Cosmopolitanism and nativism in Hispanic-American literature

These writers want independence from Spain. But they are still writing in Spanish.

That is the starting tension. When the opening paragraph says “we,” it means Hispanic-American writers who write in Spanish. They come from different cultures, but their shared language connects their work to a European literary tradition. Using that language doesn't mean they want their literature to remain dependent on Spain's.

So how do they establish something of their own?

The first paragraph gives us two approaches, and we need to attach each name to the right idea. Cosmopolitanism means looking outward: adopting forms and styles from other European and North American literatures. The important word is other. These writers can move away from Spain's influence without refusing every outside influence.

Nativism means looking toward the life around them: describing the United States and giving voice to the Hispanic peoples who live there. Here, the focus is on whose experiences the literature expresses. Don't let the unfamiliar labels obscure a manageable distinction: borrowing outside literary approaches versus expressing one's own people's lives.

Why would those approaches conflict? A writer could presumably care about both. But they can lead writers and critics to value different things, and the second paragraph shows us how.

One Mexican-American novelist gets praised for adapting European techniques but criticized for a “paucity” of Mexican-American settings or characters. Paucity means a shortage. The complaint is that there isn't enough of that specifically Mexican-American life in the work, even though the technique is impressive.

The Cuban-American novel has the opposite problem. Its characters' daily lives feel vivid, but critics find its form and language rough. These examples make the competing priorities concrete: polished literary technique can win praise without satisfying the demand for a distinctive local voice; vivid local experience can win praise without satisfying expectations about literary form.

Paragraph 3 gives us another way to track the distinction. Cosmopolitanism ventures into the public or mainstream culture. Nativism returns to the original culture. Different periods emphasize different directions.

The years 1918–1930 are an example of the outward-looking phase. Writers search, experiment, and draw on European movements such as expressionism and surrealism. Those movements influence other North American writers too. The result includes excellent works with strikingly daring expression (paragraph 3). This is experimental, adventurous writing.

Then the emphasis changes. The following period returns to the writers’ own communities and everyday speech, producing work less dependent on fashionable mainstream trends (paragraph 3). Colloquial dialects are the familiar ways people actually speak. The focus shifts back toward the writers' own communities and voices.

Keep those periods separate. The experiment-heavy phase comes first; the return to local people and speech follows. We aren't being told that each individual novelist starts a career with one approach and switches to the other.

The final paragraph brings this history into the present. Contemporary writers still have European roots and an American horizon. They face both influences, rather than neatly escaping one of them.

The ending also explains why simply picking a winner would miss something. Venturing into the wider culture helps writers appreciate their own culture's value. Returning to their origins helps them avoid disappearing into the mainstream. Both movements serve a purpose.

Our first reaction might be that these writers need to balance the two. That captures the ending, but the larger point includes how they got here: the pursuit of independence from Spain has involved two often-conflicting approaches, which have taken turns dominating and which contemporary writers are trying to reconcile.