Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Post-Contemporary
Interventions and
En Traducción
Em Tradução
MODERNITIES
Culture and Politics in
Nineteenth-Century
Latin America
Foreword by
DIVERGENT
Typeset in Quadraat by
on acid-free paper 8
this book.
Contents
Prologue xxxv
PART I
PART II
Migratories
Appendixes
Translations of Three Texts by José Martí
Index
vi Contents
Translator’s Preface
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
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
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
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
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:
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.
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. )
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
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. )
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-
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. )
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-
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-
[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
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. )
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, –)
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
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,
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:
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:
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
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
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 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. )
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-
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:
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
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
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, ).
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.
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. )
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-
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:
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 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-
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:
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-
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
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
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
[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
[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
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:
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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
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. )
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Darío added:
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
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:
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
The Correspondents
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
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
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)
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
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
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,
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:
He later adds:
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
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.
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 respect, the city is not simply the background, the scenery in
which the fragmentation of discourse that distinguishes modernity would
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 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.
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)
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
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
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-
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-
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.
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.
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
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
[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 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 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
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. )
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-
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
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
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
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)
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.
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
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
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 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. –)
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. )
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. . . .
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. –)
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 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.
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-
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
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
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, ), –.
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:
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
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:
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-
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]
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: ),
.
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’’
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. )
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. )
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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. –)
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
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
seeing
swarm
aerial serpent
ever-growing crowd
[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
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
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
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,
), –.
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:
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.
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
‘‘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
[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. )
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
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. )
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. )
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-
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
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. )
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
¡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
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:
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
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:
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
[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
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.
[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)
train-serpents
crowd-anthill
exile-sheep
we-eagle, butterfly
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,
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.
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:
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
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
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:
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,
[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. )
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-
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’’
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
Rodó would distance himself from ‘‘art for art’s sake,’’ insisting on the
‘‘realistic function’’ of art in modernity:
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
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. )
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’’
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:
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’’:
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
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
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
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
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
‘‘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
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)
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
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
Father Martí, true father, storehouse of past appetite and future hunger,
reservoir of what keeps us alive! 2
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
II
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 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. )
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. )
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
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. )
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
IV
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. )
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
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 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. ).
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
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
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 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 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
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. (): –
.
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:
Migratories
Y es ¡oh mar! la gaviota pasajera
Que rumbo a Cuba va sobre tus olas!
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
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:
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
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.
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. Art for art’s sake, . See Aesthetic(s); Bürger,
Adorno, Theodor, xvi, xxxiii n., , , Peter; Literature: fin de siècle
n., , n., , n., n., Ascasubi, Hilario, , n.
, n. Assis, Machado de, –, n.
Aesthetic(s), xxxix, xlv, –, , –, Azúa, Carlos Real de, n.
–, , –, –, , , –
; anti-, –, , , –, –; Balbuena, Bernardo de, n.
and literature, –, –, –, – Barbarism. See Civilization and barbarism
, , , –, –, –, ; Barceló, Javier Malagón, viii
of luxury, , –, – n., –, Barthes, Roland, , n.
, ; and politics, –, –; and Bastos, María Luisa, –
self-critique of autonomy, , , , . Baudelaire, Charles, , , , n.
See also Arielism; Chronicle, modern(ist); Beauty. See Aesthetic(s)
Culture: and culturalism; Letters; Literary Belles lettres. See Letters
ideology; Literature; Martí, José; Style: and Bello, Andrés, viii, xv–xvi, xxxv, , n., –
stylization; Writer: fin de siècle , , nn., , , –; division of
Alberdi, Juan Bautista, n. knowledge in, –; eloquence in, –,
Aldrey, Fausto T., – , ; and Sarmiento, –, –,
Alienation. See Estrangement n.. See also Letters
Alsina, Valentín, , – Beltrán, Oscar, n.
Altamarino, Carlos and Sarlo, Beatriz, Benjamin, Walter, viii, n., , n., ,
n. –, n. and n., n., –
Althusser, Louis, n. n., – n., n.
Alvear, Torcuato de, , n. Berman, Marshall, xxxiii n.
Anderson, Benedict, Beverley, John, xxxi–xxxii n.
Anti-imperialism, , , –, , – Bidau, Eduardo, and Piñero, Norberto, –,
, . See also Spanish-American War
() Bilbao, Francisco, –
Arendt, Hannah, n. Bolívar, Simón,
Argentina: literature of, , , , , . See Bonalde, José Antonio Pérez, xxxv–xl, n..
also Sarmiento See also Martí, José
Arielism, xxxix, , , , , , –, Borges, Jorge Luis, n., n.
–. See also Aesthetic(s); Culture: and Bourdieu, Pierre, n.
culturalism Brooklyn Bridge, –
Arlt, Roberto, Buffalo Bill,
Bulnes, Francisco, –, n. Creole,
Bunge, Carlos, n. Criminology,
Bürger, Peter, xli, xlvi n., – n., , Cruz Malavé, Arnaldo, n.
– Cuba, –
Burrows, Susanna, n. Cuban Revolutionary Party (),
Culture: and culturalism, xxiv, xxxvi, ,
Cambaceres, Eugenio, , –, –, –, , –, ; high,
Campos, Haroldo de, n. –, –, , –, n.;
Capitalism, xl, , , –, ; and the industry, , , , , , –;
newspaper, –, –, –, –, mass, xvi–xvii, xxxiii n., , , , ,
n., . See also Culture: industry; , , –, n., , , ,
Journalism –; national, , –, –, –
Casal, Julián del, xli, –, –, , , . See also Aesthetic(s): and literature;
Arielism; Fetishism; Humanities
Casey, Calvert, n.
Castelar, Emilio, Dana, Charles,
Castellanos, Juan de, n. Darío, Rubén, xxxvi, xli, , , , –,
Catastrophe: in Sarmiento, –, –; in n., n., , , , , ,
Martí, , –, n., n., –, –, –, ,
Centennials. See Latin America: centennials –, n., , n.. See also
Certeau, Michel de, nn., , n., , Aesthetic(s); Writer: fin de siècle
n. Decadentism. See Darío, Rubén
Chronicle, modern(ist), xli–xlii, xliv–xlv, – Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix, xxxi n.
, –, , –, n., –, and n., xxxiii n., n., n., ,
n., , –, –, –, –, n., n.,
– n.; and the essay, –, . Dependency: economic. See Modernization:
See also Aesthetic(s); Journalism; Strolling; uneven
Style: and stylization Derrida, Jacques, viii, n., n.
Científicos. See Positivism Díaz, Porfirio, , , , ,
Citizenship, xxxvi, xliii, , , n., , Díaz Quiñones, Arcadio, n.
, , , . See also Law; Letters; Disenchantment of the world. See Weber, Max
Nation-state consolidation Drinnon, Richard, xxx
City: as emblem, , –, –, –; Du Bois, W. E. B., xxvii
and gender, , –; and the newspaper,
–, – Edison, Thomas A., –
Civilization (and barbarism), xxxix, xlii, – Eloquence. See Bello, Andrés
, , , –, n., , –, , Emerson, Ralph Waldo, –, n.
–, –, –, Encyclopedism, , ,
Clark, T.J., –, n. Enlightenment, , , , n., , , ,
Clifford, James, xii, xxvi , , , , ,
Conant, William C., , nn., Escandell, Noemí, n.
Concha, Jaime, n. Essay, xliv, , , –, . See also
Coney Island, –, –, –, Chronicle
n., , – Estrangement, xlii, , n., –, –
Consumerism. See Fetishism , –, , , , , ,
Coronil, Fernando, xi-xii n.
Cortázar, Julio, – Exile, xxxv–xxxvii, xviii, xxviii–xxix, , ,
Index
, –; in Martí, –, –, , Groussac, Paul, , , ,
–, Gutiérrez, José María,
Gutiérrez Girardot, Rafael, xl–xli, , n.,
Facundo Quiroga, Juan, , – n., n.
Family: crisis of the, –, , Gutiérrez Nájera, Manuel, xli, , ,-,
Feminization, , , –, –, –, –, , –, , n.
, , n., . See also Aesthetic(s):
and luxury Habermas, Jürgen, xi–xiii, xxiii, xxxi n.,
Fernández Retamar, Roberto, xxxi, xxxii n., xxxi n., , n., n., , –,
xxxiii n. –, n., n.
Fetishism, –, –, n.. See also Halperín Donghi, Tulio, n., n.,
Aesthetic(s): and luxury n.,
Figueroa, Sotero, n. Hamon, Philippe, n., – n.
Fin de siècle writers. See Writers: fin de siècle Hauser, Arnold, , n.
Flaneur. See Strolling Haussmann, Baron, , , n.,
Flaubert, Gustave, . See also Aesthetic(s): n.
modernist Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, xxxix–xl, , n.,
Fornaris, José, –, , n., , , –,
Foucault, Michel, xviii, n., – n., nn.,
n., n., n. Heredia, José M., , n.
Franco, Jean, xl, n., n., , n., Hostos, Eugenio María de, , n., –,
, n. n.
Frankfurt School, . See also Adorno, Theodor Humanities, , n., –. See also
Letters
Gamboa, Federico, –,
García Canclini, Nestor, xxxii n. Imperialism, xvii, xxix–xxx, –, ,
García Gutiérrez, Antonio, , , nn., . See also Spanish-
García Lorca, Federico, American War ()
García Marruz, Fina, n., –, n. Indigenismo,
Gift-economy, , – n. Intellectuals: traditional vs. organic, xlii–xliii,
Gilroy, Paul, xxvi-xxviii , nn., , , –. See also Writer
Goldar, Ernesto, Interior: as aesthetic autonomy. See Aes-
Gómez, Eusebio. See Criminology thetic(s); Arielism; Chronicle: modernist;
Gómez, Máximo, , Culture: and culturalism; Literature: fin de
Gómez Carrillo, Enrique, xli, , , –, siècle; Martí, José: and poetry
, –, , n.
González, Aníbal, n., n. Jackson, Helen Hunt, xii, –
González Echevarría, Roberto, x n., n., Jameson, Frederic, n.
n., n. Jay, Paul, xxxii n.
González Prada, Manuel, , –, , Jitrik, Noé, – n., , n., n.,
n., – n.
Gossman, Lionel, , nn., Journalism, xlii, –, n., , ,
Goyena, Pedro, n. . See also Literature: and journalism;
Grammar and grammaticism. See Bello, Newspaper
Andrés
Gramsci, Antonio, xxxiii n., n., , Kant, Immanuel, viii, , n.
–, n., Kantorowicz, Ernst, n., n.
Index
Kaplan, Amy, xxix , , , –, ; and journalism,
Kaplan, Marcos, n. –; pedagogical function in, –,
Kasson, John F., n., –; and state politics, xxxvi–xxxvii,
Katzman, Israel, n., –; travel, , –, –. See
Kitsch. See Art for art’s sake; Style: stylization also Aesthetic(s); Chronicle: modern(ist);
Knowledge-as-said. See Bello, Andrés Civilization and barbarism; Culture; Let-
Krauze, Enrique, n. ters; Literary ideology; Martí, José; Style:
stylization; Writer
Lara, Agustín, Litvak, Lily, n.
Latin America: centennials in, , , Lizardi, Fernandez de, –
–; and cultural identity, –, , Lloyd, David, xv, xxxii n.
–, , –, –; Latin Ameri- López, Lucio V., ,
canism, xlv, , , –, , , , Lott, Eric, xxxiii n.
n., –, n., n., , Lott, Tommy, xxxiii n.
n. Ludmer, Josefina, , – n.
Latino writing, – Lugones, Leopoldo, , nn.,
Laviera, Tato, –, n. Lukacs, Gregory, , n., n.
Law, xxxvi–xxxix, xlii, , –, , –, Luz y Caballero, José de la, viii, –, –,
, n., n., ; vs. letters, , , nn.,
–, –, – n., n., . See Lyotard, Jean-François, n., , ,
also Citizenship; Civilization and barba- n.
rism; Letters; Rationalization; Writer: as
patrician intellectual Maceo, Antonio,
Legendre, Pierre, n. Marcus, George, xii
Letrado. See Writer: as patrician intellectual Marcuse, Herbert, n., n.
Letters, xxxvi, –, , n., –, Market, xl–xli, –; and art, –, –
–; and citizenship, –. See also , –, –, n., . See also
Bello, Andrés; Law; Writer: as patrician Capitalism; Journalism
intellectual Martél Miró, Julián,
Lezama Lima, José, xxx, n. Martí, José, ix–x, xi–xii, xiv, xv–xxvi, , ,
Lida, Raimundo, n., n. –, –, –, , –, –
Literariness. See Style: stylization , n., , , –, n.,
Literary autonomization. See Literature: and , , , –, n., n.,
autonomization nn. , , , nn., ; and Amis-
Literary ideology, , , , – n., , tad funesta, ; and discourse of war, xii,
n., –, , xvii, xviii–xxxi, , , –, –;
Literato. See Literature: fin de siècle; Writer: fin and Escenas norteamericanas [North American
de siècle Scenes], xii, xvii, xxxi, xliv–xlv, , n.,
Literature: as academic discipline, –, , , –, –, , –, n.,
–; autonomization in, xviii, xxxvii, – n., , , ; and journal-
xxxix, xl–xlii, –, , , – n., ism, –, –, n., –; and
n., –, –, –, , , ‘‘Our America,’’ xxix, n., , –;
–, ; as critique of modernity, xxxv, and the Poema del Niágara, xii, xvii, xxxv–xl,
xxxviii, , , , –, –, , , –, n., –; and poetry,
–, –; fin de siècle, –, , xii, , –, n., n., , ,
, , , , , , , –, –, nn., , –, n.,
; as invented tradition, –, – –, n.; Ramona, –. See also
Index
Chronicle: modern(ist); Culture; Literature; Obligado, Rafael,
Writer: fin de siècle Olivio Jiménez, José, ix
Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel, Onís, Federico de,
Marx, Karl, xxxiii n. Orality: and/vs. writing, –, – n.,
Marx, Leo, n. –, n.,
Mass-culture. See Culture: mass Organic intellectual. See Intellectuals
Mauss, Marcel, n. Orientalism, ,
McLuhan, Marshall, n. Orígines. See Lezama Lima, José
Mejía, José M. Ramos, n. Ortega y Gasset, José, , ,
Mercado, Manuel, –, –, , n. Oyuela, Calixto, ,
Mexico: revolutionary. See Latin America
Mignolo, Walter, xxxi Pacheco, José Emilio, xl, , n., –,
Miranda, Francisco de, , n. n.
Mistral, Gabriela, Partido Revolucionario Cubano (). See
Mitre y Vedia, Bartólome, , –, n., Cuban Revolutionary Party
n. Paz, Octavio, xl, ,
Mitre, Emilio, Piglia, Ricardo, –
Modernism. See Chronicle: modernist; Lit- Piñero, Norberto. See Bidau, Eduardo
eratures: fin de siècle; Style: stylization; Poe, Edgar Allan,
Writer: fin de siècle Poetry, xli–xlii, –, – n., , –
Modernization, uneven, x, xiv, xvii, xl–xlii, , . See also Bello, Andrés; Darío, Rubén;
–, –, –, , –, , , Heredia, José M.; Laviera, Tato; Literature;
, Martí, José; Sarmiento, Domingo F.
Molloy, Sylvia, n., , n., n. Porush, David, n.
Monsiváis, Carlos, n., n. Positivism, xxxix, , n., –,
Mora, Jorge Aguilar, n. Postmodern poetics, –, –
Mumford, Lewis, , n. Poulantzas, Nicos, , n., , n.,
n.
Nación, La (Buenos Aires), –, – n.
Nation-state consolidation, xxxvi, xlii, , Quiroga, Horacio,
, –, , n., –, –,
–, –, –. See also Citizen- Rabasa, José, xi
ship; Civilization and barbarism; Law; Rama, Angel, viii–ix, xxxvii, xl, xlvi, n.,
Nationalism n., , –, , n., n., ,
Nationalism, n., , –, –, n., –, nn., ,
, Ramos, Julio, n., n.
Neruda, Pablo, Rationalization, xlvi n., , n., –,
Nervo, Amado, , . See also Literature: autonomization in;
Newspaper: and the city, –; news bul- Modernization: uneven
letin, , –; and rationalization, Reification, critique of. See Fetishism
–, . See also Chronicle: modernist; Republic of letters. See Letters
Journalism; Market: and art; Nación, La Reyes, Alfonso, xxix, , nn., , n.,
North/South dichotomy, –. See also –, n., n.
We/they antithesis Riffaterre, Michel, n.
‘‘Nuestra América.’’ See Martí, José: and ‘‘Our Rimbaud, Arthur,
America’’ Rivera Cambas, Manuel,
Roca, Julio A.,
Index
Rodó, José E., xxxix, xlv, , , –, –, Subaltern representation, –
n., n., , , –, , Subirats, Euduardo, n.
n., , , –, , –, .
See also Arielism; Culture: and culturalism Tableau vivant, –, n.,
Rodriguez, Manuel Díaz, Ten Years War (Cuba),
Roebling, John A., –, Thom, René, n.
Rojas, Ricardo, , , nn., , n., Trachtenberg, Alan, n.
–, Translation, –, ,
Romanticism, n., , ,
Romero, José Luis, United States, –, , – n.,
Rómulo Fernández, Juan, n.
Rosas, Juan Manuel. See Civilization and Vagrancy. See Saco, José Antonio
barbarism Vallejo, Cesar,
Rotker, Susana, xxxi n. Varona, Enrique J., xliii, –, nn.,
Vattimo, Gianni,
Saco, José Antonio, , , , n., Vasconcelos, José, –, n.,
n., –, Vedia, Enrique de, –
Said, Edward, , , – Vega, El Inca Garcilaso de,
Saldívar, José David, xxxiv n. Viñas, David, , , n., n.
Salinas, Pedro, n., n. Virgil, n.
Santi, Enrico Mario, n. Vitier, Cintio, , n., n.
Sarmiento, Domingo, xv, –, –, n., Volosinov, Valentín, – n.
n., –, , –, n., – Voyeurism, –. See also Chronicle: mod-
, , –, n., , nn., ernist
, . See also Bello, Andrés; Civilization
and barbarism; Culture: and culturalism; We/they antithesis, xxiv, , –. See also
Exile North/South dichotomy
Schiller, Friedrich von, , n. Weber, Max, xiii, xvii, xxxii n., xxxv—xxxviii,
Secularization. See Rationalization; Weber, , n., , n., ; disenchantment
Max of the world, xlvi n., ,
Sellén, Francisco, Whitman, Walt, , , n.
Sierra, Justo, , White, Hayden, n., n.
Silva, José Asunción, –, Wilde, Eduardo, – n., –, ,
Simmel, Georg, , , n.
Sommer, Doris, n. Williams, Raymond, xiii, n.,
Spanish-American War (), xxix–xxx, xxix, Women: and industrial society. See Feminiza-
, , . See also Imperialism tion
Spivak, Gayatri, – n. Writer: as patrician intellectual, xxxvi–xxxix,
Starobinski, Jean, n. xl, xlii–xliii, , , , , , –, –
Strolling, –, –, –, . See , , ; fin-de siècle, xliv, , , ,
also Chronicle: modern(ist); Style: and –, –, , , –, n.,
stylization; Writer: fin-de siècle –, , , –, , , , ,
Style: and stylization, , n., –, , –
, n., , , , –, –
, , n.. See also Aesthetic(s); Zea, Leopoldo, n.
Chronicle: modernist; Writer: fin de siècle
Index
Julio Ramos is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
at the University of California, Berkeley.