Our America

With the present study, the author aimed to identify and analyze the basic traits of Americanist content present in the work of one of the most eminent Hispanic American intellectuals of the 19th century, the Cuban writer and political leader José Julián Martí y Pérez (1853-1895). One of the basic purposes is to demonstrate how the Martían discourse for the transformation of the American Society of his time incorporated an eminently utopian essence, a privileged form by which he expressed his general vision of America. It is a perspective that, far from being inserted into the realm of the fantastic, of the impossible dream, of the unworkable, is, quite the contrary, seated in rather real bases and endowed with a high sense of criticism, which transforms the study of his extensive work into a fertile and rich debate of ideas that characterized the American intellectual atmosphere of the late 19th century. Such utopian essence ended up being constituted in the singular form of expression of his continental identity project, embodied in his idea of Our America.