Dario, Marti, and Florescano: Modernismo and God
“And, even accounting for the rest, you lack one thing: God!”
-From “To Roosevelt” by Rubén Darío
In Dario’s poem despising the political strength of Theodore Roosevelt, he accuses the United States of being “the future invader of the guileless America of indigenous blood that still prays to Jesus Christ and still speaks in Spanish.” Recurrent in the poem is Darío’s insistence that despite the power wielded by the English-speaking people of the Americas, the heart and soul of the western hemisphere resides in the Spanish-speaking peoples who have faith in someone bigger than the United States. What the United States lacks is religious virtue and when virtue “takes the form of a cross”, as Jose Marti puts it, “they cast it off in horror.” Dario seems to say that it has been Latin America that has born the cross and is destined for future glory.
Both Dario and Marti desire to create a connection between contemporary and ancient Americans. Marti argues that “The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught in clear detail and to the letter, even if the archons of Greece are overlooked.” So he is willingly to cut off American ties with Europe, not only socially and economically as he argues elsewhere, but also historically in order that Americans may take pride in their indigenous roots. Dario also speaks this way when he talks of “the guileless America of indigenous blood”, hinting not only at Latin Americans’ ancient character, but also of their innocence.
Despite Marti’s rejection of Europe and its ways, and Dario’s despising of the United States they both point to Christianity, not native to the Americas, as a unifying factor and a strength of Latin Americans. That said, Latin American Christianity has historically been syncretic as Christian practice was often commingled with indigenous religious traditions. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the Virgin of Guadalupe who was the unifying symbol during the Mexican Revolution in the beginning of the nineteenth century. The cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe replaced an indigenous one without losing its non-Christian aspects. The Creoles, Mestizos, and Indians adopted the symbol of the Virgin of Guadalupe as something unique and defining of New Spain, a religious identity that gave them a special place in the sight of God. If anyone is interested in this topic a good book is Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico: From the Aztecs to Independence (1994) [in Spanish it is Memoria mexicana (1987)] by the Mexican author Enrique Florescano who argues ways in which the peoples of Mexico unified themselves through the adoption of symbols and the rewriting of history in order not only to give themselves a place in the world, but to distance themselves from Spain. When I read Marti and Dario it seemed as if the spirit described by Florescano continued or perhaps was revived during the Modernismo movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
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The religious syncretism connection with Martí and Darío makes sense. Historically, the Modernistas always got a bad rap for not being American enough (especially Darío and co., not so much Martí whose American credentials were established by his political activism). For decades, they were seen as the most europeanized and conservative of writers but in the last 25 years scholars have reappraised them and valued them as the earliest and most complex critics of Latin American modernization at the turn of the century.