The American Chronicles of José Martí: Journalism and Modernity in Spanish America (Reencounters with Colonialism: New Perspectives on the Americas)

Jose Marti, who was the main organizer of the triumphant movement for Cuban independence as well as a revolutionary of poetic language, lived most of his adult life as an exile in the U.S., reporting for several South American newspapers. Viewed by some as a Cuban George Washington and Walt Whitman combined, Marti was one of several writers who used the genre of the cronica to disseminate ideas through news channels. His chronicles became pivotal in articulating cultural debates and questions of national and cultural identity, and in forming Spanish America's "modernism." In the first complete study of Marti's chronicles, Susana Rotker assesses the class of professional journalists and writers of whom Marti was the most prominent example. She examines their response to and influence on the issue of modernization, which symbolized the breach between the U.S. and its southern neighbors, and she provides close readings of some of the most important chronicles. A critical reassessment of these texts is crucial to an understanding of how Spanish- and Anglo-America came to interact culturally at the turn of the century and of the forms of literature generated around locations of exile in the continent. The book, originally published in 1992 as Fundacion de una escritura, received the prestigious "Premio Casa de las Americas" award