José Martí · Politics

Nuestra América: The Republic Grown From Its Own Soil

Martí’s 1891 essay ‘Nuestra América’ - his argument that Latin America’s new republics kept failing because their elites governed by imported European and North American blueprints instead of by the real character of their own peoples, and his call for a politics grown, like a tree, from native soil.

What you'll be able to recall

You learned that Martí diagnosed Latin America’s postcolonial instability as a mismatch between imported constitutions and native reality, praised the ‘natural man’ who knows his own country over the ‘artificial letrado’ who copies Europe, and proposed grafting the world’s learning…

Leads to Domingo Faustino Sarmiento.

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