This selection presents two contrasting views of the work of Carlos Mérida. In the preface to the artist’s print portfolio Images de Guatemala, French poet and critic André Salmon (1881–1969)—who with Guillaume Apollinaire and Maurice Raynal was a staunch defender of Cubism—writes of Mérida’s success in adopting this widely practiced language of painting for his autochthonous purposes. The second text is a critique of Mérida’s work of the same period (1920–27) by Guatemalan poet and art critic Luis Cardoza y Aragón (1901–1992). Salmon questions whether Mérida can move beyond painting the “exotic” (which did not have negative connotations at the time) to create works that appeal to “cultivated” audiences, all the while preserving the painter’s own “race.” Cardoza y Aragón presents the artist—“Carlos Mérida: Ensayo sobre el arte del trópico”—as a figure who, while powerfully evoking America, also notably transcends nationality. Published by the Galerie de Quatre Chemins as “Fragments de la préface pour un album à apparaître prochainement,” [Carlos Mérida portfolio, Images de Guatemala (Paris: Galerie de Quatre Chemins, 1928), 3–5], Salmon’s preface should not be confused with his introduction to the catalogue for Mérida’s first exhibition in Paris, also held at Quatre Chemins, in 1927. Although Cardoza y Aragón also wrote from Paris, where he was living at the time, he published his text in the Peruvian cultural and political journal Amauta [(Lima), no. 14 (April 1928), 12; 32–36]. This journal was printed in Lima during the 1920s and was widely read by intellectuals throughout Latin America and abroad.