Since the eighteenth century, at least, the dominant concern in the minds of Hispanic Americans has been that of self-identity. All those who have turned their gaze, with some care, to the panorama of these peoples have agreed, in some way, in pointing out this feature. Some has argued about an ontological anguish of the Creole, searching relentlessly for himself, between contradictory inheritances and dissimilar relationships, at times feeling exiled in his own land, at times acting as a conqueror of it, with a fluid notion that everything is possible and nothing is given in a definitive and proven way.

​

Successively and even simultaneously, many representative men of the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking America naively believed, or pretended, to be what they obviously were not and could not be. There was a time they thought of themselves as noblemen of Castile, as there was later to imagine themselves as Europeans in exile in unequal struggle against native barbarism. There were those who tried with all their soul to appear French, English, German and North American. Later there were those who believed themselves indigenous and set out to claim the fullness of an aboriginal civilization irrevocably interrupted by the Conquest, and there were also, in certain regions, those who felt possessed by a black soul and tried to resurrect an African past.

Culturally they were not European, much less could they be 'Indians' or Africans ...

​

​

*    *    *

​

​

…Hispanic America is perhaps the only great area open in the world today to the process of creative cultural "mestizaje". Instead of looking at this extraordinary characteristic as a mark of backwardness or inferiority, it must be considered as the most fortunate and favorable circumstance for the New World vocation that has been associated from the beginning to the American destiny to be affirmed and extended.

​

It is on the basis of this fruitful and powerful "mestizaje" that the personality of Hispanic America, its originality and its creative task can be affirmed. With everything that comes to it from the past and present, Hispanic America can define a new time, a new direction and a new language for the expression of mankind, without forcing or adulterating the most constant and valuable of his collective being, which is his aptitude for living and creative "mestizaje".

​

It is now open and ready to receive and transform in a great attempt at unity and synthesis the living present of its multiple heritages and to carry out, on the eve of the 21st century, a feat of renewal and cultural rebirth similar to the one Rome did in its time, or did the West.

 

Its vocation and its opportunity is to carry out the new stage of cultural "mestizaje" that is going to be that of its time in the history of culture. All that deviates from that will be to divert Latin America from its natural path and deny it its manifest destiny, which is none other than to fully fulfill the promise of the Garcilasos, the Bolívars, the Daríos, the builders of cathedrals, for the work of a New World.

​

​

​

​

​