Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

Discussion Questions
civilized folk marry the barbarians 219
• How does Sommer’s idea of foundational fi ction expose Gallegos as a
“dead author”?
• Although Sommer never calls foundational fi ction a discourse per se,
why is it clear from her reading that it is possible to do so?
• According to Sommer, how does Marisela’s education refl ect the
values that Gallegos was hoping to impose on his nation?
• What does Sommer mean when she refers to Santos’s historical guilt
and how does Gallegos resolve this guilt?
Introduction to José Martí’s “Our America”
“Our America” has had such a profound impact on modern Latin America
that it is easy to forget its brevity (ten pages) and the fact that José Martí
wrote thousands more pages in his life. Perhaps its conciseness partly explains
“Our America”’s lasting infl uence. With an economy of words, Martí
called upon Latin Americans to be united in common cause, proud of their
heritage, and free from foreign control. The general nature of Martí’s petition
gives it almost universal appeal, allowing opposing political factions
to draw upon it. The Cuban government under Castro promotes Martí as
a national hero, while Cuban exiles in south Florida appeal to him in their
quest to overthrow Castro. In twentieth-century Latin American history,
Martí and “Our America” are ubiquitous.
Born in Havana, Cuba in 1853, Martí began his lifelong journey of political
activism at an early age. Cuba at that time was still a Spanish colony,
one of the only possessions Spain retained after the wave of independence
movements in the early 1800s. Martí was the fi rstborn son of a sergeant
in the Spanish army in Cuba and an immigrant mother from the Canary
Islands. In 1862, at the age of nine, he traveled through the province of
Matanzas in eastern Cuba and observed slavery fi rsthand. As his fi rst exposure
to extreme social injustice, this experience affected him for life. Martí
initially sought comfort in poetry, as it allowed him to express his feelings
without activism or violence, but eventually he focused his attentions on
Cuban independence from Spain and became more active. The combination
of his writings and activism resulted in his arrest and deportation to Spain
in 1869 at the young age of sixteen.
While in Spain, Martí enrolled in law school in Madrid and also worked as a
journalist. He eventually began working with other Cubans and sympathetic
Spaniards who shared his belief in the cause of Cuban independence. Martí