The documents in this section which were first published in Amauta, the Lima-based journal established by José Carlos Mariátegui in the late 1920s, reveal the intensive debates of the Latin American intelligentsia grappling with the concept of a continental identity. In “¿Cuál es la cultura que creará América? III. Mexicanización y Argentinización” [Amauta, no. 17 (1928), 14–16], Peruvian philosopher and journalist Antenor Orrego (1892–1960) posits Mexico and Argentina as the two poles of a foundational Indo-American culture. Mexico represents Europe’s lack of understanding of the Americas; Argentina functions as an entity embedded in what is sublimely European. And between these poles, Orrego argues, lies the threat represented by the United States. The second text, “Panorama móvil–Polémica: autoctonismo y europeismo (réplica a Franz Tamayo),” is a response from Martí Casanovas (1894–1966)—a Cuban writer of Catalonian extraction—to a letter from Bolivian intellectual Franz Tamayo [Amauta, no. 18 (1928), 77–83]. Writing on June 22, 1928, from Mexico City—where he had been expelled by the dictator Gerardo Machado—Casanovas questions Tamayo’s (and, implicitly, other Latin American intellectuals’) desire to locate an American classicism in pre-Columbian civilization. He celebrates, however, the works of the indigenous youth who participated in Mexico’s Post-revolutionary open-air schools of painting. Orrego echoes Casanovas’s sentiment in “Americanismo y peruanismo” [Amauta, no. 9 (1927)], arguing for what he calls the “new man” of America as the source of an emerging, vital culture in the region and warns of the impossibility of creating an exclusively national art in the future. All translations are from the originals.