I.6.3 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1054477
Brazilian poet, journalist, and short-story writer Ribeiro Couto (né Rui Esteves Ribeiro de Almeida Couto, 1898–1963) wrote this letter to Alfonso Reyes from Marseilles, France, on March 7, 1931, while serving as Brazil’s honorary vice-consul and in the same year that he published Cabocla, his best-known novel. As in the preceding text by de Morães Neto, Alfonso Reyes published this work in Monterrey [(Rio de Janeiro), no. 8 (1932), 2]. The letter is distinguished by the author’s coining of the term the “cordial man,” a construct that was later analyzed extensively for the Brazilian context by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda in his Raízes do Brasil [SEE DOCUMENTS I.6.4 AND I.6.5] and by Oswald de Andrade in “Um aspecto antropofágico da cultura brasileira: o homem cordial,” a manuscript from March 1950, first published in 1966.
“TRUE AMERICANISM REJECTS THE IDEA OF INDIANISM, of a local ethnic purism, of primitivism, yet summons the contribution of the primitive races to Iberian man. The [concept of a] pure Iberian man would be an error great as [the concept of] pure primitivism (lack of culture, ignorance of the evolution of the human spirit in other ages and on other continents). From the fusion of Iberian man with the new land and the primitive races, a “(Latin) American sensibility” will surely emerge, a new race, a product of a virgin culture and intuition: the Cordial Man. In my opinion, this is what our America is contributing to the world: the Cordial Man. European egoism, built on religious persecutions and economic disasters, marked by intolerance and hunger, crossed the oceans and founded, there in beds of primitive women and all the generous vastness of that land, the Family of Cordial Men. These [men] distinguish themselves from the rest of humankind by two essentially American characteristics: a hospitable spirit and a tendency to credulity. In short: the Cordial Man’s attitude contrasts with the European’s mistrust and the selfishness of a home closed to passersby. (How good it is, in the villages and small hamlets of our America, in your Mexico as well as in my Brazil, to invite into our home the French peddler who sells linen or the German engineer who is studying the local geology, and to invite them to share a meal! Right away, we shout inside: ‘Hey, woman, have them kill a chicken!’ …)
“The fact, however, is that if we are not Latin—coming as we do from the Celtic-Iberian peninsular adventure in American lands, (an adventure nourished in the nuptial hammocks of the wild indigenous women and by the docile sensuality of the easily-available Négresse)—if we are not Latin, then we are something else very different in spirit and in our sense of everyday life. We are a people who like to converse, to smoke quietly, to listen to the guitar, sing our popular songs, love with modesty, invite a foreigner to come in for a cup of coffee, to shout through our windows at the moon on clear nights: “What beautiful moonlight!” This attitude of emotional openness is truly ours, it is Ibero-American. It is observable in the little nothings, in the insignificant small events of everyday life. These take on importance in the eyes of the critic because they are the indications of this Cordial Civilization that I consider Latin America’s contribution to the world.”
Marseilles, March 7, 1931