Logo: cartoon - emerging U.S.

English text: Lesson 17: The U.S. Emerges; the Modernists Martí, Rodó

I. The emergence of the United States

The turn of the century saw the emergence of the United States as a dynamic and even aggressive regional and world power after over a century of relative indifference to Latin America (outside of Mexico). This new U.S. role profoundly affected Latin America, its literature and its art.

The earliest significant expression of a Latin American policy toward Latin America was, as we have noted previously, the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which because of United States weakness and distraction by other problems was not enforced for most of the 19th Century. Thus, the British taking of the Falkland/ Malvinas Islands (1833), Spanish raids on the Pacific Coast of South America (1850's and 60's) and French intervention in Mexico in the mid 1860's were not countered by any effective U.S. action.

By the 1840's the Latin American perception of the U.S. was shaped not by the Monroe Doctrine so much as by U.S. expansion to the West at the expense of Mexico. During the Mexican-American War Mexico lost substantial portions of its national territory to its northern neighbor, a fact that Mexicans will never forget, although many in the United States relegate that episode to ancient history and tend to forget that most of the Southwest was Spanish and Mexican long before it was American.

Latin fears over U.S. expansion were calmed somewhat during the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, when internal problems distracted the United States and kept it from taking a more active role in Hemispheric affairs. This was the period when French Emperor Napoleon III, acting in concert with Mexican conservatives, seized upon the excuse of unpaid debts to install the Hapsburgh Maximilian and his Empress Carlotta on the "throne" of Mexico. The brief interlude of Mexico under a foreign emperor was accompanied by bitter fighting between liberals and conservatives until the French withdrew their troops and Maximilian was executed. The U.S., in the middle of its Civil War, did not act.

After Reconstruction and economic recovery the U.S. sought markets for its expanding industrial production and began to look southward. In 1889 the first Inter-American Conference was held in Washington, primarily responding to the U.S. agenda of stimulating trade and commerce. Fittingly, the permanent secretariat set up after the meeting was called "The Commercial Bureau of the American Republics".

Towards the end of the Century there was a strong current of thought in the U.S. that stressed social Darwinian ideas of the survival of the fittest, and Spencerian notions of superiority of the Anglo-Saxon and European races of the mid-latitudes. Building upon the earlier notions of the U.S. as a chosen people with a manifest destiny to become a great power, they were to provide the ideological basis for U.S. policies in Latin America and the Caribbean for an extended period. These ideas were coupled to the geopolitical theories of Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan to justify the expansion of a superior nation into the weaker and inferior nations of Latin America (and especially the Caribbean Basin). To be taken seriously as a major actor on the world stage, the argument went, it was essential that the U.S. control its own "back yard" of the Caribbean, which was frequently called "the American (U.S.) Mediterranean". This in turn meant controlling the proposed inter-oceanic canal and several key islands of the Caribbean.

The decline of Spain as world power and the continuing struggle by Cuban and Puerto Rican patriots for independence provided the opportunity to make these ideas operational. The explosion of the battleship USS Maine in Havana harbor in early 1898 was the excuse the U.S. needed to launch into the "splendid little war" which brought Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines into the U.S. orbit.

Art in this period includes two increasingly powerful media: the camera and the cartoon. Photography had been invented in the 1840's, but its use as a tool for recording historical events did not come into its own until the U.S. Civil War. The Spanish-American War of 1898 was the first major event in Latin American history in which photography, as historical document as well as expression of esthetic creativity, was a significant instrument. Cartoons, of course, had been around for a long time, but technological progress in mass printing techniques made it an increasingly useful and effective tool in this period. Adding to the impact of both photography and the cartoon in this period was the fact that the publishing giants William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer saw in the 1898 War an opportunity to expand their circulation, using both the photograph and the cartoon to do so.

II. José Martí, poet of Cuban Independence

José Martí has a richly deserved place as both writer and hero of the Cuban independence movement. As an author he was extraordinarily versatile: he produced some of the best lyric poetry of the late-romantic and early-modernist period, and he was also a skilled essayist and translator. Because of his political activities in favor of Cuban independence from Spain, he was jailed and forced into exile for long periods of time. Most of his exile was spent in the United States (mainly New York), and in this period he became a keen observer of his host country. He earned his living by translating and writing about the United States for several major Latin American newspapers. He also held diplomatic posts (consul, conference representative) for various Latin American nations, and left the best insider's description of what went on at the First International Conference of the American Republics (which founded the Inter-American System) in Washington, 1889-1890.

Martí was in many ways the ideal "bridge" person between the Latin American and U.S. political and cultural worlds of his day. Like Rodó and many others before him, he admired much of what the United States had to offer, but he also warned his Latin compatriots of the seductive and less attractive side of U.S. materialism (see his essay, "Nuestra America-Our America"). He was especially concerned that the United States would seek to force Spain out of Cuba and Puerto Rico for its own political and economic benefit.

As a poet Martí took many of the finer elements of the late romantic period in Latin American literature and re-fused them into the foundations of the emerging modernist movement. His poetry is thus simpler, more emotional and less aloof than Darío's. His "Simple Verses" are still very popular, and have been adapted to become the lyrics of the song "Guantanamera".

Because of his anti-imperialist writings, Martí has been warmly embraced by the Castro regime in Cuba. But he is equally beloved by Cuban exiles living outside Cuba as the symbol of their homeland. He died in combat against the Spanish while leading a landing in Cuba in 1895.

"Simple Verses" by José Martí

I am a sincere man

born where the palm trees grow;

and before dying, I want

to release these verses from my soul.

I come from all places,

and to all places I go;

art I am among the arts;

and in the hills I am hill.

I know all the strange names

of the herbs and the flowers,

of mortal trickery,

and sublime pain.

I have seen the dark night

rain upon my head

and the rays of pure light

coming from divine beauty.

I have seen wings born on shoulders

of beautiful women,

and butterflies flying up

out of the debris.

I have seen a man

with a dagger in his side,

who never spoke the name

of the woman who killed him.

Quick, like a reflection,

twice I have seen a soul, twice:

first when the old man died

and then when she said goodbye to me.

I trembled once - at the grating,

at the entrance of my vineyard -,

when the savage bee

stung my little girl's forehead.

I felt pleasure, of a sort

that I never felt before: when

the warden, crying

read my death sentence.

I hear a sigh over

land and the seas,

yet it is not a sigh, it is

my son about to awaken.

If they say take from the jeweler

the best of his jewels,

I take a sincere friend

and set aside love.

I have seen the wounded eagle

fly the serene blue sky,

and I've seen the lair

where the poisonous viper dies.

I know full well that when the world

surrenders, tired, to rest,

that over the deep silence

the quiet stream murmurs.

I have put a daring hand,

stiff with horror and joy,

to touch the burned-out star

that fell at my front door.

I hide in my wild chest

the pain that wounds me:

the son of an enslaved people

lives for it, is quiet, and dies.

All is beautiful and constant,

all is music and reason,

and all, just like the diamond

is coal before light comes.

I know that the stupid man is buried

with great pomp and many tears,

and that there is no fruit on earth

quite like the cemetery's.

I am silent, and I remove

the pomp of the verse-maker;

I hang up on a withered tree

my academic gown.

"My Little Horseman" by José Martí

Mornings

my little one

would wake me

with a big kiss.

Astride

my chest

he made bridles

of my hair.

Giggly he with pleasure

giggly I with pleasure

he spurred me,

my little horseman.

What a gentle spur

his two fresh little feet.

How he laughed,

my little horseman!

And I kissed

his little feet,

two feet that fit

in a single kiss!

Our América (fragment) by José Martí

... But our America faces, perhaps, another danger. Not one from within, but rather from the United States. It stems from the different origins, methods and interests of the two major continental elements. And the moment is approaching when this hard-driving and enterprising nation, which scorns us and does not know us, will approach us, demanding intimate relations...

This formidable neighbor's scorn and lack of knowledge is the greatest threat to our America. Because the moment of closer contact is upon us, it is urgent that our neighbor get to know us, and soon, so that they will not scorn us. Ignorance may lead her, perhaps, to greed with regard to us. But respect, through getting to know us, would preclude this from happening. We have to have faith in the good side of man and be careful of man's bad side. We must allow the better side to emerge and prevail over the worse. If not, the bad will prevail. Nations should have a pillory for those who provoke useless hate, and another for those who do not tell the truth soon enough. ...

Nor should we assume, through some parochial antipathy, that the blond people of the continent are inherently and fatally evil because they do not speak our language, because they do not live as we do, because their political scars are different from ours, or because they do not highly regard men who are quick-tempered or swarthier. Nor should we think less of them because they, from their lofty but still unsure eminence, may look down on those who, less favored by History, are still struggling to establish republics; nor should we hide the facts surrounding the problems that must be solved for peace; we must study them in order to reach the urgently required tacit union of the continental soul. The unanimous anthem is already heard; the present generation is now carrying striving America forward along the path shown by our founding fathers; from the Rio Bravo to the Strait of Magellan, the Great Sower has scattered from the wings of the condor the seeds of the new America!

III. José Enrique Rodó: Ariel, Caliban, and the U.S.-Latin relationship

The Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó (1871-1917) is the principal prose writer of the modernist movement. He is best known for his extended essay, Ariel, named after the airy spirit in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Ariel has often been interpreted simplistically as symbolizing the struggle between the spiritual and cultural values of Latin America (represented by Ariel) and the crass materialistic and utilitarian values of the United States (represented by Caliban, that less attractive character from The Tempest).

Although this first-level interpretation is not necessarily contrary to Rodó's thinking (as well as that of many other Latin Americans then and since), it misses much of the rest of his message. Rodó's voice is that of the nobler values of Latin culture speaking out against the mechanistic and deterministic dictates of Positivism, which were so prevalent in his period around the turn of the Century. Rodó notes the many contributions of both cultures, summarized in his statement that the Anglo-Saxon gift to mankind was liberty while the Greco-Roman (Latin) gift was culture. However, neither is the exclusive preserve of one group, and each must learn from the other.

Rodó was not criticizing the United States as much as warning the Latins that their "Latinity" was endangered by an excessive and unquestioning acceptance of foreign values, especially those he labeled as "nordomania". Rodó felt that Latin America had a tendency to drift toward chaos, and that an excessive emphasis on unbridled liberty would exacerbate this trend. Caliban's materialism, he said, posed grave dangers to Ariel's core values of spirituality, idealism, free will and beauty, with the end result being a "de-Latinization" of Latin America.

We must understand that Rodó was part of the esthetic reaction against Positivism and that many of his arguments were phrased in the rhetoric of the Parnassian and Modernist movement of his period. Nevertheless, his ideas have had a profound influence on how Latin Americans view the United States and the dangers (as well as opportunities) it presents to their core values.

In effect, Rodó's advice to the Latin youth of his day is balanced: grow, and develop all your possibilities as human beings, avoiding early specializations in your career which would close doors. Be careful not to separate ethics from aesthetics, for the good is better if it is also beautiful; admire and respect the United States, and borrow from that great country those things which can enhance your own worth, but be wary of the materialism that can corrode the spirit that makes you what you are.

In recent years Rodó has been criticized for presenting his cultural arguments in bi-polar terms, focusing on Anglo-Saxon and Latin currents without regard for the contributions of the Indigenous, the Blacks, or the Mestizos. Despite these defects, his "Arielismo" is important to our understanding of how the Latin Americans view the United States.

Ariel (extract) by José Enrique Rodó

That afternoon the old and venerated teacher brought his young disciples together for the last session of the year's studies. They called him "Prospero", alluding to the wise magician of Shakespeare's The Tempest. They had already arrived in their spacious study room, in which a delicate but severe taste was evident, emanating from the noble presence of books, Prospero's faithful companions. An elegant bronze statue of The Tempest's Ariel dominated the room, as the deity of its serene environment. The old teacher usually sat next to this bust, and so they gave him the name of the magician who in the play had served and favored the fantastic personage who was the object of the sculptor's work. But perhaps he had intended, in his teachings and character, a deeper reason and sense.

In Shakespeare's work Ariel, genius of the air, represented the noble and winged part of the human spirit. Ariel is the domination of reason and sentiment over the gross stimuli of irrationality. It is generous enthusiasm, the high and disinterested motives for action, the spirituality of culture, the vivacity and grace of intelligence, the ideal toward which human selection climbs, correcting in superior man the tenacious vestiges of Caliban, symbol of sensuality and crudeness, chiseled by the persevering reality of life.

The statue, a true piece of art, showed the aerial genius at the instant when, liberated by the magic of Prospero, he hurls himself into the void. His wings are unfolded, and his light garments are loose and floating, with the caressing light falling like gold on bronzed silk. His face is uplifted, lips parted in a calm smile. All of this as Ariel reaches the smooth and graceful moment of takeoff. With great inspiration, the sculptor's art had managed to keep, at the same time, an angelic and idealistic appearance.

Prospero, meditating, touched the statue's face, and arranged the affectionate and attentive young group around him. Then with his firm and magisterial voice, which he used to fix an idea and penetrate the inner depths of the soul like the clear illumination of a shaft of light, or the incisive blow of chisel on marble, or the pregnant stroke of brush on canvas, or wave on sand, began to speak:

...

The utilitarian conception as an idea of human destiny, and the mediocrity of equality as a social norm, are intimately related and make up what is called in Europe the spirit of Americanism. It is impossible to meditate on both inspirations of conduct and sociability, and compare them with others, without insistently bringing forth the image of that formidable and fertile democracy of the North. That democracy of the North shows off the manifestations of its prosperity and power, like an overwhelming proof of the value of its institutions and the direction of its ideas. If one can say that utilitarianism is the basic definition of the English spirit, then the United States can be considered the incarnation of that word "utilitarian". And the gospel of this word is scattered all over as it is linked to the material miracles of its triumph. And Spanish America is not exactly characterized as a land of unbelievers in the face of this triumph. The powerful Federation is carrying out in our midst a sort of moral conquest. The admiration for her greatness and her strength is a sentiment which advances with great strides in the spirit of our leaders, and even more perhaps in the spirit of our masses, who are fascinated by the stamp of victory. And from admiring it one moves, with an easy transition, to imitating it. Admiration and belief are, for the psychologist, passive forms of imitation....

One imitates that which one believes to be superior and prestigious. And thus there floats through the dreams of many of our people who are concerned with our future, a sort of vision of a "de-latinized" America imitating the image of the archetype from the North. This happens without the extortion of conquest, but rather through our own free will. We are inspired by the desire to bring to fruition the most suggestive of parallels with the North, which show up in constant proposals for renewal and reform. We have our nordomania. It is necessary to confront this consumption of nordomania with the limits which reason and sentiment indicate.

...

Any severe judgment made of the North Americans must begin by extending to them, as one would do with high adversaries, the chivalrous formality of a greeting. It is easy for my spirit to do this. To deny good qualities is just as bad as to ignore defects. They are born (to use Baudelaire's paradox) with the innate experience of liberty. They have kept the faith with their original laws, and have carried out, with mathematical precision and assurance, the fundamental principles of their organization. They have thus given their history a unity which, even if it excluded the possibility of acquiring other aptitudes and merits, has the intellectual beauty of logic. The trail of their footsteps shall never be erased in the annals of human law, because they were the first who embodied our modern concept of liberty. Moving from the first shaky attempts, and despite all the utopian imagining, they converted it into an imperishable bronze and a living reality. Because they have demonstrated through their example that it is possible to extend to a vast national organism the firm authority of a republic. Because, through their federative form of government they have revealed, using de Tocqueville's fortunate phrase, the way in which it is possible to reconcile the brilliance and power of large States with the happiness and peace of small ones.

...

Their culture, which is a long way from being refined or spiritual, nevertheless has an admirable efficiency which is always directed in a practical manner toward the achievement of an immediate goal. They have not fixed on a single general scientific law or principle. Rather, they have made magic with the wonders of applied principles, and have become giants of utility. They have given the world the steam engine and the electric dynamo, billions of invisible slaves who have multiplied man's power a hundredfold, like Aladdin's lamp. The growth of their greatness and strength shall be the object of enduring astonishment in the future...

Puritan liberty, which gave it light from the past, united this light with a faith which still endures. Next to factories and schools, their strong hands have also built houses of worship where many millions of free consciences pray. They have been able to salvage, in the shipwreck of all ideals, the highest ideal, keeping alive a religious tradition. This religious tradition, which might not soar on the wings of a deep and sensitive spiritualism, but at least sustains among the raw utilitarian tumult the strong reins of morality. ...

Deprived like an orphan of deep traditions which would give it direction, this nation has not learned how to move from the inspired ideals of the past to a high and disinterested conception of the future. They live for the immediate reality, for the present, and because of that they subordinate all their activity to the selfishness of personal and collective well-being. Prodigious in their wealth, the North Americans have been able to acquire the satisfaction and vanity of sumptuous magnificence; but they have not been able to acquire the carefully selected note of good taste.