In July 1906, two gentlemen, one a prolific essayist, former leader of Brazil’s abolitionist movement, and its current ambassador to the United States; the second, an internationally renowned Nicaraguan poet, journalist and occasional diplomat, crossed the Atlantic on the same boat with other Spanish American delegates, to participate in the third Pan-American Conference in Rio de Janeiro. For Joaquim Nabuco the conference was to be a crucial step toward realizing his vision of a spiritual unification of the continent under the tutelage of the United States, a project that had earned him the reputation of an ardent Monroeist, “more Yankee than the Yankees themselves,” in the words of a friend. Rubén Darío, in contrast, had recently published his anti-Yankee manifesto “To Roosevelt,” condemning, in the name of “our America,” that “wealthy country” to the North “joining the cult of Mammon to the cult of Hercules; while Liberty, lighting the path to easy conquest, raises her torch in New York.”

Darío, unlike Nabuco, has been widely considered one of the main protagonists of turn-of-the-century Latin Americanism, generally characterized as a more or less idealistic intellectual trend, and associated with a group of writers and thinkers generally known by the name modernistas. Reacting in large part to U.S. expansionism, and acting independently from the centers of political power, these intellectuals famously pitted an idealistic, spiritual Latin America against a utilitarian, materialistic Anglo-Saxon America. Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó’s essay Ariel (1900) is widely seen as the quintessential text of the movement, and the antagonistic, binary identification it promoted has been often termed accordingly Arielismo. Other scholarship has highlighted the elitist and/or racist nature of Latin Americanism, depicting it as a conservative elitist response no so much to external as to domestic threats from below. According to this approach, the idea of “Latin America” was a form of internal colonialism, a cultural-political project of Creole and Mestizo elites that hailed ties with Europe and erased the Indian and the Afro populations.

In this sense, the historiography of the concept of “Latin America” is emblematic of wider trends in Latin American studies. Strongly informed by dependency or postcolonial theory, and highly state centered, the scholarship concerning national and supranational identification in nineteenth century Latin America has revolved around asymmetrical relations of power–be those relations of domination, confrontation, or negotiation–both between center and periphery and within each country of the periphery. Whether writing with a top-down or a bottom-up approach, implicitly or explicitly, historians and literary critics have directed their attention to two main axes of interaction, the first connecting Latin America’s upper classes with Europe and the United States, and the second connecting these predominantly white, upper classes with the “colored” masses of their respective countries.

This article argues for the importance of a third axis of interaction, namely the trans-Latin American axis, or what might also be called a histoire croisée, an entangled history, to be distinguished from comparative history of the subcontinent. In accordance with this approach, and as already hinted by the multidirectional intersecting political-poetic itineraries of Nabuco and Darío, a truly integrative intellectual history of “Latin America,” with or without quotes, must pay attention to transnational intercrossings inside the region. This is demonstrated by reconstructing the largely forgotten role of key Brazilian intellectuals in the Latins versus Anglo-Saxons debates that developed around 1898, and by emphasizing the embeddedness of their thinking in the growing circulation of men and ideas across national borders within South America, principally in the River Plate region. The key here was Brazilians’ change of view of their traditional rival, Argentina, the one country which epitomized Spanish America’s transition from the times of the caudillos to the times of “order and progress,” during the last third of the century.

Shifting attention away from the usual Spanish American suspects and their repeatedly cited essays such as a Rodo’s Ariel, this change of focus does not only challenge the common depiction of Latin Americanism as a purely Spanish American phenomenon and of the United States as its major catalyst, but also allows a more nuanced understanding of the movement’s nature. Latinoamericanismo, goes the argument, should not be equated with the literary-idealist response to U.S. imperialism. There was another type of response as well, statist-realist, even social-Darwinist, intricately tied to the practice of international relations. If Arielismo derived from a sense of material weakness, then what I call Latin Americanism derived from self-confidence, intimately related to Argentina’s great leap forward, or, in other words, from a dual perception of Latin America as at once ordered and disordered, vigorous and weak, civilized and barbaric.