Rerouting Latin Americanism: Pedro Henríquez Ureña's "Hispanic America," 1897-1921

This dissertation examines the formative years of Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1884-1946), one of the founding fathers of academic Latin Americanism. The son of eminent Dominican intellectuals, Henríquez Ureña’s late nineteenth-century upbringing in Santo Domingo featured discussions about education policy; moral philosophy; modern Latin American, European, and U.S. American literatures; international politics; the movements for Cuban and Puerto Rican independence from Spain; and the growing influence of U.S. American culture and empire in the Caribbean. The focus of this study is Henríquez Ureña’s dedication to academic Latin Americanism between 1897 and 1921.

Henríquez Ureña lived outside of the Dominican Republic starting in 1901. Combining genres such as biography, intellectual history, history of intellectuals, and institutional history, this dissertation follows him through New York City, Havana, Veracruz, Mexico City, Washington DC, Minneapolis, and Berkeley, California. While living in these cities, Henríquez Ureña studied independently and at universities; read a range of old and new studies of Hispanist and Latin Americanist criticism, history, and philology; published Hispanist and Latin Americanist studies of his own; participated in these cities’ cultural scenes; and collaborated with specialists and non-specialists to both shape and impart his academic Latin Americanism.

This dissertation ultimately shows where, when, how, and why Henríquez Ureña became a specialist and professor of Iberian Spanish and Latin American literatures. In becoming a specialist, however, Henríquez Ureña also became a well-rounded humanist. He accomplished this by studying the history of criticism and the broader humanities since antiquity. As early as the 1900s, Henríquez Ureña was aware of common stereotypes of Spanish and Latin American “backwardness” and “inferiority.” This study also shows how, in order to contest such stereotypes, Henríquez Ureña historicized and taught the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America as regions that participated in global intellectual trends.