Our America

A short political essay that the Cuban poet and independence leader wrote in New York and published in January 1891, first in La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York and then in Mexico City's El Partido Liberal. Martí argues that the young Spanish American republics failed when their educated elites governed with laws and ideas copied from Europe and the United States. Good government, he says, must grow out of a country's own elements and people, including its Indigenous, Black and mestizo majorities, whom he gathers under the figure of the 'natural man'. Universities should teach the history of the Incas before the history of ancient Greece, and foreign ideas may be grafted on only if the trunk is local. He insists there is no such thing as race hatred, because races are inventions of bookish thinkers, and he ends by warning that a powerful, contemptuous neighbour to the north threatens a divided America, which must know itself and unite.

It is the founding statement of Latin American cultural and political self-determination, and still the starting point for debates about imitation, identity and the relationship between Latin America and the United States.