Etnocentrismo, racismo y miedo: los indígenas y los incultos en Martí

In the following article I return to the idea of ethnicity and liberalism in Latin America during the last part of the 19th century. I also discuss Martí’s view of the Indians after 1885, when his chronicles were fueled by the rhetoric of pro-indigenous groups such as the Friends of Indians Association. I propose to look at other ways in which Martí’s ethnocentric view of culture and race intertwined with his agenda of “defending” the Indians, especially in his essay “Nuestra América.” For that purpose I retrace some of my previous arguments and discuss other essays that have recently elaborated on Martí’s “other side”, the one that imposes on the Indians his own liberal agenda, and the vision of modernity that the elites were constructing in Latin America at the end of 19th century. In my previous articles I discussed Martí’s chronicles on the Guatemalan, Mexican and American Indians and here I will focus on the similarities between the positivists in Mexico and Martí’s emphasis on “scientific politics” as well as his fear that those that were at the lowest level of society could one day revolt against the republic and destroy the justice “accumulated in books.” For books symbolized for Martí the “lettered elite”, those that had power and exercised it to their own advantage. He talked about this fear in Mexico, and in his most famous essay he returned to it again with a somewhat different perspective, but still with the conviction that within a democracy everything could be solved and a revolt from the “unlettered” masses was not justified. I argue that even if “Nuestra América” meant a more positive view of the “Indian problem”, Martí still considers the Indians, the “gauchos” and the rest of the “incultos” as a threat. They were the natural ally of the “caudillos” that ruled for so long Latin America, charismatic caudillos such as Juan Manuel de Rosas.