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Jaime Alazraki has studied with some care' ‘El indigenismo de Marti y el antindigenismo de Sarmiento” (The indigenism of Marti and the anti-indigenism of Sarmiento].
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1 refer the reader interested in the subject to this essay; here
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shall only draw on some of the quotations from the works of both included in that study. I have already mentioned some of Martis observations on the Indian. Alazraki recalls others:

No more than peoples in blossom, no more than the bulbs of peoples, were those the valiant conquistador marched upon; with his subtle craftiness of the old-time opportunist, he discharged his powerful firearms. It was a historic misfortune and a natural crime. The well-formed stalk should have been left standing, the entire flowering work of Nature could then be seen in all its beauty. The conquistadors stole a page from the Universe!

And further:

Of all that greatness there remains in the museum scarcely a few gold cups, a few stones of polished obsidian shaped like a yoke, and one or two wrought rings. Tenochtitlin does not exist, nor Titian, the city of the great fair, Texcuco, the city of the palaces, is no more. Indians of today, passing before the ruins, lower their heads and move their lips as if saying something; they do not put on their hats again until the ruins are left behind.

For Sarmiento, the history of America is the “bands of abject races, a great continent abandoned to savages incapable of progress." If we want to know how he interpreted the maxim of his compatriot Alberdi that "to govern is to populate," we must read this: “Many difficulties will be presented by the occupation of so extensive a country; but there will be no advantage comparable to that gained by the extinction of the savage tribes.” That is to say, for Sarmiento, to govern is also to
depopulate
the nation of its Indians (and gauchos). And what of the
heroes
of the resistance against the Spaniards, those magnificent men whose rebellious blood Marti felt coursing through his veins? Sarmiento has also questioned himself about them. This is his response:

For us, Colocolo, Lautaro, and Caupolican, notwithstanding the noble and civilized garb with which they are adorned by Ercilla, are nothing more than a handful of loathesome Indians. We would have them hanged today were they to reappear in a war of the Araucanos against Chile, a country that has nothing to do with such rabble.

This naturally implies a vision of the Spanish conquest radically different from that upheld by Marti. For Sarmiento, “Spanish—repeated a hundred times in the odious sense of impious, immoral, ravisher and impostor—is synonymous with civilization, with the European tradition brought by them to these countries.” And while for Marti, “there is no racial hatred, because there are no races,” the author of
Conflicto y armonias de las rams en America
[Conflict and Harmony among the Races in America) bases himself thus on pseudoscientific theories:

It may be very unjust to exterminate savages, suffocate rising civilizations, conquer peoples who are in possession of a privileged piece of land. But thanks to this injustice, America, instead of remaining abandoned to the savages, incapable of progress, is today occupied by the Caucasian race—the most perfect, the most intelligent, the most beautiful and most progressive of those that people the earth. Thanks to these injustices, Oceania is filled with civilized peoples, Asia begins to move under the European impulse, Africa sees the times of Carthage and the glorious days of Egypt reborn on her coats. Thus, the population of the world is subject to revolutions that recognize immutable laws; the strong races exterminate the weak ones and the civilized peoples supplant the savages in the possession of the earth.

There was no need then to cross the Atlantic and seek out Renan to hear such words: a man of this America was saying them. The fact is that if he did not learn them on this side of the ocean, they were at least reinforced for him here—not in our America but in the other, “European [,] America,” of which Sarmiento was the most fanatical devotee in our mestizo lands during the nineteenth century. Although in that century there is no shortage of Latin Americans who adored the Yankees, our discovery of people among us equal to Sarmiento in their devotion to the United States would be due above all to the ranting seqoyism in which our twentieth-century Latin America has been so prodigal. What Sarmiento wanted for Argentina was exactly what the United States had achieved for itself. The last words he wrote (1888) were: “We shall catch up to the United States. . . . Let us become the United States.” His travels in that country produced in him a genuine bedazzlement, a never-ending historical orgasm. He tried to establish in his homeland the bases for an enterprising bourgeoisie, similar to what he saw there. Its present fate makes any commentary unnecessary.

What Marti saw in the United States is also sufficiently well known that we need not dwell upon the point. Suffice it to recall that he was the first militant anti-imperialist of our continent; that he denounced over a period of fifteen years “the crude, inequitable, the decadent character of the United States, and the continued existence therein of all the violence, discord, immorality, and disorder for which the Hispano-American peoples are censured”
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; that a few hours before his death on the battlefield, he confided in a letter to his great friend, the Mexican Manuel Mercado, “Everything I have done to this day, and everything I shall do is to that end [,]... to prevent in time the expansion of the United States into the Antilles and to prevent her
from
falling, with ever greater force, upon our American lands.”
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Sarmiento did not remain silent before the criticism that Marti — frequently from the very pages of
La Nacidn
—leveled against his idolized United States. He commented on one occasion on this incredible boldness:

Don Jfos6 Marti lacks only one requirement to be a journalist ... He has failed to regenerate himself, to educate himself, so to speak, to receive inspiration from the country in which he lives, as one receives food so as to convert it into life-giving blood. ... I should like Marti to give us less of Marti, less of the purebred Spaniard, and less of the South American, and in exchange, a little more of the Yankee —the new type of modem man. ... It is amusing to hear a Frenchman of the
Courier des etats-Unis
laughing at the stupidities and political incompetence of the Yankees, whose institutions Gladstone proclaims the supreme work of the human race. But to criticize with magisterial airs that which a Latin American, a Spaniard, sees there, with a confetti of political judgement transmitted to him by the books of other nations—as if trying to see sunspots through a blurred glass—is to do the reader a very grave injustice and lead him down the path of perdition. . . . Let them not come to us, then, with their insolent humility of South Americans, semi-Indians and semi-Spaniards, to find evil.
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Sarmiento, who was as vehement in his praise as his invective, here places Marti among the “semi-Indians.” This was in essence true and for Marti a point of pride; but we have already seen what it implied in the mouth of Sarmiento . . .

For these reasons, and despite the fact that highly esteemed writers have tried to point out possible similarities, I think it will be understood how difficult it is to accept a parallel between these two men, such as the one elaborated by Emeterio S. Santovenia in the 262 sloppy pages of
Genio y accidn: Sarmiento y Marti.
A sample will suffice: according to this author, “Above and beyond the discrepan-ties in the achievements and limitations of their respective projections concerning America, there does emerge a coincidence [ii'c] in their evaluations [those of Sarmiento and Marti] of the Anglo-Saxon role in the development of political and social ideas that fertilized the tree of total emancipation in the New World"
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This luxuriant undergrowth of thought, syntax, and metaphor gives some indication of what our culture was like when we wens part of the “free world,” of which Mr. Santovenia (as well as being one of Batista’s ministers in his moments of leisure) was so eminent a representative.

On the Free World

But the portion of the free world that corresponds to Latin America can boast today of much more memorable figures. There is Jorge Luis Borges, for example, whose name seems to be associated with “memorable.” The Borges I have in mind is the one who only a short time ago dedicated his (presumably good) translation of Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
to United States President Richard Nixon. It is true that Borges wrote in 1926, ‘‘I want to speak to the Creoles—to those who feel their existence deeply rooted in our lands, not to those who think the sun and the moon are in Europe. This is a land of born exiles, of men nostalgic for the far-off and the foreign: they are the real gringos, regardless of their parentage, and I do not address myself to them.” It is also true that Sarmiento is presented at that time as a ‘‘North American Indian brave, who loathed and misprized anything Creole.”
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But the fact is that
Borges is not the one
who has gone down in history. This “memorious” individual decided to forget the little book of his youth, that he wrote only a few years after having been a member of “the sect, the blunder, called Ultraism.” In his eyes that book and the ideas in it were also a blunder. Pathetically faithful to his class,
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it was a different Borges who would become so well known, attain such great circulation abroad, and experience the public acclaim of innumerable literary prizes—some of which are so obscure that he would seem to have awarded them himself. The Borges in question, to whom we shall dedicate a few lines here, is the one who echoes Sarmiento’s grotesque “We belong to the Roman Empire,” with this declaration not of 1926 but of 1955: “I believe that our tradition is Europe.”
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It might seem strange that the ideological filiation of such an energetic and blustering pioneer would come to be manifest today in a man so sedate, a writer such as Borges—the archetypal representative of a bookish culture that on the surface seems far removed from Sarmiento’s constant vitality. But this strangeness only demonstrates how accustomed we are to judging the superstructural products of our continent, if not of the whole world, without regard to their concrete structural realities. Except by considering these realities, how would we

recognize the insipid disasters who are the bourgeois intellectuals of our
time as
descending from those vigorous and daring thinkers of the rising bourgeoisie? We need only consider our writers and thinkers in relation to the classes whose world view they expound in order to orient ourselves properly and outline their true filiations. The dialogue we have just witnessed between Sarmiento and Marti was, more than anything else, a class confrontation.

Independently of his (class) origin, Sarmiento is the implacable ideologue of an Argentine bourgeoisie that is attempting to transport bourgeois policies of the metropolitan centers (particularly those of North America) to its own country. To be successful, it must impose itself, like all bourgeoisies, upon the popular classes; it must exploit diem physically and condemn them spiritually. The manner in which a bourgeoisie develops at the expense of the popular classes’ brutalization is memorably demonstrated, taking England as an example, in some of the most impressive pages of
Das Kapital.
“European America," whose capitalism succeeded in expanding fabulously—unhampered as it was by the feudalists order—added new circles of hell to England’s achievements; the enslavement of the Negro and the extermination of the indomitable Indian. These were the models to which Sarmiento looked and which he proposed to follow faithfully. He is perhaps the most consequential and the most active of the bourgeois ideologues on our continent during the nineteenth century.

Marti, on the other hand, is a conscious spokesman of the exploited classes. “Common cause must be made with the oppressed,” he told us, “so as to secure the system against the interests and customs of the oppressors.” And, since beginning with the conquest Indians and blacks have been relegated to the base of the social pyramid, making
common
cause with the oppressed came largely to be the same as making common cause with Indians and blacks—which is what Marti does. These Indians and those blacks had been intermingling among themselves and with some whites, giving rise to the
mestizaje
that is at the root of our America, where—according to Marti—“the authentic mestizo has conquered the exotic Creole.” Sarmiento is a ferocious racist because he is an ideologue of the exploiting classes, in whose ranks the “exotic Creole” is found, Marti is radically antiracist because he is a spokesman for the exploited classes, within which the three races are fusing. Sarmiento opposes what is essentially American in order to inculcate—with blood and fire, just
as
the conquistadors had tried to do—alien formulas here. Marti defends the autochthonous, the genuinely American. This does not mean, of course, that he foolishly rejected whatever positive elements might be offered by other realities: “Graft the world onto our republics," he said, “but the trunk must be that of our republics.” Sarmiento also sought to graft the world onto our republics, but he would have their trunks uprooted in the process. For that reason, if the continuators of Marti are found in Mella and Vallejo, Fidel and Che, and in the new culture of revolutionary Latin America, the heirs of Sarmiento (in spite of his complexity) are, in the final anal-'

ysis, the representatives of the Argentine vice-bourgeoisie. They are, moreover, a defeated class, because the dream of bourgeois development that Sarmiento envisaged was not even a possibility. There was simply no way an eventual Argentine bourgeoisie could develop. Latin America was a late arrival to that fiesta, for as Mariategui wrote: ‘ ‘The time of free competition in the capitalist economy has come to an end, in all areas and in every aspect. We are now in an era of monopolies, of empires. The Larin-American countries are experiencing a belated entry into competitive capitalism. The dominant positions are already well established. The fate of such countries, within the capitalist order, is that of simple colonies.”
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