Martí’s “Nuestra América mestiza” and Darío’s “Unión Latina”: Constructing Latin American Identity vis-à-vis Europe and the United States

Abstract

In this article, I examine four ideological differences that separate Darío’s call for “la Unión latina” in “El triunfo de Calibán” (1898) from Martí’s vision of “nuestra América mestiza” in his famous essay “Nuestra América” (1891): (1) Darío’s use of the term “la Unión latina” strives to foster a Pan-Latin identity that links the Latin American region to its “Latin” ancestry in Europe and pits them against the United States, while Martí’s call for a unified continent and a Pan-Hispanic-American ideal aims to distance the burgeoning Latin American nations from both their European forebears and the giant nation to the north; (2) Darío promotes imitation and emulation of European literary and cultural sources, whereas Martí calls for literary and cultural autonomy and autochthony; (3) Darío adopts an anti-naturalistic and cosmopolitan attitude, whereas Martí celebrates the natural wonders of the American subcontinent and rejects the artificiality of urban life; (4) Darío presents an aristocratic and elitist viewpoint, whereas Martí advocates a democratic and egalitarian solution to the inequality and oppression of colonial Cuba in particular and of postcolonial Latin America in general. Thus, despite Darío’s apparent desire to establish himself as heir to Martí’s lifelong struggle for Latin American regional autonomy, careful readers will undoubtedly recognize these authors’ strikingly different viewpoints in terms of both politics and poetics.