Native Americans and “Nuestra América”
Travels and residence outside of Cuba were the principal reasons for Martí’s interest in and defense of indigenous communities in the Americas, and Mexico and Guatemala were the first places where his consciousness was stirred. Returning from Europe in 1875, the deportee joined his family in Mexico City, where he became part of the vibrant intellectual life of the capital, living and working in a society with an ethnic framework and a historical relation to Spain very different from that of Cuba. Mexico had experienced the reformist presidency of a Zapotec Indian from Oaxaca, Benito Juárez, from 1867 to 1872, and the nation’s independence had been launched by a rebellious priest who led an army of peasants and Indians. The reform movement of Juárez and Indian participation in Mexican independence were both applauded by Martí. At the same time, as Juan Blanco has cogently shown—citing Jorge Camacho and others—some of Martí’s initial observations of Indians in Mexico conform to common prejudices of the era. In these views, the stereotypical Indian was bound to the land, pitiful to behold, lethargic, and without a vision for the future. Indeed, in some of his writing for La Revista Universal Martí identified Indians as belonging to an unfortunate race that needed to be shaken from indolence in order to be redeemed by education and made to realize that their own interests could be advanced by progress (Blanco 80–81).
In a sharp critique of Indian apathy and lack of ambition, an article for La Revista Universal in July 1875 lists lack of work and lack of agricultural success as problems facing Mexico. Here the Cuban writes with scorn of the native population, whom he chides as being unable to save, to put aside crops, to aspire to a better life, or to think beyond narrow horizons. Now they are hungry because nature has been unkind and scarcity rules in many parts of the Republic. But Martí’s judgment is unforgiving. He labels the Indian race (“raza”) stupid and wretched because they have not stored food or saved for the future. Yet in the end compassion overrules contempt, and Martí concludes the piece by saying that if a home is without grain, then public granaries should be opened to provide for those in need (6: 283–84).
In this early writing, however, even as he bemoans the plight of Mexico’s “forgotten” and downtrodden natives, Martí signals that the cause of their misfortune is not of their making and that the nation needs to step up and step in to correct the historical crime of Indian enslavement that did not fully end with independence. According to the Cuban observer, slavery degraded the Indians and hangs over them like an unrelenting sentence. Here he states: “Liberty is not just for oneself: duty demands that it be extended to others: having a slave tarnishes the owner: it is shameful to own someone else” (6: 266).
In the land of Juárez, Martí met Manuel Mercado, a lawyer from Michoacán, who became a lifelong friend and provided a continuing connection with Mexico and her people. The bond between Mercado and Martí went far beyond their common birthday, January 28, and the friendship of their families. For the Cuban, Mercado was an intellectual equal, a confidant with whom sorrows and disappointments could be shared, and a source of nourishment for faith in mankind (Franyutti 256). Martí’s connections with Mercado, largely through letters that go right up until Martí’s last days, reveal private sorrows and political angst, and they highlight the crucial role of the novel Ramona in manifesting Martí’s views about indigenous America. Fears over U.S. imperialism and how it might affect the southern neighbor and worries over the future of Native Americans led Martí to translate and self-publish in 1888 Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, a book designed to rouse indignation over the treatment of American Indians. Martí wrote enthusiastically to Mercado about Ramona and sought to enlist his help in promoting the sale of the translation in Mexico.1
If Mexico had awakened Martí’s realization of an Indian presence, his experiences in Guatemala, where he relocated in spring 1877, sharpened his analysis. Almost immediately he wrote a work commissioned by the Guatemalan government to celebrate the nation’s independence, and his theatrical piece, subtitled Indian Drama, presented a stark and highly critical picture of Spanish oppression of the continent’s original inhabitants. This work, written in verse, gives the Indian characters prominent spoken parts in which they vilify the Spanish, and the play portrays as heroic figures Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec ruler, and Hatuey, the native symbol of Caribbean resistance to the conquest.2
In writing of Guatemala, Martí addressed economic issues surrounding the indigenous population and the government’s agricultural and educational reforms of the 1870s (Blanco 74). In his book Guatemala, the Cuban author noted the impoverished condition of the Indians and bemoaned their apathy, while championing the promise that schooling offered them. He wrote: “The Indians sometimes resist; but the Indians will be educated. I love them and I will work to make it so” (EC 5: 286). This work contains a famous Martí aphorism in praise of popular education: “To learn to read is to learn to walk. To learn to write is to learn to ascend” (EC 5: 284).3
Martí’s comments on the Indian population of Guatemala—he described them as lacking energy and initiative—must be seen in historical context. Justo Rufino Barrios, a well-to-do coffee planter who ruled Guatemala from 1873 to 1879, remained a dominant figure until 1885, delivering numerous liberal reforms to the country. He expropriated church lands and ushered in a radical agrarian reform. Land was sold to private owners, but laws enacted in 1877 also obliged Indian communities to provide labor, a quasi-return to colonial expectations that could hardly have produced motivation among the Indians. The Barrios era also took away church control of education and gave it to the state, a reform with which Martí was in sympathy (Santana 112–13).4
With regard to Native Americans, life in the United States opened up a vast and new—to Martí—panorama of history, customs, challenges, and political considerations. There Martí learned of Indian chiefs, became acquainted with the horse culture of the Great Plains and the buffalo hunt, and learned about reservations, broken treaties, and scheming Indian agents, all of which he shared with his readers. He discovered Indians who were champions on horseback, unlike most of the indigenous people of Mexico and Central America, who were peones, working and traveling on foot. His chronicles mentioned tribes by name—the Sioux, Apaches, Crows, Cheyenne, Black Foot (pies negros), Arapahoes (Arapajos), Cherokees (cheroqueses), Pintes, Chickasaws, Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, Tuscaroras, the Gros Ventre (vientres gruesos), and the Umatillas of Oregon—thus conferring cultural identity. He noted prominent leaders like Red Cloud (Nube Roja), whose photograph became part of an American archive on Indians. From his New York vantage point, he described the role of Indians in Wild West spectacles that came to the city and the fame of sharp-shooting scout and Indian fighter, Buffalo Bill. Such urban dramatizations, which had no real counterparts in Latin America, gave a romanticized version of settlers versus Indians, with audience applause rewarding the roles of the white men. Martí reported about the close of such an event but did not join the applause.
Reprising the focus on education for indigenous peoples that he had vigorously promoted in Guatemala, he wrote approvingly of reform efforts and the establishment of Indian schools, noting that some graduates of the Cherokee schools went on to famous colleges like Dartmouth and Yale (10: 273). He became a fan of Helen Hunt Jackson and her crusade to end the mistreatment of Indians, and he translated Ramona, the book she published in 1884 to prod American citizens and politicians into action.
References to American Indians abound in the newspaper essays that Martí wrote in New York. Most are tales of suffering and disenfranchisement: skirmishes and clashes with settlers and army troops, rapacious government middlemen, the hunger and degradation caused by insufficient rations on the reservations, and the litany of false promises from the “Great White Father.” In Martí’s accounts the crippling consequences of reservation life—indolence, alcohol abuse, gambling, and dependency—were the fault of the government and a distortion of the Indian’s true nature. He claimed that everyone who was enslaved, referring to Indians as victims of slavery, was intrinsically damaged by the system (10: 324). Martí, in his assessment of culpability, quoted Erastus Brooks, a prominent author and editor, who declared in 1885: “There is no Indian vice for which we are not responsible” (10: 325). Martí also praised President Cleveland for taking the nation to task over its failures in the treatment of the country’s first inhabitants. The Cuban writer reported on the calls for reform and the proposed solutions, such as individual plots of land for every Indian family and practical instruction from experts in agriculture and animal husbandry (10: 327). In the context of his writing about the suffering of North American Indians, he attached a moral: “Mankind has but one cheek; when you strike one man all men feel the blow” (10: 288).
Some descriptions by Martí are of North American native attire and arts. He introduced new words, like squaw, tomahawk, pow-wow, and wampum (Algonquian beads, which Martí wrote as wampunes) and referred to Indian “ponies.” He praised Indian accomplishments and translated the words of Erastus Brooks, who stated unequivocally that in equal circumstances the Indian was as mentally, morally, and physically capable as the white man (10: 324). At times the stereotypical language of his time and place, words like savage and primitive, appear in the writing: “The Indian is discrete, imaginative, intelligent, and disposed by nature to embrace elegance and culture. Of all the primitive men he is the most attractive and least repugnant. No other savage people take such pride in embellishment …” (9: 329). In a critique of Indian problems, we see: “The savage may live in varying degrees of civilization, but he lives like a savage” (10: 372). About the 1885–86 campaign against Geronimo’s Apaches, Martí mused: “the Apaches are the excessive form of Indian revenge. What just idea does not have its fanatics? What justice does not engender exaggeration? Why should it seem strange to find in men still so close to nature the inherent sins of human nature?” (10: 372). But what also underlies Martí’s statements is the truth that he applied the word savage to Indians and non-Indians alike, and that most tribes in what is now the United States were not advanced civilizations. Some led a hunter-gatherer existence, or in the case of Plains Indians, like the Comanches and others, lived essentially off of the buffalo herds. Numerous accounts attest to Indian cruelty and punishment of captives that could certainly be described as savage.5
Government Policies and American Indians
While in Mexico, Martí had regarded as progress the liberal and modernizing agenda promoted by President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, who led Mexico from 1872 to 1876, just before Porfirio Díaz came to power. As authors Robert L. Huish and W. George Lovell note, Martí approved of the Mexican president’s aim to reduce Indian dependency and to integrate Indians more fully into national life. The Cuban also supported the more aggressive approach that had developed in Guatemala. There Martí embraced the Barrios government’s progressive reforms that sharply curtailed the role of the church and advanced commercial agriculture, especially coffee, in which the authoritarian President Barrios had a vested interest. But for Guatemala’s Mayan Indians who had preserved a cultural legacy in their communities, the liberal plans meant an intrusion on their traditions and land as well as a return to labor servitude, something Martí did not appear to comprehend or appreciate (28–34). Furthermore, as Huish and Lovell explain: “Barrios’s promotion of coffee … was disastrous for the well-being of Maya communities, as it unleashed an assault on Indian lands by opening up communal holdings for private purchase. Many Indians, accustomed to living in the bracing climate of the highlands, fell ill, or died, from working in the more tropical and humid zones of the Pacific piedmont, where Guatemala’s coffee plantations were concentrated” (34). Martí wanted Indians to advance but was seemingly unaware of the cultural encroachment and physical displacement that advancement on national terms would bring, especially in Guatemala. He understood the land—his depictions of Guatemalan geography are lavish—but failed to adequately understand her people, a charge he later leveled at American writer Charles Dudley Warner in regard to Mexico (see chapter 8).
Years later, in the United States, in numerous commentaries but especially in chronicles written in 1885, 1886, and 1887, Martí described a similar set of circumstances: the desire of Native Americans to maintain cultural autonomy and identity versus the so-called civilizing strategies that were put forth and implemented by outside forces. As Native Americans were pushed off their land in the expanding United States, many reformers, in the name of progress, advocated changes that completely disrupted Indian traditions and ways of living. One change was the foundation of Indian schools where indigenous language was replaced with English and another was the allotment to Indians of plots of land for farming or grazing. Writing in 1882, Martí approvingly offered the example of a general who dealt with the Cheyenne by selling their war ponies and bringing them workhorses and draft animals for plowing and seeding. According to his chronicle, if the Cheyenne kept their ponies, they would be tempted to return to life on the plains even when hunting barely afforded survival. But, the narrative continued, once they saw the use of the wheel and had raised a crop of corn, they settled down successfully as farmers and tradesmen (9: 297–98).
In this article Martí described the shift to agriculture by people accustomed to the freedom of the Great Plains as a positive move, a way forward. There was no mention of how disruptive it might be to the Cheyenne. It is useful, however, to see Martí’s remedy of land, farm, and hearth in context. He promoted it not just for Indians but also as a progressive strategy for Spanish America as a whole. Writing for La Nación in 1885, he urged Spanish Americans to shake off the dust of the past, open their arms, and give the new arrival “a plow, a piece of land, and help to build a home” (10: 260). Martí’s casual dismissal of Cheyenne longing for a simpler but less providential life in the 1882 chronicle is reminiscent of his 1875 criticism of Mexico’s Indians for not saving and not prudently planning for the future.
If the Cuban had missed the problematic contradictions between modernization and the cultural birthright of indigenous people in Mexico and Central America, in the United States the competing agendas were in plain sight. Unlike Mexico and Guatemala, the United States offered extensive press coverage and spirited public debate about the options regarding Native Americans, and Martí’s reporting closely followed the newspaper accounts. His assessments about what was right, what was wrong, and how the government should treat the nation’s Indian groups were not always consistent. In 1882 he had complimented the Cheyenne for accepting relocation, farming, and settlement, but in 1885 he decried as inhumane the move of the Northern Cheyenne from their homes in a cool and hospitable climate to hot and pestilential lands where mother’s milk dried up and children perished (10: 272). At times he seemed to strongly favor individual homesteads, but he counted the Cherokee model of land held in common with property rights for the person who worked the land as an effective system. For the Cherokees, the one who tilled the soil could consider it as his, but if he failed to cultivate the land, it returned to the tribe. Martí’s prescient statement that the “the land belongs to the one who works it” (10: 273) has its echo in the Mexican Revolution and in many reform movements of twentieth-century Latin America.
A key piece about the topic was an article called “Indians in the United States,” sent to La Nación in 1885 and focused on the Mohonk Conference, held at Lake Mohonk in upstate New York, October 7–9. The conference was billed as an assembly of “Friends of the Indian” and was covered by the New York newspapers that were customary sources for Martí’s reporting as well as an eighty-page publication of the Proceedings. True to his typical pattern, Martí translated and paraphrased liberally from the published accounts. His piece helped readers see the calumnies of reservation life: meager rations dispensed like meat thrown to animals, and listless captives confined to a small space and given over to drink and gambling. It described formerly proud people, cheated at every turn, and beguiled by bright-colored trinkets. In his portrayal they were pitiful to behold and showed little interest in the prospects of farming and schooling. Martí compared the rounded-up and forcibly resettled Indians to slaves who remembered lands in which they were free and whose resentment simmered below the surface, ready to burst into flames when life became too odious. He reprised the theme that the Indian in such a state was what the white man had made him, and he criticized the corruption that surrounded each phase of the Indian resettlement process.
The purpose of the Mohonk Conference was to discuss the causes of the pernicious problems on the reservations and to propose solutions. Martí’s chronicle recorded their recommendations. These included getting rid of the reservation system and its subsidies, gradually giving Indians space to mingle with the white population and own land, and allowing a path toward citizenship. Indians would have to give up communal land-holding, accept a portion of terrain for each family to work, and agree to education with a practical imprint. Indians would be compelled to learn new ways and to adopt new work patterns. Such ideas were in harmony with the Cuban’s consistent goals of promoting an individual work ethic and supporting both formal literacy and practical learning. He wrote that the usurpation of Indian lands even when deemed rational and necessary should not lead to repression and that Indians should preserve their rights as men; however, he did not signal a path forward that would allow for both autonomy and economic well-being (10: 326).
In fact, what the Mohonk assembly projected was a complicated process that would force Indian children into schools with industrial education and dismantle lands held in common. The convention’s approved platform stated that after common lands were broken up, “each Indian family should receive a patent for a portion of land to be held in severalty, its amount to be dependent upon the number of members of the family and the character of the land, whether adapted for cultivation or for grazing, the land to be inalienable for 25 years.” The report continued: “all portions of the Indians’ reservations which are not so allotted should, after the Indians have selected and secured their lands, be purchased by the Government at a fair rate and thrown open to settlement, the cash value of the lands thus purchased to be set aside by the Government as a fund to be expended as rapidly as can wisely be done for their benefit, especially their industrial advancement” (“To Benefit the Indians”). Finally, the plan called for surveying the reservations and modifying the treaties—indeed, pressing the Indians to consent to the changes. Tribes who gave up their reservations and accepted the land allotments and Indians who gave up tribal organization and embraced “civilized life” could become citizens (“To Benefit the Indians”).
Martí missed the chance to report some obvious ironies and troubling questions. Why would Indians trust more land deals with the government after what had originally been theirs had been wrongfully taken away? How could Indians abrogate treaties that had already been broken? And why were no Indian voices part of the discussion? The New York Tribune of October 14, 1885, raised some of the issues the Cuban writer had overlooked. In its brief column titled “The Indian Question,” the paper reported on the Mohonk Convention’s platform: “Thus while it is agreed that the best way to civilize the Indian is to admit him to full citizenship, it is in the same breath proposed to subject him to restraints and regulations incompatible with the possession of civil liberties. It is gravely recommended that his children be taken from him and compelled to attend schools and learn trades. But if so broad a swath is to be cut through the Indian’s rights of citizenship, it is clear that little will remain to him” (4).
“Indians in the United States” acknowledged suffering and the cultural upheaval brought by displacement. Summarizing the Indian’s plight, Martí wrote: “He is obliged by onerous treaties to surrender his lands; he is removed from the place he was born which is like tearing out a tree from its roots … he’s forced under the pretext of farming to buy animals to work land that is not his; he’s compelled under the pretext of schooling to learn in a foreign tongue, the hated language of his masters” (10: 323). Thus in Martí’s letter to the Buenos Aires newspaper in 1885, we see much of the ambivalence that characterized his reports on North American Indians for the Latin American press. In adapting and translating broadly from publications in English, he recorded some statements uncritically, and in championing individual initiative and education, he seemed to jump on the bandwagon of those clamoring to bring civilization to the natives. At the same time, compassion always had a place in his chronicles, as it did in his life.
Martí’s article on the Mohonk Convention points to differences between the experiences of Spanish American Indians and what Indians experienced in Anglo America. The word he used for reservations was reducciones, a term that in Spanish connotes South American settlements of converted Indians in the colonial era. But Spanish American reducciones, often established by the Jesuits, while tightly structured and Eurocentric in focus, were designed to protect Indians from enslavement, something quite different from the reservations of North America. In this case Martí was translating a concept that did not have a clear equivalent in his America. Another distinctly North American feature of his reporting on Indian reform efforts that had no real equivalent in Latin America was the makeup of the group at Lake Mohonk; the gathering was composed of politicians and journalists but also included protestant clergymen and women who played a prominent role.
When Interior Secretary Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar issued a report in 1886 on the Indian problem facing Americans, Martí again took up the topic and explored the question of what to do with Indians despoiled of their land and pressured by the interests of herdsmen, settlers, and railroads. The reporter divulged the apparent options facing the United States, including extermination, corruption as a means of extermination, more forced relocation, or education for Indians on the lands the government said they owned. Martí’s analysis raised the issue of land use, especially the Native American tradition of land held in common as opposed to privately owned and demarcated parcels. It questioned how Indian education should proceed. Would Indian children be sent to far-off schools or be educated by fellow Indians, as the Cheyenne were doing? And would treaties be honored? We know, of course, that they were not. Martí seemed to approve of Lamar’s optimistic vision of North American Indians living on deeded properties and educating their children themselves, even though he suggested that the secretary’s hopes were unlikely to be realized (10: 371–75).
Most Indians in Spanish America had remained on or near the lands conquered by the Spanish, so their circumstances were very different from those of North American Indians in the 1880s, many of whom were forcibly relocated. But Martí’s article of 1886 was sent to La Nación, whose readers lived in a country that had seen General Roca’s “Campaign of the Desert” in the 1870s and 1880s strike at nomadic Indians with an eye to extermination or suppression. Argentines may have glimpsed in Martí’s writing a northern version akin to their own policies.
Jorge Camacho’s astute analysis of the 1889 chronicle about the Oklahoma land rush frames the Indian issue in relation to European landseekers and the legal actions that the United States took to further open up Indian territories to settlers from across the ocean. And this carefully researched critique of the Martí article offers clear evidence of the evolving nature of the Cuban writer’s assessment of U.S. policies about its Native Americans. Camacho begins by reviewing the debates in the United States in the 1880s over land distribution and proposals to grant citizenship to Indians. He acknowledges that Martí was in favor of granting parcels of land to Indians so that they could homestead like the immigrants from Europe; he notes that to receive citizenship, Indians were obliged to renounce their wars, concede identity, and give up their lands. Camacho also signals the importance of the Dawes Act of 1887 (“‘Cosa magnífica y sangrienta’”).
As the lead part of his letter to La Nación in January 1887, Martí laid out the provisions of the Dawes Act, which gave the president the authority to break up reservation land held by tribes and redistribute it as small plots to individuals. The goals were to end government subsidies on the reservations, to treat Indians as individuals rather than as tribes, and to confer citizenship on Indians who accepted the arrangements and adopted a “civilized” lifestyle. Martí gave his approval to all, celebrating especially the accomplishments of Indian children who were receiving schooling, learning arts and trades, and earning school prizes (11: 133–34). What the approving Cuban did not surmise was that, in short order, the vested interests of commercial enterprises, the railroad industry, and whites eager to colonize would threaten the Indian lands anew. The Oklahoma land rush was just such an assault.
In his panoramic account of the stampede for land in Oklahoma, written in 1889, the interpreter of U.S. life for Latin Americans presents a view about U.S. treatment of Indians that digresses from some of his earlier assessments. Martí begins by saying the homesteaders will invade (emphasis mine) what had been the ancestral home of the Seminoles (12: 205). A key passage in this chronicle, as Camacho cogently explains, is when Martí describes those ready to push across Indian land as “the white invader.” Significantly, his choice of word is invader, not colonizer or settler. What follows next is an elaborate set of images. First Martí says that the land being plundered is bereft of a soul. Then he explains that the soul was lost when a brave Indian, captured and gravely ill, chose to face death, with warrior’s garb, a knife laid on his chest and war paint on his face. The Indian is Osceola, a Seminole war chief who had resisted the U.S. plan to move Seminoles to Oklahoma and who died in 1838. In Martí’s telling, which he put in quotation marks, Osceola “had not the heart to kill the white man like he would kill a bear or a wolf, [but] the white man like a bear and a wolf fell upon him, with friendship in one hand and a serpent in the other” (12: 206). The Seminole chief had died long before the Oklahoma land rush, but Martí links the two to underscore the betrayal of relocation promises by the U.S. government and to contrast the defiant dignity of Osceola in facing death with the rowdy and often boorish behavior of many of the prospective settlers. Camacho confirms that Martí’s purpose was to show the goodness of the Indians and the perversity of the whites, even as he maintained support for the reforms of the Dawes Act (“‘Cosa magnífica y sangrienta’”).
Reporting about Native Americans in the United States prompted Martí to compare them with Indians to the south. An 1884 article stated: “The Indian, who in North America is disappearing, annihilated by formidable white pressure or diluted by the invading race, is a constant factor in Central and South America, where little is done for his benefit, little account is taken of him …” (8: 329). Martí concluded with a message for Latin America: “Either the Indian joins in the way forward, or his weight will impede the march” (8: 29), a sentiment repeated with different phrasing in another article just a few months later.6 In his insistence on this message, the Cuban who planned for Spanish America’s future also asked rhetorically how his America could walk toward a new history with the weight of Indian abuse on its back (10: 273).
Discovering the Indigenous Past
A series of articles for La América of New York in 1883 and 1884 illustrates how much Martí learned about Latin America’s indigenous civilizations in the United States. Although Martí had visited Mayan sites in Yucatan and was acquainted with distinguished Mexicans interested in the country’s archaeology, the claim that much of Martí’s writing about sites such as Uxmal, Chichén Itzá, Palenque, and Mitla was based on direct knowledge of those places is simply not correct (Acosta 503–4).7 Martí never visited Palenque or Mitla, and nowhere in the chronicles written in New York did Martí suggest that he was remembering his time in Yucatan. It was through his access to museums, exhibits, books, and articles reflecting the interest of European and U.S scholars in aboriginal cultures that he gained the astonishing array of information about pre-Columbian America, which he absorbed in English and then shared in Spanish. As early as 1882, when he was sending articles to La Opinion Nacional in Caracas, he informed his readers that the Mayan language was still spoken, that Diego de Landa’s book had helped to preserve it, and that more was being learned about this ancient civilization thanks to the discovery and study of hieroglyphs, stonework, murals, and the Mayan codices taken to Europe (EC 12: 201–2).8
The articles for La América covered many topics, from Mexican priest and anthropologist Father Sahagún to Augustus Le Plongeon, explorer of Mayan ruins. Martí mentioned Mayan literature, the books of Chilam Balam, the Incan drama Ollantay, and the Nahuatl odes of Netzahualcoyotl, king of Texcoco. Here we find lines of appreciation for Native American literature that are echoed in “Nuestra América”: “How august the Iliad of Greece! How brilliant the indigenous Iliad! Homer’s tears are of gold; Indian verses are goblets of palm fronds where hummingbirds sip” (8: 337). Martí denounced the policies of erasure and destruction by the Spanish conquerors that had made it difficult to learn about pre-Columbian societies, and he welcomed the efforts of European and American anthropologists to rediscover the American past. While appreciating the search for information about American Indian civilizations and including a vivid description of the now-iconic Chac-Mool, Martí decried the intentions of Europeans like Le Plongeon and Brasseur de Bourbourgh to remove ancient treasures from Mexico and Guatemala. The studies of aboriginal cultures of both North and South America by Daniel G. Brinton appear to have been a primary source of information. Brinton was a physician who took up anthropology and wrote a series of books about Indians in both North America and Latin America and who praised indigenous literature for its color and imagination. Brinton, who produced more than twenty books and hundreds of articles, received frequent attention in the New York press during the years of Martí’s articles for La América.
The valuation of pre-Hispanic America and the references to its achievements in the articles for La América are a validation of race as well as culture. In describing Andean quipus, the Popul Vuh, Quechua writers, Quiché drama, painted “parchments,” inscriptions on stone, and Aztec paper made from the Maguey plant, the reporter asserted a literary presence in the Americas before the Conquest. In praising temples, schools, plazas, aqueducts, and roadways constructed by Indian hands before Europe touched the New World, he affirmed the high level of civilization attained by Native Americans. All were testaments to the capabilities of the race that created them. “The spirit of men floats above the land in which they lived, and we all breathe it in,” wrote Martí (8: 336), his way of connecting man and nature, past and present, Indian and non-Indian. Dominican-born writer Pedro Henríquez Ureña quotes this very line in his essays on American identity to point out that some of the best works on the indigenous theme have come from counties like the Dominican Republic and Uruguay, where aboriginal presence is minimal, but the air carries their spirit (39).
Indians in La Edad de Oro
In his excellent edition of La Edad de Oro, Eduardo Lolo gives an important context for Martí’s article “Las Ruinas Indias” (The Indian Ruins): “The time at which Martí was writing this chronicle, the United States and Europe were ‘discovering’ the cultural wealth of the great pre-Columbian American civilizations” (125). Lolo also points out that this interest was bolstered by technological advances. Photographs that were commercialized as popular prints or as images seen through a viewer that gave a 3-D impression were in vogue, and Indian archaeological sites were favorite views (125). Martí’s passages provide some of this visual appeal and take the reader from a quick historical overview to an emphasis on Mexico and a guided tour of major sites, including Tenochtitlán, Cholula, Mitla, Palenque, Uxmal, and Chichén Itzá. Significant in this essay for children is the comparative defense Martí makes of Indian practices such as human sacrifice. He describes how the Inquisition in Spain burned men alive in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid before a gathering of bishops, royalty, and ladies looking on from their balconies, before stating: “Among all peoples superstition and ignorance make men barbarous” (18: 382).9
Ramona
Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona is of singular importance to the topic of race and Indians in the world of José Martí. He was inspired by its message and believed that in Spanish translation it could have a dual purpose. First, it would present the theme of justice deferred, delayed, and denied to Native Americans, and second, with its California setting, it would show Mexicans why they needed to be ever wary of the “manifest destiny” tendencies of the Anglos. Martí called his translation “nuestra novela” (our novel), and many of its emphases are carried over to his landmark essay “Nuestra América” (Our America).
Ramona is the story of an interracial romance and its tragic end. The setting is nineteenth-century Southern California, after the Mexican-American War, when Anglos were replacing the Spanish and Mexicans, and Indians were increasingly persecuted. The story begins on the ranch of a family who typify the California Mexican aristocracy. The lead character, Ramona, the daughter of an Indian woman and a Scottish seaman named Angus Phail, is raised as an adopted child by a member of the landed gentry, Señora Moreno, who tells Ramona nothing of her parentage.10 After Ramona falls in love with Alessandro, the strong and handsome Indian on the ranch, and they elope, the couple faces prejudice and isolation, and they retreat farther and farther from settlements, until finally Alessandro, grown mad from constant abuses, is accused of horse theft and is shot to death. In the end Ramona, who has discovered that she is half Indian and that Felipe, Señora Moreno’s son, is not her brother, marries Felipe and they move to Mexico.
While Jackson’s Ramona did move American public opinion toward more sympathetic views of Indians, the novel truly triumphed as a love story with many layers, set in a picturesque time and place. The interest that Ramona inspired—with hundreds of print editions, film and theater versions, and a tourism boom for its Southern California settings—has prompted an enormous range of academic and popular studies, far too many to assess in these pages. What does concern us is what Martí saw in the work: the legacy of a part of the United States that had once been Mexico, the steady assault on California’s tribal communities, and the relentless encroachment of white settlers. In translation, Martí kept the essentials of action and characters but shortened descriptions and some of the dialogue and gave titles to chapters that were simply numbered in the original. His adaptation of names was especially apt. Alessandro became a more virile-sounding and more authentically Californian Alejandro, and the good priest Father Salvierderra became Father Salvatierra, literally the “landsaving” priest.
In his thesis José Martí y su concepto del indio en “Ramona” (José Martí and the concept of the Indian in Ramona), Jonathan Alcántar successfully argues that Martí perceived in Jackson’s novel more than an effort to draw attention to indigenous rights. As Alcántar’s abstract states: “For Martí, the translation offered a chance to project the Indian as a symbol of resistance, to synthesize his ideas about indigenous communities in the Americas, and to warn Mexico (where the translation was to be marketed) of threats posed by its powerful neighbor.” Alcántar’s thesis argues that the Cuban’s prior writings about Indians culminate in Ramona and that his translation follows a socio-symbolic approach that conveys a strong and resilient portrayal of Native Americans.
Ramona in Spanish translation is a bridge connecting the Indians of the United States to the Indians of Martí’s “Nuestra América,” and it points to the common threat that they faced from a boisterous and expansive nation. The shared challenge is part of the comprehensive vision of hemispheric relations that is at the heart of Martí’s famous essay.
As suggested in chapter 2, “Nuestra América” has become a defining piece of the obra martiana. Julio Ramos heads a list of scholars of Latin American literature who have studied Martí and “Nuestra América” from theoretical and critical approaches. The essay has also become a popular focus for critique from academicians who read the work in translation. Several distinct translations into English are available.11 My goal here, however, is not to analyze or replicate those approaches but to point directly to the essay’s images of the Indian, who is linked inexorably to the land, to nature, to the abuses of the past, and to the task of nation-building.
In this essay, as in much of Martí’s writing, the intent is best understood when considered in the broad context of the author’s work. For example, when the essay refers to the sons of America, an America “that must save itself with its Indians,”12 the language is reminiscent of the declarations made in 1884 that the Indian must be part of the march to progress, or he will impede the march (see endnote 6 of this chapter). When Martí states that foreign models would not work to stir and quicken the blood of the Indian, the words recall a talk he gave in Venezuela in 1881, where he described an indigenous voice cut short, with words frozen in the poet’s throat, and spoke of mountains of men who would need to be thawed to be a vibrant part of society (7: 285). In a talk given in 1889, Martí referred to America’s first inhabitants as razas heladas, frozen races (6: 138). These images converge in “Nuestra América,” where Indian blood is characterized as static (sluggish) and where those who desire a future of promise are called upon to unfreeze (deshelar) America.
Martí’s remedy for the stagnant conditions brought about by conquest and colonization is for those who govern to know all the elements and peoples who make up a country, including the first inhabitants and those brought from Africa. “Nuestra América” gives credit to the Indian masses who helped launch Mexican independence and attacks the disdain for native peoples that continued in Spanish America after independence. As the essayist describes what should have happened in the new republics, he suggests a union of the “vincha” and “toga,” the Indian headband and the European robe. He says Indians must be freed from stagnation, and blacks must have a place. The need to reverse course from a colonial apparatus that froze—that is to say, held back—participation for blacks and Indians in Spanish America is a message that runs throughout the essay. With phrasing similar to his declaration to Venezuelans in 1881, Martí calls upon Spanish Americans to embrace and lift up the unfortunate and proclaims: “Let the heart’s fires unfreeze all that is motionless in America, and let the country’s natural blood surge and throb through its veins!” (Selected Writings 294).13 As for language and literature, the essay says that dramatists put native characters on stage, and that in countries with Indian populations, those who govern are learning Indian languages. The essay closes with an image from pre-Columbian traditions, the “Gran Semi,” or “Great Spirit,” astride a condor, sowing the seed for a New America.14
The 1883 and 1884 articles for La América about the indigenous past, an 1887 article about Daniel G. Brinton for El Economista Americano, the translation of Ramona in 1888, and La Edad de Oro of 1889 all contributed to Martí’s vision of the Indian in “Nuestra América.”15 References to the literature of pre-Hispanic America in this essay were clearly the result of reading and writing in the United States. Thanks to the U.S. sources, Martí discovered the literature and advancements of the Maya, the codex writing of the Nahua, and the drama and poetry of the Incas. It would be hard to imagine Martí claiming to prefer “the Greece that is ours to the one that is not ours” based solely on his time in Mexico and Central America and on his scant praise for the Indian communities there. Like many who study the essay today, I find the Indian of “Nuestra América,” the Indian of Martí’s imagination and vision in 1891, to be a noble figure whose contributions were essential to the formation of just and equitable nations, who had helped win the wars of independence, and whose languages and literatures were cultural assets. I do not find persuasive the claims that Martí, in this essay, regarded Indians as backward, especially since we know how much Martí understood and appreciated indigenous cultures of the Americas by the 1890s.
Conclusions
Martí’s voice regarding the Indian was not uniform. The texts from the years he was living in the United States evolved and sometimes contained contradictory messages. Those of the 1890s were very different from the unflattering portrayals in La Revista Universal and his accounts about Guatemala and Mexico. The writing of the 1890s represents a maturation of his thought. With the breadth of his experiences during the U.S. years, Martí had before him many examples of how being swallowed by suffering could sap ambition from a people. He knew of the experiences of Native Americans in North America, pushed from the land and pursued relentlessly. He became aware of competing cultural agendas and of the effects of government policies. He witnessed the surge of Indian schools and the efforts to “civilize” Indians and move them along toward western ways and citizenship. He felt the sting of Anglo disdain for blacks and Indians and for Spanish Americans, whatever their race. His wide reading in a country with books, illustrated magazines, and newspapers that reported widely about the rest of the world introduced him to information about the high achievements of pre-Columbian civilizations. Overall, he discovered an American Indian with qualities and prospects far removed from the hapless and haggard souls of Mexico and Guatemala of the 1870s.
With his translation of Ramona, Martí moved toward an identification of Indian rights linked to Hispanic hemispheric rights and a concept of U.S. imperialistic design as the common enemy of both. From his extensive analysis of the degradation endured in the Indian reservations of the United States, he saw a history of subjugation chronologically close at hand and yet reminiscent of the humiliations visited upon native peoples in Spanish America. The sixteenth century and the nineteenth century joined in ignominy. And in “Nuestra América” the lethargy he had noted in Indian communities in the 1870s claimed its roots: it was not the intrinsic nature of the conquered peoples but rather the “sluggish blood” and stagnation produced by Spanish colonial rule. In “Nuestra América” the Cuban patriot cast Indians and blacks as essential to Spanish America’s future and also warned that their future was endangered by the specter of domination by another race—the formidable blond neighbors to the north.