The American Chronicles of Jose Marti. Journalism and Modernity in Spanish America

Abstract

The American Chronicles of Jose Marti. Journalism and Modernity in Spanish America. By Susana Rotker. Translated by Jennifer French and Katherine Semler. Hanover. UP of New England, 2000. 144 pages. Marti's position as a Pan-American political icon has long been established. His stature as one of the towering figures of modernismo has been a given in manuals and literary histories. At the same time, the image of Marti is literally set in stone, hardened along predictable lines, often overcrowded with repetitive hagiographies and hackneyed paeans. For the past twentyfive years or so, the best readings of Marti have worked against the grain of this tradition, opening up new ways to read the awesome, shattered universe that is his legacy. After the publication of La invention de la cronica in 1992, Susana Rotker was among those critics whose work defined a more vital, more transgressive image of our national hero. The American Chronicles of Jose Marti. Journalism and Modernity in Spanish America is an English version of Rotker's indispensable 1992 book. Early studies of modernismo tended to view it as an aesthetic movement, with the poet in flight from an increasingly oppressive reality. In this critical vein, the emphasis was on poetry, while the cronica took second place. However, contemporary critics, Anibal Gonzalez, Julio Ramos and Rotker among them, have shown that the cronica modernista was created at the heart of the radical changes that defined modernity during the second half of the nineteenth century. Rotker's work focuses on the cronica as the crucible of a new cultural subject, one whose influence still marks us today, long after the themes and techniques associated with modernismo were consigned to our archive of charming antiquities. In a series of telling juxtapositions, Rotker contrasts, for example, the New York Sun's report on the opening of the Brooklyn bridge with Marti's version. Rotker shows how Marti rewrote current events, transforming the grinding work of the journalist into a medium for recasting himself. In other words, the exile seer in the entrails of the monster, perhaps Marti's most influential persona, developed in the interstices of his work as a journalist. In the United States, Marti's body, and body of writing, became the vehicle of a searing tension between admiration and horror. In one of the most suggestive sections of her book, Rotker explains that Marti writes from the margins of the gaze, not with the inferiority assumed of the subject confronted by Empire, but with a transforming will (104). …

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