I.4.4 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1054203

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GUARDIANS OF THE QUILL

Alfonso Reyes, 1930


Alfonso Reyes wrote this letter to Waldo Frank in New York with the expressed intent of sending him a clipping of a text that Reyes had published in an Argentinean newspaper on the occasion of Frank’s visit to Buenos Aires in 1929. Reyes expresses his gratitude to Frank for having dedicated his Primer Mensaje a la América Hispana to him and lauds him for his various lectures and activities that inspire the young people of Latin America to embrace and work to fulfill Frank’s utopian vision of a “potential America.” Reyes published the letter in Monterrey: Correo literario de Alfonso Reyes, an epistolary bulletin that he edited during the years he served as Mexican ambassador to Argentina (1927–30 and 1936–37) and to Brazil (1930–35 and 1938–39). The journal has been reproduced in at least two facsimile editions: in 1980 [(Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica)] and, more recently, in 2008 [(Nuevo León: Gobierno del Estado de Nuevo León/Fondo Editorial de Nuevo León/Comité Regional Norte de Cooperación con la UNESCO/Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León)]. This translation is from the original [Monterrey: Correo literario de Alfonso Reyes (Rio de Janeiro), no. 2 (August 1930), 2].


TO MY FRIEND WALDO FRANK, NEW YORK:

You mentioned my name at the start of your Primer Mensaje a la América Hispana [First Message to Hispanic America, SEE DOCUMENT I.4.3]. You recalled our fortuitous meeting in Madrid years ago, the one that helped convince you—as you said in a dedication to another one of your books—that your dream of a more vast America was an intuition based on reality. I feel that all our young people recognize that your journey through the South and the conferences that you now organize are a real step toward the creation of that América potencial [potential America], which you hope Man will wholly embrace just as he does the light of happiness and beauty. You believe America is the most historically appropriate place to inherit and combine all the cultures that have come before, with a sense of universality that, until now, has never been realized. And even if that hour should never arrive, it is no less certain that our only clear path of conduct is to pursue it and to strive for it.

We do not believe that America is an accident of Geography. In studying the origins of the Discovery, we find that America was a premonition, almost an invention or a necessity of the soul, even before it became the inevitable port of arrival for those seafaring adventurers. Considering in retrospect the excitement that the Discovery generated, we see that in their thirst for happiness, men converted that glimmer of the New World into the place of choice to strive for an easier life, a more just republic, a Utopia. It does not matter that the idea flickers like a flame in the wind: its preservation is our mission. The gold miners of the North are not that far removed from the rapacious men in the South who dealt in slaves and haciendas, only thinking of their own prosperity. And, in the corruption of the times, the errors of those men and of these now complement each other like supply and demand. We have inherited then this same mission and we must overcome those same obstacles. . . .