already said that I now live by means of commer-
cial jobs, and that, as I am lacking in money (if not means) I labor in a
foreign land in order to earn it, something like having been transformed
[in New York] from a thoroughbred of the plains into a beast of burden.
And yet, what an amazing flight home every day—keeping secretly to
myself, so that no one will see, the terrors hidden in the soul. (p. )

Home/alienated labor: the opposition marks a break in the history of the

notion of privacy, a crucial one for literature. Literature folds back on itself
into that interior, away from the reified world of labor. In the earlier discourse
of the Enlightenment, writing was an invocation to labor. In contrast, Martí,
during precisely the period of the aforementioned letters, delimits poetry’s
domain in opposition to that outside of labor:

Ganado tengo el pan: hágase el verso,

y en su comercio dulce se ejercite
la mano, que cual prófugo perdido
entre oscuras malezas, o quien lleva
a rastra enorme peso, andaba ha poco
sumas hilando y revolviendo cifras.

I have earned the bread: let poetry be made,

and in its sweet commerce let the hand work—
a hand that, however lost a fugitive it be
in the dark underbrush,
or as one dragging behind him
an enormous weight,
has until recently
been adding and spinning numbers.14

Poetry is the site of an alternative commerce. Moreover, it seems emblem-

atic that in those years, Martí’s poetry insistently comes to locate the scene
of writing in the night, in an interior, always after work. This sense of having

    

been freed from the day implies the literary subject’s will to autonomy, his
distantiation from the rationalizing and instrumental logic that defines the
modern social order. Hence, in order to understand the density and speci-
ficity that the interior claims for itself, one would need to determine what is
outside. The chronicle, thus, can be read as a discursive domain in which the
poet encounters the city as the outside.
As we will soon see, Martí sought an alternative to alienated labor sold
at the trading table in the early s. He continued to promote himself as an
intermediary between the United States and various Latin American groups,
especially in Mexico, Venezuela, and Argentina. The mediator function is
already at work in his translation for Appleton House, which faced with the
absence of a publishing industry in Latin America, produced books for the
growing Hispanic public—not only in New York, but in Mexico and Havana
as well.15
We can also read Martí’s work for the newspaper La América (between
 and ) in terms of the strategies of the intermediary/translator. La
América, as a number of Martí’s contributions show, was published in New
York for the Hispanic community; but it was also a much larger commercial
project. It circulated in various Latin American countries, where it served as
a showcase for the most recent advances of North American technology, and
acted as a general liaison in a network of trade and commerce.16 This can be
seen, for example, in advertisements for the most varied and at times some-
what unusual inventions, which Martí covered for the newspaper.17 It was
a fait accompli that Martí would not last long in this post: in , he had
conflicts with the publishers and was once again committed to looking for
alternatives.
In , he writes Mercado:

I have considered the prospect of becoming a publisher for cheap and

useful books, for education and whatever might help it: books that could
be made here [New York] in accordance with the nature and necessities
of our peoples and countries, the kind that they can obtain by applying
[the knowledge] themselves. These books could be sold in Mexico pri-
marily, with the smallest margin of profit.18

This project, for Martí, represented the potential of developing an in-

dependent publishing industry, outside the reach of rapacious publishers—
perhaps Appleton, one might suspect. Although the project did not go very
far, the first book that the new enterprise launched was Ramona, the trans-
lation of a novel by Helen Hunt Jackson: ‘‘Ramona is very interesting to me,
and perhaps the basis of my independence’’ (p. ). Prior to the publication

Journalism and Literature 

of the book in , Martí had already succeeded in selling , copies in
Buenos Aires (p. ). He published a second edition that same year, which
quickly sold out.
The most effective means of subsistence through writing, however, was
journalism. From the beginning of the s, Martí, who was working as a
foreign correspondent for Caracas’s La Opinión Nacional (–) and La
Nación of Buenos Aires (–), had recognized the attraction that the
new U.S. press held for the Latin American reading public. Martí describes to
Mercado his utilitarian merchandise, superior for its importance, the chronicle:

I have imagined myself seated at my table to write, throughout the

whole month, as if I were here publishing a review: the mail leaves from
New York to a country of ours: I cover anything noteworthy that has
happened: political cases, social studies, theater bills and literary an-
nouncements, novelties, and peculiar aspects of this land. . . . In sum, a
Review, done in New York on all the things that might interest our im-
patient and imaginative cultured readers, but done in such a way that
it could be published in the daily press. . . . For little, I propose to give
much; something of value not because of me, but because it speaks of
the interesting, new, and vivid. (p. )

The chronicle emerges as a showcase for modern life, produced for a

cultured reader longing for a foreign modernity. Certainly, this gesture of
advertising the modern, tied to the ideology and form of the travelogue (an
extremely popular genre among patricians), does not entirely define Martí:
in fact, he will bring the chronicle to unhoped-for realms, transforming it
into a critique of the intermediary, incorporative gesture of the cosmopoli-
tan traveler—the import journey. This critique notwithstanding, the traveler’s
mediation between a foreign modernity and a desiring public makes possible
the emergence of the chronicle—even for Martí.
In the quotation above, then, we find indications of a fundamental con-
flict: writing in the newspaper as something of value not because of me. On the
other hand, poetry, contrary to the newspaper, is projected as the ‘‘refuge of
the outlawed.’’ 19 In other words, in contrast to the Enlightenment men of let-
ters (letrados), journalistic labor is for Martí conflictive, opposed to the ‘‘high-
est’’ and ‘‘most subjective’’ values of poetic discourse. Yet, at the same time,
the newspaper represented a way of life much closer to those ‘‘instruments
of labor, which are my tongue and my pen,’’ as Martí described it, than to the
buying and selling (or governing) of imported information. By , Martí
had already been published in over twenty newspapers, although it appears
that not all of them respected the author’s copyrights that Martí demanded.20

    

 If we have emphasized this mundane aspect of Martí’s life, we have done
so with a twofold purpose. First, to highlight the fact that, in modernity, even
heroes are subject to the laws of exchange; frequently, it was precisely this
subjection that triggered a critical discourse that later led Martí and others
to fashion themselves an image of purity and heroism. But more important
still, to point out the fragility of the institutional basis supporting the fin de
siècle literary field—a fragility that forced literature (not only the literato) to
depend on external institutions in order to consolidate and legitimize a do-
main of authority in society. Once again, this brings us to the heterogeneity
of Latin American literatures, particularly at the turn of the century.

Journalism and Nation Building

And yet, this heterogeneity—even in the hybrid form of journalism—does

not correspond to a discursive heteronomy. A crucial aspect of the modernist
chronicle is that although it expresses a literary dependence on the news-
paper, it nevertheless does not constitute a kind of free-for-all ‘‘melting pot’’
of hybridity. Rather, the chronicle reflects a discursive field contested by com-
peting subjects or authorities. In this field, the will to aestheticize appears, at
times, even more emphatic in the newspaper than in poetry itself. Thus, the
uneven autonomization of Latin American literature must not be confused
with the continuation of a traditional (heteronomous) discourse motivated by
the ‘‘civilization/barbarism’’ dichotomy. Without a doubt, aesthetic authority
is one of the generative forces of the fin de siècle chronicle, all the more so as
other authorities and functions sought to limit its aesthetic autonomy. More-
over, it is necessary to consider the limit implied by journalism for literature
in terms of a double function. On the one hand, journalism relativizes and
subordinates the authority of the literary subject. Yet at the same time, this
concern for a discrete demarcation between the proper field of the literary
subject and other discursive functions (tied to journalism and the emergent
urban cultural industry) paradoxically made it possible to conceive the in-
terior domain of modern poetry and poetic subjectivity in Latin America. In
other words, within the very confines of the newspaper and in opposition to
it, the literary subject brings himself into being, and this at the precise mo-
ment of confrontation with the antiaesthetic zones of journalism and mass
culture. In this sense, the chronicle was ironically a condition of possibility
for poetic modernization. If poetry, for the modernists (Martí included, at
certain moments), is the literary interior par excellence, the chronicle repre-
sents and thematizes the exteriors, tied to the city as well as the newspaper
itself, which the interior obliterates.21 Hence, the chronicle as defined by its

Journalism and Literature 

reflection on the conflict of authorities may be read as the process of produc-
tion for this later reified, purified poetic interior.
Literature’s dependency on the newspaper, then, could suggest some
kind of continuity with respect to the field of the republic of letters, in which
journalism had been a quintessential medium. But then there arises the fol-
lowing question: doesn’t the intense participation of fin de siècle writers in
journalism (a participation that, in Martí’s case, surpasses his involvement
with all other positions of the intellectual or writer) prove the civil charac-
ter of their writing, their integral and organic role (in the Gramscian sense)
in the public sphere, as well as their affinity with the previous model of the
letrado or publicist? After all, as shown earlier, the difference between the let-
tered (letrado) field and the literary (literario) one following the s cannot
be solely established in relation to the market factor, since long before the
turn of the century, writing (in newspapers) was already subject to the laws
of economic exchange.22 How, then, can one differentiate Martí’s journalism
and the modernist chronicle from the earlier system of publicity?
What had journalism been before? Briefly, one can say that between the
period of emancipation and the consolidation of nation-states all the way to
the last quarter century, journalism had been the basic means of distribution
for writing. And as we saw in the readings of Sarmiento and Bello, writing
was the model, in its ordered and ordering tendency toward common sense,23
for a rationalized public sphere. Journalism, then, would not represent a con-
flict for literature, given precisely the nonexistence of a specifically aesthetic
authority endowed with some degree of autonomy. Under the system of the
republic of letters, it was the site where the rationality, enlightenment, and
culture that separated civilization from barbarism was debated. Hence, it
would be possible to think of the journalism of that (previous) period as the
site where the polis—the public sphere—was formalized along the lines of
rationalization.
Journalism had been critical for the production of a sense of nationality,
what Benedict Anderson calls an imagined community.24 In his history of
the formation of national subjects, Anderson emphasizes the importance of
writing for the regulation and delimitation of the national space. Journalism
produces a public on which, at least in the beginning, the images of the emer-
gent nation are formed. The newspaper is not only a consolidating agent of
the market, a fundamental aspect of the modern concept of the nation; the
newspaper also contributes to the production of a field of identity, a national
subject, initially inseparable from the public reader(ship) of the newspaper.
In Latin America, for Anderson, the lack of a communication network among
different areas of the continent—the fact that newspapers would localize, in

    

a reductive manner, their image of the public—in part explains the impos-
sibility of the project to unify the continent under a common state, as the
United States had done.
Anderson’s thesis aside, during the period between approximately 
and , the newspaper was a generator of new national subjects in another
way. It not only solidified the feeling of rationality—an order implying sta-
bility and the delimitation of nationalities—but also enabled that order to
extend across the insubordinate and illiterate areas of barbarism. Transform-
ing the barbarian into a reader, subjecting his orality to the law of writing (we
have already seen this in Bello and Sarmiento), was one of the projects tied
to the will to generate a national space. Journalism, then, was a pedagogi-
cal invention basic to the formation of citizenship. The pages of José Antonio
Saco on journalism in La vagancia en Cuba (Report on Vagrancy in Cuba) are illu-
minating (regardless of the fact that they were written in colonial Cuba). Let
us recall that, for Saco, writing was a tool for the rationalization of labor,
another condition of possibility for modernization. Saco points out:

When the necessary funds are gathered together, and education is

spread throughout the entire island, how different will the luck of her
inhabitants be! Then, and only then, can the subjects of knowledge and
the understanding be popularized, no less useful to agriculture and the
arts, as to the domestic and moral order of our rustic population. I will
not ask for this, that professors or professorial chairs be set up in the
fields. A newspaper, that perhaps as an outlet for essays could be estab-
lished in some spot, a newspaper, I repeat, in which moral maxims
would be published, and good counsel regarding the domestic economy,
the important discoveries, the machines and improvements in agricul-
ture, the methods of acclimatizing new animal breeds and of perfecting
those that we already have; in a word, all that one might consider neces-
sary for the progress of the branches that constitute our wealth, would
contribute overwhelmingly to the prosperity of the island. . . .
A newspaper of this nature being the most reliable vehicle for
spreading the knowledge of things, and improving on the customs of
the rustic population, there can be no doubt that it ought to be under the
auspices of the town and city councils and patriotic societies. Its pub-
lication could be assigned to two or more individuals belonging to the
locale, or outside of it, the cost of print being taken from its funds, and
having a suitable number of copies [of the newspaper] distributed freely
among the rural folk. . . .
Certainly the distribution of this paper would be inconvenient;

Journalism and Literature 

 but the difficulty will be equalized, given the proper mediation by the
rural priests, or the army captains, who will easily be able to distrib-
ute it every Sunday in the parish where the parishioners congregate. It
would be useful, when after the mass [the newspaper] would be read
outside the church in a loud voice, by a respectable person, because in
this way a greater interest would be given it; it would become the topic
of conversations; the most learned would clarify the doubts of the less
intelligent; and the attention of all having been absorbed by such a rec-
ommended object, many of our farmers would no longer spend their
Sundays around the gambling table, or delivered up to other dangerous
pastimes.25

The newspaper was to be a means of incorporating the other, a means

of rationalizing labor. Once again, Saco’s imaginary architectonics merit at-
tention. The church and its traditional intellectuals are given a new func-
tion, contributing to the extension of modernity. But a problem immediately
arises: how would writing incorporate an illiterate public? At this moment,
the function of the mediator becomes clear: s/he would be a kind of educator
who reads the newspaper aloud for the illiterate community. In other words,
thanks to these intermediaries, writing would become capable of extending
its domain beyond the reduced world of the local urban public. This was,
no doubt, one of the key functions of the gauchesca poet in Argentina, where
poetry produced by men of letters (letrados) was transformed into a kind of
newspaper of/for illiterates: a newspaper for ‘‘barbarians’’ (at the different
moments that overdetermine the development of the genre, from Bartolomé
Hidalgo to José Hernández) who were interpellated by different subjects seek-
ing to dominate the emergent field of national identity.
Toward the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the place of the news-
paper in society changes within a wider transformation in the field of social
communication. As nations consolidated themselves, autonomizing the po-
litical sphere into new states capable of generalizing their jurisdiction, the
concept of the public underwent a number of significant transformations.
These came about, in part, as a result of a new division of labor, concomitant
to the transformation of those threads that articulated the discursive fabric
of the social. Such restructuring, as Jürgen Habermas has shown, affected in
particular the relation between the public and private.26 The emergence of a
new field of privacy, which comes to be set in opposition to the reified com-
munication of the social, was crucial to the emergent modern literature.
Within this transformation of the public and private realms, journal-
ism plays an important role: it rationalizes its medium, it differentiates its

    

political-state functions. To put it another way, the newspaper had earlier
served to bring the rationalizing will into being, thus satisfying a state func-
tion. Now its relation to the state changes: despite the fact that the newspaper
neither refrains from assuming political positions (at times openly partisan)
nor stops being ideological, we begin to see the newspaper’s tendency to dis-
tance itself from public affairs, now properly located within the jurisdiction and
concerns of the state.27 In order to trace the itinerary of the newspaper’s rela-
tive estrangement from the state, it would be appropriate to examine the
case of La Nación, without a doubt the most modern and modernizing news-
paper of the period, where Martí as well as Darío, among others, published
the greater part of their chronicles. This will enable us to later approximate
the place of literature in journalism at the turn of the century and take up
again the problem of the newspaper’s heterogeneity as it is reflected in the
chronicle.

La Nación of Buenos Aires

In contemporary societies that find expression through technologies of com-

munication, at times quite complex and refined, it would perhaps be difficult
to understand the importance that a simple newspaper could have in the
organization of the life-world of societies at the turn of the century. For ex-
ample, the travel itinerary of any piece of news before  between London,
Paris, and Buenos Aires would strike us as unbelievable today. That year in
Buenos Aires, La Nación inaugurated the telegraphic service, affiliated with
the Paris Havas Agency, and announced in headlines that the distance be-
tween Europe and Argentina would be forever reduced. Before that year, any
information, even commercial, arrived in the form of letters by boat fifteen
days after its departure from Portugal, making stops in Rio de Janeiro and
Montevideo before arriving in Buenos Aires.28 Only a few years after the in-
stallation of the telegraph, newspaper editors were saying:

Six years ago, before La Nación inaugurated the first European telegraph
system that has ever existed in the Río de la Plata, the events of European
countries, in whose life we participate so closely, in a community [tied]
by blood . . . , by thought, no less than by reciprocal interests in com-
merce and industry, came to us when they had run their course along
with more than the necessary time for them to have been forgotten. . . .
Today this no longer happens: information that affects interconti-
nental interests in one way or another arrives at the precise moment that
it is required.29

Journalism and Literature 

 In general, the historians of the period—the epoch of Latin America’s
incorporation into the global economy, as Argentine historian Tulio Halperín
Donghi has shown 30—do not give much attention to the importance that
the new means of communication had in terms of social modernization. It
has been overstated that the press contributed to the articulation of local and
even international markets, and that the newspaper in some way remains an
archive of quotidian practices in those societies. Yet the absence of more or
less rigorous histories of journalism, the development of which has often
been the object of narratives and anecdotes from journalists themselves, is
striking. Even so, it is nevertheless possible to argue that the development
of the press in the nineteenth century—as the modernizing patricians had
foreseen—was a condition of possibility for the modernization and social re-
organization that characterizes the fin de siècle. In terms of our objectives,
we must limit ourselves to one aspect of such a reorganization, particularly in
the area that concerns the change in the relation between the newspaper and
public life. A paradoxical effect of the newspaper, even as it was rationalizing
its medium, was the development of a certain literature tied to the modernist
chronicle.
As described earlier, La Nación was founded in  by Bartolomé Mitre,
two years after serving his presidential term. To a certain degree, the news-
paper continued the project of its predecessor, La Nación Argentina, edited by
José María Gutiérrez. During Mitre’s presidency, La Nación Argentina had prac-
tically been an official organ of the Liberal Party—a role that lasted until
, the year dominated by Mitrism. It is necessary to stress the prior state
function of La Nación Argentina because Mitre—already under Sarmiento’s
presidency—founded La Nación specifically with the objective of initiating
an independent press, autonomous from the state. Here, Mitre explains the
necessity of reformulating the role of the press:

Today the combat has ended. Yes, it has indeed ended, and we are tri-
umphant in all questions of national organization, which have been re-
solved or which are well on the way to a solution that cannot change.
Nationality is a fact and an indestructible right, accepted and applauded
by her very adversaries in other times. . . . The great contest is over. . . .
La Nación Argentina was the battle. La Nación will be an advocacy. . . .
With the nationality having been founded, it is necessary to propa-
gate and defend the principles by which it has been inspired, the insti-
tutions that are its base, the guarantees that it has created for all, the
practical ends that it seeks, the moral and material means that have
placed [the newspaper] in the service of those ends.31

    

 In effect, the national territory was considered relatively consolidated
under the power of a central, state-governing law, whose authority, at least
in principle, was accepted by distinct dominant groups. The press, which up
until that point had been a key element for the centralization and delimita-
tion of the nation, and hence tied to the politics of the state, now had to
reformulate its functions. It is evident that La Nación, particularly until ,
would continue to be a good example of political journalism, a journalism
of opinion (characteristic of traditional public life). The newspaper, in spite
of Mitre’s claims in that first editorial, initially constituted a party organ: a
means of anti-Sarmiento dissidence in the Liberal Party, which would lead
Mitre to attempt a coup d’état against Nicolás Avellaneda soon after the 
presidential elections. The newspaper became the mouthpiece of the emer-
gent Nationalist Party, behind the eventual split of the Liberal Party into
mitristas and alsinistas-autonomistas in Buenos Aires. Thus, the newspaper con-
tinued to be conscripted by institutions of the political field.
Throughout the next two decades, the political and partisan function of
the newspaper remained dominant. Of equal weight in this period, however,
would be its progressive modernization, in terms of print technology as well
as the rationalization and specification of its new social functions—primarily
tied to information and commercial advertising. While these new functions,
which were concomitant with the emergence of new journalistic discourses
(and forms of writing), would not entirely displace the traditional, partisan
function of the press, the modernization of the newspaper would demand a
certain autonomization from the political.
In , after Mitre’s incarceration (for the frustrated coup d’état just
mentioned) and the consequent sequestration of La Nación, the newspaper
would undergo a significant transformation. A newspaper writer recounted
that epoch of change:

Since [the  sequestration,] La Nación took the lead among all the
other newspapers in Buenos Aires. Its administration gave a commercial
character to the enterprise, [which had been] until that time exclusively
political; and the daily paper, without ceasing to maintain its colors,
entered into a more solid terrain, as it was now channeled into the cur-
rent of information from which it had been separated, and which is the
principal source on which journalism feeds.32

Enrique de Vedia, Mitre’s nephew, came to be the new driving force

behind the newspaper. Vedia recognized that in order to survive as a com-
mercial enterprise, the newspaper had to become autonomous from the most

Journalism and Literature 

immediate political events of the day. If the newspaper, as Mitre had himself
projected, was going to serve as a catalyst for modernization, it had to move
beyond the limited sphere of the party. The paper had to reach an increasingly
heterogeneous audience; it had to become an advertising agent for sectors
that might well be politically antagonistic. La Nación began to proclaim its ob-
jectivity, hence deploying a strategy of legitimation that emphasized its will
to autonomy and modernization.
Beginning with Vedia’s editorship, the newspaper submitted itself to a
new division of labor. Initially, the owner-editor (in this case Mitre) was a
producer and writer, even as he personally supervised the very printing of the
paper, in a setup that could be typically regarded as artisan. And certainly,
the fact that the production of the paper would be carried out in Mitre’s
own house (until ) indicates that the spaces of privacy and work were
not yet fully differentiated—a contrast to the later period of professionaliza-
tion, marked by a significant split between the private and public life of the
subject. During Vedia’s tenure, these aforementioned tasks began to undergo
specialization. This change was particularly salient in the distribution—and
in the very discourses—of journalism. Information progressively acquired
importance in the newspaper, as the space for advertisements expanded and
became technically modernized.
Still, in , Mitre was able to publish his Historia de Belgrano in in-
stallments, each of which occupied a third of the immense first page of the
newspaper’s Folletín (serial) section. Yet this type of discursive indifferentia-
tion from the previous period of journalism had already begun to change.
The predominance of partisan editorials throughout the s also dimin-
ished, especially with the new informative discourse that was already starting
to be the newspaper’s specialized function.
To a certain degree, these effects had to do with the process of autono-
mization of the press within a larger transformation in the fabric of social
communication. This transformation of the social fabric is crystallized in
precisely the emergence of the press as a medium for a new mass culture: a
function opposed to its earlier political utility. Habermas describes the au-
tonomization and relegitimation of the press:

Only with the establishment of the bourgeois constitutional state and

the legalization of a political public sphere was the press as a forum of
rational-critical debate released from the polemical stance and able to
concentrate on the profit opportunities for a commercial business. In
Great Britain, France, and the United States at about the same time (the
s) the way was paved for this sort of transition from a press that

    

 took ideological sides to one that was primarily a business. The advertis-
ing business put financial calculation on a whole new basis.33

For Habermas, the passage from a press of opinion—which brought the

reasoning, discussion, and privacy inserted into the public of the liberal era
into existence—toward a properly commercial and organic press for an emer-
gent consumer society, marks a fundamental change in the history of capital-
ism. The shift in the press crystallizes and promotes a radical transformation
in the relation between the private and public in a society increasingly domi-
nated by the developing culture industry, along with a concept of the public
that excludes the discussion and participation that (for Habermas) character-
ized communication in the liberal period of the European bourgeoisie. Social
communication, the field of the public sphere dominated by the culture in-
dustry, is thus constituted as the sum of pseudoprivacies in a fragmented and
reified life-world.34
Habermas’s history of the concept of the public and its changing rela-
tionship with the private sphere is a valuable source, particularly for its excep-
tional theoretical grasp of the history of journalism, a field dominated by em-
piricism. A nostalgic idealization of social communication in the liberal era
of capitalism, however, becomes evident in his sometimes emphatic critique
of the culture industry, typical of the s (and the Frankfurt School tradi-
tion from which Habermas had started and later broke away). To this, the fol-
lowing question must be posed: what social agent determined the consensus,
the ratiocination, in the spaces of discussion (that is, the press, clubs, etc.) of
the liberal era? For whom did the consensus apply, and what use or abuse of
power did the consensus serve? Finally, what social groups—or for that mat-
ter, other communicative games—did reasoning exclude or suppress?
The transformation of social communication was quite uneven in Latin
America: we would be mistaken to assume the European model, which traces
the passage from the liberal era to advanced capitalism, as an explanation
for the transformations at the turn of the century. For example, even through-
out the last two decades of the nineteenth century, La Nación continued to be
an extremely hybrid newspaper, which preserved vestiges of traditional jour-
nalism even as it radically modernized its discursive and technologized orga-
nization. More in the tradition of French journalism than that of the emer-
gent North American yellow journalism, La Nación never limited its function
to the transmission of information. Neither can its discursive organization
be discussed in terms of a culture industry distinctive of advanced capital-
ism. Still, we cannot underestimate the kind of modernization proposed by
the newspaper, not only as the periodical’s entrepreneurial project, but as a

Journalism and Literature 

model of transformation for Argentina in general as well—very much along
the lines of the developmentalist ideology of Mitre himself.
In terms of the rationalization of newspaper discourses, the inaugu-
ration of the telegraph service was decisive. It enabled the community of
readers to represent themselves as a nation inserted into a universe articu-
lated by means of a communication network that contributed greatly to the
systematization of the international market of the period. For La Nación, the
telegraph quickly began to supply commercial communiques, supplemented
(beginning in ) by biweekly bulletins that announced new products ready
to be exported to Europe. In and of themselves, these novel advertisements,
which filled almost half of the newspaper throughout the s, served as a
showcase for the most modern agricultural implements—as well as objects
of wealth and luxury—from English, French, and North American compa-
nies. The newspaper thus became an essential intermediary between foreign
capital and the commercial sectors of Buenos Aires, the latter of which were
becoming increasingly more powerful.
The telegraph’s capacity for transmitting information also had signifi-
cant effects on the rationalization of newspaper discourses. It stimulated the
specialization of a new kind of writer, the reporter, delegated to a new lin-
guistic and commercial object: the bulletin. When ‘‘Sansón Carrasco’’ recalled
the changes that the newspaper underwent under Vedia’s leadership, he indi-
cated in reference to Emilio Mitre (a reporter and son of the patrician) that:

The traveler was dedicated to studying English journalism . . . and little

by little continued to introduce to the great Argentine daily paper the re-
forms that he believed necessary. . . . A practical spirit, like Vedia, Emilio
Mitre has cast aside the rubbish in order to replace it with substance,
giving to the bulletin the importance that it deserves.35

This specialization, at the same time, tended to problematize the legiti-

macy of letters in the new journalism. As another newspaper writer explained:

Journalism and letters seem to agree with one another like the devil and
holy water. In fact, the essential qualities of literature are a forceful con-
ciseness, inseparable from endless labor, the elegance of forms. . . . The
good journalist, on the contrary, cannot allow his pen to be lost in the
fields of fantasy.36

Today, the antithesis between journalism and literature would seem to

us a given. In the s, however, this distinction between literature and
the use of a specifically journalistic language was relatively new. The antithe-
sis indicated the fragmentation of discursive functions presupposed by the

    

modern literary subject, who emerged precisely in the ‘‘field of fantasy’’ and
labored in the ‘‘elegance of forms.’’ Under the earlier system, the intellectual
was a publicist and the newspaper was the place of letters, operating as an
extension to the order of writing. But in the s, that undifferentiated let-
tered intellectual and his function began to be questioned, even as letters and
writing shattered into practices—at times antagonistic—that competed for
authority within a new division of labor on language. Along with this change
came the relative dissolution of the class exclusivity of writing, in a system
where (thanks, in part, to the market) writers of the new middle classes pro-
liferated.37 A relative democratization of writing was brought about, described
by Martí in  as follows:

With the descent of the lofty heights, the lower plains have risen to an
equal level, which will make passage through the land much easier. The
individual geniuses turn out to be less, because they continue to lack the
smallness of those convolutions that had once elevated their writing to
such a great degree. And as everyone continues to learn how to harvest
the fruits of nature and to hold her flowers in their estimation, the old
masters touch the flower and the fruit less, and the new peoples who
were before the mere cohort of those venerators of the good harvests,
more. It is as though we are witnessing a decentralization of the intel-
lect. The beautiful has come to be the realm of all people.38

In contrast to many of his contemporaries (with perhaps the excep-

tion of González Prada), Martí frequently looked on this reorganization with
optimism, as an opening up of intellectual domains. But his positive vision
of journalism was not the norm in the literary field of the period. Although
Latin American literature at the turn of the century depended on the press for
its distribution, the new writers often represented (even in the newspaper)
their own opposition to the uses of writing that journalism was in the pro-
cess of instituting. Ironically enough, they generally represented journalism
as one of the essential reasons for the crisis of literature. Mexican writer and
intellectual Justo Sierra wrote:

The newspaper [is the] book’s matador (the matador of Notre Dame), that
continues to make of literature a report, that transforms poetry into a
chemical analysis of the poet’s piss.39

Gutiérrez Nájera contended that:

In this case, as in many, the telegraph has lied. This great talker, this
winged and subtle reporter, does not wait for the news to be confirmed

Journalism and Literature 

 for it to be transmitted . . . and does not repair the damage that its
stammerings, its mistakes, its bad spelling can produce. It is industrial,
commercial. . . . The telegram has neither literature, nor grammar, nor
spelling. It is brutal.40

Darío added:

The task of a literary writer [literato] in the daily paper is overwhelmingly

burdensome. First, the jealousy of the journalists. The reporter feels
usurped, and for a reason. The literary writer can make a report: [but]
the reporter cannot possess that which is simply called style. . . . In sum:
the literary writer should be paid . . . for quality, the journalist for quan-
tity; the former for art, for ideas, the latter for information.41

And Casal exclaimed:

Yes! Journalism, as we still understand it to be, is the most nefarious in-

stitution for those who, neither knowing how to place their pen in the
service of small causes nor valuing at all the ephemeral applause of the
worthless crowd, feel possessed by the love of art, but [it is a love] of art
for art’s sake, not the art that dominates in our society.42

Anticipating some of the topics in the critique of mass culture, which

today serves to legitimize a great deal of high intellectual production, Gon-
zález Prada himself observed:

For the multitude that cannot or does not want to be nourished by the
book, the newspaper satisfies the only cerebral nutrition available: thou-
sands and thousands of men have their newspaper, which they keep
every day, like a good friend, bearer of news and advice. Where the
volume has not succeeded in penetrating, the feature page has easily
slipped through. . . .
However, journalism has not ceased to produce great liabilities. It
spreads a literature of clichés or stereotypes, it favors the intellectual
idleness of the crowds, and kills or puts to sleep individual initiatives.
There abound minds that cannot function until their daily paper delivers
to them a jolt: a kind of electric lamp, which is only lit when the current
is discharged from the central office.43

To a certain degree, the new antagonism is a consequence of the compe-

tition brought about by the rise of new writing authorities, and the struggle
of traditional intellectuals (in the Gramscian sense) against organic writers
in the new information market. In Habermas’s terms, this conflict was a

    

contest between the journalism of private writers and the public services of
mass media:

The relationship between publisher and editor changed correspond-

ingly. Editorial activity had, under the pressure of the technically ad-
vanced transmission of news, in any event already become specialized;
once a literary activity, it had become a journalistic one. The selection
of material became more important than the lead article; the processing
and evaluation of news and its screening and organization more urgent
than the advocacy of a ‘‘line’’ through an effective literary presentation.
Especially since the s the tendency has become manifest: the rank
and reputation of a newspaper are no longer primarily a function of
its excellent publicists but of its talented publishers. The publisher ap-
points editors in the expectation that they will do as they are told in the
private interest of a profit-oriented enterprise.44

One might conclude, at least for now, that this progressive displacement
of ‘‘high’’ writers from their central place in the newspaper created tension
between a new journalism that had grown increasingly specialized during the
s and the literatos, above all the chroniclers, who continued to depend on
the newspaper.
At first sight, then, it would seem that literary journalism in Latin
America during the last two decades of the century represents an instance
of a traditional discourse and authority, which had entered into the period of
the newspaper’s modernization; the chronicle would thus seem to be a re-
sidual form, tied to an earlier system of letters and displaced, in part, by the
emergent information market in the newspaper.45 This would lead us, once
again, to see the relation between literature and the market (in the news-
paper) along the lines of a crisis, in accordance with the self-representation
of the fin de siècle literary writers. As Gutiérrez Nájera described it:

The chronicle, ladies and gentlemen, is in these passing days, an anach-

ronism. . . . The chronicle—venerable Nao of China—has died in the
hands of the reporter.46

In fact, such complaints of the literatos in the new fin de siècle news-

papers were systematic, formulated, in general, in terms of the crisis of
literature in a society governed by productivity and efficiency—all of which
found an emblem in the power of a new monster: technology.47 The crisis,
in a sense, corresponded to what was in effect a reorganization of the intel-
lectual field and a redistribution of powers belonging to different discourses
within the fabric of social communication. But as we have hinted at earlier,

Journalism and Literature 

the crisis was also a rhetoric legitimizing the emergence of new writers from
within the greater transformations of the intellectual field.
From the perspective of journalism, the question would be whether
there actually was a displacement of literary authority in the newspaper and
the new market; or if to the contrary, this literary authority—albeit limited
by other discursive functions at work in the newspaper—proliferated in the
turn-of-the-century press, often as a critique of the market and emergent
mass culture.
In examining the place of letters in La Nación, the displacement of cer-
tain traditional forms merits some attention, for it coincides with the mod-
ernization of the newspaper medium and its languages (which were already
relatively oriented toward commercial publicity and information). To cite an
example, throughout the s, the chronicles or conversations of Aben Xoar
(Arabic for ‘‘son of the conversation’’) had occupied a privileged place on the
newspaper’s front page. These older chronicles, rooted in regionalism or cos-
tumbrismo, also provided a space for local literary texts as well as translations,
less frequently, of European classics, according to the norms of the domi-
nant taste in the (still) ‘‘big town’’ [ gran aldea] of Buenos Aires. This type of
writing—also tied to the limited world of the club, a fundamental institution
in the traditional system of letters—faced a crisis in the newspaper’s phase
of modernization. At the beginning of the s, the space of Aben Xoar (or
similar forms of regionalist costumbrismo) shrinks, while journalistic informa-
tion expanded. At the same time, however, new forms of literature and new
translations of European authors gained importance, leading to a change in
the literary orientation of the newspaper and its readers. In , one of the
writers for La Nación commented:

The household pseudopoetry in the columns of a daily paper—one must

not confuse it with the inspired writings of genius. Its life [is] limited to
the narrow circle of the Club: Today for you, tomorrow for me, lasts for
as long as it takes for the chroniclers [in the style of Aben Xoar, presum-
ably] to remember it. . . .
This literature attacks the human organism, paralyzing the circula-
tion of blood.
Reading it makes us suffer along with Byron, Schiller, and Hugo,
who inspired [these poets], who cannot imagine that from them have
come forth such offspring.48

This kind of debate, launched from within the newspaper’s opposition

to the institution and traditional taste of the club, is significant in under-
standing the change in the place of letters during the period. In fact, from

    

the beginning of  (when Aben Xoar disappears from La Nación) onward,
it will become more difficult to find that type of household literature in the
newspaper.
Yet literature does not entirely disappear. To the contrary, La Nación pro-
gressively becomes a showcase for the most recent intellectual production in
Europe. Throughout the s and s, the newspaper’s pages will include
contributions from the newest Latin American writers (not only Argentines)
of the period, like Martí and Darío. Of course, it is impossible to fix the lit-
erary ideology of the newspaper, forever hybrid. In the s, for example,
European writers like Victor Hugo, Alphonse Lamartine, Théophile Gautier,
Heinrich Heine, Edmondo de Amicis, Alexandre Dumas, and later Émile
Zola, were frequently featured. But starting in , the first page of the news-
paper included a translation of Edgar Allan Poe (‘‘Berenice’’), who until then
was practically unknown throughout the continent. And some years later, in
, Martí published his ‘‘Oscar Wilde’’—a work that occupied more than
a third of the immense front page of La Nación—in which he describes the
emergence of a new literature in England and Europe.49 Indeed, La Nación
was transformed, albeit unevenly, into a place for the literary vanguard of the
epoch, in the same movement as it technologized its material and discursive
production—crystallizing, in more than one sense, the process of modern-
ization in Buenos Aires at the turn of the century.
One may be tempted to think that in spite of the evident promotion of
the new literature in the newspaper, the relation between journalism and lit-
erature was merely contingent, and that the newspaper was simply a means
of distribution for a literature lacking in institutional bases. Such was the
case, at least in part, as we have earlier tried to show. Still, the relationship
is much more complex, and constitutes a privileged object of analysis of the
interaction between the emerging literary field, the market, and the mass
culture of the modern city. Only in the web of these relations can journalism
be understood.
For instance, in the case of Darío, for whom journalism clearly consti-
tuted a problem, La Nación was not simply the means of access to a new public
and a new salary that would render possible a certain economic autonomy
from state politics. La Nación, as Darío recalls in his Autobiografía (Autobiogra-
phy), was a workshop for formal experimentation:

Before embarking for Nicaragua [in ] I was informed that I would
have the honor of meeting the great Chilean Don José Victoriano Las-
tarria [in Valparaíso]. And it was in this manner: for a long time I had
as a keen aspiration [the hope of ] being a foreign correspondent for La

Journalism and Literature 

 Nación of Buenos Aires. I must emphasize that it is in this newspaper
where I understood in my own way the craft of style and that at that time
my masters of prose were two very different men: Paul Groussac and
Santiago Estrada, aside from José Martí.50 (Italics added)

It seems almost impossible to imagine Darío as a cross between Grous-

sac, Estrada, and Martí. In any case, we are more interested in what Darío
points out here about the newspaper as a place for learning the craft of style.
Let us recall that style was the very specifying mechanism of the literary
during that period, frequently placed in opposition to unstylized, mechani-
cal discourses of modernization (in Darío’s words, the reporter cannot have
what is simply called style). Thus, the relation between the newspaper and the
new literature was not strictly negative, as the chroniclers postulated in their
discourse of crisis. The newspaper was a condition of possibility for literary
modernization, although it also brought into being the limits of literature’s
autonomy.
Hence, the fin de siècle newspaper (La Nación, above all) may be a privi-
leged site for studying the conditions of literary modernization, not only
because of its positive relation with the new writers, who found recourse in
an alternative place apart from traditional institutions; but also as a means of
contact and cultivation of a new readership. The newspaper simultaneously
condenses the irreducible aporias of the will to autonomy and the hybridity
of the literary subject in Latin America.
What exactly, then, was the place of new writers in the newspaper? Why
does the newspaper promote the proliferation of modern literature, in the
full swing of an epoch characterized by the rationalization of the newspaper’s
technology and discourses?

The Correspondents

At this juncture, it might be appropriate to return briefly to Martí’s entrance

into Buenos Aires’s La Nación in . Similar to his earlier involvement with
La Opinión Nacional in Caracas, Martí was hired by the Argentine newspaper as
a press correspondent from New York. In fact, many turn-of-the-century liter-
atos, especially the chroniclers, found a space in the new press of the period
by writing letters from foreign cities, which others would later edit in the
form of books of chronicles. Such was Darío’s situation, as well as that of
Argentine Enrique Gómez Carrillo—a chronicler par excellence (along with
Amado Nervo in Mexico), who also wrote for La Nación (from the end of the
s). Many chroniclers, of course, were not correspondents. Even if chroni-

    

clers were writing from their own cities, however, the rhetoric of travel (the
mediation between the local public and foreign cultural capital) in various
ways authorized and modeled many of their chronicles. This can be seen in
the other influential chroniclers of the epoch: Gutiérrez Nájera and Casal. An
explanation of those conditions in which the correspondents emerged and
operated may help to elucidate the conditions of possibility for the modern-
ist chronicle in general.
Martí was not the first press correspondent for La Nación. According to
the newspaper editors themselves, the first properly modern correspondent
was Emilio Castelar from Spain, right in the period when the newspaper was
amplifying its international web of communication with the new telegraph:

The electric telegraph, which by means of a transatlantic cable antici-

pates for us day by day the index of the universal chronicle, has been
for the first time applied by La Nación to the daily press in the Río de la
Plata. And today, the authoritative and eloquent word of Castelar . . . re-
lates, amplifies, and comments in a rich and abundant style about ideas,
events that the telegraph transmits to us in a quick and dry language.51

The value of this brief note is not simply documentary. It enables us to

underscore yet again the degree of differentiation and specialization in the
concept of labor on language and writing within the newspaper’s administra-
tion itself. Opposed to the machinic language of the telegraph (let us recall
Gutiérrez Nájera’s complaints, among others), the newspaper itself nurtured
the proliferation of other discourses, which would come to supplement tele-
graphic information.
Hence, it would be impossible to assume as such the insistence with
which the literatos blamed information for the death of literature; an alibi that,
on the other hand, represents an instance of the entirely ideologized origi-
nary opposition between art and mass culture, perhaps until today definitive
for the modern aesthetic subject. The reverse side of this assertion regarding
the crisis of literature in the newspaper is that chroniclers widened their field
in the press precisely in the era of the telegraph.
Clearly, one might be led to believe that Castelar in no way was a literato
in the modern sense, and that to the contrary, from , he was the para-
digm of the civil writer that the new literatos—Martí, Gutiérrez, and Casal—
dismantled, above all in terms of their project to renovate prose. But be-
ginning with Martí, under the administration of Mitre y Vedia, La Nación in
 establishes a clear precedent, transforming correspondences into a site
not only for informative discourse on foreign lands and peoples, but formal
and literary experimentation as well. In , Sarmiento himself recognized

Journalism and Literature 

in Martí’s correspondences a new labor on language: when Sarmiento asked
Groussac to translate the Fiestas de la Estatua de la Libertad (Festivals regarding the
Statue of Liberty) into French, he wrote: ‘‘In Spanish, nothing is as it seems
when Martí lets loose his howls, and after Victor Hugo, France has not pre-
sented anything of this resounding din.’’ 52
Sarmiento’s other readings on Martí’s chronicles in La Nación are also
significant in terms of the role the correspondent plays (here, the anxiety of
influence is particularly sharp, although from the perspective of the father or
model preceding an emergent subject):

Don José Martí lacks one thing in order to be a publicist, now that his
style has increasingly rid itself of ties or forms, precisely because he
makes use of the entire arsenal of colloquialisms and catchphrases of
the language, [both] archaic and modern, Spanish and Americanized,
in accordance with what the most brusque movement of ideas may re-
quire, in a field more vast, more open, more subject to violence and to
new atmospheric currents.
But he has not received the inspiration from the people in the
United States of America, where he lives, to regenerate and educate him-
self [as they do].53

Immediately after, Sarmiento defines the tasks of the press correspon-

dent:

How should a correspondent for South America write of the United

States, bearing in mind that the correspondent of the daily paper is still
somewhat more elevated than a reporter, another high functionary of
knowledge . . . ? The correspondent is not our consul, who must sustain
from afar who or what of his native land passes through there, rubbing
elbows with foreign interests. He ought to be our eye, which contem-
plates the human movement where it is most accelerated, most intellec-
tual, most free, most guided toward the heights of society, to be able to
communicate this to us, in order to correct our extravagances, to show
us the right way. (p. )

Sarmiento identifies the task of the correspondent along the lines of the
import journey, which in various ways had been the means of authorizing his
own discourse. In effect, the intellectual in Sarmiento had been a traveler,
destined—due to the lack of modernity in his own society—to be a guide
to foreign surplus: the traveler-intellectual points out the right way toward
modernity. The correspondent also (according to Sarmiento) had to fulfill his

    

role as intermediary, thus legitimizing his discourse in terms of the modern-
izing project. But from Martí onward, as we will have the occasion to see in
our reading of his North American Scenes, modernization has become problem-
atic. Although Martí’s chronicles recognize in the import journey a condition
for their authority and value for La Nación, they also constitute a critique of the
modernizing project. A critique not only of the United States as an emblem of
desired modernity for Sarmiento (and for the Mitrist developmentalism of La
Nación), but of the very legitimacy of the patrician intellectual that Sarmiento
epitomized.54
For now, let us concentrate on this central aporia in the constitution
and very materiality of discourse in the chronicle. Although by means of the
chronicle the literato seems to have found his place in the new newspaper,
the writer also here remains subject to external interpellations (like those
of Sarmiento), which among other things exacerbates and threatens his will
to autonomy. In the chronicle, the literato had to inform, from within a field
of discursive competition where informing would already represent a differ-
entiated form antagonistic to literature. In other words, while neither the
telegraph nor the reporter silenced the emergent literature, without a doubt
information (among the chroniclers) constituted an other activity to literary
practice.
For example, the editor-owner of La Opinión Nacional, Fausto Teodoro
Aldrey, in  demands of Martí:

Among other things, I must notify you that the public has expressed its
annoyance because of the extension of your latest reviews on Darwin,
Emerson, etc., since the readers of this country want news briefs and
political anecdotes, and as little literature as possible.55 (Italics added)

In another letter from the same year, the editor adds:

With respect to your letters I must own that the readers—for the most
part—desire them to be more informative and less literary. . . .
Of the telegraphic notices from everywhere, you may take part in
discoursing in diverse manners, and attempt to divide them into two or
more reviews. . . .
The literary issue of which you speak does not seem to me befitting. I
know the country and for the past twenty years I have been a newspaper
writer in it. I have relied on the literatos for a long time now in order to
edify and utilize them as a tool for editorial enterprises in all branches
of the press, and I have spent thousands of pesos in the undertaking of

Journalism and Literature 

 this project. . . . I don’t want to have anything to do with them. They are
a literary rat pack . . . and they bite. (pp. –; italics added)

To inform/to make literature: the opposition is crucial and its historical

significance, long after the turn of the century, cannot be reduced to the site
of writing in the press; rather, it is an indication of the struggle for power over
social communication that has characterized the modern intellectual field
since the emergence of the culture industry. And the newspaper (before film,
radio, and television) was its fundamental medium at the turn of the century.
Certainly, Martí rarely criticized directly the emergence of information
as new merchandise for the emergent culture industry. He even spent many
years writing for Charles Dana, director of the New York Sun,56 which was one
of the principal antecedents to the yellow press of William Randolph Hearst
and Joseph Pulitzer. Even so, this struggle between authorities and discursive
subjects, between the will to autonomy and external interpellations, is defini-
tive for the heterogeneous space of Marti’s chronicles. Let us pause briefly,
with a passage from one chronicle written for La Opinión Nacional that may
well be read as a self-reflection on the conditions and struggles that define
the genre:

What does the cable, much less the correspondent, have to do other
than—in an act of what may seem the tenacity of the pen or the af-
fect—to faithfully reproduce the echoes of the country from which the
word rises on wing, winds through the deep sea, witnesses the blue for-
ests and the pearly fields of the ocean’s bosom, to arrive at last in the
New York station, where hungry mouths on the bottom floor swallow
telegrams that are given each morning to new readers about what was
happening a few hours earlier in Europe? 57

This is a good example of a discourse that subverts its own assertion:

the correspondent ought to faithfully reproduce, inform, but the very nature
of his or her writing denies any norm of transparency in its referential or in-
formative execution. The object of the statement is in itself revealing: Martí
presents the process of telegraphic communication, from Europe to New
York. The theme is technologized communication itself. The form of descrip-
tion, however—which displaces its object until the very end of the state-
ment—is emphatic in its stylization, that characteristic feature of the literary
that is exactly what Aldrey wanted to dispose of in his newspaper.
In order to be able to speak in a newspaper, the literato adjusts himself
to its exigency: he informs, and even takes up information as a privileged ob-

    

ject of his reflection. But, in the act of informing, he overwrites: he writes over
the newspaper in a kind of palimpsest, which he continually reads even as
he undertakes the task to verbalize in an entirely emphatic manner—a char-
acteristic that the news bulletin did not possess.58 The chronicle, then, as
an exercise of overwriting, highly stylized in Martí, is at once a newspaper
and literary form. It is a heterogeneous yet not heteronomous discursive site: styli-
zation (already noticed by Sarmiento in his reading of Martí) presupposes a
literary subject, a literary authority, a highly specified gaze. The chronicle as-
sumes this specified gaze, yet it is a gaze without a proper space; a gaze that
is subordinated, limited, by other authorities that converge (in conflict with
one another) in the chronicle. Thus, from a formal perspective, the chronicle
may represent and even thematize the work of a literary subject (stylization)
as well as the limits of his autonomy (information). If poetry ideally repre-
sented the interior of fin de siècle literature par excellence, in the sense that
it constituted a field of immanence, purified or purifiable against external
interpellations, then the chronicle in its (always contested) formal nature
represents the struggle of authorities, a discursive competition, presupposed
by the poetic interior. The interior, the field of identity for a subject (a liter-
ary subject, in this case), would therefore only acquire meaning in opposition
to the exteriors that limit it, besiege it, but which also are the conditions of
the subject’s possibility as they demarcate the outer limits of his domain. The
limit or boundary is not strictly negative, as the modernists of the antiaes-
thetic space in the newspaper claimed. The boundary enables us to recognize
the specificity of the interior: the emphasis on style (a device that specifies
the literary subject at the turn of the century) only holds weight in inverse
proportion to the antiaesthetic places in which it is at work. The chronicle
was not a mere supplement to poetic modernization, an idea that dominates
nearly all the historiography of modernism; rather, it was (in the literary
subject’s encounter with other fields) the condition of possibility for a new
degree of consciousness and self-reflexivity in this subject, well on the way to
autonomization.

Notes

 See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, ).
 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).
 Gayatri Spivak, in a brief commentary on Fernández Retamar, suggests that the place of
Caliban also remains inscribed in Shakespeare’s work, in a symbolic field entirely European,

Journalism and Literature 

 in which otherness or the margin accomplishes nothing more than the consolidation of the
identity of civilized Europe. See her ‘‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,’’
in Race, Writing, and Difference, special issue of Critical Inquiry , no.  (autumn ): .
 The abstract, ahistorical assertion of literature as an antidisciplinarian discourse or a cri-
tique of truth is one of the key ideologies for different poststructural (and) deconstructive
positions. The instability of the literary subject is hypostatized and assumed in the abstract,
as an absolute model for transgression. This kind of ideologization of the literary margin as-
sumes that literature, far from the conjunctures in which it has been historically produced,
is by definition a critique of power. See, for example, Jacques Derrida’s reading of Stéphane
Mallarmé in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
), –.
 A number of previous works on this topic have been essential to the theme of this chapter:
Angel Rama, Los poetas modernistas en el mercado económico (Montevideo: Universidad de la Re-
pública, ), included later in his Rubén Darío; David Viñas, ‘‘De los gentlemen-escritores
a la profesionalización de la literatura,’’ in Literatura argentina y realidad política (Buenos Aires:
Centro Editor de América Latina, ); Noé Jitrik, ‘‘La máquina semiótica/la máquina
fabril,’’ in Las contradicciones del modernismo (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, ); Carlos
Monsiváis, A ustedes les consta. Antología de la crónica en Mexico (Mexico City: Biblioteca Era,
); and Aníbal González, La crónica modernista hispanoamericana (Madrid: Porrúa Turan-
zas, ).
 José Martí, Amistad funesta, in Obras completas, vol.  (Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba,
–),  [hereafter OC, followed by volume and page number].
 José Martí, in OC, vol. , .
 Calixto Oyuela, ‘‘Asociaciones literarias,’’ from his Estudios literarios, the above fragment of
which is found in Jorge B. Rivera, ed., El escritor y la industria cultural: El camino hacia la profesion-
alización (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, ), .
 Julián del Casal, ‘‘Folletín: Crónica semanal,’’ in Crónicas habaneras, ed. Ángel Augier (Santa
Clara, Cuba: Universidad Central de Las Villas, ), .
 Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, ‘‘La protección de la literatura,’’ Obras. Crítica literaria, vol. , ed.
E. Mejía Sánchez, comp. E. K. Mapes (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México, ), .
 See also Rubén Darío, ‘‘La vida literaria. A propósito de los últimos dos libros del general
Mitre,’’ in Escritos inéditos de Rubén Darío, ed. E. K. Mapes (New York: Instituto de las Españas,
), –.
 Sylvia Molloy, ‘‘Conciencia del público y conciencia del yo en el primer Darío,’’ Revista Ibéro-
americana – (): –; and Sylvia Molloy, ‘‘Voracidad y solipsismo en la poesía de
Darío,’’ Sin Nombre  (): –.
 José Martí, Cartas a Manuel A. Mercado (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México, ),  [hereafter CMM].
 José Martí, ‘‘Hierro,’’ in Versos libres, Obra literaria (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), .
 As Martí mentions to Mercado, his translation of a novel by Hugh Conway for Appleton—
published under the title Misterio—circulated in Havana and Mexico: ‘‘I sent him . . . a novel
that I had translated, and in Havana at least, innumerable people have bought it. . . . As for
the book, I don’t lend to it any more importance than what it has for me: a mouthful of
bread. It may one day be considered great, but for me, in spite of my prose, it remains a dirty
trick. El Nacional has been announcing it in big letters’’ (Martí, CMM, ).
 Buenos Aires’s La Nación, for example, received and reprinted La América articles written by

    

 Martí. Until the present day, a complete collection of La América has yet to be gathered,
although some of its individual releases can be found in the Biblioteca Nacional in Havana.
 Volume  of Martí’s complete works (OC ), published in , contains many of these adver-
tisements, fascinating because they are exemplary of Martí’s emphatic stylization, at work
in even the most unsuspected of places.
 Martí, CMM, .
 Prologue originally intended for Flores del destierro, Obra literaria,  (see note ).
 ‘‘And the number of newspapers publishing my letters has surpassed twenty, with praises
for which I am grateful, but all of which are offered freely, and like Molière, [the publishers]
take them freely where they find them’’ (Martí, CMM, ). One might add that, in New
York, Martí closely followed Mark Twain’s struggle (which included other writers on the way
toward syndicalization) for the formalization of international laws on intellectual property.
In other words, already at work in Martí is the modern notion of the writer as a producer, as
a ‘‘cultural worker’’ (following the common expression).
 Regarding this dialectic between the exterior—tied to an emergent urban culture—and the
interior of the aesthetic subject, one might easily point to Darío’s sonnet ‘‘De Invierno’’ (‘‘On
Winter’’) in Prosas profanas. The following verse is particularly exemplary: ‘‘I enter, without
making noise; I take off my gray overcoat’’ (‘‘entro, sin hacer ruido; dejo mi abrigo gris’’).
The entrance into the interior enclosure can be seen as a process of purification for the sub-
ject who comes from outside, contaminated. The chronicle, on the other hand, assumes a
movement in the opposite direction.
 Yet it is also certain that at the turn of the century, the position of the writer in the mar-
ket changes significantly. With respect to this change, a letter from Bartolomé Mitre y Vedia
(editor of La Nación, who later censored Martí’s first correspondence to the Argentine press)
to Martí is entirely revealing: ‘‘A youth speaks to you, who probably has much more to learn
from you than you from him, but insofar as he deals with a commodity—and please pardon
the bluntness of the word, for the sake of exactitude—which seeks a favorable placement in
the market that serves as a base for his operations, he tries, as it is his right and obligation,
to come to an agreement with his agents and correspondents abroad regarding the most
convenient means of giving to them the full value of which they are deserving’’ (in Papeles de
Martí, vol. , ed. Gonzalo de Querada y Miranda [Havana: Imprenta El Siglo XX, ], ;
letter dated September , ).
Martí’s response is equally significant: ‘‘I write for people who must love me’’ (Nuestra
América [Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), ]. Martí attempts to erase—with a rhetoric
of love—the impersonality of the market. As Mitre y Vedia remind him, however, Martí was
in reality writing for a reading public, within the communicative context where participants
did not share a primary space for discussion that was not mediated by the market. This will
be one of the greatest differences between Martí, along with the fin de siècle literary journal-
ists, and the publicists from the republic of letters. For the latter, journalism still served to
consolidate a localized, relatively organic, public domain, which materialized by means of a
common language shared by the writer and his/her readers. In contrast, the public of Martí
comes to be a mass, and the editor, basically, a merchant.
 Ramos is using ‘‘common sense’’ in the Kantian sense of the word, that is, common sense
as a sensus communis, a ‘‘community of sense,’’ wherein there exists a sense of ‘‘commonness’’
along the lines of an unspoken and assumed consensus. Trans.
 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Lon-
don: Verso, ).

Journalism and Literature 

 José Antonio Saco, La vagancia en Cuba (; reprint, Havana: Cuadernos de Cultura, ),
–.
 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, th ed., trans. Thomas
Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ), in particular chapters  and  on the transfor-
mation of the public sphere in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe.
 Regarding the change in function of the press, see Juan Bautista Alberdi, Cartas sobre la prensa
y la política militante de la República Argentina (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Estrada, ).
 The following exploration on the history of La Nación (–) is based, above all, on
research conducted at Harvard University, the Biblioteca del Congreso Argentino, and the
Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires in . Other histories that were consulted include
Oscar Beltrán, Historia del periodismo argentino, (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sopena, ); and
Juan Romulo Fernández, Historia del periodismo argentino (Buenos Aires: Librera Perlado, ).
The Artes y letras en La Nación de Buenos Aires (–) guide, edited by Beatriz Álvarez et al.,
was also quite useful.
 La Nación,  July , .
 Tulio Halperín Donghi, Contemporary History of Latin America, ed. and trans. John Charles
Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), –.
 Bartolomé Mitre, ‘‘Nuevos horizontes’’, La Nación,  January , .
 La Nación,  February , .
 Habermas, Structural Transformation, .
 An important work on the history of the public/private relation is Hannah Arendt’s The
Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
 Sansón Carrasco (pseudo.), ‘‘El coloso de la prensa argentina,’’ La Nación,  February , .
 ‘‘Notas literarias: el periodismo y las letras,’’ La Nación,  November , .
 The access of new subjects to writing is, in part, a corollary of what Benjamin called the situa-
tion of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. The newspaper, in different ways, elimi-
nates the aura and exclusivity of writing, even as it makes possible the emergence of new
authors. See Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, ).
 José Martí, ‘‘Prólogo al Poema del Niágara,’’ in Obra literaria (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho,
), .
 Justo Sierra, Viajes, En tierra yankee, in Obras completas vol.  (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, ), .
 Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Obras inéditas: Crónicas del Puck, ed. E. K. Mapes (New York: Instituto
de las Españas en los Estados Unidos, ), .
 Rubén Darío, ‘‘La enfermedad del diario,’’ in Escritos inéditos, ed. E. K. Mapes (New York: In-
stituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos, ), .
 Julián del Casal, ‘‘Bonifacio Byrne,’’ in Crónicas habaneras, ed. Angel Augier (Las Villas: Uni-
versidad Central, ), .
 Manuel González Prada, ‘‘Nuestro periodismo,’’ in Horas de lucha (Callao, Peru: Tipografía
Lux, ), .
 Habermas, Structural Transformation, –.
 ‘‘Residual’’ refers to the well-known essay by marxist scholar and critic Raymond Williams
in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, esp. . Trans.
 Gutiérrez Nájera, Obras inéditas, –.
 We will analyze the relationship between literature and technology in chapter  of this book.
 ‘‘Recuerdos de la semana: Reflexiones periodísticas,’’ La Nación,  March .

    

 Martí’s significant ‘‘Oscar Wilde’’ is reproduced in Obra literaria (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacu-
cho, ), –.
 Rubén Darío, Autobiografía (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Marymar, ), .
 La Nación,  January , .
 Domingo F. Sarmiento, letter to Paul Groussac, La Nación,  January , .
 Domingo F. Sarmiento, Obras. Páginas literarias, vol.  (Santiago, Chile: Imperos de Guten-
berg, –), .
 Martí’s ‘‘Nuestra América’’ can be read along the lines of a critique of this kind of legitimacy
bestowed on the intellectual importer. See chapter  in the second part of this book.
 Letter from Fausto Teodoro Aldrey to José Martí in , included in Papeles de Martí, .
 Noemí Escandell has recently recovered (and translated into English) some of Martí’s texts
on art, published in the New York Sun. See Escritura , no.  (): –.
 Martí, OC, vol. , .
 Throughout North American Scenes, Martí represents his own undertaking and reflects on the
production of chronicles. His frequent point of departure is a reading of the reports that ap-
pear in the New York newspapers. Hence, many of Martí’s chronicles act as montages of dif-
ferent news items that he reads, each in conjunction with another. Chronicles represent news
items, and in representing them, reflect on their relationship with informational discourse.
An exceptional instance of the chronicle as the rewriting of informational discourse
can be found in the last sketch that Martí wrote for La Nación in , ‘‘El asesinato de los ita-
lianos’’ (‘‘The Assassination of the Italians’’), about a case of ethnocide in New Orleans. The
chronicle centers around a deconstructive use of the citation, in which Martí quotes from
a report that had appeared in the New York Herald on March ,  entitled ‘‘Armed Mobs
Shoot Down Mafia’s Tools.’’ By means of citation, however, Martí inverts the ideological
system implicit in the transmission of information, calling the report’s claim to objectivity
into question and postulating the innocence of the victims (hence, the dramatic transfor-
mation of the title). Moreover, he stylizes the report so as to render it conspicuous; which is
to say, he overwrites the report, highlighting the gaze and the literary authority that the cited
text does not possess. The chronicle ends in the following manner: ‘‘They took Bagnetto in
their arms: his face would not be seen from his wounds: they threw the knot of a new cord
around his neck, already almost cold from death: they left him hanging from the branch of
a tree: later they will cut off the neighboring branches; and the women will wear the leaves
of the branches in their hats, the men in their buttonholes, as an emblem! One takes out his
watch: The time has passed quickly: forty-eight minutes. From the flat roofs and balconies
the people stared, with theater binoculars’’ (OC, vol. , ).

Journalism and Literature 

 Decorating the City: The Chronicle
and Urban Experience

As is often the case, rationalism goes hand in hand with the enjoyment of life since as
a general rule, he who thinks rationally discovers in the same thought that the plea-
sures of life ought to be enjoyed. From another angle, rationalism demands a sober
and clear vision of the world, realistic and laid bare, to the effect that rationalism soon
discovers how cruelty and abomination obstruct the full enjoyment of life: or indeed
that one must erect in the beautiful the abominable . . . in order to obtain the full en-
joyment of life, or again one must close one’s eyes to abomination and cruelty, and
choose the beautiful so that enjoyment, which has become the aesthetically select,
may become possible without interference. Nevertheless, the same denial in one case
as in another—that denial being in both the affirmation of cruelty as well as its re-
pudiation—always entails, in spite of the rationalist pretension to an authenticity
without cosmetics, an aesthetic masking of the abominable, its hypertrophy or its
glossing over: it entails a sleight of hand by means of decoration.—Hermann Broch,
Poesía e investigación

In many ways, the chronicle was a weak form of literature for fin de siècle
writers. It was a space exposed to contamination, open to the intervention of
discourses that, far from coexisting in some stabilized multiplicity, clashed
with one another for the imposition of their respective principles of coher-
ence. In the last chapter, we saw how in spite of the protests of the mod-
ernists, who (generally speaking) idealized the autonomous and pure totality
of the book, the heterogeneity of the chronicle fulfilled an important task
in the constitutive process of literature in Latin America. Paradoxically, the
encounter with lower and antiaesthetic discourses in the chronicle made pos-
sible the consolidation of the emergent aesthetic field.
Now, we would like to explore other uses of the chronicle at the turn
of the century. Let us examine how the chronicle as a minor form developed
strategies for representing capitalist everyday life, which during that period
of intense modernization, exceeded the thematic horizon of canonical and
codified forms. Of course, this is something that Martí had already pointed
out in the Prólogo al Poema del Niágara (Prologue to the Poem of Niágara) in .
For Martí, modernity implied the experience of a vertiginous and fragmen-
tary temporality that annulled the very possibility of a ‘‘permanent work,’’
because ‘‘the works of these times of reconstruction and remodeling are in
essence volatile and restless.’’ 1 ‘‘Hence, these small ebullient works’’ (see ap-
pendix ), emerging from the modern experience of fragmentation itself,
constituted an adequate medium for reflecting on change.
Yet we do not propose to idealize either the marginality or heteroge-
neity of the chronicle. On the contrary, we will attempt to see how the formal
flexibility of the chronicle enabled it to become an archive of the ‘‘dangers’’
implicit in the new urban experience; an ordering of daily life as yet unclassi-
fied by instituted forms of knowledge.
Let us once again take up an earlier question: why, in the full flowering
of the newspaper’s rationalization, does the modernist chronicle prosper?
What use could the emergent aesthetic subject, highlighted in bold relief (by
his anxiety) in the chronicle, have for the modern culture?

A Rhetoric of Consumption

The chronicle, like the newspaper itself, is a space rooted in cities on the road
to modernization at the turn of the century: first of all, because the authority
(and value) of the correspondent’s word is based on his or her representation
of urban life in some developed society for a designated audience desiring—
although at times fearful of—this modernity. Hence, the close relation be-
tween the chronicle, specifically its epistolary form, and travel literature,
essential to the modernizing patricians.
In Martí’s epoch, the travelogue, correspondence as a generic form, was
still entirely heterogeneous from a thematic perspective. With an exceptional
intellectual intensity, Martí wrote about practically every aspect of capital-
ist daily life in the United States, as we will later see in his North American
Scenes. But toward the s—when Darío, Nervo, and Gómez Carrillo be-
come model correspondents—the demands of the newspaper on the chroni-
cler changes significantly. In this epoch, the chronicler will be above all a
guide through the ever-more refined and complex market of cultural goods,
contributing to the materialization of a rhetoric of consumption and pub-
licity. Let us examine the following passage:

Furniture of all styles—the modern style most outstanding—confirm

the search for elegance together with the firm sense of comfort. In all of
them you will find the geometric and powerful attribute of the race and
a preoccupation with the home.

The Chronicle and Urban Experience 

 It is the display of all that has been achieved in the domestic indus-
try under the influence of domestic concerns.2

There is no need to overanalyze the inflection, the adjectival inclination,

the appeal to a certain kind of reader, extremely fin de siècle (bourgeois,
refined, and domestic), in order to recognize the emergence of an advertise-
ment rhetoric. Significantly, the author of the piece is Rubén Darío, searching
for a rhetoric proper to the Great Paris Exposition of . It was at the ex-
position that Darío envisioned the realization of one of those utopias woven
into the fabric of modernism (without necessarily dominating it): the ideal of
a modernity that would be at once capitalist, technological, and aesthetic:

Greater in extension than all the previous expositions, one immediately

notices in this one the advantage of the picturesque. In the  [expo-
sition] iron reigned supreme—which led [Ioris Karl] Huysmans to write
one of his most precious pages—yet in this one, engineering has be-
come more closely united with art; the color, in the architectural whites,
in the grey palaces, in the pavilions of distinctive features, strikes a note,
in its nuances, the cabuchon facets, and the golds, and the polychrome
that prevails, certainly give to the light of the sun or the splendor of the
electric lamps, a repeated and varied Arabian-nights sensation.3

Stylization in the chronicle transforms the threatening signs of progress

and modernity into a picturesque and aestheticized spectacle. Having oblit-
erated the utilitarian vulgarity of iron, the machine is embellished, painted
over, and modernist (lexical) gold is applied to the decoration of the city. At
the exposition, a direct antecedent to the modern industry of entertainment,
the diatribe of art against mercantilization is suspended. The chronicler is
seduced by the promise of his encounter with a new, massified public, whose
contact with art will be facilitated by the culture industry. At least within the
exposition—within the scene of entertainment and leisure—the market itself
was able to cover its utilitarian features, even to the point of opening up a
space for the experience of the beautiful in the city. Walter Benjamin observed
that world expositions are the sites of pilgrimages to the commodity fetish.4
It might be added, with respect to Darío, that the chronicler is an avid pilgrim:

Surrounded in a sea of colors and forms, my soul cannot find anywhere

to fix my attention with any concentration. The result is that, when a
painting calls you for one direct reason, another and a hundred more
shout to you with the impressive reach of their pincers or the melody of
their tints and nuances. And in this predicament, you contemplate the
many pages of many books, as if they had materialized [at the exposi-

    

 tion]. A thousand nebulous poems float in the firmament hidden from
your mind; a thousand seeds are awakened in your will and your artistic
longing.5

In the exposition of art, as in that of other novelties, objects interpellate

the consumer in an infernal competition. This is the call of the commodity:
‘‘when a painting calls you for one direct reason, another and a hundred more
shout to you with . . . their pincers.’’ The object of art, incorporated into the
market, no longer appears as the crystallization of a particularized and origi-
nal experience. Rather, Darío here celebrates the serial production of beauti-
ful objects, before which the spectator clearly figures as a virtual buyer. And
the slippage that follows the call of merchandise is even more revealing: ‘‘in
this predicament, you contemplate the many pages of many books, as if they
had materialized. A thousand nebulous poems float in the firmament hidden
from your mind.’’ Perhaps poetry could be produced en masse as well, like
the paintings that seek a buyer.
In the chronicles written by Gómez Carrillo, the charisma of merchan-
dise, its lavishness and abundance, is intensified in a rhetoric—still in cur-
rency today—where fetishism becomes explicitly erotic: ‘‘the sumptuousness
of the shop windows, with the perpetual attraction of the luxurious, of the
lustrous, of the feminine.’’ 6 The subject, in the context of this quote, is a
strolling passerby in Buenos Aires:

In order to prolong the enchantment of the moment I let myself be

guided by a friend and I penetrated a shop that, from a distance, did not
seem to me anything less than enormous. How surprised I was to find
myself suddenly transplanted to the true capital of elegance! Is it Prin-
temps, with its thousand pagan employees and its perpetual rustling
[froufrou] of silks crushed by aristocratic hands? . . . Is it the Louvre and
its endless display of precious objects? . . . [The store] is all these things
together; it is the citadel of women’s fantasies, the cavern where witches
have accumulated what makes Margarita’s soul tremble; it is, in a word,
the palace of temptations. (p. )

He later adds:

It is not in fact a disinterested sweetness, as a museum provides, or as

such is noticed in other places. It is a fearful, imperious, titanic desire. How
can one resist all that attracts? In general, the objects in shops do not ap-
pear before the buyer, but through the glass of the window displays. . . .
Here the strangest and most expensive, the most fragile, the most exqui-
site . . . is within the reach of one’s hands. And the hands, the pale, ner-

The Chronicle and Urban Experience 

 vous hands, approach, I daresay touch, no, caress, what coquetry covets,
and little by little, on contact with that smooth and almost warm some-
thing, a sheer rapture takes possession of the woman’s soul. (p. )

Even as the commodity acquires a life of its own—in the erotic palpita-
tion, smooth and almost warm—the consumer loses the exalted soul in his
or her rapture. This is, precisely, the logic of the fetish. Even more important,
the fetishism of merchandise is represented as an aesthetic experience. The
shop substitutes the museum as an institution of beauty, and the stylization
so preeminent in the author’s labor on language works toward a consumer-
ist epiphany. In an inflated and grotesque way, we find in Gómez Carrillo one
of the extreme consequences of the autonomization of the aesthetic sphere
in modern society: the separation of the aesthetic and cultural from prac-
tical living predisposes an autonomized, disinterested art to the risk of its
incorporation by the very oppressive rationality from which it had sought to
become autonomous.
In Gómez Carrillo, or earlier in Darío, the aesthetic of luxury as one
of the ideologies of autonomization could well have attempted a critique of
the utilitarian principle of efficiency and productivity distinctively featured in
capitalism. Such an economy would, indeed, touch on the very use of lan-
guages stripped of any trace of style: technologized discourses of bureaucracy
and the modern (market). Luxury—the aesthetic of excess—in the economy of
fin de siècle literature, can thus be read as a subversion of utilitarianism in
other forms of discourse, all of which might be called organic discourses of
capitalism. But together with this critical impulse of the will to autonomy, the
differentiated space belonging to the aesthetic is reified, objectified (in style);
it becomes easily appropriated as a consolatory, affirmative activity, as a com-
pensation for the ‘‘abominable’’ of modernization. Stylization, in the poetics
of excess and luxury, rejects the use value of the word in the deployment of
its will to autonomy; and yet, in doing so, it remains inscribed as a most ele-
vated form of fetishization, where the word is a strict exchange value. One can
thus recognize in the jewel, the useless piece of merchandise par excellence a
model for production. And this, at the turn of the century, prepared the way
for the development of a kitsch art, distinctive for modern mass culture.
In her lucid work on the chronicles of Gómez Carrillo, María Luisa
Bastos reads an application of modernist style to the necessities of the emer-
gent market of luxury, and interprets this usage as a kind of vulgarization
of the initially high, autonomous, and perhaps radical aesthetic of modern-
ism.7 In essence, her interpretation coincides with that of Rama, Jitrik, and
Pacheco, who all saw two moments in modernism: the critical and radical

    

antibourgeois moment, and a second phase, in which modernism, at the
beginning of the century, became the aesthetic for dominant groups. The
chronicles of Gómez Carrillo, or even better, what he referred to as his ap-
plied literature to fashion,8 would come to represent this second phase (which
Pacheco recognizes, in the boleros of Agustín Lara).
Nevertheless, the postulation of two phases in literary modernity—one
initial phase of plentitude, another involuntarily parodic or trivialized in
kitsch—establishes a chronology that dissolves the real complexity of the
initial moment. Darío, in his ambiguous ‘‘El rey burgués’’ (‘‘The Bourgeois
King’’) from Azul, reflected on the danger that threatened his entire work
from the very start.9 In it, the inner room of the bourgeois king, seen with a
great disgust, overflows with objects of art and wealth. And the poet, with his
little musical machine, runs the risk of becoming incorporated as yet another
object.
Martí himself, who had earlier criticized the will to autonomy in his sys-
tematic critiques of luxury and excess, defined one of the possible uses of
beauty, of the autonomized aesthetic, in the following manner:

The love for art melts and lifts the soul: a beautiful painting, a limpid
statue, an artistic performer, a modest flower in a pretty vase, brings
smiles to the lips where tears, only moments before, were dying. Above
the pleasure of knowing the beautiful, which enhances and strengthens,
is the pleasure of possessing the beautiful, which leaves us content with
ourselves. Bejeweling the house, hanging the walls with paintings, en-
joying them, evaluating their merits, extolling their beauties, are noble
enjoyments that give value to life, distraction to the mind and high em-
ployment to the spirit. One feels a new knowledge running through the
veins when one contemplates a new work of art. . . . It is like drinking
from Cellini’s cup an ideal life.10

Here, also, the sphere of the beautiful (as a reified concept) is incorpo-
rated into the market as a decorative, compensatory object; critical of utili-
tarianism, perhaps, but in the final instance affirming instrumental logic
and the mercantilization of the world. Literature—in the selfsame critique
of modernization deployed by the will to autonomy—is reincorporated by
the logic of capitalism as a decorative mechanism of modern and especially
urban abomination: the modernist writer as a makeup artist, painting over
the dangerous features of the city. Hence, from the first stage on, the asser-
tion regarding the radicality of the will to autonomy, signified by the logic of
excess, is an entirely imprecise and untenable one. The chronology (first radi-
cality and later incorporation) serves only to dissolve these contradictions.

The Chronicle and Urban Experience 

And it is necessary to be able to speak of the contradictions because already
at the turn of the century, the ambiguous relationship between literature (as
an autonomous discourse) and power was being debated in a discussion that
would continue throughout the twentieth century.
The problem is rooted in thinking of dominant culture as homogeneous
and static. The field of power, above all in modernity, is fluid and deterri-
torializing; of course, this does not mean that networks and relations of
domination are not established. In order to better explain this fundamental
flexibility, its oftentimes contradictory manifestations, and the will to aes-
thetic autonomy that at once results from and responds to it, we will need to
take up again the problem of the chronicle in the newspaper, as well as the
relationship between literature and urban abomination.

Representing the City

What exactly, at the turn of the century, did the city signify? For Sarmiento, as
for many other patricians of modernization, the city (almost always in bold-
face letters) was a utopic space: the place for an ideally modern society and
a rationalized public sphere. Thus, in Sarmiento, it is possible to read the
concept of civilization—as well as politics—in its etymological relation to
the city.
Toward the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the concept of the
city—which to a certain degree, continued to legitimize the discourse of the
chronicle—was problematized, in part by the actual process of urbanization
that distinguished many Latin American social formations of the period.11 In
Martí, the city will become closely linked to the representation of disaster,
of catastrophe, as a distinctive metaphor for modernity. The city, for Martí
and his contemporaries (particularly the modern writers or literatos, among
others), gives rise to what we might call the catastrophe of the signifier. Martí’s
understanding of the city is that it spatializes the fragmentation of the tra-
ditional order of discourse, a fragmentation that the city has brought in its
wake; and this spatialization problematizes the very possibility of represen-
tation:

In this turbulent undertow, the natural currents of life no longer emerge.

Everything is obscured, disarticulated, ground into bits; one cannot
[distinguish], at first sight, virtues from vices. Tumultuously mixed, they
melt away.12

In this respect, the city is not simply the background, the scenery in
which the fragmentation of discourse that distinguishes modernity would

    

come to be represented. Rather, it is the space of the city as the field of
signification itself that needs to be thought, a space that in its own formal
assemblage (that is, with its disarticulations and networks) is enmeshed in
the fragmentation of codes and traditional systems of representation as they
appear in modern society. From this perspective, the city would not only be
a passive context for signification, but also the crystallization and configura-
tion of the very borders, articulations, currents, and aporias that constitute
the presupposed field for signification.
Of course, the metaphor of catastrophe was not new in its moment of
inscription by Martí. It was the enlightened patricians themselves who situ-
ated the metaphor at the heart of their rhetoric. To cite an example, in ,
Sarmiento interprets the effects of an earthquake in Chile:

This interests [us] so much more as the tremor is a good stimulant for
the public to pay attention to the matter of architecture, the solution to
which will bring life relief, if not fortune. If the land wishes to tremble
it is a perverse desire for which we must blame neither Providence nor
the government. Our only means of confronting the threat is to extin-
guish the danger by improving the construction of buildings, because if
the house does not fall on our heads, a tremor will become an occasion
to admire without fear the sublime conflicts of nature. For men, then, a
tremor is a question of architecture.13

The slippage from the descriptive to the analytical value of disaster is

later followed by a metaphor: ‘‘This matter still interests [us], for tremors
come to life at the precise moment that an extraneous revolution is at work
in our lives’’ (p. ). Disaster, without a doubt, can be a natural phenome-
non, external to discourse; its representation, however, transforms the event
into a convergence of different signifieds that chaos—danger, disorder—
may bring about at a given conjuncture. Throughout the nineteenth century,
catastrophe is the other of rationality par excellence. In its extreme form, it
condenses the danger of revolutionary ‘‘chaos.’’
Still, in Sarmiento’s exacerbated faith in the virtual order of discourse
(in this case, architectonic), the earthquake fulfills a positive function: it dis-
mantles the previous traditional space, and leads to the reorganization and
modernization of cities like Valparaíso and Santiago. Catastrophe problema-
tizes the architecture of the traditional order, and hence, makes possible the
construction of the new city, of a desired modernity. In Sarmiento’s histori-
cal fable, catastrophe does not constitute an insurmountable fissure. To the
contrary, catastrophe indicates the moment of a new foundation where the
becoming (devenir) of progress gathers momentum.

The Chronicle and Urban Experience 

 In Martí, particularly in the Escenas norteamericanas where his reflection on
modernity is a central theme, catastrophe is again a key figure. The charge
of the metaphor, however, along with its relation to an Enlightenment tele-
ology, has been considerably complicated. In his exceptional chronicles ‘‘El
terremoto de Charleston’’ (‘‘The Charleston Earthquake’’) and ‘‘Inundaciones
de Johnstown’’ (‘‘The Johnstown Flood’’), the representation of catastrophe
presupposes a critique of the enlightenment epitomized by Sarmiento. Let us
note, in passing, the role of transport (an icon from the modern order) in the
following description:

The trains were not able to arrive at Charleston, because the rails had
come off their hinges, or exploded, or meandered over their suspended
sleepers.
A locomotive came running triumphantly forward at the instant
of the first tremor, and flew up in the air, and shaking the line of cars
hitched to the back of the train like a rosary [it] smacked face down with
all its dead machinery. . . . Another one not far away continued whistling
happily, the earthquake heaved its weight against [the train] and cast it
against a nearby tank.14

Evidently, the catastrophe here no longer promotes the order of the city:
as Martí insists, it destroys all signs of modernity (above all, the market). And
yet, it also makes possible, by means of the destruction of the city, the re-
turn to an origin that progress had earlier obliterated: ‘‘The forests that night
were full of town villagers, who fled from the shaken roofs, and who took
shelter in the trees, joining one another in the darkness of the forest to sing
in chorus’’ (ibid.).
Ironically, disaster has given rise to a reencounter with the community,
the reconstruction of the chorus. And it is the Blacks (at the height of racial
conflicts in the United States in that period) who guide the return of the city
to modernity’s other, the forest: ‘‘the horror [of disaster] left the tempestuous
imagination of the Negroes burning’’ (p. ). Thus, the return and chorus at
the same time imply the restitution of the power of myth and the imagina-
tion (proper to literature) that was cut short in the city by the rationalization
and its disenchantment. To invent tradition, an origin—to ‘‘remember’’ the past
of the city, and mediate between modernity and areas that modernity has ex-
cluded or run over: this will be one of the great strategies of legitimation
instituted by modern Latin American literature beginning with Martí. For
in literature, as Martí suggests in ‘‘Nuestra América,’’ the ‘‘mute Indio,’’ the
‘‘victimized Black,’’ speaks. Literature is, in effect, legitimized as the site of
rationalization’s others.

    

 Certainly, it is not only in New York, London, or even the Paris of Baude-
laire where the concept of the city crystallizes the problematic of the unrepre-
sentable—the disarticulation, turbulence, and crisis of traditional categories
of representation. In many areas of Latin America, the process of fin de siècle
urbanization was also quite radical and decisive. As José Luis Romero has
pointed out, not all cities changed in a homogeneous manner.15 There were
stagnant cities; but particularly in port cities like Rio de Janeiro, Havana,
and Montevideo, the transformations were considerable. And above all, in
Buenos Aires and Mexico City—axes of fin de siècle literary modernization—
the changes were intense, as indicated by the proliferating urban literature of
the period, especially in the chronicles and the then-emerging novel.
The transformation of the cities was rarely calculated, although particu-
larly in the Buenos Aires of Intendente (superintendent) Torcuato de Alvear and
the Mexico of Porfirio Díaz, the influence of the project to rationalize (and
before it, demolish) urban space was decisive. Of course, the rationalization
of urban space would entail a prior process of demolition, as Baron Georges-
Eugène Haussmann succeeded in doing with the Paris of Napoleon III.16 Of
Buenos Aires, Romero declares: ‘‘[the city] decided on demolitions, the pri-
mary focus of which was the radical renovation of the traditional centers in
the big town.’’ 17 These transformations, as Lewis Mumford suggested with
respect to the European cities of the nineteenth century, were not simply
physical or material: the reorganization and rationalization of urban space
ushered in an overall transformation of the epoch’s symbolic regimes.18 Let
us examine, in Mexican Federico Gamboa’s  novel Apariencias (Appear-
ances), the figurative slippages in his description of the reconstructed city:

It was a street under construction and like most new streets, situated
in the fashionable extension of the great city that offers a singular and
characteristic aspect: the sidewalks, wide and recently paved; the houses
in construction, with their accumulation of materials; the holes, with-
out markings, of doors and windows, like the cavities of antediluvian skulls;
the scaffolds, which resemble the rigging of phantom ships; the build-
ing sites, closed off by irregular fences in which multicolored advertise-
ments of public diversions and patented medicines can be seen; at a
distance a small hollow or hillock that still conserves a green and worn
moss.19 (Italics added)

Paradoxically, to conserve is here a key word; it is an inserted word, as if

to emphasize its ephemerality, in a passage configured by the rhetoric of disas-
ter. In Gamboa, the city is rather an iconoclastic force that reorganizes space,
the life-world. The adjective should be taken literally: the city is iconoclastic

The Chronicle and Urban Experience 

inasmuch as it takes icons apart, along with traditional systems of representa-
tion; it destroys all figures, space as figure, of traditional culture. This is also
the main theme in another influential, albeit forgotten, novel of the epoch
by Argentine Lucio Vicente López, La gran aldea (The Big Town): ‘‘How things
in Buenos Aires have changed in twenty years!’’ 20 For López, and to a certain
degree for Gamboa as well, to write was to remember—or invent—the tradi-
tion that the iconoclastic force of modernization had dismantled. The rheto-
ric of disaster is systematically nostalgic, although from different angles and
political positions.
Fin de siècle testimonies to the crisis generated by urbanization spread.
They confirm the tensions unleashed by modernization—at least for litera-
ture, along with those social groups identified with the institutions, icons,
and symbolic spaces taken apart by urban rationalization. Yet it is indeed re-
markable how modernization, in a move against the grain of its demolition
impulse, ironically promoted the reconstruction of territorialities, oftentimes
erecting in its wake the monuments and masks of a reified tradition. Conse-
quently, even as modernization destroyed the traditional modes of represen-
tation and identification, it also fashioned new images, frequently oriented
toward the past, as simulacra of tradition and social order in (a compensa-
tory) response to the violent changes that it had effected.
This reconstructive and compensatory aspect of modernization can be
seen, for example, in the monumentalist historicism that dominates fin de
siècle Mexican architecture. The importance that a certain notion of the natu-
ral recovers in the modernizing period of Porfirist Mexico acts as an index of
this reconstruction impulse as well. Israel Katzman shows:

From the year  houses began to be constructed in the fields by

the Paseo de Reforma [Reform Promenade], and as the rural ambience
began to fade, in  a five-year exemption of the property tax was de-
creed for those who would allow a garden of at least eight meters to
grow in front of their houses.21

In the Buenos Aires of Intendente Honorio Pueyrredón as well, in the

s, we see introduced at the height of urbanization numerous recreational
spaces and parks in a city otherwise oriented toward technological produc-
tivity and efficiency.22 Eduardo Wilde, an exceptional chronicler of the period,
comments on the inauguration of the novel Tres de Febrero (Third of February)
Park in :

Buenos Aires needed you. . . . Along the edge of its center, [there was]
not one tree, nor one garden, nor one unasphyxiated place, nor one wide

    

 avenue: in its small plazas, neither shadow nor coolness, nor vegetation
where we could exchange the poison in our lungs for some life.23

Pure air in a polluted city: Wilde not only remarks here on the inven-
tion of a natural space in the city, but on one of the functions that his own
discourse (in the chronicle) would satisfy in the final decades of the century.
Although modernization demolished the traditional systems of representa-
tion, causing social tensions, it also fostered the production of images re-
solving these contradictions; it even fostered a discourse of the crisis, giving
weight and authority to the memory of a certain past. To represent the city,
which is tantamount to representing the unrepresentable that was the city, by
then no longer entailed a mere exercise of recording or documenting change
or flux brought about by the city. Representing the city was one mode of su-
perceding it, reterritorializing it. Thus, as Haussmann in Paris—or Carlos
María de Alvear and José Ibes Limantour in Buenos Aires and Mexico City re-
spectively—had at the same time demolished and reorganized urban space in
accordance with a spectacular and past-oriented monumentalism, while the
culture industry (in the newspaper) was able to find in the new literatos agents
for the production of reorganizing images of those discourses that the city—
and the newspaper itself, in its many other facets—was in the process of dis-
mantling.24

Journalism, Fragmentation, Narrativization

The modern newspaper, like no other discursive space in the nineteenth cen-
tury, embodies the segmented temporality and spatiality distinctive of moder-
nity. It materializes—and fosters—the dissolution of codes and explosion
of stable systems of representation.25 The newspaper not only erects the new
(the other of traditional temporality) as a principle for organizing its themes,
which would be as promotional (in the advertising sense) as they were infor-
mative; the newspaper also delocalizes—even in its graphic layout of material—
the communicative process. In the newspaper, communication is detached
from an immediate context of enunciation, and is thus able to configure
an abstract life-world—never entirely experienced by its readers in the field
of their day-to-day existence. In this sense, the newspaper presupposes the
privatization of social communication, as it epitomizes the submission and
submittal of the subject caught up in the process of this privatization to a
structure of the general public that tends to obliterate collective experience in
ever greater extremes. The newspaper achieved with its layout and ordering
of language what the city was doing with its traditional public spaces. Conse-

The Chronicle and Urban Experience 

quently, one need do no more than read the newspaper as the representation
(on the very surface level of form) of the city’s arrangement: with its central,
bureaucratic, or commercial streets; with its small plazas and parks, places
of leisure and gatherings.
In part, the newspaper can be said to have become a condition of unity
for the new city. It is certain that both the city and the newspaper persist
in deploying strategies to recompose their territories (spatial and discursive)
and articulate the fragmentation. Here the businessperson, the politician,
and even the literato communicate with the private subject. In the newspaper,
articulations are established that make it possible to envision the ever deterri-
torializing city as a congruent social space: the urban subject experiences the
city not only because s/he walks through entirely delimited areas, but also be-
cause s/he reads it in a newspaper that collects and narrates the city’s distinct
fragments. But even more important, it seems, is the fact that the news-
paper’s formal organization of language (or the modern shop’s organization
of things), is traversed by principles of organization that also overdetermine
the order of urban space. The logic is profoundly fragmentary, unhierarchized
by an accumulation of fragmented codes, in which languages are imposed
one upon another, juxtaposed or simply mixed, with discourses of all kinds
derived from an unassignable historical proceeding. The newspaper, like the
city, is a segmented and derivative space par excellence.
On the other hand, fragmentation must not be read solely in formal or
descriptive terms. For Benjamin, the form of the newspaper crystallizes the
dissolution of the social—of community experience—which he saw incar-
nated in traditional narrative:

Man’s inner concerns do not have such an irrevocably private character

by nature. They do so only when he is increasingly unable to assimi-
late the data of the world around him by way of experience. Newspapers
constitute one of many evidences of such an inability. If it were the in-
tention of the press to have the reader assimilate the information it
supplies as part of his own experience, it would not achieve its pur-
pose. But its intention is just the opposite, and it is achieved: to isolate
what happens from the realm in which it could affect the experience of
the reader. The principles of journalistic information (freshness of the
news, brevity, comprehensibility, and, above all, lack of connection be-
tween the individual news items) contribute as much to this as does the
make-up of the pages and the paper’s style. (Karl Kraus never tired of
demonstrating the great extent to which the linguistic usage of news-
papers paralyzed the imagination of their readers.) . . . The replacement

    

 of the older narration by information, of information by sensation, re-
flects the increasing atrophy of existence.26

It would nevertheless be difficult to assign a specific historical place to

this type of older narrative communication, nostalgically evoked by Benja-
min. In any case, Benjamin’s reading of modern writing (in Baudelaire and
Proust, among others) as an attempt to reconstruct an organic communica-
tive project, betrays a clear indication of an ideology that actually propelled
intellectual production, above all in this initial phase of advanced capitalism.
The problematics of fragmentation are essential to understanding the
ideological function of the chronicle in Latin America’s fin de siècle. The
chronicle postulates the fragmented temporality of the city and newspaper,
even as it systematically attempts to renarrativize—to unite the past with the
present. To cite an example, if the Paris Exposition was a spectacle of novelty,
Darío’s gesture functions as its reverse, by seeing in every event a fragment
to be articulated in a continuity guaranteed by the poetic vision:

Parisian fashion is enchanting; but the modern mundane cannot sub-

stitute in the glory of allegory or symbol what has been consecrated by
Rome and Greece. . . . At night it is a phantasmagoric impression that
offers us a white door with its thousands of electric lights. . . . It is the
entrance to a country of mystery and poetry inhabited by magic. Cer-
tainly, in every soul that contemplates these splendid fairies, there arises
a sensation of infancy. . . . Here the modern of the scientific conquest is
joined to the ancient sacred icon artistry.27

To impose tradition, archaic experience, the sensation of infancy, on the

modern, tied in this instance to technology and the city: this will be the dis-
tinguishing mark of the chronicler and the culture industry proper that Darío
here describes, and in which he participates.
In Martí, however, the event—the fragment of urban temporality—is
directly related to journalistic and informative discourse. As we suggested
earlier, Martí prepares his chronicles as readings of different news bulletins
that appear in the fragmented space of the newspaper. He reads the hetero-
geneity of the newspaper and, in the same movement, reflects on the prob-
lematic of its fragmentation:

How can one put together such varied scenes? There in the resplendent
solitudes of the Arctic, some valiant explorers turn their heads at last
on their pillow of snow; here, in a colossal house, the sacerdotal and
mystical chords of exalted music, the most solemn of human arts, re-

The Chronicle and Urban Experience 

 sound before thousands of absorbed listeners. In the trees, all is green.
In the features of every face, all is happy. In Ireland, all is fearful. In
San Francisco, the enemies of the Chinese prevail. In the display cases
of bookstores shines the monumental work of an ancient of eighty-two
years. Around a rich table the Mexicans of New York gather together to
celebrate the Gloria Patri. Inflamed masses of people are united to protest
against the assassins of the English ministers in Ireland, and against the
assassins of the patriots of Ireland by English soldiers. A grandiose fes-
tival has transpired. Guiteau now enters his death cell. It is whispered
that there will be an important change in diplomatic positions.28

At first sight, it would seem that the trouble only lies in the chronicle’s
composition, its syntax. But the problem of the arrangement of news bul-
letins in the chronicle is ideologically overdetermined, precisely because in-
formation is a mode of representation that (as Benjamin has suggested) ma-
terializes the problematic of order and communication in modern society. In
other words, in rewriting the newspaper’s fragmentary existence, the chroni-
cler takes up the segmented temporality of the city on a strictly formal level.
Hence, the city, in Martí’s chronicles, is not solely a represented object but
a conjunction of verbal materials, tied to journalism, which the chronicler
seeks to dominate in the very process of representation. The chronicler sys-
tematically attempts to rearticulate the fragments, narrativize the events, in
order to recreate the organicity that the city has destroyed.
This will to order and integrate modern fragmentation, in its turn, is
semanticized in what we might call the rhetoric of strolling (retórica del paseo) in
the chronicle (not only those of Martí). That is, the narrativization of iso-
lated sections of the newspaper and city comes to be frequently represented
as the work of a subject who, while walking through the city, traces an itin-
erary in the discurrence of, or the speaking about, strolling. The stroll orders
for the subject the chaos of the city, establishing articulations, junctures,
and bridges between disjointed spaces (and events). Hence, we may read the
rhetoric of strolling as the on-site position for the principle of narrativity in
the chronicle.

Strolling and the Privatization of the Urban Subject

Beginning with the chronicle, it becomes possible to assemble a typology of

the different ways of representing the fin de siècle city. Two types of gazes
are predominant. The first, a totalizing one, presupposes the distance of the
subject as a condition for representing. As Darío writes:

    

 In the magnificent spectacle seen as an eagle would see it, which is to
say, from the heights of the Eiffel Tower, the fabulous city appears in a
manner such that it is hard to believe that one is not witnessing the real-
ization of a dream. The gaze falters, but even more the spirit before the
overwhelming, monumental perspective.29

In this representation, space is notably hierarchized: from a height, the

subject tends to demarcate urban heterogeneity, condensing its multiplicity
into the frame of a magnificent spectacle. This panoptic gaze, as Michel de
Certeau would say, is at the heart of the professionalized cartography pro-
duced by urbanists in the nineteenth century. Its logic presupposes the trans-
formation of the urban fact into a concept of the city.30
Nonetheless, the concept of the city, particularly at the end of the nine-
teenth century, was problematized as the city progressively became the space
of the event, of the contingency unleashed by the capitalist flux. In the above
Darío quote, the panoptic gaze falters: its capacity to order is minimal. In the
chronicle, walking would be an alternative way of experiencing, and super-
ceding, urban contingency.31
Through the stroll, the chronicle represents (and is fostered by) a new
type of urban entertainment, quite indicative of the transformation that the
arrangement of space undergoes at the turn of the century. Strolling—in-
deed the flâneur—became a new cultural institution. In the Argentina of the
s, López points out:

In sum, I, who had known that Buenos Aires of , [as] patriotic,
simple, part marketplace, part-Papal grounds, and part village, now
found myself with a people of great European pretension who wasted
their time in strolling about [en flanear] the streets, and in which no pre-
destined generals any longer reigned, nor the [old aristocratic] Trevexo
family, nor the Berrotaráns.32

Of course, walking around the city, even strolling, was a millenarian activity,
doubtless tied to the structure of the public square, center of a relatively
organic and traditional city. But as López suggests, strolling had become a
distinct form of entertainment, which he himself relates to the moderniza-
tion of Buenos Aires.
Strolling is a kind of entertainment, distinctive of those fin de siècle
cities subordinated to an intense mercantilization that aside from erecting
productive labor and efficiency as supreme values, instituted the spectacle of
consumption as a new form of diversion. The leisure time of the new urban
subject becomes mercantilized as well.

The Chronicle and Urban Experience 

 In México pintoresco, artístico y monumental (Picturesque, Artistic, and Monumen-
tal Mexico, ), Manuel Rivera Cambas highlights the class character of the
new entertainment, which even threatened to displace the theater as a center
for diversion:

In actuality, it is the evening stroll [that is] a necessity for the social class
that may dedicate itself to respite; in other times, it was not the stroll but
the theater that was the favored diversion, solicited by Mexican society.33

Strolling is corollary to the production of luxury and fashion, within an

emergent culture of consumption, as Cambas describes:

The streets of Plateros include establishments with everything that can

satisfy the most demanding caprice of taste or fashion: great shop win-
dows with signs, behind enormous glass walls; a multitude of elegant
damsels traverse the streets. (p. )

On the other hand, strolling is not simply a way of experiencing the city.
It is, indeed, a way of representing it, of looking at it and recounting what is
seen. In strolling the urban, privatized subject approximates the city with a
gaze from which s/he sees an object on exhibit. Thus, the windowed display
becomes an emblematic object for the chronicler. Justo Sierra remarks:

How does one translate the French verb flâner into Spanish? To wander
capriciously with the security of not being chased by any inner thoughts,
like a fly by a spider; to wander with the certainty of perpetual distrac-
tions for the eyes, with the certainty of forever objectifying, of not falling
into the power of the subjective . . . ; to wander jostled by people, lean-
ing against the store display windows . . . gazing into the interiors of
houses.34

Uncomfortable among the multitude, yet simultaneously exhausted by

the interiority, the private subject sets out to objectify, to reify urban move-
ment by means of a gaze that transforms the city into a contained object
behind the store display window. In this respect, the shop window becomes
a privileged figure for analysis, a metaphor for the chronicle itself as a media-
tion between the private subject and the city.35 It is a metaphor for the dis-
tance between this subject and the urban heterogeneity that the gaze seeks to
dominate: a figure that contains the city’s image behind a glass window that
transforms the image into an object of consumption.
In Gómez Carrillo, the chronicle’s consumerist poetic is even more
emphatic. Here, we also note the attraction that creates an impression of

    

a sumptuousness of the store display windows, with the perpetual lure of
the luxurious, the lustrous, the feminine. The chronicler-flaneur, oppressed
by urban noise, seeks refuge. In the areas of commerce for wealthy goods
(Florida Street, in Buenos Aires), s/he encounters an alternative place:

[Florida Street] has been made with exquisite artistry, of what in Europe
is the most distinguished, the most animated, the most brilliant, the
most modern. . . .
And it in fact is, with its innumerable stores of sumptuous ameni-
ties, with its golden signs that run across the balconies, advertising suits
and gowns . . . with its store display windows full of precious stones,
with its numerous art exhibits. And at the same time it is something
else, more cheerful and intimate: it is almost a salon in which no one is
in a hurry.36

In the activity of strolling, the chronicler transforms the city into a salon,
into an intimate space, precisely by means of this consumerist gaze that
turns an urban and mercantile activity into an object of aesthetic and even
erotic pleasure. The private citizen’s attempt to contain the city, to transform
it into an intimate and familiar space, belies the considerable anxiety of the
chronicler-flaneur. This anxiety is, in various ways, the drive that brings about
both the activities of strolling and writing about the city in the chronicle. The
uneasiness of the chronicler-flaneur in the city is founded on the redistribu-
tion of urban space in accordance with the opposition between zones of pri-
vacy and the public, commercial sector. In the activity of strolling, the private
subject departs from a residential zone to become a tourist in his or her own
city, in the centers of public space, ever-more commercialized, becoming for-
eign and alienating to the private (bourgeois) subject.37 Consumption—and
the discourses of mass culture that sustain it—will begin to mediate between
the two polarized fields of urban experience.
Let us take a look at the history of this polarization in the city of Buenos
Aires:

The commerce of colonial Buenos Aires, to a great degree the product

of contraband, came to be realized in the infinity of small living units in
the same apartment, as rooms that would lead to the street or hallway.
As they continued to extend outward, this system overtook the most im-
portant houses, one by one, with units that began to include particular
rooms for rent in their construction. But the intensification of activities
and the higher volume of markets posed problems of space that forced

The Chronicle and Urban Experience 

 the living areas to move toward the back [of the buildings], and finally,
the entire building had to be used for business. The iron structures en-
abled the patios to be roofed, through which a wide covered and lighted
space could be obtained. Later came the next step, consisting of special
constructions for commercial enterprises. Store buildings spreading out
along a row were characteristic of the epoch, as much in the city as in
the provinces; they had general stores and salons for the exhibition and
sale of products.38

The other face of this division of labor that cuts across urban space was
the rise of new residential zones. In Buenos Aires, the first properly residen-
tial street was the Avenida Alvear around . Residential zones, toward the
north of the city, were distinguished by their

introversion, which translated their front gardens into facades and de-
fenses. They are mansions to be admired from afar. . . . The spectator
can hardly approach them, the iron weight of the Italian or Louis XV
grille, the striated garden wall or the balustrade of gray pilasters ob-
scures a clear view. The house may be seen up close only by someone
who has access to it.39

The interior, an essential theme in fin de siècle literature, is the space

of a new individuality that presupposes the progressive dissolution of public,
communitarian spaces in the modern city. In the stroll of the private subject
—from the estrangement that his/her tourist gaze over urban space implies—
s/he attempts to get away from the interior, in a gesture that, albeit not neces-
sarily critical, in any case reveals the need to reconstruct and consolidate the
fields of collective, class identity. The city itself (asserting the reterritorializing
capacity of modern power) would provide the means toward the reinvention
of the community. This would be one of the functions of both the chronicle
and the culture industry in that epoch inaugurating the modern era.

Strolling and the Reinvention of Public Space

The stroller is a curious subject. S/he sets out to expand the boundaries of his
or her private domain in the chronicle. By strolling, not only does s/he reify
the flux of the city, turning it into material for consumption and incorpo-
rating it into that curious receptacle, or showcase, that is the chronicle; the
chronicler-stroller also seeks out, in the touristic digression that individual-
izes and distinguishes him or her from the urban mass, the signs for a virtual

    

shared identity in the features of certain others. In response to the solitude of
the interior, the chronicler investigates the forms of privacy outside him or
her, thus becoming a voyeur, an urban onlooker. In Gutiérrez Nájera, we find
the sign of the voyeur: ‘‘I have set out to wander [ flâner] for awhile through
the streets. . . . Sad are those who walk around the streets with their but-
toned overcoats, looking through the cracks of doors for the fire hearth of
home.’’ 40 If the city (and the newspaper itself ) had fragmented and priva-
tized social experience, the chronicle in contrast created simulacra, images
of an organic and healthy community. This is the function of orality in the
chronicle, which among the mercantilized and technologized discourses of
the newspaper, often represented itself as a conversation or familiar chat.
An emblematic short story by Gutiérrez Nájera, ‘‘La novela del tranvía’’
(‘‘The Streetcar Novel’’), offers us a good example of the way in which the
chronicler, in his stroll through the city, reinvents a collective space. In this
particular instance, the collective space is brought about by means of gos-
sip—a mode of traditional representation, the extreme of nonprivacy.41 The
stroller takes a streetcar and ends up in a radically unfamiliar landscape:

No, Mexico City does not begin at the Palacio Nacional nor does it end
in the Avenue Reforma. I give you my word that the city is much more.
It is a great tortoise that stretches its dislocated paws toward the four
cardinal points. These paws are dirty and hairy. (p. )

Estrangement, on the outskirts of the city, is projected onto the rela-

tionships among the very people inside the streetcar: ‘‘Who might be my
neighbor? Surely, he was married, and with daughters’’ (p. ). The sub-
ject, throughout the chronicle, does not simply inform us about the city;
against the grain of information, he conjectures, invents, and in the final in-
stance, makes of the chronicle a tale, a fiction.42 Here again, we see the anti-
informative gesture of the chronicle, which continually violates the norms of
journalistic referentiality. Moreover, fictionality is here concomitant with the
will to re-create (via gossip) the collective space that had been precisely disar-
ticulated by urban fragmentation and dislocation. In ‘‘The Streetcar Novel,’’
the narrator invents a life for each one of the passengers; he invents story
lines with a consistent irony that emphasizes the impossibility of knowing
the other’s privacy—which is to say, the growing difficulty of conceiving a
vital collective, a shared sphere in the modern city.
Given its brevity, we would like to cite one of Gutiérrez Nájera’s chroni-
cles in which the functions of gossip and the voyeur (in response to urban
solitude) are even more transparent:

The Chronicle and Urban Experience 

 Una cita [A Rendezvous]

In the mornings I am accustomed to strolling through the sidewalks

of the surrounding neighborhood and through the Chapultepec park, a
site favored by lovers.
This has lent me the opportunity to act as an involuntary witness
to more than one amorous rendezvous. Three days ago I saw arrive in
an elegant carriage one beautiful unknown madame, dark-haired, with
fiery eyes, and a slender and elegant figure. A young man, an adoles-
cent, almost a child, waited expectantly at the entrance to the park. She
alighted from the carriage, which the coachman discreetly led away, ap-
proached the young man, who was trembling, respectful, flushed as a
poppy, demonstrating by his general behavior that it was his first ren-
dezvous, and it would be necessary for the madame to take his arm,
which he did not dare offer her. The two lovers both began to walk down
the street apart from each other and alone. The couple interested me and
I followed them at a certain distance. The madame cried, the boy’s emo-
tion carried him away as the conversation that was transpiring between
them became animated. Some phrases reached my ears: they were not
two lovers: they were mother and son. Without wanting to, I became
aware of an entire history, a true novel that interested me extraordinarily,
which forced me to be not only indiscreet, but disloyal, because my curi-
osity, which had prevailed over my scruples, made me draw ever closer
to the couple who, distracted in the telling of their misfortunes, did not
notice me, did not hear my steps on the dry leaves of trees, scattered
on the ground. That woman was an angel, a martyr; that boy a human
being worthy of respect, interest, and compassion, who had sacrificed
himself to the repose and respect of society for his mother. There were
in that tale two damned souls who deserve to be branded with the exe-
cutioner’s iron: [the] two men who have sacrificed those two wretched
beings worthy of a better fate.43

This drawing ever closer to the other is distinctive of the gossiper’s curi-
osity. He posits not only a hearing of the other’s life, but a telling as well; a
desire to make this life public. The other side, the erased referent of gossip, is
urban privacy, the fragmentation of the collective that makes the city an inter-
section of enigmatic discourses, at times illegible, from the perspective of the
privatized subject. Certainly, Gutiérrez Nájera here anticipates some aspects
of Julio Cortázar’s ‘‘Las babas del diablo’’ (‘‘Blow Up’’). But if in Cortázar’s
story the other is in the last instance an evanescent object, in Gutiérrez Nájera,
the danger and rampant sexuality of the city is domesticated in the affirma-

    

tion of a familiar structure. Literature—fiction, in this case—still commands
the power to posit the reinvention of a stable, organic space, in contradistinc-
tion to the danger of the city that unmakes traditional forms of familiarity.
On the other hand, the class character of the constitution of any public
space whatsoever must be stressed, as it governs the field of identity. Gossip,
in the end, does not include everyone. In the very oral quality of the chronicle,
which in general continues to be organized as causeries or conversations at
the turn of the century, the exclusivity that the voice of the gossip-tale asserts
and the anxiety with which the chronicler protects the borders of a reconsti-
tuted community are obvious. As Gutiérrez Nájera writes:

The poor chronicle, of an animal traction, cannot compete with these

lightning trains. And what is left for us, miserable chroniclers . . . ? We
have arrived at the banquet during dessert. Should I serve you, young
lady, a pousse-café? . . .
On the other hand, this moment is propitious for pleasant, well-
intentioned conversation and . . . of the future. Oh fickle enchantresses!
The fan has come open in your hands.44

Orality—pleasant conversation—may indeed be opposed to the tech-

nologized language of information; and even protected as a simulacrum of
familiarity, of (a certain) community, within the fragmented project of the
newspaper. But, above all, it is an orality that interpellates (not without irony,
as in Gutiérrez Nájera) the readers of a social class capable of identifying
themselves with this kind of community, epitomized in the pleasant con-
versation of the club. One must avoid the abstract idealization of spaces of
discussion, including their rhetorical models, which are in any case always
socially overdetermined. The orality of the chronicle is an inclusive proceed-
ing, a vehicle for the formation of the social subject. Yet this inclusion of a
certain kind of other in the chronicle has its exclusive function as well. What
would exist outside it, in its exterior?

Strolling and the Representation of the Proletarian Exterior

The chronicle, in its archive of dangers of modern daily life, foregrounds the
problematic of proletarianization in a prominent position, always in sight
of the anxiety-ridden chronicler. Even for Martí, who throughout the s
supported the struggles of the active union movement in New York, the rep-
resentation of new social forces is irreducibly ambiguous: ‘‘The Bowery, a
Broadway for the poor, had an air of battle [during an  strike]: and
many a robust and somber man inspired respect, but also fear.’’ 45 Before the

The Chronicle and Urban Experience 

working-class crowd, the police console the chronicler: ‘‘the brown heads of
the police emerge from among the black mass’’ (vol. , p. ). ‘‘And rising
up from the middle of the crowd, covered in humble blue hoods, are the emi-
nent heads of the city police, who order the mob’’ (vol. , p. ). Before the
physical, uncontainable energy of the multitudes, discourse in the chronicle
will continually effectuate its own disciplinary mechanisms.
For the chronicler, facing an emergent working-class culture, one option
was the obliteration of the dangerous body of the other, by means of a decora-
tive sleight of hand. Even around the time of the Independence Centennial,
in an Argentina full of immigrants with an emergent union movement, and
deeply influenced by anarchism, it was still possible for Gómez Carillo to
write the following:

And if some doubt seizes me, it would have no more to do with the
splendid processions of the little women workers who march, light and
rhythmic, in search of some nearby street to la Paix . . . they are the same
as ever, they are those of yesterday, they are those of evermore, they are
those who, with their genteel coquetries, while away the hours in which
wealthy madames sleep; they are the humble temptresses, who pass the
time stroking visions of love and happiness.46

In Gómez Carillo, the decorative gesture is exacerbated. Conversely,

much of Argentine literature from the s (by authors such as Eugenio
Cambaceres and Julián Martel Miró) had related the terror that the new ‘‘bar-
barian’’—following the rhetoric of the epoch—produced among the elite.
Martel’s narrator in La bolsa (The Stock Exchange), after describing the extremely
rich interior of the protagonist’s apartment, points out:

On the other side of the gilded iron gate, faintly sketched out in the
storm, shapeless humps of people . . . ; humps among which the doctor
sees illuminated two eyes, like those of a cat, which perhaps belonged
to some hungry one of those who wandered through the night . . . with
a knife in their belts.47

The phobia does not necessarily contradict the decorative gesture.

Rather, the embellishment of urban misery is one of the effects of terror, of
the paranoia of a class that in its own modernizing project to eradicate rural
barbarism had created new contradictions. It was precisely these contradic-
tions that had begun to relativize their hegemony at the turn of the century.
And doubtless, the city was the space of these contradictions in the epoch of
the modernist chronicle.
In response to these tensions, the chronicle elaborates other ways of

    

representing the working-class exterior through the figure of the stroller. The
almost touristic divagations toward the margins of the city will be another
distinct gesture of the chronicler-stroller. In these strolls, the chronicler
emerges once again as a producer of images of otherness, contributing to the
elaboration of a knowledge about the ways of life for subaltern classes, and
thus, serving to neutralize their threat.
Let us focus on a chronicle by Eduardo Wilde, ‘‘Sin rumbo’’ (‘‘Aimless’’),
significantly titled after Cambaceres’s later novel. ‘‘Walking, walking, I went
toward the edge of the city, by the estates. . . . On the outskirts could be seen
men and women who once inhabited the center, and whom the city, in its
eternal flux and reflux, had thrown out to the edges.’’ 48 The first mark that
differentiates the other is his or her lack of property, the lack of an interior
that defines the subject who strolls by:

Further out, the small houses and ranches are disseminated, with their
microscopic and dislocated windows, through which an empty and dis-
possessed interior may be seen, where a family without genealogy conducts
the expediencies of a hungry life. (p. ; italics added)

Dispossession and lack of genealogy: beyond a description of the other,

the chronicle here fixes the proper field of the subject’s identity. The subject
goes to the edge, to the boundary of the city, not to be other, but rather to as-
sert his or her difference; or in other words, to affirm his or her own identity.
If the other is, by definition, the outside or exterior of discourse—the
contingent-particularity par excellence—in Wilde (as in Sarmiento earlier),
we find the functionality of the classificatory tableau, the generalizing scene
that condenses and orders heterogeneity and danger: ‘‘All have the mark of
misery and vice on their faces and this way of looking like beggars that shocks
and saddens’’ (p. ). But even in Wilde, the contingency of the particular
resists its transformation by the tableau and stereotype:

[A beggar] approached me, asking me for pennies in order to com-

plete . . . a quota destined for his sustenance that day. I had left to
see a forever beautiful nature and to resolve ideas in my head, while I
reflected various aspects [of my ideas] with my senses. The poor gentle-
man wholly unsettled everything for me, entirely changing the course of
my thoughts. (p. )

Contact with the beggar interrupts and prevents the narrator’s self-
centeredness, disarticulating the generalizing frame, the stereotype, which
the stroller invents as a way of ordering the chaos of the increasingly prole-
tarianized city.

The Chronicle and Urban Experience 

 This disciplinary, ordering aspect of the stroll is significant, as it later
becomes a narrative stratagem in the distinctive criminology of the fin de
siècle. In La mala vida en Buenos Aires (Criminal Life in Buenos Aires) from , for
example, criminologist Eusebio Gómez writes:

Now let us enter into the lower foundations of the city of Buenos Aires;
let us see how the gentlemen of vice and crime operate: let us surprise
them in their sinister machinations; let us pass through the caverns
where they gather together to deliberate or enjoy the benefits of their
parasitism; let us listen to their conversations; let us examine them in
all the details of their personality. It will be necessary to sacrifice many
conventions for this, and above all, to master our profound repugnan-
cies; but let us do it, and at the end of the journey, in the intimacy of
our self, certainly there will exist for them neither sentiment of hate nor
desire for vengeance.49

The rhetoric of strolling, previously formalized in the chronicle, be-

comes a paradigmatic mode of representation for the dangers of a new urban
life.

Chroniclers and Prostitutes

Perhaps no other social figure of the period incarnates the danger of the pro-
letarianized city like the prostitute. In discourses about the city, the prostitute
is a condensation (the Mexican naturalist novel Santa by Gamboa offers us
a classic example) of the dangers inherent in urban heterogeneity. As Georg
Simmel has pointed out, prostitution is the sign of the impact of the laws
of exchange on the most intimate or private zones of modern life.50 In other
words, the prostitute represents the intervention of the market into the most
protected areas of the interior. Prostitution, far from being an anomaly, may
be seen as the model for human relations under capitalism. Discourses on
modernity never cease to reflect on this, condensing in the prostitute not only
a figure of modern sexuality and a threat to familial, bourgeois living, but the
danger of the new working class as well.
In a lucid reading of Édouard Manet’s Olympia, Thomas J. Clark traces
the relation between the bourgeois culture of Paris, prostitution, and the
ideological function—forever tense and contradictory—of impressionism.
For Clark, the representation of the prostitute in Manet was a reflection on a
deterritorialized sexuality, entirely problematic for the dominant culture not
only for the display of nudity (and of prostitution itself ), but also because

    

such nudity was a sign of class.51 The impressionist, in an extremely contra-
dictory manner, would end up covering this nudity, subordinating its par-
ticularity (and danger) to canonical and processed forms of the naked body.
According to Clark, the radicality of Manet lies in the ambiguity and the apo-
rias that confront the placement of the other in bodily form as the kind of
ironic naked body that Olympia represents.
In fin de siècle Buenos Aires, prostitution became a problem that threat-
ened even the disciplinary capacity of the urban police. As Gómez Carrillo
had himself noted in El encanto de Buenos Aires (The Charm of Buenos Aires), pros-
titutes appeared in the street, uncontained by the institutional sites of the
brothel or rooming house. Hence, the prostitute was one of the privileged ob-
jects for the science of criminology, as the proliferation of books like Eusebio
Gómez’s La mala vida en Buenos Aires adequately proves. Moreover, as Ernesto
Goldar has shown, an immigratory flux of prostitutes impacted fin de siècle
Buenos Aires, many of whom were oftentimes involuntarily brought over
by the sinister organization Zwi Migdal. This organization administered the
trata de blancas (white slave trade) that would explode in the s (and would
be essential to the fiction of Roberto Arlt).52
For us, this background is significant: it refers to the obliterated aspects
of city life—or better yet, to the city decorated and domesticated by many
chronicles of the time. Gómez Carrillo writes:

Before lying down I turned to open my window so that I might contem-

plate the spectacle of the expressive street. . . .
The slow coming and going, as slow as it is everywhere, of the
caress vendors, suggested ideas of an infinite piety. Ah! The courtesans
of the Avenida de Mayo! . . . If only they had something provocative,
some perversion, something of the diabolical! . . . But they go, the poor
ones, one after the other, without coquetry, almost without sustenance,
and when they pause every so often in order to attract a man who may
pass by hurriedly or distracted, one notes that the movement of their
heads, jerking sidewise, is purely mechanical. From my observatory I see
neither their gazes nor their smiles. But I know well what they are like.53

Here, the subject is no longer a flâneur; the site of the gaze is much more
secure and protected: an interior from which, once again, the particularity of
the object—and its threatening aspect—is erased, producing a generalized
scene. The prostitute is a courtesan who inspires piety. Yet in spite of her piety,
the subject insists on marking out the distance: from the observatory, the
gaze domesticates the street.

The Chronicle and Urban Experience 

 On the other hand, more empirical than this detached gaze was Gómez
Carillo’s strolls to outlying brothels. Gómez Carrillo passed by these as well,
such as in a chronicle entitled ‘‘El tango’’:

It is a faraway barrio, sordid and almost deserted. On the ground, full of

water, the strange lights from public lighting are reflected with a spec-
tral pallor. Along the sidewalk, in essence a path, as one here would say,
we walk along in leaps over the puddles. . . .
No longer are they the daughters of France, no, neither the subtle
and stylized graces as we long to see, but only the natural flowers of the por-
teño mire and the porteño undulations.54 (Italics added)

The chronicler did not need to see a stylized prostitute: stylization (once
again the signet of a literary identity) is what his discourse provides to the
represented world, dominating it. Over the despicable wretchedness of the
city, a map of another city—strictly bookish or bibliographic—is imposed:

But the strange, the inexplicable, is that the tango that I see this eve-
ning in this low and vile bouge of Buenos Aires is not different from
the Parisian tango in any essential detail. The dancers of Luna Park are
noticeably more beautiful, wealthier, more gracious, and more airy than
those here. The dance is the same. Does such a phenomenon consist of
the fact that the influence of Parisian refinement has come to even this
wretched and faraway neighborhood? (p. –)

It is the chronicler who imposes Parisian refinement, the stylization of a

certain literary city on the wretched neighborhood, for:

Where is the city? . . . Where is the city? . . . I also ask it myself when, on
certain tepid afternoons, I lose my sense of interest, guiding a miniscule
carriage without fixed direction through the avenue foliage. (p. )

The city has been erased by an aestheticizing discourse.

There are many encounters between chroniclers and prostitutes, not
always as sublimated as in Gómez Carrillo. In Darío’s chronicles about Paris
(the ideal city), he betrays a certain anxiety:

On the right border, throughout the enormous artery of the boulevard,

the luxurious vehicles pass toward the elegant theaters. Later on, you
have the dinners at the expensive cafés, where the women of the world

    

 who are highly prized are at work in their traditional job of dazzling the
initiates. . . .

Near the Magdalena and the Concord plaza is the famous place that
would tempt the pen of a writer of comedies. There these madames
flourish their magnificent feathers, present the most audacious tu-
nics. . . .

Throughout the streets of Fauborg Montmartre and of Notre-Dame-de-

Lorette, a procession of partygoers ascends every night, as cosmopoli-
tan as they are Parisian, aficionados of the Moulin-Rouge and of white
nights. No one has any literary and artistic recollections anymore for
what was years ago a refuge for artists and writers [literatos]. Besides, the
mercantilization of art is already known.55 (Italics added)

On the basis of this account of prostitutes with tunics and magnificent feath-
ers, would it not be possible to speak of a modernist prostitution? Certainly,
the remarkable thing about this chronicle is how, after describing a prosti-
tute, Darío reflects on the mercantilization of art, one of his favorite topics.
He continues:

Nocturnal Paris is light [n.] and unique, delight and harmony; and hélas!
delight and crime. . . .

It knows that with gold everything can be obtained, in the gilded hours
of the golden villa, where love transforms this corner of happiness,
where some years ago one dreamed dreams of art and loved with less
interest. . . . It is said that the artists of today, the same artists, do not
care for any more than profit. (p. –)

From prostitution to the mercantilization of art: in Darío, the slippage

is constant, and forces us to at once suspect the chronicler’s introjection
of the prostitute’s condition into his own practice. For is not the chronicle
precisely an incorporation of art into the market, into the emergent culture
industry? And was not mercantilization, following the idealism professed by
many modernists, a form of prostitution?
A strange stroll—a schizo-stroll, one would have to add—of the poet
Fernández in De sobremesa (After Dinner) by José Asunción Silva, lends weight to
the suggestion:

It was twenty minutes to twelve when I left for the boulevard and I was
confused by the human river that swarmed through it. . . . I walked for
a quarter of an hour with a firm enough step and . . . Transparent cards? a

The Chronicle and Urban Experience 

 boy said to me, putting away the obscene package when I turned to look
at him.

The light from the windows of a bronze shop attracted me, and walking
slowly, as I felt that my spirits had abandoned me, I was about to stop at
the entrance to one of them.

A pale and flaccid woman, with the face of hunger, her eyelashes and
mouth tinged with carmine, made me shudder from head to foot when
she touched the trimming of my heavy leather overcoat that enveloped
me and a psst, psst, that she directed to an obese and sanguinary En-
glishman, sounded insidiously in my ears. . . . I later noticed myself in
the shop window. . . . It seemed to me that I was a prisoner between
two glass walls and that I would never be able to leave. . . . A heavy mist
floated before my eyes, a violent neuralgia passed through my head from
one temple to the other, like a ray of pain, and I collapsed onto the ice.56

The stroller initially appears protected by a shield that envelops him, that
interiorizes him in a heavy leather overcoat. At the foot of the shop’s window,
however, his contact with the prostitute shakes him: stripped of subjectivity,
he immediately believes himself a prisoner between two glass walls.
The metonymic displacement from the prostitute to a prisoner trapped
in the window display is revealing. As we have seen earlier, the store window
is one of the privileged objects for the stroller: it refers to consumption as a
mediation between the urban subject and his world. At the same time, the
window is a metaphor by means of which a certain fin de siècle writing (par-
ticularly in the chronicle) represents its own subordination to the laws of the
market.
Fernández’s stroll is doubly significant: it situates the subject trapped by
the glass contiguous to the prostitute who sells her services. And this occurs
precisely in a novel where the economic exchange of artistic objects and the
general issue of mercantilization are fundamental.
The complaints—and little obsessions—of the modernists against
money were many. On the other side of their frequent and anxiety-ridden
claims to purity (in modernity even purity is highly valued, as is the case
with the uselessness of luxury), the poet figures as a salaried worker, above
all in chronicles. Once the writer—his protective veil broken—recognizes
his reflection in the glass showcase, he begins to see himself as an other,
at times as a prostitute. Among other things, the decorative assemblage of
beauty becomes complicated. Beginning with this moment, the literato, even
the chronicler, ceases to be a compliant flâneur.

    

Martí: The Chronicle and Quotidian Existence

The chronicle is a type of minor literature, a fragmentary and derivative form,

yet essential to the literary field at the turn of the century. As a minor form,
generically imprecise, it enabled the representation of diverse experiences
linked to a capitalist field of daily existence that remained excluded from the
more stable forms of literary (or artistic) representation. Yet abstractly speak-
ing, it is impossible to postulate the political sign of the minor form. As we
have seen in the case of the chronicle, its very lack of discipline, its formal
flexibility, actually enabled it to take on a disciplinary function, an emplot-
ment of order for an as yet unclassified quotidian existence.
Even so, it is certain that the heterogeneity of the chronicle, at least in
Martí, gave the writer an exit from the field of art and high culture. In Martí,
these departures resist producing a decorative image of the city. In contrast
to the decorative function that the modernist chronicle tends to satisfy, Martí
records the misery and exploitation generated by the most advanced forms of
modernity during that period in the United States:

From the rooftops of the neighboring houses, which are the most com-
mon in poor neighborhoods, clusters of legs hang down.
From below, from far below, one sees there, in the heights of the
seventh floor, a red shirt raising a mug full of beer, like a drop of blood
on which another drop of milk has fallen. The moon leaves sulfurous
tints on the blond-haired heads, and the pale faces vent their spleen.
Searching for cooler bricks to rest on, from one chimney to another
the exhausted workers, their hair tangled, mouths drooping, swearing
and staggering, wiping the streams of sweat with their hands, as if they
were unstitching their entrails, pass by half-naked, like dwarves. On the
sidewalk where the children assuage their parched stomachs by throw-
ing themselves facedown on the half-warm tiles, the soulless mothers,
weakened by the routine of the house, fatal in the summer, stretch
their feet beneath a sickly tree or on the steps of the staircase out-
side; their eyebrows are caverns; their eyes, embers or prayers; whether
their breasts can be seen does not matter to them; they hardly have the
strength to silence the pathetic scream of the dying creature wrapped in
their skirts.57

Here, the emphatic distance that separates the subject from the repre-
sented object, the working-class body, can be compared to the function of
distantiation that we had seen earlier—a semantic and ideologically charged
estrangement, remarkable in this instance for its grotesque treatment (noth-

The Chronicle and Urban Experience 

ing celebratory) of the description. Fragmentation, as a characteristic feature
of the other, penetrates the descriptive format itself. But equally extraordinary
is the absence of embellishment in the description of misery. The body of the
other, a conglomerate of fragments, appears in threatening opposition to the
subject, but remains untamed or undomesticated. Misery here is neither pic-
turesque nor docile, in contrast to the rhetoric of strolling in Wilde or Gómez
Carrillo. Martí’s chronicles do not decorate, nor do they resolve the tensions
of the city; to the contrary, it would seem that the violent fragmentation of
the other’s body disperses into the very space of discourse, the secure place
of the subject who also seeks to impose a distance. This kind of description
went entirely against that of the patrons of stylized prose who prevailed in
the realm of the modernist chronicle.
Toward , Martí’s first texts about New York (where he certainly was
no longer a tourist) record his ambiguous position before marginal cultures
and the workers of the city. A position of distance, and even of fear, but at the
same time of affiliation:

I love the silence and the quietude. Poor [Thomas] Chatterton made
sense in his desperate longings for the delights of solitude. The plea-
sures of cities begin for me when the motives that produce pleasure
for the rest begin to disappear. The true day for my soul dawns in the
middle of the night. Even though last night in my nocturnal, habitual
stroll many sad scenes caused me grief. An old man strolled by silently
beneath a streetlamp, dressed in that style that reveals at once the good
fortune that we have had and the bad times that are now on us. His eyes,
fixed on the people who passed, were filled with tears. . . . He could not
articulate even one word. (vol. , )

The stroller seeks out an alternative space in the city, in the solitude of the
night. Yet in his search for an empty place—his own—in the city, the subject
is interpellated by the gaze of the other. Perhaps it may be possible to read
here not only an encounter, but a projection of the subject onto the other as
well. It is an other who reveals ‘‘the good fortune that we have had and the
bad times that are now upon us.’’ Indeed, these words describe the exiled
Martí himself, recently arrived in New York, and from the very first writings,
subordinated to the market as a salaried writer. Regardless of his irreducible
contradictions, for Martí, the writer is in fact an other, the writer in New York is
a worker. And the chronicle is the site where this concept is put into practice.
On the other hand, Martí’s nearness to the marginalized areas of the
city—to the antiaesthetic material of the city—cannot be explained solely in
terms of the personal experience of exile. As pointed out earlier, his relation

    

is mediated by the struggles at work within the intellectual field: struggles
between different positions and literary concepts. In Martí, the rejection of
writing as urban decoration assumes a critique of the incorporation of the
aesthetic as an autonomous sphere by the culture industry. This critique,
however, also finds its support in lower and minor forms of journalism in
order to attack a certain type of high intellectual:

The history that we continue to live is more difficult to grasp and recount
than that which is spit out in the books of ages past: the latter is only for
crowning with roses, like a meek and gentle ox; the other, slippery and
many headed like an octopus, suffocates those who would try to reduce
it to a graphic form. A detail finely perceived of what is happening in the
present; [or] the sudden pulsation in time with the human heartstrings,
is worth more than those churned-out facts and pyrotechnic generaliza-
tions used so often in brilliant prose and oratory. . . .
[When] you speak face-to-face in the plazas with the hungry with-
out work, in the omnibus with the needy driver, in the small shops with
the young worker, over the fetid tables with the bohemian cigar ven-
dors and polacos [Polish] . . . , then the scenes of fecund horror from the
French Revolution will turn to confront you with a terrible reality; and
you learn that today in New York, in Chicago, in Saint Louis, in Milwau-
kee, in San Francisco, there ferments the dark yeast that brought the
bread of France to ripen with blood.58

The chronicle offered Martí an (deterritorialized) exit to the street. It en-

abled him to launch a critique of the book, as well as a reflection on the risks
of the autonomous will of literature as a phenomenon of modernity. Thus
began Martí’s critique of the interior, now projected onto the most miniscule
testimonies of capitalist quotidian existence—testimonies made at times
with the very verbal, fragmented, and derivative material of the modern city.

Notes

 José Martí, Obra literaria (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), . On the relation between
the chronicle and modern temporality, see Fina García Marruz’s useful reading of the Escenas,
‘‘El tiempo en la crónica norteamericana de José Martí,’’ in En torno a José Martí, ed. Fina
García Marruz et al. (Bordeaux, France: Editions Bière, ).
 Rubén Darío, Peregrinaciones (Paris: Librería de la Vinda de Ch. Bouret, ), . The chroni-
cles on Paris included in this book initially appeared in La Nación as Darío’s correspondences
on the  Paris Exposition.
 Rubén Darío, ‘‘En Paris,’’ Peregrinaciones, in Obras completas, Viajes y crónicas, vol.  (Madrid: Fro-
disio Aguado, ), –.

The Chronicle and Urban Experience 

  Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth-Century,’’ in Reflections (New York:
Schocken Books, ), .
 Rubén Darío, ‘‘En el gran palacio,’’ Peregrinaciones, in Obras completas, Viajes y crónicas, vol. 
(Madrid: Frodisio Aguado, ), .
 Enrique Gómez Carrillo, El encanto de Buenos Aires (Madrid: Perlado, Pez y Ca, ), .
 María Luisa Bastos, ‘‘La crónica modernista de Enrique Gómez Carrillo o la función de la
trivialidad,’’ Sur – (): –.
 Enrique Gómez Carrillo’s project to generate an applied literature, a useful art for the emer-
gent culture industry, can be found in a privileged instance in La mujer y la moda. El teatro de
Pierrot (Madrid: Mundo Latino, ). Here, Gómez Carrillo points out: ‘‘Fashion is superior
to logic, higher than beauty itself ’’ (p. ).
 Rubén Darío, Azul (Barcelona: F. Granada y Compañía, ), –.
 José Martí, ‘‘Oscar Wilde,’’ La Nación,  December , in Obra literaria (Caracas: Biblioteca
Ayacucho, ), . Regarding the reification of the aesthetic sphere, it is appropriate to
recall these words of Benjamin: ‘‘If the concept of culture is a problematical one for histori-
cal materialism, the disintegration of culture into commodities to be possessed by mankind
is unthinkable for it. . . . The concept of culture as the embodiment of entities that are con-
sidered independently, if not of the production process in which they arose, then of that
in which they continue to survive, is fetishistic’’ (Walter Benjamin, One Way Street [London:
New Left Books, ], ).
 See Angel Rama, La ciudad letrada (Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, ), esp. the chap-
ter entitled ‘‘La ciudad modernizada.’’ See also Rafael Gutiérrez Giradot, Modernismo (Barce-
lona: Montesinos, ), esp. –.
 José Martí, Obras completas, vol.  (Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, –), 
[hereafter OC, followed by volume and page number].
 Domingo F. Sarmiento, ‘‘Los temblores de Chile,’’ Obras, vol.  (Santiago, Chile: Imprenta de
Gutenberg, –).
 Martí, OC, vol. , .
 José Luìs Romero, Latinoamérica: las ciudades y las ideas (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, ), esp.
the chapters ‘‘Las ciudades patricias’’ and ‘‘Las ciudades burguesas.’’
 The transformation of Paris after  was a privileged object of study for Benjamin in his
(inconclusive) study on the Parisian arcades and thoroughfares. See Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Paris,
Capital of the Nineteenth-Century,’’ in Reflections. Thomas J. Clark has studied the relation
of the Haussmannization of Paris to systems of representation in The Painting of Modern Life:
Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ).
 Romero, Latinoamérica, p. xx.
 On the change in urban structure in Europe since the end of the sixteenth century, Lewis
Mumford indicates that the ‘‘new forces favored expansion and dispersion in every direc-
tion, from the colonization of the ultramar to the organization of new industries, whose
technological perfections cancelled . . . practical as well as symbolic’’ (The City in History: Its
Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects [New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, ), .
 Federico Gamboa, Apariencias (Buenos Aires: Jacobo Peuser, ), –.
 Lucio V. López, La gran aldea (Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Martín Biedna, ), .
 Israel Katzman, La arquitectura del siglo XIX en México, vol.  (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, ), .
 See Instituto de Arte Americano, La arquitectura de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Universidad
Nacional, ), –.

    

 Eduardo Wilde, Páginas escogidas (Buenos Aires: Ángel Estrada y Cía), .
 In The Painting of Modern Life, Clark writes: ‘‘The city was eluding its various forms and fur-
nishings, and perhaps what Haussmann would prove to have done was to provide a frame-
work in which another order of urban life—an order without an imagery—would be allowed
its mere existence. . . . Capital did not need to have a representation of itself laid out upon
the ground in bricks and mortar, or inscribed as a map in the minds of its city dwellers. One
might even say that capital preferred the city not to be an image—not to have form, not to
be accessible to the imagination, to readings and misreadings, to a conflict of claims on its
space—in order that it might mass produce an image of its own to put in place of those it
destroyed. On the face of things, the new image did not look entirely different from the old
ones. It still seemed to propose that the city was one place, in some sense belonging to those
who lived in it. But it belonged to them now simply as an image, something occasionally and
casually consumed in places expressly designed for the purpose—promenades, panoramas,
outings on Sundays, great exhibitions, and official parades. It could not be had elsewhere,
apparently; it is no longer part of those patterns of action and appropriation that made up
the spectators’ everyday lives. I shall call that last achievement the spectacle, and it seems to
me clear that Haussmann’s rebuilding was spectacular in the most oppressive sense of the
word’’ (p. ).
 This is one of the constant themes in Marshall McLuhan’s work. Haroldo de Campos under-
lines the importance that the techniques of visual spatialization and titles of the daily
press had in Stéphane Mallarmé. See Haroldo de Campos, ‘‘Superación de los lenguajes ex-
clusivos,’’ América Latina en su literatura, ed. C. Fernández Moreno (Mexico City: Siglo XXI,
), .
 Walter Benjamin, ‘‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt,
trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, ), –.
 Darío, ‘‘En París,’’ –. In another chronicle about the exposition, he writes: ‘‘And as the
spirit leans toward a blessed return to what is past, in the memory there materializes the
million themes of history and the reading that relates them to all of these names and places.
Love affairs, acts of war, the beauty of times in which life was not exhausted by practical
prose and progress as it is today’’ (p. ).
 Martí, OC, vol. , .
 Darío, ‘‘En París,’’ .
 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of
California Press, ), –.
 In the following analysis of the activity of strolling, the works that I have found most useful
are Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Flaneur,’’ in Charles Baudelaire: Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,
trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, ), –. Karlhein Z. Stierle, ‘‘Baudelaire
and the Tradition of the Tableau de Paris,’’ New Literary History (): –; Michel de Cer-
teau, ‘‘Walking in the City,’’ in The Practice of Everyday Life, , no. , –; Clark, The Painting
of Modern Life, esp. ‘‘The View from Notre-Dame,’’ –; and Sylvia Molloy, ‘‘Flâneries textu-
ales: Borges, Benjamin, y Baudelaire,’’ in Homenaje a Ana María Barrenechea, ed. Lía Swartz and
Isaías Lerner (Madrid: Castalia, ).
 López, La gran aldea, .
 Manuel Rivera Cambas, México pintoresco, artístico y monumental, vol.  (; reprint, Mexico
City: Editora Nacional, ), –.
 Justo Sierra, Obras completas, vol.  (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónom de México,
), .

The Chronicle and Urban Experience 

 Philippe Hamon, Introduction à l’analyse du descriptif (Paris: Hachette, ). Hamon writes: ‘‘A
second metaphor of equal weight in its insistence within the metadiscourse of the text in
general and the descriptive text in particular, is that of the emporium-text. The metaphor
of the front store window can be considered moreover as a connecting ‘thread,’ beginning
with that of the emporium, or vice versa. The emporium is the place where products of labor
are arranged and sold as ‘articles’ (the descriptive term, it must be noted, is also the site of
a ‘cutting-out’ [decoupage] and ‘working over’ of language): the emporium of the ‘brand-
new,’ ‘the latest’; or once again, ‘retail’ ’’ (n.p.).
 Gómez Carrillo, El encanto de Buenos Aires, .
 Even Sarmiento, for whom the city had been the site for a desired public order, writes in
 about the problem of alienation for the new urban subject in ‘‘Un gran Boulevard para
Buenos Aires,’’ in Obras, vol. , –: ‘‘The old Buenos Aires we have relinquished to the
vendors, the national government, and to the prisons, hotels, customs house, the depen-
dents and people occupied with trivial matters, working like Negroes, caught up with other
occupations’’ (p. ). Sarmiento requests the Intendente Torcuato de Alvear to construct a
new boulevard to connect the residential neighborhoods with the center, so that the ‘‘good
people may come to walk around from time to time out of curiosity, through this ancient
Buenos Aires, with [its] government, with the customs house, with the cathedral, and all
types of businesses, shops, and taverns’’ (ibid.). Sarmiento here describes the tourist gaze
of the private subject.
 Instituto de Arte Americano, La arquitectura de Buenos Aires, .
 Blas Matamoro, La casa porteña (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, ), .
 Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, ‘‘Las misas de Navidad,’’ in Cuentos y cuaresmas del Duque Job, ed.
F. Monterde (Mexico City: Ediciones Porrúa, ), –.
 ‘‘La novela del tranvía’’ is reprinted in C. Monsiváis, ed., A ustedes les consta. Antología de la
crónica en México (Mexico City: Era, ), –.
 It is significant that many chronicles by Gutiérrez Nájera, Darío, Eugenio Cambeceres,
Casal, and even Martí operate along the border between referentiality and fiction. The func-
tional marginality of the chronicle consists of this play along the boundaries of the genre. In
fact, many fictions by these authors were originally published as chronicles.
 Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, ‘‘Una cita,’’ originally published in El Nacional,  September ,
and reprinted in ed. Erwin K. Mapes, Cuentos completos y otras narraciones (Fondo de Cultura
Económica, ), .
 Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Obras inéditas: Crónicas del Puck, ed. Erwin K. Mapes, .
 Martí, OC, vol. , .
 Gómez Carrillo, El encanto de Buenos Aires, .
 Julián Martel Miró, La bolsa (Buenos Aires: Guillermo Kraft, ), –.
 Eduardo Wilde, ‘‘Sin rumbo,’’ Páginas escogidas, ed. José María Monner Sans (Buenos Aires:
Ángel Estrada y Cía, ), –.
 Eusebio Gómez, La mala vida en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Juan Roldán, ), –.
 Georg Simmel, ‘‘Prostitution,’’ in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Nathan (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. First published in .
 Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, –.
 Ernesto Goldar, La mala vida en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina,
).
 Gómez Carrillo, El encanto de Buenos Aires, .

    

 Gómez Carrillo, ‘‘El tango,’’ in El encanto de Buenos Aires, . Porteño is a colloquial designa-
tion for the people of Buenos Aires.
 Rubén Darío, ‘‘París nocturno,’’ in Obras completas, cuentos y novelas, vol.  (Madrid: Afrodisio
Aguado, ), –.
 José Asunción Silva, De sobremesa (Bogotá: Editorial de Cromos, ), –. First pub-
lished in .
 Martí, OC, vol. , .
 Jose Martí, Nuevas cartas de Nueva York, ed. Ernesto Mejía Sánchez (Mexico City: Siglo XXI,
), .

The Chronicle and Urban Experience 

PART II
Introduction: Martí and His Journey
to the United States

Until recently, Latin American literary history has been primarily concerned
with the process of consolidating the institution of literature as an academic
discipline. Such an undertaking has, for the most part, entailed the demarca-
tion of literature’s domain through a series of incisions and exclusions that
privilege the law of ‘‘pure’’ genres (among other norms). Before written ma-
terials were allowed to become a legitimate object of reflection and instruc-
tion, thereby gaining entrance into literature’s guarded sanctum, they had
to be subjected to a meticulous examination, and adapted and incorporated
into an economy of ‘‘knowledge.’’ Almost invariably, the means of evalua-
tion for such an economy were derived from European canons. In the best of
cases, these institutionally constructed canons held some kind of credible au-
thority where literature had effectively succeeded in becoming autonomized;
in securing not only a relatively specialized social authority, but also a set of
categories and techniques for working on language, which would differenti-
ate it from other discourses and social practices. To such a disciplinary gaze,
delimited by canons, vast areas of nineteenth-century Latin American intel-
lectual production remained invisible; unpresentable due precisely to their
unruly heterogeneity, and lack of generic and functional specificity. This has
certainly been the case with nineteenth-century travel literature 1—one of the
models that granted legitimacy to the fin de siècle chronicle and the episto-
lary discourse of international correspondents. Martí’s Escenas norteamericanas
emerged from this discursive tradition.
In Latin American societies following the wars of independence, the
journey (particularly to France and England) became one of the basic ritu-
als in the education of the ruling elite. At the same time, travel literature—
conveniently published in installments that took the form of letters in the
newspapers of the epoch—became one of the fundamental narrative and rhe-
torical paradigms shaping the proliferating reflections on emerging nations.
Exceeding the boundaries of touristic curiosity, by the middle of the cen-
tury, travel narratives had become one of the privileged forms of discourse on
modernity in Latin America.
Likewise, in the heyday of nineteenth-century European expansion, the
voyage occupied a prominent position and had enormous popularity within
the system of letters. As Edward Said has lucidly pointed out, the voyage to
the peripheral zones of Western culture was an important strategy for the
construction of an orientalist discourse, an archive of known facts and tropes
about the oriental other that constituted one of the epistemological founda-
tions of nineteenth-century European imperialism:

Orientalism is the discipline by which the Orient was (and is) ap-
proached systematically as a topic of learning, discovery, and practice.
But in addition I have been using the word to designate that collection
of dreams, images, and vocabularies available to anyone who has tried
to talk about what lies east of the dividing line. These two aspects of Ori-
entalism are not incongruent, since by use of them both Europe could
advance, securely and unmetaphorically upon the Orient.2

Hence, for Said, the configuration of images generated around the other
would go beyond any claims to understand a foreign reality, as they served
to consolidate Western identity, and legitimate the civilizing mission and ex-
pansion of modernity.
In terms of Said’s archaeology of orientalism, travel literature written by
Latin Americans in the nineteenth century presents us with a paradox: this
literature was not generated by or in the name of a European subject who
would produce stereotypes and categories for a subaltern and surmountable
otherness. To the contrary, Latin American travel literature was produced by
intellectuals searching in the modern discourses of the European library for
the keys to solving the enigmas and gaps in their own identity. If it is in-
deed true, as Jean Franco has shown, that nineteenth-century Latin America
witnessed a proliferation of European travelers connected to the expansion
of markets,3 then the reverse side of the coin is equally significant: namely,
the importance of traveling for the Latin American liberal elites in search of
models that could order and discipline the chaos, that could modernize and
redefine the barbarism that was (for them) the Latin American world.4
Aside from the pedagogical function of the voyage—‘‘the inevitable
transformations that travel exerts on the spirit’’—Sarmiento emphasized the
relationship between travel literature and the civilizing endeavor:

With regard to myself, the idea has become increasingly clear to me so

as to assume the character of an indomitable, persistent conviction that

    

 we in America are on the wrong track, and that there are profound and
traditional causes that must be broken if we do not wish to be dragged
into the erosion, the nothingness, and I daresay the barbarism, an ines-
capable mire.5

In the discourse of travel narratives, the distribution of space is ideologi-

cally determined: ‘‘There are regions that lie too high above sea level, where
the atmosphere cannot be breathed by those born in the lowlands’’ (p. ). In
Sarmiento, the intellectual was to be a traveler who goes from low to high:
his social authority would be legitimized via his ability to mediate between
the uneven areas of America and Europe. The traveler-intellectual translates a
foreign plenitude with the objective of correcting the wrong track of his own
tradition—that erosion that distinguishes his place of origin. In this sense,
the voyage for Sarmiento is the very foundation of the authority that vali-
dates his work as an intellectual, his intellectual labor. For instance, it would
be impossible to imagine Sarmiento’s work as an educator without consid-
ering his journeys (commissioned by the Chilean government between 
and ) to Europe and the United States. They grounded his pedagogical
theory in the  De la educación popular (On Popular Education), the basis of the
Argentine educational system after Juan Manuel de Rosas, former dictator of
the Argentine provinces (–).
The voyage from low to high, from chaos to order, displaces the traveler-
intellectual and affords him or her a privileged perspective: the ability to
write from the future about the chaos left behind. The voyage is a prospec-
tive exercise, a displacement to the future that propels the subject beyond
the insufficiencies of the present. In his or her curious and wistful review of
modernity’s institutions, monuments, and machines, the traveler announces
the signs of a future that would reach Latin America when the vestiges of tra-
dition had been overcome.
In this symbolic topography, the United States holds a prominent place.
Perhaps more rightfully than ancient Europe, the United States stood out
as the modern space par excellence—a new society where progress had suc-
ceeded in freeing itself from the heavy chains of tradition. Even in Martí’s
first chronicles of New York, in , we still find echoes of a utopian vision
of the United States.

The splendor of life . . . the vision of this new country rising from the
ruins of old nations, awakens the attention of thinking men who anx-
iously seek the definitive elimination of all destructive forces which in
the last century had begun to build the foundations for a new era of

Martí and His Journey to the United States 

 humanity. This could be, this ought to be, the significance of the United
States.6

We will soon see how Martí dismantles this rhetoric in Escenas norteameri-
canas. For now, let us say that since Francisco de Miranda’s ‘‘Viaje por los
Estados Unidos de la América del Norte’’ (A Journey through the United States of
North America),7 published in –, the utopia associated with the North
had been a key trope for the modernizing patricians. For Sarmiento, the New
World character of modernity was crucial: the United States, like Argentina,
was gifted with an unexplored nature, untouched by cultural erosion. At the
same time, the United States constituted a society that, without severing its
ties to the best (that is, English) colonial traditions, was not shackled by the
weight of accumulated historical experience.
Nonetheless, even Sarmiento could not hide a certain amount of dis-
comfort when contemplating the modernity he so desired. During his second
trip to the United States, in , he writes the following about New York:

Changes of such magnitude have occurred since my first journey, that

the part of the city where I now live, the most splendid one, did not
then exist. . . .
This spaciousness of the streets, this vegetation of trees, ivy, flow-
ers, and iron gates do not cover the stupendous buildings, but rather
adorn them; the confusion of cars, buses, trains, people, signs, and bill-
boards leave a strange impression on those who, like us, have lived in
narrow streets thirty-six feet across that limit the vision.8

In this New World city, nature embellishes the artifice. And yet, the vege-
tation, which is controlled and demarcated, does not cover the stupendous
buildings. If the expansiveness and urban flow produce a strange impression,
it is because certain deficiencies have ‘‘limited the vision’’ of those who ‘‘come
from the lowlands.’’ Even in , Sarmiento asserted: ‘‘Let us not stop the
United States in their march; this is as much as some people ultimately pro-
pose. Let us catch up with the United States. Let us be America, as the sea is
the ocean, let us be the United States.’’ 9
Similarly, in Cuba, the influential intellectuals of Martí’s formative years
also associated the United States with the modern utopia. Given that Cuba
still remained a Spanish colony, the North was one of the models in which
liberal discourse, critical of Spain’s sovereignty, found support. But even in
a colony where annexation to the United States had been the anticolonial
option since mid-century, the debates over North American expansionism
were inflamed. To cite one example, soon after the  North American in-

    

vasion of Mexico, José Antonio Saco—one of the ideologues for Cuban mod-
ernization and a great admirer of the United States (where he was living in
exile)—criticizes the annexationist option from a kind of cultural perspective
that was to gain importance in the coming years:

As far as I am concerned, and lest it be believed that I am attempting

to convert any Cubans to my personal opinion, I must frankly own that
even though I recognize the advantages that Cuba might gain were it to
form a part of the States, deep in my heart I would be left with a secret
feeling for the loss of Cuban nationhood.10

Later, he adds:

If the country to which we were to add ourselves were of the same origins
as ours—Mexico, for instance, assuming that this unfortunate nation
could grant us the protection that it lacks itself—then, by an instinctive
impulse and as quick as the electric current, Cubans would all turn their
eyes to the regions of Anahuac. But, when dealing with a foreign nation,
still more foreign to us than others, it would be a strange phenomenon
for the Cuban people, by severing themselves in one stroke from their
ancient traditions, the strength of their customs, and the empire of their
religion and their language, to throw themselves en masse into the arms
of the North American confederation. (p. )

Saco’s text against annexation reveals not only a criticism of the United
States, but also the fear that Cuba would be annexed to the South of the
United States; a fact that would contribute to the expansion of the slave
trade economy—the antipode of progress in Saco’s eyes—and the growth of
a slave population, which for him as well as many of his liberal contempo-
raries represented a threat to the nation’s ethnic and social equilibrium. Still,
even in Saco, the emphasis on a ‘‘culturalist’’ argument is significant, as a
few decades later (beginning with Martí and Rodó’s Arielism) it would become
the generative rhetoric behind an emergent concept of Latin America defined
precisely in opposition to the United States.
As Saco suggests in his reference to ‘‘unfortunate Mexico’’ the North
American expansion into Mexican territory starting in  decisively altered
the Latin American representations of the United States. In , Chilean
Francisco Bilbao stated:

We see empires that attempt to renew the old idea of global domination:
the Russian Empire and the United States. . . . Russia is far away, [but]

Martí and His Journey to the United States 

 the United States extends [its dominion] every day in this game of the
hunt that is leading them to the South. We already see Latin America’s
fragments falling into the Anglo-Saxon jaws of that magnetizing boa
that is unraveling its torturous coils.
Yesterday Texas, after which the North of Mexico and the Pacific
saluted a new master. Today the advancing guerrillas awaken the Isth-
mus, and we see Panama, that future Constantinople of America, vacil-
late suspended, its destiny swinging over the abyss and wondering: Shall
I belong to the South, [or] shall I belong to the North? 11

Relatively forgotten in this century, Bilbao discussed Yankee individu-

alism in Panama in a forward critique against imperialism that in many
ways anticipates post- Latinoamericanista discourses. Bilbao’s rhetoric is
entirely significant inasmuch as it inscribes the North/South antithesis; in
doing so, the essay articulates a concept of Latin America as a repository
for ‘‘aesthetic,’’ ‘‘human,’’ and ‘‘spiritual’’ values opposed to North Ameri-
can capitalist and technological modernity. We/they forms the matrix of an
emerging nationalistic subject: it constitutes an antithetical configuration
that introduces the opposition between Anglo-Saxon and the Latin race, one of
the foundational tropes of fin de siècle Arielism. Bilbao writes:

Something of that divine ancient humanity and hospitality inhabits our

regions. In our bosoms there is room for the love of the human race. We
have not lost the tradition of spirituality that belongs to man’s destiny.
We believe and love all that unites; we prefer the social over the indi-
vidual, beauty over riches, justice over power, art over commerce, poetry
over industry, philosophy over texts, pure spirit over reason, duty over
interest. In our enthusiasm for the beautiful, we are those who believe
we see in art, regardless of its results, and in philosophy, the splendor of
the sovereign good. Neither on earth nor in earthly joy do we see man’s
ultimate end; and the Black, the indio, the destitute, the unhappy, the
weak find in us the respect owed to the title and dignity of being human.
(p. )

We shall return to this idea—or discourse—about Latin America. For

now, let us highlight the importance of a concept of art in the configuration
of a discourse around Latin American identity: a concept differentiated from
both the signs of rationalization and a modernity reified in the representa-
tion of the North. Specifically, in contrast to the Enlightenment letrados, Bil-
bao in  presupposes an aesthetic sphere proper (‘‘that which is beautiful,

    

regardless of its results’’) whose authority postulates a critique of modern-
ization. In Bilbao, we witness the ontologization of that aesthetic authority
that, beyond a limited art purism, claims legitimacy as the essential key to
the very definition of Latin American being. Furthermore, in this remarkable
critique of the modernizing letrados, we also see how the aesthetic subject,
in defining a continental being, incorporates precisely those subaltern areas
of experience marginalized by modernization. Bilbao’s passage reveals the
double movement that characterizes the formation of modern Latinoamerican-
ismo, inseparable from the development of a literary and cultural authority.
This double movement entails, on the one hand, the exclusion and reification
of the North (rationalization, reason, industry, interest), and on the other,
the inclusion of the distinct others in modernization (the beautiful, disinter-
est, spirit, tradition, the subaltern) by means of the aesthetic subject’s inte-
grating gaze. A reading of Martí’s ‘‘Our America’’ will show how this rhetoric
is honed, constituting one of the critical strategies for the legitimization of
modern literature in Latin America.
One would be tempted to argue that the representations of the United
States changed as the object of the Latin American intellectual’s interest (that
is, North American modernity) shifted its political position and threatened
the autonomy of Latin American nations. Yet in the case of Bilbao as well as
Martí’s Escenas norteamericanas, this explanation is only partially valid and does
not elucidate the significance of the gaze, the specificity of the intellectual-
traveler’s authority: both of which presuppose a discursive field, a figura-
tive network that guarantees the meaning and coherence of the represented
world. The authority of that subject over the form of representation is crys-
tallized in a certain rhetoric, in tropes and figures—ways of cutting through
and organizing discursive material. Martí observes:

I keep my first impressions vividly alive. The crowds on Broadway; the

quietude of the evenings; the character of men; the character of women,
even more curious and worthy of notice; hotel life, which will never be
understood by us; that dreamy woman, physically and mentally stronger
that the young man who courts her; this feverish life, this astonish-
ing movement, this splendid sick people, on one hand marvelously en-
hanced, on the other—that of the intellectual pleasures—childish and poor;
. . . these men, all too dedicated to the matters of their wallets, with
a remarkable unawareness of their spiritual matters. It all comes at once
and begins to organize itself in this brief narrative of my impressions.12
(Italics added)

Martí and His Journey to the United States 

 In fact, narrating implies the organization and formalization of ma-
terials taken from experience. Even under the banner of referentiality and
spontaneity in the travel narrative, here discourse does more than passively
present its object: it reveals a distinctive shaping of the object’s outlines. The
voyager recounts not only what s/he sees; s/he furthermore insists on point-
ing out what is missing in the represented world. Driven by economic ratio-
nality, they are the ones who do not enjoy intellectual pleasures, unaware of their
spiritual matters. On the other side of this represented world—namely, North
American modernity—an alternative identity of us takes shape, along with
the intellectual and spiritual authority of the one who speaks. In Martí, the sub-
ject criticizes modernity and subverts the norms of the travel narrative, which
is itself historically linked to the modernizing project from an aesthetic, lit-
erary gaze. Thus, we will read Escenas norteamericanas in a twofold articulation:
as a lucid testimony to a writing that struggles to coexist with the signs of
modernity and as the context in which Martí elaborates his Latinoamericanista
thought—the discourse on us that culminates in ‘‘Our America’’ and Versos
sencillos.

Notes

 In this respect, David Viñas’s reading of Argentine travelers in the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries is exceptional. See his De Sarmiento a Cortázar (Buenos Aires: Editorial Siglo
Veinte, ).
 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, ), .
 Jean Franco, ‘‘Un viaje poco romántico: Viajeros británicos hacia Sudamérica (–),’’
Escritura  (): –.
 On the other hand, it is also true that these same Latin Americans traveled throughout re-
gions of barbarism. As suggested earlier, this is the case in Facundo. See also Julio Ramos,
‘‘Entre otros: Una excursión a los indios ranqueles,’’ Filología , no.  (): –.
 Domingo F. Sarmiento, Viajes por Europa, Africa, y América, in Obras completas, vol.  (Buenos
Aires: Imprenta Mariano Moreno, ), . First published in .
 José Martí, Obras completas, vol.  (Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, –), –.
 Francisco de Miranda, Diario de viajes y escritos políticos, ed. Mario H. Sánchez-Barba (Madrid:
Editora Nacional, ). See, in particular, his description of Philadelphia: ‘‘at last the clean-
liness, evenness, and width of the streets, their illumination by night, the vigilance of watch-
men posted on every corner for the purpose of well-ordered security [sic], and the police in
the city of Philadelphia constitute one of the most agreeable and well-ordered peoples of the
world’’ (p. ).
 Domingo F. Sarmiento, ‘‘Nueva York: rápidas impresiones,’’ Obras completas, vol.  (Buenos
Aires: Luz del Día, ), .
 Domingo F. Sarmiento, Conflicto y armonía de las razas en América Latina (Buenos Aires: ),
.

    

 José Antonio Saco, Ideas sobre la incorporación de Cuba a los Estados Unidos (Paris: Imprenta de
Panckoucke, ), .
 Francisco Bilbao, El evangelio americano y otras páginas selectas, ed. Armando Donoso (Barce-
lona: Casa Editorial Maucci, n.d.), –.
 Jose Martí, Obras completas, vol. , .

Martí and His Journey to the United States 

 Machinations: Literature and Technology

Aside from his solderer, the one-armed man had no mechanical implements other
than five or six essential tools. All the pieces of his machines came from the house of
one, the living room of another, like the blades of his Pelton wheel: for the confection
he used all the old buckets from around the area. He had to switch tasks without re-
spite behind a meter of tubing, or a rusted sheet of zinc which he, with his one arm
and the help of his stump, was cutting, turning, twisting, and soldering with his ener-
getic faith and optimism.—Horacio Quiroga, ‘‘The Orange Distillers’’

Machines proliferate throughout Martí’s landscapes. Some of them are useful

and easily apprehended: ‘‘How full of inventions [is printing]! What an ex-
cess of machines, these steelworkers!’’ 1 Others are ostentatious, bearers of
an iconoclastic violence: ‘‘The entire body trembles, disturbed and uneasy,
when one travels through this fragile frame, incessantly shaken by a shud-
der that releases all the springs in the body, like those of a railroad’’ (vol.
, p. ); ‘‘And woe be the house, if the railroads take it away!’’ (vol. ,
p. ). The indications of periodization in Martí’s writing are functional:
they belong to the scientific-technological revolution, one of the forces driv-
ing North American advanced capitalism. Of even greater significance is the
fact that Martí resided in what was perhaps the industrial and commercial
capital of the United States: ‘‘in New York [life is] a train with a billowing
plume of smoke and fiery entrails’’ (vol. , p. ).
In that same era, Thomas Edison strolled through the streets of Paris,
commenting on the novelists with irony: the best fictions of the time, he
declared, are my own inventions. Not many years before, John Augustus
Roebling (a German-born engineer of a Hegelian persuasion) consolidated
the prestige of engineering—a prototypical profession in the industrial era—
with the design of the Brooklyn Bridge, thereby claiming a place for him-
self in intellectual spheres. Both figures loomed large in Martí’s imagination:
while Edison was a Dantesque figure, a character out of Émile Zola’s novels,
Roebling was the poet of a new era. Of the latter, Martí writes, ‘‘As a poem
grows in the mind of an ingenious bard, so grew this bridge in Roebling’s
mind’’ (vol. , p. ). The infatuation is emphatic, notwithstanding its con-
sistent ambiguity. Yet among these giants, new ‘‘poets’’ of the modern world
and modernity, what would be the place for a writer of letters? Martí posed
the question and suggested an answer: ‘‘The noises of cars drown the voices
of the lyre. We await the new lyre, that will form chords out of the axles of
cars’’ (vol. , p. ).
The presence of the machine in Martí is not solely thematic. Neither is
it merely an object for representation. Indeed, he is engaged in a constant
struggle to coexist with and among them—legitimizing his practice in con-
trast to the machine, emphasizing his utility. Particularly in the chronicle,
writing is represented in competition with the discourses of technology; its
use value lies in its capacity to establish boundaries, at times connections.
Bridges.
Martí often takes up a technical language, stripped of style, when he de-
scribes machinery. In those moments, description tends to become concise
and elides the traces of the literary subject. Discourse dissimulates its level of
depth and presents itself as the graphic details of the machinic body:

Nothing other than steel is used in these machines for the rolling pins,
axles, and nails. The nuts and bolts are made of a hardened metal; the
connection boxes are made of the metal used for firearms; the shaft
boxes are constructed apart from the frame, and they are only attached
to it by screws, so that if they break, they can be replaced at very little
cost, which cannot be done with machines that have the shaft box en-
tirely connected to the frame itself, so when it breaks, the entire frame
has to be replaced. The bearings [original in English] grease themselves
[automatically]. (vol. , p. )

Martí here transcribes the other language without translating it (bear-

ings: bearings). The intended destination of these descriptions can be as-
signed: ‘‘for their elementary and easy use it is recommended for those
countries where there is no significant number of people in the know about
mechanics’’ (vol. , p. ). As we have seen, the press correspondent is a
mediator between the modern space and another space lacking in modernity.
Here, the metaphor of the correspondent as a display case or exposition is
literalized. In fact, in many cases, Martí’s advertisements written for La Amé-
rica (a commercial newspaper in New York) deal primarily with inventions
and machinery that could be exported to Latin America.2 This condition in
part guaranteed the appearance of the writer-by-trade, a career that gave rise

Literature and Technology 

to a subsequent slippage and relativization in the once exclusive domain of
writing. To write under the banner of journalism in the second half of the
nineteenth century was no longer solely a prestigious, exclusive act, inscribed
within the sphere of high culture. The space of writing, now subject to the
laws of the market, opened up to the new middle classes.
On the surface, this new space of writing has been stripped of style and
rendered neutral by the demand of the market for language to be primarily
communicative and informative, a space where writing is an instrument by
trade. Still, we encounter small fissures, incongruities, foci of intensity—
signs of struggle. For instance, in another one of Martí’s advertisements,
the Herring Company office (which sold steel safe boxes) is described as a
‘‘curious museum, with its boxes of all sizes and inventions, from one that
looks like an elegant sewing box, to those that seem colossal, sculpted from
colored rock.’’ 3 Oftentimes, stylization reappears to dramatize the imbal-
ance between the literal and the literary in its emphatic affirmation of the latter
practice:

And one can see in the newspaper that everything is an attempt to take
the telegraphs from the roofs, the threads of electric light from their
eminent poles, and have them fall upon the market like drops of fire in
which the aerial and pyrotechnic star shatters into multiple telegraph
and subterranean lighting companies. (vol. , p. )

Martí’s work of illumination appears in unsuspected places: chronicles,

letters, reports, articles, ads—minor texts. It is almost as if the inconspicu-
ous character of the place where Martí’s rhetoric shines brightest is a funda-
mental prerequisite for the emergence of Martí’s poetic illumination. We will
examine this hypothesis later; for now, let us merely note that within a flat,
journalistic, technical, or informational discourse, the poetic word refers to
and remarks on its foreignness (extrañeza), the dilemma of being forever off-
site. This condition can, in turn, be read as a register for the writer’s surprise
amid the signs of modernity.
This foreignness, the other side of an ambiguous infatuation, would
seem to affirm the following remarks by Octavio Paz: ‘‘It is not the machine,
essence of modernity, that fascinates [the modernists], but the creations of
the art nouveau. Modernity is not the industry, but luxury.’’ 4 ‘‘The modernity
that seduces the young poets is quite distinct from that which had seduced
their parents; it is not called progress, nor are its manifestations the railroad
and the telegraph: it is called luxury and its signs are useless and beautiful
objects.’’ 5 Angel Rama offers a historical interpretation of the opposition:

    

 Perhaps here, in the ample utilization that the bourgeoisie of the nine-
teenth century conferred to scientific and technical discoveries, as well
as in the difficulty of reconverting romantic idealism to the interpre-
tation of transformations brought about by science, one must examine
the origin of this rejection on the part of the humanistic sector that
led to the split between two modern cultures (to which [Charles Percy]
Snow refers). In any case, the nineteenth-century poets did not sing the
praises of scientific conquests as the eighteenth-century poets had, as
in the example of the discovery of the vaccine. Science and technics were
presented as antithetical to poetry until the appearance, ushered in by
the twentieth century, of Marinetti, who was also unable to close the fis-
sure that he had created with his futurist visions.6

In Europe, this antithesis was systematized early on in the nineteenth

century in the reaction that the romantic aesthetes had launched against the
Industrial Revolution (particularly in England).7 In the Latin America of the
nineteenth century, however, where the lettered class usually administered
the project of reform and progress, the antithesis did not come to be formu-
lated until the last quarter of the century, especially in areas on the road to
modernization. Even a classic text like Andrés Bello’s  ‘‘Silva a la agricul-
tura de la zona tórrida’’ (‘‘Hymn to Agriculture in the Torrid Zone’’), written
in England, is a panegyric to technology. Behind Bello’s critique of urban life
and his inscription of America as a locus amenus, site of an originary purity,
the poem is a song dedicated to agriculture—specifically, the transformation
of natural spontaneity into economic or cultural value through the interven-
tion of the machine:

el fértil suelo,
áspero ahora y bravo,
al desacotsumbrado yugo torne
del arte humana y le tribute esclavo.
Del obstruido estanque y del molino
recuerden ya las aguas el camino;
el intricado bosque el hacha rompa,
consuma el fuego.

let the fertile soil

now rough and rugged
turn to the unaccustomed yolk of human
art, and pay the slave’s tribute.
From the stagnant pond and the waterwheel

Literature and Technology 

 let the waters recall the way;
let the hatchet break through the tangled forest,
let the fire consume.8

Art here is techne. Far from the romantic epiphany of a prediscursive

soil, the discourse of the hymn (silva) in Bello is legitimized as the control
and exploitation of the jungle (selva), as the converter of American chaos to
a rationalized order. At the same time, however, it is clear that the song is
about agriculture and not industrialization, with which Bello must have been
familiar in the London of the s.
Curiously, in Sarmiento’s trip to London in the s, he seems to fixate
on the topic of the much-discussed machine:

There is nothing that has disturbed me more than the inspection of

those foreboding factories that are the pride and the mark of human
intellect, and the source of wealth for modern peoples. I cannot see in
them anything other than wheels, motors, fulcra, levers, and a labyrinth
of small parts, which move in an unknown fashion, to produce what I
know to be the results.9

Sarmiento anticipates his sense of estrangement early in the text: ‘‘it is

becoming ever more difficult to write about traveling, if the traveler departs
from less-advanced societies, only to become cognizant of the societies that
are more [advanced]. . . . Anacarsis does not come with his split-eye to con-
template the marvels of art, but at the risk of injuring the statue’’ (p. ).
Estrangement, following Sarmiento, is a consequence of underdevelopment;
and it is foreignness that the utopia of progress seeks to dispel.
As suggested earlier, writing in Sarmiento is defined along the lines of
a modern utopia, as a kind of machine that will transform American ‘‘bar-
barity’’ into the sense and order of ‘‘civilization.’’ The machine is an emblem
that condenses the ideal principles of coherence and rationality captured
in Sarmiento’s notion of the book. Sarmiento himself explained the book-
machine relation when, in Recuerdos de provincia, he recalled the following
words of his teacher Domingo de Oro on Sarmiento’s pedagogical treatise
Educación popular (Popular Education):

The character of your chronicle had called my attention, in its tendency

to translate the theories that have been ceaselessly lampooned into prac-
tice, into fact. It seems to me that you conceived of it as a machine
in order to force it to work in the sense of industry and mechanical or
physical movement. Your book is the machine that gives that same im-
pulse to the intellectual movement, and I daresay to the intellectual and

    

 moral industry as well, which in its own time [and] with its momentum
will heighten recourse to material and industrial movement.10

In stark contrast, the modernists were the first to articulate the rela-
tion of modern literature to modern rationalization in terms of an antithesis.
Take Gutiérrez Nájera, for example: ‘‘the asthmatic cough of the locomotive,
the bitter shriek of the rails and the whistle of the factories [leave no room]
to speak of the Academus gardens, of Aspasia’s festivals, of Pyrrhus’s tree,
in the deaf and bland speech of the poets.’’ 11 Or Darío: ‘‘The artist has been
supplanted by the engineer.’’ 12 According to Rodó, science ‘‘interpreted with
the strict criterion of a school, has at one point succeeded in wounding the
spirit of religiosity or the spirit of poetry.’’ 13
What brought about the change in the representation of technology?
More than a neutral feature in the landscape of modernization, the machine
had (long before the turn of the century) become an emblem of rational-
ization, of the life-world projected by the powerful discourses of modernity.
At the turn of the century, the place of writing—of literature—had changed
considerably in the face of the modernizing discourses. As pointed out in the
previous section, this change was concomitant with a fissure between the lit-
erary field and rationalization, the latter of which had employed letters as
a vehicle for formalization up until the s in Latin America. This fissure
is the distinctive feature of modern literature, which in this epoch came to
be defined as an ambiguous critique of rationalization; as even a defense of
‘‘humane’’ and ‘‘individual’’ values in a world on the way to technologization
and massification.
The resulting antithesis between the machine and literature thus
emerged. And, as we will soon see, this representation of technology is en-
tirely ideologized. The antithesis serves as a mechanism for order, for orga-
nizing a complex and contradictory reality: as a motif, the antithesis facilitates
the formulation of an outside, the proper place for the threatening machine,
in contradistinction to an interior realm where literature and other areas of aes-
thetic production acquire specificity.
Criticism, engaged in the task of defining the fin de siècle literary field by
means of the antithesis between literature and technology, takes for granted
that its ground of possibility has itself been determined by the very same pro-
ductive forces from which it distinguishes itself. This self-definition (which
also implies a delimitation or division between itself and its other) can be
called a literary ideology, an imaginary representation that the components of
the field elaborate concerning the real conditions of their production.14 The
problem arises at the moment when the antithesis, the organizing binarism

Literature and Technology 

of the literary ideology, becomes the organizing mechanism for critical dis-
course. To cite an example, for Paz, ‘‘technics interposes itself between us
and the world, forecloses any perspective for the gaze: beyond its geometries
of steel, glass, or aluminum there lies absolutely nothing.15 In opposition to
the machine, Paz ascribes to poetry the task of ‘‘discovering the image of the
world in what emerges as fragment and dispersion, [of ] perceiving in one
the other.’’ Such a project ‘‘would return to language its metaphoric value: to
give presence to others. Poetry, the search for others, the discovery of other-
ness’’ (pp. –). Poetry uncovers that which technology hides; it restores
to the gaze the organic, integral landscape heretofore obliterated by the ma-
chine. Poetry here fulfills a therapeutic function. Doubtless, the modernist
ideologies and poetics carry an ineluctable weight, even today.
Without pursuing the two cultures debate, which has always implied a
struggle of good against evil, suffice it to say that the antithesis as a motif
has been essential to those discourses that literature and the humanities
(from the turn of the century) had deployed in an ongoing relationship with
modernity. The weight of the binarism displaces a fluid relation, rife with im-
balances and contradictions. Contrary to proposing a synthesis, however, let
us merely note the contamination inherent in those fields of literature and
technology projected by the antithesis as discrete spheres. Let us analyze the
antitechnological discourse elaborated by literature not as an aggregate of
‘‘truths’’ about the world, but rather, as a strategy of legitimation for intellec-
tuals who had become estranged from the utopia of progress and modernity.
Beyond the emphatic critique against technologization, we will see the ma-
chine become a model for a certain fin de siècle literature that paradoxically
attempted to rationalize and specialize its own medium of labor.16
Martí’s Escenas norteamericanas constitutes a remarkable archive of dis-
courses on the new experience of technologization. In his representations of
New York above all, Martí as a foreign correspondent forecasts the risks of
modernization to his Latin American readers. His language, still tied to the
Enlightenment, nevertheless begins to disengage itself from the rationaliz-
ing will. On the one hand, this development implied the emergence of an
aesthetic authority that would (critically) reflect on modernity and its effects;
but by the very fact that this new ‘‘gaze’’ has not as yet been codified, insti-
tuted, the representation of technology still remains flexible, without polar-
ized value. In other words, the excluding operation of antithesis in Martí has
yet to naturalize the cliché of the evil machine—still very much a part of our
imaginary landscape today.
Let us concentrate on the chronicle entitled ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’
which concerns one of the most celebrated accomplishments of nineteenth-

    

century engineering.17 At the same time, keep in mind that it is no coinci-
dence that this subject is treated in a chronicle. For, as we have seen, this
journalistic space in which Martí primarily operates presupposes technologi-
zation as a condition of possibility for writing—not only on the level of its
subject matter, but on the level of new languages as well.

The chronicle begins in the following manner: ‘‘[Through] the Brooklyn

Bridge . . . throbs a blood so magnanimously in our day’’ (p. ). The verb, in
this instance, appears at the beginning: palpitation is the vital sign of move-
ment, and it indicates the intensity of a flux. The organ contracts and dilates:
this double movement is the fundamental semantic basis for Martí’s descrip-
tion of the bridge. The bridge—emblem of modernity—expands the limits
of a territory, but it also implies the contraction of another space, until then
outside the sphere of communication, almost autonomous.
The allusion to fabric is another key trope: in Martí’s text, the Brooklyn
Bridge is constructed as a monumental fabric. From the bridge’s appearance,
it would seem as if engineering had sought to hide the dimension of its task
behind an almost artisanal play in the placement of cables. This artistry was,
of course, not simply fortuitous: Roebling was entirely conscious of the need
to humanize the bridge, the largest in the world at that time and the first to
use steel, an ‘‘ignoble’’ material, in its construction.18 From steel and stone,
the apparatus was put together, as if it were a hinge between two epochs, con-
joining them. It has already been pointed out that Roebling was a Hegelian.
Martí would call the bridge the realization of the eternal in the new.
In the chronicle, the fabric of the bridge is crucial:

And beneath our feet everything is a fabric, a net, bright with steel:
the steel bars are interlaced for pavement and the walls dividing [the
bridge’s] five wide levels with the grace and lightness and slenderness
of threads: before us it rises up, like a curtain of an invisible cloth lined
with long white bands, the four taut walls that hang from the four curv-
ing cables.19

‘‘What spider wove this fabric from border to border over the empti-
ness?’’ (p. ). The bridge establishes a continuity where before there was
only emptiness; it condenses what is scattered and dispersed:

Crowded together today as among neighboring work areas from the top
to the deep heart of a mountain, are Jews with their sharp profiles and
avid eyes, jovial Irish, fleshy and harsh Germans, rosy and strapping

Literature and Technology 

 Scots, beautiful Hungarians, lavish Negroes, Russians . . . , elegant Japa-
nese, lean and indifferent Chinese. (pp. –)

Although the condensation implies a centripetal, unifying impulse, it is

also preceded by an incisive, separating force. ‘‘Cables are the sutures of the
universe’’ (p. ). The heterogeneous mass is ‘‘crowded together today as
among neighboring work areas from the top to the deep heart of a moun-
tain.’’ The landscape is presented as an effect of a violence exercised on
nature: in another passage, Martí says of the cables, ‘‘[they are] like the teeth
of a mammoth that in one bite would be capable of decimating a mountain’’
(p. ). Palpitation, fabric, landscape: through these interlocking tropes a
bridge comes into being.
Martí reads, interprets, the apparatus. In his allegory, the bridge opens
up unto a new era. The arches of the bridge are ‘‘like the doors to a gran-
diose world that uplifts the spirit’’ (p. ). Half stone and half steel, the
bridge portrays the history of progress on a material basis, the threshold of
the liberal utopia: (‘‘No longer will deep moats open up around walled for-
tresses; cities will instead embrace each other with arms of steel’’) (p. ).
On the rather superficial, visceral level of Martí’s poesis, we see how the ma-
terial opposition (between stone and steel) and its resolution are played out
in language. The phonetic contrasts in the original Spanish (o/a) distribute a
semantic opposition, wherein the ‘‘o’’ sound corresponds to a metaphorics of
constriction or encirclement thrown open by the ‘‘a’’ sound preceding or fol-
lowing it: ‘‘Ya no se abren fosos hondos en torno de almenadas fortalezas; sino se abrazan,
con brazos de acero, las ciudades.’’ Martí’s homophonous discourse demonstrates
the construction of discursive continuities and bridges. This materialization
of the bridge’s function on the level of poetic language is reciprocal; when
Martí says, ‘‘[The bridge is] an iron gate between these two words of the
New Gospel’’ (p. ), technology is reincorporated into the Bible, signifying
Martí’s attempt to subjugate the sign of modernity by means of its inclusion
in the book of tradition par excellence. Such an attempt may, indeed, mark
a new departure for the modern intellectual; but it also indicates a consider-
able anxiety.
At first sight, technology in ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’ does not seem to
contradict the world of ‘‘spiritual’’ or aesthetic values. Rather, the ‘‘four great
cables [are] strings of a powerful lyre, at last worthy of men, who now begin
to hum their songs’’ (p. ). Technology appears as an instrument for the
transformation of nature disposed to the service of human beings. This con-
cept of an enlightened history recalls the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
whom Martí read feverishly during this epoch.

    

 For Emerson, writing in the period prior to the North American Civil
War, technology was an extension of nature; nature, in its turn, was a tech-
nological force. In his  ‘‘Nature,’’ Emerson contends that:

Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the
process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other’s
hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates
the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side
of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant
feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of divine charity
nourish man.20

Even in ‘‘The Poet,’’ from , Emerson emphasized the integrity of

the nature/technology relationship, notwithstanding an inescapable tension
between the two:

Readers of poetry see the factory-village and the railway, and fancy that
the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these; for these works of
art were not yet consecrated in the reading; but the poet sees them fall
within the great order not less than the beehive or the spider’s geomet-
rical web.21

Although even the poet was capable of overcoming the fragmentation

of the landscape brought about by technology, here Emerson highlights a
problematic that will lead him to change his position, particularly during the
period of intense industrialization following the Civil War. By , his essay
‘‘The Progress of Culture’’ bears a remarkable contrast:

It is only in the sleep of the soul that we help ourselves by so many in-
genious crutches and machines. What is the use of the telegraph? What
of newspapers? . . . the wise man waits for no mails, reads no telegrams.
He asks his own heart. . . . Science corrects the old creeds. . . . Yet it does
not surprise the moral sentiment.22

Emerson correlates technologization with an intense division of labor that

succeeded in displacing ‘‘culture’’ from its governing position in society:

In this country the immense production that had to be achieved has

generated new divisions of labor or created new professions. Let us con-
sider, in this epoch, all that has brought about, on a national scale, the
variety of questions, public and private enterprises, the ingenuity of sci-
ence, management, practical skills, teachers, each in his own province,
the railroad, the telegraph . . . , manufacture, inventions. (p. )

Literature and Technology 

 According to Emerson, in spite of progress and the new regime of spe-
cialization, ‘‘we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of forgetting Homer . . . ,
nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Archimedes’’ (p. ). As Rodó will later re-
affirm, the Greek is the model of the harmonious, originary man;23 his re-
inscription in the modern world is a response to the extreme degree of frag-
mentation implied by the division of labor. Hence, the paradox in the title of
Emerson’s essay: ‘‘progress’’ and ‘‘culture’’ were in the process of becoming
antithetical terms.
Until now, this chapter has mainly been based on what Martí sought to
express and thematize in the circulation of tropes and a strategy of demon-
strating the material world on the level of discourse. From the latter, we have
seen that Martí’s discourse on technology does not only operate on the seman-
tic level; on the contrary, form also fulfills an active ideological function that
may coincide with the level of the signified (as in the above case), but which
remains ultimately isomorphic to it. Indeed, the rhetorical form may actually
contradict what is explicitly postulated on the level of subject matter, expressed
beliefs. In the following analysis, I want to show how this is, in fact, the case
in Martí’s ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’: behind the apparent exultation voiced by
Martí for the advent of the machine, the problematic of the landscape and its
technologization is evident, and reveals an anxiety shared by Emerson con-
cerning the implications of modernization.
Let us return to the opening line of the chronicle. The first reference to
the bridge is the following: ‘‘en piedra y acero se levanta la que fue un día
línea ligera en la punta del lápiz de un constructor atrevido’’ (‘‘in stone and
steel rises what was once a light line on the point of a daring constructor’s
pencil’’).24 Two series of oppositions emerge on the semantic level:

rises/what was once

stone and steel/light line

The first series registers a contrast between two verb tenses, indicating
an opposition between a reflexive activity that takes place in the present (se
levanta: is risen or rises) and the conclusive and intransitive aspect of the past
( fue: was). From the second series unfolds the relation between the concrete
and abstract: ‘‘light line on the point of a . . . pencil’’ introduces by contiguity
an intellectual activity opposed to the bridge’s material elements. The seg-
mentation at work here, whereby a series of asymmetries has been generated,
may be represented in the following manner:

present/past
activity/passivity

    

 concrete/abstract
matter/intellect

This network of oppositions proliferates, determining the distribution of

images throughout the chronicle. For example, the present/past division
has its corollary in the novelty/tradition relation: in Martí’s essay, ‘‘the
horses of young men who cross the bridge will soon take the place of the
Trojan’’ (p. ). From the matter/intellect opposition comes that of the ar-
tifice/nature (which includes human activity): ‘‘the [bridge] foundation bites
into the rock’’ (p. ). This segmentation, in turn, implies a molding pro-
cess that generates a hierarchizing axiology. In other words, the differentia-
tion of terms across the divisions produced by these four categories creates
asymmetrical power relations whereby the first term prevails over the sec-
ond. Although intellectual labor is putatively the origin of technology, on the
semantic level, the first field—present, active, material—figures as the force
that displaces the second: past, passive, intellectual.
This incongruity between terms that are differentiated along the four
categories can be seen in figurative processes, such as Martí’s use of simile.
While the chronicle systematically establishes analogies between two things,
the first is always the factual analogue on which the imaginary acts. Hence,
the bridge is like an ‘‘aerial serpent’’ (p. ). On one level, the bridge/aerial
serpent relation corresponds to the concrete/abstract division; however, the
process by which this division is established—that is, simile—is significant,
as the predominance of simile in the chronicle immediately indicates the sup-
plementary function of the second term.
On a deeper level, the ideological function of such figurative processes
cannot be underestimated. As suggested earlier, Martí’s writing does not
solely presuppose asymmetries generated by modernity, but develops strate-
gies for leveling out the incongruencies as well. Writing may begin with the
asymmetries, but its own tendency to a formal order underlines the attempt
to fill the empty spaces, to fabricate over discontinuity, to produce a symme-
try or equilibrium.
To return to the figurative process of simile, in the play of analogies that
predominate throughout the piece, the second term is not always an imagi-
nary entity: it is oftentimes, in fact, a citation from the Book of Culture.
For example, ‘‘the towers of the bridge seem like slenderized Egyptian pyra-
mids’’ (p. ); ‘‘the cables are fastened onto trowel anchors, by masses of
the likes of which can be found in neither Thebes nor the Acropolis’’ (p. ).
Martí works with emblems, with cultural landscapes, which in the chronicle ful-
fill the task of reintroducing various elements found in a canonical culture

Literature and Technology 

that has been precisely displaced by modernization.25 The continual biblical allu-
sions, the sacred oratory that at certain moments determines the resonance
of Martí’s language, are other examples of representation, citations from the
Book of Culture: ‘‘who took the water from its dwelling place and rode on
the air?’’ 26
Analogic proceedings, superceding what at first sight seem to be op-
posing terms, indicate a unifying impulse that attempts to reestablish con-
tinuities among the objects of an ineluctably fragmented world. Of course,
one need not seek in Martí’s work a poetics of fragmentation. But against
the backdrop of a divisive rhetoric, Martí’s writing insists on seeing the har-
mony, and tries to materialize this harmony through the figurative process of
correspondence. For Martí, this was to be one of the tasks for modern literature:
to reinstate the lost order, the image of totality, in a fluid and unstable world.
And yet, fragmentation is a presupposition of the analogic gaze. The
very connective movement that attempts to reestablish ties between things,
takes as a given point of departure the fissure and flux that underlies the junc-
ture. Moreover, as we saw earlier, the problematic of fragmentation in the
chronicle, tied to the new technologized languages of the newspaper, is not
simply a feature of the world seen (and dominated) by the chronicler; frag-
mentation obtains in the very materiality of his discourse.
What, then, does the chronicler in effect visualize? Martí’s chronicle de-
ploys an ensemble of key devices that produce the illusion of presence. In
this respect, the chronicle participates in the conventions of referential dis-
course. The legitimacy of the referential mode is grounded not in the value
of the (verbal) work that proceeds by discourse, but in its utility as a bearer
of information, in its claim to contain the properties of an object. Reference
is authorized in the (illusory) rhetoric of a discursive transparency and in the
presence of a subject who sees what he recounts. Such was the system of lin-
guistic norms that proliferated in different genres of writing related to the
heyday of information in the second half of the nineteenth century.
On the surface, the importance of seeing is played out in ‘‘The Brooklyn
Bridge’’:

See how the resounding dredges, with concave jaws, descend through
four large openings to the bottom of the excavation. . . . See how, in the
meantime, those heroic feverish workers clean the base . . . they alter-
nately continue to take down the fences. . . . See how the water pushes
out. (p. )

The chronicle puts into play the identification between seeing and read-
ing/writing: ‘‘Raise up with your eyes, readers of La América, the great fastened

    

structures’’ (p. ). To say it is to see it, Martí insists in ‘‘The Charleston
Earthquake,’’ thus articulating one of the basic conventions of the journalis-
tic chronicle.
Seeing—the speaker (or writer) claims to be contemplating the refer-
ent—is a mechanism of verisimilitude that enables the illusion of presence
to be activated. The rhetoric of strolling intensifies this effect: ‘‘By the hand
we will take our readers of La América, and lead them to see from up close’’
(p. ). The signature of narrative in the chronicle, delineated as a stroll,
incorporates elements of a specific referential genre, the tourist guide, an
important substratum of travel literature:

Let us call the doors to the New York station. Thousands of men,
thronged at the station door, stop us in our tracks. . . . Now the mob has
relented: let us leave a cent on the counter of the entrance booth, which
is the passage fare; the colossal towers can hardly be seen from the New
York station; over our heads, striking against the still unfinished rails of
the train station, which have yet to reach the bridge, ponderous ham-
mers resound; pushed by the crowd we hurriedly ascend. . . . Before us
five lanes open. (pp. –)

Although defined by the narration of a stroll, the descriptive function

predominates in the chronicle’s elocution: it refers to the mimetic model pre-
supposed by the chronicle. Hence, it would seem that the value of the word in
the chronicle is determined by its capacity to refer immediately to its object.27
Description has not always carried the same discursive or ideological
charge. In classical rhetoric, for example, description is the locus in which
the orator exhibits his or her mastery of tropes; the function of description in
the latter case is not referential but ornamental.28 Georg Lukács, antagonist of
description, at the same time affirms its importance to the second half of the
nineteenth century, particularly among the first ideologues of literary special-
ization. For the defenders of pure art and the naturalists as well, description
was the workshop for formal experimentation, to the point of disfiguring the
very languages that articulated ‘‘the real.’’ 29 So that even in the nineteenth
century, the functions of description tended to exceed the restricted econ-
omy of ‘‘reality,’’ or what Roland Barthes called the reality-effect.30 Taken to
an extreme, description could become the site of stylization, albeit at the risk
of displacing the power of narrative discourse in the chronicle.31 As we will
soon see, this latter use of description was fundamental for Martí and other
fin de siècle chroniclers.
For now, let us return to the rhetoric of ‘‘immediacy’’ in the chronicle.
If description indeed presupposes (and puts into play) the iconic imperative,

Literature and Technology 

doubtless between the object and the descriptive function there arises a net-
work of mediations, an interpretative apparatus, that cannot be explained
merely in terms of the gaze and primary mimesis (‘‘to say it is to see it’’).
The gaze reads the signifieds that conform to the semantic field of the de-
scribed object. In this respect, description plays an active role in establishing
hierarchies, subordinations, asymmetries, and conflicts between the repre-
sented discourses; it registers the impact of the division of labor on discursive
production. ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’ represents discourses and texts that at
their proper historical junctures held a specific relationship with technology.
Throughout the piece in general, the vocabulary betrays the ‘‘presence’’ of
engineering: caisson, mount, solderer, needlepoints, teeth, bolts, anchorage, chain, and
so forth. Of even greater significance is Martí’s treatment of statistical and
geometric quantification in the description of the machine:

Raise up with your eyes, readers of La América, the great fastened struc-
tures that complete the bridge from either side. They are walls that
would shut down the passage of the Nile, of hard and white stone,
which peak at  feet beyond the high mark: the walls are almost cubic,
measuring  feet in height and  in width, and with their enormous
weight they strain (as we will now see) four chains, each with thirty-six
hooks, that secure the four cables. There at the bottom, of the far back-
side furthest from the river, lie four irons, each one of , pounds,
with a . × . foot surface area, lined with slender teeth, like an
octopus with multiple tentacles, or like stars that radiate curved spokes,
and these slender spokes connect with the compact mass of the center,
. feet in thickness, where eighteen steel links intersect across eigh-
teen oblong openings, placed in two rows of nine parallel columns, and
through these wide terminal eyes, which remain below the iron in a
double thread, pass these strong bars of  feet in length, secured in two
open semicylindrical canals at the base of the iron. Such are the teeth
of the bridge from each side. Around the eighteen primary steel links
that remained standing like lances of . feet, terminating in an eye
instead of a point, waiting for soldiers yet unborn, the blocks of gran-
ite are mounted, which seemed like pieces of a mountain, and together
with the steel links that continued to be secured by bolts that all at once
reach across to the thirty-six terminating eyes of each of the eighteen
contiguous interwoven links—as when the fingers of both hands are
interlaced.32

In the heterogeneous space of the chronicle, Martí assumes an-other dis-

course: quantification, corollary to a gaze that attempts to geometrically

    

rationalize space. In this same passage, however, the figuration and syntactic
dislocations proliferate in a writing that dramatizes its literariness as well.
The intersection of discourses makes the reading difficult, perhaps to
the point of making the description illegible in terms of its referential im-
perative. Of course, resistence to the referential imperative, which in an im-
plosive manner breaks with the iconic capacity of description, cannot be read
as a simple failure on the part of the chronicler. For exactly at the ‘‘blind’’ spot
of description, the literary specificity of this writing acquires density and em-
phasis. This does not mean that the discourse remains inscribed in some kind
of solipsistic celebration or intransitivity. Suffice it to say that in the cited pas-
sage, the chronicle represents, on a strictly formal level, the asymmetry be-
tween discourses tied to technology and literature. The decision to represent
something along the lines of one given discourse and not another is never
disinterested or passive: it presupposes the struggle of literary discourse that
is constantly pushing its way through the ‘‘strong’’ signs of modernity.
The machine/quantification relation was consolidated in Martí’s epoch.
Quantification, for our purposes, signifies a language identified with the ma-
chine; such is the way Martí conceived it. On the other hand, it is evident that
quantitative discourse is not an extension of the object made ‘‘present’’ by
the chronicler. Martí’s chronicles generally work along the lines of a reading
on texts, almost always journalistic. In the case of ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’
the reportage on which Martí’s reading was based can be identified: ‘‘The
Brooklyn Bridge’’ by William C. Conant, published in Harper’s News Monthly
Magazine.33 Once again, we find the chronicler in the position of a translator.
The sequence of descriptive segments, in both texts, is almost equal. At cer-
tain moments, the chronicle seems to refer to the numerous illustrations and
diagrams of the original coverage, an essential feature of the ekphrasis that
naturalizes the seeing/writing identification. Needless to say, these illustra-
tions are lacking in the chronicle.
The multiple and dramatic transformations in Martí’s ‘‘Brooklyn Bridge’’
illustrate the task of the translator. At the point where the description of the
apparatus begins to become illegible (in terms of a strict referentiality de-
manded by the norms of reportage), the emergence of conflicting discourses
intersect and intercept the language of the earlier text.34 Martí overwrites,
writes over, but the palimpsest of style leaves traces of a transformed matter
or material.
The rewriting of reportage in Martí represents a technical writing. The
marks of this technical writing, literature’s other, that remain on Martí’s
paper (on the borders, like displaced remains) refer to the mode of represent-
ing and interpreting the world that lends coherence to the cited passage. In

Literature and Technology 

this case, the palimpsest implies the terms of a struggle that surpasses the
verbal level.
The logic of this other discourse is the extreme rationalization of the
represented material. Its strategical devices are statistics and geometry.35
Rationalization quantifies experience: it establishes the means for universal
value in order to interpret and exchange the elements of a heterogeneous and
particular reality. In , Georg Simmel, anticipating one of the privileged
themes of Adorno’s criticism regarding the ‘‘regulated world’’ of modernity,
correlated this rationalization with the development of a new ‘‘mentality.’’
For Simmel, this mentality, which had arisen from science and a monetary
economy, impregnated even the apparently most spontaneous and insignifi-
cant aspects of modern daily life:

The modern mind has become more and more a calculating one. The
calculating exactness of practical life which has resulted from a money
economy corresponds to the idea of natural science, namely that of
transforming the world into an arithmetical problem and of fixing every
one of its parts in a mathematical formula. It has been the money econ-
omy which has thus filled the daily life of so many people with weigh-
ing, calculating, enumerating and the reduction of qualitative values to
quantitative terms.36

Quantification is not oriented toward the object of representation; the

object only exists in terms of its interchangeability, its adjustment to the
parameters imposed by the measure of exchange. Neither is it oriented to-
ward the subject of representation, who becomes an agent in an anonymous
circulation. Quantification places the weight of discourse on the very mea-
sure of exchange, in its universalizing apparatus that reduces the specific and
heterogeneous.
Martí’s writing operates on the other side of such a rationalization, pos-
tulating the value of the exceptional word that veers from the linguistic and
social norm. If technologization (from the perspective of the emergent lit-
erary field) presupposes the massification of language, literature would fold
back on the notion of style, by authorizing itself to be precisely the critique
of massification. We return again to literature, as Martí conceived it, as a
strategy of legitimation that takes into account the ‘‘destylized’’ and ‘‘me-
chanical’’ languages of modernity as obliterated matter for the supposed ‘‘ex-
ceptionality’’ of style.
Hence, Martí would privilege another way of seeing:

    

 Seeing them conglomerate to swarm quickly over the aerial serpent,
squeezed together, the vast, clean, ever-growing crowd—one imagines see-
ing seated in the middle of the sky, with her radiant head appearing over
the summit, and with white hands, as large as eagles, open, in a sign of
peace over the land—Liberty.37 (Italics added)

Martí reworks the concept of sight into a hallucination. His discourse

departs from a descriptive empirical instance (‘‘Seeing them conglomerate’’),
which immediately undergoes a metaphoric transformation. The referential
moment of the gaze is minimal. The ‘‘swarm[ing]’’ crowd and the bridge are
erased behind the ‘‘aerial serpent.’’ Martí’s illumination begins with this brief
moment when the common word (bridge) is obliterated, but not its essen-
tial trace. Bridge is assumed as the provision that opens up the possibility for
a writerly transformation; the contrast between the referential and the liter-
ary dramatizes the literary task. Beginning with this instant, writing ascends
toward apotheosis, thematized in the cited passage above as follows:

seeing
swarm
aerial serpent
ever-growing crowd

one imagines seeing

middle of the sky
summit
eagles
over the land
Liberty

The statement articulates a spatial hierarchization. The point of depar-

ture is the bestial low (where creatures swarm). The space below is crowded,
full of people squeezed together. Starting with ‘‘one imagines seeing,’’ the
space opens up and expands: ‘‘in the middle of the sky,’’ ‘‘white hands . . .
open.’’ The bestial is elevated (eagles) and the perspective closes with the
moment of highest abstraction, ‘‘over the land—Liberty.’’
The shaping of this brief allegory, which thematizes the opposition be-
tween two modes of seeing, can be read as a hierarchization of different
ways of representing. The mechanism of illumination (‘‘one imagines seeing’’)
is stylization, which generates the sublime ascendancy promised in the task
offered by poetic language. The elision of the ordinary word in Martí is repre-
sented as an elevation. Stylization is founded on a model of literary discourse

Literature and Technology 

as a dramatic deviation from the linguistic norm(s) in operation, evidenced
in both the figurative saturation of allegory and the hyper-strained syntax.
Martí overwrites, re-marks (on) stylization. The point of departure for
and effaced boundary of stylization is the other discourse: the ability to see
from the nonliterary and, more specifically, quantitative (in the case of ‘‘The
Brooklyn Bridge’’) description. In Martí and the other modernists, stylization
is the reverse side of the universality that imposes the value of exchange and
the new statistical rationality.38 If the predominance of the exchange medium
and its universalizing will emphasize the anonymous character of quantita-
tive discourse, stylization will place the weight of signification on the activity
of the subject who imagines seeing.
This will to style has been generally interpreted in relation to modernist
individualism. For example, for Henríquez Ureña, the will to style ‘‘only pur-
sues originality.’’ 39 The modernist project, for Federico de Onís, consisted of
‘‘being unique and individual, in having an unmistakable voice and style, in
searching for the maximum personal originality.’’ 40
The will to style at the turn of the century would thus seem to reinstate
the topos of romantic individuality. At times, even Martí openly affirms a poet-
ics of expression 41 with the personal I as the source from which discourse ema-
nates, overflows from the interior onto the world. Poetic verses are ‘‘sliced
pieces of my entrails,’’ lava spewed from the volcanic I. The I, better yet the
interior realm, forms one of the fields essential to the confabulation of liter-
ary space at the turn of the century. Martí writes:

[In] the universal factory there is no small thing that does not contain
within it all the germs of greater things, and the sky turns and moves
along with its tormented days and nights, and man spins and continues
forward with his passions, faith, and bitterness; and when his eyes no
longer see the stars of the sky, he turns to gaze at those of his soul.
Hence the pale and groaning poets; hence that new tormented and pain-
ful poetry, a necessary consequence of the times.42

In Martí’s labor on language, stylization would appear here to be the

converter or translator of the writer’s individuality; at least that is how mod-
ern writers have been read. Yet if it is indeed evident that stylization drama-
tizes its distantiation, a sense of estrangement and a ‘‘deviation’’ from the
(social) linguistic norm, the relationship between style and individualism
would have to be qualified in the specific context of modernity. Rodó’s read-
ing of Darío, for example, suggests one of the possible directions for this
kind of analysis, notwithstanding the critic’s tacit rejection of stylization:

    

 For you [readers] who, above all, seek in poetry the reality of the pelican
myth, the ingenuousness of confession, the generous and truthful aban-
don of the soul that would deliver itself unto you entirely, relinquish (for
the present moment) the harvest of bleeding stanzas ripped from pal-
pitating entrails. Never will the rasping bellow of intense or devouring
passion follow from the lines of such a poetically calculating artist. . . .
Over the expression of personal sentiment the concern with art will pre-
vail.43 (Italics added)

The opposition between art and expression is striking in Rodó’s cri-

tique of Darío. In effect, the emergent poetics of artifice, opposed to the
still-accepted ideology of expression, registered one of the formative contra-
dictions of the fin de siècle literary field.44 Even for writers most apparently
attached to individualism—such as Silva, Casal, and Darío himself—literary
activity begins to become a complex, ‘‘calculating’’ practice with an institu-
tional memory that exceeds inspiration or personal expression. Literature de-
ploys a concept of ‘‘museum dreams,’’ 45 wherein even nature, the realm of
the spontaneous, only acquires meaning in reference to a codified interpreta-
tive sign, archived in the Book of Culture. The interior realm is replete with
Greek statues.46
All discourse generates a memory, a version of its past, even as it recip-
rocally presupposes the task of citation. The modernists, however, were the
first to exhibit the Book of Culture as a presupposed archive: reference to a
specifically artistic past becomes a thematized device. José Asunción Silva, in
De sobremesa (After Dinner), provides us with many examples: ‘‘relieved of her
overcoat and hat, which lent her a certain resemblance . . . to the portrait of a
princess painted by Van Dyck’’; ‘‘and she rubbed her hands, two little hands,
long and pale, with sharp fingernails like those of Ana de Austria in the por-
trait by Rubens’’; and ‘‘The other silhouette, her own, ingenuous and pure as
that of a virgin out of Fra Angelico.’’ 47 Manuel Díaz Rodríguez writes in Ídolos
rotos (Broken Idols): ‘‘With her fair-haired beauty, and even her clothing itself,
she expressed a similar beauty of such a harmonious conjunction that it made
Alberto exclaim as if he were talking to someone: a Botticelli!’’ 48 Stylization
here begins with the task of citing, in order to generate a second-degree arti-
ficiality. In extreme cases, the system of citations becomes the driving force
behind the entire work. In De sobremesa, for instance, the insatiable desire for
aesthetic experience comes to motivate the search that frames the story. The
protagonist looks for a semiphantasmic woman who has awakened his mem-
ory of a painting that he had seen in his childhood.
In Martí, the Book of Culture as an imagined compendium of West-

Literature and Technology 

ern sources has not been aestheticized to the degree it has in Casal, Darío,
or Silva. As we saw in ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ however, Martí also imposes
emblems, topical images (Trojan horses, bestiary, biblical allusions) on the
(modern) phenomenon represented in his work. These emblems incarnate a
‘‘tradition’’ in the text: a tradition without assignable origin, a tradition that
is perhaps rather driven by the historicist logic of the museum—the most
salient cultural institution in the archaeological imaginary of the nineteenth
century.49 The codified, topical character of these emblems is functional in
Martí: the vertical, subordinative arrangement in his bestiary of serpents and
eagles, for example, enables him to create the illusion of a strictly hierar-
chized system of values juxtaposed precisely to a decodified and fluid world
of masses.
The ‘‘dream of the museum’’ is the history projected by literature as its
own past. It is a way of specifying the domain of literary identity. Stylization,
which activates this institutional memory, thus cannot be understood as a
simple corollary of individual will, fundamental to the romantic ideology of
expression, spontaneity, inspiration, creation, and so on.
Toward the final decades of the century, Latin American literature begins
to renounce the idea of being an expression or medium. It even begins to de-
velop an ethic of labor and an ideology of productivity, tied to the technologi-
cal logic of the artifice. From Martí in the s onward, the transformation
can be traced strictly in the manner that writers would formulate the sub-
ject/style relation. In , following the publication of his Revista Venezolana,
Martí responds to a criticism of which he was the primary object of attack:

Some have associated the style of some simple productions that saw the
light in our last issue with neatness and pulchritude.
It is not a defense but a clarification that we here propose. One
is the language of the cabinet: the other the agitated parliament. One
language speaks an urgent polemic: the other unhurried biography. So,
when did pulchritude begin to be a negative condition? The facts only
accumulate with the days, and it is force that truth lends to style: the
writer has to paint, like a painter. There is no reason that one [writer]
would avail of diverse colors, and not another. The atmosphere changes
with different zones, as does language with different themes.50

The analogy between writer and painter in this instance cannot be re-
duced to the topos of ut pictura poesis. The point of comparison is not rooted
in representation, but in the material basis of their labor. The painter works
with a concrete material, color, which distinguishes his or her work from
any other kind of intellectual labor. The modern writer or literato, on the

    

other hand, works with an apparently undifferentiated medium: language, a
medium for different types of communication. Martí, therefore, would insist
on the ‘‘different zones’’ that constitute a differentiated world of language,
stratified by the division of labor: ‘‘One is the language of the cabinet: the
other the agitated parliament.’’ Style is the medium of labor that differen-
tiates the writer (as the use of color does the painter) from other social,
institutional practices that also use language as a medium. Stylization is one
of the marks of specificity by which literature, in accordance with the norms
of specialization, attempts to delimit a proper territory and an irreplaceable
social function. Hence, the double paradox of stylization: it deindividualizes
the ‘‘spontaneous’’ or ‘‘inspired’’ language of experience through the indi-
viduation of language on the level of form.51 Conversely, stylization as the
distinguishing mark of the literary field authorizes literature to be incorpo-
rated on an institutional level.
As Rodó had suggested (albeit nostalgically), the new interior realm be-
gins to be emptied of its personal referent. One of the functions of this I is
to act as the pronoun of the literary (and not personal, or individual) subject.
Stylization is one of the processes in which a type of authority takes shape
that is no longer legitimized by politics, history, information, or sociology.
The legitimacy of this literary subject is grounded in the aesthetic endow-
ment that literature—in accordance with its specific means of labor—would
be able to grant society. As Martí contends:

To found literature in science. Which does not mean introducing the sci-
entific style and language into literature, which is a form of truth distinct
from science, but rather comparing, imagining, alluding, and deduc-
ing whereby what is written may remain, it being in agreement with the
constant and real facts.52

The ideology of specialization in Martí does not propose a distantia-

tion from life: ‘‘To approach life—I have here the object of literature’’ (vol.
, p. ). On the contrary, he represents literature as an efficient and system-
atic approach to the world. For Martí, literature was a ‘‘form of truth distinct
from science,’’ which ought to have a specific, rigorous means of knowing
and changing life ‘‘in order to reform it by knowing it’’ (ibid.).
In Martí’s view, literature could not be a passive site of confluence among
other already specialized discourses. Literature here begins to desire a field
of immanence, a discourse (not a medium) capable of actively participating in
a society where the segmentation brought about by the division of labor was
constantly intensifying. The desire for this interior, as the cited passage indi-
cates, at times presupposes science and technology themselves as models:

Literature and Technology 

 The whole art of writing is concretizing.
The same thing that is happening to the common public with re-
gard to some writers is also perchance happening to these same writers
with regard to these complicated machineries, of admirable construc-
tion and effect; for their rudimentary, deformed, irregular education,
being in some aspects plethoric, in others anemic, if not taxed and weak-
ened, ill-prepares them to understand and esteem these [machines].
The ill-prepared separate themselves from all carefully crafted style
bearing transcendental and new ideas, as ignorant travelers distance
themselves with a grimace from, or endure with visible disgust, the in-
spection and explanation of machineries of the most curious and ven-
erable make, the operations of which are, on the superficial or irregular
level of instruction, to them [the ignorant travelers] impenetrable.
Each paragraph must be organized as an excellent machine, and
each one of its parts be adjusted, inserted with such perfection among
others, so that if any one part is taken from among the ensemble, it
would be as a bird without wing, and the parts would not function, or
like the building from which one of its walls has been taken. The com-
plexity of the machine indicates the perfection of its make [trabajo].
Volta’s battery is not the dynamo of today. Nor is Papin’s pot Watt’s ma-
chine. Nor is the locomotive of Brooks or Baldwin that of the wooden
tracks. (vol. , p. )

‘‘The complexity of the machine indicates the perfection of its make’’:

stylization (the machine) registers the pervasive ideology of work and effi-
ciency in Martí, corollary to specialization. Literature is here represented in
the formulation of an other space and the consequent demarcation of that
outer space’s inside, an interior realm. The interior, however, contradictorily
emulates what it projects as its signs of otherness: the perfection of the work,
the immanent rationality of the machine: ‘‘Language has to be mathematic,
geometric, sculpturizing’’ (vol. , p. ).
Still, in Latin America (and in no case more evident than in Martí), the
machine of style confronted a series of insurmountable obstructions. The
will to autonomy and specialization emblematized and set in motion by this
machine faced irreducible contradictions (as perhaps it does even today) that
underlined the incongruities distinctive of uneven modernity. Certainly, the
fact that this chapter focuses primarily on a chronicle (‘‘El puente de Brook-
lyn’’), in order to trace the itinerary of the ‘‘will to style’’ as an institutional
device, is not coincidental, and implies a certain irony. If stylization is indeed
exaggerated in the chronicle (precisely because in the chronicle, the ‘‘liter-

    

ary’’ word coexists and struggles against discursive ‘‘antiaesthetic’’ functions
tied to the technologized medium of journalism), the heterogeneity of the
chronicle on both a formal and institutional level also shows the impossi-
bility of ‘‘purifying’’ the field of aesthetic authority toward the turn of the cen-
tury. The chronicle cannot be read as merely a ‘‘marginal’’ and ‘‘alien’’ space
in literature, but instead, as an area of confluence for competing discourses:
heterogeneity was the distinctive feature of this ‘‘literature,’’ notwithstand-
ing the protests of the modernists and the forgetfulness of historians.
These incongruencies and contradictions distinguish Martí’s moder-
nity. They determine not only the multiplicity of his social roles, but his own
relation to language—a relation that, particularly in his chronicles (as we
have seen in ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge’’), is submitted to a laborious (re)shaping
of fragments and remains taken from both modern and traditional forms.
These forms are taken from their original sites and given new functions. In
this respect, the literary ‘‘machine’’ in the chronicle, beyond the consistency
and coherence of the ideal ‘‘machine,’’ was more fittingly akin to the curious
apparatus described by Quiroga in the epigraph opening this chapter. A ma-
chine of secondhand refunctionalized pieces that the emergent artist ‘‘with
his one arm and the help of his stump, was cutting, turning, twisting, and
soldering with his energetic faith and optimism.’’ 53 Such are the machines
of our uneven modernity.

Notes
 Jose Martí, Obras completas, vol.  (Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, –), –
[hereafter cited by volume and page number].
 Some of these advertisements can be found in volume  of Martí’s complete works. Al-
though La América was published in New York, it circulated in Latin America: La Nación, for
example, reproduced Martí’s articles.
 Martí, OC, vol. , .
 Octavio Paz, Cuadrivio (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, ), .
 Octavio Paz, ‘‘Traducción y metáfora,’’ Los hijos del limo (Barcelona: Seix Barral, ), .
 Angel Rama, ‘‘Sueños, espritus, ideología y arte,’’ prologue to El mundo de los sueños, Rubén
Darío (Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Universitaria, ), . José Emilio Pacheco adds
that ‘‘against mechanization, homogenization, and the uniformity of industrial procedure,
against the infinite repetitions and redundancies, poets attempted to underline the unique
aspect of experience’’ (‘‘Introducción,’’ in Antología del modernismo [–], vol.  [México:
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, ], xxiv). Along this line of thought, see also
Lily Litvak, Transformación industrial y literatura en España (–) (Madrid: Taurus, ).
 See Meyer Howard Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (particularly ‘‘Science and Poetry in
Romantic Criticism’’) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. For a history of the
machine metaphor, see David Porush, The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (New York: Methuen,
), –.

Literature and Technology 

  Andrés Bello, Obra literaria, ed. Pédro Grases (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), .
 Domingo F. Sarmiento, Viajes por Europa, Africa, y América, in Obras de D. F. Sarmiento, vol. 
(Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Gutenberg, –), . First published in .
 Domingo F. Sarmiento, Recuerdos de provincia (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sopena, ), . First
published in .
 Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, ‘‘El Nacional,  May ,’’ in Obras. Crítica Literaria, vol.  (Mexico
City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, ), .
 Rubén Darío, ‘‘ ‘El hierro,’ La Tribuna,  September ,’’ in Obras completas, vol.  (Madrid:
Afrodisio Aguado, ), .
 José Enrique Rodó, Ariel, ed. Angel Rama, prologue by Carlos Real de Azúa (Caracas: Biblio-
teca Ayacucho, ), . First published in .
 The definition of ideology given here is taken from Louis Althusser, ‘‘Ideology and Ideo-
logical State Apparatuses,’’ in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left
Books, ).
 Octavio Paz, Los signos en rotación (Buenos Aires: Sur, ), –.
 This is one of Noé Jitrik’s main themes in ‘‘La máquina semiótica/La máquina fabril,’’ in Las
contradicciones del modernismo (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, ).
 José Martí, ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ in OC, vol. , –. First published in .
 See Alan Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
).
 Martí, ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ .
 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, in The Selected Writings of Ralph W. Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson
(New York: Modern Library, ), .
 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘‘The Poet,’’ in The Selected Writings of Ralph W. Emerson, ed. Brooks
Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, ), .
 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims, in Complete Works, vol.  (Cambridge, Mass.:
Riverside Press, ), –. On the North American debate around the impact of mod-
ernization on culture, see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal
in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), esp. ‘‘Two Kingdoms of Force,’’ –;
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York:
Hill and Want, ); and John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values
in America, – (New York: Penguin Books, ).
 See Georg Lukács, ‘‘The Ideal of the Harmonious Man in Bourgeois Aesthetics,’’ in Writer
and Critic, trans. Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin Press, ), –.
 Martí, ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ .
 Pedro Salinas writes of Darío: ‘‘in Darío vital direct experience and this other kind of experi-
ence that Gundolf calls Bildungserlebnis, the experience of culture, are inseparable’’ (La poesía
de Rubén Darío [Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, ], ).
 Martí, ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ .
 At least, this is one of the functions commonly attributed to description by contemporary
criticism; such an identification, however, underestimates its semiotic possibilities. See
Michel Riffaterre, ‘‘Descriptive Imagery,’’ in Yale French Studies  ():  ff.
 ‘‘To describe is never [in classical rhetoric] to describe a reality, but to prove one’s rhetorical
know-how, to prove one’s book learning’’ (Philippe Hamon, ‘‘Rhetorical Status of the De-
scriptive,’’ Yale French Studies  []: ).
 According to Georg Lukács, ‘‘in dialogue, [we see] the lack of the sober and trivial poetry in
daily bourgeois life; in description, the most affected artifice of art refined in the studio’’;

    

 ‘‘Narrate or to describe? A preliminary discussion of naturalism and formalism’’ (‘‘Ideal of
the Harmonious Man,’’ [see above, note ] –).
 See Roland Barthes, ‘‘The Reality-Effect,’’ in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, ), –.
 Raimundo Lida has studied in Darío the ‘‘contemplative aestheticism of description at
the base of [Darío’s] refined pictorial impressions, interweaving his prose with that of
[Alphonse] Daudet or the Goncourts’’ (‘‘Estudio preliminar,’’ in Cuentos completos, ed. Ernesto
Mejía Sánchez [Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, ]), xlii).
 Martí, ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ .
 William C. Conant, ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ Harper’s New Monthly Magazine  (December
–May ): –. Along with the article, the magazine published engineer Roeb-
ling’s blueprints for the bridge. Reportage is an instance of a kind of North American
journalism that was developed in the epoch of the scientific-technological revolution. Its
function was to mediate between specialized and public knowledge. This kind of journalism
also highlights the diversification of written languages in society, as well as the proliferation
of new non-‘‘lettered’’ intellectuals assigned the task of administering writing and informa-
tion.
 No discursive purity can be presupposed in either of the two texts. The report displays some
remarkable ‘‘poetic’’ moments, although poesis is not its dominant function. Martí, for his
part, seizes a metaphor from Conant (a flying serpent), translates it literally (‘‘sierpe aérea’’),
and uses it to describe a different object.
 ‘‘Geometry is the language of reason within the universe of signs. It apprehends all the
forms at their beginning—at their principle—on the level of a system of points, lines, and
constant proportions. Any cleavage, any irregularity, appears to it as the intrusion of evil’’
(Jean Starobinski, ‘‘ et de langage des principes,’’ Preuves  [January ]: ).
 Georg Simmel, ‘‘The Metropolis and Mental Life,’’ in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed.
Donald M. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . The principal works by
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer on rationalization and technologization are found in
Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, ).
 Martí, ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ .
 On the other hand, the development of anonymous and rationalized forms of writing in
capitalism bypass statistics. On the role of bureaucratic writing, Poulantzas writes: ‘‘Doubt-
less there has always been a close relationship between the State and writing, insofar as the
State represents a certain division between manual and intellectual labor. But the role of
writing is completely unique in the capitalist State. From concise indices and footnotes to
archives, from a certain standpoint nothing exists in the eyes of the State that is not writ-
ten, and everything that is recorded in writing always leaves a written trace somewhere.
But the technology of writing is quite different in this instance from that of precapitalist
States: in the former it is not a writing of transcription, pure trace of the sovereign’s word
(real or imagined), a writing of revelation or transcription: writing as a monument. It is an
anonymous writing, that does not repeat any discourse but rather becomes the trajectory of
a reconnaissance for the purpose of recording various bureaucratic divisions and functions’’
(Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, and Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller [London: Verso, ],
xx; translation modified).
 Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Breve historia del modernismo (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econó-
mica, ), .

Literature and Technology 

 Federico de Onís, ‘‘José Martí: valoración,’’ in España en América (Río Piedras, Puerto Rico:
Editorial Universitaria, ), . First published in .
 On the poetics of expression as a romantic ideology or theory, see Meyer H. Abrams, ‘‘The
Development of the Expressive Theory of Poetry and Art,’’ in The Mirror and the Lamp, –.
 José Martí, Obra literaria (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), .
 José Enrique Rodó, ‘‘Rubén Darío,’’ in Obras completas, d ed., ed. Alberto José Vaccaro
(Buenos Aires: Antonio Zamora, ), .
 Once again, the issue concerns a contradiction in a field where these and other literary ide-
ologies coexisted as contending forces. An author (in this case, Martí) may at times act as
an agent of both (as well as other) ideologies. Rodó, in the same text on Darío wherein he
[Rodó] proclaims himself a modernist, writes: ‘‘Every act of selection brings with it a limi-
tation, an extensive diminution: and without a doubt the refinement of poetry by the author
of Azul diminishes it beyond the sight of humans and universality’’ (‘‘Rubén Darío,’’ ).
 Salinas uses this phrase of Gustave Flaubert’s to refer to this ‘‘experience of culture,’’ spe-
cifically artistic, that mediates between literature and the world. See his La poesía de Rubén
Darío, –.
 ‘‘Vivid and fluid pastiche would be quite a gratuitous (at times archaeological) diversion for
Rubén’’ (Lida, ‘‘Estudio preliminar,’’ xxxvii n. ). Regarding the emergence of pastiche, Darío
marks a division between Leopoldo Lugones (and the avant-garde that systematized its use)
and Martí. Pastiche is entirely absent in Martí.
 José Asunción Silva, De sobremesa (Bogotá: Editorial de Cromos, ), , , . First pub-
lished in .
 Manuel Díaz Rodríguez, Ídolos rotos, in Narrativa y ensayo, selection and prologue by Orlando
Araujo (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), . First published in .
 For a discussion on the museum as the scene and public space of philology and its archaeo-
logical method throughout the nineteenth century, see Aníbal González, La crónica modernista
hispanoamericana (Madrid: Porrúa Turanzas, ), pp. – (esp. pp. ff.). González op-
poses the public spectacle of philology in the museum (and its demotion throughout the
nineteenth century) with the private ‘‘interior’’ of literature in the domestic space and in
fantasy. See also chapter  above, note .
 Martí, Obra literaria, .
 Thus, the ideal of the ‘‘exception’’ or ‘‘deviation’’ from the linguistic norm becomes an
institutional norm. Beginning in the mid-s, Jorge Luis Borges is one of the first to sys-
tematically critique the norm of originality. Regarding the paradox of the ‘‘institutionalized
exceptionality’’ of literature, Georg Simmel’s interpretation of fashion in On Individuality and
Social Forms (pp. –) has been quite useful.
 Martí, OC, vol. , .
 Horacio Quiroga, ‘‘Los destiladores de naranja,’’ in Cuentos (Mexico City: Porrúa, ). First
published in .

    

Chapter  ‘‘This Cardboard Tabloid Life’’:
Literature and the Masses

From whence does one speak? From what nameless social milieu does one
write? What are the demands, debts, and compensations crystallized in that
moment of silence from which writing springs and disperses? What must be
given for one to be able to speak, to have the power to reflect—particularly
on the specificity and autonomy of the discourse that one maintains?
Ironically, in our attempt to approach the will to autonomy, we have pro-
ceeded laterally through the least specialized field of fin de siècle literature:
the chronicle. It is as if we had almost eluded the principal point of depar-
ture, the ‘‘purity’’ and interiority that poetry claims for itself:

Ganado tengo el pan: hágase el verso,

y en su comercio dulce se ejercite
la mano, que cual prófugo perdido
entre oscuras malezas, o quien lleva
a rastra un enorme peso, andaba ha poco
sumas hilando y revolviendo cifras.

I have earned the bread: let poetry be made,

and in its sweet commerce let the hand work—
a hand that, however lost a fugitive it be
in the dark underbrush,
or like a person dragging behind him
an enormous weight
has until recently
been adding and spinning numbers.1

We have, instead, moved within the diurnal place of literature, the zone
of an other commerce, where one writes in order to earn one’s bread. In this
zone the modern writer figures as a salaried employee—his self-deprecatory
gestures notwithstanding:
 For very little I propose to give a lot; things of value not by my account, but
because they will be things of interest, new and novel.

What I offer is a useful merchandise, superior for its importance, regard-

less of how I would have it—[in comparison] to what I ask for in exchange.2
(Italics added).

Here, Martí relates to Manuel Mercado one of the conditions of production

behind the chronicle: writing is subject to the laws of the market.3 This sal-
aried labor is ambiguously represented as an instance of alienation: as the
above example shows, the value of the word in the chronicle elides the posses-
sive mine. Perhaps we can sense in this avoidance the fate to which the literato is
more or less resigned—the fact that his words always emerge off-site, outside
the territory of his ideal constituency. But what value exactly does this alien-
ation take on? What value does this mine acquire? Literature pricks us with its
response: ‘‘I have earned the bread: let us now make poetry.’’ One does not,
however, have to accept this interpellation: in criticism, such a move would
be tantamount to assuming the literary subject’s self-representation and sys-
tem of exclusions as the starting point for our critical task.
We proceed through the chronicle, a liminal area that betrays the incon-
sistencies of the project of autonomy brought about by fin de siècle literature.
The chronicle, tied to the history of the folletín, is the place occupied by litera-
ture in the newspaper. As we have seen, such a place was, in part, subject to
the exigencies of the growing culture industry. More important, it was from
this section of the newspaper that literature began to insistently announce
the project of autonomy—its institutional utopia, to use an oxymoron. This
utopia, bound to encounter numerous inconsistencies, nevertheless sought
to erase the traces of the place from which it emerged. In order to apprehend
its historicity, it would therefore be necessary to examine this place; a place
that is at once the site of speech and the object of a corrective practice. For
behind the face of a projected utopia, literature’s dependence on the news-
paper relativizes and even contradicts its will to autonomy.
In our earlier reading of ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ it was shown that styli-
zation—a process that seems to specify the parameters of literature—not
only distinguishes literary language from other emergent discourses of the
period, it also coexists and even merges with the ‘‘straightforward,’’ ‘‘alien-
ated,’’ ‘‘quantifying’’ language of the other discourses. In fact, in ‘‘The Brook-
lyn Bridge,’’ the condition of possibility for the sense of ascendancy achieved
by stylization is the baseness (bajeza) 4 of the scene of writing or inscription.
This scene of inscription, in Martí’s case, was the technologized world of the
newspaper and modern city. This presupposition of a baseness from which

    

the writer must ascend (through stylization) is hinted at in Darío’s statement:
‘‘Martí wastes his diamonds on any old thing. . . . Recall, if nothing more, his
correspondences for La Nación.’’ 5 And Martí, in his article ‘‘Oscar Wilde,’’ had
written: ‘‘One cannot but hate tyranny as to live under it. Not [in order] to
exacerbate the poetic fire, so much as to live among those who are lacking in
it.’’ 6 This condition of baseness prevails throughout his extended residence
in New York: ‘‘[Here] they do not understand beauty. . . . They do not exhibit
beautiful objects, but bury them among other objects.’’ 7
A driving impulse behind fin de siècle literature—and a legitimizing
mechanism for literature’s virtual autonomy in society—was its self-repre-
sentation as a response to the fragmentary and ‘‘antiaesthetic’’ movement of
the modern city. Literature, particularly in the overdetermined field of poetry,
performs a counter-elision to those objects and discourses that efface beauty:

These that I offer, they are not finished compositions: they are, alas!
notes of images taken in haste, lest they escape into the unrefined crowd
of the streets, into the tumultuous and sudden rush of the trains, or in
the urgent and inflexible tasks of a commercial office—a dear refuge of
the banished.8

In contrast to poetry, the chronicle thematized the process of elision:

the confrontation of literature with the ‘‘antiaesthetic’’ areas of capitalist
daily life. In fact, the production of meaning in the chronicle, which served to
represent the objects that ‘‘extinguish’’ beauty, begins with this very confron-
tation. As we saw in ‘‘The Brooklyn Bridge,’’ the organization of discourse in
the chronicle presupposes the struggle of literature in the field of competi-
tion established by the division of intellectual labor.
In spite of its tangential nature—composed as it is of ‘‘alienated’’ words,
objects, and discourses—the chronicle was fundamental to the turn-of-the-
century will to autonomy. The chronicle served as a kind of experimental
workshop, where literature could continue exploring and configuring the
representation of discourses—discourses that developed and formed their
borders or exteriors in relation to one another. They all converged in the new
urban experience. With greater insistence than any other discursive space of
the period, the chronicle enabled literature to designate and denounce those
discourses that comprised its (literature’s) outside: information, technology,
commercial reason, and (as we will see in this chapter) the crisis of experi-
ence in mass culture.9 If, in poetry, literature speaks of its inner ideal, in
the chronicle, literature projects a map of the modern city where autonomy
stakes its claim for specificity and difference. Literature, then, was not predi-
cated on the development of its self-consciousness; quite the contrary. The

Literature and the Masses 

condition of possibility for an interior, autonomous space was rather the
competition for the legitimation of a proper space in society. And it is this
space that elicits the need to produce a self-consciousness, a specificity.
The struggle for legitimation is the germinal seed of the chronicle. Hence,
the chronicle’s tangential and undisciplined form nevertheless constitutes a
privileged field for the analysis of those social conditions presupposed by the
will to autonomy, by literary modernization in Latin America along with its
contradictions and uneven development.
This chapter consists of two sections: the first, ‘‘Urban Flow and the
Splitting of Pairs,’’ is a reading of Martí’s representation of the city as a desta-
bilizing, fragmentary force in the Escenas norteamericanos, particularly ‘‘Coney
Island’’ core of an emerging culture industry.10 The second part, ‘‘The House
of Discourse,’’ analyzes the role of the speaking subject in the chronicle—the
totalizing will of the aesthetic subject—as a compensatory and corrective re-
sponse to the effects of urban flow. The reading of ‘‘Coney Island’’ will enable
us to explore (in the following chapter) the concept of ‘‘culture’’ (and litera-
ture) assumed by the subject as a defense of spiritual values in a massified and
commodified city. Martí’s concept of culture will, in many ways, foreshadow
the emergence of what Rodó in Ariel would call ‘‘our modern literature of
ideas,’’ tied to the Latinoamericanista essay in the twentieth century.

Urban Flow and the Splitting of Pairs

‘‘Fourteen years ago,’’ Martí wrote in , Coney Island was ‘‘a heap [montón]
of abandoned earth’’ (appendix , p. ). In this version of Coney Island’s
past, the ‘‘heap of earth’’ precedes any semblance of order or social signifi-
cance. This undifferentiated matter, sign of a mute nature, is alien to all arti-
fice; an island, with its back to the city. One might go so far as to suggest that
it was almost a nonplace, left outside the parameters of the social space de-
marcated by the urban landscape. From the perspective of the city, this aban-
doned earth was an outreach or frontier: an insignificant place, deaf to com-
munication because of the expanse of water separating it from the mainland.
Martí will emphasize this aspect of Coney Island’s past in order to high-
light the intensity of transformations that shape its present. For at the time
that Martí is actually writing about Coney Island—the scene of inscription—
the once empty island is filled with the signs of modernity. The descriptions
stress the sense of agglomeration, a massification distinctive of the represented
world where crowds ebb and flow. Coney Island is now a place on which the
city has turned its masses, its machines and discourses, especially its written

    

traces: ‘‘newspapers, programs, advertisements, signs, can be read every-
where’’ (p. ). The ‘‘heap of earth’’ has become a place

overflowing with people, dotted with sumptuous hotels [and] com-

muted by an aeriel railway; sprinkled with gardens, kiosks, small the-
aters, beer gardens, arenas, tents, innumerable carriages, picturesque
assemblies, mobile stalls, auctions, fountains. (p. )

Enumeration, the primary vehicle for description throughout the chronicle,

emphasizes the experience of agglomeration. Yet, the juxtaposition of hetero-
geneous elements in the act of enumeration also casts doubt on the prospect
of articulating this new ‘‘community’’ of people, things, and discourses that
the city has displaced onto an empty land. In fact, the proliferative quality of
discourse in ‘‘Coney Island’’ begins with this questioning of a possible order
for the represented world: on what basis might the random experience of
massified urban life be organized into a coherent vision?
An agglomerate in no way delineates a contained space; to the contrary,
in ‘‘Coney Island’’ (as in the Escenas norteamericanas in general) the city appears
as an impulse that overruns boundaries, formal limits—forever displacing
and configuring them. The city empties out, courses outward, in a perpetual
flow. Territorial boundaries are overthrown before the expansive, uncontain-
able movement of the capitalist city:

[What] one finds so shocking there is the size, the quantity, the un-
expected effect of human activity, this immense valve of open pleasure
upon an immense people . . . , this daily spillage of an extraordinary
people onto an extraordinary beach; this mobility, this talent for ad-
vancement, this change of form, this feverish rivalry of wealth . . . , this
rising tide, this annihilating and incomparable expansiveness, solid and
frenetic, and this naturalness in the marvelous; this is what one finds
shocking there. (p. )

The city is ‘‘mobility,’’ ‘‘spillage’’: flux. How can it be represented? How

can it be contained, if its constitutive impulse is precisely to overrun territories,
continents, and perpetuate in protean fashion a constant ‘‘change of form’’?
In Martí’s Escenas norteamericanas, representations of the city rarely as-
sume an expository mode of description. In contrast, this collection of chron-
icles must be read as an immense urban cartography, harnessed at times with
the very verbal, fragmented material of the industrial city itself. In this land-
scape, words—more than the presence of things—bring forth the emblem-
atic intensity of Martí’s allegories. As Fina García Marruz would say, Martí

Literature and the Masses 

‘‘thought with images’’ in his North American journalism, ‘‘as if by doing so
he wanted to give back this sense of totality that the passage of time seems
to steal from us in its flight.’’ 11 And these ‘‘image-objects,’’ which are part
of what García Marruz calls a poetics of concretion at work in Martí, shape the
allegorical landscape of the city. Such an allegorical landscape was Martí’s
response to the fragmentary, destabilizing impulse of the modern city. If we
examine the trajectory of some of these image-objects or emblems as they
appear in ‘‘Coney Island,’’ one can see how these nuclei form the basis of sig-
nification in the chronicle.

Transport. Martí’s city is not exactly an instance of chaos. Over the amorphous
‘‘heap of earth,’’ the city imposes its own logic of sense. Different means of
communication conjoin with the heterogeneous particularities that form the
agglomerate; it is these means that make Coney Island a conjunction of four
‘‘smaller towns . . . united by carriageways, streetcars, and steam trains.’’ 12
At first glance, transport appears to have an ordering function, to cre-
ate a feeling of unity that the city can impose on the unformed matter. When
Martí speaks of the way the ‘‘iron docks . . . advance over the sea upon elegant
pillars three blocks in length,’’ the civilizing function of transport here seems
to approximate the classical vision of Latin American enlightened oligarchs.
In this sense, transport would serve to grant meaning and social value (utility
is perhaps the key word) to a brute nature, outside rationality and forever
coming into conflict with it. And the sea, the flowing body par excellence,
would be the image that evokes this conflict, this interference.
Nonetheless, in ‘‘Coney Island,’’ Martí proceeds ironically. He positions
himself in a field of signification, an ideological field (‘‘In human affairs,
nothing equals the marvelous prosperity of the United States of the North’’
[p. ]); yet he immediately relativizes it, breaks it down, through an im-
plosive force deployed by a minute but crucial semantic slippage: ‘‘Now
more than ever, it is certainly true that never a happier, merrier, more well-
equipped, more jovial, and frenetic crowd has lived around such useful labor
in any other region of the land’’ (appendix , p. ; italics added).
The city imposes a network, its order. But ‘‘the rails crisscross like the
threads of a lace embroidered by a mad woman.’’ 13 Transport erects a frenetic
logic of sense in which everything is displaced, interchangeable:

Sea Beach Palace, which is no more than a hotel now, and which was
once the famed ‘‘Agricultural Building’’ during the Philadelphia Expo-
sition—transported, as if by the art of enchantment, to New York and

    

 re-elevated in its original form, without so much as a splint lacking, on
the coast of Coney Island. (appendix , p. )

Faced with the transference and permanent derivativeness of the new

site, which belies the absence of the building’s origin, the subject cannot hide
his surprise: his shock is the most efficient means of establishing a distance
from it. He represents the displacement as a fall from the ‘‘famed ‘Agricul-
tural Building’ ’’—perhaps a symbol of rootedness—to a hotel, site of transit,
placed in the fugacity that dismantles the authority of tradition. The irony,
always subtle in Martí’s chronicle, is more graphic in the following descrip-
tion of a high-rise:

it is Cable, the laughing Cable, with its elevator higher than the Trinity
tower in New York—two times higher than the tower of our cathedral—
to whose peak travelers climb, suspended by a diminutive cage at a
height that gives one vertigo. (p. )

The terms of comparison are asymmetrical, far from gratuitous: the

elevator, for one, is described as a ‘‘diminutive cage’’—a machine that di-
minishes and isolates, or perhaps more specifically atomizes, the person(s)
trapped within it. Martí opposes this image to an ecclesiastical structure
around which the communitarian space of a more ‘‘traditional’’ society had
been constructed.
The industrial city is a decentered space. Articulated by modern trans-
port, this space presupposes and reproduces a model of the world as an aggre-
gate, juxtaposed in Martí to the organic coherence of the traditional system.14
Transport is the figure of an order opposed to the hierarchical, subordinative
verticality of a society based on tradition. In Martí, traditional society finds
its metaphorical paradigm in the figure of the tree, grounded by the root.15 By
contrast, transport installs a system of relays, based on continuous displace-
ments and the voracious accumulation of contiguous spaces:

like a monster that empties its bowels entirely into the hungry jaws of
another monster, that colossal crowd, crushed and compact, mobs the
entrances of the trains that moan when they are full, as if tired from
the weight, on their way through the solitude that they transform by
redeeming it; and they later yield their mixed-up cargo to the gigantic
ocean liners . . . that lead to the wharves and sprinkle the tired passen-
gers into a thousand cars and roads like veins of iron, across slumbering
New York City. (appendix , p. )

Literature and the Masses 

 Thus concludes ‘‘Coney Island.’’ This visionary finale, where the dis-
tance of the subject before the material baseness of the represented world is
highly emphasized, in many ways condenses Martí’s notion of urban order
as a dispersive movement. From train to boat, from boat to streetcar, move-
ment at first appears to find a focal point, a territorial boundary, in the city,
represented as a body, an apparent organic unity. The city, however, actually
generates an even stronger force of dispersion, so intense that it explodes
and breaks down into the ‘‘thousand cars and roads,’’ into the sprinkled crowd.
This unrestrained impulse unhinges all ‘‘ties’’ and ‘‘roots,’’ which constituted
the basis of Martí’s evaluation of the United States at the beginning of the
chronicle:
In human affairs, nothing equals the marvelous prosperity of the United
States of the North. Whether or not deep roots are lacking in them;
whether or not the ties that bind sacrifice and a common suffering are
more enduring than those that bind the common interest; whether or
not this colossal nation will carry ferocious and tremendous elements
in its bowels; whether or not the absence of a feminine spirit, origin of
artistic sense and complementary to the national being, will prevail and
corrupt the heart of this astonishing people, this is what the times will
tell. (p. )
If transport initially exemplified the semantic field of connection, com-
munication, in opposition to the interference of the great bodies of water, the
closing fragment of ‘‘Coney Island’’ presents transport as the figure of a new
interference, this one artificial and mechanical. Transport traces the lines of
a new labyrinth, the industrial city, that severs ties, roots. From the city, and
as a response to it, Martí insists on the reconstitution of the center. And it
is through this that his New York writing, his discourse about and from the
city, acquires the weight of authority.

Broken Families. While the city unties familial connections, transport displaces
families; hence, another important motif in Martí’s chronicle concerns bro-
ken families. The railroads, which empty ‘‘their serpent breast swollen with
families’’ (p. ), represent for Martí the limit of the house that attempts
to fortify itself against the impact of modernization. The following passage,
written some years after ‘‘Coney Island,’’ makes this relation explicit:
May they preserve the house, those who want an enduring people! And
woe to the railroads if they overrun the house, which will come to be the
liver that cleans out all the impurities of life! This cardboard tabloid life
we lead today is no good. It is better to live like the Greeks, without win-

    

 dow to the street, nor more than a solitary door in the entire house (OC,
vol. , p. ).

Outside, the chronicler—a subject of the interior who exits for a stroll—
gazes with timidity and estrangement at the atomized masses. In ‘‘Coney
Island,’’ Martí stresses the dismemberment of the traditional community.
The masses, in effect, act here as an anticommunity. And when Martí at-
tempts to focus on or designate an image of the mass, he turns to that of the
broken family—as if in this fractured nucleus he would find the minimal unity
of the masses, of atomization.
Significantly, in Martí’s chronicle, Coney Island delineates a feminine
space. The mass and even the railroad have ‘‘breasts’’ and ‘‘bowels’’ that
carry or nurture life. The city itself is represented as a ‘‘sleeping’’ woman.
Martí sets up such an association of the feminine body in order to empha-
size the deterritorialization of the reproductive organs; for example, witness
the ‘‘gigantic cow, milked night and day, fails to produce a fresh twenty-five
centimeter glass.’’ (appendix , p. ). There are ‘‘bearded women’’ (p. ),
‘‘a rough Irish woman’’ (p. ), ‘‘strapping German woman’’ (p. ), and
‘‘legions of intrepid ladies and gallant peasants’’ (p. ). The hypollage is
by no means accidental: it accentuates the extravagance, the deterritorializa-
tion of the represented world where women are masculinized, and men are
notably absent or lacking.
In this paradoxically feminine space, solitary mothers abound. Families
are either broken or in the tension of rupture, delivered by the evils of the city:

the poor mothers . . . squeeze their ill-fated babies against their breasts;
they seem as if devoured, drained, eaten away, by this terrible disease
of summer that cuts down children like the sickle reaps the grain—the
cholera infantum. (p. )

In this world of the single, the unpaired, the ‘‘extravagant,’’ the couple
is torn apart. Not coincidentally, the figure of the father stands out by his
very absence; he is nowhere to be found in Martí’s modern landscape. For
when the couple is torn asunder, the minimal unit of meaning, the basis
of the social model at work in Martí’s writing, is fractured. As we will see,
this model affirmed a sense of historical continuity based on filiation. Thus,
the tree that represents the rootedness of a traditional society was at the
same time genealogical: ‘‘Everything moves toward unity, toward synthesis,
essences come to one being; all existences to the existent: one father is the
father of many children: a trunk is the seat of infinite branches.’’ 16 The city
doubtless complicated such a notion of continuity and order. Filiations, the

Literature and the Masses 

ties that unite parents to children, tradition to the present, are broken by the
urban impulse that undoes all codes and territorialities that order life in tra-
ditional society.
Martí here touches on the topos of the familial crisis, perhaps today all
too crystallized in conservative rhetoric. Yet during Martí’s epoch—and over-
all for any Latin American recently arrived in New York at the turn of the
century—the ‘‘crisis’’ must have consisted of an intense experience, much
more significant than a simple rhetorical attack on modernization. Martí in-
sisted on this rupture, which indicated for him the elimination of an entire
way of living, understanding, and representing the world; a mentality that even
throughout his New York years, continued to exercise an influence over his
vision of the capitalist city, frequently based on a comparison with his ‘‘world
of yesterday.’’
From his  arrival in New York onward, Martí would relate this
‘‘crisis’’ to the transformations of the place of women in industrial society.
Women were incorporated into the labor force, into the world of the street.
Hence, their deterritorialization, along with (for Martí) their masculiniza-
tion. Already in his first texts on New York, he writes:

Why must such mannish women be seen? Their rapid pace when climb-
ing or descending the stairways, in the street bustle, the certain gesture
and the decisiveness in all their actions, their all too virile presence;
[these things] divest them of serene beauty, ancient grace, exquisite sen-
sibility that turn women into those superior beings—of which Calderón
had said they were a ‘‘small world.’’ (OC, vol. , p. )

We ought to ask these women what the natural end of their inextin-
guishable thirst for pleasure and distraction is. We ought to ask them
whether . . . they might later bring to their home these solid virtues,
these sweet feelings, the good sense of resignation, that evangelical
power of counsel capable of preserving on high a home shaken by mis-
fortune, and inspire in children the contempt for material pleasures and
the love for internal satisfactions that make happy and strong men, as
[these things] did to Ishmael. (vol. , p. )

Familial crisis is a reiterated motif in modern literature. In order to ap-

preciate its importance, one need only contrast the broken family at the turn
of the century with the function performed by filiation and the family in the
previous century. A canonical example can be found in Sarmiento’s auto-
biography, Recuerdos de provincia (); in this instance, the authority of the
subject is based on the imitation and repetition of familial models, them-

    

selves rarely questioned. Sarmiento writes: ‘‘In the history of the family lies
the history of the native land, as its theater of action and its background. To
my progeny I am bequeathed; and I believe that by following my tracks, like
those of any other down that path, . . . it seems possible to see portrayed this
poor America of the South before me.’’ 17 I; family; native land: the synech-
dochical trajectory is unmistakable.
The family as a discursive function in nineteenth-century literature, most
particularly the novel—Amalia, Martín Rivas, or María would be basic examples
—exceeds the thematization of a social institution. Of course, literature in
this period nurtured and was nurtured by a familialism that prevailed in the
emergent modern cities. But beyond the obvious thematization of the family,
it was essential to the process of narrative modeling, a fundamental mode of
organizing literary material. The family, therefore, would come to constitute
both a model of the world and a figure or trope for a specifically literary sys-
tem of representation. It was a structure that ensured the apprehension, the
very representation of the heterogeneous mass that comprised the reality of
the socius. In this respect, the family was a form of naturalized representa-
tion—a representation given validity by the genealogical and filiative claims
that conflated a historical continuity with a biological process.
In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, new fictions began
to problematize the construction of an earlier Latin American literature pro-
foundly oriented toward the family. We see in Andrés, the main character
in Argentine Eugenio Cambeceres’s Sin rumbo (Aimless) from , a subject
‘‘[who had] fought to the point of death with society, whose doors had shut
on him, . . . denying the possibility of happiness in a home and looking on
marriage with horror.’’ 18 His sense of impotence, of filiation as an impossi-
bility, is striking, as it is also related in the novel to the crisis of patrimony.
After Andrés’s suicide and the death of his daughter, the novel emblemati-
cally concludes with a conflagration in the house, the center for an entire world
that had lost the sense and possibility of continuity.
Even before Cambeceres, Machado de Assis in Brazil radicalized the
problem of filiation and the dependence of literature on the familial para-
digm. In his  Memórias pósthumous de Brás Cubas (Posthumous Memories of Brás
Cubas), Machado dismantles familial history as a narrative model that cer-
tainly directed his own earlier work; in doing so, he brings the uprootedness
of the familial structure to the level of speech and discourse, individualizing
the voice of the narrator who is violently cut adrift from the family:

Upon reaching this other side of the mystery, I find myself with a small
gain, which is the final negation in this chapter of negations: I did

Literature and the Masses 

 not have children, I did not bequeath to any creature the legacy of our
misery.19

In contrast, Martí obstinately insisted upon the power of filiation as a

legitimate model in and for history:

¡El Padre
No ha de morir hasta que la ardua lucha
Rico de todas armas lance el hijo!
¡Ven, o mi hijuelo, y que tus alas blancas
De los brazos de la Muerte oscura
Y de su manto funeral me libren!

The father
Must not die until the arduous battle,
Complete with every armament, inaugurates the son!
Come, my dear child, and may your white wings
From the arms of dark Death
And her funeral shroud free me! 20

And notwithstanding the claim that Martí’s first book of poetry, Ismae-
lillo (), demonstrates the early modernization of Latin American poetry,
it in fact casts poetic discourse in the form of an allocution by the father to a
son.21 How, then, is it possible to speak of broken families?
Martí’s insistence on a filial hierarchy must be read as a will to conti-
nuity. Beyond the assumed spontaneity of a familial, primary ideology proper
to modernity, this will to filiation performs an act of compensation: contrary
to a mere (re)affirmation of the family, Martí’s exacerbated will to filiation
registers the crisis of the family as an ideology, a structure, or paradigm, as
well as the lack of this stable structure in a changing society.22 Martí’s dis-
course attempts to provide schemas, reconstructions, which at times take on
the familial form, precisely in order to redeem the failures of traditional struc-
tures before the impulse of modernity. These reconstructions act as a kind of
second-degree familial ideology, asserted in the face of its dissolution. Re-
gardless of these efforts, though, the broken family remains an inescapable
fact to which Martí responds with a discourse that will serve as a fortification
composed of different residual experiences displaced by the new society. To
compensate for the loss of the home, Martí will erect a house of discourse.

The Sea. The fluid body par excellence, the sea always appears in ‘‘Coney
Island’’ as the background, the limit of the social world. Yet its laterality—in

    

itself significant—must not deceive us. As the classical image of flows, the
sea ties together all the other semantic nuclei that comprise the chronicle:
transport, mass, and the broken family merge together in the field of disper-
sion that is the sea, the destabilizing impulse of desire. Such a connection
between the sea and sexuality is suggested throughout the chronicle: Martí
speaks of ‘‘fleshy coasts,’’ ‘‘burning sand,’’ a ‘‘sea [that] caresses,’’ ‘‘shimmer-
ing beaches,’’ the ‘‘wet [húmeda] seashore,’’ the ‘‘potent air [of the ocean],’’
and the ‘‘all-too-penetrating air [of the ocean]’’ (appendix , p. ). Bodies,
almost naked, ‘‘throw themselves on the sand and let themselves be covered,
knocked about, massaged, and enveloped in the burning sand’’ (p. ).
Families—which again represent codes, structures—are broken against
the oceanside, site of desire:

True, any thinker would find shocking so many a married woman walk-
ing around without husband; so many a woman strolling by the wet
seashore with a scarf around her shoulders, wrapped up in her pleasure
and unmindful that the all-too-penetrating air must inevitably wound
the flaccid nature of her offspring. (p. )

The shoreline delineates the experience of a limit: the limit of the familiar,
of the socially ordered and representable world. The fluid substance of un-
anchored desire, an amorphous, discontinuous mass that eludes the grasp of
discourse, lies on the other side of the limit and family.
Let us briefly expand our focus on the reading to examine the signifi-
cance of the ocean in other areas of Martí’s work. The opposition between the
sea and discourse—one that certainly brings to mind the instability of the
nature/culture binarism in Martí—is the germinal seed of ‘‘I Hate the Sea’’
from his Versos libres:

Odio el mar, sólo hermoso cuando gime

Del barco domador bajo la hendente
Quilla, y como fantástico demonio
De un manto negro colosal tapado,
Encórvase a los vientos de la noche 
Ante el sublime vencedor que pasa:—
Y la luz de los astros, encerrada
En globos de cristales, sobre el puente
Vuelve un hombre impasible la hoja del libro.
Odio el mar, vasto y llano, igual y frío 

I hate the sea, only beautiful when it moans

From beneath the cloven quill of the masterful

Literature and the Masses 

 Boat, and like a fantastic demon
Under a colossal black mantle cloaked,
It stoops beneath the winds of the night
Before the sublime conquerer passing by:—
And in the light of the stars, encased
In crystal globes, over the bridge
An impassive man turns the page of a book.
I hate the sea; vast and flat, level and cold 23

The initial lines establish a hierarchical opposition: the sea holds value
only when it serves to facilitate communication, which dominates the sea by
means of transport. The sea, which the speaker hates when it is ‘‘vast and
flat, level and cold,’’ moans; that is, it produces a sound, associating it with
the voice, with an unformed vocal content. But this voice lies ‘‘beneath the
cloven quill.’’ The ‘‘cloven quill’’ opens up a trajectory across or on the ‘‘black
mantle’’ of undifferentiated matter in an image that immediately evokes the
theme of light and meaning. The boat allows passage across the sea, which
along with later images of the sea as a ‘‘treacherous and shifting sand’’ or
a ‘‘lethal serpent,’’ contrasts with the stability of solid ground, interrupting
its continuity. Lines – reiterate and reformulate the previously sketched
hierarchies: the ‘‘crystal globes’’ of the streetlamps are containers or perhaps
continental spaces that enclose the ‘‘light of the stars’’ that, like the sea, are
characterized by their tendency toward dispersal. And on the bridge, as if
tiny in comparison to the vast forces surrounding him, stands a man, illumi-
nated by artificial light: ‘‘over the bridge / An impassive man turns the page
of a book.’’ Both the preposition over and the object bridge resonate with the
position of the boat over the water in the second line.
Finally, the reference to discourse through the image of the book can
be connected to the image of transport, which makes the sea ‘‘moan’’ and
is composed of a ‘‘cloven quill’’ that plots a course, a trajectory over the
water. Both the moving ship and the process of reading suggest the discurrence
or chronotope, the proceeding of writing and reading. Transport, in effect,
becomes an image of discourse, which should be understood in its etymo-
logical sense: to course through, pass through, in an orderly fashion. The
ocean obstructs discurrence; in Martí’s words, it is like ‘‘the shifting sand.’’
For this reason, it must be dominated—by means of transport—and trans-
formed into a means of travel and exchange. Only when this objective has been
accomplished does the sea become ‘‘beautiful,’’ or more specifically, ‘‘valu-
able’’ insofar as it has become useful. Its beauty is expressed in its capacity
to moan or generate a sound, to acquire a voice that guarantees sense and

    

meaning.24 An Enlightenment ideology thus appears to prevail in ‘‘I Hate the
Sea,’’ wherein technology (tied to the course of meaning that passes through
the pages of a book) functions as a means of mastering the barbarous matter
of a mute nature, external to discourse. The act of discourse would establish
order in the heterogeneity of nature; for as Adorno and Horkheimer would
argue, ‘‘nothing could remain outside, since the very idea of the exterior was
a source of fear.’’ 25
From another angle, however, this Enlightenment rhetoric—which re-
fers directly back to the writings of Sarmiento, Bello, Luz y Caballero, and
Hostos—serves only as a point of departure and an object of Martí’s critical
reflection. For example, at the end of the poem, the sea, which has already
become a means of exchange, of ‘‘sense,’’ nevertheless ‘‘leads to a tyrant.’’
But even more striking is the uncontained or uncontainable aspect of Martí’s
image-objects: the motif of the sea as an interruption or interference later
becomes situated at the very heart of a society entirely directed by its sexual
appetite:

Odio el mar, muerto enorme, triste muerto

De torpes y glotones criaturas
Odiosas habitado, se parecen
A los ojos del pez, que de harto expira,
Los de gañán de amor que en brazos tiembla
De la mujer horrible libidinosa: (. . .).

I hate the sea, a great dead thing, a sad corpse

By sluggish and gluttonous creatures
Hatefully inhabited: they are like
The eyes of a fish dying of surfeit,
As those of love’s slave who trembles
In the arms of a horrifying libidinous woman.26

In Martí’s bestiary, the fish are signs of baseness and sexual appetite.
The simile between fish and the libidinized social world shows the relation
between the sea and sexuality as a new source of interference. It also indi-
cates Martí’s fear that the sexualized world, emphatically identified with the
feminine urban masses, would bring with it the reincorporation of the city,
of social order, in the area outside discourse, in the sea that is desire itself.27
Desire as the other side of discourse is capable of contaminating the very
heart of transport, which occurs in the rowboat of Martí’s Versos sencillos:

En el bote remador iba remando

Por el lago seductor

Literature and the Masses 

 Con el sol que era oro puro
Y en el alma, más de un sol.

Y a mis pies vi de repente,

Ofendido del hedor,
Un pez muerto, un pez hediondo
En el bote remador.

In the rowboat I went rowing

Upon the seductive lake
With the sun that was pure gold
And in the soul, more than one sun.

And at my feet so suddenly

Offended by the stench,
I saw a dead, stinking fish,
Stinking in the rowboat.28

Again, we see the high/low opposition, which in Martí constitutes an

axiology, in the rowboat/seductive lake couplet, as in the sun (and soul) of
the first stanza opposed to the feet and fish in the second. In opposition
to the aesthetic and economic value of gold, an image associated with the
‘‘higher’’ plane, we find the absence of value in the ‘‘low’’: the abject fish. The
axiology initially establishes a stable schemata, but is undermined in the sec-
ond stanza with the intervention of the fish (low) inside the boat (high). The
‘‘seductive lake,’’ at first subjugated by transport, is nevertheless capable of
contaminating the order of discourse (represented by the boat) with its ma-
terial baseness. Desire, like the fish, is what departs from its proper place and
destabilizes the axiology established by discourse.
Before the irrational energy of the modern flow, Martí responds with
a terror similar to that of children in this remarkably familial scene from
‘‘Coney Island’’:

trains . . . enter and exit, emptying their serpent breast swollen with
families onto the beach; women rent out their blue flannel outfits . . . ;
men, dressed in simpler garb, lead the women by the hand and enter
the sea; the children, barefoot, wait on the wet seashore for the roaring
wave to wet them, and they escape when it arrives, concealing their ter-
ror with laughs. (appendix , p. )

The child is who remains on the edge, at the border of sexual play, which
here, once again, disjoins the nuclear family.
‘‘Coney Island’’ is, in many ways, a chronicle about sexuality unleashed

    

by the modern city.29 From the distance that is made possible by the writer’s
appall, this text centers on ‘‘this original North American love’’ and the ‘‘im-
mense valve of open pleasure upon an immense people’’ (appendix , p. ).
The urban mass is the ‘‘rising tide,’’ the irrational force motivated by the
promise of satisfaction for the appetites. In a later chronicle, Martí declared:
‘‘In vain do the men of foresight attempt to direct by means of culture and
religious meaning this forceful mass that heedlessly searches for the quick
and total satisfaction of its appetites.’’ 30 Hence, the projection of feminine
organs on the city: the masses and the city (‘‘slumbering New York’’), over-
run by ‘‘iron veins,’’ splice together a field of the irrational, the passional, the
vulnerability to desire, with signs of the feminine.31
The woman-mass analogy was a common point of reference for many of
the early intellectuals and their experience before the crowd. José M. Ramos
Mejía, an Argentine writer who was influenced by the ‘‘psychology’’ of the
crowd (an area of study that spread throughout France, particularly after the
 Commune) remarked in an explicit manner: ‘‘They constitute the prin-
cipal nuclei of the multitude: the sensitives, the neurotics, the individuals
whose nerves need only be barely caressed, on the surface, by sensation, for
them to vibrate. . . . Thus [crowds] are impressionable and fickle like im-
passioned women, purely unconscious; fiery, but full of fading light; above all
lovers of violent sensation, vivid color, noisy music, beautiful men and things
of great stature; because the multitude is sensual, aroused and full of lust for
the pleasure of the senses. It does not reason, it feels.’’ 32
In fact, from Martí’s perspective, the gendered city progressively ceases
to be the site of rationality par excellence. The city erects a social world at the
frontier of irrationality, on the border of a sea that swallows up dyadic distri-
butions. And when these pairs are torn asunder, the threat of the pairless, of
the unstructured, intensifies. In contrast to the Enlightenment polis, the city
in Martí is a destructuring impulse, the annulment of harmony. In this city,
‘‘the rising tide,’’ we see what Martí calls the ‘‘blinding variety’’ proliferate.
Its flow dissolves all sense of totality, constituting the unbound force of the
particular:

[It] tortures science and places the soul in a state of longing and exas-
peration at finding the essential unity in which, like a mountain at its
summit, everything seems to be grasped and condensed. . . . The uni-
verse is the universal. And the universal uni-various, is the various in the
one. Nature, full of surprises, is all [as] one.33

The city, however, destroys the virtual image of this totality.

Far from a representation of an equilibrated world, ‘‘Coney Island’’

Literature and the Masses 

manifests the intellectual subject’s confrontation with the new ‘‘order’’ of
the city, with its permanent ‘‘change of form’’ that invalidates all ties, all me-
diation between the one and the varied. In this fundamental work, Martí ex-
presses his terror before the ‘‘blinding variety’’ that generates the unshackled
multiplication of atoms in the masses. Even beyond the insistence on har-
mony, this terror emphasizes the fragility of the subject before a world that
s/he experiences as a substance that resists and, at times, invalidates repre-
sentation. In one of his ‘‘Impressions of America,’’ Martí further expounds
on this ‘‘blurred life, the morbid passion, the ardent and anguished desires of
New York living’’:

In this turbulent tide, the natural currents of life no longer appear.

Everything is obscured, disarticulated, pulverized; virtues cannot be
distinguished from vices at first glance. They fade away, tumultuously
mixed. (OC, vol. , p. )

The gendered city—flow, turbulence—takes apart the traditional sys-

tems of analysis and representation for the world.34
The heterogeneity let loose by the city is blinding. In other words, it is
not in the final instance controllable, representable; rather, it is a condition
that obscures even the subject’s sense of vision. Thus emerges one of the
problems that occupied Martí’s attention throughout his New York period: if
the profoundly antiorganic city, with its science and machines, destroyed the
older structures, what language would dominate it, represent it, with a frame
as yet capable of articulating figures of unity and totality?

The House of Discourse

To be surprised, alienated, is to begin to understand. It is the activity and the luxury

specific to the intellectual. Hence, his definitive gesture consists of gazing at the world
with eyes dilated by the feeling of strangeness.—José Ortega y Gasset, La rebelión de
las masas

Martí would not deliver himself to the deterritorialized flows. Instead he re-
sisted, and asserted his distance. In his discourse, he created forms of sub-
jecting, of reinstating the power of the subject over the threatening heteroge-
neity of the city. ‘‘Coney Island’’ is the enactment of a confrontation, perhaps
to this day irresolute, between the will to totality that constituted the subject
and the ‘‘blinding variety’’ set free by modernity—a battle between a subject
who is firmly anchored in the compensatory fabric of discourse and the ma-
teriality of a world that resists the order of representation.

    

 As we have seen, the urban flow, for Martí, constantly breaks structures
down. Let us now examine the violence that Martí’s discourse, in its will to
order, exercises over the fragmentary flow that drives the city. We will proceed
on another level, by focusing on how the subject in ‘‘Coney Island’’ prepares
himself or herself for the task of speaking about the city. This will enable us
to later explore the concept of discourse and aesthetic culture that Martí at
once presupposes and attempts to legitimate.

Distance and Condensation. In contrast to the relatively impersonal discourse

that comprises much of the Escenas norteamericanas, ‘‘Coney Island’’ is a text
saturated with indices that situate and portray the act of enunciation. The
signs of identity displace the focus of discourse from the referential world,
the city, in favor of the ‘‘here and now’’ of the speaking subject. These mark-
ers, for the most part emphatic, serve to embody and position the subject:
‘‘Such people eat quantity; we, quality’’ (appendix , p. ). The weight of
self-representation is clear: in response to the depersonalized world of the
city, the insistence on fixing the identity of the subject activates discourse as
a compensation for the lacunae of the represented world.
In fact, the subject reiterates his or her self-representation in opposition
to the referential world: ‘‘Other peoples—and we among them—live as [if ]
devoured by a sublime inner demon. . . . Not these tranquil spirits, disturbed
only by the anxiety to possess a fortune’’ (p. ). The field of the subject is
created in his assertion of distance from the other world (‘‘those peoples’’).
The reverse side of this self-willed exclusion of the subject from the other
is the production of a proper field of identity, of a we, through the interpel-
lation of his or her reader. Martí represents this field of identity as a place
autonomous from the commercial laws and instrumental principles that rule
the represented world. By this strategy, discursive functions (subject, object,
receiver) are semanticized to the point of transforming them into ideological
realms of identity that regulate the distribution of meaning and value in the
chronicle.
Now, this spatial semanticization of discursive functions is complicated
at the very moment that we interrogate the location from which the subject
speaks (a complication that is further heightened when we ask from whence
the chronicler writes, in the newspaper). In spite of the distance asserted by
the subject, the ‘‘there’’ that corresponds to the ‘‘they’’ or ‘‘them’’ of the state-
ment is at one and the same time the place where the speaking subject evokes
the ‘‘here’’ and ‘‘now’’ of his locution. From this place, the subject includes
himself in a we that is simultaneously ‘‘the flock’’ that resides far away, in a
place that can only be nostalgically recalled by the exile:

Literature and the Masses 

 [It] is common knowledge that a melancholic sadness seizes the men
of our Hispanic American communities who live there, who seek in vain
and do not find; who for however much their senses grant importance
to their first impressions, with their eyes enamored, their reason dark-
ened and obfuscated, are possessed by the anguish of solitude in the
end, the nostalgia for a higher spiritual world that invades and inflicts
them; they feel like sheep without a mother or pastor, astray from the
flock; and whether or not it shows in their eyes, the[ir] frightened spirit
breaks down in the most bitter torrent of tears, has been broken, be-
cause that great land is bereft of spirit.
But what a coming and going! What a flow of money! (pp. –)

In ‘‘Coney Island,’’ as in other writings by Martí in New York, the subject

is represented as an exile. The motif of the broken family—the having gone
‘‘astray from the flock,’’ the crisis of the subject cut adrift from the commu-
nitarian structure—reappears in this fragment. Of course, the biographical
circumstances of Martí’s life cannot be underestimated: doubtless Martí here
refers to the consequent uprootedness of his own exile, which distanced him
from the native land for almost his entire adult life. This condition of exile,
caught between two worlds, overdetermines the subject position mapped out
in his Escenas norteamericanas. More than an account of his travels, these works
are an enormous testament to the sense of alienation produced by the ex-
perience of exile. As ‘‘Coney Island’’ shows, the Escenas are often addressed
to a constituency denominated as we—a we from which the subject is never-
theless estranged. The implicit affirmation of a we behind Martí’s discourse
is asserted over and against capitalist modernity; and while it may appear to
him as foreign, it is nonetheless the scene of inscription and writing.
Yet exceeding the limits of biographical explanation, in this passage the
displaced subject is not only a Latin American who ‘‘lives there’’; the subject
also speaks of an internal exile of the ‘‘spirit’’ in a society motivated by the
‘‘flow of money’’: ‘‘the[ir] frightened spirit breaks down in the most bitter tor-
rent of tears, has been broken, because that great land is bereft of spirit.’’ We
later discover that it is the exile of the thinker: what could be the place of the
literato, the artist, and the many other traditional intellectuals 35 in the over-
crowded space of the city? Martí transforms the biographical situation of his
exile into a representation of the site of ‘‘spiritual’’ or, more specifically, aes-
thetic activity in modern society. Regardless of the lived experience of the exile
(as Martí indeed experienced exile in his life), the modern writer privileges the
image of exile in the legitimizing representation of his place in modernity.36
Exile enables the subject to assert his or her capacity to voice those ex-

    

periences displaced by economic rationality. Exile thus becomes a strategic
positioning, an assumed distantiation, which authorizes the critical word of
the artist-as-exile in the city. For even at the heart of his own society, the exile
is a figure of the claim to autonomy that legitimizes the artist as a critic of
modernization. We will later examine this strategy of legitimation at work in
the literary subject, who attests to the emergence of a concept of literature
fundamental to the twentieth century.
For now, suffice it to say that this ‘‘will to distance’’ in part determines
the textual organization of many of the Escenas norteamericanas, particularly the
perspective of the speaker before the referential world. The following three
examples show how this perspective is inscribed in ‘‘Coney Island’’:

[The] grains of sand . . . from afar . . . seem like restless higher spirits.

[What] one finds so shocking there is the size, the quantity, the unex-
pected effect of human activity . . . , these restaurants that seen from afar
look like lofty armies, these roads that from a two-mile distance are not
roads but long carpets of heads.

Seen at some distance from the sea, the four populations, radiant in the shad-
ows, look as if the stars that populate the sky had unexpectedly fallen
into the seas and had been reunited into four colossal groups.’’ (appen-
dix , pp. –, italics added throughout)

Let us highlight three distinctive features of the perspective given to the

reader in ‘‘Coney Island.’’ To begin with, the assertion of distance in the first
two examples situates the subject over the referential world (that is, over the
‘‘grains of sand’’ and the ‘‘carpets of heads’’). It cannot be understated that
the high/low opposition always implies a hierarchy in Martí. In this instance,
height determines the site of spiritual superiority. Second, seeing from afar in
the three examples indicates the act of representation, the passage from a
variety of elements to a global unity: an act that condenses the dispersed set
of elements into a given domain. Stars form ‘‘colossal groups,’’ heads form
‘‘carpets,’’ the multitude in transit integrates the ‘‘lofty armies.’’ In the first
example, this passage from the multiple to the integrated implies an act of
transfiguration, an ascendancy of dispersed matter (for instance, ‘‘grains of
sand’’) to a spiritual level. Third, the process of condensation not only depends
on the distance and height of the subject’s gaze; it is also an effect of the
transfiguration of the particular (or multiple) into the total (the one), which
is necessarily mediated by the analogical activity of the subject.
What is interesting here is that the subject does not elide the use of con-
nectors like ‘‘seem’’ and ‘‘like,’’ which register the act of condensation; to the

Literature and the Masses 

contrary, he flaunts them, thus stressing the figurative aspect of his descrip-
tions. In this way, he leaves signs of passage, from the literal word (‘‘grains of
sand’’) to the figurative plane (‘‘higher spirits’’), as if to emphasize the gravity
of the subject’s transformative activity. This emphasis positions the sub-
ject as the necessary hinge, as the condition of possibility for passage from
‘‘blinding variety’’ to the general frame, the scene, which congeals the move-
ment of the multiple to produce the image of the ‘‘lofty armies’’ or the mass.
It is significant that the act of configuration, the slippage from the literal to
the figurative, is flaunted: it attempts to illustrate the insufficiency of natural
language, too exposed to the power of fragmentation. Such an insufficiency
would inevitably give rise to another kind of gaze, capable of integrating the
fragmented planes of the modern city into an organic picture. This would be
the ideal of Martí’s urban poetics.
The act of condensation, achieved by means of the figure or trope,
brings the literary subject proper into being. The subject’s virtual power is
rooted here: in the violence that his or her gaze exercises on things. This
gaze attempts to reduce the multiplicity of the city into a figurative map, per-
haps diagrammatic, in which all particularity would remain absorbed by the
condensing operation of signs, of these ‘‘image-objects’’ that evoke the alle-
gorical landscape of the city. As Martí would say: ‘‘The entire art of writing is
[in] concretizing.’’ Concretion literally involves the accumulation of particles
united to form masses. Such was Martí’s project: to direct the movement of
the flow, to cut into it and in this way control it, thus compensating for the
dissolution of oneness in modernity.
Another example presents itself in Martí’s bestiary. In ‘‘Coney Island,’’
the bestiary configures an important area of the allegorical landscape im-
posed by Martí over the city. Here are some of its elements:

train-serpents
crowd-anthill
exile-sheep
we-eagle, butterfly

A discussion of iconography here would be pointless. The symbols given in

this tabulation are commonplace, crystallized in a culture of biblical tradi-
tion, easily accessible to the world in which Martí lived and breathed. In fact,
the productivity of the bestiary is rooted precisely in its topical, codified char-
acter. The bestiary makes the frame possible, wherein the predisposition of
established values contains and subjects the displacement and interchange-
ability of matter in the represented world.
Yet this schema is markedly binary. It is modeled on the minimal unity

    

of the pair or couple, in this case antithetical: the lowliness of urban signs
(anthill, serpent) is juxtaposed to the loftiness of signs tied to the field of the
subject, the Latin American we, who possesses aesthetic qualities.

We/They: Couplings. Confronted with a world where pairs dissolve, caught up

in the matter that is de-hierarchized by the flow of the unpaired, the will to re-
pair stands out in Martí’s discourse:

Aparejadas
van por las lomas
las cogujadas
y las palomas.

Coupled
they pass between the hills
the crested skylarks
and the doves. (p. )

The collocation of this miniature poem in the midst of the crowd of words
that comprise ‘‘Coney Island’’ is surprising, even on the level of its graphic
arrangement. Surrounded by the machines, the monstrosity, the denatural-
ized extravagance of the urban world, Martí cites by memory the ‘‘tender
verses’’ of Spanish romantic poet García Gutiérrez. Of course, the context in
which the citation is given lends the verses an intensity, an enigmatic quality
doubtless unforeseen by Gutiérrez. The placement of the citation only serves
to rarefy the verses, spiritualize them in their antithetical relation to the secu-
larity of the profane world. It provokes the question: how would it be possible
for such fragile lines to persevere in a city such as that described by Martí?
The shock of unfamiliarity that Martí introduces through the inclusion
of these verses opens a fissure in the rhythmic pattern of the prose—which
as mentioned earlier, is marked by an enumerative, accumulative quality. The
appearance of poetic verse registers a site of struggle, a pressure point for
intense forces in conflict. This contrast can be further elaborated by examin-
ing the structure of the verses themselves: they can be semantically divided
into two pairs, although both pairs are in turn tied together by the rhyme’s
perfect consonance. Together, they thematize the affirmation of the couple,
in a rhythmic as well as semantic sense. Martí thus represents the family—
a structure taken apart by the city—as a natural order, innate to the open,
organic spaces.37 These small verses—with their exalted bestiary, the hills
(contrapuntal to both the sea and city), and most important, their ability to
pair the plural with random dispersity—present a world external to the city,

Literature and the Masses 

one capable of providing what the city destroys. Or, to put it another way,
the citation is a thematization of a model of representation that nurtures the
subject in ‘‘Coney Island.’’ The staged representation of discourse as a pro-
ductive activity, albeit on a strictly formal level, supplements that which the
city lacks: the couple, structure.

Such People Eat Quantity; We, Quality

In ‘‘Coney Island,’’ the binary will in the face of modernity proceeds by divid-
ing discourse into two great, totalizing fields. Two sides and one pivot: the
antithesis we/they, at the very core of a signification that at once binds and
separates the two. If modernity has unleashed a violence that problematizes
the relation between subject and the world, the binarism attempts to repair
such a relation. From a height that characterizes the perspective of discourse,
the subject recognizes the threat of heterogeneity, tied to the urban flow; but
s/he tries to reify it in a ‘‘they’’ that condenses and objectifies the violence, thus
rendering it controllable. The act of saying ‘‘they’’ brings heterogeneity under
rein beneath a reifying practice; in this way, the ‘‘blinding variety’’ of mod-
ern experience can be converted into a representable object. This is achieved,
first of all, by always using ‘‘they’’ as the pronoun of the absent party on the
stage of discourse. For it is precisely by its absence, by the distance that such
an objectification allows the subject, that the implied referent of ‘‘they’’ be-
comes an object and, hence, subjugated by representation. To represent, in
Martí, is to control, to subordinate a de-hierarchized matter. The question,
then, would arise as to whether or not this subordinating will would effec-
tively succeed in dominating all of the other forces at work in Martí’s scene
of inscription (escritura).
And we? What would be the content of this pronoun? In contrast to
a fixed content or referent, the pronoun is capable of assuming different
semantic charges. Let us briefly examine the trajectory of its functions in
‘‘Coney Island’’:

[Its] elevator . . . two times higher than the tower of our Cathedral.

[They] do not hold censure and shock in high regard, as might those
who think as in this land we think.

Other peoples—and we among them—live as [if ] devoured by a sub-

lime inner demon.

[The] men of our Hispanic American communities who live there.

    

 [This] original love of the North Americans, in which almost none of
those elements that constitute the sentimental, tender, and elevated love
of our lands enters in.

Such people eat quantity; we, quality. (appendix , pp. –)

On close analysis, the fact that the pronoun is used in a relatively loose
and detached manner does not mean that it is semantically devoid of mean-
ing. We, in each case, signifies ‘‘Hispanic American communities’’; or more
specifically, it signifies the interpellation of the intended listener, the virtual
reader of the chronicle, as a member of the Hispanic American community.
The speaker (I) incorporates this other ( you, plural)—which is not to be con-
fused with the absolute other, they—into the field of identity that the speaker
claims to speak for: our lands. The interpellation attempts to reduce the dis-
tance between the subject and the intended listener or addressee; in this
respect, it is far from a neutral function in the verbal exchange. Still, the ad-
dressee is not represented as a distant, heterogeneous public domain; rather,
she or he constitutes a field of identity from which the subject speaks—a do-
main of identity on which the authority of the speaking subject is based, set
in opposition to they, ‘‘the North Americans.’’ Such is the grounding gesture
of Latin-Americanism.
Granted, the tenuousness of these interpellations is evident. For ex-
ample, when Martí speaks of ‘‘our Cathedral,’’ to which cathedral is he re-
ferring: to any Hispanic American cathedral, to the one in Havana, or the
one in Bogotá (where the chronicle was first published)? We, nosotros or per-
haps nos-otros, we others, is a constructed unity, condensed (like they) by the
subject’s generalizing gaze. Its function in the chronicle is essential: it acts
as a device that creates affiliations, a new family, albeit one that is no longer
grounded in the notion of a biological continuity. Rather, it articulates a
political and cultural domain. Edward Said has discussed this importance of
affiliation in modernity precisely as a response, a compensation, for the in-
stability of the familial structure and of filiation as a metaphor for historical
continuity:

Childless couples, orphaned children, aborted childbirths, and unre-

generately celibate men and women populate the world of high modern-
ism with remarkable insistence, all of them suggesting the difficulties
of filiation. But no less important in my opinion is the second part of the
pattern, which is immediately consequent upon the first, the pressure
to produce new and different ways of conceiving human relationships.
For if biological reproduction is either too difficult or too unpleasant,

Literature and the Masses 

 is there some other way by which men and women can create social
bonds between each other that would substitute for those ties which
connect members of the same family across generations? . . . The only
other alternatives seemed to be provided by institutions, associations,
and communities whose social existence was not in fact guaranteed by
biology but by affiliation.38

Referring to the importance of affiliation as an alternative mode of organiz-

ing intellectual fields of knowledge (for the most part traditional, as was the
case of the literary field), Said adds:

[The] affiliative order so presented surreptitiously duplicates the closed

and tightly knit family structure that concerns generational hierarchical
relationships to one another. Affiliation then becomes in effect a literal
form of re-presentation, by which what was ours is good, and therefore
deserves incorporation and inclusion in our programs of humanistic
study, and what is not ours in this ultimately provincial sense is simply
left out. (pp. –)

Said is here referring to the metropolitan, university apparatus, which is

at work in a concept of culture, entirely nondescriptive, produced by means
of the delimitation of a ‘‘high’’ territory that excludes the minoritarian, so-
called Third World, subaltern cultures. Of course, this in no way is to be con-
fused with Martí’s handling of the pronominal we. We, in Martí, is the reverse
of they, the United States, bearers of economic power. What is excluded from
this field of identity in this schema is the power of the metropolis: hence, the
function of affiliation is political. In effect, at least in terms of the interna-
tional distribution of power, Martí seems to speak from the periphery, from
a we oppressed by a they. Again, this does not prevent his discourse from also
operating by means of an exclusive, binary apparatus.
What function, then, does the affiliative, ideologically overdetermined
we serve? Affiliation enables the subject to represent himself as an exile, out-
side the referential world. This distance is necessary, as it guarantees the
representation, the imposition of order, on the urban flow. Moreover, the dis-
tance asserted by the subject generates a higher opposition between the spirit
—tied to the field of identity belonging to the we that legitimates the speak-
ing subject—and the economic and instrumental logic of the city:

Other peoples—and we among them—live as [if ] devoured by a sub-

lime inner demon, which drives us to the relentless pursuit of an ideal
of love or glory; and when we grasp some level of this ideal that we

    

 have pursued, with the pleasure with which an eagle seizes its prey, a
new urge unsettles us, a new ambition spurs us on, a new aspiration
launches us into a new vehement longing, and from the eagle escapes
a once-imprisoned free rebel butterfly, as if defying us to follow it and
shackling us to its scrambled flight.
Not these tranquil spirits, disturbed only by the anxiety to possess
a fortune. (appendix , p. )

We, then, does not only signify ‘‘Hispanic American communities’’; it

also creates the basis for an affiliation that presents the possibility of being
autonomous from the economic flow of the city. In Martí, this space outside
the city, this autonomous domain, tied to art and culture, is also represented in
terms of an inner experience, which in many texts finds its proper emblem in
the figure of the house:

Culture demands a certain repose and cleanliness, just like domestic life;
otherwise when the orator in the assembly raises his voice charged with
reason, or the actor onstage embodies an immortal character, . . . or the
father exhausted from work recounts the tales of heroes to the son who
leans against his knees—the voice would be drowned by the groan of a
machine passing by, the thought would be disturbed by the deafening
and insufferable noise that never ceases in the street, or a puff of smoke
would enter in through the window, charged with electric sparks. . . .
The most worthy of the city distance themselves from the noisy
centers, inasmuch as the noise, which has a certain presence and almost
makes visible the presence of what produces it—appalls the artistic
soul. . . .
Private life has lost much of its modesty, and that of the city much
of the relative seclusion that it once granted, since this constant intru-
sion of brutal noise in every act and thought.39

Affiliation is represented in the emblem of the house centered on the

figure of the father. At the same time, the house is the niche for ‘‘culture’’ as a
defense in the name of ‘‘private life,’’ the voice of tradition—residual experi-
ences that share as a common denominator their displacement by capitalist
rationality. The train, formerly an emblem of a modernization desired by the
Enlightenment patricians, once embodied a logic of sense as an organizer
of the natural ‘‘chaos’’ in a state of barbarism. Yet, in Martí, the train only
produces a ‘‘brutal noise’’ that ‘‘[overruns] the voice.’’ The urban rationality
envisioned by the Enlightenment patricians brought, in practice, irrationality

Literature and the Masses 

instead, against which the new literato will raise an accusatory voice. Cul-
ture—now tied more than ever to the experience of the aesthetic—will seek
to legitimate its domain by extricating an autonomy for itself, apart from the
rationality that rules the urban world.
Certainly, in Martí, this interior, this place that has its back turned to
the city yet is relentlessly pursued by it, is not the sacred realm of the collec-
tor in Walter Benjamin’s essay, who by means of collecting luxurious objects
removes them from the sphere of practical life, the world of utility and the
market—that ‘‘outside world’’ of people dominated by the crisis of experi-
ence and depersonalization.40 Although the house, for Martí, is a representa-
tion of ‘‘culture’’ and the aesthetic experience, his interior is presented as a
repository of residual traces from a communitarian tradition, transmittable
through the epic that the father recounts to the son. In Martí, ‘‘culture’’ will
assert its self-representation as the sphere of filiation, in contrast to the fierce
individualism and the incapacity or nugatory will of filiation that appears in
other Latin American writers of the fin de siècle.
In the city, Martí’s subject fortifies the house of discourse. At least,
such is the way that the subject represents his task to himself: he produces
couples, affiliations; and from this distant and privileged place, he encom-
passes with his or her gaze the totality that the city has taken apart. From
this house that protects him or her from the noise, urban meaninglessness,
the voice of moral authority speaks, capable of even appalling and censuring
that which others accept as second nature: as Martí had earlier said, ‘‘they’’
are those who ‘‘do not hold censure and shock in high regard, as might those
who think as we think in this land.’’ 41 It is this voice that has been most lack-
ing in the outside that constitutes the experience of the urban metropolis. The
virtual legitimacy of this voice in the city, over the city, would be based on an
assertion of distance and will to autonomy. Thus would the subject socially
authorize himself as the redeemer of the ills brought about by modernity.
From this interior, the oracle speaks, the oracle who is none other than
the voice of the father. The inclusion of the voice cannot be underempha-
sized, for in the continuity of tradition, the father who ‘‘exhausted from
work recounts the tales of heroes to the son who leans against his knees’’
does not hold the same authority in the sphere of writing. Writing, like the
train, disjoins. Hence, it becomes an attribute of the other, the world outside;
for example, ‘‘newspapers, programmes, advertisements, signs’’ in ‘‘Coney
Island.’’ Through the intonation of Martí’s prose, particularly in his journal-
ism, the oral inflection of writing simulates the presence of the orator. Such
a strategy would be deployed more systematically in later forms of cultural-

    

ism, in the pronouncements of the ‘‘old and venerable teacher’’ (no longer
the father) that comprise Rodó’s Ariel.42

Notes

 José Martí, ‘‘Hierro,’’ Versos libres, in Obras completas, vol.  (Havana: Editorial Nacional de
Cuba, –),  [hereafter OC, followed by volume and page number].
 José Martí, Cartas a Manuel Mercado (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,
), , .
 It would also be appropriate to recall the letter (dated September , ) written by Bar-
tólome Mitre y Vedia to Martí after censoring his first correspondence to La Nación in :
‘‘A youth speaks to you, who probably has much more to learn from you than you from him,
but insofar as he deals with a commodity—and please pardon the bluntness of the word,
for the sake of exactitude—that seeks a favorable placement in the market that serves as a
base for his operations, he tries, as it is his right and obligation, to come to an agreement
with his agents and correspondents abroad regarding the most convenient means of giving
to them the full value of which they are deserving’’ (in Papeles de Martí, vol. , ed. Gonzalo de
Quesada y Miranda [Havana: Imprenta El Siglo XX, ], ).
 The Spanish bajeza contains both the religious and secular meanings of baseness: as both a
moral indictment and a condition of ‘‘lowliness,’’ ‘‘commonness,’’ or ‘‘mundaneness.’’ A
more apt translation for this word would be the pre-Enlightenment meaning of profanity, as
in ‘‘the sacred versus the profane worlds.’’ Trans.
 Rubén Darío, ‘‘La insurreción en Cuba,’’ in Escritos dispersos de Rubén Darío, vol. , ed. Pedro
Luis Barcia (La Plata, Argentina: Universidad de La Plata, ), .
 José Martí, Obra literaria (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), .
 Martí, OC, vol. , .
 José Martí, Prologue to Flores del destierro, in OC, vol. , .
 ‘‘Since the end of the last century, philosophy has made a series of attempts to lay hold of the
‘true’ experience as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured
life of the civilized masses’’ (Walter Benjamin, ‘‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’’ in Ilumina-
tions, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken Books, ], ).
 ‘‘Coney Island’’ was published in La Pluma, a newspaper in Bogotá, on December , ,
and is reprinted in Martí’s complete works (OC, vol. , –). The reader may recall that
Coney Island was one of the first commercialized and managed amusement parks. It is, in
this respect, possible to read Martí’s chronicle as a reflection on the emergence of mass cul-
ture from the ‘‘high’’ perspective of an emergent literary subject. For a translation of ‘‘Coney
Island,’’ see appendix  in this volume.
 Fina García Marruz, ‘‘El tiempo en la crónica norteamericana de Martí,’’ in En torno a José
Martí, ed. F. García Marruz et al. (Bordeaux, France: Editions Bière, ), .
 Martí, ‘‘Coney Island,’’ in appendix , this volume.
 Martí, OC, vol. , .
 In this sense, the city can be seen as a reduced model of the greater unity of the United
States. For Martí—who was writing at the height of America’s territorial expansion west-
ward—this logic of the aggregate, forever in motion, is the law of North American society.
See his fascinating chronicle ‘‘Cómo se crea un pueblo nuevo en los Estados Unidos’’ (‘‘How

Literature and the Masses 

 a New People Is Being Created in the United States’’), OC, vol. , –. On the railroad
as the vehicle of this logic, see Martí’s ‘‘Ferrocarriles elevados’’ (‘‘Elevated Railroads’’), OC,
vol. , –.
 On the metaphor of the tree as a model for the classical world and the book, see Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, ), –.
 Martí, OC, vol. , .
 Domingo F. Sarmiento, Recuerdos de provincia (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sopena, ), –.
 Eugenio Cambaceres, Sin rumbo (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, ), .
 Machado de Assis, Memórias pósthumas de Brás Cubas (Rio de Janeiro: Ediçoes de Ouro, n.d.),
. On the contradictions of privatization from Machado’s perspective, see Julio Ramos,
‘‘Anticonfesiones: Deseo y autoridad en Machado de Assis,’’ Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 
(): –.
 José Martí, ‘‘Canto de otoño,’’ Versos libres, in OC, vol. , .
 ‘‘[The] father-son relationship . . . acquires the characteristics of an obsessive preoccupa-
tion in Martí. In the literature of our language, there is no other instance that can approxi-
mate [Martí’s] reverential respect for the father, tied to such a tremulous love for the son’’
(Angel Rama, ‘‘La dialéctica de la modernidad en José Martí,’’ in Estudios martianos, ed. M. P.
González et al. [Río Piedras: Editorial Universitaria, ], ).
 In La restauración nacionalista from , Ricardo Rojas comments on the familial ‘‘crisis’’ and
proposes literary education as an alternative, compensatory structure: ‘‘As for the family,
nothing more can be expected of it. Until now it has done nothing but take away the civic
and intellectual forces from the school, with the indifference of the creole home or the hos-
tility of a foreign one’’ ([Buenos Aires: Librería La Facultad, ], ).
 Martí, OC, vol. , –.
 Significantly, in ‘‘¡Bien vengas, mar!’’ (‘‘Farewell, Ocean!’’) from Flores del destierro, the image
of the son counteracts the interference of the sea, which immediately evokes Martí’s attempt
to tie the familial trope to the structure of social meaning, opposed to the ‘‘chaos’’ repre-
sented by the sea: ‘‘¡Bien vengas, mar! De pie sobre la roca / Te espero altivo: Si mi barca toca / Tu ola
voraz, ni tiemblo, ni me aflijo: / Alas tengo y huire—¡las de mi hijo!’’ (‘‘Farewell, Ocean! Standing on
the rock / I await you with disdain: Should my boat touch / Your ravenous wave, I will not
tremble, nor will I be beset / I will flee, I have wings—the wings of my son!’’) (OC, vol. ,
). See also ‘‘¡Oh nave!’’ (‘‘Oh Ship!’’) and ‘‘A bordo’’ (‘‘On Board’’) in Flores del destierro, OC,
vol. .
 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, ‘‘The Concept of Enlightenment,’’ in Dialectic of En-
lightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, ), .
 Martí, OC, vol. , –.
 See, in particular, ‘‘Amor de ciudad grande’’ (‘‘Love of the Great City’’) in Versos libres: ‘‘Se ama
de pie, en las calles, entre el polvo, / De los salones y las plazas; muere la flor el día que nace’’ (‘‘One loves
standing, on the streets, in the dust / Of saloons and town squares; the flower dies the day
it is born’’) Roberto González Echevarría offers an interesting interpretation of this text in
‘‘Martí y su ‘Amor de ciudad grande’: notas hacia una poética de Versos libres,’’ Zona Franca ,
no.  (April ).
 Martí, OC, vol. , . See Angel Rama’s reading of these lines in ‘‘Indagación de la ideología
en la poesía (los dípticos seriados de los Versos sencillos),’’ Revista Iberoamericana , nos. –
 (xxxx): –. For Rama, the rationalizing impulse is the driving force behind Martí’s

    

 writing. In contrast, this chapter will try to analyze this rationalizing will as the object of in-
vestigation and critique for Martí, and not his field of signification.
 There can be no doubt that the city and desire are always tied together in Martí, as is evi-
denced once again in the following remarks by Martí on one of his dreams, ‘‘Elementos
de un sueño’’: ‘‘Parts of a dream—A disproportionate, sexual dream. A facade of the highest
building in New York. When I returned home at night, a tin tube, long and full of curves. . . .
In the dream, the house was the woman, and the enormous, growing, defiant, flexible, half-
erect tube—had changed form’’ (Cuaderno , OC, vol. , ). The dream shows how the
city and its signs penetrate even the most profound depths of the interior.
 Martí, OC, vol. , .
 ‘‘Iron veins’’ from Martí, ‘‘Coney Island,’’ appendix , p. . The woman-mass analogy was
a common point of reference for many of the early intellectuals and their experience before
the crowd. José M. Ramos Mejía, an Argentine writer who was influenced by the ‘‘psychol-
ogy’’ of the crowd (an area of study that spread throughout France, above all after the 
Commune), remarked in an explicit manner: ‘‘They constitute the principal nuclei of the
multitude: the sensitives, the neurotics, the individuals whose nerves need only be barely
caressed, on the surface, by sensation, for them to vibrate. . . . Thus [crowds] are impres-
sionable and fickle like impassioned women, purely unconscious; fiery, but full of fading light;
above all lovers of violent sensation, vivid color, noisy music, beautiful men and things of
great stature; because the multitude is sensual, aroused, and full of lust for the pleasure of
the senses. It does not reason, it feels.’’
 Las multitudes argentinas: Estudio de psicología colectiva, d ed. [Buenos Aires: J. Lajouane and Cía,
], –). On the work of crowd ‘‘psychologists’’ in France like Le bon and Tarde, see
Susanna Burrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late-Nineteenth-Century France (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ).
 Martí, OC, vol. , .
 In his essay ‘‘Response to the Question: What Is the Postmodern?’’ Jean-François Lyotard
writes: ‘‘I shall call modern the art that devotes its ‘little technical expertise,’ as Diderot
used to say, to present the fact that the unpresentable exists’’ (in The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, ], ). The instability of codes and forms of representation as one
of the distinctive features of modernity is also one of the key theses of Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem,
and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), esp. –.
 Once again, we are using the Gramscian distinction between traditional and organic intel-
lectuals. See note , chapter .
 Charles-Pierre Baudelaire’s ‘‘Le cygne’’ (‘‘The Swan’’)—written in  and significantly
dedicated to Victor-Marie Hugo, the civil poet par excellence—is by now a classic example
of art’s exile in advanced capitalism: ‘‘Je pense à mon grand cygne, avec ses geste fous / Comme les
exilés, ridicule et sublime / Et rongé d’un desire sans trêve! Et puis à vous . . . Je pense aux matelots oubliés
dans une île, / Aux captifs, aux vaincus! . . . à bien d’autre encor!’’ (I think of my great swan, the im-
becile strain / Of his head, noble and foolish as all the exiled, / Eaten by ceaseless needs . . .
I think of sailors washed up on uncharted islands, / Of prisoners, the conquered, and more,
so many more!’’) (Flowers of Evil, th ed., ed. Marthiel and Jackson Matthews, trans. Anthony
Hecht [New York: New Directions, ] –, –). On the other hand, Martí dis-
tanced himself from the heroism of marginality taken up by Baudelaire as a banner. In

Literature and the Masses 

 Martí, poetry offers the ideal of reincorporation into the public sphere: his Latin American
‘‘family’’ crystallizes his attempt to propagate filiation by means of aesthetics.
 In a chronicle entitled ‘‘Una novela en Central Park’’ (A novelty in Central Park), Martí
writes: ‘‘For one to see (the swallows) making their nest is to almost see one’s own mind at
work. . . . It was already night, and the following morning would be witness to the miracle.
What had the swallows done? [Had they] brought the nest to another branch? Begun a new
nest? Suspended love until after having finished the house?’’ (OC, vol. , –). And in
another chronicle written that same month, he observes: ‘‘The home [in the city] is a hotel
room, whose walls are not at all like those of our houses, within which we love and converse
with one another, like living beings, beings from whom the soul cannot be wrested without
tearing it away, as one would a tree that has its roots in the soil’’ (OC, vol. , ).
 Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
), .
 Martí, OC, vol. , .
 Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,’’ in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet
in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, ), ‘‘Paris, Capi-
tal of the Nineteenth-Century,’’ in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, trans.
Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, ).
 Appendix , p. .
 On the importance of the ‘‘voice’’ in Ariel, see Carlos Real de Azúa, prologue to Ariel, in
the Biblioteca Ayacucho edition, ix–xxxi; see also Roberto González Echevarría’s invaluable
reading of magisterial rhetoric, ‘‘The Case of the Speaking Statue: Ariel and the Magisterial
Rhetoric of the Latin American Essay,’’ in The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Mod-
ern Latin American Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, ), –.

    

 Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo

The relationship between the intellectuals and the world of production is not as di-
rect as it is with the fundamental social groups, but is, in varying degrees, ‘‘mediated’’
by the whole fabric of society and by the complex of superstructures, of which the
intellectuals are, precisely, the ‘‘functionaries.’’—Antonio Gramsci, ‘‘The Formation
of Intellectuals’’

‘‘Coney Island’’ is a minor text, limited in circulation and influence in its time,
and practically forgotten today. It did, however, register and participate in
some of the fundamental debates of the fin de siècle literary field; a small re-
minder that the confluence and struggle of contesting discourses that shaped
the modern Latin American literary field are irreducible to ‘‘great’’ canoni-
cal texts.
From the beginning of the s, ‘‘Coney Island’’ served to demonstrate
a new concept of ‘‘culture’’ as a defense of spiritual values faced by the mar-
ket. Such an activity was essential to the specification of the writer’s domain
in a changing society. Even at the superficial level of the essay’s tone, as
well as the kind of authority that the subject claims for himself or herself, or
in the (antithetical) distribution of meaning, ‘‘Coney Island’’ anticipated the
emergence of what Rodó would later call ‘‘our modern literature of ideas,’’ 1
tied to the Arielista genre of essay writing at the turn of the century and to
Latin-Americanism. Yet in ‘‘Coney Island’’ and other Escenas norteamericanas,
the figure of the writer was already portrayed as the ‘‘thinker’’ in the midst
of the amorphous materiality of the masses. S/he acted as the cultural critic,2
defender, and in many respects, creator of a superior world—high culture:

In vain does the ancient puritanical spirit, cornered by this constant in-
vasion, endeavor to take hold of the reins that are forever slipping from
his hands. In vain do men of foresight attempt, by means of culture and
religious sentiment, to direct this driven mass that heedlessly seeks the
quick and full satisfaction of its appetites.3
 Mass/culture: from a height, the critic of modernity gazes with unfamil-
iarity at the material baseness of the masses, ‘‘the crowd that knows more
about appetites than ideas’’ (vol. , p. ).
For Ortega y Gasset—the epitome of this modern specialization of mass-
culture criticism in this century—unfamiliarity was the ‘‘definitive gesture’’
and the ‘‘luxury specific to the intellectual.’’ 4 At least it was for a certain type
of traditional intellectual struggling to secure a place within the redistribu-
tion of social authority (which, in turn, implied the new division of labor),
especially on the heels of the emerging culture industry, organically attached
to the market by the turn of the century.
In effect, the city produced its own ‘‘art.’’ Martí insisted that on Coney
Island there were ‘‘fifty-cent museums, where they exhibit human monsters,
outlandish fish, bearded women, melancholic dwarves, and rickety elephants,
which the advertisement pompously promotes as the largest elephants in the
world.’’ 5 There are ‘‘operas sung on café tables’’ (p. ), and ‘‘black min-
strels, who could alas! never be like the minstrels from Scotland’’ (p. ).
For Martí, this incorporation of art into the market indicated a sense of
degradation:

[One] absorbed group admires an artist who is cutting a black piece of

paper, which he later stamps onto white cardboard, the silhouette of
which he wants to portray in this singular manner; another group cele-
brates the skill of a lady who, in a stall that cannot measure more than
three-quarters of a yard, creates curious flowers made of fish skins; with
bellowing laughs, others applaud the skill with which a ball thrower
has managed to hit the nose of a misfortunate man of color, who in
exchange for a measly day’s wage, stands day and night with his fright-
ened head stuck through a hole made in the canvas, avoiding the pitches
of the ball throwers with ridiculous movements and exaggerated faces;
the bearded and venerable sit heavily on a wooden tiger, or a griffin, or
an effigy, or on the back of a boa constrictor, all of which are placed
in circles, along with horses, that spin around a central mast for a few
minutes to the tune of unorchestrated sonatas played by self-proclaimed
musicians. (p. )

Art incorporated into the market here appears overrun by the same laws
of disjunction that shape the new urban culture. The figure of the abused
black performer, who ironically lives by the aggression of the crowd, is by
no means coincidental: for Martí, the market subjects the artist to an intense
degradation that is matched by the transformation of the signs of tradition,

    

the Book of Culture (griffins, effigies, boa constrictors), into strange ma-
chines for amusement. Incorporation paradoxically serves to unorchestrate
the sonatas. Finally, the artist is made into a self-proclaimed social figure.
‘‘Coney Island’’ is arguably one of the first Latin American critiques of
the culture industry. Its visionary capacity was, in part, enabled by Martí’s
experience in New York, where the debate around an emerging mass culture
was already a decisive focal point in the intellectual field during the post-
Reconstruction years. As John F. Kasson points out in his remarkable history
of Coney Island:

Amusement parks emerged as laboratories of the new mass culture, pro-

viding settings and attractions that immediately affected behavior. Their
creators and managers pioneered a new cultural institution that chal-
lenged prevailing notions of public conduct and social order, of whole-
some amusement, of democratic art—of all the institutions and values
of the genteel culture. Amusement complexes such as Coney Island thus
shed light on the cultural transition and the struggle for moral, social,
and aesthetic authority that occurred in the United States at the turn of
the century.6

For Kasson, the debate on Coney Island testified to a redistribution of cultural

authority, which became particularly threatening for the traditional intellec-
tuals who foresaw their eventual displacement or at least the necessity of
relegitimizing their social functions:

[Coney Island] emerged as the unofficial capital of the new mass cul-
ture and aroused special interest among artists, writers, and critics. . . .
The resort raised profound questions in their minds about the nature of
crowds, the ultimate influence of this new breed of amusement, and the
future of American culture in an urban-industrial age. (p. )

Coney Island indeed helped to displace genteel culture with a new mass
culture. (p. )

In Latin America, this redistribution of intellectual tasks occurred more

slowly, although the debate among many intellectuals over the new journal-
ism at the turn of the century had already begun to show the tension between
two conceptions of intellectual activity: one organic, tied to the market, and
another that asserted an autonomy and distance from it. This tension marked
the beginning of a division, still prevalent today, between an emergent con-
cept of literature and its twin: intellectual production under the dictates of

Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo 

the culture industry. This other mode of intellectual production paradoxi-
cally demarcated the proper field of identity for the modern literary sub-
ject—a subject conceived negatively, as the opposite of the culture industry.
The ‘‘high’’ intellectual, nostalgic for ‘‘a higher spiritual world,’’ 7 in Martí’s
words, represented mass culture as a source of the crises threatening ‘‘cul-
ture’’ and spirit in modernity.
As we have seen, these crises themselves became institutionalized. The
question at stake, then, would be whether the field of mass culture simply
brought about this crisis of ‘‘true’’ spiritual values, or whether it in fact con-
stituted one of the conditions of possibility for an aesthetic discourse of crisis. In
the latter case, such a discourse would at once serve to legitimize and stimu-
late the spread of ‘‘high culture’’ at the turn of the century.
Of course, such a hypothesis would in no way invalidate Martí’s power-
ful critique of the reification of daily life in capitalist society; in fact, his
early critique of massification is still pertinent today, as is the intensity of his
language, which in many ways anticipates some features of Federico García
Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York. It would be equally naïve, however, to accept the
ideologization of terms such as ‘‘culture’’/‘‘false culture,’’ which presupposes
an antithetical, all-too-schematic order behind Martí’s critique of reification.
Our task, then, would be to take on assertions of his cultural critique as the
object of our analysis, as a strategy of legitimation for the literary subject in
Martí and the fin de siècle.
For Ortega y Gasset, the city was an overcrowded space: ‘‘What was
once no problem at all has come to be an almost continuous one: finding a
place.’’ 8 Where would the writer fit in? ‘‘Culture’’ held the promise of a spe-
cific social domain for the intellectual, granting weight to his or her critique
of the spirit’s displacement in the city of masses. In other areas of his New
York opus, Martí—deeply affected by the desublimating experience of jour-
nalism and salaried labor—developed a critique against this auratic concept
of culture. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that such a concept of
culture at work in his critique of modernity was not passively inculcated in
him; in fact, it appears in one of its earliest Latin American formulations in
the Escenas norteamericanas. In his role as a cultural critic in ‘‘Coney Island,’’ Martí
in effect helped to formulate one of the grand narratives of legitimation for
the wide-open field of the literary enterprise (which continued to function at
least until the centennials of the Latin American wars of independence). The
legitimation of culture as a critique of modernity was also linked to a widely
influential culturalist Latin Americanism that proliferated after  as a re-
sponse to the expansionism of North American imperialism.

    

Culture and the Experience of the Beautiful

To begin with, what does ‘‘culture’’ signify? When is its semantic field pro-
duced through the exclusion of the ‘‘masses’’? Toward the middle of the eigh-
teenth century, the Diccionario de autoridades (Dictionary of Sources) () reg-
istered two principal definitions of the word culture. Its first meaning, close
to its Latin roots, refers to the cultivation of land. The second, metaphoric
definition signifies the cultivation of mental faculties. The example cited by
the dictionary is significant for our investigation: ‘‘It would be a reprehen-
sible thing in man to be inferior in docility and culture to animals, [since] the
sovereignty of reason makes him superior to them.’’ By analogy, ‘‘culture’’
is thus tied to the cultivation of the mind, in opposition to a bestial irratio-
nality; however, the semantic field of ‘‘culture’’ as yet does not distinguish
among different intellectual faculties. Even the  Gran diccionario de la lengua
castellana (Great Dictionary of the Spanish Language) maintains both meanings.
Concerning the second definition, culture signifies: ‘‘Result or effect of cul-
tivating the forms of human understanding and of refining oneself through
the exercise of the intellectual faculties of man.’’ 9 On the other hand, the 
Diccionario enciclopédico de la lengua castellana (Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Spanish
Language) records the anthropological definition as ‘‘the state of intellectual
or material advancement or progress of a people or nation.’’ 10
Even in Rodó’s Ariel, the ambiguity of the term is striking: it can signify
the apprehension of a kind of professional knowledge, in the sense of a ‘‘uni-
lateral’’ culture of professions; and it can also be used in an anthropological
sense, as in Latin or North American culture. Notwithstanding the field of
possible meanings for the word, which is particularly extensive in Rodó’s
essay, ‘‘culture’’ begins to be identified with a specific category of ‘‘spiri-
tual’’ and ‘‘disinterested’’ intellectual faculties, which are oftentimes set in
opposition to practical life: ‘‘the high and disinterested incentive for action,
the spirituality of culture.’’ 11 Culture here designates Ariel’s domain as op-
posed to Calibán, who is the ‘‘symbol of sensuality and laziness.’’ ‘‘Culture’’
and ‘‘high culture’’ in Rodó’s Ariel is also clearly opposed to the ‘‘disruptive
barbarism’’ (p. ) of the urban masses. This use of the concept, in no way
descriptive, evidently implied a valorization rife with elitist connotations.
Moreover, in Rodó—and even earlier, in Martí—this definition of ‘‘cul-
ture’’ at once presupposed a differentiation among distinct categories of
intellectual faculties, and indicated a certain reduction of the semantic field
of ‘‘the cultural’’ to the realm of disinterested intellectual activity. This realm
consisted of the experience of the beautiful and specifically aesthetic fac-

Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo 

ulty.12 As a corollary to art in its definitive opposition to utilitarianism, cul-
ture, in this sense of the word, gained currency at the turn of the century.
Rodó contends:

To the conception of rational life that is grounded in the free develop-

ment of our nature—and [which] for the most part includes among its
final ends that which is achieved in the felt contemplation of the beau-
tiful—is opposed utilitarianism, by which the entire compass of our
activity is directed toward the immediate finality of interest.13

Clearly, culture here is not opposed to rationality. To the contrary, feel-

ing for the beautiful comprises a part of ‘‘the higher elements of rational
existence’’ (p. ). Culture is the antithesis of the utilitarianism at work in the
economics of daily existence; furthermore, it belongs to that sphere of tem-
porality in society that is governed by ‘‘creative leisure.’’ According to Rodó,
‘‘The inner life . . . , life that is comprised of disinterested meditation, con-
templation of the ideal, old-fashioned leisure’’ (ibid.), occupies the time of a
‘‘truly rational’’ existence (p. ). The emphasis on rationality betrays Rodó’s
attempt to separate any conception of ‘‘the rational’’ from its previous (En-
lightenment) identification with bourgeois, utilitarian rationalization, dur-
ing a period when positivism was still a dominant discourse throughout Latin
America. ‘‘True’’ rationality, the opposite of utilitarian rationality, would be
found in the domain of aesthetic experience—culture. Predictably enough,
poetry became the paradigm of ‘‘culture,’’ as we see in Martí’s  ‘‘El poeta
Walt Whitman’’ (‘‘Walt Whitman, the Poet’’):

Who among the ignorant maintains that poetry is not indispensable to

the people? There are those of such narrow vision, who think that the
whole fruit consists of the shell. Poetry, which gathers and disperses,
which fortifies or preoccupies so as to lead or cast down the soul, which
gives or strips men of faith and need, is more necessary to the people
than industry itself, since the latter provides them with a way of sur-
viving, while the former gives them the desire and strength to live. . . .
The best, those whom nature anoints with the sacred desire for future
things, would in a painful and deafening moment of annihilation lose all
motive for overcoming human squalor; and the masses, the vulgar, the
men and women of appetite, the plebian, would procreate empty chil-
dren, elevate to the level of essential faculties those [things] that ought
to serve as mere instruments, and drown out the irremediable affliction
of the soul, only comforted in the beautiful and the great, in the din of
an always incomplete prosperity.14

    

 In this fundamental text, it is important to note the series of antithe-
ses established by the differentiation between the domain of the beautiful
and industry: the opposition presupposes the modern notion of autonomy,
which would have been unthinkable for the Enlightenment patricians who
were thoroughly invested in a utilitarian notion of ‘‘literature.’’ This opposi-
tion in Martí’s text leads to another, the one between practical life and con-
templation: ‘‘Where will a community of men go, who have lost the faithful
practice of thinking about the significance and reach of their actions?’’ (ibid.;
italics added). Finally, as we have seen in Martí’s earlier texts, the ‘‘masses’’
reemerge as the outer limit of ‘‘the beautiful’’—the materiality that lacks the
gift of culture.
An auratic concept of culture thus comes into play, tied to the ‘‘au-
thentic experience’’ of art. Art, in turn, would continue to redefine itself in
opposition to the massified experience of capitalist daily existence. Raymond
Williams highlights the historical relationship between the rise of ‘‘culture’’
and modernization in his archaeology of culture as a concept:

The word [culture] which had indicated a process of training within a

more assured society became in the nineteenth century the focus of a
deeply significant response to a society in the throes of a radical and
painful change. This idea of Culture, it seems to me, is best studied as
a response of this kind: the response of certain men, attached to cer-
tain values, in the face of change and the consequences of change. The
idea of Culture, in fact, is an aspect of that larger and more deeply com-
plex response which men of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have
made to the Industrial Revolution and its results.15

Our task, then, would be to ask: from what place in society, from what
domain staked out in the division of labor that defines modernization, did
the concept of culture originate?
When Martí, Rodó, and many other modern writers of the period as-
serted the dangers of modernization and the superiority of the aesthetic
sphere (as a response to such dangers), they did it from within the very cul-
tural sphere that they defended and defined. In other words, their discourse
was from the start compromised by the project to legitimize the cultural
sphere within the modernization that they attempted to ‘‘see’’ or represent.
In their assertion of distance (Martí’s ‘‘seeing from afar’’), these intellectuals
postulated the possibility of an objective and disinterested view of society. But
their representation—perhaps version would be a more appropriate term—
was in itself a social construct, also subject to the impact of modernization,
which was used in the struggles that comprised the social ‘‘represented’’

Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo 

world. For representation is always mediated by interests, by the positions
such as those occupied by intellectuals like Martí or Rodó in the competition
among discourses brought about by modernization.
Does this mean that the ‘‘crisis’’ of spiritual values was simply an object
created by a biased, ideologically invested representation generated by tra-
ditional intellectuals on and from within modernization? In La ciudad letrada
(The Lettered City), Angel Rama analyzes the effects of modernization on Latin
American cities during the last quarter of the century:

[The] problem was larger and circumscribed everyone: the mobility of

the real city, its bustling traffic of strangers, its successive constructions
and demolitions, its accelerated rhythms, the mutations brought about
by new customs: all of these things contributed to instability, to the loss
of the past, to the conquest of the future. The city began to live for the
sake of an unforeseeable future and [it] stopped living for a nostalgic
and identificatory past. Quite a difficult situation for citizens: their day-
to-day experience was one of constant estrangement.16

Doubtless, fin de siècle modernization signified an intense transforma-

tion of daily life. The experience of estrangement was not merely a fiction
engineered by intellectuals affected and frequently displaced by moderniza-
tion. In fact, it was modernization that once employed the letrados with the
essential task of overseeing the project of rationalization, the imposition of
order on the ‘‘barbarous nature’’ that was America.
Still, one would have to differentiate between these modern transfor-
mations (probably experienced and endured by earlier generations) and the
representations of these transformations in terms of a crisis. If these trans-
formations did indeed constitute an empirical fact, then what we read in
the passionate commentaries written by fin de siècle intellectuals on these
changes is not a passive ‘‘reflection’’ of a reality external to discourse and the
literary field. The commentary itself, the representation proper, is an activity
inscribed into society—an activity that would later reemerge as a represented
object. The crisis is thus inseparable from the commentary,17 from represen-
tation, and from the projects of the social group (in this case intellectual,
literary) that invest the literary subject with authority.
In the fin de siècle literary field (as well as in other areas of the intel-
lectual field, in particular the emergent field of sociology), the transforma-
tions brought about by modernization became the object of a new discourse,
a rhetoric of crisis. To speak of the death of culture, or the crisis of spiritual
values, or the marginality and vulnerability of the aesthetic in absolute oppo-

    

sition to the masses and the market: this entire ‘‘crisis’’ paradoxically led to
the expansion of the ‘‘cultural’’ domain, which asserts its autonomy against
the ‘‘alienated’’ life of the market and masses. The crisis was—and perhaps
still is—a condition of possibility for the emergence of ‘‘culture,’’ at least
in the modern sense, which managed to gain a degree of social specificity
with respect to other areas and discourses of modernity. The ‘‘crisis’’ became
a remarkable narrative of legitimation, imbued with a great deal of char-
ismatic appeal, through which intellectuals displaced from their traditional
functions (as former overseers of the rationalizing, modernizing dream) re-
claimed their authority. They achieved this by arguing that their voices were
autonomous from the market, and precisely for this reason, capable of criti-
cizing the project of modernization.
The critique of modernization made the modernization of critique pos-
sible, along with the specification of social functions for the writer within
the new division of labor. Hence, the importance of the claim to autonomy,
the distantiation that authorizes the writer’s power to represent moderniza-
tion. To see from afar: the ‘‘purity’’ of the literary field, the demarcation of an
autonomous domain uncontaminated by the market, was one of the bases
for literature’s virtual social authority. Modern writers could speak about the
crisis of ‘‘authentic’’ values because they were not subject to the destabiliz-
ing flow of the city and market. Such, at least, was the way they represented
themselves. They could speak, they had authority, because they were above and
outside. The notion of their ‘‘marginality,’’ tied to the topos of the martyrdom
and exile of art in capitalist society, enabled the specification of the writer’s
place within society, along with the relative extension of the modern writer’s,
the literato’s public functions. This legitimation of the modern writer in part
accounts for the impact that the essayists of  came to exercise over edu-
cation; it is also at the very heart of the cultural sphere’s construction of an
ontology of Latin American being, opposed to the economic power of ‘‘they,’’
which found one of its first articulations in Martí’s ‘‘Coney Island.’’
Now, to reiterate, did the will to autonomy, which promoted the speci-
fication of a cultural domain, imply an antisocial position on the part of
writers? The notion of culture’s autonomy with respect to the demands of the
market cannot in any way be reduced to the ideology of ‘‘art for art’s sake,’’
which exercised only the most precarious influence in Latin America. Martí
was eager to propose the social function of beauty:

Some may believe that beauty is nothing more than the ephemeral blos-
soming of a moment, or the exaggerated exhibit of wealth, or a simple
intermezzo in the serious matters of life. There where life breaks away

Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo 

 from beauty . . . there begins the misfortune and the real unhappiness,
degradation, and impoverishment of our actual existence.18

Rodó would distance himself from ‘‘art for art’s sake,’’ insisting on the
‘‘realistic function’’ of art in modernity:

If you intend to secularize respect for the beautiful, begin by making

[people] understand the possibility of a harmonic concert among all the
legitimate human activities, and this will be the easiest way of directly
transforming the love of the beautiful, for [the sake of ] beauty itself, into an
attribute of the multitude.19 (Italics added)

If culture is indeed opposed to the utilitarianism that dominates prac-

tical life, its functionality is far from lacking. For Martí, ‘‘poetry . . . is more
necessary to the people than industry itself.’’ 20 Far from designating an anti-
social posture, the will to specify a cultural domain presupposed the socially
indispensable character of autonomy for a changing society, prone to crisis.
By becoming autonomous from the generative forces of the crisis, culture
was able to assert its compensatory value.
As we have already seen, Martí related modernization to the progressive
inability of traditional, religious images to represent and grant coherence to
the world: ‘‘And further, in this time of renovation in the human world, dis-
consolate eyes full of questions turn to the empty sky, moaning beside the
corpses of gods. . . . Living in the city makes [one] wither.’’ 21 Literature,
in the face of change, attends to the transformations and necessities of a
modern life that invalidates all dogmas; indeed, it can be said that literature
presented itself as the only possible religion in the city. As we see in Martí—
an avid reader of Whitman—literature reclaimed for itself the empty place in
the secularized world left by the gods:22

Literature that announces and spreads the final and joyful harmony of
apparent contradictions, literature that, as the spontaneous counsel and
teaching of Nature itself, proclaims identity in a peace superior to the
dogmas and rival passions that divide and shed blood among communi-
ties in their elementary state; literature that inculcates in Man’s terrified
spirit a conviction so rooted in a definitive justice and beauty that the
penury and squalor of life can neither dishearten nor embitter it, will
not only lead to a social state much closer to perfection than any known
today, but through the harmonious brotherhood of reason and grace
[literature] will nourish Humanity—longing for a sense of wonder and
poetry—with the religion that it had hesitantly awaited, since it had
known the hollowness and insufficiency of its ancient creeds.23

    

 Here, the insistence on the social function of beauty is clear, although it
must not be confused with the indifferentiation or absence of specificity with
regard to a definition of the cultural as distinct or set apart from modern-
ization. Already in Martí, the cultural sphere comprises a social domain that
defends its autonomy, its specificity, with respect to social functions that are
satisfied by other discourses—also subject to the inevitable regime of spe-
cialization. Culture was socially indispensable for the notion of autonomous,
differentiated being; but it was also opposed to the ‘‘strong’’ discourses of
modernization.

Culture: The Specialization of the Critique

of Specialization

Concerning the social role of the writer presupposed by this narrative of

legitimation, a question arises: what group was able to organize and preside
over the social and discursively specific domain of culture? Like the economy,
the state, or science, the sphere of culture as a certain type of ‘‘knowledge’’ re-
quired specialized, qualified agencies for administering its separate domains.
Defending culture, an act that effectively produced the cultural sphere, be-
came a means for the reactivation of a wide field of traditional intellectuals.
In this respect, culture paradoxically acted as an adaptative mechanism; in
other words, it facilitated the adaptation of intellectuals to the demands of
modernity, particularly specialization (imposed by capitalism as the organiz-
ing principle behind different kinds of labor). The paradox lies in the fact that
even as intellectuals responded to the division of labor with an insistent will
to autonomy, they nevertheless legitimized and represented this autonomy
as the condition that made their critique of specialization possible in the first
place. In their role as critics of modernity, these intellectuals systematically
condemned the fragmentation of the faculties accomplished by specializa-
tion.
The critical reflection on the division of labor is a prevalent theme
throughout Martí’s Escenas; several of his chronicles develop a critique of
specialization in North American education. In this regard, one may con-
sider Martí’s critique as an antecedent of Rodó’s aesthetic pedagogy, which
claimed that specialization was not only an effect of modernization in the
United States, but also in Latin American countries where positivist pragma-
tism was still dominant at the turn of the century.24 Martí writes:

Man: a routine machine, expert in the field to which he is con-

signed, completely closed off from all understanding [conocimiento],

Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo 

 commerce, and sympathy with the human. This is the direct result of a
rudimentary and exclusively practical instruction. As there is not enough
soul in this gigantic nation, and [we are] bereft of this marvelous junc-
tion, everything among these communities catastrophically comes to
naught. In spite of all appearances, men in this nation are only united
by their interests, by the amorous hate that they hold for one another as
they bicker for the same prize. It is necessary for them to be united by
something stronger. It is vitally necessary to create a common environ-
ment for [these] isolated spirits.
. . . It is necessary to rescue these souls from this belittlement. The
merchant ought to be cultivated in the man—yes; but so must the priest.
. . . The reading of beautiful things, the knowledge of universal har-
mony, the mental contact with the great ideas and noble feats . . . will
vitalize and extend the understanding, . . . and create, through the union
of men alike in loftiness, the national soul.25

In Martí’s view, literature would be able to provide modern society on

the verge of fragmentation with this mediation with the one, the ‘‘marvelous
junction’’ suppressed by atomization.
In ‘‘Walt Whitman, the Poet,’’ Martí adds: ‘‘The universities and acade-
mies have turned men in such a way that they no longer recognize each other;
instead of throwing their arms around each other, moved by the essential
and the eternal, they distance themselves . . . through merely accidental dif-
ferences.’’ 26 The context of this biographical sketch (and the first study of
Walt Whitman in Spanish) is significant: ‘‘Walt Whitman, the Poet’’ forms
part of a series entitled Norte-Americanos (North Americans) by Martí himself,
who since  had been planning a compilation of these chronicles in the
form of a book. These biographical sketches were, for the most part, obituary
notices (Walt Whitman was an exception). Read together, they constitute a
prolonged reflection on the social authority—and sometimes the ‘‘death’’ of
authority—of different kinds of intellectuals in a changing society: preach-
ers, politicians, army officers, working-class leaders, engineers, poets, and
even figures of the emergent entertainment industry, like Buffalo Bill. The
sketches affirm Martí’s constant reflection upon the division of labor and the
ensuing crisis of traditional intellectuals in modernity. Perhaps not surpris-
ingly, the poet occupies a central position in Norte-Americanos—because the
poet sees the hidden convergence or ‘‘junction.’’ The poet’s discourse—that
of the beautiful—articulates the whole, harmonizing the different faculties
disjointed and placed in contradiction to one another by specialization.
The critique of specialization—by now a prevalent theme in Martí—is

    

one of the fundamental matrices of the Latinoamericanista essay at the turn of
the century. This critique of the division of labor practically opens the discus-
sion of the modern crisis that concerns Rodó’s Ariel:

When a certain vulgarized and utterly false concept of education, which

imagines education to be subordinated exclusively to a utilitarian end,
is on the one hand dedicated to mutilating the natural integrity of the
spirit by means of this utilitarianism and premature specialization; and
on the other hand, desperately tries to banish any disinterested and
ideal element from teaching, it does not sufficiently take into account
the danger of preparing narrow-minded spirits for the future: spirits in-
capable of concerning themselves with anything more than the one as-
pect of reality with which they are immediately confronted, who will live
as driven apart by icy deserts from those who within the same society
follow their own way of life.27

In the face of fragmentation, the subject of culture recalls the harmony

of the Greeks: ‘‘The incomparable beauty of Athens, the undying aspect of the
model tied by the hands of the goddess to admiration and the enchantment
of humanity, gave birth to that prodigious city that founded its conception of
life in the concord of all the human faculties’’ (p. ). Athens is the model of
a lost totality that is necessary to recall. In contrast, the modern city is the
segmented, atomized space of specialization and urban masses. Although
Rodó recalls—or perhaps invents—this harmonious past, he also recognizes
its inescapable evanescence in the present: ‘‘In our times, the growing com-
plexity of our civilization dismisses any thought to restore this harmony, only
possible among elements of a gracious simplicity’’ (p. ).
This critique of the division of labor, already at work in Martí, does not
presuppose a concept of culture and literature prior to the regime of special-
ization. To the contrary, the fin de siècle literary field generated a discourse of
culture as a response to modern fragmentation: such a response recognizes
its condition of possibility in the intensification of the regime of specializa-
tion, in the explosion of discourse and rationality (until then, undifferenti-
ated from ‘‘literature,’’ which acted as its repository of forms) into multiple
discursive fields, each with its own apparatuses of formalization. And these
apparatuses no longer recognized letters as a model of order. The ‘‘concord’’
promised by literature could not exist prior to specialization: it acted as a
reaction to specialization, as a response to the relative displacement of lit-
erature from its functions in the administration of traditional society and the
realization of the early dream to modernize.
Rodó cites Jean-Marie Guyau: ‘‘There is a universal profession, which is

Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo 

that of man’’ (p. ). Literature, pivot of culture, was able to offer a refuge for
the total experience of ‘‘the human,’’ which from Martí onward was opposed
to the ‘‘routine machine’’ of specialization. By means of its virtual impact
on education, literature was able to offer a metaspecialization: its entirely mod-
ern function would entail the maintenance of a balance, the organicity of the
faculties that as a consequence of specialization, tended toward dispersion in
the ‘‘utilitarian’’ regime oriented toward efficiency and productive power.
In Ariel ’s characteristically defensive tone, which doubtless registers
the nervousness of a discourse struggling to justify and authorize its exis-
tence, Rodó comments on the importance of art for education (which in this
epoch of transformations was also in the process of reconfiguring its social
function):

For the anonymous masses the superfluity of art is not worth  ducats.
If at all, they respect it as an esoteric cult. And yet, according to the
thesis developed in the eloquent pages of Schiller, among all the ele-
ments of human education that may contribute to the formation of a
vast and noble concept of life, no other encompasses the virtues of a
more extensive and complete culture, in the sense of lending itself to
the stimulus of all the faculties of the soul toward concordance. (p. )

In effect, Ariel emerges out of (even as it helps to formulate) one of

the key narratives of legitimation (and specialization) propagated by litera-
ture at the turn of the century. This narrative certainly appears throughout
Martí’s work beginning in the mid-s, in part because of his privileged
(at least in this respect) residency in New York, along with his contact with
the North American literary scene.28 In this narrative, ‘‘culture’’ is conceived
as a synthesis of intellectual faculties, a higher form of rationality, capable of
articulating fragments disseminated by the division of labor. Once again, we
find in this narrative the will to harmony, the distanced and totalizing gaze
belonging to a certain kind of intellectual, who in spite of his or her force
of will, betrays the insurmountable tendency toward fragmentation through
the very insistence of his or her search for totality.
A paradoxical mode of becoming specialized, to be sure. And this para-
dox—the specialization of the critique of specialization—will perhaps clarify
the importance of the essay as a form—along with its modernist anteced-
ent, the chronicle—in the elaboration of this strategy of legitimation at once
defensive and conducive to the rise of modern culture. It is thus no coinci-
dence that in the first decades of this century, the proliferation of essays was
concomitant to the culturalist project; for the form of the essay represents
the ambiguous place of the modern writer faced with that disciplinarian

    

will that distinguishes modernity. In its formal organization, the essay oscil-
lates between the expository and argumentative mode, and the poetic image:
this ambivalence attests to the paradoxical relationship of writers to special-
ization, which vacillates between emulation and condemnation. As Georg
Lukács would argue, the essay lies somewhere between poetry and science:29
it resists the norm of discursive purity, the order of specialized discourses.
At the same time, however, it operates on these discourses; in other words,
it presupposes them as the primary material of an integrative (albeit never
theoretically definitive) gaze, the gaze of culture. The essay is the form of
metaspecialization, a reflection on and critique of specialization.
By seizing on other specialized discourses in the modern world, the
form of the essay served a mediating function: that is to say, through the
activity of interpretation, it mediates between the interior of the beautiful
(poetry) and the demands of society. And this mediation was fundamental
for writers who, accustomed to reflecting on the lack of an audience capable
of reading their specialized discourse, had begun to reformulate their roles
in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The modern writer extended his
or her social territory as an interpreter and public announcer of the beauti-
ful, first in the chronicle, but later in the essay as a privileged form of the
‘‘maestros’’ at the turn of the century. As an essayist and teacher, the modern
writer exercised an influence over society, promising it a direction that only
this new metaspecialization (which had already begun to fabricate its own
history, beginning with the dawn of humanity) was capable of offering.
It is no coincidence that many turn-of-the-century chronicles, especially
those written by Martí (‘‘Nuestra América’’ would be the greatest example),
would end up in literary histories and anthologies beneath the more noble
and prestigious rubric of the essay. Of course, the assimilation of the essay
into literature is understandable: as we have seen in ‘‘Coney Island,’’ Martí’s
chronicles set forth a concept of culture that, in many ways, gave birth to the
essay and the ‘‘modern literature of ideas’’ that spreads among the writers
of .
There is, however, one crucial difference between the chronicle and the
essay, the consequences of which cannot be underestimated, particularly in
Martí’s Escenas norteamericanas: in the chronicle, the modern writer was sub-
ject to the exigencies of the newspaper. In the emerging publishing market
(which the chronicle doubtless fostered in its role as the harbinger of liter-
ary modernity), essayists were able to attain a higher degree of autonomy.
In contrast to the chronicle’s hybridity, the essay in the form of the book
was at least able to assert its distance from the place non grata of the news-
paper, virtual backbone of the culture industry in the city of masses. In fact,

Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo 

Ariel registers the institutionalization of an authority that was already at work
in Martí, albeit in a more uneven and contradictory fashion. Ariel marks the
consolidation of ‘‘culture,’’ and a concomitant decisive change in the rela-
tionship between this discourse and power.
Thus, in spite of the apparent continuity between the tropes of cultural-
ist discourse in both Martí and Rodó, these writers did not voice their critique
of modernization from the same institutional fields. This is not simply a ref-
erence to the fact (in itself revealing) that around  the authority of a
relatively specialized culture had already crystallized in the institutional site
of the book. In contrast, Martí worked amid the heterogeneous and prob-
lematic material of the newspaper. Moreover, at the beginning of the century
(and particularly during the period of nationalist fervor around the centenni-
als of the independence wars), the relationship between cultural authority
and the state changed radically. At this conjuncture, the aestheticizing gaze
of the culturalist subject acquired a great deal of importance, as s/he consti-
tuted the axis of an anti-imperialist critique that had a strong impact on the
official politics of the times.
Although we have already seen in Martí the tendency to hypostatize
the contents of culture and identify cultural authority as the normative prin-
ciple of a Latin American ‘‘we,’’ his discourse implied a critique from outside
the institutional power spectrum, against the modernizing project that still
served to legitimize state politics. By comparison, the influence of Ariel on the
educational systems of the continent demonstrated its close relation to the
elite groups, which were in the process of debating their various positions in
the face of an impending modernization, most of all after .

The Pedagogical Apparatus: Culture and Order

If the appearance and flowering of the most elevated activities in society that deter-
mine high culture demand as an indispensable condition the existence of a substantial
and dense population, it is precisely because this importance of quantity, which gives
rise to the most complete division of labor, makes the formation of strong controlling
elements possible, elements that effectively render the rule of quality over number.
The multitude, the anonymous masses, are in themselves nothing. The multitude will
be an instrument of barbarism or civilization, depending on whether or not it lacks
the coefficient of a high moral leadership.—José Enrique Rodó, Ariel

Let us broaden the field of the spirit.—Pedro Henríquez Ureña, ‘‘La utopía de América’’

In many ways, the essayists of  repoliticized the strategies of legitima-

tion that fin de siècle literature had earlier elaborated on—the ‘‘interior,’’ the
religion of art, the critique of massification and fragmentation. Through the

    

concept of culture—the matrix of Latin Americanism—essayists succeeded
in widening the horizon of aesthetic authority, bringing art’s critique against
modernization to the very center of political debate and appealing to areas
of power whose relation to the modernizing project had become problema-
tized. Obviously, such an activity was already a far cry from the reduced liter-
ary field. If the projected literary autonomization of the earlier modernists—
and most important, of Martí—implied for them the risk of alienation and
public ineffectiveness,30 not to mention a lack of institutional support, the
essayists of  were apparently able to overcome this aporia through the
aestheticization of politics. On the one hand, in doing so, they ontologized
the concept of the interior—the ‘‘house’’ of discourse—which quickly began
to fill with the assumed signs of Latin American identity, opposed to the
economic world of ‘‘they’’: foreign capital. On the other hand, these essay-
ists reactivated forms of literary and normative rhetoric through education,
giving them a new function against social ‘‘chaos’’ and massification. Thus,
they were able to claim for the discipline of the humanities a guiding role in
the control of a world where a new form of ‘‘barbarism’’ had begun to spread:
the working-class ‘‘masses.’’ Yet as Rodó explicitly recognized, these very
‘‘masses’’ were ironically the justification for the need for culture to provide
a ‘‘high moral leadership.’’ 31 The interiority of Ariel presupposes the threat
of Calibán; ‘‘chaos’’ and ‘‘disaster’’ were the conditions presupposed by the
‘‘broadening of the spirit’’ (p. ).
Now, although the normative and disciplinary character of cultural au-
thority was a widespread feature in essay writing, the uses and institution-
alization of this rhetoric were not homogeneous among the different Latin
American contexts. Once again, it is necessary to distinguish between the
tropes of a discursive authority and its specific relation to power at a given
conjuncture. If we take the initial debates around the institutionalization of
culture in the universities of Argentina and revolutionary Mexico during the
period of early nationalism (in the s and s), for example, we find that
the differences among contesting forces overdetermine decisive variations in
the cultural field’s configuration, above all in the political uses of cultural au-
thority.
In centennial Argentina, the modernizing pragmatism that had domi-
nated education since Sarmiento’s presidency (–) became the focus
of increasingly intense debates, almost always related to a reflection on the
importance of the humanities as a discipline capable of compensating for the
crisis generated by modernization. Of course, the project of incorporating
and specializing literary studies preceded the foundation of the Facultad de
Filosofía y Letras (School of Philosophy and Letters) in  at the University

Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo 

of Buenos Aires. Although the institutionalization of Argentine literature was
tied to the work of Ricardo Rojas (who was the first dean of the faculty and
later rector of the university), from the s onward, university secretaries
Norberto Piñero and Eduardo L. Bidau were engaged in the task of defending
the necessity of literary education in an environment that remained hostile
to it:

For the very reason that wealth, the fruits of fortune, industries, the pur-
suit of opulence and commerce might be developed . . . it is necessary to
spread the high understanding provided by philosophy, the arts, and let-
ters, lest the character [of people] be diminished and they begin to see
the accumulation of material interests as their supreme end.32

Still, it was certainly not until the turn of the century that the concept
of education as a compensation for utilitarianism succeeded in consolidating
itself.
In the s, the heyday of what was called a return to the ‘‘culture’’
of Ariel, the utilitarian and positivist notion of education confronted a great
deal of resistance. One of the first ideologues of pedagogical reform was
Ricardo Rojas, a man of literary background, who later came to be one of
the founders of literature as a university discipline in Argentina.33 In his first
important book, La restauración nacionalista (The Nationalist Restoration)—signifi-
cantly, commissioned by the state—Rojas proposed a general reevaluation of
Argentine education, emphasizing the importance of the ‘‘modern humani-
ties,’’ and in particular, history and national literature. As the programmatic
title for this book announces, Rojas believed that the humanities needed to
‘‘respond to the crisis of the Argentine consciousness.’’ 34 He attributed the
crisis to the effects of modernization, the ‘‘death’’ of traditions, and the in-
flux of immigrants, which in fact had transformed the country. Regarding
the role of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in such a ‘‘restoration’’ and
national homogenization, Rojas wrote:

[The] institution that will render principal services to historical restora-

tion is our Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. It has been the debasement
of its purely professional function and the lack of economic viability in
its ends . . . that have distanced many illustrious patrons from us (p. )

Some years later, in  (when he was already dean of the faculty),
Rojas recalled the history of setbacks in the department and launched into
a critique of utilitarianism in education from within the realm of authority
consolidated by ‘‘culture’’:

    

 History, philosophy, and art were thus not only recommended, but nec-
essary to a nation of pastoral shepherds: but some of our teachers did
not understand it that way. Two of the most influential among them,
Alberdi and Sarmiento, had exaggerated the founding doctrine in their
predictions, and it is time that we divest them of their authority in all
matters wherein they were evidently mistaken. Both were reasonable to
speak on behalf of our current utilitarian progress and the need for prag-
matic teaching to combat our indigence. But they were mistaken in their
notorious disdain for certain disinterested forms of spiritual life. . . .
Both contented themselves with believing that banks, markets, wal-
lets, congresses, harvests, technical schools, ports, and railroads were
enough to comprise civilization. . . . Without this spiritual disinterest,
what remains does not serve anything other than the accumulation of
colonies or the increased prosperity of factories.35

The ‘‘divestment’’ of modernizing discourse and positivism highlights

the field of polemics that gave rise to the ‘‘new humanities’’—the pedagogical
apparatus that would take up as a model the ‘‘disinterested forms of spiritual
life’’; that is, the aesthetic authority that literature would develop from mod-
ernism onward.
Moreover, this perspective—capable of ‘‘divesting’’ even Sarmiento of
his canonical authority in the pedagogical realm—was not voiced from a
marginal or peripheral position in the social field. Rather, in Argentina, the
concept of culture was adapted to the necessities and predominating social
currents of the time. In Rojas, culture was indeed opposed to chaos; however,
‘‘chaos’’ was no longer simply an abstract impulse of modernity, but a sign of
the emergent working class, nurtured by cultural heterogeneity and the radi-
cal politics of immigrants. And one of the arenas in which this struggle was
to be played out was the idea of a national language. For Rojas (in The Nation-
alist Restoration), along with Rodó before him, the purification of the national
language was an essential task of culture, especially literature:

The issue is that of defending our language in our own house, and de-
fending it from those who come, not only to corrupt it, but supplant it
as well. The street belongs to the public domain, and just as the state
intervenes in the public domain for reasons of health and morality, so
too must it intervene for reasons of nationality or aesthetics.36

House/street: in this rhetoric of culture as a kind of social and hygienic

therapy, the opposition is by now a familiar one. And yet, it is important
to note how cultural authority is no longer marginalized in relation to the

Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo 

inner field of power relations. In its appeal to the forces of order, the de-
fense of the ‘‘house’’ sallies forth to purify the contaminated, ‘‘sick’’ world of
the street, the space belonging to the working-class and immigrant ‘‘other.’’
From a similar perspective, in his  essay Didáctica (Didactics), Leopoldo Lu-
gones added:

Given the inferior condition of immigrants, cosmopolitan immigration

tends to deform our language with generally pernicious contributions.
And this is a very serious issue, since it is through this [deformation]
that the disintegration of the nation has begun. A reading of the Tower
of Babel is in this respect significant: the dispersion of men began
through the anarchy of language.37

Here, the flow of migration unleashed by modernity has become the

primary fragmentary, dispersive force. In opposition to the ‘‘anarchy’’ that
‘‘contaminated’’ the very ‘‘foundation’’ of nationality and the mother tongue,
culture was postulated as a mechanism of order, the key to homogenization.
For Rojas: ‘‘Our goal, for now, ought to be the creation of a community of
national ideas among all Argentines, thereby completing a description of a
national character that reveals the influence of the land upon us. The anar-
chy that afflicts us today is a passing thing. It is due to immigration and the
weaknesses of our education.’’ 38 Although we find a direct antecedent to this
rhetoric in the ethnocentrism of many intellectuals from the s’ genera-
tion (such as in Lucio Vicente López’s La gran aldea [The Great Village], Eugenio
Cambaceres’s En la sangre [In Blood ], or Julián Martel’s La bolsa [The Stock Ex-
change]), it was not until the turn of the century that this discourse came to be
institutionalized. In a remarkable exposition on the ‘‘epic’’ origin of Argen-
tine literature in gauchesca poetry, the voice of Lugones in the Odeón Theater
in  marks the apotheosis of this nationalist discourse in Argentina.39 His
speech can be read as an anxious tale about the ‘‘pure’’ origin of Argentine
literature, in which the modernist poet takes on the role of a critic of moder-
nity, to propose his or her particular hermeneutic as a privileged, superior
approach capable of resolving the enigmas of politics. Curiously (but not sur-
prisingly), at the height of the period that marks the emergence of the new
middle and working classes, Lugones’s speech concentrates instead on inter-
pellating large sectors of the oligarchy.
In Mexico, too, the concept of culture from the early years of the revolu-
tion became crystallized in a rhetoric of crisis and social chaos. As a response
to the crisis, the affirmation of culture as a compensatory and therapeutic
mechanism acquired authority through the process of its reification in the
humanistic disciplines. Of course, it would be misleading here to attempt to

    

establish a symmetrical comparison between the insurrectionary Mexico of
the Ateneístas (Athenianists) and the Argentina of the centennial years. It is clear,
however, that in both societies, cultural authority and its definitive critique
of utilitarianism spread beyond the narrow scope of the literary field, ap-
pealing to jurisdictions of power whose relationship with modernization had
become problematized. In Mexico as well as Argentina (albeit from distant
and contradictory perspectives), even the elite groups began to identify mod-
ernization with their imminent subordination to foreign capital. And doubt-
less, such a problematization of the developmentalist dream only served to
increase the authority of the modern writers who had been honing their criti-
cal discourse of modernization since the s. Literature at once nurtured
and was nurtured by the emergent nationalism and Latin Americanism of the
epoch, both of which were based on the discourse of culture generated by the
literary field.
Yet, on closer examination, it can be seen that although in Mexico these
areas of power were indeed nationalistic, they were nevertheless distinct
from the Argentine oligarchy. In the radicalized and populist context of the
revolution, the discourse of culture would have to confront the necessity of
rewriting and, to a great degree, radicalizing its own legacy of Arielismo.
As late as , influential Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes recalled the in-
tense crisis that the Mexican Revolution had represented for him. In ‘‘Atenea
Política’’ (‘‘Political Athens’’), he writes:

I have some right to advise you [plural] on the life of culture as a guar-
antee of stability in the midst of moral crises. My traveling gear is well-
stocked with experiences. Do not forget that a Mexican professor of my
age still knows what it is to cross a city besieged by a bombardment
that lasted ten consecutive days, in order to pay your respects to a son
or brother, and even a husband or father, with grief in your heart and a
scholarly book under your arm. Never, not even amid the suffering that
to this day cannot be told, did we abandon the Atenea Política.40

The allusion here to the Decena Trágica (the ‘‘tragic ten days’’ in Feb-
ruary  that marked Victoriano Huerta’s seizure of power) is intense and
emotional; it was there that Reyes’s father, ex-general of the Porfirio regime,
died. It was also the point at which the initial projects of reform and ex-
pansion, begun in the early years of the revolution and led primarily by the
intellectuals of the period, fell apart. Against the ‘‘moral crisis’’ and ‘‘chaos’’
brought about by the revolution, Reyes would assert the redemptive and com-
pensatory power of culture.
Still, the relationship between intellectuals and the revolution was more

Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo 

complex. Without minimizing the uncertainty probably fostered by the revo-
lution among citizens belonging to different social classes, it is also evident
that for the young intellectuals affiliated with the Ateneo de la Juventud de
México (Athenian for the Youth of Mexico, founded in )—Reyes, Alfonso
Caso, José Vasconcelos, and P. Henríquez Ureña (who studied law in Mexico)
—the revolutionary violence enabled an aperture, an opportunity, favorable
to the consolidation of a cultural and literary authority to open—one that
would dismantle the institutional network of científicos or positivistic organic
intellectuals of the Porfirian regime.41
In a key text entitled Pasado inmediato (The Immediate Past), Reyes estab-
lishes an analogy, familiar to the circle of new intellectuals, between the
revolution and the battle for power within the literary field:

The riots, the dispersed outbreaks, the first steps toward revolution, had
begun. Meanwhile, the campaign of culture [also] began to take effect.
. . . With the fortitude of positivism broken, the legions of philosophy—
led by the light cavalry of so-called anti-intellectualism—resolutely ad-
vanced. The cultural scene had experienced its first upheaval.42

Henríquez Ureña also used the metaphor of intellectual war:

Among other things, the political agitation that had begun in 
did not abate, but rather increased from day to day, before culminating
in the años terribles (terrible years) of  and , years that would
have marked the end to all intellectual life were it not for the persistence
in the love of culture inherent to Latin tradition. While war ravaged
the country, and even the men belonging to intellectual groups became
soldiers, the attempts at spiritual renovation, albeit somewhat disorga-
nized, continued to move ahead. The fruits of our philosophical, literary,
and artistic revolution continued to gradually take shape.43

The belligerent tone in Henríquez Ureña’s piece is striking: the revolu-

tion intensified not only the struggles for state power, but the antipositivist
war of the centennial generation as well. The revolution redistributed power.
The new intellectuals tied to the literary field foresaw the possible ascendancy
of their discourses, their new modes of interpreting the reality of a country
whose revolution had, in effect, demolished positivist rhetoric (which was
aligned with the ancien régime). In Henríquez Ureña’s dissertation for his
licentiate in law in , he writes:

Among Spanish-speaking nations, especially those of America, which

unfortunately suffer from the exclusive influence of France in the realm

    

 of culture and ignore the intellectual life of other nations much richer
than the French in the variety of orientations and extension of labors,
there exists in vulgar fashion the mistaken idea that the university is
solely the collection of professional schools that could well indeed exist
by themselves. . . . There are those who go even further (the Mexi-
can comtistas [positivists] for example) as to declare that universities are
keepers of tradition—perhaps to the point of routine—and enemies of
new ideas.44

The argument is familiar: the critique of positivism was a frequent and

even distinct theme in the literary field since the s.45 Yet, despite the
fact that Reyes and Henríquez Ureña here refer back to a concept of cul-
ture that saw its earliest formulations in the epoch of Gutiérrez Nájera and
Martí—a formulation later crystallized in the cult of Arielismo—the passages
cited above situate us before a struggle for the control of the university do-
main, something that neither Martí nor his contemporaries could have ever
foreseen.46 Henríquez Ureña’s thesis, written at the height of revolutionary
turbulence, registers the gradual extinction of the intellectual cadres belong-
ing to the old regime of Porfirio Díaz. In education, this displacement was
accompanied by the emergence of a new cultural authority as an alternative to
and critique of the pragmatism and specialization that still dominated higher
education. Reyes, reflecting precisely on this metaspecialization crystallized
in the form of the essay, commented in ‘‘Homilía por la cultura’’ (‘‘Homily
for Culture’’): ‘‘The desire to find moral stability in the sole exercise of one
technical activity, more or less restricted, without remaining open to the cir-
culation of spiritual currents, leads nations and men to a kind of malnutrition
and scurvy.’’ He adds: ‘‘let us reconstruct our necessary unity with a perma-
nent will. This, and nothing else my friends, is the task of culture.’’ 47 Even in
La raza cósmica by José Vasconcelos, the Ateneísta debate against positivism was
seminal to an understanding of the period:

Only a leap of the spirit, nurtured by facts, will be able to offer us a vision
that can rise above the microideology of the specialist. Let us then delve
into the mystery of events to discover in them a direction, a rhythm, and
a purpose. And there where the analyst understandably finds nothing,
the synthesizer and creator will illuminate.48

In La raza cósmica, the critique of specialization and fragmentation has

gone through yet another transformation, and now brought with it a series
of consequences as yet unforeseen by Reyes or Henríquez Ureña. For, in Vas-
concelos, cultural authority has become ontologized, constituting the base

Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo 

of a new ‘‘theory’’—that of the ‘‘Latin race.’’ Specifically, the super-vision of
culture materialized in the ‘‘total form’’ of the essay came to represent the
distinctive attribute of the ‘‘cosmic,’’ ‘‘Latin’’ race, which having reached a
higher state of human progress, would succeed in overtaking the limitations
of the inferior state of ‘‘Anglo-Saxonism,’’ still dominated by the narrow and
segmented gaze of science and technology. For Vasconcelos, the very form of
metaspecialization in the essay and the newly established authority of culture
together anticipate the finality of utopia in this delirious teleology.
In the early years of the revolution, the focus on the Ateneísta ‘‘war’’
against positivism was above all the struggle to redirect education and teach-
ing at the higher levels. Although as Henríquez Ureña had pointed out,
through the revolution ‘‘the nation has discovered that it possesses rights,
among them the right to be educated,’’ 49 the function that was to be accom-
plished by the humanities in a country devastated by war was, for the most
part, still uncertain. In this respect, the relationship between the state and
the Escuela de Altos Estudios (School of Higher Studies), founded in 
by Justo Sierra—a bastion of Ateneísmo—is representative of a keen crisis of
legitimation that even after the fall of the Porfirian regime (including that
of the Comtian positivists or científicos) continued to relativize cultural au-
thority. The School of Higher Studies was the precedent for the Faculty of
Humanities at the Universidad Nacional (National University), although the
latter did not succeed in becoming established until . At the School of
Higher Studies, which was defined as a haven for ‘‘disinterested’’ intellectual
labor autonomous from immediate final ends, the ‘‘Subdivision of Literary
Studies’’ was founded in  as the first institutionalized department of lit-
erature in Mexico. That same year, Reyes, Henríquez Ureña, and González
Martínez offered specialized courses in Spanish, English, and French litera-
tures (respectively). In Pasado inmediato, Reyes recalls the transformation of
the concept of literature that the School of Higher Studies would attempt to
institutionalize. Until that year, Mexican literature in higher education had
been a repository of forms tied to oratory and the study of law: ‘‘The men
of the past believed in being practical; they pretended that history and lit-
erature only served to adorn juridical documents with metaphors or reminis-
cences.’’ 50 Paradoxically, Reyes proposes the ‘‘scientific’’ study of literature,
in opposition to the concept of letters as a recourse to oratory. According
to Reyes, this approach ‘‘came to be one of the campaigns of the centennial
youth’’ (p. ).
Nonetheless, the institutionalization of literature and the humanities
was met with resistance by the state. In ‘‘La cultura de las Humanidades’’
(‘‘The Culture of the Humanities’’), Henríquez Ureña wrote:

    

 It barely overcame the fall of the ancien régime, and now the school,
disdained by governments, orphaned from any defined program, began
to live a risky life, becoming the chosen victim for attacks by those who
did not understand. Around it [ella] legends formed; the warnings were ab-
struse; their cooperation, minimal; their retributions, outrageous. . . .
All that, for what? 51

‘‘Culture’’: what for? Although the hegemony of the científicos had crum-
bled in the intellectual field, the legitimacy of culture-as-discourse did not
automatically prevail in conjunction with the revolution. In this respect, ‘‘La
cultura de las Humanidades’’ is a foundational text, as it reflects on the his-
tory of the humanities and claims to authority for the new university disci-
pline as the domain of aesthetic and cultural authority. Thus, explained Hen-
ríquez Ureña, the aporetic situation of the humanities in Latin America at
the time: ‘‘The societies of Spanish America, agitated by immense necessi-
ties left unsatisfied by our inexperience, gazed with natural suspicion on any
orientation that evades practical applications’’ (p. ). But he also insisted
on the importance of the humanities and with great erudition recounted the
history of humanistic studies, tied to philology in the German university sys-
tem, where he found the discipline to be impressively developed.
The Ateneístas did not retreat. They were, by and large, dedicated to legiti-
mizing their virtual power in the largely uncultivated terrain of the university,
which had to reorient itself to the ‘‘disinterested’’ study of ‘‘high culture.’’ 52
Exhibiting his Arielista legacy, Henríquez Ureña declared:

High culture is not a luxury: the few who fully reach it are the guardians
of the understanding; only they possess the laboratory and subtle secret
of perfection in knowledge; only they, the teachers of teachers, know
how to set forth certain norms and definite notions to the rest, the pro-
fessionals, men of higher action, guides for the youth.53

For the Ateneístas as well as Rojas in Argentina (albeit in a very different

context, which had more to do with the democratic appeal of the revolution),
the humanities served as a source of ‘‘reconstruction’’: a key to order.54 The
humanities were to act as the site for a new synthesis. And precisely because
of its power to distance itself and proclaim its autonomy from practical life
(which must not be confused, however, with a rejection of or independence
from it), the humanities would contribute to the cultivation of an inner har-
mony, necessary for social reorganization. As Henríquez Ureña argued:

The humanities, an old stamp of honor in Mexico, must exercise its

subtle spiritual influence on the reconstruction that awaits us. Because

Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo 

 it is much more than the skeleton of intellectual forms belonging to the
ancient world: they are the gift-bearing muse of inner good fortune, jors
olavigera for the secrets of human perfection.55

The humanities—with literature occupying the central place—would be

the discipline capable of stabilizing the turbulent world of the street.56 When
Henríquez Ureña thus speaks of ‘‘inner experience,’’ the point of reference is
evidently Rodó’s Arielismo: culture as a fortification to defend the ‘‘authentic
experience.’’
What resonance would this language of an Arielist bent carry in the popu-
list Mexico of the revolution? Such a discourse doubtless provoked a general
mistrust of the ‘‘elite’’ intellectuals. Reyes recollects: ‘‘The representatives,
without knowledge of the school, said that to speak of higher studies in
Mexico . . . amounted to dressing a barefoot nation in coattails.’’ 57
In the opening made possible by the revolution, all legitimizing narra-
tives had to popularize and democratize the concept of culture. The public
sphere allowed the expansion of the field, on the condition that writers adapt
and promote their discourses in agreement with the necessities of the revo-
lution. Yet it must be emphasized that the issue at stake is not a question of
opportunism, at least in terms of the field in general, but rather, of the effect
that social struggles had on the field and its discourses. The issue concerns
the social demands to which the field of culture was forced to respond, reno-
vating and self-criticizing its languages and parameters of valorization. The
later Henríquez Ureña, for example, came to severely question the concept of
‘‘high culture’’ that he himself had promoted in the early years of the revolu-
tion. In La utopía de América (America as Utopia), in , he writes:

Mexico knows what instruments it must employ for the task (of recon-
struction) to which it is dedicated; and these instruments are culture
and nationalism. But culture and nationalism, to be sure, are not to be
understood in the manner of the nineteenth century. They must not be
conflated with the [idea of ] culture that reigned throughout the era of
capital disguised as liberalism, a culture of exclusive dilettantes, a closed
orchard where they cultivated artificial flowers, an ivory tower where a
dead science was kept, as in the museums. One must instead imagine a
social culture, offered and actually given to all and rooted in labor: learn-
ing is not only learning to understand but also learning to act. There must
not be any high culture—any high culture would be false and ephemeral where there
is no popular culture.58 (Italics added)

    

 The corrective gesture of rewriting some of the basic tenets of Arielism
is striking. Culture here is no longer an effect of ‘‘creative leisure,’’ but of
labor. In what he calls ‘‘learning to act,’’ Henríquez Ureña inverts the contem-
plation/action antithesis that constitutes one of the fundamental rhetorical
forms of Rodó’s aesthetic culture. Even more pronounced, however, is the
way in which this ex-disciple of Arielismo undercuts the notion of ‘‘high cul-
ture’’ as a haven, a defense against the inevitable approach of ‘‘popular cul-
ture’’—another area excluded from the aesthetic field in Ariel. And in response
to Rodó’s classicism and Western orientation, Henríquez Ureña proposes a
return to the land, because ‘‘the autochthonous in Mexico is a reality’’ (p. ).
The nationalist inflection, which gradually assumes cultural authority,
would have been unthinkable for the early Ateneístas. The claim of literature
as a privileged discourse for the rearticulation of the origin, of the primal
characteristics of national identity, was at once a response and an attempt to
overcome the aporias confronted by cultural authority throughout the early
years of the revolution.
The context of La utopía de América further corroborates this conclusion:
the text was originally a speech delivered by Ureña at the Universidad de La
Plata (University of the Plata region, Argentina) when he was a member of a
delegation sponsored by the recently founded Ministry of Public Education
in Mexico. Minister José Vasconcelos, a former Ateneísta, presided over the
delegation. Culture—no longer marginal or peripheral—had assumed state
authority in Mexico.59 Still, an entire process of revising ‘‘the cultural,’’ a
process overdetermined by the demands of Mexican society throughout the
early decades of the revolution, served to mediate between the fervent Ariel-
ismo of the early Ateneístas (Vasconcelos included) and the concept of ‘‘social’’
and ‘‘popular’’ culture propagated by Henríquez Ureña in . At this con-
juncture, the height of the nationalist epoch, the humanities were legiti-
mized as the archive of autochthonous tradition: as Reyes declared, ‘‘I want
the humanities to be the native vehicle for all that is indigenous.’’ 60 An ex-
emplary instance of this narrative of legitimation can be found in Reyes’s
‘‘Atenea Política’’—precisely the same essay in which he speaks of culture as
a response to the ‘‘cataclysm’’ and ‘‘moral crisis’’ at hand:

When the smoke of the combatants had cleared, a Mexico transformed

found itself before the wondrous spectacle of Mexican being, the na-
tional tradition from which the vicissitudes of history throughout the
nineteenth century had led us insensibly astray. I speak here of such
transformation as a total phenomenon, higher than individual tastes,

Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo 

 or those of political parties or important people, higher still than their
leaders. What has come out of the flowering of the nation—the great
concern for the education of the people, and the immeasurable devel-
opment of the plastic arts and archaeology—are movements of perfect
historical relation, which are in the process of rectifying the earlier hesi-
tation of misanthropy: movements that are built upon an ancient and
transcendent past, in the process of recovering each note of a melody
that has transpired across the centuries; movements that are inspired
by it, that benefit from [the past] as a supplement to the present, and
with this recourse, they cross the mobile sea of the future with leaps and
bounds, full of a robust confidence. . . . I am not speaking here of any
desire to translate the present in terms of the past, but to the contrary,
the past in terms of the present.61

Culture would not only provide an inner order, a compensation for ‘‘moral
crises’’; it would also be charged with the task of reconstructing the mem-
ory of a past that was desperately needed in a time of rupture. According
to Reyes, ‘‘The continuity that is here established is culture, the work of the
muses, daughters of memory’’ (p. ). This memory must not be confused
with an antiquarian passion: the sense of continuity, the national past, was
exactly what the ancien régime, in following in the footsteps of modern-
ization, had intended to efface. Through culture, and its intellectuals, the
revolution would seek to recompose (in the words of Reyes) ‘‘the wondrous
spectacle of Mexican being.’’

Notes

 José Enrique Rodó, Ariel (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), .

 The concept of the ‘‘cultural critic’’ is not being invoked here in a neutral, descriptive fash-
ion; following Adorno, the term will be used in this chapter to refer to a type of ‘‘high’’ dis-
course that claimed legitimacy through the practice of dividing cultural values between the
low and high, and criticizing the ills of modern, commercialized society (other examples of
the cultural critic include Oswald Spengler and José Ortega y Gasset). See Theodor Adorno,
‘‘Cultural Criticism and Society,’’ in Prisms, th ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ), –
. See also Frederic Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, ), esp. –; and Jorge Aguilar Mora’s reading
of Octavio Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad, in La divina pareja: Historia y mito en Octavio Paz (Mexico
City: Ediciones Era, ).
 José Martí, Obras completas, vol.  (Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, –),  [here-
after OC, followed by volume and page number].
 José Ortega y Gasset, La rebelión de la masas, in Obras completas, vol.  (Madrid: Alianza Edito-
rial, ), .

    

 José Martí, ‘‘Coney Island,’’ in appendix , p. .
 John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and
Wang, ), .
 Martí, ‘‘Coney Island,’’ .
 Ortega y Gasset, La rebelión de las masas, .
 Aniceto de Payer de Puig, Gran diccionario de la lengua castellana (Madrid: Establecimiento tipo-
litográfico ‘‘Sucesores de Rivadeneyra,’’ ).
 Diccionario enciclopédico de la lengua castellana (Paris: Garnier hermanos, []).
 Rodó, Ariel, .
 The concept of ‘‘the beautiful’’ as ‘‘disinterested’’ refers to Friedrich von Schiller (On the Aes-
thetic Education of Man, ), which develops the Kantian notion of an aesthetic ‘‘sphere’’ as
the free play of autonomized faculties. Martí doubtless knew Schiller through Emerson and
the North American transcendentalists, although by , Luz y Caballero had introduced
Schiller into Cuba with the translation of Schiller’s autobiography (reproduced in José de la
Luz y Caballero, Escritos literarios [Havana: Ediciones de la Universidad de La Habana, ],
–).
 Rodó, Ariel, .
 José Martí, ‘‘El poeta Walt Whitman,’’ in OC, vol. , .
 Raymond Williams, ‘‘The Idea of Culture,’’ in Literary Taste, Culture, and Mass Communication,
vol. , ed. Peter Davison, Rolf Meyerson, and Edward Shils (Cambridge, U.K.: Chadwyck-
Healey, ). See also Herbert Marcuse, ‘‘The Affirmative Character of Culture,’’ in Nega-
tions, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, ), –. First published
in .
 Angel Rama, The Lettered City, ed. and trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, ), .
 René Thom points out the subjective character of the crisis in ‘‘Crise et catastrophe,’’ Com-
munications  (): –.
 José Martí, Anuario del Centro de Estudios Martianos  (): . The journal does not cite the
specific reference.
 Rodó, Ariel, .
 Martí, ‘‘Walt Whitman,’’ .
 Martí, OC, vol. , .
 In Walt Whitman’s preface to Leaves of Grass (), he writes: ‘‘There will be no more priests.
Their work is done. They may wait a while . . . perhaps a generation or two . . . dropping
off by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place . . . the gang of kosmos and prophets
(the poets) en masse shall take their place’’ (in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose [New York:
Literary Classics of the United States, ], ). ‘‘El Poeta Walt Whitman’’ should be read
in conjunction with Martí’s Prólogo to Poema del Niágara by Pérez Bonalde, where this same
narrative of legitimation is at work. The notion of literature as a substitute for religion in
modernism is one of the central themes of an important book Rafael by Gutiérrez Girardot,
Modernismo (Barcelona: Montesinos, ).
 Martí, ‘‘Walt Whitman,’’ .
 Sarmiento is, of course, the canonical example. Less studied, although doubtless a crucial
player in the Cuban intellectual scene during Martí’s formative years, is José de la Luz y
Caballero, a great admirer of English pragmatism. In his ‘‘Informe sobre la Escuela Naútica’’
(), Luz y Caballero writes: ‘‘But the clamors that are raised against this arrangement
have already reached the ears of the commission, clamors for a division of labor, the prin-

Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo 

 cipal motivation behind the essentially progressive industrial and scientific achievements
of this century. Doubtless the subdivision of labor has worked wonders, particularly in the
Albión suburb, and perhaps among the immense advantages that it has brought about,
there is none more beneficial to the cause of the sciences as its frontal attack on and cor-
rective alteration of encyclopedism, which has invaded modern education’’ (in Escritos educativos
[Havana: Editorial de la Universidad, ], ). This provision notwithstanding, his text
leaves no doubt as to the validity of specialization as a model, which the literatos would begin
to criticize in the s. Specialization, for Luz y Caballero, was an essential feature of a de-
sired modernization and rationalization of every aspect of social life.
 Martí, OC, vol. , –.
 Martí, ‘‘Walt Whitman,’’ .
 Rodó, Ariel, .
 On the concept of ‘‘culture’’ in the United States, see the important essay by Ralph Waldo
Emerson, ‘‘The Progress of Culture,’’ Letters and Social Aims, in Complete Works, vol.  (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, ), –. First published in .
 See Georg Lukács, ‘‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay,’’ in Soul and Form, trans. Anna
Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ); and Theodor Adorno, ‘‘The Essay as Form,’’
in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press,
). The latter piece situates the essay between philosophy as a discipline (particularly as
it had acquired specialization in Germany) and literary production. See also Roberto Gon-
zálaz Echevarría, ‘‘The Case of the Speaking Statue: Ariel and the Magisterial Rhetoric of the
Latin American Essay,’’ in The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American
Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, ).
 In Cantos de vida y de esperanza (), Rubén Darío responds to Rodó’s criticism in a poem
dedicated to him: ‘‘La torre de marfil tentó mi anhelo; / quise encerrarme dentro de mí mismo, / y tuve
hambre de espacio y sed de cielo / desde las sombras de mi propio abismo’’ (‘‘The ivory tower tempted
my longing; / to shut myself within myself; / and I was hungry for space and thirsty for the
sky / From within the shadows of my own abyss’’) (in Poesía [Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho,
]). From this point on in Darío’s life, his poetry will invoke a marked Latin American-
ism and Hispanicism.
 Rodó, Ariel, .
 Norberto Piñero and Eduardo L. Bidau, Historia de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, in Anales de la
Universidad de Buenos Aires, vol.  (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Martín Biedma, ), .
 See the study by Carlos Altamirano and Beatriz Sarlo, ‘‘La Argentina del Centenario: campo
intelectual y temas ideológicos,’’ Hispamérica , nos. – (): –.
 Ricardo Rojas, La restauración nacionalista (; reprint, Buenos Aires: Librería de la Facultad,
), .
 Ricardo Rojas, ‘‘La Universidad y la cultura argentina,’’ in Documentos del decanato (–)
(Buenos Aires: Imprenta de la Universidad, ), –.
 Rojas, La restauración nacionalista, .
 Leopoldo Lugones, Didáctica, in El payador y antología de poesía y prosa, ed. Guillermo Ara (Cara-
cas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), .
 Rojas, La restauración nacionalista, .
 Leopoldo Lugones’s speeches on gauchesca literature were published later in a volume en-
titled El payador (Buenos Aires: Otero, ).
 Alfonso Reyes, ‘‘Atenea Política,’’ in Obras completas, vol.  (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, ), . First published in .

    

 See Callos Monsiváis, ‘‘Notas sobre la cultura mexicana en el siglo XX,’’ in Historia general de
México, vol. , ed. Daniel Cosío Villegas (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, ), esp. –
; Enrique Krauze, Caudillos culturales de la Revolución mexicana (Mexico City: Siglo XX, ),
esp. ‘‘La genealogía intelectual,’’ on the Ateneístas; and Leopoldo Zea, El positivismo en México
(Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, ), esp. the discussion on the emergence of
antipositivism in ‘‘El ocaso.’’
 Alfonso Reyes, Pasado inmediato, in Obras completas, vol.  (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, ), . The essay was first published in .
 Pedro Henríquez Ureña, ‘‘La influencia de la Revolución en la vida intelectual de México,’’ in
La utopía de América, ed. Angel Rama (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), .
 Pedro Henríquez Ureña, ‘‘Universidad,’’ in Universidad y educación (Mexico City: Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México, ), .
 For example, see Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, ‘‘El arte y el materialismo,’’ in Obras, vol. , Crítica
literaria (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, ), –. First pub-
lished in . See also Martí’s notes against the Cuban positivists, in OC, vol. , –.
 ‘‘Between the world of the university and the independent world of letters there was at that
time a bond that shows the educational and social concerns of what we call the centen-
nial generation. This sole feature distinguishes it from the literature prior to it, the brilliant
generation of modernism that—indeed—still slumbered in its ivory tower’’ (Reyes, Pasado
inmediato, ).
 Alfonso Reyes, ‘‘Homilía por la cultura,’’ in Obras completas, vol.  (Mexico City: Fondo de
Cultura Económica, ), .
 José Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica (Mexico City: Ediciones de la Secretaría de Educación Pú-
blica, ), .
 Henríquez Ureña, ‘‘La influencia de la Revolución,’’ .
 Reyes, Pasado inmediato, .
 Pedro Henríquez Ureña, ‘‘La cultura de las Humanidades,’’ in La utopía de América, ed. Angel
Rama (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, ), .
 On the university as a haven for ‘‘higher culture,’’ see Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s licentiate in
Universidad y educación (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, ), .
 Henríquez Ureña, ‘‘La cultura de las Humanidades,’’ .
 For a criticism of the concept of the humanities in a wider context, see Hayden White, ‘‘The
Culture of Criticism,’’ in Liberations: New Essays on the Humanities in Revolution, ed. Ihab Hassan
(Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, ), –.
 Henríquez Ureña, ‘‘La cultura de las Humanidades,’’ .
 Henríquez Ureña describes the revival of classical studies among the Ateneístas toward :
‘‘Once we congregated to read Plato’s Symposium together. . . . For three hours we read, and
never had we so completely forgotten the world of the streets, though our reunion took place in
an architect’s studio on the busiest street in the city’’ (‘‘La cultura de las Humanidades,’’ ).
 Reyes, Pasado inmediato, .
 Pedro Henríquez Ureña, La utopía de América, ed. Angel Rama (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho,
), .
 Vasconcelos’ speech at the opening of the new ministry sheds light on the institutional-
ization of culture in Mexico: his allegorical imagination elaborates on the blend of Aztec,
Buddhist, and classical motifs on the building’s facade. The goal, he states, is ‘‘a culture in
which the indigenous flourishes within a universal environment.’’ Vasconcelos asserts that
the building, like the ministry itself, brought many artists, including Diego Rivera, into the

Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo 

 project, thus reflecting the trends of political culture that Mexico would develop in the years
to come. The speech is included in Boletín de la Secretaría de Educación Pública , no.  (): –.
 Alfonso Reyes, ‘‘Discurso por Virgilio,’’ in Obras completas, vol.  (Mexico City: Fondo de Cul-
tura Económica, ), . Reyes’s tactic of adapting the classical humanities to his coun-
try’s political climate is revealing. For example, he insists on Virgil’s importance as a ‘‘fer-
ment for the notion of nationhood’’ (p. ). Later, he represents Virgil as a model poet for a
rural society: ‘‘Virgil, to be one of us, sings of the small farmers and modest, pastoral land-
owners’’ (p. ). He was not very far from claiming Virgil as the true poet of the revolution.
 Reyes, ‘‘Atenea Política,’’ .

    

Chapter  ‘‘Nuestra América’’: The Art of
Good Governance

Where is America going, and who will unite and guide her?
—José Martí, ‘‘Mother America’’

Let us begin with a brief commentary on the objectives and difficulties of the
following chapter: beyond contents of an idea or concept of Latin America
in Martí’s classic essay ‘‘Nuestra América,’’ I would like to explore the con-
figuration of a discourse presupposed by Martí’s work that will later provide
the foundation for an emergent Latin Americanism. The notion of the ‘‘idea’’
as the point of departure—almost always nonreflexive—for a certain kind of
cultural historiography has, in many ways, remained unquestioned. In this
type of historiographic narrative, Latin America is often taken to be a field
of identity already constituted independently of the ‘‘concepts,’’ like a time-
less presence easily designated or even contained by the transparency of ideas
only later subject to the vicissitudes of history.
It has been the subject of this book to explore the tropes and strategies
of authorization that have made possible the mapping, the textual framing,
of what is posited as ‘‘Latin American.’’ The premise behind such an under-
taking has been that Latin America as an organized, demarcated field of iden-
tity does not exist prior to the intervention of a gaze that seeks to represent it.
To the contrary, we began with the hypothesis that what is ‘‘Latin American’’
is a field produced and ordered within the very same, politically overdeter-
mined assemblage of the discourses that name—and by naming, generate—
this field of this identity.
At the same time, however, it is also important to establish some dis-
tance from the mythology, very common in recent years, of a pure ‘‘self-
referentiality’’ presumed by language. Such an ideology would lead us to
believe that the heterogeneous reality of Latin America, beyond the words
that designate it, possesses nothing more than the logical status of a book
or fiction. One need not adopt a naive empiricism in order to recognize that
‘‘Latin America’’ exceeds the representations produced by intellectuals about
the multiple and contradictory experiences pertaining to the name. Latin
America exists as an inescapable problem that demands reflection and rigor:
its existence is at least as dense and unshakable as, say, North American poli-
tics in the Central American region in recent years.
Let us, then, propose a distinction: between the multiple and heteroge-
neous space of the American landscape, and the different attempts to con-
struct a world, a logic of sense, with these materials, there lies a distance
marked by the transformation brought about by a whole confluence of dis-
cursive practices; even (or perhaps especially) when these discourses would
assert the existence of essential, categorical definitions of their object of
study. The value and political character of any reflection on what was ‘‘Latin
American’’ is thus not rooted so much in its referential capacity or ability to
‘‘contain’’ the ‘‘true’’ Latin American identity, as it is in the position occupied
by each postulation of being in the social or more specifically intellectual
field from which the ‘‘definition’’ was articulated. In this sense, Latin America
can be seen as a field of struggle wherein diverse postulations and Latino-
americanista discourses have historically sought to impose and naturalize their
representations of the Latin American experience, in a battle—at times fol-
lowed by armed combat—that would decide the hegemonic conditions to be
imposed over the meaning of ‘‘our’’ identity. Behind every assertion of what
is Latin American, in other words, there lies a will to power exercised from
different positions on the map of social contradictions. The analysis in this
chapter will concern the position of a Latin Americanist classic, Martí’s ‘‘Nues-
tra América,’’ within such a contested field.
It is always difficult to read a classic with a critical eye. In the case of
‘‘Nuestra América,’’ we are dealing with a classic whose conditions of pro-
duction have been effaced in the process of its canonization and the passage
of time. More than a mere representation of Latin America, this text has come
to be an unmediated code wherein different angles and political positions
within discordant areas of culture ‘‘recognize’’ their identity. Of course, this
description can easily serve as a possible definition of a classic text: a discur-
sive event that, in the accumulation of a history of its readings, assumes enor-
mous power as a referential object, thereby erasing the specific conditions
of its production;1 a discourse that in the process of its institutionalization
loses its character as a discursive event and assumes the task of projecting
the represented world as an unmediated presence. Thus, in the example of
Martí, we would continually seem to be reading ‘‘our’’ identity. By means of
this referential power projected onto the text by cultural institutions, we feel
safe to assume that Martí effectively defines us; it is that easy to accept the

    

transcendence of his ‘‘truth.’’ Moreover, ‘‘Nuestra América’’ frames this pro-
jected identity in an undoubtedly critical, anti-imperialist gesture: a gesture
that has been incorporated into the very act of saying ‘‘we.’’ But several ques-
tions immediately come to light: who are those included, or excluded, by this
field of identity? From what position on the map of social contradictions is
the solidarity of this ‘‘we’’ declared, asserted? What social authority regulates
the entrance of hitherto unidentified materials into this field of identity? Or
is it that we all effectively speak through this voice—that of the writer—that
speaks of us, that speaks us? It would be necessary to begin with specifying the
historical conditions, the political struggles, to which this we was formulated
as a possible response or resolution—a we that, to all appearances, exists
outside time and contingency. But how would it be possible to explain the ar-
tificiality, the norms of this discourse that defines us, when we know that it
was designed to defend us, protect us from a ‘‘they’’ who would divest us of
our self-representation?

Father Martí, true father, storehouse of past appetite and future hunger,
reservoir of what keeps us alive! 2

Certainly, the enormous interpellative, inclusive capacity of the Mar-

tían family was only in part a result of his canonization. From the opening
paragraphs of ‘‘Nuestra América,’’ Martí himself projected a place for his ad-
dressee within the field of authorial identity:

Those born in America who are ashamed because they wear the apron of
the indio, of the mother who reared them; and [those] who disown their
sick mother—the scoundrels!—and leave her abandoned on her sick-
bed. What, then, is a real man? The one who stays with his mother, to
cure her of her illness, or the one who puts her to work where no one will
see her, [the one who] lives at her expense on rotted lands . . . displaying
the written sign of treachery on [his] back? 3

Such is the man you have to be. ‘‘Criticism is the health of nations,
but with one heart and one mind’’ (p. ). Either you’re this man—given
the undisputed norms of this ‘‘mind’’—or you’re a traitor. The interpella-
tive text predisposes a place for his intended listener within the family. The
image of the family, a key metaphor throughout Martí’s work, reinforces and
strengthens the interpellation; for although it may be possible to question
the conventional categories of the social, it is far more difficult to distance
oneself from the ‘‘natural’’ community of family and filiation. Criticism, how-
ever, must begin where the metaphor of the family ends, by denaturalizing
and explicating the historical character of this authority that determines the

The Art of Good Governance 

features of a decidedly inclusive ‘‘we’’ as an effect of the interpellation. Still,
how would it be possible to establish a distance from this evocation of the
family, the intonation of the father’s voice, which vehemently announces to
us (to his ‘‘children,’’ or rather, his readers) that the rejection or even the
questioning of familial homogeneity—the space of his authority—will be
condemned to silence, to the exclusion with which traitors are punished?
Perhaps the polemical and critical discourse of ‘‘Our America’’—which rigor-
ously takes up and dismantles the ‘‘families’’ of other postulations regarding
the notion of American ‘‘being’’—provides a response to this question.

II

The discourse of identity in ‘‘Our America’’ is based on an account of his-

tory with which Martí formulates the problematic or ‘‘the Spanish American
enigma’’ (p. ) that his own discourse will attempt to resolve. According to
this account, the history of America is not a process in which ‘‘being’’ harmo-
niously and progressively accumulates the essential traits of its identity. Iden-
tity is not represented as a totality constituted from time immemorial. On the
contrary, the being of America is represented here as an effect of the violent
interaction of fragments that tend toward dispersion in random fashion:

We were a vision, with an athlete’s breast, a dandy’s hands, and a child’s

brow. We were a mask, [dressed] in breeches from England, a Parisian
vest, a jacket from North America, and a bicorne from Spain. The mute
indio walked slowly around us. (p. )

More than an organic identity, this body—the body of Mother America

—has been ‘‘dislocated’’ and ‘‘decomposed.’’ Constructed with the remains
of codes, incongruent fragments of conflicting traditions, this body is the
product of historical violence, of displacements brought about by ‘‘confused
origins stained with blood.’’ 4
Once again, Martí’s discourse situates itself in the face of fragmentation
and attempts to condense what is in the process of becoming disperse. His
authority, tied (as we will see) to the compensatory strategies of a redemptive
gaze, is also grounded in a projection of the future, an aesthetic and teleol-
ogy that postulates the definitive supersession of fragmentation: the ultimate
redemption of an organic America, purified of the stains that darkened its
originary plentitude. But this is where the ambiguity of Martí’s teleology be-
comes evident: history is not seen as the harmonious becoming of a future
perfectability, but rather, as a process of continuous battles, a ‘‘suffocating
past’’ (p. ) that disperses the body of originary harmony. As Martí would

    

say, ‘‘as in the case of humanity all progress consists in a return to the point
of departure.’’ 5 Driven by continuous ‘‘parricidal discordances,’’ history is
made of ‘‘ruins.’’ 6 In Martí, the becoming of history is the decomposition of
a totality whose organic, originary body has left only fragments behind, re-
mains that must be rearticulated.
There is no need to search here for a poetics of fragmentation; fragmen-
tation in Martí produces terror, it sketches the limits of his discourse. Dis-
persion produces the nostalgia of a subject who sees in the past an incessant
unfolding of a catastrophe.7 It is from this catastrophe that he will attempt to
refashion the solidity of a foundation, a renewed sense of stability, with the
broken, ruined material of historical experience.
For Martí, this activity of ordering, or ‘‘fraternalizing,’’ was doubly nec-
essary. Not only would it guarantee the consolidation of good governance—
essential to the struggle against the forces of parricide, the ‘‘tigers within’’—
but it would also enable the reconstituted family to defend itself against the
threat—far from imaginary—of foreign intervention, the ‘‘tiger outside.’’ 8
Once again, the discourse of being would arm itself with the inside/outside
dialectic, in a double movement that would serve to at once homogenize the
interior—‘‘the house of our America’’ 9—and exclude the powerful ‘‘other’’
whose threat in any case made the consolidation of the interior both possible
and necessary. But in ‘‘Nuestra América,’’ ‘‘they’’ does not merely signify the
presence of capital and foreign modernity. As Martí himself would say, the
‘‘we’’ that is also a ‘‘we-others’’ [nos-otros] is a place also occupied by tigers,
‘‘others’’ that had until then forestalled the coherence of Latin American
being. The question, then, would be: what kind of forces did interior frag-
mentation imply?

III

Significantly, in the very gesture that takes up the question ‘‘What are we?’’
in the itinerary of writing as a search for the ‘‘key to the Spanish-American
enigma’’ (p. ), ‘‘Our America’’ does not immediately and spontaneously
respond to either the enigma of identity or the real threat of North American
imperialism. Once the question is posed, the text situates itself before the
archive of materials, images, and representations that had been posing this
question since the wars of independence. It is this Latinoamericanista archive
that had defined the intellectual’s task precisely as an investigation into the
enigma of identity and the conditions of possibility for good governance.10
At first sight, it would seem as if Martí’s terror in the face of frag-
mentation is connected to the will to order, which since Simón Bolívar,

The Art of Good Governance 

had defined the modernizing discourse of the patricians. As we may recall,
their legitimacy and effective power was rooted in the project of form-
ing enlightened national subjects, a project inseparable from the process
of state consolidation. In fact, ‘‘Our America’’ only seems to take up and
rewrite the tropes and representational devices of that rhetoric: civiliza-
tion/barbarism, city/countryside, modernity/tradition; or to use Martí’s own
metaphor, ‘‘chaos’’ as an effect of ‘‘the battle between the book and the altar
candle [cirial].’’ 11
As we saw in our reading of Bello and Sarmiento, however, for the patri-
cians the power of the letter provided the rationality necessary for the domi-
nation of America’s barbarous nature; in this respect, writing contributed to
the modernization and civilization of the American landscape. On the other
hand, ‘‘Our America’’ inverts this economy of meaning by postulating a realm
of the autochthonous, the ‘‘natural man,’’ as the necessary (if somewhat blood-
stained and forgotten) foundation for the definition of Latin American being
and good governance.
Like the letrados, the postrevolutionary elite men and women of letters,
Martí represented Latin America as a ‘‘disjointed’’ reality; moreover, in both
we find the desired homogeneity of the ‘‘we,’’ posited as a response to the
chaos and disarticulation of the state. But contrary to this rhetoric of mod-
ernization, Martí would explain this chaos in terms of the false represen-
tation propagated by the ‘‘artificial men of letters [letrados]’’ (p. ) whose
discourse, delimited by forms of the ‘‘imported book’’ (p. ), excluded the
American, autochthonous singularity on which any national project would
have to be based.
‘‘The battle is not between civilization and barbarism, but between false
erudition and nature’’ (p. ). The reference to Sarmiento is unmistakable.
In Sarmiento, we saw how the intellectual represents and legitimizes him-
self as a traveler and translator who acts as the mediator between the blank
page of the desert and the plenitude of the European library. In Martí, the dis-
course of identity rejects any model based on importation, proposing instead
the construction of an alternative library. Against the ‘‘bookish redeemers’’
(p. ), Martí postulates the need for an archive of tradition, an alternative
knowledge proper to Latin America:

The European university must give way to the American university. The
history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught hands-
on; even at the expense of the archons of Greece. Our Greece is prefer-
able to the Greece that is not ours. . . . Let the world be grafted onto our
republics, but the trunk must be our own. (p. )

    

 In this polemical gesture, which methodically dismantles the tropes and
mechanisms of authorization at work in the rhetoric of modernization, Martí
proposes the authority of a new form of knowledge whose working metaphor
can be found in the image of the tree:

We can no longer be a people of leaves who live in the air, our crown
brimming with blooms, crackling or whirling about, depending on the
caprice of the light’s caress, or whether the tempests thrash the tree
about and overturn it. The trees must form ranks lest the seven-league
giant stride on! It is the hour of retribution, of the united march, and we
must go forward in close formation, like silver in the roots of the Andes.
(p. )

In Enlightenment rhetoric, the displacement of the journey in the image

of transport, which divides the desert and endows it with meaning, was a key
metaphor, an icon of the organizing power of discourse. And yet, in Martí,
the dominant image of the tree stands precisely in opposition to the force
of displacement (‘‘the seven-league giant’’): ‘‘like silver in the roots of the
Andes,’’ the tree is tied to the geological, or perhaps more accurately, the
pure, elemental, fundament that grounds Latin American being.
Deleuze and Guattari have already pointed out the importance of the
tree—specifically, the book tree—as the classic emblem of a stable, hierar-
chizing form of knowledge dominated by the desire for continuity and a firm
foundation that, in Martí’s case, would guarantee the notion of a pure, un-
contaminated origin (the ‘‘silver in the roots’’).12 But it would be hasty to
hypostatize the significance of a trope whose function may vary at different
points of conjuncture. Indeed, it would be rather necessary to question the
position (and the performance) of such a rhetoric with respect to discourses of
power. In Martí, autochthonous knowledge would fulfill a stabilizing func-
tion through its postulation of a return to what was most basic and elemental
(‘‘the most genital of the terrestrial,’’ Pablo Neruda will say half a century
later, in the Heights of Macchu Picchu). And it is precisely this knowledge that,
in Martí’s time, would contest the institutionalized state discourses of mod-
ernization and progress.
Still, this discourse of the autochthonous certainly became a strategy of
legitimation that would eventually grant an enormous degree of social au-
thority to areas of Latin American literature, even within the state. This will
be the case, for example, with the cosmic race theory forwarded by Vasconce-
los, as well as the official indigenismo [nativism] promoted by the Ministry of
Public Education in Mexico beginning in . We might also recall a simi-
lar situation in Argentina throughout the centennial years: the importance of

The Art of Good Governance 

the culturalist nationalism of Rojas and Lugones was in every way tied to the
sublimation and appropriation of gauchesca literature, to the point of situating
it at the very center of the national literature.
During the epoch in which Martí was writing, however, the discourse of
the autochthonous did not yet appeal (nor was it addressed) to those in the
state; instead, it was a subaltern discourse, critical of power in an epoch still
dominated by widespread positivism and social darwinism. As we have seen,
this optimism for the order and progress promised by modernization finds
its clearest exemplar in the figure of Sarmiento:

Let us not hinder the forward march of the United States. . . . Let us
catch up with the United States. Let us be America, just as the sea is the
ocean. Let us be the United States.13

Although Sarmiento, the obvious emblem of modernity’s civilizing mis-

sion in Latin America, has been the key point of reference in the polemics
of ‘‘Our America,’’ one must also bear in mind the specific context in which
the essay was published. ‘‘Our America’’ appeared in , at the height of the
Porfirian regime in Mexico, in El Partido Liberal—an official newspaper of the
pro-development state, which had opened the country to foreign capital like
no other at that point in history. With these conditions in mind, we might
read the discourse of an autochthonous Latin America in ‘‘Nuestra América’’
as an audacious, albeit necessarily oblique critique of the Mexican govern-
ment’s politics of modernization:

Over the heads of some republics the octopus is sleeping. Other [re-
publics], which have forgotten that [Benito] Juárez once went about in
a coach drawn by mules, hitch their carriages to the wind, with a soap
bubble as their coachman; for poisonous luxury, the enemy of freedom,
corrupts the lascivious man and opens the door to the foreigner. (ap-
pendix , p. )

The polemic is directed against organic intellectuals, the Comtian cien-

tíficos of the Porfirian regime, and the positivist notion of knowledge insti-
tutionalized in the field of state power. Around the time that ‘‘Our America’’
was published, engineer Francisco Bulnes—one of the more salient Mexican
científicos—wrote:

Europe and the United States, with their ambitions, are not the enemies
of the Latin American peoples; there is no greater enemy to our well-
being and independence than we ourselves. Our adversaries, as I have

    

 already pointed out, are these: our tradition, our sickly heritage, our
alcoholism.14

‘‘Our America,’’ in effect, emerges during a period traversed by the cir-

culation and prevalence of representations of Latin America as a sick body,
contaminated by racial impurity and the survival of traditional cultures and
ethnicities presumably destined to disappear in the unfolding of progress and
modernity. In this context, dominated by official discourses that would re-
spond to the question ‘‘What are we?’’ with ‘‘Let us be the United States,’’ one
cannot underestimate the critical intensity of a root knowledge—a knowl-
edge of roots—along with Martí’s rapprochement with cultures decimated
by modernization.
For Martí, these colonizing discourses were the ‘‘tiger within,’’ the very
cause of the ‘‘sickness.’’ In ‘‘Our America,’’ chaos is not the effect of ‘‘bar-
barism,’’ the lack of modernity: the disintegration of America is produced
by the exclusion of traditional cultures from the space of modern political
representation. Hence, ‘‘Our America’’ would propose the construction of a
‘‘we’’ from out of the very material excluded by the discourses of moderniza-
tion and the modernizing state: the ‘‘mute indio,’’ the ‘‘scorned Negro,’’ the
peasant marginalized by the ‘‘disdainful city’’ (appendix , p. ). For if the
‘‘natural man’’ is not included in the project of national being, in the space
of good governance, ‘‘he will shake it off and govern [it himself ]’’: ‘‘Along
comes the natural man, strong and indignant, to overturn the justice accu-
mulated from books because it has not been administered in accordance with
the patent necessities of the country’’ (p. ).

IV

At times, the critique of the ‘‘bookish redeemers’’ in ‘‘Our America’’ seems to

indicate a certain anti-intellectualism: ‘‘Neither the European book nor the
Yankee book provided the key to the Spanish-American enigma’’; and ‘‘the
imported book has been vanquished by the natural man in America’’ (p. ).
Martí’s critique of the (imported) letter proposes a more effective alternative:
the gaze of an aesthetic Latinoamericanista subject, and the creation of a dis-
course that could claim an unmediated access to ‘‘the true elements of the
country’’ (p. ). Liberated from ‘‘imported forms’’ (p. ), this gaze would
be fundamental to the consolidation of good government: ‘‘Natural states-
men emerge from the direct study of Nature’’ (p. ).
At the same time, it is also evident that knowledge and understanding
(saber and conocer)—the specific discursive tasks proper to intellectuals—are

The Art of Good Governance 

key terms throughout the essay. ‘‘To know [conocer] one’s country well and to
govern it in accordance with this understanding, is the only way of liberat-
ing it from tyranny’’ (p. ). The implication here is that the spontaneity or
immediacy attributed to any previous claim regarding ‘‘the country’s native
elements’’ was entirely relative, if not impossible. According to the text, the
alternative gaze is more ‘‘direct’’ than the artificiality of the lettered word. But
when faced with the reality it attempts to represent, a whole series of formal
devices, strategies, and forms come into being: a system of mediations that
makes possible the production of meaning and demarcation of objects.
The economy, the parameters of valorization that regulate this gaze, are
questions that remain unresolved. For now, let us merely note that the first
step in the itinerary of a ‘‘good’’ representation of American being has been
negative: the explicit divestment of authority from other modes of repre-
sentation. Throughout ‘‘Our America,’’ we find a marked insistence on the
necessity and social authority of a certain type of knowledge possessed by
a specific type of intellectual. This reveals the intensity of the struggles for
power (over the meaning of what was Latin American) in which the text is in-
scribed. The object of this struggle, for Martí, is the authority over represen-
tation—the knowledge (saber)—of what we really are: the key to the enigma.
In this sense, ‘‘Our America’’ is more than a ‘‘reflection’’ on Latin America;
it is a reflection on the type of discourse that could legitimize and effectively
represent this conflicting field of identity. In the process of representing a
‘‘we,’’ in other words, Martí’s ‘‘Our America’’ reflects on and debates the con-
ditions of possibility and norms of ‘‘good’’ representation.
As suggested earlier, the primary condition of truth for this represen-
tation would be the inclusion of traditional, subaltern cultures (which even
then had been subjugated and marginalized by the discourse of moderniza-
tion) in the space of a ‘‘we,’’ the space of a new politics:

The Indian, mute, walked slowly around us, and went off to the moun-
tain, to the summit of the mountain to baptize his children. At night,
the scorned Negro sang in the music of his heart, alone and unknown,
amid the waves and wild animals. The peasant, creator, blind with in-
dignation, turned on and against the disdainful city, against his own
creation. (p. )

Martí’s discourse presents itself as a site of incorporation for all those

areas of the American world excluded by the letrados, who had marked off
these areas as the dangerous limits of their civilizing mission and desired
identity. At first glance, it would seem as if in Martí one hears the voice of the
other, of ‘‘barbarism.’’ In his scene of inscription [escritura], which proposes

    

a return to ‘‘the soul of the land’’ (p. ), to the mother, to the margins of
civilization—a world of myth, music, and wild nature—it would seem that
the distance between knowledge (saber) and traditional cultures is dissolved,
that ‘‘the struggle of the book against the altar candle [cirial ]’’ is superseded
in a dehierarchizing, zero-sum ‘‘we.’’ It would seem, finally, that the condi-
tion of truth is the obliteration of the father’s oppressive law and the restitu-
tion of the originary maternal voice at the very heart of ‘‘we.’’
These binarisms, however, are confounded by Martí’s assertion that the
others—the ‘‘mute Indian masses’’ (p. )—have no discourse of their own.
It is the very history of their exploitation that has generated ‘‘the impolitic
disdain for the aboriginal race’’ (p. ).15 Although the subaltern had to be
an object of representation and knowledge, s/he could not become a knowing
subject:

If, in nations composed of both cultured and uncultured elements, the

cultured have not learned the art of governance, then the uncultured will
govern, through their habit of attacking and resolving doubts with their
hands. The uncultured masses are lazy, and timid in matters of the intel-
lect, and they want to be well-governed; but if the government aggrieves
them, they will shake it off and govern themselves. (p. )

This mass, insistently addressed in the feminine pronominal (ella), is

framed as a dangerous body situated on the other side of the intellect. This
‘‘uncultured’’ body does not possess knowledge: to the contrary, it is the other
of knowledge. But precisely in inverse proportion to this body’s silence, the
‘‘intellect’’ that speaks acquires weight and authority. Such a formulation has
at least two important consequences. First, that between the one who has the
authority to speak and the object that must be represented—the subaltern
cultures—there exists a marked distance that serves to establish a relation-
ship of hierarchy and subordination. And second, that this ‘‘higher intellect’’
differentiates itself from the knowledge proper to the modernizing men of
letters, insofar as it would be able to represent the ‘‘unknown’’ (the enigma,
the other, the forgotten mother), and thereby plays the mediating role be-
tween the two conflicting worlds and provides the necessary knowledge for
good government.

In terms of an analysis of the subject and the authority presupposed by the

representation of a Latinoamericanista ‘‘we,’’ the ‘‘ideas’’ concerning good gov-
ernment in ‘‘Our America’’ are, at bottom, not as decisive as the very articula-

The Art of Good Governance 

tion of the statements within a field of conflicting discourses. In his critique
of ‘‘the quill or the colorful word’’ (p. ) characteristic of the Enlighten-
ment intellectuals or letrados, Martí asserts the priority of a ‘‘distilled and spar-
kling prose, charged with ideas.’’ In other words, he defends the necessity of
an unmediated, transparent form of knowledge, rooted in the ‘‘weight of the
real’’ (p. ). Obviously, such an assertion belies the highly stylized form
of writing deployed by Martí in ‘‘Nuestra América.’’ In addition to privileg-
ing the tropological movement of the ‘‘native’’ word, this writing relativizes
standards of ‘‘proper’’ syntax, overturning the conceptual economy of argu-
ment, and problematizing the ‘‘transparency’’ and the very communicability
of discourse.
Beyond the question of being simply ‘‘loaded with ideas,’’ this intensely
overwritten prose is saturated with tropes. In the discursive movement of the
writing, the multiplication and intensification of figurative devices support
the literary artistry and authority underlying the essay. As we have seen, such
a form finds its principle of coherence in the will to style. Stylization, of
course, cannot be read as an individual characteristic belonging to Martí;
what we read in stylization is the mark—etched on the very surface of dis-
course—of a work highlighting the specificity of an alternative and polemical
(social) authority.16 Beyond Martí, this authority emerged in Latin America
not only in opposition to the ‘‘contents’’ of the modernizing project, but also
in defiance of the ‘‘scientific’’ uses of language favored by a state-oriented
politics and its various forms of positivism.
Hence, Martí’s emphasis on the literary authority at work in represen-
tation does not presuppose a distantiation from the social. Rather, the lit-
erary quality of the gaze is what guarantees ‘‘the truth’’ in ‘‘Our America,’’
the representation’s claim to political authority. According to this strategy of
legitimation, literature portrayed itself as the discourse still capable of repre-
senting the origin, the autochthonous, and all those marginalized elements
left unrepresented and unrepresentable by rationalizing languages in the ser-
vice of modernization. In this sense, the very form of discourse in ‘‘Our
America’’ fulfills a fundamental political function. While clearly devalued in
the utilitarian economy of meaning that regulated state-oriented discourses,
this literary language posits itself as an alternative paradigm, as the form to
be learned by good statespeople, ‘‘creators,’’ in order to govern the originary
world of America, centered in ‘‘the soul of the land’’ (appendix , p. ).
‘‘Throughout the Latin nations of the continent and the sorrowful islands of
the sea, the Great Semí is seated astride his condor, sowing the seed of new
America’’ (p. ). In ‘‘Our America,’’ a text assembled around the conju-
gative and condensatory power of metaphor, literature represents itself as the

    

cultivation of this dissemination, the gathering together of seeds scattered
over the earth, to recast itself in the form and image of arborescent knowl-
edge. At the risk of being redundant, this America is the space par excellence
of the figure, the trope, the tropic of foundation; hence, literature’s claim to
priority as an authority in the practice of good government.
The tropology of ‘‘Nuestra América,’’ with its ineluctable telluric inflec-
tion, was not new for Martí. It refers back to a concept of modern literature—
differentiated from belles lettres and state politics—that Martí had been
elaborating since the beginning of the s: literature as a privileged herme-
neutic, perhaps the only one in a secularized society capable of reconstruct-
ing the experience of a lost totality; the only means with which to interpret
the obscure signs of originary harmony, dislocated and decomposed by the
unfolding of progress and modernity. In the modern era, it is the poet who
can mediate among the forces of history, ‘‘the impatient man and disdainful
nature’’; or perhaps the ‘‘mute mother’’ who hides ‘‘the secret of birth.’’ 17 We
may recall from the previous chapter that in ‘‘Walt Whitman, the Poet,’’ Martí
had written:

A literature that announces and spreads the final and joyful harmony
between apparent contradictions; a literature that as the spontaneous
counsel and teaching of Nature itself, heralds identity in a peace higher
than the dogmas and rival passions that divide and shed blood among
nations in their elementary stages; a literature that inculcates in Man’s
terrified spirit a conviction of ultimate beauty and justice so deeply
rooted that the penury and squalor of life can neither dishearten nor em-
bitter it, will not only lead to a social state much closer to perfection than
any known up to now, but through the harmonious brotherhood of rea-
son and grace [literature] will nourish Humanity—longing for a sense of
wonder and poetry—with the religion that had confusedly awaited since
it had known the hollowness and insufficiency of its ancient creeds.18

With the power of traditional systems of representations relativized in

the ‘‘wretched times’’ of modernity, it became possible for literature to as-
sume this compensatory task: to take in hand the scraps and ruins of experi-
ence in order to reconstruct the totality of ‘‘the one,’’ the foundation, the lost
origin hidden behind the fragmentation unleashed by the division of labor,
rationalizing economics, and the disenchantment of the world.19
‘‘Nuestra América’’ presupposes this strategy of legitimation: the as-
sertion of the redemptive, auratic power of literature.20 At the same time,
however, the essay extended the domain of the literary gaze considerably, en-

The Art of Good Governance 

abling literature to apply its hermeneutics to political enigmas and effectively
Latin Americanizing its aesthetic critique of modernity.
In the prologue to ‘‘The Poem of the Niagara,’’ Martí went so far as to re-
late the emergence of the new literature to the experience of privatization; he
was referring, of course, to a loss of the collective, epic dimensions of life that
in traditional societies guaranteed the importance and social influence of lit-
erature.21 But ‘‘Our America’’ manifests the attempt to overcome the ‘‘crisis,’’
the alienation from the public sphere that in ‘‘The Poem of the Niagara’’
defines the situation of the modern writer. Through the ars of good govern-
ment, ‘‘Nuestra América’’ ushers in a repoliticization of literary discourse, an
attempt to bring the authority of the aesthetic gaze to the very center of the
Latin American public sphere. It was not simply a question of subordinating
literature to political imperatives; the issue instead concerned the indispens-
able place of a literary knowledge in the administration of good government,
based on ‘‘the power of the soul in the soil, harmonious and artistic.’’ 22
As a form of resistance to modernization, literature effectively harnessed
a defense against imperialism, against the threat of ‘‘they,’’ which signified at
once the expansive modernity of the United States and the internally coloniz-
ing discourses of the ‘‘artificial letrados.’’ But this defense of ‘‘being,’’ articu-
lated from within the emergent sphere of literature, implied a new frame—
hierarchical and subordinative—of the heterogeneous American experience.
Driven by a desire for legitimacy, by a claim to public influence, the ‘‘truth’’ of
being—in Martí as elsewhere—is the effect of a formidable will to power.

Notes

 ‘‘One of the greatest risks involved in a study of Martí is to remain under the spell of his work.
. . . Even if one does not forget that his work is the testimony of a man who did not separate
art from life, speech from action, the richness of this work is such that it alone could absorb
all our energies. But to give oneself over to such a singular fascination would not be an act
of true fidelity to the spirit of Martí’’ (Cintio Vitier, ‘‘Martí futuro,’’ in Temas martianos, Cintio
Vitier and Fina García Marruz (Havana: Biblioteca Nacional José Martí, ), .
 Gabriela Mistral, ‘‘Los Versos sencillos de José Martí (Mexico City: Editorial Cultura, ), .
 José Martí, ‘‘Our America,’’ see appendix  in this volume, p. .
 José Martí, ‘‘Mother America,’’ in Our America: Writings on Latin America and the Struggle for Cuban
Independence, ed. and trans. Philip S. Foner (New York: Monthly Review Press, ), ;
translation modified.
 José Martí, prologue to ‘‘The Poem of the Niagara,’’ in appendix , this volume.
 Martí, appendix , p. .
 The allusion refers to Benjamin’s angel of history, whose ‘‘face is turned toward the past.
Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling
wreckage on wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken

    

 the dead, and make whole what has been smashed, but a storm is blowing from paradise. It
has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This
storm irresistibly propels him into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of
debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress’’ (Walter Benjamin,
‘‘Twelve Theses on the Philosophy of History,’’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, ), –.
 The allusion to ‘‘tigers’’ here as well as in Martí’s ‘‘Our America’’ refers to Sarmiento’s por-
trayal of Argentine boss Facundo Quiroga, ‘‘el tigre de los llanos’’ (‘‘the tiger of the plains’’),
as an allegory of barbarism and its opposition to the forces of civilization. Trans.
 Martí, ‘‘Mother America,’’ .
 Already in Sarmiento, the question ‘‘What are we?’’ took the form of an investigation (and
an account) of an enigma: ‘‘Terrible shadow of Facundo, I shall evoke you, so that in shaking
off the bloodstained dust that covers your smoldering ashes you may rise and explain to us
the secret life and internal convulsions tearing at the entrails of a noble people. You possess
the secret: reveal it to us!’’ (Domingo F. Sarmiento, Civilización y barbarie. Vida de F. Quiroga
[Madrid: Editorial Nacional, ], ; first published in ). On the other hand, the ac-
count of the enigma is a classic mode of organizing the production of knowledge. In an
alternative reading of Oedipus, Foucault analyzes tragedy—no longer as a tale of the subject’s
desires and repressions, but rather, as a reflection on the relation between the search for the
truth and the imposition of power: ‘‘The role played by the tyrant is not only characterized
by power but also by a certain knowledge. . . . Oedipus is the one who manages, with his
thought and his knowledge, to solve the famous riddle of the sphinx. [At] every moment he
says that he vanquished the others, that he solved the riddle of the sphinx, that he cured the
city’’ (Michel Foucault, La verdad y las formas jurídicas, trans. into Spanish by Enrique Lynch
[Barcelona: Gedisa, ], ; currently, no English translation available). For his part, Jorge
Luis Borges, in ‘‘The Library of Babel’’ (in Ficciones, trans. Anthony Kerrigan [New York:
Grove Press, ]), had reflected on the violence and struggles for power implicated in a
search for the key to the enigma. See also his ‘‘Poema conjetural’’ on the scholar Francisco
Laprida, who in an encounter with ‘‘barbarism’’ at the moment of his death, discovers ‘‘the
recondite key of my years . . . / The missing letter, the perfect / form known by God from the
beginning.’’ See Jorge L. Borges, El otro, el mismo (Buenos Aires: Compañía Imperosa Argen-
tina, ), –.
 Martí, ‘‘Our America,’’ .
 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘‘Rhizome,’’ in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).
 Domingo F. Sarmiento, Conflicto y armonías de las razas en América (Buenos Aires: La cultura
argentina, ), . First published in . This book by Sarmiento can be read as a
classic example of the positivism against which Martí had so intensely contested: ‘‘There is
no hate among races,’’ Martí writes, ‘‘because there are no races. Narrow-minded thinkers,
thinkers by lamplight, stir up and string together races which the discerning traveler and
the cordial observer will find only in the bookstore, not in the justice of nature, where the
universal identity of man stands out against the background of his victorious love and tur-
bulent appetite. . . . It is a sin against Humanity to foment and propagate opposition and
hate among races’’ (see appendix , ). Nevertheless, in his attack against the concept of
racial determinism prevalent in positivism, Martí tends to downplay the struggles and hier-
archizing forces that, in fact, operated along the lines of ethnicity. He tends, for example, to
hypostatize the concept of a supposedly integrated ‘‘mestiza’’ or ‘‘creole’’ America. Although

The Art of Good Governance 

 the desire for homogenization and ethnic integration implies a critique of positivist racism,
it nevertheless suppresses the factor of ethnicity as an effective means of exclusion and vio-
lence in the politics of the modernizing states at the end of the century.
 Francisco Bulnes, El porvenir de las naciones latinoamericanos ante las recientes conquistas de Europa y
Norteamérica (Estructura y evolución de un continente) (Mexico City: Sociedad de Artistas y Escri-
tores, n.d.), . Another influential positivist reflection on the Latin American ‘‘malady’’ was
the  Nuestra América (Ensayo de psicología social) (Our America [An Essay in Social Psychology])
by the Argentine Carlos O. Bunge (Buenos Aires: Casa Vaccaro, ): ‘‘All things consid-
ered, the malady, our malady, could not be incurable. . . . I have found but one remedy, one
single remedy for all our calamities: culture, to attain to the highest culture of the European
peoples. . . . How is this possible? Through work’’ (p. ). ‘‘Culture,’’ for Bunge, was syn-
onymous with progress and modernization. The metaphor of the ‘‘malady’’ and sociological
cure is a generative nucleus also in Alcides Argüedas, Pueblo enfermo: contribución a la psicología
de los pueblos hispanoamericanos (). In Cuba, several years after Martí’s death, Enrique J.
Varona set his sights on the ‘‘enigma’’ in a  text entitled ‘‘El imperialismo a la luz de
la Sociología’’ (‘‘Imperialism in the Light of Sociology’’). For Varona, the only way to de-
fend Cuba from foreign powers (significantly, he is referring to England and not the United
States) was to modernize, to urbanize the countryside, to shoulder the progress that would
reinforce imperialist power. This text can also be read as one of the limits of the debate that
Martí, already in , took up against positivism and its privileged ‘‘science,’’ sociology.
(Varona’s text can be found in the Edición homenaje a E. J. Varona [Havana: Apra, ], –.)
 In Martí’s ‘‘Mother America,’’ the hierarchy is even more pronounced: ‘‘And when the ele-
ments that formed our nations reappear in this crisis of their elaboration, the independent
Creole is the one who will prevail and find security, not the beaten indio, justly identified as
such, serving as spur boy who holds the stirrup and puts his own foot into it so that he can
appear higher than his master’’ (p. ).
 The polemical character of stylization in Martí becomes even clearer when one reads the
rationalizing ‘‘style’’ of Enrique J. Varona in ‘‘El imperialismo a la luz de la Sociología.’’
Varona’s first move in this essay is to specify the position of his discourse within a disci-
pline: ‘‘My theme is imperialism, but studied in the light of sociology; studied in the light of
a science whose material is ancient—as are the preoccupations of men who come together
to live in society—however new its name and its procedures of investigation may be in the
light of a science that today takes first place in the preoccupations of men of knowledge’’
(pp. –). Certain features of this essay are highly emphasized, namely Varona’s taste for
statistics, his attempt to avoid any mark of literary ‘‘style,’’ and the rigorous economy of his
arguments. These are the very antipodes of Martí. It is not simply a question of variations in
personal ‘‘styles,’’ but of ‘‘gazes,’’ parameters of discursive authority that generate contra-
dictory objects (‘‘concepts’’ of Latin America). If Varona insists on speaking from the point
of view of sociology, we would also have to say that Martí speaks—and represents Latin
America—from the point of view of literature.
 Martí, ‘‘The Poem of the Niagara’’ (see appendix , p. )
 José Martí, ‘‘El poeta Walt Whitman,’’ translated as ‘‘Walt Whitman, the Poet,’’ in On Art and
Literature: Critical Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Monthly Review Press, ), ;
translation modified. See also his ‘‘Emerson’’ () in the same volume.
 In one of his Escenas norteamericanas, Martí writes: ‘‘Science tortures and places the soul in a
state of exhaustion and longing for the essential unity wherein everything appears gathered
together and condensed, like the mountain at its peak. . . . The universe is the universal.

    

 And the universal is the uni-various, variation in the one. Nature, full of surprises, is all [as]
one.’’ See ‘‘Novedades de Nueva York’’ in OC, vol. , –. Metaphor is the figure privileged
by this longing for condensation, the attempt to see the ‘‘juncture’’ between the fragments
disarticulated by rationalization and modern temporality.
 ‘‘Only bourgeois art, which has become autonomous in the face of demands for employment
extrinsic to art, has taken up positions on behalf of the victims of bourgeois rationalization.
Bourgeois art has become the refuge for a satisfaction, even if only virtual, of those needs
that have become, as it were, illegal in the material life-process of bourgeois society. I refer
here to the desire for a mimetic relation with nature; the need for living together in solidarity
outside the group egoism of the immediate family; the longing for the happiness of a com-
municative experience exempt from imperatives of purposive rationality and giving scope
to imagination as well as spontaneity. Bourgeois art, unlike privatized religion, scientistic
philosophy, and strategic-utilitarian morality, did not take on tasks in the economic and
political systems. Instead it collected residual needs that could find no satisfaction within
the ‘system of needs.’ Thus, along with moral universalism, art and aesthetics (from Schiller
to Marcuse) are explosive ingredients built into the bourgeois ideology’’ (Jürgen Habermas,
Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy [Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, ]). On the
other hand, in Martí, the aesthetic defense of the ‘‘victims of rationalization’’ is presented
as a defense of Latin American identity itself. The ‘‘interior’’ of auratic art thus expands the
sphere of its action, positing itself as an art of government. This also is undoubtedly an effect
of what we referred to earlier as the unequal modernization of institutions and discourses in
Latin America: in contrast to Europe and the United States, the modern separation of func-
tions discussed by Habermas did not achieve such massive consolidation in Latin America.
Hence, the ‘‘confusion’’ of roles as a distinctive feature, for example, of Martí and fin de
siècle Latinoamericanismo.
 In ‘‘The Poem of the Niagara,’’ Martí points out: ‘‘And like the man from Auvergne dying
in happy Paris, more from the ills of the country than from bedazzlement, where everyone
whom one pauses to gaze on goes about besieged with the sweet evil of this century, the
poets today—simple Auvergnese in bustling and sumptuous Lutetia—have a nostalgia for
the great deed’’ (see appendix , p. ); ‘‘Hence these pale, complaining poets; hence this
new painful and tormented poetry; hence this intimate, confidential, and personal poetry, a
necessary consequence of the times’’ (p. ). On the privatization and ‘‘psychologization’’
of the modern literary subject as an effect of the dissolution of epic and collective possibili-
ties in literature, see Michel Foucault’s essay on Hölderlin, ‘‘The Father’s No,’’ in Language,
Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. and trans. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
). It can be said, however, that Martí resists such a privatization. His Latinoamericanismo,
as a reading of the Versos sencillos would demonstrate, is an attempt to overcome the ‘‘alien-
ation’’ of poetry, and to convert literature into the paradigm of collective, national, and
continental identity.
 Martí, ‘‘Mother America,’’ .

The Art of Good Governance 

 The Repose of Heroes: Poetry and
War in José Martí

The year  marked the centennial of the death of José Martí. He fell in the
heat of battle on May  at Dos Ríos, in the Oriental province of Cuba, sev-
eral weeks after the beginning of the war against the Spanish colonial army.
According to the testimony of those who accompanied him, Martí rode at the
head of his troops on a white horse against an ambuscade.1 His corpse, cap-
tured and mutilated by enemy soldiers, was buried in a potter’s field and was
not recovered by the liberating army until the end of the war. Over  years
later, around the radical absence of his body, monuments continue to prolif-
erate, speeches multiply. And they dispute the silence.
Martí died for the fatherland. He gave his life for a meaning of justice:
the most basic and material condition of his existence for the sake of an idea
of a future community. What conditions made such an exchange possible: an
exchange between the body of the poet-soldier and the principles of a future
fatherland? What discourses intervene to produce an ethic of patriotism, a
nexus of identification, the logic that regulates the value of an exchange
manifested in the greatest gift of all that a soldier, particularly one who falls
in battle, offers his community? 2
Almost two decades before his death (while he was living in Guatemala),
Martí wrote to General Máximo Gómez, veteran of the Ten Years War (–
), a passionate letter of introduction. ‘‘Here I live,’’ he laments, ‘‘dead
with shame because I am not fighting.’’ 3 Initiating an extraordinary exchange
between the young writer and the experienced soldier, the letter situates us
before the problematic relation between writing and the exigencies of war.
Let us examine the hierarchies that define the subject positions in the
letter, beginning with the distant and peripheral place from which Martí ex-
presses his admiration for the military hero’s vitality and vigorous capacity
for action. ‘‘It has moved me many times to think about the way you fight
in battle. I have written about it, I have spoken about it. . . . in the modern
history of war I have not encountered anything similar; neither have I seen it
in the ancient.’’ Martí petitions Gómez for information, with the objective of
writing a book on the war and also a biography of the general. The letter thus
acts as a double mirror that at once constitutes the figure of the soldier in
Martí’s fateful project—to recall from the past a heroism of epic resonance—
as it does the intellectual as subject, who is inscribed in the same peripheral
site that Martí has marked out for himself. In the double play of who writes
and who is written, the writer simultaneously invents the hero and himself.
At first glance, Martí places these positions into a hierarchy of unequal
and uneven exchange. He recognizes heroism as virile and powerful, while
he places himself in the position of what he judges to be the derivative nature
(secundariedad) of words—that mediated and passive space of writing—from
which he admires and prioritizes the actions emblematized by the healthy
and complete body of the military soldier. ‘‘Seriously ill and tightly bound,
I think, see, and write,’’ Martí explains, identifying writing with a physical
lack, as the contemplative exercise of a subject incapable of military action.
‘‘I will be a chronicler, since I cannot be a soldier,’’ he adds, intending one
day to publish ‘‘the hidden feats of our great men.’’
And yet, it is important that we not overlook the multiple layers ( pliegues)
of the statement, the negotiation at work in the gesture of recognition
granted to that powerful other. For one thing, the chronicler’s gaze and act
of writing are postulated as the conditions of possibility for any soldier’s
‘‘greatness’’ inasmuch as that chronicler makes public, by means of writing,
the soldier’s ‘‘hidden feats.’’ For another, one would need to explore Martí’s
critique of violence, which some years later induced him, in a moment of
rupture with the military leaders of the revolutionary movement, to remind
Gómez that ‘‘a people is not founded as a military camp is commanded’’
(p. ).4 From the beginning of the s, such a critique would be grounded
in the defense of a poetic and spiritual sensibility, which according to Martí,
ensured the coherence and meaning of a just war, a revolution inevitably vio-
lent yet directed as ‘‘a detailed and visionary work of thought’’ (p. ).
In contrast, the closure of that first letter is deeply enigmatic, as Martí
bids the general farewell by signing himself ‘‘the sad mutilated one’’ (el mu-
tilado triste). What mutilation does he refer to? The chronic pain that Martí
suffered, in part because of the brutality of his imprisonment in Cuba at the
age of seventeen (), was certainly not simply metaphoric. But, the dra-
matic closure of Martí’s letter suggests a cut or fragmentation that can also
be read, on another register, as the effect of the tense emergence of a sub-
ject profoundly divided, split by the incisive opposition between the priority
of action and the supplementarity and suspect passivity of representation: a
subject split by the ‘‘abhorrence that I hold for words that are not accompa-
nied by acts’’ (p. ).

The Repose of Heroes 

 The opposition between words and acts—the cut that mutilates, that
blocks the possibility and potency of an organic heroic subject—brings to
mind the cervantine topos of armas y letras, inscribed througout Latin Ameri-
can history, for example, in the work of El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega y Ercilla.
In the nineteenth century, one finds it at work in the writings of Simón Bolí-
var and the Campaña del ejército grande of Sarmiento, who emphatically laments
the subordinate role of the chronicler on the field of battle. The ‘‘shame’’
that Martí communicates to General Gómez, however, is more radical in the
sense that it inaugurates—precisely in the experience of guilt, out of an ‘‘envy
for those who fight’’—the constitution of a new kind of intellectual as sub-
ject, whose relation to war and the future fatherland will be mediated (up
until the very moment of Martí’s death at Dos Ríos) by an aesthetic autono-
mization.
Let us examine this process more closely. From the start of the s,
when Martí resided in New York, his discourse on war was enmeshed in a
complex and intense reflection on the crisis and reconfiguration of modern
literature. His  prologue to the Poema del Niágara initiated the reflection
by identifying the emergence of ‘‘modern poetry’’ with the ‘‘nostalgia of the
great deed,’’ and the dissolution of the conditions that had made possible the
normative and nomic contents of an epic authority in literature.5 As Martí
suggests, such a process entails the ‘‘sufferings of modern man’’ (appendix ,
p. ) before the transformations of a ‘‘new social state’’ (p. ), in which
‘‘every image that was hitherto revered [is] found dethroned and stripped;
and even the images of the future as yet unknown’’ (p. ); it entails an age
marked by the ‘‘blinding of the sources and this obfuscation of the gods’’
(p. ). Martí explicitly relates the new social state—linked to what Max
Weber later called the ‘‘disenchantment of the world’’ as an effect of mod-
ern rationalization—to the dissolution of a discursive and institutional fabric
of belief that, until that moment, guaranteed the central authority of liter-
ary forms in the articulation of the constitutive nomos of the social order.6
Hence, the poet with ‘‘broken wings’’: a solitary figure in a landscape of ruins,
who ‘‘presents himself before us, armed with every weapon, in an arena
where he sees neither combatants nor spectators; nor does he see any prize.’’ 7
The crisis of heroism that Martí attributes to the dissolution of epic pos-
sibilities in modern literature exceeds the simple question of literary genre.
It is, in fact, inscribed in a restructuring of the very conditions of social
communication, which according to Martí, were undergoing an intense frag-
mentation. In Martí’s words, this fragmentation is what brought about the
‘‘dismemberment of the human mind’’ (p. ) and the ‘‘decentralization of
the understanding’’ (p. ). An entire symbolic order that had once ensured

    

the articulations of society, the stability of its nexuses, and the effectiveness
of social identification was being reconfigured.
Such transformations gave a specificity and relative autonomy to litera-
ture. As it has been argued in the first part of this book, rationalization sub-
jected an emergent class of intellectuals to a new division of labor, leading to
the professionalization of the literary medium and delineating the reassign-
ment of tasks for writers in the public sphere. Perhaps even more important,
the autonomization of the literary field generated a new kind of subject, dis-
tinct and frequently in competition and conflict with other subjects and dis-
cursive practices, all of which in turn demarcated the fields of their own social
authority. This literary subject was constituted in a new circuit of communica-
tive interaction that led to the differentiation of newly independent yet over-
lapping spheres of knowledge comprising the social realm, each of which had
its own immanent laws for the validation and legitimation of its statements.
Beyond the simple construction of new objects or themes, we are speaking
of an emerging discursive authority that was crystallized through the inten-
sification of its labor on language as the decisive element in the elaboration
of literature’s specific strategies of social intervention. Its gaze, its particular
logic—the economy of values with which the literary subject cuts across and
hierarchizes social matter—marked out the limits of that sphere more or less
specific to the cultural aesthetic. To recapitulate, the unevenness of autono-
mization is what produced an irreducible hybridity in the literary subject and
made possible the proliferation of mixed forms—the chronicle, the essay—
which register, on the same surface of their heteronomous forms and modes
of representation, the contradictory drives that set in motion the hybrid sub-
ject constituted on the frontiers, in the zones of contact and passage between
literature and the demands of other discursive and social practices.
Autonomization had effects that, for Martí, were profoundly problem-
atic. Although he welcomed some aspects of the ‘‘decentralization of the
understanding,’’ which to a degree implied the democratization of media in
an epoch when ‘‘the beautiful has come to be the domain of all’’ (p. ), au-
tonomization encouraged the folding back of the literary subject on himself
and the demotion of literature’s social effects. ‘‘Life,’’ Martí writes, ‘‘inti-
mate, feverish, unfastened, impulsive, clamorous life—has come to be the
principal theme and, along with nature, the only legitimate subject of mod-
ern poetry’’ (p. ):

Hence, the pale and groaning poets; hence, this new painful and tor-
mented poetry; hence, this intimate, confidential, and personal poetry,
a necessary consequence of the times—ingenuous and useful, like a

The Repose of Heroes 

 song of kinsmen when it springs from a healthy and vigorous nature;
dismayed and ridiculous when evoked through the strings of a feeble,
gifted feeler. . . . Like women, weak women would seem the men of
today, who . . . are likely to exhaust the honey-sweet wine that seasoned
the festivals of Horace. (p. )

Martí responded to the folding back of the lyrical subject with marked
ambivalence, even with suspicion that the autonomization of interdependent
spheres of knowledge reduced literature to a mere state or position of solip-
sism, a ‘‘weak’’ form of social intervention. His reflection, as we shall see, in-
scribes the emergence of modern poetry in a drama of virility that feminizes
the marginality of literature with respect to ‘‘strong’’ and effective discourses
of instrumental rationality.
Thus, one finds in Martí, on the one hand, a ‘‘nostalgia for the great
deed’’ (p. ) and, on the other, the same emphasis with which he, through-
out the prologue to the Poema del Niágara (along with the better part of his
poetry, particularly Ismaelillo and Versos libres), transposes the functions of a
language of war to the ‘‘battles’’ of the solitary poet. Martí offers us a new
kind of warrior: ‘‘he is of those righteous leaders who lead with the lyre’’
(p. ), as if in some way the metaphor of the poet-soldier ensured the
vigor and virile will of the subject, thereby compensating for the ‘‘frailty,’’ the
derivative quality, and the ‘‘feminization’’ of language, which Martí saw as a
special risk of modern poetry. Of course, neither ‘‘femininity’’ nor ‘‘frailty’’
are essential attributes of poetry: we are dealing with a response to autono-
mization, a reaction that ambivalently associates the new lyrical subject with
malleable, weak forms of thought. Such a reaction was motivated by the sus-
picion that the interiorization of literary language into its own sphere had at
least two effects: it reduced the capacity of literature to intervene in public
affairs, and in the most radical and nocturnal instances of the lyrical sub-
ject’s folding back and over itself, it problematized the relation between an
aesthetic drive and ethicopolitical imperatives, since the radicalization of the
aesthetic drive tended to collapse the economy of truth that formed the very
basis of social communicability.
Hence Martí’s reticence in publishing two books of verse, Ismaelillo
() and Versos sencillos (), and in deciding to leave unpublished his most
extensive work, Versos libres (written in New York during the s and early
s).8 ‘‘Before I make a collection of my verse, I would like to make a col-
lection of my actions.’’ 9 Yet he never stopped writing poetry. It proliferated,
motivated by the same tensions generated by the autonomization of the lit-
erary, by the struggles of an intensified writing set in motion precisely by

    

the double movement of the interstitial subject positioned between dos patrias
(two fatherlands)—Cuba and the night—in the memorable poem from Versos
libres.10

Dos patrias
Dos patrias tengo yo: Cuba y la noche.
¿O son una las dos? No bien retira
su majestad el sol, con largos velos
y un clavel en la mano, silenciosa
Cuba cual viuda triste me aparece
¡Yo sé cual es ese clavel sangriento
que en la mano le tiembla! Está vacío
mi pecho, destrozado está y vacío
en donde estaba el corazón. Ya es hora
de empezar a morir. La noche es buena
para decir adiós. La luz estorba
y la palabra humana. El universo
habla mejor que el hombre.
Cual bandera
que invita a batallar, la llama roja
de la vela flamea. Las ventanas
abro, ya estrecho en mí. Muda, rompiendo
las hojas del clavel, como una nube
que enturbia el cielo, Cuba, viuda, pasa . . .

Two Fatherlands
Two fatherlands do I have: Cuba and the night.
Or are the two one? As his majesty
the sun retires, silent Cuba,
how sad a widow, appears to me,
with long veils and a carnation in hand.
I know well that bloody carnation
trembling in her hand! My breast
is empty, destroyed and empty
that place where my heart used to be. Now is the time
to begin dying. It is a good night
for saying farewell. Light disturbs
as does the human word. The universe
speaks better than man.
As a flag
calling us to arms, the red flame

The Repose of Heroes 

 of the candle flickers. The windows
almost closed in me, I’ll open. Mute,
breaking off the petals of the carnation, like a cloud
that darkens the sky, Cuba, a widow, goes by . . .

The first verse places the subject, initially emphatic, marked by the sign
of possession, between two patrias. But how can one have two fatherlands? It
would seem that the concept of patria refers to the native country, the place
of origin, so longed for by Martí in the course of his exile. If so, neither the
duality to which the title refers nor the allusion to the night in the first verse
are explained. The origin, by definition, is the only source of identification
for a subject; hence, the constitutive paradox of the poem in its assertion
of irreducible duality at the very foundation. The paradox is intensified by
the unstable division between Cuba—the patria civil, the proper name of an
emerging nation—and the night.
How can a fatherland be the night, or a night the fatherland? Certainly,
night can be a fatherland only in a metaphorical sense, which may lead us
to think that the shift between Cuba and the night registers the problematic
passage between the proper, univocal name of the political fatherland and
a metaphorical designation. The metaphor of a nocturnal fatherland runs
through the wider context of Versos libres. For example, we read in ‘‘La noche
es la propicia’’ (‘‘Night is timely’’) the following: ‘‘A la creación la oscuridad con-
viene / . . . la oscuridad fecunda de la noche’’ (‘‘For creation is darkness most
suitable . . . the fecund darkness of the night’’). In ‘‘Aguila blanca,’’ Martí
writes:

Y las oscuras
Tardes me atraen, cual si mi patria fuera
La dilatada sombra. ¡Oh verso amigo:
Muero de soledad, de amor me muero!

And dark
afternoons attract me as if my fatherland were
the ever-widening shadow. O dear verse:
I die of solitude, of love am I dying!

In the second verse of ‘‘Dos patrias,’’ the brightness of the sun, ‘‘his
majesty,’’ is opposed to the darkness of the night, which is associated with
the practice of poetry, the second fatherland, of the subject. The subject is
placed on the borders that separate two radically distinct modes of naming:
he is situated between two fatherlands, two modes of producing sense and
meaning, two spheres of legitimacy. Between two laws: on the one hand,

    

the demand for an ethicopolitical denomination—the patria civil, Cuba—and
on the other, the metaphorical fatherland of the night—that dark, rebellious
practice and nocturnal intensity of the aesthetic drive. The subject emerges
precisely there, between the opposed spheres of legitimacy, to enable the
passage, the nexus between both laws, attempting to overcome the scission
or fragmentation brought about by autonomization. The interstitial subject
will be the one to turn the trajectory of poetry around and back, to the center
of combat, and from there bring forth the gift of poetry to war.
‘‘Or are the two one?’’ The synthesis, we should perhaps emphasize, ap-
pears immediately interrogated. The poem certainly suggests that a synthesis
can be employed to overcome the paradox between a political designation
and metaphor. The assumption of a synthesis, of binding, of connections,
between Cuba and the night may well be the principle that overdetermines
the tropological trajectory of the poem, whose configuration deploys, from
the third and fourth verses, the metaphorical conjunction of two laws via the
condensation of the dark widowed Cuba that appears before the poet at the
exact moment when the brightness of the sun, the other law, withdraws. The
metaphorical proceeding redistributes the field of oppositions in a double
movement: first, it separates Cuba, the political patria, from the brightness of
the sun (the king), in order to locate it immediately in the dark reign of the
night, the domain of the aesthetic drive—as if the subject asserted, by means
of a metaphorical rearticulation, an alternative mode of thinking politics in
accordance with the nocturnal drive of an aesthetic legitimacy, opposed to
the solar luminosity of the patria civil. Such an assertion can certainly be seen
in ‘‘Aguila blanca’’:

Oh noche, sol del triste, amable seno

Donde su fuerza el corazón revive,
Perdura, apaga el sol, ( . . . )
Librame, eterna noche del verdugo,
O dale, a que me dé, con la primera
Alba, una limpia y redentora espada.
Que con qué la has de hacer? Con luz de estrellas!

O night, sun of the sad, beloved breast

From whence revives the heart its force,
Endure, extinguish the sun . . .
Free me, eternal night, of the executioner,
Or give, that might be given to me,
with the first dawn, a clean and redeeming sword.
With what must it be made? With the light of stars!

The Repose of Heroes 

 Nocturnal luminosity guarantees the return, the passage of the poet
toward combat and the political itself. It is indeed a luminosity designated
by the gendered darkness surrounding it, the night that appears in ‘‘Dos
patrias’’ as eroticized in that revealing reinscription of the femme fatale who
breaks off the petals of a carnation, beneath the window of the solitary sub-
ject observing her. Eroticization is crucial: the heart is transposed, with the
figurative passage of the metaphorical object (the carnation), from the breast
of the subject into the hands of the patria: ‘‘I know well what that bloody car-
nation trembling in her hand is! My breast is empty, destroyed and empty
that place where my heart used to be.’’
More than just a metaphor, then, the bloody carnation is a commen-
tary on the metaphorical procedure, the passage from one patria to another,
the night; a reflection on the transformative process of metaphor, designated
as a mechanism of articulation, of an amorous exchange between the poetic
subject and patriotic ethic.11 The metaphor transports the blood of the heart
to the emblem of the patriotic flower. Metaphor guarantees a passage not
only between the two spheres of legitimacy separated in the first verse, but
also between the body of the subject and principles of the patria. Metaphor
acts here fundamentally as an oblational figure of exchange: it is the bearer of
a gift on which a patriotic and amorous interpellation is based. And the gift
is tied inexorably to death, to the emptiness of the body’s destroyed chest,
which nevertheless marks the sublime encounter with the ‘‘all’’ in which ‘‘the
universe / speaks better than man.’’
The final verses, in contrast, take up the scene of inscription. The red
flame of the candle—another instance of nocturnal light, which condenses
within it the color of blood and the flag as it burns brightly—is set forth as
the condition that makes writing as a form of combat possible. These final
verses, however, come to situate the subject in the interiorized and solitary
space from which he sees Cuba ‘‘go by.’’ That is, this interior refers us once
again to the space demarcated by the aesthetic autonomization that Martí ties
to the solitude of the modern poet. ‘‘Y yo, pobre de mí!, preso en mi jaula, / la gran
batalla de los hombres miro’’ (‘‘And I, poor me! prisoner in my cell / The grand
battle of men I watch’’), we read in ‘‘Media noche’’ (‘‘Midnight’’) from Versos
libres. ‘‘The windows / almost closed in me, I’ll open,’’ the poet adds in ‘‘Dos
patrias.’’ But outside the Cuba that goes by is a fleeting line that crosses and
darkens the transparent sky: an object in motion, elusive, lost. Far from any
synthesis, the movement of the dark line cancels the gift, the epiphany of the
encounter. And yet, one must not underestimate the weight, the exaspera-
tion, of the attempt, which nonetheless motivates the becoming (devenir), the

    

movement of desire in Martí’s poetry, even perhaps, as this desire brought
Martí to a fate that he heroically confronted at Dos Ríos, between two rivers, in
that moment of death for the patria.
Although the lyrical subject observes the loss of the object, the evanes-
cence of Cuba as it passes by, this subject cannot account for the multiplicity
of positions intertwined within Martí’s discourse. The solitude of the folded
subject in Versos libres, along with his exile from the patria civil, evidently finds
itself counteracted by the reinsertion of the political into Martí’s life, particu-
larly after his return to active politics in the late s, culminating partly in
the interventions centered on the founding of the Cuban Revolutionary Party
(Partido Revolucionario Cubano) in ; and later, in his discourse on the
revolution as a just war. Indeed, Martí’s engagement in the Cuban emancipa-
tory movement would seem to have definitively overcome the isolation and
inaction of the subject divided by the paradox of dos patrias, just as his heroic
militancy would seem to have overcome the principal opposition between
the prioritization of acts and the demotion of the word and representation as
secondary, only to place the word in an even more radical silence, in the de-
finitive repose that death concedes to the poet-soldier on the field of battle.12
While he lived, however, his discursive practices were grounded in more than
one field of opposition, in more than a resting place of a synthesis capable
of overcoming radical gaps and differences; his discourse traverses the bor-
ders, the thresholds that separate and with the same movement create zones
of contact, points of intersection and passage.
Perhaps it would be fitting to recall the passage of the poet in his return
to the native land. Martí began to write the Diario de campaña (War Journal),
his lucid account of the formation of the soldier-subject, in the Domini-
can Republic, where he arrived from the United States en route to Cuba in
.13 The narrative continues when Martí journeys through Haiti, closing
only hours before his death at Dos Ríos. Like no other text written by Martí
about war, the Diario de campaña mounts a sharp critique of violence that as-
serts the necessity of aesthetic mediation, the only kind of mediation capable
of containing and granting meaning to the ineluctably aggressive energy of
the revolutionary forces:

The spirit I have sown is that which has spread, across the island; with
it, and guided in accordance with it, we will soon triumph, and with
the greatest victory, and for the greatest peace. I foresee that, for a little
while at least, the force and will of the revolution will be divorced from
this spirit—it will be deprived of its enchantment and taste [encanto y

The Repose of Heroes 

 gusto], and of its ability to prevail from this natural consortium; [it] will
be robbed of the benefit of this conjunction between the activity of the
revolutionary forces and the spirit that animates them.14

Martí finds the revolution also to be divided by a double drive: by the

deployment of an uncontainable and violent activity; and by the ‘‘enchant-
ment and taste’’ of a spirit that needs to be called on to direct action. Is
this not the call of the aesthetic (‘‘enchantment and taste’’) in the midst of
war? Martí’s insistence on it at various times in the War Journal is only par-
tially explained by his recorded disagreements with General Antonio Maceo,
another military leader of the patriotic army, who at one point accused him
of being ‘‘a city-bred defender of the obstacles and hindrances hostile to the
military movement’’ (p. ). More important, the opposition splits the revo-
lutionary subject; it unleashes the dispute among differentiated positions,
all of which need to intervene in the multiple movement toward emancipa-
tion. For war, in Martí, is what is outside discourse, both feared and desired:
the violent energy to shatter the order of forms.15 Hence, the revolutionary
movement required the intervention of another subject, perhaps ‘‘weak’’ and
‘‘malleable,’’ but capable of conjoining and mediating the tendency constitu-
tive of war toward dispersion and destruction; a subject capable of guaran-
teeing the meaning of justice behind every act of violence. In the vicissitudes
of that subject would be inscribed the gift of poetry to war.

Notes

 Ezequiel Martínez Estrada has collected several accounts of Martí’s death in his prologue to
José Martí, Diario de campaña (Montevideo: Biblioteca de Marcha, ),  ff.
 On the ethic of patriotism, see the lucid history of the topic pro patria mori by Ernst H. Kan-
torowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, ), –. On the economy of the gift and reciprocity, see Marcel
Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. I. Cunnison (New York:
W. W. Norton, ); and Jacques Derrida’s critical reading of Mauss in Counterfeit Money,
trans. Peggy Kamuf, vol.  of Given Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
 José Martí, Epistolario de José Martí y Máximo Gómez, in Papeles de Martí, ed. Gonzalo de Quesada
y Miranda, vol.  (Havana: Imprenta El Siglo XX, ), .
 This letter, written in New York, is dated  October .
 See appendix , .
 Max Weber, ‘‘Religious Rejection of the World,’’ in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed.
Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .
 Appendix , .
 On Martí’s ambivalence regarding the moral value of poetic practice in Ismaelillo, see Enrico
Mario Santí, ‘‘Ismaelillo, Martí y el modernismo,’’ Revista Iberoamericana, no.  (): –
.

    

 José Martí, Cuadernos de apuntes, in Obra literaria, ed. Cintio Vitier (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacu-
cho, ), .
 ‘‘Dos patrias’’ used to be included in Martí’s posthumous collection of poetry, Flores del des-
tierro, edited by Gonzalo de Quesada y Miranda in . In their critical edition of Martí’s
Poesia completa (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, ), E. de Armas, Fina Garcia Marruz,
and Cintio Vitier identify ‘‘Dos patrias’’ as part of Versos libres ().
 On love and country, see Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin
America (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); and Pierre Legendre, L’Amour du cen-
seur: Essai sur l’ordre dogmatique (Paris: Seuil, ).
 On Martí’s fascination with death, see Calvert Casey, ‘‘Diálogos de vida y muerte,’’ in Memo-
rias de una isla (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, ), –.
 In spite of its conjunctural nature, the Diario de campaña has been extremely influential in
twentieth-century Cuban literature, particularly since José Lezama Lima and the Orígenes
group celebrated the text’s fragmentary, intense poetic prose. The War Journal forms a pivotal
point of reference in Lezama’s crucial Latin Americanist essay, La expresión americana (Madrid:
Alianza Editorial, ). Lezama celebrates Martí’s will to create an event—a political event,
we might add—through the poetic image (). On Lezama’s readings of Martí, see Arnaldo
Cruz Malavé, El primitivo implorante: El ‘‘sistema poético del mundo’’ de José Lezama Lima (Amster-
dam: Rodolphi, ).
 José Martí, Diario de campaña (Montevideo: Biblioteca de Marcha, ), .
 On war as a problematic of meaning and justice, see Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies; and
Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Para una crítica de la violencia,’’ in Para una crítica de la violencia y otros en-
sayos, trans. R. Blatt Weinstein (Madrid: Taurus, ), –.

The Repose of Heroes 

 Migratories

What does it mean to write in another country, a country distinct from the
one a subject claims as his or her own? Under which register, apart from one’s
mother tongue, does the subject recognize himself or herself ? How does s/he
move into another language? And what are the borders of the community to
which s/he adheres? What remains outside or behind?
In a somewhat paradoxical way, this reflection has been brought about
by a suggestion by Theodor W. Adorno on exile and dwelling: ‘‘In exile, the
only house is that of writing.’’ 1 The implications of the metaphor are obvious
enough. For Adorno, in the face of personal, cultural, and juridical fluctua-
tions and displacements produced by journeys and border crossings, writing
becomes an effective way to establish a domain, a place of one’s own on the
other side of the border. Thus, the house constructed by writing would seem
to be able to establish a compensatory place, armed precisely against the
grain of external forces, including that of the ‘‘danger’’ of any major or minor
contact with a foreign tongue.2 The house of writing shelters the subject—in
a complex play of presences and absences in the comings and goings of his
or her missives, memories, and fictions of origin—in a decentralized space
between two worlds. The subject’s positioning in such an interstitial site calls
us to reflect on the problematics of residency and citizenship (in both the
juridical and cultural senses of the word).
In this brief chapter on Latino writing in the United States, let us sus-
pend from the start that aura surrounding the word ‘‘exile,’’ without skimping
over the irreducible differences among the historical forces responsible for
different (e)migratory experiences. For the aura of the exiled tends to make
distance familiar by conceiving of it as a brief pause or interruption in the
becoming of a continuous identity, often inscribing the subject in the fiction
of a return to the native land. Even the homeward bound find themselves in a
different country. It is also true, however, that the problematic of residency—
that zone where juridical identification and interpellated subjectivity inter-
sect—is more obvious in the case of a person inscribed in networks of identi-
fication that are not necessarily amenable or complementary to the project of
returning to the native land. In any case, by posing these questions, we situ-
ate ourselves before one of the most decisive phenomena of the end of our
century: the migratory flux, the emergence of new identity and cultural prac-
tices unleashed by the processes of deterritorialization and redistribution
of boundaries in the deployment of contemporary globalization. These pro-
cesses, it seems, call on us to rethink the modern categories through which
the Western world, for several centuries already, has conceived the problem-
atic of identity and citizenship.
‘‘In exile, the only house is that of writing.’’ What house can writing
found and firmly ground, beyond its emphatic promise to do so? In what way
can writing guarantee the residence and home of the subject? Two poems
about absence and separation enable us to approach these questions: first, a
text by Martí, one of the first intellectuals of the Latino community in New
York, and second, a poem by Tato Laviera, a contemporary Nuyorican poet.
Although this reflection does not attempt to trace the line of a historical pro-
cess, it is necessary to suggest, if only in passing, that in their greatly differing
positions on the problematic of origin and identity, Martí and Laviera mark
two of the possible extremes or boundaries of the Latinoamericanista founda-
tional discourse, its genealogy and pedagogical apparatuses.3
The first poem, ‘‘Domingo triste’’ (‘‘Sad Sunday’’), was written toward
the middle of the s, when Martí resided in New York City. Let us briefly
recall that he lived there for more than fifteen years, perhaps the key period of
his political life and intellectual formation before his death in battle in 
at the age of forty-three. ‘‘Domingo triste’’ forms part of the Versos libres, a
posthumous book by Martí that records, with a verbal intensity unusual in its
time, the complex experience of the poet’s displacement in modernity.4 It is
from there that the theme of exile in Martí can be read, beyond the biographi-
cal references, as an early reflection on the changing, displaced situation of
the writer in the capitalist city—a society oriented toward new principles of
organization that problematized the relationship between literature and the
predominant institutions of the public sphere. Without losing sight of the
greater context in which ‘‘Domingo triste’’ was produced, let us rather ex-
amine the identification networks into which the subject inserts himself in
the poem:

Las campanas, el Sol, el cielo claro

Me llenan de tristeza, y en los ojos
Llevo un dolor que el verso compasivo mira,
Un rebelde dolor que el verso rompe

Migratories 
 Y es ¡oh mar! la gaviota pasajera
Que rumbo a Cuba va sobre tus olas!

Vino a verme un amigo, y a mí mismo

Me preguntó por mí; ya en mí no queda
Más que un reflejo mío, como guarda
La sal del mar la concha de la orilla,
Cáscara soy de mí, que en tierra ajena
Gira, a la voluntad del viento huraño,
Vacía, sin fruta, desgarrada, rota.
Miro a los hombres como montes; miro
Como paisajes de otro mundo, el bravo
Codear, el mugir, el teatro ardiente
De la vida en mi torno: Ni un gusano
Es ya más infeliz: suyo es el aire
Y el lodo en que muere es suyo.
Siento la coz de los caballos, siento
Las ruedas de los carros; mis pedazos
Palpo: ya no soy vivo: ni lo era
Cuando el barco fatal levó las anclas
Que me arrancaron de la tierra mía!

The bells, the Sun, the clear sky

Fill me with sadness, and in my eyes
I bear a pain for the compassionate verse to see,
A rebellious pain for the verse to break
And it is the passing seagull, oh sea
That rides upon your waves on course to Cuba!

A friend came to see me, and asked after me,

After me; in me nothing remains
Other than my reflection, like the
Salt of the sea kept by the conch on the shore,
I am a shell of myself, who in a foreign land
Turns about, at the will of the reticent wind,
Empty, barren, ripped, broken.
I watch men like mountains; as if
They were landscapes of another world, I watch the rough
Elbowing, the lowing, the burning theater
Of life around me: Not even a worm
Is now more unhappy: his is the air

    

 And the sludge in which he dies is his.
I sense the kick of the horses, I sense
The wheels of the carts; the pieces of myself
I feel: I am no longer living: nor was I
When the fatal barge weighed anchor
That tore me from my native land!

The first stanza situates the subject at the boundaries that outline a
space cut across by a partition: distance, drawn by the sea, between the mel-
ancholic subject and the absent place of origin. Significantly, even though
the separation from the place of origin—Cuba, in line six—situates the I on a
shore, it does not dissolve the subject, but rather, paradoxically marks him as
the bearer of an absence, as he who ‘‘bears’’ the pain. That pain is the effect
of a loss that, however, ‘‘fill[s] [him] with sadness’’ (‘‘Me llenan de tristeza’’).
The first lines of the second stanza restate the paradoxical gesture of the
bearer, even though the subject now carries not only an emotion, but also
the discarded fragment or residue of an integral, original body: ‘‘ya en mí no
queda / Más que un reflejo mío, . . . Cáscara soy de mí.’’ The identity of the subject
is represented here as a residue, a remainder of the sea, displaced and con-
tained in the receptacle of the conch. Like the conch, he still transmits an
echo, a simulacrum of the sea’s presence, or of an absent yet repeated ob-
ject. ‘‘Sin fruta’’ (‘‘barren’’), the subject represents himself as an instance of
discontinuity that is as devalued as is the derivative existence (secundariedad)
of the ‘‘reflection’’ that is the I in line nine: the deceiving simulacrum of the
echo, or a remainder from the sea contained by the conch.
Residue, simulacrum, discontinuity. In the experience of the (e)migra-
tory flux, Martí’s writing imposes an economy of meaning, arranging places
—the here and there—into a hierarchy, a kind of symbolic topography that
nevertheless makes the identification of the subject possible. In that topog-
raphy, the itinerary of the journey traces the history of a loss, a disintegra-
tion. S/he who leaves loses and, through contact with the foreign land, runs
the risk of becoming an echo, a residue, a simulacrum, or derivative. The
(e)migrant is a bearer of traces. And in sharp opposition to the disposses-
sion on which the poem is so insistent, the subject projects the plenitude,
the priority, the stability of ‘‘my native land’’ (‘‘tierra mía’’) on the other side
of the sea—the essence lost by the (e)migrant subject. Inescapably bound
to a telluric and territorializing imagery, that absent essence appears as the
very center of identity, constituting the ‘‘capital zone’’ in a manner of speak-
ing, of both the values that regulate the subject positions and the circulation
of meaning in the text—not to mention the symbolic map that thereby fixes

Migratories 
its center and periphery, the interior, the borders, and the other side of the
national territory. The discourse on the journey as loss and uprooting thus
projects the articulation of a nationalist rhetoric.
Still, in spite of the center that is nostalgically postulated therein, the
poem is written here—or is it there? The here of plenitude is the there of the
subject who is writing. The subject writes only on that shore that is delineated
by separation and fracture. What house can be founded for the exile, then, by
poetry?
The act of writing appears thematized beginning with line four of the
poem: ‘‘Un rebelde dolor que el verso rompe / Y es ¡oh mar! la gaviota pasajera / Que
rumbo a Cuba va sobre tus olas!’’ The importance of the act of breaking, which
opens up a series of key associations throughout the poem, must be em-
phasized. Nonetheless, the complexity of the syntax displays an irreducible
ambiguity: is it the verse that ‘‘breaks’’ the pain, or is it rather that which
is broken by the pain? The metaphor that connects the act of writing with
the seagull [ gaviota] would tend toward the former, insofar as it suggests
that writing casts a lasso, establishes contact with the absent land. It would
seem, likewise, that the ‘‘passing seagull’’ is also a passenger seagull; after all,
both meanings are contained in the adjectival pasajera. At once substitute and
palimpsest of a carrier pigeon, the image of a passenger seagull returns us
once again to the act of writing as missive or mediation.
Yet there is a blank space in the poem immediately following, which
cannot be explained simply by the metric requirements of the stanzas. The
blank space literally marks a discontinuity. If we read it as such, as a signifi-
cant element of the poem, the subsequent lines elaborating the imagery of
fragmentation and being as residue acquire another meaning. The image of
the conch shell on the shore, for instance, establishes a metaphorical link,
a resonance, with the image in the previous stanza of the ‘‘passing seagull.’’
The association can be explained in the manner of a homology: the message
is to the seagull what the echo is to the conch. That is, both seagull and conch
bear the presence (message, echo) of an absent subject. But the homology
can be reversed, to show how the ‘‘reticent wind’’ makes the broken, exiled
self ‘‘turn about’’ in the same way that the wind makes the seagull into a pass-
ing or fleeting entity. In the logic of the poem, the journey of both the pass-
ing seagull and the migrant subject represents a destabilizing movement, a
movement that negates the will and autonomy of the subject, opposing the
foundation of any roots. Together, the seagull and conch shell, creatures of
the reticent wind, elucidate the ambiguity of the earlier verse indicating a
break or rupture: ‘‘Un rebelde dolor que el verso rompe’’ (line four). When ‘‘noth-
ing is left / Other than my reflection’’ (‘‘ya en mí no queda / Más que un reflejo

    

mío,’’ lines eight and nine), poetic verse—like the house of Adorno in exile—
sets out to repeat something of the original plenitude that has been lost. It
inscribes an image, an echo of the experience. The (e)migrant is thus not the
only bearer of absences; separation is constitutive of the very act of writing.
And writing returns us to that moment it becomes a creature of the wind, of
echoes, of the derivative existence of reflections.
The second poem examined here is entitled ‘‘Migración’’ (‘‘Migration’’);
it forms part of the book Mainstream Ethics (ética corriente) by Laviera.5 From the
start, the title suggests a break, a minimal elision, which anticipates one of its
key processes. ‘‘Migration’’: in reference to demographic displacements, both
Spanish and English languages generally privilege the prefix—emigration or
immigration—which grants direction to the flux. The prefix fixes the coordi-
nates of a map that represents the migratory process as a function of a going
to or a coming from, from the beginning or end of the journey. For the ter-
ritories between which the subject moves, the designation of the direction
of the movement in the prefix deploys an opposition between the interior
and exterior of the nation, which proves to be fundamental for the demarca-
tion of the territory and, for the same reason, the production of its sense of
integrity. Juridically and ideologically, this opposition has ineluctable conse-
quences: for the territory that ‘‘receives,’’ the subject entering its interior is a
foreign element, a kind of physical prolongation of the contiguous territory.
Such a rhetoric of projected frontiers feeds into an entire tropology of con-
tact and risk, or in the worst of cases, invasion and contagion. In contrast,
the distance of the (e)migrant registers, in the very exit and occurrence of the
journey, the integrity of the national territory that is left behind and closed by
the subject’s departure.
On another level, however, the prefix is also important in a more per-
sonal sense. For example, for the person who moves, it is not the same to
designate oneself as an emigrant as it is an immigrant. The distinction be-
tween the ‘‘entrance’’ and ‘‘exit’’ may well set the scene for an identitary
drama, which can very well emphasize an identification with the country of
origin or the incorporation into the society that is the destination of the jour-
ney. Inside/outside, origin/destination: drama of identity, but also narrative
of space, the territorializing machine that once again inserts movement into
the national symbolic network.
The elision of the prefix in the title and throughout Laviera’s poem reg-
isters the gesture of a writing that problematizes the notion of the boundary
demarcating the integrity of the territorialities, as well as the ideologiza-
tion of the notions of ‘‘origin’’ and ‘‘destination’’ that map out and fix the
movement. But in turn, as in the bulk of his other texts, the elision of

Migratories 
the prefix in the title applies to another border: that of the mother tongue,
coming into contact with another language, English, and generating a tense
zone of passage. Once again, this linguistic hybridity leads us to ask about
the ‘‘citizenship’’ in which this writing is inscribed. This is not the place to
discuss the role that the fiction of linguistic purity has played in the elabo-
ration of discourses on the national identity of Puerto Rico.6 Suffice it to
say, for now, that in those nationalist discourses, linguistic contact crys-
tallizes a loss, the verbal mark of a national identity crisis. The crisis is a
metaphor for a medical history that presupposes the precedence of a healthy
body whose integrity is damaged by contact with the invading body. Laviera
responds:

los únicos que tienen

problemas con el vernáculo
lingüístico diario de nuestra gente
cuando habla de
las experiencias de su cultura popular
son los que estudian solamente a través de libros
porque no tienen tiempo para
hablar a nadie, ya que se pasan
analizando y categorizando
la lengua exclusivamente
sin practicar el lenguaje.

the only ones who have

problems with the daily
linguistic vernacular of our people
when speaking of
the experiences of their popular culture
are those who study only through books
because they don’t have the time
to talk to anybody, since they are caught up
analyzing and categorizing
the tongue exclusively
without practicing the language.7

In the spirit of Laviera, if we consider language as a practice or per-

formance of identity itself, and not as the effect of an immutable system
of norms, we would relativize the power of the metaphor of crisis. That is,
incidentally, Laviera’s mainstream ethic; his ‘‘ética corriente’’ (‘‘work-in-progress
ethic’’), the subtitle adds ironically. It is the project to configure values—of a

    

community, of a tradition—armed with the same experience that the migra-
tory stream (corriente) unleashes in its destabilizing movement. How is such
an alternative subjectivity constructed?
‘‘Migración’’ is precisely a brief exploration as to how an ethic—an alter-
native, portable method of judging—is put together. The migrant subject is
named in the poem: Calavera, which literally means ‘‘skull’’ in Spanish, but
can also refer to someone without good judgment. Like the subject in Martí’s
poem, Calavera is located on a shore: New York’s East River, on the extreme
Lower East Side. On that shore, also like the subject in Martí, Calavera lets
himself go in a process of remembrance, and recites:

‘‘en mi viejo san juan,’’ calavera cantaba

sus dedos clavados en invierno, fría noche,
dos de la mañana, sentado en los stoops
de un edificio abandonado, suplicándole
sonidos a su guitarra,
pero:
sus cuerdas no sonaban,
el frío hacía daño,
noel estrada, compositor
había muerto, un trovador
callejero le lloraba:
‘‘cuántos sueños forge,’’ calavera voz arrastrándose,
notas musicales, hondas huellas digitales
guinando sobre cuerdas.

‘‘in my old san juan,’’ Calavera sang

his fingers nailed into winter, cold night
two in the morning, sittin’ on the stoops
of an abandoned building, eliciting
sounds from his guitar,
but:
its strings didn’t play
the cold was painful,
Noel Estrada, composer,
had died, a troubadour
of the streets cried to him:
‘‘how many dreams I’ve forged,’’ Calavera voice slurring,
musical notes, deep fingerprints
hanging on strings.

Migratories 
 We remember the popular song without hesitation: the lines come from
‘‘En mi Viejo San Juan’’ (‘‘In My Old San Juan’’), a bolero from the s,
composed by Noel Estrada in New York. In the last fifty years, this song like
no other has become an anthem of Puerto Rican emigration in New York.
Emigration, to repeat, because Estrada’s song is a whole anthem of nostal-
gia, a reminder of the past for a subject whose identity is defined by the hope
of a return that never comes: ‘‘Pero el tiempo pasó / mi cabello blanqueó / ya la
muerte me llama / y no pude volver al San Juan que yo amé / Puerto Rico del alma /
Adiós, adiós, adiós, Borinquen querida, tierra de mi amor’’ (‘‘But time has passed / my
hair’s turned white / already death calls / and I couldn’t return to the San Juan
I loved / Puerto Rico of the soul / Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, dear Borin-
quen, land of my love’’).
Written as a short homage after the composer’s death, Laviera’s poem
quotes Estrada’s song almost completely. In fact, the beginning and end of
the song are identical to those of the poem, in which Calavera—a subject
astray, without judgment—tries to play Estrada’s notes on the guitar. A sub-
ject who is looking to occupy a place on the road: the poem represents not
just the act of remembrance, but also dramatizes the complex relationship
between the subject Calavera and the classic text—the road to and from the
lost community. From the start, let us note that in Laviera’s poem, the re-
lationship between the displaced subject and the origin is presented as the
interaction between memory and text. Here, the foundational tropology of
the land is not privileged; later, we may see that it is reinscribed, but always
in a manner mediated by the quote and pastiche of Estrada’s song. It is as if
the origin had always been, for the subject, a saturated discourse, a malleable
and permanently unstable form, with which s/he nevertheless establishes
(even in pastiche) an intense identification.
Laviera’s subject, Calavera, also emerges as a bearer of traces. But in
contrast to Martí, the traces for this subject do not delineate the silhouette,
the outline of an absent plenitude. The trace is rather the score of musical
notes from the song quoted, associated with those ‘‘deep fingerprints hang-
ing on strings.’’ The fingerprints leave the trace of the street singer’s presence
as he enacts the sonorousness of the popular classic. Its status as a ‘‘popu-
lar classic’’ cannot be underemphasized; for just as the song has been given
a representative status by its popularity, so is it embodied, given presence, by
the individual street singer. And he, in turn, leaves an impression, the identi-
fying lines of his fingertips, on the notes of the song. The musical notes are
thus doubly ‘‘fingerprints’’: they are the traces of both Calavera and every in-
terpreter who has performed the song before him, the silhouette of an arche-
text that is realized only in the movement of the performer’s fingers. The

    

generative nucleus of the poem is located in that interaction, in the relation-
ship between the subject ‘‘sin juicio’’ (‘‘without judgment’’) and the path set
forth by Estrada. Will the subject accept that path, that manner of judging?
Or, to put it another way: how does the subject merge with it, in the itinerary
of remembrance toward an origin promised by the song?
Calavera sings:

‘‘adiós,’’ andando hacia el east river,

‘‘adios,’’ a batallar inconsecuencias,
‘‘adios,’’ a crear ritmos,
‘‘Borinquen,’’ a ganarle la fría noche,
‘‘querida,’’ a esperar la madrugada,
‘‘tierra,’’ a apagar la luna,
‘‘de mi amor,’’ esperando el sol,
‘‘adiós,’’ caliente calor,
‘‘adiós,’’ calavera lloraba,
‘‘adiós,’’ sus lágrimas,
‘‘mi diosa,’’ calientes,
‘‘del mar,’’ bajando hasta el suelo,
‘‘mi reina,’’ quemando la acera, la carretera,
‘‘del palmar,’’ lágrimas en transcurso,
‘‘me voy,’’ aclimaban las cuerdas,
‘‘ya me voy,’’ y pasaron por sus manos,
‘‘pero un día,’’ y todo se calentó,
‘‘volveré,’’ sin el sol,
‘‘a buscar,’’ y finalmente,
‘‘mi querer,’’ las cuerdas sonaron,
‘‘a soñar otra vez,’’ el frío no hacía daño,
‘‘en mi viejo,’’ el sol salió, besó a calavera,
‘‘San Juan,’’ al nombre de noel estrada.

‘‘goodbye,’’ walking toward the East River,

‘‘goodbye,’’ to fighting trivialities,
‘‘goodbye,’’ to making rhythms,
‘‘Borinquen,’’ to get a step on the cold night,
‘‘beloved,’’ to waiting for the dawn,
‘‘land,’’ to turning off the moon,
‘‘of my love,’’ waiting for the sun,
‘‘goodbye,’’ hot heat,
‘‘goodbye,’’ Calavera cried,
‘‘goodbye,’’ his tears,

Migratories 
 ‘‘my goddess,’’ hot,
‘‘of the sea,’’ falling to the ground,
‘‘my goddess,’’ the pavement burning, the highway,
‘‘of the palm grove,’’ tears coming along,
‘‘I’m leaving,’’ the strings caught on,
‘‘I’m leaving now,’’ and passed through his hands,
‘‘but one day,’’ and everything got warm,
‘‘I’ll return,’’ without the sun,
‘‘to look for,’’ and finally,
‘‘my beloved,’’ the strings played,
‘‘to dream again,’’ the cold didn’t hurt,
‘‘in my old,’’ the sun came out, kissed Calavera,
‘‘San Juan,’’ to the name of Noel Estrada.

In the transformative process of citation, Laviera’s poem generates a

series of displacements. The writing inserts itself in between the lines of the
song, disjointing the syntax and meaning of both interpolated discourses
with the violence of enjambment.8 The point-counterpoint does not spare the
irony produced by the clash between two irreconcilable spaces. On the one
side, there lies the landscape of the place of origin, as it is constructed by the
melancholic subject of Estrada’s song, with its tropical goddesses and palm
groves; on the other, there lies the urban space of the other shore, on the East
River, with its pavements and highways. As in Martí’s poem, the subject is
located between two shores. The place of origin, however—‘‘mi viejo San Juan’’
—is a quotation, a place grounded in the performance of the song. The quota-
tion dilutes the referentiality of the name: San Juan is thus an object mediated
by the lyrics of the song, which negates any claim for the ontological priority
of the foundation. Of course, the gesture of quoting, of intoning the name of
the place of origin, does not stop being constitutive for the subject who, in
quoting and reinscribing the notes of the bolero with his fingertips, experi-
ences an epiphany. By playing the strings, the subject participates in the his-
tory of the song repeated in ‘‘choruses in barbershops’’ (‘‘coros en barberías’’),
by ‘‘sweet voices distant from Borinquen’’ (‘‘voces dulces alejadas de borinquen’’).
The chorus is the ‘‘little piece of the fatherland’’ (‘‘el pedacito de patria’’),
which is, incidentally, one of the few moments in which the poem spatial-
izes the notion of community. The homeland is sung ‘‘in barbershops, in
nightclubs,’’ because it entails precisely a manner of conceiving identity that
slips out of the topographical networks, as well as the solid categories of
territoriality and its expressions in telluric metaphors. In Laviera, the root
is perchance the quoted foundation, reinscribed by the whistling of a song.

    

Portable roots, to be used at the disposal of an ética corriente, based on the
practices of identity, on identity as a practice of judgment in the journey.

Notes

 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, ), . First pub-
lished in .
 Years after his exile in the United States, Adorno remembers the presumed ‘‘risk’’ to his
writing by the coexistence with English. He even recalls his need to return to Germany for
linguistic (and professional) reasons, postulating a ‘‘special affinity’’ between the linguistic
structures of German and philosophical reflection (see Theodor Adorno, ‘‘On the Question:
‘What Is German?’ ’’ New German Critique  [fall ], –). Our question has to do with
the writing of a subject who postulates the impossibility of return as a condition of writing
itself, as we will see in the poetic practices of Tato Laviera.
 Regarding the state of emergency conditions of Latinoamericanista practices and institutional
networks toward the turn of the nineteenth century, see chapters  and .
 ‘‘Domingo triste’’ used to be included in the editions of a volume of poetry posthumously
entitled Flores del destierro. The critical edition of Martí’s Poesía completa (vol. , ed. Cintio
Vitier, Fina García Marruz, and Emilio de Armas [Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, ],
) places the poem among the manuscripts of Versos libres, which were also published after
Martí’s death.
 Tato Laviera, ‘‘Migración,’’ in Mainstream Ethics (ética corriente) (Houston, Tex.: Arte Público
Press, ), –.
 Arcadio Díaz Quiñones discusses the problematic of language in ‘‘La política del olvido,’’ in
La memoria rota (Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Huracán, ), –.
 Tato Laviera, ‘‘bochinche bilingüe,’’ in Mainstream Ethics (ética corriente) (Houston, Tex.: Arte
Público Press, ), . The criticism of Hispanophilia in Laviera’s writing must not be con-
fused with the affirmation of a colonial politics, which for nearly forty years attempted to
impose English as the official language of education in Puerto Rico, nor as a position of as-
similation to proper English in New York. With the same intensity set free by the linguistic
crossover, Laviera’s poetry written in English subjects dominant language to a labor of hybrid-
ization and mixing, particularly in dialogue with the Black English Nuyorican communities:
‘‘melao was nineteen years old / when he arrived from santurce / spanish speaking streets //
melao is thirty-nine years old / in new york still speaking / santurce spanish streets // melaíto
his son now answered / in black american soul english talk / with native plena sounds / and
primitive urban salsa beats // somehow melao was not concerned / at the neighborly criti-
cism / of his son’s disparate sounding / talk // melao remembered he was criticized / back in
puerto rico for speaking / arrabal black spanish / in the required english class’’ ().
 Enjambment (encabalgamiento) is a poetic device in which the meter of the verse is deliberately
extended beyond its parameters, thus throwing the rhythm of the poem out of sync with itself
and introducing an unsettling ambiguity between poetic and prosaic form. (Trans.)

Migratories 
APPENDICES

Translation of

Three Texts

by José Martí
Appendix  Our America

The presumptuous villager will believe that the entire world is his village, and that as
long as he remains as the mayor, as long as he is free to coerce his rival into letting go
of his sweetheart, as long as his savings are growing in the piggy bank, then he can
accept universal order as a given, unaware of the existence of giants that travel seven
leagues in one step, likely to plant their boot squarely atop him; nor does he know
aught of the clash of comets in the sky, which hurtle through the air engulfing whole
worlds asleep.1 What remains of the village in America must awaken. These days are
not for sleeping with a handkerchief on one’s head, but rather, with weapons as a pil-
low (like the illustrious gentlemen in Juan de Castellanos) 2—weapons of judgment,
which will prevail over others. Trenches of ideas, worth more than trenches of stone.
There is no prow capable of slashing through a cloud of ideas. An energetic
idea, blazing up in its proper time in this world will stop when faced with a squad-
ron of armor-plated soldiers, like the mystical flag of the Last Judgment. The peoples
as yet unfamiliar with each other must make haste to be known, as would those who
join forces in combat. Those who taught one another the right of force, like jealous
brothers claiming the same land, or like the owner of a small house who envies the
owner of a greater one, must be fitted together, the way two hands conjoin to form
one. If those who under the protection of a criminal tradition, would tear the land
asunder and wrest it from the defeated brother—the brother still being punished for
his faults—with a saber stained with the blood of their own veins, if they do not want
to be called a criminal people, let them return these lands to their brother. No debtor
redeems a debt of honor in money, or by slapping someone on the face. And we can
no longer be a people of leaves, who live in the air, our crown brimming with blooms,
crackling or whirling about, depending on the caprice of the light’s caress, or whether
the tempests thrash the tree about and overturn it. Trees must form ranks lest the
seven-league giant stride on! It is the hour of retribution, of the united march, and we
must go forward in close formation, like silver in the roots of the Andes.
Only the seven-monthers lack courage. Those who have no faith in their land
are seven-month men: because they are lacking in courage, they deny it to the rest.
The difficult tree cannot be reached by the puny arm, the braceleted arm with painted
nails, the arm of Madrid or Paris; and they will say that the tree cannot be reached at
all. These harmful insects who eat away at the bone of the native land that nurtures
them ought to be loaded onto barges. If they are Parisians or Madrileños, let them go
to the Prado, streetlamps and all, or to the Tortoni [cafe], sorbets and all. These car-
penter’s children who are ashamed that their father was a carpenter! Those born in
America who are ashamed because they wear the apron of the indio, of the mother who
reared them; those who disown their sick mother—scoundrels!—and leave her aban-
doned on her sickbed! What, then, is a real man? The one who stays with his mother,
to cure her of her illness, or the one who puts her to work where no one will see her,
living at her expense on rotted lands with a worm for a necktie, cursing the breast
that bore him, displaying the written sign of treachery on the back of his paper jacket?
These children of our America, who must be saved along with her Indians; America,
which must expand from few to many; and these deserters who ask to fight in the
North American armies, who drown their Indians in blood, diminishing the many to
a few! These sissies, men, and yet they are unwilling to do the work of men! Look at
Washington, who made this land: did he run away to live with the English, to live with
the English in the years when he saw them go against his own land? These ‘‘incroyables’’
who drag their honor about a foreign land, like the incroyables of the French Revolu-
tion,3 dancing and licking their lips, dragging their ‘‘rr’’s!

In what other native land can a man possess more pride than in our sorrowful
American republics, raised from among the mute Indian masses, to the noise of com-
bat between the book and the altar candle [cirial],4 over the bloody arms of a hundred
apostles? Out of such disparate factors, never in any lesser historical period have more
progressive and compact nations been born. The haughty man believes that the land
was made to serve as his pedestal, because he has a quill or colorful words at his dis-
posal; and he attacks his native republic as helpless and hopeless because its forests
offer him no new way of gallivanting around the world, steering Persian ponies and
spilling champagne. The fault does not lie with the newborn country, but with those
who try to rule originary peoples, composed of a singular and violent nature, with
laws inherited from four centuries of freedom in the United States and nineteen cen-
turies of monarchy in France. No decree of Hamilton’s 5 could stop the heaving breast
of the plainsman’s steed. No pronouncement by Sieyès 6 could liberate the clotted
blood of the Indian. To govern well, attention must be directed toward what actually
exists, there in the place that one governs; and the good governor in America is not
he who knows how to govern in Germany or France, but he who knows the elements
that constitute his country, who can bring them together to reach that suitable state
(through the methods and institutions born of that selfsame country) wherein every
man knows and exercises his capabilities, wherein all may enjoy the abundance that
nature has placed for all in the community [pueblo], conceived with their labor and de-
fended with their lives. The government must be born from the country. The spirit of
governance must be that of the country. The form of government must arise from out
of that country’s constitution itself. Governance is nothing more than the equilibrium
of a country’s natural elements.
Thus, has the imported book been vanquished by natural man in America. Natu-
ral man has vanquished the artificial men of letters [letrados]. The autochthonous

 Appendix 
mestizo has vanquished the exotic Creole. There is no battle between civilization and
barbarism, but between false erudition and nature. Natural man is good, and he obeys
and rewards a superior intelligence; and yet the latter does not obtain his permission
to wound him, or offend him by ignoring him—an unpardonable thing for natural
man, ready to recover by force the respect of anyone who has wounded him with
suspicion or prejudged his interest. It is through this conformity to the disregarded
elements of nature that the tyrants of America have risen to power, and through their
betrayal of them that they have fallen. Through these tyrannies, the republics have
purged their inability to know the true elements of the country, to derive from these
elements the form of government and governance in accordance with them. Gover-
nance, in a new nation, means creation.
If, in peoples composed of both cultured and uncultured elements, the cultured
have not learned the art of governance, then the uncultured will govern, through their
habit of attacking and resolving doubts with their hands. The uncultured masses are
lazy, and timid in matters of the intellect, and they want to be well-governed; but if
the government aggrieves them, they will shake it off and govern themselves. How
will these heads of state come out of universities, if there is no university in America
that teaches the rudiments in the art of governance, or the analysis of the specific
elements of the American peoples? The youth come out into the world to make pre-
dictions with their Yankee or French ‘‘specs,’’ and they aspire to lead a people whom
they do not know. Those who are ignorant of the rudiments of politics must be de-
nied entrance into the political profession. Contest prizes must not be given to the
best song of praise, but to a close study of those factors at work within one’s coun-
try. In the newspaper, the church, and the academe, the study of real factors affecting
the country ought to be promoted. It is enough to know them, without bandages or
hesitation, because anyone who sets aside a part of the truth, either willfully or by
forgetfulness, will in the end fall prey to the same truth that he has omitted, that
grows in negligence and overthrows anything raised in the name of truth, without
it. Resolving the problem after knowing its elements is far easier than resolving the
problem without knowing them. Along comes the natural man, indignant and strong,
to overturn the justice accumulated in books, because it has not been administered in
accordance with the patent necessities of the country. To know, then, is to resolve. To
know the country and to govern it in accordance with this understanding is the only
way of liberating it from tyranny. The European university must give way to the Ameri-
can university. The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught
hands-on; even at the expense of the archons of Greece. Our Greece is preferrable to
the Greece that is not ours. Ours is more necessary. National politicians must replace
the exotic ones. Let the world be grafted onto our republics, but the trunk must be our
own. And silence the vanquished pedant; for there is no native land of which a man
can be more proud than our sorrowful American republics.

With our feet in the rosary, our heads white, and our bodies mottled in Indian and
Creole, we came, naked into the world of nations. With the banner of the Virgin, we

Appendix  
sallied forth for the conquest of liberty. A priest, a few lieutenants, and one woman 7
raised the Republic in Mexico on the shoulders of the Indians. A Spanish canon, in the
shadow of his cape, taught the principles of French liberty to a handful of magnificent
students who later made a general of Spain into a leader in Central America—against
Spain.8 With monarchical habits and the sun for a heart, Venezuelans from the North
and Argentines from the South led the people up in arms. When the heroes of both
clashed and the continent was about to tremble, one—by no means the lesser—pulled
back his reins. And because heroism in a time of peace is rarer, less glorious, than in a
time of war; because it is easier for a man to die with honor than it is to think methodi-
cally; because governing with exalted and unanimous sentiments is more immediately
feasible than leading the multiple, arrogant, exotic, or ambitious ideas that arise after
a battle; because the powers overwhelmed by the epic onslaught gawked, with the fe-
line wariness of the species and the weight of the real, at the building where it had
hoisted the flag of these peoples—nourished by shrewdness in governance through
the continuous practice of reason and liberty—on the coarse and singular regions of
our mestiza America, among these peoples of bare knees and Parisian jackets; be-
cause the hierarchic constitution of the colonies resisted the democratic organization
of the republic; because the chief ministers in bowties left their field riding boots in
the hallway; or because the bookish Redeemers did not understand that the revolution
that did triumph with the soul of the land, unleashed from the voice of the savior, had
to govern with the soul of the land, and not against or without it—America began to
suffer, and suffers, from the fatigue of having to accommodate discordant and hos-
tile elements, which it inherited from a despotic and wicked colonizer, from imported
ideas and forms that have proven utterly retarded in matters of logical government,
given their lack of local reality. Only by unacknowledging or ignoring the fools who
had helped to ransom it, the continent—dislocated for three centuries by a leader-
ship that denied man’s right to the exercise of his reason, entered into a government
that had reason as its base: the reason of all in matters concerning all, and not the
university-bred reason of one over the provincial reason of the others. The problem of
independence did not entail a change of forms, but the change of spirit.
A common cause had to be made with the oppressed to consolidate the system
opposed to the interests and customs of the rule of the oppressors. But the tiger, how-
ever frightened by the explosion, returned at night to the site of his prey. True, it is
dying with fire blazing in his eyes and his claws in the air. Yet no one heard him come,
because he came with his claws in velvet. By the time his prey had awakened, the tiger
was already on it. Thus did the colony persevere in the heart of the republic, but our
America begins to overcome her great errors—the arrogance of her chief cities, the
blind triumph of the disdainful peasants, the excessive importation of foreign ideas
and formulas, the iniquitous and impolitic scorn for the aborigine race—through the
higher virtue, fertilized [abonada] with the necessary blood, of the republic under-
neath, still fighting against the colony. The tiger waits behind every tree, huddled
behind every corner. But it is dying, with its claws in the air, fire blazing in his eyes.

 Appendix 
 But ‘‘These countries will be saved,’’ as Rivadavia 9 said; Rivadavia, the Argentine
who suffered from excessive refinement in unrefined times. The machete cannot be
sheathed in silk; after all, can one ever be rid of the lance if it is by the lance that
a country has been won? For the country becomes angry, and would demand at the
very door of Iturbide’s Congress ‘‘make the fair-haired one (Iturbide) an emperor!’’ 10
These countries will be saved, because with the prevailing temper of moderation, the
serene harmony of nature in a continent of light, and the influx of critical readings,
which in Europe have succeeded the readings of trial and error and fallaciousness
under which the previous generation was steeped, there is now being born in America,
in this epoch, the real man.
We were a vision, with an athlete’s breast, a dandy’s hands, and a child’s brow.
We were a mask, dressed in breeches from England, a Parisian vest, a jacket from
North America, and a bicorne from Spain. The Indian, mute, walked slowly around us,
and went off to the mountain, to the summit of the mountain to baptize his children.
At night, the scorned Negro sang in the music of his heart, alone and unknown, amid
the waves and wild animals. The peasant, a creator, blind with indignation, turned
on and against the disdainful city, against his own creation. We were all epaulettes
and togas, in countries that came into the world with rope sandals on their feet and
the vincha 11 on their heads. The general temper should have been to fraternize, with
charity in our hearts and the audacity of builders, the vincha and the toga; to free the
Indian, to clear up sufficient space for the Negro, to adjust liberty to the body of those
who rose up and triumphantly fought for it. We were left with the bureaucrat, a gen-
eral, the lettered man, and a prebendary. The cherubic youth, with arms like those of
an octopus, threw its head into the sky, let it fall with a sterile glory, crowned with
clouds. The native people, urged on by instinct and blind with triumph, destroyed the
golden batons. Neither the European nor the Yankee book was able to offer the key to
the Spanish-American enigma. They tried to use hate, and these countries took a turn
for the worse. Tired of useless hate, of the resistance of the book against the lance,
reason against the altar candle [cirial], the city against the countryside, the impossible
empire of divided urban castes over the native nation, by turns tempestuous or inert,
they unknowingly began to try love. People stand up on their feet and salute them-
selves. ‘‘What exactly are we?’’ they ask, and they tell one another what they are like.
When a problem emerged in Cojímar, no one sought for a solution in Danzig.12 The
frock coats were still from France, but the thought now began to come from America.
The youths of America roll up the sleeves of their shirts, sink their hands in the mass
and make it rise with the yeast of their sweat. They understand that we have imitated
for too long and that salvation is in creating. Crear is the password of a generation. If
our wine is made from bananas; and if its taste turns out bitter, it is still our wine! It is
known that the forms of a country’s government must be accommodated to the coun-
try’s natural elements; that lest there be an error of form, the form of absolute ideas
must be made relative; that in order for liberty to be viable, it must be sincere and abun-
dant; that if the republic does not open its arms to all and move forward with all, the
republic will die. The tiger within will enter through the cracks, and so will the tiger

Appendix  
from without. The general will subject the march of the cavalry to an infant’s pace. Or
with the matter of defense left to the infants, the enemy will envelop the cavalry. Poli-
tics is strategy. The people must live by being critical of one another, because criticism
is the health of nations [pueblos]—but with one heart and one mind. Stoop down and
reach toward the unfortunate, raise them up in the arms of the people! With the fire of
the heart melt a frozen America! Let the native blood of the country run, roaring and
coursing wildly through America’s veins! Standing tall, from one country to another,
these new American men will salute one another with the joyful eyes of workers. Natu-
ral statesmen will emerge from the direct study of nature. They will read in order to
apply, but not to copy. The economists will study every difficulty at the root of its ori-
gins. The orators will begin to sober up. The playwrights will bring native characters
onto the scene. The academies will discuss practical matters. Poetry will make a clean
break with the Zorrillesque 13 damsel of long flowing hair, and hang its red waistcoat
on the glorious tree. The heads of state in the Indian republics will learn Indian.

From every danger America is being saved. Over the heads of some republics the
octopus is still asleep. Others, by the law of equilibrium, have risen from the sea,
to reclaim the lost centuries with a mad and sublime urgency. Others, who have for-
gotten that Juárez 14 once went about in a coach drawn by mules, hitch their carriages
to the wind, with a soap bubble as their coachman; for poisonous luxury, the enemy
of freedom, corrupts the lascivious man and opens the door to the foreigner. Others
revise and refine the meaning of virility with the epic spirit of a threatened indepen-
dence in mind. Others, in the rapacious war against their neighbor, create an army
of thugs capable of turning against and devouring them. But another danger perhaps
runs throughout our America, which does not come from America itself, but rather
the difference in origins, methods, and interests between the two continental fac-
tions, and the hour is drawing near when an imperious and driven people who are
ignorant of our America and who disdain it, will advance, demanding intimate rela-
tions. And because the virile nations, which have emerged of their own efforts, with
shotgun and the law, love and love alone only other virile nations; because the hour
of abandonment and ambition—perhaps urged on by the more pure-blooded North
Americans, perhaps brought about by the vindictive and sordid masses, or by the tradi-
tion of conquest and the interests of a skillful leader—this hour is not so close at hand
to those of us who look on in horror, that we have not the opportunity to prove our
continuous and discrete pride, capable of confronting it and turning it away; because
North America’s republican image before the attentive nations of the Universe, places
a barrier against it that must not be broken by any impulsive provocation or osten-
tatious arrogance, any parricidal discord in our America—the pressing obligation of
our America is to present itself as it is, one soul and one intent, fleet-footed champion
over a suffocating past, stained only with the redemptive blood drawn from our hands
in our battle with ruins, only with the blood of our veins left open by our former mas-
ters. The disdain of the formidable neighbor, who does not know our America, is the
greatest danger confronting her; and it is crucial in these approaching days of their

 Appendix 
encounter for the neighbor to know her, and know her soon, lest it scorn her. Out of
ignorance, it may come, perhaps, to instill in her greed. Out of respect, after it comes
to know her, it may take her hands away. One must have faith in what is best in man,
and to distrust what is worst. One must give an opportunity for the best to reveal itself
and prevail over the worst. If not, the worst will prevail. Nations [pueblos] must have
one pillory for anyone who incites them to useless hate, and another pillory for anyone
who does not tell them the truth in time.
There is no hate among races, because there are no races. Narrow-minded think-
ers, thinkers by lamplight, stir up and string together races, which the discerning
traveler and the cordial observer will find only in the bookstore, not in the justice
of Nature, where the universal identity of man stands out against the background of
his victorious love and turbulent appetite. The soul, eternal and in every sense the
same, emanates from diverse bodies in form and color. It is a sin against Humanity to
foment and propagate opposition and hate among races. But in the jumble of peoples
faced with the proximity of still other diverse peoples, peculiar and active characteris-
tics take shape: ideas and customs, of expansion and acquisition, vanity and avarice,
which in a period of internal disorder or in the precipitation of that country’s accu-
mulated characteristics, may be able to transform that country from a latent state of
national preoccupations to a serious threat to nearby lands, isolated and weak, which
the strong country would declare idle and inferior. To think is to serve. Nor must be
assumed, through a provincial antipathy, some ingenious and fatal malice on the part
of the blond-haired people of the continent just because they do not speak our lan-
guage, or see a house the way we see it, or because they are not beseeming to us in
their political blights, ours being different from theirs; or because one does not find
bilious and dark-skinned men in great numbers there, or because from its still uncer-
tain prominence, their country does not look favorably on those who, with less favor
in History, are still pursuing the road of the Republic to the last heroic stretch. Nor
must one hide the patent facts of the problem, which can be resolved, for the peace of
centuries, with the timely study and the tacit and urgent union of the continental soul.
Because the united hymn is already sounding; by the road prepared by their sublime
parents, this present generation has brought on its back a worker’s America; from
the Bravo to the Magallanes, seated astride his condor, the Great Semí 15 is sowing
throughout the Latin nations of the continent and the sorrowful islands of the sea,
the seed of new America!

Notes

Unless otherwise noted, the following notes have been adapted and translated from José
Olivio Jimenez’s edition of Martí’s prose: see José Martí, Prosa escogida, ed. José Olivio Jimenez
(Madrid: Novelar y cuentos, ). Trans.
 This essay was published in La Revista Illustrada (New York) on January , , and in El Partido
Liberal (Mexico City) on January , . Along with the speech known under the heading
‘‘Madre América’’ (‘‘Mother America’’), this text most concisely and comprehensively sum-

Appendix  
 marizes the Latin-Americanist anxieties and predictions presented in Martí’s thought in the
face of the threat of U.S. expansion. The title of this work has remained the most accessible
one for its readers in the Latin American world.
 Juan de Castellanos. Spanish priest and poet Juan de Castellanos (–) resided in many
places throughout America from a very young age. In , he wrote the extensive Elegías de
varones ilustres de Indias (Elegies for Illustrious Gentlemen of the Indies) in verse, which is of great
interest for the numerous facts it presents on American life and history in the sixteenth cen-
tury.
 Incroyables of the French Revolution. During the period of the  Directory in France, this
name was given to certain young men who dressed, spoke, and gestured with an excessive
affectation, and who enjoyed a social life of elegance.
 There has been some debate on the specific intent behind this word choice: cirial can mean
either altar candle or cactus tree. The first meaning would imply the opposition between En-
lightenment thought and religious superstition, yet the second would suggest Domingo F.
Sarmiento’s opposition between civilization and barbarism (see chapter ). Trans.
 Hamilton. Alexander Hamilton (–), North American statesman who participated in
the U.S. War of Independence; he later acquired prestige in public administration as the sec-
retary of the treasury.
 Sieyès. Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès (–), French statesman and publisher who was in-
volved in the publication of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, as well as the French
Constitution of .
 A priest . . . and one woman. The first reference is to Mexican priest and revolutionary Manuel
Hidalgo (–), who gave the first shout of rebellion that incited the War of Libera-
tion in Mexico. The woman alluded to is Josefina Ortiz de Domínguez (d. ), wife of Don
Manuel Domínguez, mayor of Querétaro, who was persuaded by her to join the indepen-
dence movement. Mexican modernist poet Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera dedicated one of his
most well-known compositions to this event in ‘‘La Corregidora’’ (‘‘The Mayoress’’).
 A Spanish canon . . . against Spain. The canon mentioned here is José María Castilla, the Span-
ish liberal who urged El Salvador to declare its independence; the general of Spain is Brigadier
General Gabino Gaínza, who accepted the political and military command of the indepen-
dent government of Guatemala. Both events occurred on September , .
 Rivadavia. Bernardino Rivadavia (–), man of progressive ideas who served as presi-
dent of the Argentine Republic for a brief period of time (–).
 Make the fair-haired one (Iturbide) an emperor! In , the Mexican people demanded that the
nation’s Congress, already freed from Spain, declare Mexican General Agustín Iturbide an
emperor. Iturbide ruled in this capacity for ten months, under the name Agustín I.
 Vincha. Handkerchief used by natives on their neck or head.
 Cojímar is the small coastal area in the northern province of Havana, Cuba. Danzig is a Euro-
pean port on the coast of the Baltic Sea. For a long time, it was known as the ‘‘Free City’’ of
Europe, although it actually belonged to Poland.
 Zorrillesque. Allusion to the extreme style of Spanish romantic poet José Zorrilla (–).
 Juárez. The great Mexican liberal statesman Benito Juárez (–), who was the most
noteworthy and progressive president of the Mexican Republic in the nineteenth century,
was of humble and indigenous origin. The rest of the sentence in the text refers metaphori-
cally and hyperbolically to the pompous and lengthy dictatorial government of Porfirio Díaz
(who was in power throughout the entire end of the nineteenth century and the first decade
of the twentieth, provoking the Mexican Revolution of ).

 Appendix 
 From the Bravo to the Magallanes, from one tip of Latin America to the other. The Río Bravo
del Norte (Bravo River of the North) begins in Colorado (in the United States), crosses New
Mexico and Texas, and empties out into the Gulf of Mexico. Magallanes (Magellan) is the
name of the meridian strait of South America, called thus by its discoverer, the explorer
Ferdinand de Magellan. Great Semí. Among the pre-Columbian natives of the Antilles, Semí
was a divinity who incarnated all the forces of nature.

Appendix  
Appendix  Prologue to Poema del Niágara

Passersby, halt! The one whose hand I hold is no rhyme weaver, no repeater of the old
master—old from repeating themselves to no one—no romance tale-teller, like those
who would turn the sinister cradle of the treacherous Italian gondolas into magical
zithers, no professional complainer, like so many of those who force honorable men
to hide their burdens as failings, and their sacred laments as adolescent triflings! The
man who accompanies me—and he comes hooded—is great, though he be not of
Spain: it is Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde, who has written the Poem of the Niagara.1 Ask
me anything more of him, curious passerby, and I will tell you that he has measured
himself against a giant 2 and has not left the field in defeat, but with something of
a victorious aura on his brow, lyre resting on his shoulder, since he is of those righ-
teous fighters who lead with the lyre. And ask no more, for to dare to measure oneself
against giants is already more than proof of greatness: merit does not lie in the success
of the feat, even if he fared quite well in combat, but in the value of the undertaking.
Age in ruins, where the only prized art is good for filling the house pantry, or
for sitting on a golden chair, or living in a gilded world—without seeing that human
nature cannot change what it is, and that by bringing the gold outside, one has only
left the inside bereft of gold! Age in ruins, in which love and the will to greatness are
rare and illustrious achievements! Men today are like certain damsels, who latch onto
certain virtues only when they see them either praised by others, or sublimated in so-
norous prose or in winged poetic verse; far from embracing virtue, which takes the
form of a cross, they cast it from themselves with loathing, as if it were a corrosive
shroud that would eat away at the rosiness in their cheeks, the pleasure in their kisses,
their wreaths of colored butterflies, which women so love to put in around their necks!
Age in ruins, where priests no longer deserve either the praise or veneration of the
poets—nor have poets even begun to be priests!
Age in ruins! Not for all mankind, that draws from itself (in the manner of
spiders) the magnificent thread on which to glide, through space; it is rather an age in
ruins for these eternal youths: these apostolic and visionary, exemplary feelers, chil-
dren and parents of peace; for these ardent believers, hungry for tenderness, voracious
for love, ill-equipped to keep their feet or a plot of land; full of memories of clouds
and wings, seekers with broken wings, these poor poets! It is their daily duty to take
the eagles ceaselessly born in their breast—the way a rose overflows with perfume, the
way the ocean offers shells and the sun, light—and to sit, while with mysterious notes
they accompany these wayward travelers with the lyre, watching their eagles fly away.
But now the poet has changed in his task, and has now turned to drowning these
eagles. In what direction will they turn, if their flight is today obscured by the dust of
a battle that began a century ago and still has not come to an end? And who will follow
them in their flight, if today men hardly have the time to take the gold from out of the
mines, drink it from their cups, to cover their women with it?
And to stretch every exercise of reason even further all that is logical appears in
a contradictory fashion. That which is coming to pass, through this epoch of elabo-
ration and splendid transformation—wherein men are preparing themselves for the
enjoyment of themselves, to be the kings of kings, after overcoming the obstacles
that precede all greatness—is destined for the poets, great men amid the confusion
brought about by the change of states, faith, and governments, epoch of tumult and
suffering, where the noise of battle drowns out the melodious prophecies of good for-
tune in the times to come; and the ebb and flow of combatants leave the rosebushes
without roses; and battleships darken the soft light of the stars in the sky. But in the
factory of the universe there is nothing, however small, that does not contain in it
every seed of great things: the sky spins and bears its daily and nightly torments, and
man turns about and goes on with his faith, his passions, and regrets; and when his
eyes no longer see the stars in the sky, he turns to behold those in his soul. Hence, the
pale and groaning poets; hence, this new painful and tormented poetry; hence, this
intimate, confidential, and personal poetry, a necessary consequence of the times—
ingenuous and useful, like a song of kinsmen when it springs from a healthy and vig-
orous nature; dismayed and awkward when evoked through the strings of a feeble,
gifted feeler, like the peacock of brilliant plumage with the gift of song.
Like women, weak women would seem the men of today—who, crowned with
the wreaths of roses, lying in the arms of Alexander and Cebetes,3 are likely to exhaust
the honey-sweet wine that seasoned the festivals of Horace. The pagan lyric remains
in disuse for its sensuality: the Christian lyric, too, however beautiful it is for having
changed humanity through the ideal of Christ, seen yesterday as the smallest of the
gods, and loved today as perhaps the greatest among men. The poets today can be
neither lyrical nor epical with naturalness and ease; nor can there be anything more
lyrical than that which each one takes from himself, as if the only thing whose exis-
tence could not be doubted were one’s own being, or as if the problem of human life
would require such bravery and such studied anxiety—that there could be no greater
study, nor more stimulating, nor more moved by profundity and greatness than the
study of oneself. No one today has any certain faith. The ones who do are deceived.
Hounded by beautiful inner furies, the ones who write about faith bite their fists,
which they keep clenched when they write. There is no painter who can confidently de-
pict the luminous aureole of virgins with the novelty and transparency of other times;
nor is there any religious cantor or soothsayer who can recite his stanzas and anathe-
mas with his own blessing or reassurance. They are all soldiers of an army on the
move. They were all kissed by the same sorceress. In each and every one boils the new

Appendix  
blood. Although their entrails are being torn apart, they are there in their silent room,
irate and hungry: Intranquillity, Insecurity, Vague Hope, Secret Vision. An immense
pallid man of gaunt appearance, dressed in black, eyes full of tears and mouth dry,
walks with heavy steps throughout the earth, without repose or sleep; and he has sat
in every home, and has placed his tremulous hand on every headboard! What a battle
being waged in his brain! What fear lies in his bosom! What a demand for what is not
forthcoming! What a lack of awareness of what he desires! What a feeling in his spirit,
at once delightful and nauseous—nauseous at the day that dies, delight in the dawn!
There is no longer any permanent work, because works in these times of recon-
struction and reshaping are by essence mutable and restless; there are no constant or
enduring paths, so soon are they seen as new altars, as great and wide open as for-
ests. The mind solicits diverse ideas from everywhere—and ideas are like polyps, like
the light of the stars, the waves of the ocean. One either incessantly longs for the
knowledge of something that will verify, or fears to know anything that would change,
one’s present beliefs. The development of a new social state has rendered the battle
for personal existence ever more insecure, ever more retrenched in accomplishing the
daily obligations that, finding no wide open roads, change form and direction at every
instant, agitated by the fear that the nearness or probability of misery brings. With
the spirit divided among contradictory and unsettled loves; the concept of literature
constantly alarmed by a new gospel; every image that was hitherto revered found de-
throned and stripped; and even the images of the future as yet unknown, it does not
seem possible in this discord of the mind, this turbulent life with neither fixed direc-
tion, defined character, nor definite end, this acerbic fear of the impoverishment of
the home—and in the varied and halfhearted labor that we undertake to evade it—
to produce those distant and patient works, those spacious histories in verse, those
enviable imitations of Latin peoples that were written with infinite patience, year
after year, in the repose of the cell, in the pleasant leisure of a court official, or in a
wide meticulously crafted armchair of cordovan leather, studded with fine gold, in the
beatific calm instilled in the spirit by the certainty that the good native was knead-
ing the bread, the good king was dispensing the law, and the mother church bore her
cloak and scepter. Only in a general and determinedly literary age, an age of stable
and constant elements with the promise of possible individual tranquillity, fixed and
well-known channels, was the production of those solid, corpulent works of ingenuity
possible—works which require to no avail such a conjunction of suitable conditions.
Perhaps hate, that accumulates and concentrates, can still naturally produce such a
genre of works; but love overflows and disseminates; and these are the days of love,
even for those who hate. Love murmurs fugitive songs, and no longer produces works
of unhurried sustenance and arduous labor through its culminating and vehement
emotion—a tension that exhausts and overwhelms.
And there is today something like a dismemberment of the human mind. Behind
us are the days of raised fences; this is the time of broken ones. Now, men have begun
to walk without stumbling throughout the entire land; before, they would hardly have
begun walking when they would run into the wall of one man’s backyard or the bas-

 Appendix 
tion of a convent. Man loves a God who penetrates him and furthers him in every way.
It would be blasphemous to give the Creator of all beings and all that exists the form of
only one of those beings. As in the case of humanity, wherein all progress perhaps con-
sists of returning to the point of departure, man is returning to Christ, the crucified,
pardoning, captive Christ; to the naked feet and open arms, not to an evil and satanic,
malevolent, hating, fierce, lashing, judgmental, impious Christ. And these new loves
do not gestate slowly, as before, in quiet cells where an adorable and sublime soli-
tude would hatch gigantic and radiant ideas; nor are ideas from distant days and years
brought forth from the mind, ripening and being nurtured, growing with impressions
and analogical judgments, to fly at once to huddle around the mother idea, the way
standard-bearers in a time of war gather around each other in a small heap where they
raise the flag; nor from this prolonged mental pregnancy are those cyclopean and over-
grown children born now, the natural trace of an epoch fallen silent and withdrawn,
where ideas would become the rattles of the king’s joker, or the clapper of a church
bell, or some delicacy brought straight from the gallows; then, the only form under
which human judgment could be expressed was charming gossip in a bad setting of
romantic comedies about love caught between the criss-cross of swords and the flurry
of farthingales, among the suitors and beauties of the town village. Now, the trees of
the jungle have no more leaves than the cities have languages; ideas grow in the plaza
where they are taught, and pass from hand to hand, and from traveler to traveler.
Speech is not a sin, but cause for celebration; hearing is not a heresy, but rather taste,
custom, fashion. One has an ear pressed to everything; thoughts barely sown already
bear flowers and fruits, leaping from the paper, and entering minds like a subtle,
finely ground powder; railroads have leveled the forest, just as newspapers have done
to the human jungle. The sun penetrates the cracks of old trees. All is expansion, com-
munication, fluorescence, contagion, dissemination. The journal deflowers grandiose
ideas. Ideas in the mind no longer form either family, house, or long life, as before.
They are born with wings, on horseback, saddled on lightning. They do not believe in
only one mind, but rather the commerce of all. Nor do they delay, after a strenuous ma-
ternal labor, in reaping benefit from their small number of readers; they begin almost
immediately after having been born. Their readers wring them, elevate them, crown
them, lock them in the pillory, hoist them high like an idol, explode them, toss them
into the air. Although even the ideas belonging to a lower law have begun to shine as
those of a better one, they cannot support the traffic, the beating, the tide, the harsh
treatment. The ideas of a good law prevail in the end, compact and entire—bruised,
but with the virtue of spontaneously healing themselves. We awaken with a problem;
we go to bed with another one. Images devour one another in our mind. The time has
not yet come to give form to what is thought. Ideas in the mind’s ocean are lost in one
another, as when a stone pierces the blue water, and the circles are lost each within
each. Before, ideas would be erected in silence in the mind, like solid towers, for the
purpose of being seen from afar; today, they leave en masse from the lips, like golden
seeds that fall on the feverish soil; they are broken, they are reaffirmed, they evapo-
rate, they are wasted for the one who created them—oh, beautiful sacrifice! They come

Appendix  
undone in fiery sparks; they crumble. Hence, the small ebullient works; hence, the ab-
sence of those great works—climactic, sustained, majestic, concentrated.
And it may also be that with the great common labor of humans, and the healthy
custom of self-examination and asking after one another’s lives, and the glorious
necessity of kneading the bread for oneself, bread to be served on the altar cloth, the
epoch neither stimulates nor perhaps allows for the isolated appearance of super-
human beings occupied in a unique kind of work of a nature widely held to be mar-
velous and supreme. A great mountain seems less than great when it is surrounded by
hills. And this is the epoch in which the hills are at war with the mountains, in which
the peaks disintegrate into plains: an epoch rapidly approaching another wherein all
plains will be peaks. With the descent of the heights comes the rise of the plains to
the same level, which will facilitate transportation throughout the land. Individual
geniuses will be ever less distinguished, because the smallness of their environment
that had raised their stature to be what it is, is a thing of the past. And as humanity
continues to learn how to harvest the fruits of nature and value her gifts, the masters
and teachers of old reach them less and less, all to the benefit of still more new people,
who were before the mere followers of these venerators of the skillful harvesters. What
we are witnessing is something akin to a decentralization of the understanding. The
beautiful has come to be the domain of all. It negates the number of good secondary
poets and the lack of eminent, solitary ones. Genius freely passes from the individual
to the collective. One man loses to the benefit of many others. The qualities of the
privileged are diluted, expanded for the masses; whatever is not pleasing to the privi-
leged of humble mien, certainly will be to those who possess noble and generous
hearts, who know that the quality of greatness is not of the earth—however great a
creature one may be—but rather, lies in the golden sand that will one day return to the
beautiful golden font, reflection of the Creator’s gaze.
And like the man from Auvergne 4 dying in happy Paris, more from the ills of the
country than from bedazzlement, where every man who pauses to see himself goes
about besieged with the sweet evil of this century, the poets today—simple Auverg-
nese in the bustling and sumptuous Lutetia—have a nostalgia for the great deed. War,
once the source of glory, has fallen into disuse, and what was once considered great
has come to be a crime. The court, once the refuge of hired bards, looks with fright-
ened eyes on the modern bards, who now only pluck at their lyre from time to time,
and sometimes not at all. God walks about in confusion, women bewildered and mad;
but nature always lights the solemn sun in the middle of a clearing. The gods of the
forests still speak the language as yet unspoken by the divinities of the altars; man
casts the serpents of his speaking head across the oceans, grasped from one side by
the rugged coast of England and, on the other, by the bridled American coastline: he
lights the light of stars in a crystal globe; and hurls his black and smoking tritons
across the waters and over the mountains;—and when the suns that had illuminated
the earth tens of centuries have blown out, the sun in the human soul keeps shin-
ing. There is no west for man’s spirit; there is only the north, crowned with light. The
mountain ends in the peak; the culminating wave spun by the tempest and thrown

 Appendix 
toward the sky ends in the crest; so, too, must human life also end, at the height.
In these transitory changes we are witnessing, and in this refraction of man’s world,
in which new life charges forth like spirited horses pursued by barking dogs; in this
blinding of the sources and this obfuscation of the gods, nature, human labor, and
man’s spirit open up like pure, unexhausted wellsprings to the dry lips of the poets.
Let their cups of precious stones be emptied of the old bitter wine, and let them be
filled with the rays of the sun, the echoes of manual labor, prized and simple pearls,
taken from the depths of the soul,—and let them with their feverish hands raise the
sonorous cup before the eyes of frightened men!
Thus has the lyrical poet come into his own again, his feet and eyes a pitiable
sight from having seen and walked through the still-smoking ruins; he was always,
more or less, a personal poet. Thus has he directed his eyes toward the battles and
solemnities of nature: this man, who had once been in courtly, conventional, or bloody
times, an epic poet. The battle now lies in the workshop; glory, in peace; the temple,
everywhere throughout the land; the poem, in nature. When life assents to it, a future
Dante will arise, not by his own effort above the Dantesque men of today, but by the
force of the time; for what is the arrogant man but the outburst of the unknown, echo
of the supernatural, mirror of eternal lights, the more or less finished copy of the
world in which he lives? Today, Dante lives in and of himself. Ugolino 5 continues to
eat away at his son, or rather, more himself than his son—witness how today there is
no crust of stale bread more chewed than the soul of the poet. If they could be seen
with the eyes of the soul, the raw knuckles of their fists and the holes in their torn
wings would be dripping blood.
But suddenly, now, historical life hangs in the balance. With newborn institu-
tions too new, too confused, to be able to offer poetic elements—because like wine,
perfume comes to nations with the years—and the crumbled roots of poetry too old,
thrown to the wind, to the critical impulse; with personal life so full of doubt, conster-
nation, questions, unease, and battle fever, life—intimate, feverish, unfastened, im-
pulsive, clamorous life—has come to be the principal theme and, along with nature,
the only legitimate subject of modern poetry.
How much work did it cost to discover this very thing! Man, who has only re-
cently begun to enjoy the use of reason that from his birth was denied him, has to
unmake himself to truly come into his own. It requires a Herculean blow against the
obstacles erected against him by his own nature as well as by those who, in evil hour,
heap on him those conventional ideas of what he is, by impious counsel and culpable
arrogance sustained. There is no more difficult task than this, of distinguishing the
acquired, proficient aspects of our existence from the spontaneous and natural; what
man brings into the world with him, from the lessons, laws, and ordinances imposed
on him by those who came before him. Under the pretext of completing the human
being, they interrupt it. He has not even been born, and they are already standing be-
side his crib with great and strong crutches, by their hands prepared: philosophies,
religions, political systems, and the passions of his parents. And they tie him up, strap
him down; and man becomes a bridled horse throughout the rest of his life. Thus is

Appendix  
the land today a vast abode of masqueraders. One enters life as pliant wax; and chance
empties us into preset molds. Created conventions deform all true existence, and true
existence comes to be something like a silent current that invisibly courses beneath
an apparent life, at times not even felt by the one for whom it performs its cautious
work, akin to the long path that winds silently beside the mysterious Guadiana be-
neath the Andalusian land. To affirm humanity’s free will; to leave the seductive form
of ghosts to the realm of ghosts proper; to leave unspoiled those aspects of virgin
nature with the imposition of distant prejudices; to endow them with the aptitude to
take what is useful for themselves, without confusing or driving them toward a fixed
direction: I declare this to be the only way of populating the land with a vigorous and
creative generation of man! All forms of redemption have hitherto been theoretical
and formal; it is necessary that they now be effective and essential. Literary originality
will not suffice, nor will political liberty persevere, while spiritual liberty is not guar-
anteed. The first task of man is to reconquer it. Men must be returned to themselves;
they must be freed from the ill governance of convention that suffocates or poisons
their emotions, accelerates the awakening of their visceral senses, and burdens their
mental capacity with a pernicious, foreign, cold, and false sense of wealth. Only the
genuine is fruitful. Only what is direct is powerful. Anything else is tantamount to a
reheated delicacy. It behooves each man to reconstruct his life: the little that he finds
in himself, he reconstructs. Anyone who, under the pretext of guiding the new genera-
tions, teaches them an absolute and isolated heap of doctrines, or preaches to them a
barbarous gospel of hate before sweetly murmuring in their ears about love, is a pre-
meditated assassin, shameless before God and an enemy of men. Anyone who, in one
way or another—in any way whatsoever—prevents the free use, the direct application,
and the spontaneous employment of the magnificent faculties of man, stands accused
of treachery against Nature! Welcome the good, valiant lancer, the ponderous jouster,
the knight of human liberty—the greatest order of knighthood—who comes directly
out of the epic poetry of our times, with neither Balbuena’s moans nor Ojeda’s sup-
plications;6 he who flung his generous hands toward the sky in the manner of prayer,
and lowered them, cupped, like a sonorous amphora, now replete with opulent and
vibrant stanzas, caressed by Olympian scintillations! The poem is in the man, deter-
mined to enjoy every apple, to make sport with every bit of knowledge from the tree
of paradise, and to transform the fire with which God, in ages past, had forged the ex-
terminating sword into a glowing hearth fire! The poem is in nature, the mother with
nourishing breasts, the wife who never stops loving, the oracle who always responds,
poet of a thousand languages, sorceress who can communicate what remains unsaid,
consoling woman who gives strength in life and preserves after death! Welcome the
good bard of Niagara, who has written an extraordinary and resplendent song in the
endless poem of nature!
The poem of Niagara! All that Niagara recounts—the voices of the torrent, the
agonies of the human soul, the majesty of the universal spirit, the titanic dialogue be-
tween the impatient man and disdainful nature; the desperate cry of a son, his great
father as yet unknown, who asks his mute mother for the secret of his birth; the shout

 Appendix 
of all men in the bosom of one; the heaving of the breast that responds to the ferocity
of the waves; the divine heat that scorches and soaks man’s brow as he confronts the
grandiose; the prophetic and softest commingling between rebellious, self-denying
man and fatal, revelatory nature; the tender nuptial with the eternal; the delightful
whirlwind in creation through which man turns to himself, drunk with force and jubi-
lation, as strong as a beloved monarch, this anointed king of nature.
The poem of Niagara! A halo of spirit surrounds the halo of colors in the water.
The simultaneous swell of all that lives, that will one day die, driven by the unseen,
rearing up and turning about, there in what remains unknown; the law of existence,
logic in the force of incomprehensible being, that destroys both martyrs and vil-
lains without apparent consideration, and like a starving ogre, swallows a handful
of evangelists in one breath, even as it leaves hordes of criminals alive on earth, like
red-mouthed vermin who feast on it as they will; this very road wherein men and thun-
derous cataracts explode, clash, rebel, leap into the sky, and sink into the deep; the
angelic clamor and combat of man captivated by an overwhelming law, which in the
very act of resignation and death, in blasphemy, rises up like a titan that would shake
entire worlds and roar; the hoarse voice of the cascade driven by a parallel law, a cas-
cade that moans in rage when it reaches the sea or cliff; and after everything, the tears
that now envelop it entirely, and the heartrending lament of a single soul: this is the
formidable poem that this man, in his age, saw in Niagara.
All history that continues to be written is the history of this poem. In the sense
that this poem is a representative work, to speak of it is to speak of the epoch that it
represents. The strongest links forged emit the highest sparks. To speak of something
as relative is pointless if it does not awaken any thought of the absolute. Everything
must be developed in such a way that it leads the mind to the general and the great.
Philosophy is no more than the secret of relations among various forms of existence.
The soul of this poet was moved by the enthusiasms, the solitudes, the misgivings,
the aspirations of genius in a singer. He presents himself before us, armed with every
weapon, in an arena where he sees neither combatants nor spectators; nor does he see
any prize. He runs in search of opponents, burdened with every weapon weighing on
him. He finds a mountain of water that passes him by; and since he has come with his
bosom filled with the desire for combat, he challenges the mountain of water!
Hardly had Bonalde cast his eyes on himself, and around him; and living as he
was in a time of upheavals and in a very cold land, he saw himself alone, a fervent dis-
ciple of a religion not yet established, with a heart ready for adoration, but with his
reason averse to reverence—a believer by instinct, a skeptic by reflection. In vain did
he seek the dust worthy of his virile brow, when he prostrated himself in homage; in
vain did he try to find his place, in this age wherein no land exists that has not dis-
rupted its people, in the confused and accelerated battle of the living; in vain, created
as he was to his own misfortune for heroic undertakings, and armed with the knowl-
edge of analysis that represses such enterprises (when it does not prohibit or ridicule
them), did he resolutely pursue the great actions of men, who now consider it an
honor and proof of a strong spirit not to attempt anything great, but rather something

Appendix  
easy, productive, and feasible. On his lips overflowed robust verses; in his hand shook
perhaps the sword of liberty—for certainly he had never before carried a sword;—in
his spirit the poignant anguish of living overflowing with untapped forces, not unlike
the little body of a turtle infused with the sap of a tree. The rushing winds beat against
his temples; the thirst of our days assailed his jaws; the past, nothing but a solitary
castle and empty suit of armor!; the present, nothing but a question, denial, rage,
blasphemy of defeat, scream of triumph!; the future, entirely obscured by the dust and
smoke of battle! And exhausted from searching in vain for heroic deeds among men,
it was to be the poet to salute the heroic feat of Nature.
And they understood one another. The torrent presented its voice to the poet;
the poet his cry of pain to the roaring marvel. Out of the sudden encounter between a
naive soul and a wondrous spectacle emerged this palpitating, overflowing, lush, luxu-
riant poem. At times it falters, because the words cleave the ideas instead of giving
them form. At times it rises to great heights, because it contains ideas that pass over
the lips as they would above a valley of reeds. The poem has a Pindaric ostentation,
a Heredian flight, rebellious curves, arrogant excesses, resplendent uprisings, heroic
rages.7 The poet loves, instead of remaining astonished. He is not terrified, he calls
out. He sheds every tear from his breast. He rebukes, strikes out, implores. He recti-
fies every arrogance of the mind. He would fearlessly brandish the scepter of darkness.
He seizes the fog, rips it, penetrates it. He evokes the God in man; it is buried in the
muddy cave: the air is frozen around him; he reemerges crowned with light; he sings
the hosanna! Light is the supreme enjoyment of men. Now he paints the sonorous,
turbulent, vertiginous river, crashing in a silver dust, evaporating in the many-hued
mist. The stanzas are paintings: either blizzard gusts, fire blazes, or lightning bolts.
Now Lucifer, now Prometheus, now Icarus. It is our age, facing our nature. Being this
is a privilege given to few. He recounted to Nature the sufferings of modern man. And
he was forceful, because he was sincere. He mounted the golden carriage.
This poem was an impression, a clash, a striking wing, a genuine work, sudden
rapture. Here and there can be seen the scholar who reads, a misfortunate character
in these clashes between man and Nature; but above it all, gallant and daring, leaps
man by his good fortune. The wailer stares on, but the feeler vehemently triumphs.
The torrent that tells all, tells him nothing; but after awhile the poet attunes his ear,
and in spite of the books of doubt that erect a barrier before him, he hears everything.
Potent ideas clash, hurl themselves, take shelter, wrestle and become intertwined with
one another. At times the letter bruises them, as the letter always does; at times it pro-
longs them, as a way of wounding them; oftentimes the copious and burning idea is
nobly contained in shining verse. All that the poet is sallies forth in these verses; maj-
esty evokes and brings all that is majestic to its feet. Bonalde’s stanza at this point
would be like a wave born of the restless sea, and it grows with each passing en-
counter with other waves, and towers above them, and coils, and noisily unfolds, and
goes to its death in the sonorous spume and irregular, rebellious whirlpools unbound
by form or extension, here lording over the sand and spreading out over it like a victor
that casts his cloak over the prisoner by captive; there deafeningly kissing the chiseled

 Appendix 
edges of the capricious breakers; yonder breaking explosively against the lofty edge of
the rocks. Its irregularity arises out of its sheer force. The perfection of the form is
almost always obtained at the cost of the perfection of the idea. Look at the lightning
bolt: does it conform to a straight path in its way down? When was the running mule
a prettier sight than the colt grazing in the meadow? A tempest is more beautiful than
a locomotive. By excess and turbulence are those works torn directly from the depths
of great souls marked.
And Pérez Bonalde loves his language, and caresses it, and punishes it; as there is
no pleasure equal to that of knowing from whence comes every word used, or how far
it will reach; nor is there anything better for broadening and strengthening the mind
than the painstaking study and proper application of language. After writing, one feels
the pride felt by a sculptor and painter. It is the diction of this well-rounded and beau-
tiful poem, with its ample stock, its wide canvas, its colors resistant to the sun. Each
phrase reaches the heights, as it comes from deep below, and falls scattering colors,
or folded with majesty, or fractured like the waters it portrays. At times, in the rush to
reach the fleeing image, the verse remains inconclusive, or concluded in haste. But its
height is constant—the wave, and the wing. Pérez Bonalde pampers what he writes;
but he is not a heavy-handed poet, nor does he want to be. As is obvious, he wants the
verse to stream forth from his sonorous pen, well minted and well dressed; he does
not want to be like others who approach their verse with a hammer of gold and burin
of silver, gadgets for cutting and incising, chipping away at one extreme here, reinforc-
ing a joint there, polishing and shaping the jewel without seeing that if the diamond
suffers from craftsmanship, a pearl would die from it. Poetic verse is a pearl. It can-
not be like the lush rose, full of leaves, but rather like the Malabar jasmine, loaded
with fragrance. The leaf must be limpid, perfumed, solid, terse. Its every dale must be
a scent-filled vessel. Wherever verse breaks, it must release light and perfume. Like a
tree, poetic language must be pruned of all the frail, yellowish, or ill-fated branches,
leaving nothing more than the healthy and robust ones; so that, despite fewer leaves,
the branch may grow in a more dignified manner, and bear fruit better, and allow the
breeze to flutter around it more freely. Polishing is good enough, especially before the
verse is released from the lips and still remains in one’s mind. There it boils, like juice
fermenting in the wine cask. Moreover, wine is not improved after it has been aged
by adding alcohol and tannins; nor does verse appreciate after being dressed up and
adorned with accessories. It must be made of a piece and a sole inspiration, because it
is not the work of a laborer in mass production but rather that of a man in whose breast
nest condors, a man who must capitalize on the flapping of their wings. Thus did this
poem stream forth from Bonalde, and it is one of his talents: it was made of a piece.
Oh, this task of cutting, this mutilation of our children, this bartering of the
poet’s pick for the surgeon’s scalpel! Hence the final end of polished verses: deformed
and dead. As each word must bear its own spirit and bring its own train to the verse,
the reduction of verses is the reduction of the spirit, and changing them is reheating
the fermenting juice that, like coffee, must not be reheated. The soul of the verse cries
out as one maltreated, from these chisel blows. And it becomes less a painting of da

Appendix  
Vinci’s than a mosaic of Pompei’s. A trotting horse does not win battles. It is not in di-
vorce that one remedies the ills of marriage, but rather in choosing the bride well and
not being blind in times of mishaps regarding the real reasons for being together. Nor
does the high quality of poetic verse lie in its polished glow, but rather in its having
come into being winged and singing. Nor must the verse be considered finished in the
hopes of ending it later; it may be finished later in appearance, but not truly, nor with
that enchantment, that virginal aspect possessed by every verse that has not been cut
or overburdened. Because wheat is stronger than verse, and crumbles and goes bad
when it changes form too many times. When verse is considered finished it must be
armed with every weapon, with a strong and resonant breastplate, and white plumage
to crown the sturdy helmet of resplendent steel.
All this notwithstanding, like the loose straw that one did not bother to gather
up at the first whiff of perfume when the perfume box was opened, some lines [of
the poem] that could have been finished, remain at loose ends: here an epithet is ex-
cessive; there an untimely assonance stands out; further on a bold antepenultimate
flaunts its capricious volute; but as an occasional verse takes flight a bit short of wing,
which really is no big deal in this gathering of verses abounding with great wings—
since, as I consider to be characteristic of the time, there appear infectious cries and
cultivated moments of despair, akin to St. Elmo’s fire in a sky already populated with
stars—well then! It may be true, but such a trifle is a matter for pedants. Whoever
goes in search of mountains does not bother to gather up stones along the way. S/he
greets the sun, and pays homage to the mountain. Anything more is gossip for the
after dinner dessert and coffee. Such matters are whispered from ear to ear. After all,
who does not know that language is the rider of thought, not its horse? The imper-
fection of human language in order to secretly express man’s judgments, affects, and
designs is a perfect and absolute proof of the need for a future existence.
It is now perhaps time for me to comfort this most gallant poet’s soul, knocked
about and embarrassed as it is; to assure him of what he longs to know; to pour into
him the knowledge bequeathed to me by the gaze of children, a gaze full of fury, akin
to someone who enters a humble house, having come from a palace; and by the last
gaze of the dying, which signifies less a farewell than an appointment. Bonalde him-
self never denies, but rather inquires. He has no absolute faith in the next life; but
neither does he possess any absolute doubt. When he is asked in desperation what is
to become of him, he remains quiet, as if hearing what was left unspoken. He takes
faith in the eternal aspect hidden in those conversations and responds to such ques-
tions with bravery. In vain would he fear death, when he finally rests his head on the
grass carpet of the earth. In vain would the echo, forever playing with his words, re-
spond that nothing survives the hour that seems to us the very last—because nature,
like the Creator himself, is jealous of her best creatures, and seeks to confuse the
judgment that she has given them. The echo in the soul speaks of deeper things than
the echo of the torrent. There is no torrent like our soul. No! Human life is not life en-
tirely! The fall is an endless descent. Yet the mind would not be able to conceive what
it was incapable of realizing; existence cannot merely be the abominable plaything of

 Appendix 
a malignant madman. Man leaves this life like a folded cloth, fond of displaying its
colors, in search of a frame; like a gallant ship, anxious to cross entire worlds, which
in the end, must empty out into the oceans. Death is jubilant, resumptive, a new task.
Human life would be a repugnant and barbarous invention if it were limited to life on
earth. After all, what is our brain, sown with exploits, but a sign of a certain country in
which all must find their end? A tree is born in the soil of the earth and finds its envi-
ronment by extending its branches; water does the same thing in the mother deep and
has its wellspring in the mind: the jubilant apprehensions of incomplete sacrifices,
the end to a series of spiritual feats, the thrills that accompanied the imagination of
a pure and honest life, the impossibility of attaining it on this earth. Will there be no
space for this golden grove to extend its branches into the air? What more would there
be for the man when he dies, for all that he had labored in life; who, giant that he
is, has lived condemned to weave a monk’s baskets and fashion little nests for gold-
finches? What must the tender and overflowing spirit be—which lacking productive
labor, takes refuge in itself, and emerges completely autonomous and unemployed by
the earth? This adventurous poet has not even entered into the bitter bosom of life.
He has not suffered enough. Out of suffering wells forth faith like a halo of light,
faith in the life to come. He has lived with the mind, which has darkened; and with
love, which at times had deceived him; he has only to live with the pain that comforts,
purifies, and elucidates. After all, what is a poet but the living nourishment of the illu-
minating flame? Cast his body into the fire, and the smoke will rise to the sky: let the
clarity of this marvelous conflagration scatter, like a soft heat, throughout the earth!
Fare you well, sincere and honorable poet, who partakes of his own self for sus-
tenance. Behold the lyre that sounds! Behold the poet whose heart beats wildly, who
fights with his hands turned to the sky, who turns his arrogant face to the living air!
Behold a man, a marvel in his supreme art, a rare fruit in this land of men! Behold
a hale harbinger who casts a sure foot, an avaricious mind, apprehensive and serene
eyes on this pile of temple remains, propped-up walls, gilded cadavers, and wings
made into chains, which so many artful opponents with a sinister fanaticism would
seek to employ in the service of rebuilding a prison for modern man! He does not
pursue poetry, fleeting spume of the deep sea, that only floats to the surface when a
deep sea exists beneath it: fickle charmer who neither cares for her suitors, nor re-
frains from her caprices to the misfortunate. The poet keeps the early hour, when the
body distends and the eyes are inundated with sobs, the bosom fills with intoxica-
tion, and the sails of life swell with unknown winds, and the boat moves naturally
with the speed of a mountain. The air of the tempest is his own, and he sees in him-
self the lights, the half-opened abysses bordered by fire, and the mystical promises. In
this poem, the poet bared his tormented bosom to the pure air, his tremulous arms to
the pious oracle, his scorched brow to the calming caresses of sacred nature. He was
free, humble, inquisitive, master of himself, knight of the spirit. Who are those sober
enough to arrogate to themselves the right to restrain such a thing born free; to suffo-
cate the flame lit by nature, to deprive such a creature as august as the human being of
the natural exercise of his faculties? Who are those owls who would keep vigil over the

Appendix  
cradle of the newly born, only to drink the oil of life from their golden lamp? Who are
these wardens of the mind, who imprison the soul, this gallant Castilian, behind two
rows of bars? Is there a greater blasphemer than one who, under the pretext of under-
standing God, dares to correct the work of the Divinity? Oh Liberty! Never stain your
white tunic, lest the newborn fear you! Fare you well, Poet of the raging Torrent, who
would dare be free in an epoch of pretentious slaves; thus do men accustom them-
selves to servitude, so that even when they have ceased to be slaves of sovereignty,
with shameless humiliation, they now begin to be slaves of Liberty! Fare you well,
illustrious singer, and see how well indeed I esteem the value of the word[s] I tell you!
Fare you well, master of the flaming sword, rider of the winged horse, rhapsody of the
oaken lyre, man who has opened his bosom to nature! Cultivate the great, you who
brought all forms of cultivation to the earth. Leave the small matters to the small. May
these solemn winds always lead you. Put aside the hollow, worn-out rhymes, strewn
with pearls and sprinkled with artificial flowers; these are more fit for sleight-of-hand
tricks and the diversion of idle ingenuity than the ignited spark of the soul, the feat
worthy of those barons of the mind. Gather together these contagious burdens into
a tall sheaf: the Latin tepidities, the showy rhymes, the faraway doubts, the evils of
books, prescribed faith; throw them into the fire, and in these cold, sorrowful times
warm yourself in the healthy flame. Now that the sleeping creature in the mind has
been awakened, every man has risen to stand on earth: lips compressed, their chests
courageously bared, fists reaching for the sky, demanding of life its secret.

Notes

 Venezuelan romantic poet Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde (–), exiled from his country
under the dictatorship of Guzmán Blanco, established his residence in New York. There, he
met up with Martí, whom Pérez Bonalde had met when he was still residing in Caracas. In
New York, Pérez Bonalde published his Poema del Niágara () with this Prólogo by Martí. For
its sharp diagnosis of the epoch herein portrayed, as well as the novelty of its aesthetic ideas,
many consider the prologue to be the literary manifesto of Latin American modernism inas-
much as it is the first conscious evaluation of the modern world in the Hispanic context.
 Measured himself against a giant. Some annotators of Martí’s work take this to refer to the colos-
sal size of the Niagara waterfalls. It is more likely that he is indirectly alluding to the great
Cuban poet José María de Heredia (–). Heredia had written on the same subject
much earlier (Niágara, ) with great literary success: his poem immediately earned him a
well-deserved celebrity.
 In the arms of Alexander and Cebetes. In the fifth century, writer Tiberio Claudio Donato wrote a
Life of Virgil, which came to be well known: it was frequently used later as a prologue to vari-
ous editions and translations of Virgil’s work. In it, Donato writes: ‘‘Virgil had a particular
affection for two young slaves. One was named Cebes and the other Alexander. The latter, who
became the subject matter of an ecalogue [the theme of which is the fatal love of the shep-
herd Corydon for the youth Alexis], had been presented to Virgil as a present from his friend
Asinio Pollion. The care that the former invested in shaping the spirits of both youths was not
futile. He made a poet out of Cebes and a grammarian out of Alexander’’ (from the French

 Appendix 
 edition of Les poésies de Virgile, ed. P. F. Catrou [Paris: Frères Barbou, ]; innumerable trans-
lations of Donato’s Life omit this passage). Here, Martí has derived Cebetes from the accusa-
tive form of Cebes, not the nominative, which would have been the more correct spelling.
 Auvergne. Old province in southern France. The Auvergnese are portrayed as being a mountain
people—at once robust, simple, dignified, and hospitable; and coarse and ignorant.
 Ugolino. In cantos  and  of his Inferno, Dante narrates the history of Count Ugolino della
Gherardesca, who after being conquered by the rival family Visconti in battles for control of
the government in the Italian city of Pisa, ended his life locked up in a tower with his children
and grandchildren, all of whom died of hunger. In Dante’s version, he implies that Ugolino
devoured his children, or at least chewed on their bones. The historical veracity of this event
has been much disputed.
 Balbuena’s moans nor Ojeda’s supplications. These are references to Bernardo de Balbuena (–
), author of the famous  epic poem El Bernardo o la victoria de Roncesvalles (Bernardo, or the
Victory of Roncesvalles) and the descriptive  poem Grandeza Mexicana (Mexican Grandeur); and
Dominican monk Diego de Ojeda (–), based in Lima, Peru, where he wrote one of
the most important epico-religious poems of Spain’s Siglo de Oro: La Christiada (The Christened
One) in . In the context of this essay, in which Martí is alluding to an old epic poetry that
required patient elaboration, it is doubtful that, as some of Martí’s commentators have as-
sumed, this allusion refers to the Spanish philologist Manuel de Valbuena (d. ), who had
contributed to the Real Academia’s Diccionario de Autoridades (Standard Dictionary); neither does
it refer to the Spanish journalist Antonio de Valbuena (–), known for his satirical
articles on correct grammatical usage.
 Pindar (– ...) is perhaps the best known lyric poet of the ancient Greeks, and his
poetic works were often used as the standard for evaluating poetry in the neoclassical period.
‘‘Heredian’’ refers to José María de Heredia (see note  above). Trans.

Appendix  
Appendix  Coney Island

In human affairs, nothing equals the marvelous prosperity of the United States of the
North.1 Whether or not deep roots are lacking in them; whether or not the ties that
bind sacrifice and a common suffering are more enduring than those that bind the
common interest; whether or not this colossal nation will carry ferocious and tremen-
dous elements in its bowels; whether or not the absence of a feminine spirit, origin of
artistic sense and complementary to the national being, will prevail and corrupt the
heart of this astonishing people, this is what the times will tell.
Now more than ever, it is certainly true that never a happier, merrier, more well-
equipped, more jovial, and frenetic crowd has lived around such useful labor in any
other region of the land, nor is there one that has brought about and enjoyed a greater
fortune, nor is there one that has covered a greater number of rivers and oceans
with ships bedecked in merriment, nor is there one that has extended itself with a
more tumultuous order and ingenuous happiness through gentle coastlines, gigantic
wharves, and glittering and fantastic promenades.
North American newspapers come full of hyperbolic descriptions of the original
beauties and singular attractions of one such summer place, overflowing with people,
dotted with sumptuous hotels [and] commuted by an aeriel railway; sprinkled with
gardens, kiosks, small theaters, beer gardens, arenas, tents, innumerable carriages,
picturesque assemblies, mobile stalls, auctions, fountains.
French newspapers become a mere echo of this renown.
From the furthest reaches of the American Union come legions of intrepid ladies
and gallant peasants to admire the splendid landscapes, the incomparable wealth, the
blinding variety, the Herculean drive, the astonishing sight of Coney Island, this fa-
mous island, heap of abandoned earth four years ago, and today the spacious area of
repose, refuge, and recreation for a hundred thousand New Yorkers who attend the
joyful beaches daily.
Four little towns are united by carriageways, streetcars, and steam trains. The
first, wherein , people can easily fit at the same time in the dining room of a given
hotel, is called Manhattan Beach; another, which has arisen like Minerva with helmet
and spear,2 armed with ships, plazas, piers, and murmuring orchestras, is called Rock-
away; another, the least important, which takes its name from a hotel of extraordinary
capacity and weighty construction, is called Brighton; but the attraction of the island
is not the faraway Rockaway, nor the monotonous Brighton, nor the aristocratic and
solemn Manhattan Beach; it is Cable, the laughing Cable, with its elevator higher than
the Trinity tower in New York—two times higher than the tower of our cathedral—to
whose peak travelers climb, suspended by a diminutive cage at a height that gives one
vertigo; it is Cable, with its two iron docks that advance over the sea on elegant pillars
three blocks in length, with its Sea Beach Palace, which is no more than a hotel now,
and which was once the famed ‘‘Agricultural Building’’ during the Philadelphia Expo-
sition—transported, as if by the art of enchantment, to New York and re-elevated in
its original form, without so much as a splint lacking, on the coast of Coney Island; it
is Cable, with its fifty-cent museums, where they exhibit human monsters, outlandish
fish, bearded women, melancholic dwarves, and rickety elephants, which the adver-
tisement pompously promotes as the largest elephants in the world; it is Cable, with
its  orchestras, with its cheerful balls, with its battalions of carriages for children,
its gigantic cow that, milked night and day, never fails to produce a fresh twenty-five
centimeter glass, its countless couples of loving pilgrims who spontaneously burst
into those tender lines of García Guitiérrez:3

Aparejadas
van por las lomas
las cogujadas
y las palomas

(Coupled together
they pass through the hills
the crested skylarks
and the doves)

It is Cable, where families attempt to look not for the sulfurous and nauseating air
of New York, but the clean and invigorating air of the oceanside, where the poor
mothers—all gathered together around one of the tables that one finds free in one
of these extremely spacious salons, opening an enormous box full of familial provi-
sions for lunch—squeeze against their breasts their ill-fated babies, who seem as if
devoured, drained, eaten away by this terrible disease of summer that cuts down chil-
dren like the sickle reaps the grain—the cholera infantum. Ships come and go; trains
whistle, blow smoke, enter and exit, emptying their serpent breast swollen with fami-
lies onto the beach; women rent their blue flannel outfits and coarse straw hats tied
under their chins; men, dressed in simpler garb, lead the women by the hand and
enter the sea; the children, barefoot, wait on the wet seashore for the roaring wave to
wet them, and they escape when it arrives, concealing their terror with laughs, only to
return en masse, as if to defy the enemy in a game that never exhausts the innocents,
lying prostrate only an hour earlier from the severe heat; or they enter and leave, like
marine butterflies, in the fresh air of the breakers, and since each one comes provided
with a bucket and a spade, they entertain each other by filling each other’s buckets
with the burning sand on the beach; or after they have bathed (imitating, of course,

Appendix  
the conduct of the more serious people of both sexes, who do not hold censure and
shock in high regard, as might those who think as we think in this land), they throw
themselves on the sand and let themselves be covered, knocked about, massaged, and
enveloped in the burning sand, because this is held to be healthy exercise, and for
such a singular ease it offers a superficial, ordinary, and uproarious intimacy, at least
from the perspective of those prosperous people so full of enthusiasm.
But the shocking thing there is not this way of bathing, nor is it the cadaverous
features of the children, nor the capricious hats and incomprehensible dress of those
damsels, noted for their prodigality, their extravagance, and their exaggerated disposi-
tion toward happiness; nor is it the conversation between lovers, nor the bathhouses,
nor the operas sung on café tables, dressed as Edgard and Romeo, and as Lucía and
Juliette;4 nor is it the grimaces and shouts of the Black minstrels, who could alas! never
be like the minstrels from Scotland; nor is it the majestic beach, nor the mild and
serene sun; what one finds so shocking there is the size, the quantity, the unexpected
effect of human activity, this immense valve of open pleasure on an immense people,
these restaurants that seen from afar look like lofty armies, these roads that from a
two-mile distance are not roads but long carpets of heads; this daily spillage of an ex-
traordinary people onto an extraordinary beach; this mobility, this talent for advance-
ment, this change of form, this feverish rivalry of wealth, this monumental aspect of
this ensemble, which legitimately pits this nation of bathhouses in competition with
the majesty of the land that supports it, the sea that caresses it, and the sky that crowns
it; this rising tide, this annihilating and incomparable expansiveness, solid and fre-
netic, and this naturalness in the marvelous; this is what one finds shocking there.
Other peoples—and we among them—live as if devoured by a sublime inner
demon, which drives us to the relentless pursuit of an ideal of love or glory; and
when we grasp some level of this ideal that we have pursued, with the pleasure of an
eagle who seizes its prey, a new urge unsettles us, a new ambition spurs us on, a new
aspiration launches us into a new vehement longing, and from the eagle escapes a
once-imprisoned free rebel butterfly, as if defying us to follow it, shackling us to its
scrambled flight.
Not these tranquil spirits, disturbed only by the anxiety to possess a fortune. The
eyes are drawn to those reverberant beaches; one enters and leaves by those passages,
as vast as the pampas; one ascends to the peaks of those colossal houses, as high
as mountains; seated on chairs along the seashore, strollers fill their lungs with that
potent and benevolent air; of course, it is common knowledge that a melancholic sad-
ness seizes the men of our Spanish-American communities who live there, who seek
in vain and do not find; for however much their senses grant importance to their first
impressions, or captivate their eyes, or their reason darken and obfuscate, these men
are possessed by the anguish of solitude in the end, the nostalgia for a higher spiritual
world that invades and inflicts them; they feel like sheep without a mother or pastor,
astray from the flock; and whether or not it shows in their eyes, the[ir] frightened
spirit breaks down in the most bitter torrent of tears, because that great land is bereft
of spirit.

 Appendix 
 But what a coming and going! What a flow of money! What facilities for all to en-
joy! What an absolute absence of any sadness or visible poverty! Everything is laid out
in the open air: noisy groups, the enormous restaurants, this original love of the North
Americans, in which almost none of those elements that constitute the sentimental,
tender, and elevated love of our lands enters in. The theater, photography, the bath-
houses; everything is open-air. Some lift weights, because for the North Americans,
this is a source of positive enjoyment, or of real pain—depending on the number of
pounds; others, in exchange for fifty cents, will receive an envelope from a strapping
German woman in which their good fortune is written; others, with incomprehen-
sible delight, drink slender long and narrow glasses (in the shape of artillery shells) of
distasteful mineral water.
Some climb on spacious carriages that will bring them from Manhattan to Brigh-
ton in the gentle twilight hour; another lands his boat, which he was rowing earlier in
the company of a smiling girlfriend, as happy as a little girl, who leaps onto the ani-
mated beach, supporting herself with a firm grip on his shoulder; one absorbed group
admires an artist who is cutting a black piece of paper, which he later stamps onto
white cardboard, the silhouette of which he wants to portray in this singular man-
ner; another group celebrates the skill of a lady who, in a stall that cannot measure
more than three-quarters of a yard, creates curious flowers made of fish skins; with
bellowing laughs, others applaud the skill with which a ball thrower has managed
to hit the nose of a misfortunate man of color, who in exchange for a measly day’s
wage, stands day and night with his frightened head stuck through a hole made in the
canvas, avoiding the pitches of the ball throwers with ridiculous movements and ex-
aggerated faces; the bearded and venerable sit heavily on a wooden tiger, or a griffin,
or an effigy, or on the back of a boa constrictor, all of which are placed in circles, along
with horses, that spin around a central mast for a few minutes to sonatas played out
of tune by amateur musicians. The less wealthy eat crabs and oysters on the beach, or
sweets and meats laid out on tables for free, as is offered by certain hotels; the well-
to-do squander large quantities of fruit punch in doses, which they drink like wine;
and in strange and solid delicacies that our palate, accustomed to the artistic and the
airy, would doubtless reject.
Such people eat quantity; we, quality.
And this excess waste, this hubbub, this crowd, this scandalous wasp nest, lasts
from June to October, from morning until midnight—without interval, without inter-
ruption, without any change.
At night, how beautiful it is! True, any thinker would find shocking so many a
married woman walking around without husband; so many a woman strolling by the
wet seashore with a scarf around her shoulders, wrapped up in her pleasure and un-
mindful that the all-too-penetrating air must inevitably wound the flaccid nature of
her offspring; so many a damsel who leaves her little one behind at the hotel, in the
arms of a rough Irish woman; and who, on returning from her long walk, neither takes
the child in her arms, nor kisses him on the lips, nor satisfies the crying child’s hunger.
At night, there is no panorama of the city more breathtaking than that obtained

Appendix  
on that Cable beach. Does one see the heads of people during the day? One sees even
more lights at night. Seen at some distance from the sea, the four populations, radi-
ant in the shadows, look as if the stars that populate the sky had unexpectedly fallen
into the seas and had been reunited into four colossal groups.
The electric lights inundate the hotel plazas, the English gardens, the concert
areas, the beach itself where one can count beneath that vibrant light the grains of
sand, with a magic and caressing clarity. From afar these places seem like restless
higher spirits, laughing and diabolical spirits that pass through the morbid gaslights,
the threads of red lamps, Chinese orbs, Venetian chandeliers. As in the full light of
day, one can read newspapers, billboard signs, letters, everywhere. It is a town of
stars; and there lie the orchestras, the dances, the hullabaloo, the crash of the surf, the
noise of men, the chorus of laughs, the pleasure of the air, the loud cry of street ven-
dors, the swift trains, the light carriages; until, when the time to return has arrived,
like a monster that empties its bowels entirely into the hungry jaws of another mon-
ster, that colossal crowd, crushed and compact, mobs the entrances of the trains that
moan when they are full, as if tired from the weight, on their way through the solitude
that they transform by redeeming it; and they later yield their mixed-up cargo to the
gigantic ocean liners, lit up by harps and violins, that lead to the wharves and sprinkle
the tired passengers into a thousand cars and roads like veins of iron, across slumber-
ing New York City.

Notes

 This chronicle first appeared in the Colombian (Bogotá) magazine La Pluma,  December
. See José Martí, Obras Completas, vol.  (Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, –),
–. Trans.
 Minerva. Roman goddess; originally the Greek goddess Athena, who was born from the head
of Zeus completely armed for battle.
 Antonio García Gutiérrez. Spanish playwright and poet (–).
 Edgardo and . . . Lucía. Characters from the opera Lucia de Lammermoor (), written by Italian
composer Gaetano Donizetti (–).

 Appendix 
INDEX
Abrams, Meyer H.,  n.,  n.
Adorno, Theodor, xvi, xxxiii n., , , 
n., ,  n., ,  n.,  n.,
,  n.
Aesthetic(s), xxxix, xlv, –, , –,
–, , –, –, , , –
; anti-, –, , , –, –;
and literature, –, –, –, –
, , , –, –, –, ;
of luxury, , –, – n., –,
, ; and politics, –, –; and
self-critique of autonomy, , , , .
See also Arielism; Chronicle, modern(ist);
Culture: and culturalism; Letters; Literary
ideology; Literature; Martí, José; Style: and
stylization; Writer: fin de siècle
Alberdi, Juan Bautista,  n.
Aldrey, Fausto T., –
Alienation. See Estrangement
Alsina, Valentín, , –
Altamarino, Carlos and Sarlo, Beatriz, 
n.
Althusser, Louis,  n.
Alvear, Torcuato de, ,  n.
Anderson, Benedict, 
Anti-imperialism, , , –, , –
, . See also Spanish-American War
()
Arendt, Hannah,  n.
Argentina: literature of, , , , , . See
also Sarmiento
Arielism, xxxix, , , , , , –,
–. See also Aesthetic(s); Culture: and
culturalism
Arlt, Roberto, 
Art for art’s sake, . See Aesthetic(s); Bürger,
Peter; Literature: fin de siècle
Ascasubi, Hilario, ,  n.
Assis, Machado de, –,  n.
Azúa, Carlos Real de,  n.
Balbuena, Bernardo de,  n.
Barbarism. See Civilization and barbarism
Barceló, Javier Malagón, viii
Barthes, Roland, ,  n.
Bastos, María Luisa, –
Baudelaire, Charles, , , ,  n.
Beauty. See Aesthetic(s)
Belles lettres. See Letters
Bello, Andrés, viii, xv–xvi, xxxv, ,  n., –
, ,  nn., , , –; division of
knowledge in, –; eloquence in, –,
, ; and Sarmiento, –, –, 
n.. See also Letters
Beltrán, Oscar,  n.
Benjamin, Walter, viii,  n., , n., ,
–,  n. and n.,  n., –
n., – n.,  n.
Berman, Marshall, xxxiii n.
Beverley, John, xxxi–xxxii n.
Bidau, Eduardo, and Piñero, Norberto, –,

Bilbao, Francisco, –
Bolívar, Simón, 
Bonalde, José Antonio Pérez, xxxv–xl,  n..
See also Martí, José
Borges, Jorge Luis,  n.,  n.
Bourdieu, Pierre,  n.
Brooklyn Bridge, –
Buffalo Bill, 
Bulnes, Francisco, –,  n.
Bunge, Carlos,  n.
Bürger, Peter, xli, xlvi n., – n., ,
–
Burrows, Susanna,  n.
Cambaceres, Eugenio, , –, 
Campos, Haroldo de,  n.
Capitalism, xl, , , –, ; and the
newspaper, –, –, –, –,
 n., . See also Culture: industry;
Journalism
Casal, Julián del, xli, –, –, , ,

Casey, Calvert,  n.
Castelar, Emilio, 
Castellanos, Juan de,  n.
Catastrophe: in Sarmiento, –, –; in
Martí, , –, 
Centennials. See Latin America: centennials
Certeau, Michel de,  nn., ,  n., ,
 n.
Chronicle, modern(ist), xli–xlii, xliv–xlv, –
, –, , –,  n., –, 
n., , –, –, –, –,
– n.; and the essay, –, .
See also Aesthetic(s); Journalism; Strolling;
Style: and stylization
Científicos. See Positivism
Citizenship, xxxvi, xliii, , ,  n., ,
, , , . See also Law; Letters;
Nation-state consolidation
City: as emblem, , –, –, –;
and gender, , –; and the newspaper,
–, –
Civilization (and barbarism), xxxix, xlii, –
, , , –,  n., , –, ,
–, –, –, 
Clark, T.J., –,  n.
Clifford, James, xii, xxvi
Conant, William C., ,  nn., 
Concha, Jaime,  n.
Coney Island, –, –, –, 
n., , –
Consumerism. See Fetishism
Coronil, Fernando, xi-xii
Cortázar, Julio, –
 Index
Creole, 
Criminology, 
Cruz Malavé, Arnaldo,  n.
Cuba, –
Cuban Revolutionary Party (), 
Culture: and culturalism, xxiv, xxxvi, ,
–, –, , –, ; high,
–, –, , –,  n.;
industry, , , , , , –;
mass, xvi–xvii, xxxiii n., , , , ,
, , –,  n., , , ,
–; national, , –, –, –
. See also Aesthetic(s): and literature;
Arielism; Fetishism; Humanities
Dana, Charles, 
Darío, Rubén, xxxvi, xli, , , , –,
 n.,  n., , , , , , 
n.,  n., –, –, –, ,
–,  n., ,  n.. See also
Aesthetic(s); Writer: fin de siècle
Decadentism. See Darío, Rubén
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix, xxxi n.
and n., xxxiii n.,  n.,  n., ,
 n.,  n., 
Dependency: economic. See Modernization:
uneven
Derrida, Jacques, viii,  n.,  n.
Díaz, Porfirio, , , , , 
Díaz Quiñones, Arcadio,  n.
Disenchantment of the world. See Weber, Max
Drinnon, Richard, xxx
Du Bois, W. E. B., xxvii
Edison, Thomas A., –
Eloquence. See Bello, Andrés
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, –,  n.
Encyclopedism, , , 
Enlightenment, , , ,  n., , , ,
, , , , , 
Escandell, Noemí,  n.
Essay, xliv, , , –, . See also
Chronicle
Estrangement, xlii, ,  n., –, –
, –, , , , , , 
n.
Exile, xxxv–xxxvii, xviii, xxviii–xxix, , ,
 , –; in Martí, –, –, ,
–, 
Facundo Quiroga, Juan, , –
Family: crisis of the, –, , 
Feminization, , , –, –, –,
, ,  n., . See also Aesthetic(s):
and luxury
Fernández Retamar, Roberto, xxxi, xxxii n.,
xxxiii n.
Fetishism, –, –,  n.. See also
Aesthetic(s): and luxury
Figueroa, Sotero,  n.
Fin de siècle writers. See Writers: fin de siècle
Flaneur. See Strolling
Flaubert, Gustave, . See also Aesthetic(s):
modernist
Fornaris, José, 
Foucault, Michel, xviii,  n., – n.,
 n.,  n.,  n.
Franco, Jean, xl,  n.,  n., ,  n.,
,  n.
Frankfurt School, . See also Adorno, Theodor
Gamboa, Federico, –, 
García Canclini, Nestor, xxxii n.
García Gutiérrez, Antonio, 
García Lorca, Federico, 
García Marruz, Fina,  n., –,  n.
Gift-economy, , – n.
Gilroy, Paul, xxvi-xxviii
Goldar, Ernesto, 
Gómez, Eusebio. See Criminology
Gómez, Máximo, , 
Gómez Carrillo, Enrique, xli, , , –,
, –, ,  n.
González, Aníbal,  n.,  n.
González Echevarría, Roberto, x n.,  n.,
 n.,  n.
González Prada, Manuel, , –, , 
n., –
Gossman, Lionel, ,  nn., 
Goyena, Pedro,  n.
Grammar and grammaticism. See Bello,
Andrés
Gramsci, Antonio, xxxiii n.,  n., ,
–,  n., 
Groussac, Paul, , , , 
Gutiérrez, José María, 
Gutiérrez Girardot, Rafael, xl–xli, ,  n.,
 n.,  n.
Gutiérrez Nájera, Manuel, xli, , ,-,
–, , –, ,  n.
Habermas, Jürgen, xi–xiii, xxiii, xxxi n.,
xxxi n., ,  n.,  n., , –,
–,  n.,  n.
Halperín Donghi, Tulio,  n.,  n., 
n., 
Hamon, Philippe,  n., – n.
Hauser, Arnold, ,  n.
Haussmann, Baron, , ,  n., 
n.
Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, xxxix–xl, ,  n.,
–, ,  n., , , –, 
nn., 
Heredia, José M., ,  n.
Hostos, Eugenio María de, ,  n., –,
 n.
Humanities, ,  n., –. See also
Letters
Imperialism, xvii, xxix–xxx, –, ,
, ,  nn., . See also Spanish-
American War ()
Indigenismo, 
Intellectuals: traditional vs. organic, xlii–xliii,
,  nn., , , –. See also Writer
Interior: as aesthetic autonomy. See Aes-
thetic(s); Arielism; Chronicle: modernist;
Culture: and culturalism; Literature: fin de
siècle; Martí, José: and poetry
Jackson, Helen Hunt, xii, –
Jameson, Frederic,  n.
Jay, Paul, xxxii n.
Jitrik, Noé, – n., ,  n.,  n.,
 n.
Journalism, xlii, –,  n., , ,
. See also Literature: and journalism;
Newspaper
Kant, Immanuel, viii, ,  n.
Kantorowicz, Ernst,  n.,  n.
Index 
Kaplan, Amy, xxix
Kaplan, Marcos,  n.
Kasson, John F.,  n., 
Katzman, Israel, 
Kitsch. See Art for art’s sake; Style: stylization
Knowledge-as-said. See Bello, Andrés
Krauze, Enrique,  n.
Lara, Agustín, 
Latin America: centennials in, , ,
–; and cultural identity, –, ,
–, , –, –; Latin Ameri-
canism, xlv, , , –, , , ,
 n., –,  n.,  n., ,
 n.
Latino writing, –
Laviera, Tato, –,  n.
Law, xxxvi–xxxix, xlii, , –, , –,
,  n.,  n., ; vs. letters, ,
–, –, – n.,  n., . See
also Citizenship; Civilization and barba-
rism; Letters; Rationalization; Writer: as
patrician intellectual
Legendre, Pierre,  n.
Letrado. See Writer: as patrician intellectual
Letters, xxxvi, –, ,  n., –,
–; and citizenship, –. See also
Bello, Andrés; Law; Writer: as patrician
intellectual
Lezama Lima, José, xxx,  n.
Lida, Raimundo,  n.,  n.
Literariness. See Style: stylization
Literary autonomization. See Literature: and
autonomization
Literary ideology, , , , – n., ,
 n., –, , 
Literato. See Literature: fin de siècle; Writer: fin
de siècle
Literature: as academic discipline, –, ,
–; autonomization in, xviii, xxxvii,
xxxix, xl–xlii, –, , , – n.,
 n., –, –, –, , ,
–, ; as critique of modernity, xxxv,
xxxviii, , , , –, –, ,
–, –; fin de siècle, –, ,
, , , , , , , –,
; as invented tradition, –, –
 Index
, , , –, ; and journalism,
–; pedagogical function in, –,
–; and state politics, xxxvi–xxxvii, 
n., –; travel, , –, –. See
also Aesthetic(s); Chronicle: modern(ist);
Civilization and barbarism; Culture; Let-
ters; Literary ideology; Martí, José; Style:
stylization; Writer
Litvak, Lily,  n.
Lizardi, Fernandez de, –
Lloyd, David, xv, xxxii n.
López, Lucio V., , 
Lott, Eric, xxxiii n.
Lott, Tommy, xxxiii n.
Ludmer, Josefina, , – n.
Lugones, Leopoldo, ,  nn., 
Lukacs, Gregory, ,  n.,  n.
Luz y Caballero, José de la, viii, –, –,
,  nn., 
Lyotard, Jean-François,  n., , , 
n.
Maceo, Antonio, 
Marcus, George, xii
Marcuse, Herbert,  n.,  n.
Market, xl–xli, –; and art, –, –
, –, –,  n., . See also
Capitalism; Journalism
Martél Miró, Julián, 
Martí, José, ix–x, xi–xii, xiv, xv–xxvi, , ,
–, –, –, , –, –
,  n., , , –,  n.,
, , , –,  n.,  n.,
 nn. , , ,  nn., ; and Amis-
tad funesta, ; and discourse of war, xii,
xvii, xviii–xxxi, , , –, –;
and Escenas norteamericanas [North American
Scenes], xii, xvii, xxxi, xliv–xlv, ,  n.,
, –, –, , –,  n.,
– n., , , ; and journal-
ism, –, –,  n., –; and
‘‘Our America,’’ xxix,  n., , –;
and the Poema del Niágara, xii, xvii, xxxv–xl,
, –,  n., –; and poetry,
xii, , –,  n.,  n., , ,
–,  nn., , –,  n.,
–,  n.; Ramona, –. See also
 Chronicle: modern(ist); Culture; Literature;
Writer: fin de siècle
Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel, 
Marx, Karl, xxxiii n.
Marx, Leo,  n.
Mass-culture. See Culture: mass
Mauss, Marcel,  n.
McLuhan, Marshall,  n.
Mejía, José M. Ramos,  n.
Mercado, Manuel, –, –, ,  n.
Mexico: revolutionary. See Latin America
Mignolo, Walter, xxxi
Miranda, Francisco de, ,  n.
Mistral, Gabriela, 
Mitre y Vedia, Bartólome, , –,  n.,
 n.
Mitre, Emilio, 
Modernism. See Chronicle: modernist; Lit-
eratures: fin de siècle; Style: stylization;
Writer: fin de siècle
Modernization, uneven, x, xiv, xvii, xl–xlii, ,
–, –, –, , –, , ,
, 
Molloy, Sylvia,  n., ,  n.,  n.
Monsiváis, Carlos,  n.,  n.
Mora, Jorge Aguilar,  n.
Mumford, Lewis, ,  n.
Nación, La (Buenos Aires), –, – n.
Nation-state consolidation, xxxvi, xlii, ,
, –, ,  n., –, –,
–, –, –. See also Citizen-
ship; Civilization and barbarism; Law;
Nationalism
Nationalism,  n., , –, –,
, 
Neruda, Pablo, 
Nervo, Amado, , 
Newspaper: and the city, –; news bul-
letin, , –; and rationalization,
–, . See also Chronicle: modernist;
Journalism; Market: and art; Nación, La
North/South dichotomy, –. See also
We/they antithesis
‘‘Nuestra América.’’ See Martí, José: and ‘‘Our
America’’
Obligado, Rafael, 
Olivio Jiménez, José, ix
Onís, Federico de, 
Orality: and/vs. writing, –, – n.,
–,  n., 
Organic intellectual. See Intellectuals
Orientalism, , 
Orígines. See Lezama Lima, José
Ortega y Gasset, José, , , 
Oyuela, Calixto, , 
Pacheco, José Emilio, xl, ,  n., –,
 n.
Partido Revolucionario Cubano (). See
Cuban Revolutionary Party
Paz, Octavio, xl, , 
Piglia, Ricardo, –
Piñero, Norberto. See Bidau, Eduardo
Poe, Edgar Allan, 
Poetry, xli–xlii, –, – n., , –
. See also Bello, Andrés; Darío, Rubén;
Heredia, José M.; Laviera, Tato; Literature;
Martí, José; Sarmiento, Domingo F.
Porush, David,  n.
Positivism, xxxix, ,  n., –, 
Postmodern poetics, –, –
Poulantzas, Nicos, ,  n., ,  n.,
 n.
Quiroga, Horacio, 
Rabasa, José, xi
Rama, Angel, viii–ix, xxxvii, xl, xlvi,  n., 
n., , –, ,  n.,  n., ,
 n., –,  nn., , 
Ramos, Julio,  n.,  n.
Rationalization, xlvi n., ,  n., –,
. See also Literature: autonomization in;
Modernization: uneven
Reification, critique of. See Fetishism
Republic of letters. See Letters
Reyes, Alfonso, xxix, ,  nn., ,  n.,
–,  n.,  n.
Riffaterre, Michel,  n.
Rimbaud, Arthur, 
Rivera Cambas, Manuel, 
Roca, Julio A., 
Index 
Rodó, José E., xxxix, xlv, , , –, –,
 n.,  n., , , –, , 
n., , , –, , –, .
See also Arielism; Culture: and culturalism
Rodriguez, Manuel Díaz, 
Roebling, John A., –, 
Rojas, Ricardo, , ,  nn., ,  n.,
–, 
Romanticism,  n., , , 
Romero, José Luis, 
Rómulo Fernández, Juan,  n.
Rosas, Juan Manuel. See Civilization and
barbarism
Rotker, Susana, xxxi n.
Saco, José Antonio, , , ,  n., 
n., –, 
Said, Edward, , , –
Saldívar, José David, xxxiv n.
Salinas, Pedro,  n.,  n.
Santi, Enrico Mario,  n.
Sarmiento, Domingo, xv, –, –,  n.,
 n., –, , –,  n., –
, , –,  n., ,  nn.,
, . See also Bello, Andrés; Civilization
and barbarism; Culture: and culturalism;
Exile
Schiller, Friedrich von, ,  n.
Secularization. See Rationalization; Weber,
Max
Sellén, Francisco, 
Sierra, Justo, , 
Silva, José Asunción, –, 
Simmel, Georg, , ,  n.
Sommer, Doris,  n.
Spanish-American War (), xxix–xxx, xxix,
, , . See also Imperialism
Spivak, Gayatri, – n.
Starobinski, Jean,  n.
Strolling, –, –, –, . See
also Chronicle: modern(ist); Style: and
stylization; Writer: fin-de siècle
Style: and stylization, ,  n., –, ,
,  n., , , , –, –
, ,  n.. See also Aesthetic(s);
Chronicle: modernist; Writer: fin de siècle
 Index
Subaltern representation, –
Subirats, Euduardo,  n.
Tableau vivant, –,  n., 
Ten Years War (Cuba), 
Thom, René,  n.
Trachtenberg, Alan,  n.
Translation, –, , 
United States, –, , – n., 
Vagrancy. See Saco, José Antonio
Vallejo, Cesar, 
Varona, Enrique J., xliii, –,  nn., 
Vattimo, Gianni, 
Vasconcelos, José, –,  n., 
Vedia, Enrique de, –
Vega, El Inca Garcilaso de, 
Viñas, David, , ,  n.,  n.
Virgil,  n.
Vitier, Cintio, ,  n.,  n.
Volosinov, Valentín, – n.
Voyeurism, –. See also Chronicle: mod-
ernist
We/they antithesis, xxiv, , –. See also
North/South dichotomy
Weber, Max, xiii, xvii, xxxii n., xxxv—xxxviii,
,  n., ,  n., ; disenchantment
of the world, xlvi n., , 
Whitman, Walt, , ,  n.
White, Hayden,  n.,  n.
Wilde, Eduardo, – n., –, ,

Williams, Raymond, xiii,  n., 
Women: and industrial society. See Feminiza-
tion
Writer: as patrician intellectual, xxxvi–xxxix,
xl, xlii–xliii, , , , , , –, –
, , ; fin-de siècle, xliv, , , ,
–, –, , , –,  n.,
–, , , –, , , , ,
–
Zea, Leopoldo,  n.
Julio Ramos is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
at the University of California, Berkeley.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ramos, Julio.
[Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina. English]
Divergent modernities : culture and politics in th century
Latin America / Julio Ramos ; translated by John D. Blanco ;
introduction by José David Saldivar.
p. cm. — (Post-contemporary interventions)
(Latin America in translation/en traducción/em tradução)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
 ––– (cloth : alk. paper).
 ––– (pbk. : alk. paper)
. Spanish American literature—th century—History and
criticism. . Politics and literature—Latin America—History
—th century. I. Title. II. Series. III. Series: Latin America
in translation/en traducción/em tradução.
.  .'—dc - 