Between Empires - Anti-Imperialism and Latin Americanism in Contemporary Spain by Rubén Darío

10/20/2019 Between empires: anti-imperialism and Latin Americanism in contemporary Spain by Rubén Darío
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Vol 7, No. 12 (2019)

ISSN 2169-0847 (online)
Marcelo Sanhueza
University of Chile
marceloivansanhueza@gmail.com
Between empires: anti-imperialism and

Spanish-Americanism in Spain
contemporary by Rubén Darío
Among Empires: Anti-Imperialism and Hispano-

Contemporary Americanism in Spain by Rubén
Dario
Summary
This article examines contemporary Spain. Chronicles and literary portraits (1901) of Rubén
Dario to problematize his place of enunciation and perspective. To do this, in the first part,
We address the ways of representing imperialism in the Darian chronicles. In the second
On the other hand, we propose that an anti-imperialist perspective emerges in Darío's work
Hispano-Americanist, who tries to demarcate himself from colonial and Eurocentric thinking,
relocating the Hispanic-American culture against the United States and Europe.
Keywords
Rubén Darío, anti-imperialism, imperialism, Hispano-Americanism, ideological perspective.
Abstract
This paper examines Rubén Darío's contemporary Spain. Chronicles and literary portraits
(1901) in order to problematize the author's perspective and position of enunciation. In the
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first
secondpart, wewe
part, address
arguethe
thatways in displays
Darío which Darío's chronicles represent
an anti-imperialist imperialism. In the
and Hispano-Americanist
perspective, distancing himself from colonial and Eurocentric thought, as well as relocating
and differentially reevaluating Hispanic American culture in comparison to the United States
and Europe.
doi 10.5195 / ct / 2019.369 | http://catedraltomada.pitt.edu
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C ATEDRAL T OMADA : Journal of Latin American Literary Criticism / Journal of Latin American Literary Criticism
Between empires: anti-imperialism and Latin Americanism in contemporary Spain by Rubén Darío
Keywords
Rubén Darío, Anti-Imperialism, Imperialism, Hispano-Americanism, ideological perspective
Imperialism asks for blood and gold: geopolitics and geoculture in the chronicles
darianas
“But if someone said:« They are things of

ideologues Or are things of poets, say that
we are not another thing »”.
(Rubén Darío. The wandering song . 1907)
At the end of the 19th century the expansion of capitalist imperialism 1 begins
to connect the world globally, not only thanks to militarism and
trade, but also through the modernization of means of transport and
communication that enabled, among other things, the strengthening of the press as
mass media (Hobsbawm 53). Latin American nations
they are more actively integrated into commercial and cultural circuits than Europe and
the United States spread and imposed as hegemonic models for the rest
of the planet
In the literary sphere there is a parallel modernization in the
way of understanding literature, which manifests itself in the professionalization of
Spanish-American writer and the conformation of cultural industries (Montaldo
1 We understand imperialism as a phenomenon that during the last third of the 19th century
It is associated with the development of Euro-Western capitalism on a planetary scale. In terms
broad, the distinction between empire and imperialism proposed by
Michael Doyle, who points out that: “empire is a relationship, formal or informal, in which a State
controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force,
for political, economic, social or cultural dependence collaboration. Imperialism is the
empire establishment and maintenance process ”[Empires are relationships of political
control imposed by some political societies over the effective sovereignty of other political
societies. They include more than just formally annexed territories, but they encompass less than
the sum of all forms of international inequality. Imperialism is the process of establishing and
keeping an empire. The translation belongs to us] (19). Under this perspective, the States
United also became a nation with an imperialist vocation in Latin America
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although it was an informal empire, that is, a case of imperialism
without a major colonial empire like nineteenth-century European imperial states
(Osterhammel 22).

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81). These circumstances generated, according to Susana Zanetti, a “condition

essential for a joint movement in
aesthetic and ideological conceptions, so that exchange and discussion arose
between peers, moderately generalized and with some simultaneity ”
("Modernity" 500). Julio Ramos has also warned that in the period
finisecular appear “our first modern intellectuals, not because they were
the first to work with "ideas", but because certain intellectual practices,
especially linked to literature, began to be constituted outside politics and
frequently opposed to the State, which had already rationalized and automated its
socio-discursive territory ”(99). For his part, Angel Rama has considered that this
relative autonomy is related to the establishment of the capitalist economy in
Latin America, which introduced: “the division of labor, a principle that entails
forced specialization and simultaneously the loss of totalizing vision,
unifying and interpretive, of human activity ”( Rubén Darío 44).
In this geocultural and geopolitical scenario, we place Rubén Darío (1867-
1916), intellectual 2 who stood out mainly in the practice and renewal of the
Latin American poetry, although he also wrote novels, stories and hundreds of
journalistic chronicles In the present investigation we will examine Spain
contemporary Chronicles and literary portraits (1901) 3 , which brings together 42 chronicles,
written by Darío in his capacity as correspondent for La Nación de Buenos Aires,
2 We use this concept within the framework of the intellectual and intellectual history of
Latin America to make visible the role of mediator and cultural translator that Darío fulfills
articulate the literary with the political in their scriptural work and in their contribution in the conformation
of the modernist Cenacle, both in America and in Europe. In such a perspective, we think
It is pertinent to point out that, as Carlos Altamirano states, intellectuals: “They are people, so
general connected to each other in institutions, circles, magazines, movements, which have their arena
The field of culture. Like other cultural elites, its distinctive occupation is to produce and transmit
messages relating to the true (if you prefer: to what they believe true), it is about the
core values of society or the meaning of its history, of legitimacy or injustice
of the political order, of the natural world or of the transcendent reality, of the meaning or the absurdity of the
existence […] the action of intellectuals is associated with what Régis Debray calls grapheosphere
–That is to say, with the domain that has its principle in the existence of the printing press, the books, the
press– […] Intellectuals address each other, sometimes in the form of debate, but the
recipient is not always endogenous: they also tend to find that their statements resonate beyond
of the field of intellectual life, in the political arena ”(14-15).
3 In our work we use the neat critical edition made by Noel Rivas Bravo, in 2013.
doi 10.5195 / ct / 2019.369 | http://catedraltomada.pitt.edu 300
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between December 3, 1898 and April 7, 1900. The Buenos Aires newspaper
he commissioned the writing of these texts in order to “offer his readers a
First-hand testimony of the Spanish situation after the defeat against
the United States ”(Vilanova 9). However, its mission in Spain is not only
journalistic, but also responds to “informative and ideological interests
of La Nación and therefore for the social group that said newspaper represents ”(Rama,
"Dreams" 40).
We have chosen contemporary Spain within the voluminous and
Darío's overwhelming journalistic production, because we believe that his
chronicles stage a series of problems associated with the emergence of a
modern subjectivity and supranational critical thinking, which after the
Spanish defeat of 98 begins to rethink the issue of cultural identity
Latin American (Bonfiglio 74-75) 4 . For Graciela Montaldo, in this period the
intellectuals close their ranks "rescuing more than Creole traditions, a
new alliance with hispanism (that is, with his elites), but not only as
alternative to North American penetration but also –and especially–

as internal regulation of new Latin American audiences ”(85). Claudio
Corn also notes that in the face of the rise of US imperialism
“Hispanic-American intellectuals reconsider the problem in light of a
racial principle: Latinos versus Saxons ”(122). In this direction, we consider that
Dario, from his experience in Spain of the "disaster", emphasizes his attitude
ideological-political by revaluing the Hispanic-American cultural unit against the
threat posed by the Anglo-American world, as they do
other entresiglo writers like José Martí (1853-1895), José María Vargas Vila
(1860-1933), César Zumeta (1860-1955), José Enrique Rodó (1871-1917), Rufino
Blanco Fombona (1874-1944), Manuel Ugarte (1875-1951), among the most
4 The 1898 Spanish-Cuban-American War in which Spain was defeated in just three
Months by the United States caused the loss of its colonies in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.
This war, as an important part of historiography has highlighted it, marked the imperial rise
of the Americans in the world system, because it exceeded its continental borders to
begin to exercise its political, military and economic power also in Asia (Bender 231-232).

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Featured It is also, for Rama, a crucial period in Darian production,

because it marks a dividing line in his later work, while it is tactically placed
from a Latin American perspective (“Dreams” 35) 5 . We must specify that yes
well in these chronicles his concern is oriented more towards the aesthetic field-
cultural, for that reason it does not stop examining the political, social, economic aspects
and historical that he observes in his visit to the Iberian Peninsula. Noel Rivas Bravo has
pointed out in this regard that in this book Darius is a poet thinker or poet thinker
that analyzes the reality of the diminished empire and “believes in the future of Spain. A
future that must be founded in two directions, one realistic and practical and another
romantic and idealistic ”(17).
It is necessary to state in this place that Darío uses the journalistic chronicle
as a space for critical and artistic reflection that is equivalent to the work of
writer, as he points out in "The journalist and his literary merit", when
points out: “The journalist who writes with love what he writes is only a writer
as any other ”(220). And at another time the same author considers that “the
Journalism constitutes a gymnastics style ”(“ Letters ”113). Susana Rotker has
indicated that in the beginning for modernist writers journalism “where
communication and creation, information, external pressures and art seemed at odds
[…] They ended up finding their resolution space in the chronicles ”(116). The
Hispanic American chronicle then became a scriptural platform in

which in turn "tested the modernity of modernist writing, and
he took literature to the limit of his abilities to register the moment
present ”(González 82). And the modern in the case of Darío also connects with
its ability to perceive and analyze the geopolitical and social events of the
turn of the century: the fall of the delicate Spanish colonial empire and the birth of the
modern American imperialism (Bender 219).
5 In this article, we prefer to talk about Hispanic Americanism than Latin Americanism in
the case of Darío, since, as Susana Zanetti has highlighted, her “links with Brazil are
still scarce and a common belonging to the non-Spanish-speaking Caribbean is not felt ”
("Modernity" 492). For a general look at this theme in Darian literary work, see
José Alberto Barisone. "The Americanist perspective of Rubén Darío".
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Well, keeping in mind this theoretical-generic scope, our purpose

main is to analyze and identify the ideological perspective that Dario builds in
Spain ... , focusing mainly on the political, social, cultural and
literary recorded in this work. We propose that in his chronicles a
anti-imperialist and Latin Americanist perspective that is representative of a
Latin American intellectuals sector of the period and dialogue with a part
important of its own journalistic production; which in this case is expressed, by
on the one hand, in a critique of US imperialism and, on the other, in the
recovery of Hispanic cultural heritage within a project
transatlantic Spanish-Americanist that is a consequence, in part, of the threat
Anglo-Saxon imperialist. In the works of this book we will observe that there is a
effort to demarcate from colonial and eurocentric thinking while seeking
relocate Hispanic-American culture in the framework of the western world, with the
object of integrating the artistic-intellectual production of the subcontinent in the
European modernizing processes, although protecting a certain autonomy
cultural. Anyway, we recognize that Darío maintains a place of
Eurocentral and unstable statement 6 , whose cultural paradigm will be Paris (as
it was for many modernists) 7 , reproducing certain stereotypes and schemes of
6 For the distinction between place of enunciation and perspective we follow Walter Mignolo, who
proposes the concept of border thinking, located between geopolitical and cultural borders
(28). In turn, distinguishes two types of border thinking, one strong and one weak, the latter
"Arises from the disinherited, from the pain and fury of the fracture of their stories, of their memories,
of his subjectivities, of his biography, as is clear, for example, in Waman Poma de Ayala
or in Frantz Fanon ”(28). On the other hand, strong border thinking “is not a product of pain
and the fury of the disinherited themselves, but of those who are not disinherited take the
their perspective […] What matters is that, in the geopolitics of knowledge, the same
perspective can be assumed from different places of enunciation (epistemic) ”(28). Beyond
from the category of border thinking, from which we take distance, we are interested in the idea of
that many times the place of enunciation does not coincide with the perspective presented in a
determined author, situation that we will try to show in the work of the Nicaraguan writer. In
concerning the instability of Darío's place of enunciation, we rely on the approaches
by Silvia Tieffemberg, who considers it a characteristic of the mestizo enunciation
in Latin America, as would be the case with our poet (273).
7 At this point we agree with Mariano Siskind, who has warned that the preference of
Darius for France would not only be related to personal and obtuse afrancesamiento, but his
“Universalist Francophilia must be read as a theoretical-cultural effect of global Modernism.
From the independence of the Spanish colonies until the end of World War II the
ontological privilege of the French signifier was consolidated based on a double operation

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thoughts whose matrix is possible to trace in the Hispanic colonial discourse and
western. An attempt will be made to demonstrate this situation by addressing the civilizational norm
that Darío establishes in his speech, which is linked to the search for a
renovation and cosmopolitan projection of the culture of Latin America against the
American political interventionism and European cultural influence in the
region, a problem that will also be a transversal concern to his work
poetic 8 .
Before beginning the examination of the work it is necessary to place it within
Darian production that reflects on the different western empires of
his time. We will start from several works that have addressed thinking
Darío's anti-imperialist about the United States 9 . Your texts are considered
Classics on the subject are: in chronicle "The Triumph of Caliban" (1898), in prose
"Edgar Allan Poe" (1896) and "D. Q ”(1899), while in poetry his well-known ode
transatlantic On the one hand, France - as a cultural formation that spoke better than any other
the language of modernity - represented its particularity as if it were identical to the
modern universality […] On the other hand, Latin American intellectuals affirmed and
they reproduced this cultural axiom without questioning their essentialist premises ”(255). It is important
point out here that already in the same period in which Darío wrote Spain ... he did not manifest a
thoughtless admiration for Paris, as he was able to observe its chiaroscuros. In "Reflections of
Parisian New Year ”( La Nación , February 5, 1901) notes:“ What in Paris stands at
beginning the twentieth century is the apparatus of decay […] There are many illustrious French, many
noble French, many honest French who meditate silently, fight bravely or
They lament the moral catastrophe. But the ideas of honor, the old ideas of generosity, of
greatness, of virtue have passed ”(116-117).
8 While it exceeds the limits of our work that focuses on the Darian chronicles, it is relevant
notice that in his poetry he made strenuous efforts to put the literary canon into perspective
European and American regarding the Spanish-American poetry of his time and his own
poetics. In his well-known and studied "Liminar Words", of profane prose and other poems
(1896), expresses on this matter: “(If there is poetry in our America, she is in the old things:
in Palenke and Utatlán, in the legendary Indian, and in the sensual and fine Inca, and in the great Moctezuma
of the golden chair. The rest is yours, Democrat Walt Whitman.) […] The Spanish beard's grandfather
Blanca shows me a series of illustrious portraits: «This, he tells me, is the great gift Miguel de Cervantes
Saavedra, genius and manco; this is Lope de Vega, this Garcilaso, this Quintana ». I ask him
for the noble Gracian, for Teresa the Holy, for the brave Gongora and the strongest of all, gift
Francisco de Quevedo and Villegas. Then I exclaim: Shakespeare! Dante! Hugo...! (And in me
inside: / Verlaine ...!). Then when I said goodbye: «Grandfather, I need to tell you: my wife is from
my land; My dear, from Paris »(9-10).
9 On the evolution of Darío's work in relation to the United States, we recommend the
David Allen's classic article. “Rubén Darío facing the growing influence of the States
United". For a balance of the authors who have problematized the representation of the country of
North in Darío and a more up-to-date study on this subject, see Alberto Acereda. "The
other looks of Rubén Darío to the United States ”.
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“A Roosevelt” (1904) 10 , contained in his book Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905).

This book by Darío is also considered as a defining work of his
Hispanicism (Martínez, “Introduction” 58), where he formulates a constant reflection
criticism of the imperial threat of the United States that combines aesthetics and
the political in his poetic proposal, as he writes in the final sentence of his
Preface: “If there is politics in these songs, it is because it appears universal. What if
you find verses to a president, it is because it is a continental clamor. morning
we can be Yankees (and most likely); anyway my protest is
written on the wings of the immaculate swans, as illustrious as Jupiter ”(334) 11 .
However, Darío's anti-imperialist work has also been valued by
criticism as a circumstantial position vis-à-vis the United States, developed
fundamentally after 1898, like his poems of Cantos ... , but he had a
oscillating and contradictory character (Acereda, "Silence" 76). It is quoted, in this
10 Perhaps the greatest effort for the study and compilation of anti-imperialist and political works
Darío has been made by Jorge Eduardo Arellano in various works. They are emblematic their
essay for Casa de las Américas "Rubén Darío antimperialista" (1982) and the anthological book,
So many scattered vigers (1984). The latter, however, decontextualizes Darío at
Transform it anachronically into a revolutionary thinker. In the presentation of So many ...
written by the National Council of Culture of Nicaragua, for example, states: “The
sixty-three [sic] fragments of Rubén Darío that Jorge Eduardo Arellano selects, titles and scores
in this delivery, they sign up for the recovery line driven by our process […]
there they reveal a Darius sensitive to injustice, capable of warning and denouncing exploitation and
Vices of the capitalist system. A Darius open to the precursors of modern social thought.
A man of ideas, reader of Marx and Engels, open to the problems of the industrial society of
Europe, outraged by the abuses of imperialism. Anyway, a revolutionary Darius who
announces the socialist future of humanity ”(7). These works by Arellano either
problematize the ideological ambiguities of the poet. They correspond rather to a
vindication and political appropriation of an anti-imperialist Darío who, according to Diana Moro,
It had already appeared in the 60s in Cuba and the Sandinistas continued with the object
to snatch the poet from the bourgeoisie, making it “part of the revolutionary iconography, together with
the leading figure of César Augusto Sandino ”(41).
11 In this same poems his sonnet, "Los cisnes", dedicated to Juan Ramón is also remarkable
Jiménez, in which Darío, as in the aforementioned "A Roosevelt", versifies politics

expansionist of the United States and the fall of the Hispanic empire through a series of
Zoological metaphors: “Spanish America as the whole / Fixed Spain is in the East of its
fatal destiny; / I interrogate the Sphinx that the future awaits / With the interrogation of your neck
divine / Will we be delivered to the fierce barbarians? / So many millions of men will we speak in
English? / Are there no noble nobles or brave knights? / Will we shut up now to cry later? /
I have shouted my cry, Swans, among you / That you have been the faithful in disappointment, / While
I feel a flight of American foals / And the last rattle of an old lion ”(380).

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meaning, often the poem "Salutation to the eagle" (1906) 12 . However, in

the last decades, thanks to research on his journalistic work and with
the reissue of a significant number of chronicles that had only appeared in
the press of the 13th time has allowed us to investigate more acutely its
anti-imperialist perspective, which was, as we intend to demonstrate, persistent
(although with tensions) and that was not limited to the United States.
By chronologically exploring their work, for example, in La Nación
from Buenos Aires and El Heraldo de Costa Rica, we observe that the critical vision of
Darius on US imperialism was a constant in his production
intellectual. Early, before 98, we find chronicles of El Heraldo ,
where it manifests itself in favor of the defense of the subcontinent against the various
United States interventions. "Bronze to soldier Juan" (1891) 14 and "On the side
of the North ”(1892) 15 are a sample of this. Especially in the first chronicle in
that rescues and values the figure of Juan Santamaría, a Costa Rican hero who fought
against the invasion of William Walker, in 1856 (207). On the other hand, in La Nación
we identify a series of chronicles that not only challenge expansionist actions
American, but also that of the Spanish Empire, as can be seen in
“The insurrection in Cuba” (1895) 16 , in which it takes a position in favor of the
Cuban revolutionaries José Martí, Antonio Maceo and Máximo Gómez (13-16).
After the Spanish-American War, his position will focus on the analysis
of American imperialism in the subcontinent, as in “The triumph of
12 Text that generated more than one discontent among his contemporaries. In this framework, one of the
The most remembered controversy was the one he started with his friend Rufino Blanco Fombona. Before these
Critic and aware of the controversy, Darío will write a letter, in 1907, to the Venezuelan writer:
"We greet the Eagle, especially when we do diplomatic things! ... it has nothing
particular. The polite does not remove the Condor ... ”(Cit., In Acereda,“ La Hispanidad ”106).
13 Many of his chronicles were compiled in life by Darius in: Contemporary Spain (1901),
Pilgrimages (1901), The caravan passes (1902), Solar lands (1904), Parisian (1907), The
trip to Nicaragua and tropical intermezzo (1909) and Everything on the fly (1912). But due to the character
Miscellaneous of these works, the perseverance of their geopolitical concerns is lost sight of.
14 September 15, 1891.
15 March 15, 1892.
16 March 2, 1895.
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Calibán ”(1898) 17 and“ The Twilight of Spain ” 18 , along with an extensive list of
works for the nation that will intensify, according to Rocío Oviedo, after the
US interference in Panama, in 1903, with the Hay-Bunau Treaty
Rod (221) 19 . Although, as Alberto Acereda has pointed out, Darío rejected the
American imperialist policy while admiring its pragmatism and
constancy: “I praise his great poets, his men of science, and, in general,
to men in good faith, and to their freedom, their self-determination, their independence ”
("Hispanicism" 107).
In addition to the revised texts already on Spain and the United States, Darío
wrote a set of chronicles that deal with the problems of imperialism and
European colonialism and inter-imperial conflicts of the time that are
worth mentioning. A very interesting text is "Andrianamanitra mby an-trano"
(1901) 20 , which describes the arrival of the Queen of Madagascar to Paris, introducing
several recriminations to French imperialism and the racism that sustains it. Darius
write about it:
[…] The queen only has what the French government wants to give her,
in pupils […] And to make matters worse of the unhappy, when he has
adopted European fashions, bought a bicycle, learned a little bit of
piano, and come to Paris with a license, it is received like a macaca, it is
17 In El Tiempo de Buenos Aires, May 20, 1898 and a few months later in El Cojo Ilustrado
of Caracas, October 1, 1898.
18 In The Mercury of America , Buenos Aires, November 1898.
19 Some of the chronicles of La Nación , after 98, in which Darío will criticize the States
United are: "The invasion of the barbarians of the North" (December 30, 1901), "The question of
the channels ”(March 9, 1902),“ The United States and Latin America ”(April 6, 1902),
“The Anglo-Saxon invasion. Central American Yankee ”(April 23, 1902),“ The Yankee Force ”(18
May 1902), “The art of being president of the republic. Roosevelt ”(November 13,
1904), “The trip to Nicaragua / (For the Nation) IV” (November 1, 1908), “The antidiplomacy:
a note from Mr. Knox ”(April 1, 1910),“ Roosevelt in Paris ”(June 22, 1910),“ The
American politics: Zelaya responds to Taft ”(February 25, 1911),“ The Panama Canal ”(December 21
May 1912), “The end of Nicaragua” (September 28, 1912) and two years before his death,
He wrote "American Affairs / Yankee Intention" (July 6, 1914).
20 July 7, 1901, incorporated by the author in The Caravan Pass , 1902.

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black and ugly flame at every step, and there is little to be proposed for a
Hire in a circus. (91-93)
The author also dismantles in this chronicle the rhetorical strategies of the
imperialism to perceive the conflicts between these: “English finds very
legitimate its action in the Transvaal and condemns that of the French in Madagascar; he
French believes he had the right to take Madagascar; but that English, at
to conquer Transvaal, he has behaved like a robber ”(91).
Dario also addresses the colonial and imperial theme in "Gibraltar" (1904) 21 ,
“Old and new Japan” (1904) 22 and “The question of Morocco. The intimate sultan ”
(1906) 23 . In relation to British imperialism 24 writes two chronicles for the
Miter newspaper: "John Bull for ever" (1895) 25 and "In London" (1901) 26 .
The interesting thing in most of these texts is that Darío, paraphrasing
Walter Benjamin fluctuates between the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of
aesthetics to represent modern imperialism and socio-political conflicts
which warns 27 . A chronicle little studied and exhibiting eloquently is
21 April 18, 1904, incorporated by the author that same year in Solar Lands .
22 October 2, 1904.
23 February 17, 1906.
24 Argentine writer Eduardo Muslip has affirmed that Darío would not be a critic of imperialism
European, he says, when examining the life of Rubén Darío written by himself (1912), that his
“Affectionate look towards France and towards England excludes all reference to the imperial political role
who exercise [...] has no problem in rescuing for this autobiography a poem called
"God save the Queen", an apology of England in all aspects, cultural, moral, political
and the specifically imperial ”(45). We disagree with Muslip's position for two reasons;
first, because his judgment is derived from the analysis of a single source, ignoring the Darian chronicles
that we have been studying, and, second, since the quoted poem is not primarily a loa
to British imperialist politics, but rather it is a panegyric poem to the queen and to history
of the nation, as Darío clarifies in his quoted book: “Another of my friends, who has always been
Fraternal with me, it was Charles EF Vale, an incomparable Creole English. One night, on the occasion
of the anniversary of Queen Victoria, I dictated in the restaurant of «The 14 provinces», a small
prose poem dedicated to his sovereign, which he wrote in the absence of paper in a few envelopes and
that has not appeared in any of my books ”(168).
25 March 23, 1895.
26 September 15, 1901, incorporated by the author in The Caravan Pass , in 1902.
27 Benjamin's statement is known in her essay, “The work of art at the time of her
technical reproducibility ”(1936), where he writes:“ Humanity, which formerly, in Homer

it was an object of contemplation for the Olympic gods, it has become an object of
Contemplation of herself. His self-alienation has reached such a degree that it allows him to experience his
Annihilation itself as a first-rate aesthetic enjoyment . This is the aestheticization of politics
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situation is "Cake-walk" (1903) 28 , where he describes and analyzes Afro-dance

American who had arrived in Paris as a novel expression of the
Yankee culture (349). But not only is he dedicated to artistically valuing dance as
a modern body staging, but from the beginning blends with mastery
the aesthetic and political judgment: "Like the anecdote black, the Yankee continues,
continues in its universal expansion, and one of its manifestations is today the dance ”
(349). Later he adds, with bite, that President Roosevelt
politically instrumentalize the cake-walk :
[…] Is pleased to rejoice his jubilant compatriots of color, who

they do not fit themselves with crespa vanity; while an authorized journalist declares
in such a New York newspaper that it would be best to send the doctrine to hell
Monroe and share with some European powers succulent
pieces of Latin America; while the various kings of Chicago,
Manhattan, Frisco and other places have fun with the trust game, the
Cake-walk moves the world. (349-350)
And at the end of the article sentence: “To be so young, it does not do so badly
the twentieth century ... Here is the work of imperialism, there is the work of omnipotence
of the millions of the North ”(352). A remarkable element in this chronicle is that
Darío, on the one hand, shows that the American empire is also constituted
as an aesthetic-cultural spectacle and, on the other, it uses the term imperialism
to refer to the United States, demonstrating its updated knowledge of the
geopolitical vocabulary back then, because the concept of imperialism was
that fascism practices. Communism responds with the politicization of art ”(128). In Darío,
instead, the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of art are linked to plasticity
stylistic and aesthetic that gives the chronicle as a heterogeneous textual support of crosses
discursive, where it can retain relative autonomy with respect to the political field and
supporter.
28 March 19, 1903.

309
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little managed in foreign policy and even less in the Latin American concert 29 .
It will be only after the book of John A. Hobson Study of imperialism (1902) and
from the essay by Lenin Imperialism, the upper phase of capitalism (1916) than the
term will acquire a major political and interpretative preeminence within
of the lexicon of international relations (Hobsbawm 60) 30 . In turn, it is not the

first time on which Darío has used this term in his writings, but
who has already used it in the almost unknown chronicle “The diplomatic corps
Latin American ” 31 , in which it prevents:“ The future expansion of imperialism
Anglo-Saxon is not a dream; and the probability of fighting races either ”(252). A
year later in the chronicle "In London" will critically analyze foreign policy
of the British Empire, by handling metaphors that equate the
imperialism to animal rapacity: “These people go, go Where do they go? Go ahead, more
ahead they say it in their currencies, in their prologies, short, because they are not verbose
as we Latinos, race of rectors [...] Country of prey, it is said; all the worse
should be borne in mind that the use of Rubén Darío's political language may be due to the fact that
29 It
since the beginning of his literary career he held various positions related to diplomacy, which
It was also an area of which he wrote several chronicles. It should be remembered that diplomacy was a
sphere of action where Latin American intellectuals of the end of the century could fight against
economic narrowness and broaden their intellectual horizons (Myers 41). Darius, for example, in
1892 was head of the commission to represent Nicaragua in the Fourth Celebrations
Centenary of the Discovery of America in Spain. The following year he was appointed Consul of
Nicaragua and Colombia in Argentina. Between 1903-1907, he served as Consul of Nicaragua in
Paris. In 1907, he was appointed Resident Minister in Madrid, representing the government of
Nicaragua. His last diplomatic position was, between 1912 and 1914, when he was appointed by
Paraguay to be your Consul in Paris. Parallel to these appointments, Darío participated, in
1905, in the Nicaraguan commission to resolve border conflicts with Hondura. In 1906,
attended as representative of Nicaragua at the Inter-American Conference of Rio de Janeiro, in
the one that composed his controversial poem "Salutation to the eagle". We can recognize in the different
diplomatic roles that Dario played, simultaneously with his profession of chronicler and writer,
an important intellectual function that, as we have indicated, articulates the literary field with the
politician especially in his chronicles, which is a textual space where literary discourses,
cultural and political are overlapping. For a general description of the positions
diplomats occupied by Darío, we recommend reviewing Norman Caldera. Ruben Dario
diplomat (2006).
30 Eric Hobsbawm has stated that: “the term imperialism was incorporated into the political vocabulary
and journalistic during the 1890s in the course of the debates that took place on the
colonial conquest Moreover, it was then that he acquired, as a concept, the dimension
economic that has not lost since then ”(60).
31 April 29, 1900. This text belongs to the same period of the chronicles written for Spain
contemporary , however, Darío does not include it in this book or any other. Recently
It has been rescued by Noel Rivas Bravo in the edition of Spain ... which we use here.
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for those who cannot resist him and fall under his paw […] Those people go, go ”(28)
and declares with impetus and concern: "Imperialism asks for blood and gold" (37) 32 .
It is useful to emphasize that we find significant how the intellectual

Central American is reacting textually against the imperialism of
entresiglo, because he is evaluating and interpreting it not only in his condition as
political, economic and military phenomenon, but also as a practice
representational and a discursive control related to the Euro-Western culture,
which has constituted its own imperial rhetoric or way of writing about peoples
non-Westerners to sustain their dominion (Spurr 20). For this task, Darío goes
building a discourse of resistance and opposition, with hesitation, which is about
differentially place the Latin American culture in the geocultural order and
geopolitical that Western imperialism is elaborating.
Finally, we must make two observations in relation to the
Darío's perspective on modern empires. On the one hand, in front of
critics who identify the presence of certain ambiguity or deny that there is
imperialism rejected (Muslip 45), we need to state that when it employs

The term always presents it in a negative way. Also, that the admiration of
Darius for the United States, France, England or Spain, recognizable in several
of his works, corresponds to a social and cultural rescue, in cosmopolitan key, that
it does not necessarily coincide with an assessment of imperialist foreign policy
that these nations did. On the other hand, Alberto Acereda has indicated that
considering Dario as an anti-imperialist is a distortion of “hatred of
US Marxist dogmatism "(" Stalking "266) that" perpetuated the presentation
of a Darius very different from his true ideology. Thus they were printed and
commented to satiety -in use and consumption that continues to this day-
32 It will also handle, as far as we could investigate, the word imperialism in several chronicles
more: “The Anglo-Saxon invasion. Central American Yankee ”(1902),“ The United States and the
Latin America ”(1902),“ The art of being president of the republic. Roosevelt ”(1904),“ The
antidiplomacy: a note from Mr. Knox ”(1910),“ American politics: Zelaya responds to Taft ”
(1911), "The End of Nicaragua" (1912), "American Affairs / Yankee Intention" (1914). And in
non-journalistic works such as: “Dilucidaciones” (prologue of El Canto Errante, 1907) and in its
autobiographical work, History of my books (1916).

311
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certain Darian texts referring to the United States ”(“ Stalking ”266). Do not
However, Acereda forgets or ignores that anti-imperialism was not only
it has been a critical thought of Marxism or the left, but it was also
held by thinkers as dissimilar as John A. Hobson and Mark Twain 33 . In
Consequently, that Darío has enunciated anti-imperialist positions does not
it does not transform either into a liberal or a Marxist, since anti-imperialism does not
corresponds to a particular party ideology, it is rather a political attitude
and a speech of cultural resistance that can connect with different bodies
doctrinal and that is activated in certain situations marked by interference
imperialist (Kozel, Grossi and Moroni 12-14). Therefore, although we recognize the
Darío's ideological hesitations, we consider that in his case and in history
Latin American intellectual “it is convenient to keep in mind a flexible concept of

anti-imperialism, attentive to differences in individual interpretations and
the changes operated in time, in the ideas themselves and in the political positions
and ideological of the different authors ”(Pita and Marichal 12).
Don Quijote cannot and should not die: Hispano-Americanism and rhetoric of
disaster
Darío's chronicles about Spain are fundamental to understanding the

ideological role that these texts had in the context of the resurgence of
Hispanicism and the process of political-cultural reconciliation with the so-called
Motherland (Zea 19), which for much of the nineteenth century had been marginalized
33 Hobson, a British liberal and pro-capitalist economist, is a major critic of imperialism

of his time, because he points out: “not only does it prevent progress towards internationalism by promoting
enmity of the rival empires, but, with its attack on freedoms and against one's own
existence of the weaker or inferior races, causes in these a correlative excess of
national self-awareness ”(25). It is also necessary to indicate that one of the first Leagues Anti-
imperialists did not emerge to the eaves of Marxist thought, but in the United States and headed
by Mark Twain in 1898. This League was “founded in Boston with the basic aspiration to fight
and denounce the implications of the Cuban-Hispanic-American War of that year ”
(Quesada Monge 165).
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of the national and cultural projects of liberal intellectuals, because

Hispanic represented the colonial world, obscurantism and political tyranny. Already in
1892 Darius had understood the importance of reestablishing cultural ties
between Spain and its former colonies, when it was sent by the Nicaraguan government to
Madrid with the purpose of participating in the commemorations and celebrations of
IV Centenary of the Discovery of America (Schmigalle 153).
A few months before his second arrival in Spain, Darío had written “El
Triumph of Caliban ”, profusely cited, where he exposes his defense of inheritance
Latina versus Anglo-Saxon expansionism: “No, I can't, I don't want to be on my side
of those silver tooth buffaloes. They are my enemies, they are the haters of
Latin blood, it's the Barbarians. This is how every noble heart shudders today, like this
every worthy man protests that something is preserved from the milk of the Wolf ”(184). With
this rhetoric that aesthetizes and metaphorizes the United States, Darío subverts the
binomial of civilization / barbarism colonialism, while in this place it is
identified the northern country with the Caliban of the Shakespearean tradition 34 and the
barbarism (category generally attributed to non-western peoples during the

Modernity) 35 .
Shortly after the publication of this chronicle, Darío writes “En
the sea ”, with which contemporary Spain opens , establishing a reconciliation in
his speech with the former Metropolis: “Back on track, and towards the mother country that
the American-American-Spanish soul must always greet with respect, must
34 Carlos Jáuregui makes an interesting interpretation of the modernist appropriation of

figures of Ariel and Calibán, highlighting that: “The Shakespearean and Panlatinist metaphors of
Latin Americanism of the end of the century also highlights the Eurocentrism of the
Latin American intelligentsia , and its marginality or peripheral (neo) colonial location. To the
name their cause of identity as that of the Latin race, they came to a racist idea, bill
French and paradoxically designed in the process of constitution of the American booty that
they disputed powers like England, France and the United States. The allegations against Caliban
(de Groussac, Darío and Rodó) are stated from the loss of authority of the lawyer
characteristic of Modernism and from a cultural space whose referents have been offset
for the emerging economic, military and technological supremacy of the United States ”(342-343).
35 During this time of his life, Darío also writes a series of poems that exhibit his
Hispanicism and its solidarity with wounded Spain: "Cyrano in Spain", "Al rey Óscar", "Portraits
and "Trébol" (all published in various media, in 1899), which a few years later will be
gathered in songs of life and hope .

313
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love with deep affection. Because if it's not the old powerful one, the dominant
imperial, love her twice; and if she is injured, tend to her much more ”(37). In this
appointment we recognize a turn in the ideological perspective that since the beginning of
19th century they had maintained lawyers like Andrés Bello (1781-1865), Simón
Bolívar (1783-1830) and Francisco Bilbao (1823-1865), who were just looking
break with the Hispanic colonial heritage. Darius, however, introduces a
Neologism (American Spanish) to express their double consciousness and their affiliation
spiritual with the peninsular culture, although it is remarkable that it puts the American before
to the Spanish 36 , because it expresses its willingness to emphasize its position from the
New Continent against "wounded" Spain, performing "the fusion of the old and
the new ”(Gutiérrez Girardot 153). It should be noted that although this speech is
elaborates the recovery of a common sociocultural project with “the maternal country”,
affiliate relationship of the Hispanic speech (Núñez 143), also establishes a
significant silence about subalternized cultures (native peoples and
mainly Afro-descendants) that make up the Americas 37 .
36 It is interesting to note here that Darío subverts the order of cultural identity that the Jesuit
Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán (1748-1798) had drawn up in his famous “Letter addressed to the
American Spaniards ”(1792), where the identification with the Spanish preceded the American
within his emancipatory political project. Dario nearing the end of his life, in History of
my books , reinforce your American-Spanish geocultural perspective, when
retrospectively declares about the elaboration and poetic proposal of Cantos de vida and
Hope : “My optimism overcame. Spanish from America and American from Spain, I sang,
choosing as an instrument the Greek and Latin hexameter, my confidence and my faith in rebirth
of old Hispania, on the site itself and on the other side of the Ocean, in the choir of nations that
they counterbalance the strong and daring race of the north in the sentimental balance ”(205-206).
37 Later we will briefly examine the stereotyped vision that Darius has about the world
Native American in the work we are analyzing. While in relation to

African-American descendants in Spain ... does not make substantial judgments. However, Darius in
another fundamental chronicle, "The Race of Cham" (1907), expresses a racist discourse typical of a
important legal sector of the time, showing its contempt for blacks: “So, then, of Haiti
bad news arrive in France. The macacada is furious; the few whites on the island come
with fear the agitation of the natives. They know that an insurrection of color is terrible for
Europeans In the black, dancing, sad, jovial, picturesque, carnival, arises, with the fire of the
cholera and the movement of the revolt in anthropopithecus ancestor, the cannibal of Africa, the beast
Dark of the hot jungles ”(261) and then adds:“ Their imagination […] makes them conceive
a fantastic life of joys and joys, before only allowed to the hated
whites ... Vanity, which is characteristic of them - there is no vanity like that of dark skin - induces them
to imitate the gestures and ways of the white knight, of the old pattern. The minister struts. its
theory, his dream, his goal, is equality. But that does not have the simplest representation, the
smallest authority, the slightest honor, because then it becomes the worst tyrant ”
(267). For a suggestive analysis and a broader look at the problem of
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In the opening chronicle of his Spanish stay, “In Barcelona”, Darío

presents the city as an industrial, artistic and intellectual model that embodies
in a better way, modern thinking, since it is superior to the rest of the
Hispanic cities, including the imperial capital, Madrid (38). It's a city
Darío points out “laughing, cheerful, bustling, modern, maybe a bit French and
therefore full of elegance ”(36). What we identify here is his inclination for
modern city model that embodies Barcelona (whose paradigm is France) in
both the aesthetic, the industrial, the intellectual and the social combine there. Without
However, behind that idealization Darío critically observes the new subjects
and social classes (urban proletariat) generated by the industrial system. With the final purpose
to represent this social reality, narrates with a hint of irony an anecdote that
witnessed in a cafe:
[…] Near me, on one of the tables, two gentlemen, probably

businessmen or industrialists, elegantly dressed, conversing
with great interest and attention, when a worker arrived with his typical costume
and that air of greatness that marks a stamp on the workers here
unmistakable; He looked back and forth, and as there were no tables
unoccupied near there, took a chair, sat at the same table where
the gentlemen talked and asked as he would have done the same
Vifredo el Velloso, his cup. It was served, taking it, paid and it was like
had entered, without the two gentlemen suspending their conversation, nor
amazed at what elsewhere would be daring action and
impertinent. That same worker goes down the Rambla, and his step and his gesture
they imply an unprecedented possession of the most wonderful of the proud; he
pride of a democracy carried to the forgetfulness of superiority, to
point that it would be said that all these factory men have a
Earl's crown in the brain. (46-47)
representations of racial and cultural differences in the works of modernists

Hispanic Americans, we recommend reviewing Iris Zavala. "The Dialogical Cultural Signs."

315
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In this extensive quotation, we distinguish several elements that are fundamental

with respect to our object of study, because the
ideological perspective and the place of enunciation of Darío's speech. Beyond
the referentiality of this anecdote, we identify a class positioning before
what seems to disturb the social order from which he evaluates the world, well, although
he does it indirectly, he believes that the worker's behavior was an “action
bold and impertinent. ” First, Dario implicitly establishes a
class opposition between "businessmen or industrialists,
elegantly dressed ”and the worker“ with his typical costume and that air of greatness ”. In
this contrast, although we recognize, as Leonel Delgado has warned, that
“There is some aestheticization in this political vision of modernity” (21), we think
which also expresses an aversion to a social sector that presents itself as
outside the place that belongs to him, without respecting those “gentlemen” and his
"Conversation" by "sitting at the same table". Likewise, the worker is never
qualified neither as "lord" nor as "gentleman", only his pride is mentioned, and
even, Dario ironically compares him to Wifredo el Velloso, considered father
of Catalan independence. With the same irony, he ends by saying that "all
these factory men have a crown of a count in the brain . ” In
second, the chronicler reveals a critical distance from new relationships
political-social that would occur in Barcelona, since the worker personifies “the
pride of a democracy carried to the forgetfulness of superiority ”, which could
be interpreted as a somewhat conservative and contrary to a democracy that
has forgotten "superiority", that is, to a system that does not respect the
individualities and class differences within the social division of labor
naturalized by the capitalist system 38 . From this point of view, we consider
that this faith in modernization is ambiguous within its perspective, while not
38 Pablo Kraudy points out that Darío was not an admirer of democracy, but rather reproduces “the practice
Latin American
The basis of thisof the nineteenth
criterion was thecentury, where
belief that democracy
the people wereisnot
notyet
equivalent to numerical
able to exercise will. The
the roles
that one demanded ”(76-77).
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there is a positive assessment of the new ideological currents that arise with the
Modernity and industrial modernization processes 39 . In this context, Darío
it also expresses itself with some distrust of socialist movements and
Catalan anarchists:
The city is agitated. Everywhere the palpitation of a pulse, the sign

of an animation. The factories at rest, empty their workers
and workers. The worker knows how to read, discusses; talk about the RS, that is, if you like,
Social Revolution; another looks redder, and part right to anarchy. Do not
they show fear or empathy in singing anarchic songs in their
meetings, and their speakers do not have to envy anything to their peers
Paris or from Italy. You will remember that action has been reached here, and
sonorous and bloody memories there are terrible attacks […] Recently,
at an industrial party, at a time when bitter news came from
the war, certain workers tore a flag of Spain from their flagpole
and replaced it with a red flag. (49)
Unlike the worker's anecdote, here his perspective is not so

markedly adverse to these groups, since it is primarily limited to
report on the actions carried out by them. However, there is a
kind of exotization of the worker, because it stands out that "can read", "discusses", no
shows "fear", characteristics that appear to be unusual for a subject of this
class in the Darian look.
In the total sum of these quotes, it is possible to recognize that Darío is anchored in
the nineteenth-century lawyer's ideology, looking for shelter from ideologies
39 Julio Ramos has suggested that for the main Latin American modernists, such as Darío, the
working masses represented an inner barbarism of civilization that was necessary to reform,
for this reason: "the essayists refunctionalize literary, normative rhetoric against" chaos "
social and massification, claiming for the discipline of the humanities a leading place in the
administration and control of a world where a new form of "barbarism" proliferated:
Workers' mass ”(273).

317
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egalitarianists who put their class interests above projects

nationals 40 . So, in this speech you are trying to maintain a certain social order
liberal within the framework of the exaltation of individualism that respects hierarchies
social and in opposition to the crowds 41 . Finally, in the chronicle before
mentioned, "At sea", we also notice a rejection of the passengers of the
third class that go on the ship, presenting them as a “bunch of men who
It agglomerates like a horrible honeycomb ”(39) and describes them in a derogatory way:
“Today I entered the infectious environment of that human flock that would demand the
fumigation ”(39). It is also necessary to specify that the aversion stated by
Dario around the new sectors and popular social classes that the
capitalist modernization was generating in Latin America and Europe of
turn of the century, it became one of the central characteristics of a group
significant of modernist Latin American intellectuals, who possessed a high
concept of Europe, whose “classist identification with high culture and its
Westernism , put them on the side of "civilization" and the Apollonian Ariel; the
made reject any identity role from effervescence

popular ”(Jáuregui 344).
Now, one of the relevant aspects of the work analyzed is the
perspective that builds on the Hispanic imperial past and present. In this series
40 A relevant biographical fact is that Darío knew closely and became interested in the ideology
socialist and anarchist in Buenos Aires. He established friendly relations with Roberto Payró,
Ricardo Jaimes Freyre, José Ingenieros, Alberto Ghiraldo, Manuel Ugarte, among others (Zanetti,
"Modernism" 529), reputed thinkers and founders of the Argentine thought of
left In addition, he wrote several chronicles on socialism and anarchism, for example,
"Dynamite" where an anarchist attack repudiates ( La Tribuna, Buenos Aires , November 27,
1893). He also participated in some anarchist magazines, but without sharing his ideology
(Acereda, "Silences" 155). In "A walk with Núñez de Arce", of Spain ..., exposes the obstacle
that the anarchist, socialist and even nihilist groups represent for the recovery of
Hispanic national project: “Failure prevails in everything. Society, after so many centuries, does not
He has still managed to solve the problem of his own organization. See the red flowers that sprout
on the ground: they are called socialism, anarchism, nihilism. The Spanish nationality! a dream"
(277).
41 Darius in the chronicle “A political meeting” confesses: “The crowd is not pleasant to me
Your rudeness and hygiene. I like it only from afar, like a sea; or better, in the comparsas
theatrical, flowered with picturesque costumes, even if it is crowned with the frigio bell pepper ”(269). From
In this way, their appreciation of the crowds is valued in their aesthetic contemplation and from
an enunciative distancing.
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of chronicles the image of Spain delivered by Darío is elaborated through a

rhetoric of the disaster that allows him to characterize and evaluate the empire in his
different levels: social, political, artistic-cultural and economic. For example in
"Madrid", perceives that there is "in the atmosphere an exhalation of organism
decomposed ”(56), and that it also recognizes in the emblematic figures of the
Hispanicism and political conservatism (Núñez 149). Dario lists the state
present of the intellectual peaks he had known in 1892: “Cánovas died;
Ruiz Zorrilla died; Castelar disappointed and ill; Valera blind; Campoamor
Mute; Menendez Pelayo ... Spain is certainly not for literatures, amputated,
suffering, defeated ”(56).
This representation of the disaster and imperial failure, Darío visualizes it
also in the return of the defeated and cadaverous soldiers: “they reach the
ports of the homeland the unhappy soldiers of Cuba and the Philippines [...] others do not reach
the earth and are thrown into the sea, and those who arrive walk in the likeness of shadows;
they seem, by face and body, corpses ”(57). An image opposite to what you see in
society, which is far from the vicissitudes of power and war:
“The most frightening disaster has just happened; few days have passed since
that the most humiliating treaty in which the jaw of the yanquee was signed in Paris
was satisfied for the moment after the great bite: well here I could
to say that the fall had no resonance ”(56). As we have analyzed, the
perspective that is outlined in some chronicles of this book reveals the position
of Darío in the face of the cultural and political conflict he sees between the world
Latin American and Saxon represented in that calibanic "jaw" of the
US imperialism On the other hand, in this chronicle not only performs a

critical account of the social and cultural situation of Spain after the defeat, but that
holds political leaders responsible for causing the debacle:
They are the ones who have gnawed at the symbolic Lion of before; they who
they have influenced the state of moral destitution in which the public spirit
find; those who have prepared, for negligence or malice, the false ground of

319
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colonial business, so it could not come at the time of the

Anglo-Saxon prey but the most unequivocal and formidable weak. (58)
Note that the rescue of the lion as an imperial symbol shows a certain
nostalgia against, in his words, that "empire made dust" (57). Darío, in the
Chronicle "Cyrano at Lope's house", with a gesture of appreciable ambiguity you want
a resurgence of the imperial lion, which is embodied in various figures of the
Hispanic culture and tradition, summoning up to recover the spirit of Don Quixote that has
been displaced by the “Sanchesco spirit” that “prevents all ascension” (90):
Don Quixote must not and cannot die; in his avatars he changes his appearance,
but it is he who brings the salt of glory, the gold of the ideal, the soul of the world.
A time was called El Cid, and still dead won battles. Other, Cristobal
Columbus, and his Dulcinea was America. When this is purified - will it be for
iron and fire? - maybe it will reappear, in a future rebirth, with
new weapons, with new ideals, and then men will hear again,
God willing, among the columns of Hercules, roar to the sea, with blood
renewed and pure, the old and symbolic lion of the Iberians. (90-91)
With this spiritualist discourse and with modernist aestheticization,

he dramatizes his admiration for the Hispanic imperial and colonial past and his desire to
renewal of Spain, although sublimating the political-ideological conflicts that
Each of the mentioned figures represent. In addition, the

feminization of the American continent by turning it into Dulcinea, an idealized woman
of Don Quijote, because Darío inscribes in a romantic way the complex relationship
colonial of Spain with the New World. From this point of view, we can
point out that the chronicler's anti-imperialist perspective is ambiguous and not
necessarily against colonialism or anti-colonialism, since, to validate
his American-Spanish project, somehow eludes political problems,
racial and cultural, which shaped the Spanish-American colonial history. Yes
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well Darío regrets the emergence of the new American empire, “it does not stop
do the same for the end of the previous empire ”(Jáuregui 345). So, play in
part of the Spanish colonial and imperial discourse, updated in the 19th century by
intellectuals like Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (1856-1912) 42 , who saw in the
colonization and conquest of America a beneficial civilization process for
both sides of the Atlantic (Díaz Quiñones 81-82).
Notwithstanding the foregoing, in “Black Spain” Darío expresses a position
criticism when reinstalling some of the topics of the black legend, showing the side
dark of colonialism that in the previously examined omitted:
The conquerors and the friars in America did nothing but work
instinctively, with the impulse of the native wave: the Indians torn apart
for dogs, hoaxes and violence, the deaths of Guatimozin and
Atahualpa, slavery, the burner and the work of the sword and the arcabuz,
they were logical, and only an exceptional heart, a spirit
foreigner among his own, like Las Casas, could be amazed at that
manifestation of Black Spain. (125)
Here, Darío's perspective is in favor of the Indians, but in a
rhetorical operation that seems without so much force and something stereotyped, because, for a
part, reproduces the traditional discourse of the black legend, whose matrix comes from
of the thought of Bartolomé de Las Casas, and, on the other, the writer takes a
enunciative distance by not recognizing either culturally or ethnically in that world
Native American, who is presented as a passive and silent victim in front of the
Hispanic imperial apparatus. However, he defines himself as a Catholic who does not seek
attack Spain, but pursues the overcoming of fanaticism that has harmed
To this society. The chronicler notes: “I could badly, Catholic, attack what I summon;
42 It is worth remembering that Darío knows the work of this Hispanic thinker well and kept
friendly relations, whom he considered as a model of humanist and intellectual. Test
This is the chronicle dedicated to him in Spain ... : "Homage to Menéndez Pelayo".

321
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but I cannot ignore that today's Spanish Catholicism is far from small
long still of the terrible and dominant Catholicism of the cars of faith ”(130). Y
later he writes: "Spain must always be Catholic or it will not be" (131). thin
He pointed out that in this chronicle Darío recommends “a spiritualist way out for
Spain, which balances traditional Catholicism and modernity ”(27). Though
it also tells us about the place of enunciation rubendariano, while it is situated from
a European religious practice imposed in America of which he feels heir and
defender 43 .
Now, Darío in contemporary Spain never expresses a position
clear around the Hispanic political sphere, in which they faced strongly
monarchists and republicans, especially after the defeat with the states
United. However, as Antonio De la Torre has studied, Darío is inclined to

write and meet with “the champions of Spanish democracy, thinkers and
men of action that during the last decades had been the support and soul of
republican movement ”(269). Thus, it happens, for example, with the chronicles, studies
and countless quotes he dedicates to the works and personalities of Emilio Castelar
(1832-1899), Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920) and Miguel de Unamuno (1864-
1936) 44 . Or his text “A political meeting ” in which he reports his attendance at a
assembly of the republicans of Madrid, although without issuing political opinions

Very compromising.
Where perhaps we find a more obvious definition regarding the
Spanish politics and monarchy is in its text "The young aristocracy", in which
declares: "Everywhere, and through its own fault, the nobility has lost ground"
(369). And then it complements this idea, indicating: “In our democracies, the
The presence of a noble is always decorative in social life. They smell those
Gentlemen, rude, ignorant, obtuse, but almost always dress so well!
43 For the study and deepening of the relationship between Darío's Modernism and its conceptions
Religious, we recommend the article by José María Martínez. “Literary modernism and
religious modernism: encounters and disagreements in Rubén Darío ”.
44 In this direction, see: “The Argentine Legation. At Castelar's house ”,“ La Pardo Bazán in Paris.
An article by Unamuno ”and“ A novel by Galdós ”.
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Gentleman and escrocs usually arrive in America ”(369). In this way, it shows a
disdain for the nobility as a social class that is useless in democratic systems
Americans and, incidentally, their antitrust thinking, even if it comes from
indirectly through his reprobation of the noble and aristocratic world. For
Darío, in Spain the nobility has been one of the factors of decay, because
it is not productive within the capitalism that carries out the processes of
modernization during the time: “From ancient times I have known the little love of work
of the Spanish nobility […] Families full of gold and accustomed to the gift, bad
they could think of something other than the privileges of their greatness ”(371). In
summary, for Darius the nobility manifests a setback in modern times
for Spanish society, and with a speech of the republican liberal ideology
He concludes: “No, nothing can await Spain from its aristocracy. Salvation yes
comes, will come from the people guided by their own instinct, from the laborious part that
it represents the energies that remain of the Spanish spirit, free of political leaders
and of shepherds wolves ”(376). Recall again that the mention of the people must
be screened by an elitist republican ideology and a modernist rhetoric, more
that to a democratic vocation as we understand it today.

On the other hand, in the chronicle "The American novel in Spain", Darío seeks
reverse the ignorance that Hispanic writers exhibit about the
Latin American novel and cultural production, who consider that “everything
ours is hopelessly tropical, or Cuban ”(346). But maybe your goal
essential in this work is to specify the union of the cultural field
Latin American on both sides of the Atlantic, which for the modernists, in
general, “it implied the strengthening of a common literary system in the market
internationalized letters ”(Bonfiglio 71). A remarkable element of Darío
it is also that he conceives the literary field from a perspective
Hispano-Americanist, where the spiritual and racial are related to inheritance
Hispanic colonial, although recognizing the American social and cultural specificity:

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The blood cells we carry, the tongue, the bonds that bind us
the Spaniards cannot perform the merger. We are others Even in what
intellectual, even in the specialty of literature, the sablazo de San Martín
He untied the dictionary a little, broke the grammar a little. This
It does not take away that we have unity in the spirit of the race. (347)
Julio Ortega has seen in that "We are others" the "Darian self-definition of
Latin American modernism; but also as his implicit cultural theory, no
by subjective less rigorous than any other ”(144). A cultural theory that, in
This case is presented as the configuration of a novelistic project that in
Latin America was a task that had not yet been fully developed.
On the other hand, Darío in this text also contributes to the stabilization of a
Spanish-American canon of writers and works, highlighting: Amalia (1851-1855), of
José Mármol, María (1867), by Jorge Isaacs, and La Bolsa (1898), by Julián Martel.
It should be noted, however, that none of them corresponds, according to him, to the
Real American novel. For Darío, the only one who has managed to write it is the
Argentine Eduardo Gutiérrez (1851-1889) and, although he does not name his novel, it collides
which refers to Juan Moreira (1878-1888). She comments:
That barbaric creepy newsletter, that confusion of the legend and the
national history in casual and Creole writing, form, in what
copious of the work, the sign of an era in our lyrics. That literature
gaucha is the only thing that can attract Europe's curiosity until today: she
It is a natural, native product, in its wild fierceness and poet goes the soul
from the earth. (347-348)
It has been noted that "That barbaric creepy newsletter" is "almost a

oxymoron and means: Latin American narrative, speech whose "new" strength
seizes the popular genre, of the press, to register his own account of the
genus palimpsest, about the textuality of the novel, an instrument
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privileged of modernity ”(Ortega 145). Dario, then, rescues a

novelistic that is able to fictionalize the American reality in a national key,
through the binomial civilization / barbarism of Sarmiento, representing the exotic and
regional as foundational elements of national Creole identities. In
In this sense, it seeks to differentiate American literature from Spanish and European literature.
within his modernist project. A literature that will be legitimized under the criteria
aesthetic legacy of European Romanticism that privileges originality and
novelty. Thus, we agree with Leonel Delgado, who has indicated that
American barbarism can be modernized in the Darian ideological perspective:
Narrating it in a different and aesthetic way […] However, the "barbaric booklet"
identifies as it circulates from exoticism to tradition, and, back,
To barbarism. So modernity is introduced as a factor

that drives the circulation of the original and eccentric genres before
different authorities that sanction them or not (although the European criterion
be the measure). In other words, modernism can also be read in

barbarism (31)
From this point of view, Darío is reconciling literary production

local and autonomous with its cosmopolitan ideal and its modernization project of the letters
Hispanic American Perhaps for this reason, in the analyzed chronicle it ends
praising the naturalist novel, Todo una pueblo (1899), by the Venezuelan Miguel
Eduardo Pardo (1868-1905), resident in Paris, when describing and interpreting the summary
of his argument:
The tragedy that animates the narration is based on a piece of those

Warm Americas, with their semi-civilized cities and their campaigns
full of life, planted with forests in which the most brave prevails
nature and where the soul of the Indian takes refuge, the free soul of the Indian
of yesteryear, afflicted with the oppression and decay of the remains of tribes of the

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Indian now. And it is the preponderance of the descendants of the

conquerors, of the enriched mestizos; the product of the race of
adventurers and men of prey who came from Spain and the indigenous race,
which resulted in a society without genesis well clarified, which had
like European societies its aristocracy, its middle class and its people.
(351)
In this fragment a series of topics coming from the

colonial discourse that have been re-updated by nationalist speeches
liberals, interpreting the novel as a racial "tragedy", by using
a conceptual network that emphasizes the exotic and wild as opposed to the
European. Thus, Darío problematizes the Hispanic-American cultural identity as
an origin marked by miscegenation and indefinition. Despite this, the rescue of the
novel goes through the reproduction of the European look with respect to the continent
American, because it fails to exceed the categorical limits of civilization / barbarism.
While this binomial was imposed in the Latin American intellectual field
Thanks mainly to Sarmiento, it should not be unknown that, as
Roberto Fernández Retamar indicated, corresponds to a dichotomy, archaic and
ethnocentric, archetypal colonial and imperial discourse “that since the end of
18th century propagates the developing capitalist Europe ”(33) to justify its
invasion and domination of non-western peoples.
Finally, there is a remarkable silence from Darío that is necessary to highlight in
Spain ... : its political position against Cuban independence. The conflict is not
explicitly treated in any of the works of this work. A subject not less
thinking about the context in which he wrote his chronicles, also considering, as
We indicated earlier that he had supported the Cuban cause, and that he knew the
statements that José Martí had made in this regard 45 . We only noticed one
45 It should be remembered that Darío wrote a laudatory semblance of José Martí in his book Los raros
(1896), in which he values the poetic mastery of the Antillean intellectual, who had died
Recently. In addition, the Nicaraguan personally met Martí in New York in 1893,
while the Cuban was in exile because of his independence activities. Of this
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Indirect support for the struggle of Cuba in "Cyrano at Casa de Lope", the same chronicle
in which he remembers with nostalgia the Hispanic imperialism. However, in a small
caption that puts in voice of the Spanish journalist and politician, Julio Burell, Darío points out:
“Today the romanticism that dies in Europe revives in America and Oceania.
Cyrano de Bergerac - a faith, an ideal, a flag, a contempt of life - is
called Menelik in Abysinia, Samory in Senegal, Maceo in Cuba and in the Philippines
Aguinaldo ”(86). The interesting thing in this place is that Darío through a criticism
of art (from a theatrical performance) finds the opportunity to introduce
smuggling their political positions, where they value the emergence of

national liberation and anticolonialist movements of the imperial peripheries,
even if it is cautious and succinct. Thus, we observe that in the same chronicle
Dario textures opposite attitudes, a feature that once again shows his
unstable place of enunciation.
It is possible to interpret perhaps that part of the response to the almost null
treatment of the Cuban cause, we can find it in "El triumph of Calibán",
where he says: “And I have been a supporter of free Cuba, even if it was for
accompany in his dream to so much dreamer and in his heroism to so much martyr, I am friend
of Spain at the moment when I look at her attacked by a brutal enemy, who has
as he teaches violence, force and injustice ”(455). In this way, Darío
puts the Spanish-American unity project ahead of political conflicts
and national identities, as the United States is perceived as a
major and direct threat in the subcontinent while Spain is an empire in
withdrawal 46 .
I find Darío will write: “Martí was waiting for me that night at Harinand Hall, where I had to
deliver a speech before a Cuban assembly […] I highly admired the general vigor
of that unique writer, whom he had known for those formidable and lyrical correspondences
which he sent to Spanish-American newspapers. Martí had to defend himself that night. Had been
accused, I have no mind now of negligence, or precipitation, I do not know which movement of
invasion of Cuba It is the case, that the nucleus of the colony was in those moments opposite […]
on that occasion he delivered one of the most beautiful speeches of his life, the success was complete
and that formerly hostile audience acclaimed him vibrantly and prolongedly ”( Life 142-143).
46 José María Martínez considers that there are two reasons for the relegation of the political struggle
Cuban among modernists: “perhaps the main and most obvious, would be the fact that the fate of
Cuba, for Darío and for the rest of the non-Cuban writers, was an issue without implications

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Darío in another interesting chronicle, "Modernism," writes:
I have great pride here of being able to show books like those of Lugones or
Jaimes Freire among the poets, among the prose poems, like that vast one,
rare and complicated trilogy of Sicardi […] And other demonstrations of
our mental activity - not profuse and rhapsodic, that of quantity, but the
of quality, limited, very limited, but that is well presented and triumphs before
Europe's criteria - studies of political, social sciences. I feel the same

pride. (328)
This speech shows his Latin American perspective, when evaluating

with "pride" the "quality" of "our mental activity" and the development of works
intellectuals Darío introduces himself “as mediator and organizer of the new
aesthetic currents in the face of realism, naturalism and academicism ”
(Colombi 126). It then acts as a diffuser of culture
Latin American in the Old Continent, making a displacement in the
relations of knowledge production or, in his words, "mental activity": from
the former colonial world seeks to colonize Spain figuratively through the
literary knowledge and creations generated by Creole lawyers
spread them among peninsular intellectuals. In this regard, we can
interpret that your perspective is decolonizing as it subverts the
relationship of subalternity and dependence against Spain and Europe, by placing in a
same level to the American intellectual production from its seat of independence
Political and cultural Consequently, Darius, at least discursively,
completes the project of cultural autonomy proposed by Andrés Bello half a century
behind. Anyway, we note that the writer keeps Europe (yes, not to
Spain) as a rule and criterion of civilization, a gesture that can be read as the
immediate personnel and, therefore, easily neutralizable by another that they consider more
priority. The second reason would be precisely that other priority issue; that is, the
American intervention, as a new and aggressive manifestation of expansionism
American ”(“ The intervention ”195-196).
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quest to legitimize itself through the approval of the Old World, seeking
inscribe the Hispanic-American identity within Modernity. Dario Express
here the tension of finisecular Latin Americans “between the desire to join the
global order of modernism and anxiety caused by the experience of
exclusion, on the one hand, and anticipation of future exclusions, on the other ”(Siskind
37). However, Darío strives for Modernism, led by him, to
can deliver to the Latin American writers a specific position within
world literature, "independent of Spanish literature" (329).
Final thoughts
The chronicles that make up contemporary Spain served as

textual spaces of essayistic reflection, where Darío analyzed society, art,
the literature, politics and economy of Spain. All this, framed within
the major geohistoric and geopolitical problem that generated the Spanish defeat of the
98 in the Latin American intellectual and political field, beginning to be perceived
the “urgency of recreating programs aimed at achieving unity
Hispanic American, unit understood as defense ”(Corn 123). In this work you
it also dramatizes the instability of the Darian enunciation place, since it is a
subject who possesses a condition of double belonging to both a culture of
resistance as of western hegemonic culture. In addition, it represents the
Ideological ambiguities characteristic of Modernism (Real de Azúa 406), which
they express the complex and rich interdiscursive network that is articulated inside;
speeches from various aesthetic-intellectual currents that are of
difficult classification and that, at times, may seem contradictory, but articulate
in the framework of a major Spanish-American project. Such a project, as
we review, it is drawn on the basis of a rhetoric of the disaster that allows you
build Darío a textual image of the Spain of 98 for his readers
Hispanic Americans From this rhetoric evaluates the Hispanic society and the

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relocates in relation to Latin America, placing the subcontinent in a

position of equal conditions and, to some extent, superiority over the
former Metropolis, while within the Latin American cultural project are the
Modernist writers called to lead it.

On the other hand, imperialism in Darío's chronicles appears
represented and evaluated as a type of political and cultural submission to which he
opposes His criticisms of American imperialism and the old Spanish empire are
associated with a political and cultural estimate of the phenomenon, which is a look
different from the economic emphasis than thinkers like John A. Hobson, Vladimir I.
Lenin or Rosa Luxemburg will give you in those years in Europe. Speech
Darío's anti-imperialist, on the other hand, is from a spiritualist and political court in
relationship with the historical and epistemic place of Latin America in the context of
inter-imperial struggles of the turn of the century. In this way, the author of Azul emerges
as a relevant antecedent to understand anti-imperialist thinking in
our intellectual history, as it shows that such thinking, although not
free of tensions, it was a discourse of resistance itself and long-standing, as in

Francisco Bilbao or José Martí and that will be projected towards the 20th century with different
ideological and textual modulations, depending on the conditions of
production and enunciation.
Dario anticipates, in a way, the anti-imperialist discourse that
will hatch among Latin American intellectuals after the triumph of the
Russian Revolution and the founding of the III International; a thought that
was born before the imperialism concept was adopted and criticized by
European and American thinkers like Lenin or Twain. And even, in the case
of Darius, his anti-imperialism and protest against the United States expresses itself to
through literary discourse, for example, in "D. Q ”and in his“ Ode to Roosevelt ”.
In short, Darius in his chronicles then manifests a perspective
anti-imperialist and decolonizer who tries to free himself from subordination and
political and intellectual dependence to which America and its inhabitants have been subjected,
through the revaluation of the Hispanic-American culture in a cosmopolitan key.
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For this, it has appropriated the Western civilizing and modernizing model for
creatively adapt it to the Latin American geocultural reality and, of this

mode, reverse the situation of cultural and political relegation and marginalization with
Regarding the West.
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10/20/2019 Between empires: anti-imperialism and Latin Americanism in contemporary Spain by Rubén Darío

Vol 7, No. 12 (2019)

Between empires: anti-imperialism and

Among Empires: Anti-Imperialism and Hispano-

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“But if someone said:« They are things of

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81). These circumstances generated, according to Susana Zanetti, a “condition

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alternative to North American penetration but also –and especially–

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Featured It is also, for Rama, a crucial period in Darian production,

Hispanic American chronicle then became a scriptural platform in

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Well, keeping in mind this theoretical-generic scope, our purpose

it was for many modernists) 7 , reproducing certain stereotypes and schemes of

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“A Roosevelt” (1904) 10 , contained in his book Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905).

Jiménez, in which Darío, as in the aforementioned "A Roosevelt", versifies politics

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meaning, often the poem "Salutation to the eagle" (1906) 12 . However, in

15 March 15, 1892.

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technical reproducibility ”(1936), where he writes:“ Humanity, which formerly, in Homer

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situation is "Cake-walk" (1903) 28 , where he describes and analyzes Afro-dance

[…] Is pleased to rejoice his jubilant compatriots of color, who

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of the lexicon of international relations (Hobsbawm 60) 30 . In turn, it is not the

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It is useful to emphasize that we find significant how the intellectual

imperialism rejected (Muslip 45), we need to state that when it employs

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Latin American intellectual “it is convenient to keep in mind a flexible concept of

Darío's chronicles about Spain are fundamental to understanding the

33 Hobson, a British liberal and pro-capitalist economist, is a major critic of imperialism

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of the national and cultural projects of liberal intellectuals, because

barbarism (category generally attributed to non-western peoples during the

34 Carlos Jáuregui makes an interesting interpretation of the modernist appropriation of

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Native American in the work we are analyzing. While in relation to

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In the opening chronicle of his Spanish stay, “In Barcelona”, Darío

[…] Near me, on one of the tables, two gentlemen, probably

representations of racial and cultural differences in the works of modernists

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In this extensive quotation, we distinguish several elements that are fundamental

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The city is agitated. Everywhere the palpitation of a pulse, the sign

and replaced it with a red flag. (49)

Unlike the worker's anecdote, here his perspective is not so

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egalitarianists who put their class interests above projects

made reject any identity role from effervescence

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of chronicles the image of Spain delivered by Darío is elaborated through a

US imperialism On the other hand, in this chronicle not only performs a

doi 10.5195 / ct / 2019.369 | http://catedraltomada.pitt.edu

colonial business, so it could not come at the time of the

With this spiritualist discourse and with modernist aestheticization,