José Martí between modernity and modernism

Abstract

The following writing is about the relationship that the Cuban hero José Martí had with modernity and modernism. As an exile he lived in great modern epicenters such as the cities of Madrid, capital of the decadent Spanish empire, Paris, the focus of European art and intellectuality, and New York, the driving force behind capitalist modernity. In the latter, he lived for approximately fifteen years and was the city space that most showed him modernity and transformed his thinking. This, among other issues of a literary nature and independence in language, led him to create Modernism, a literary movement that developed strongly in Latin America from the eighties of the nineteenth century to the first two decades of the twentieth century. The search for his own Latin American thought, the need for an autochthonous, revolutionary and emancipatory language and the break with the old European ways when it came to saying, were the reflection of a martian initiation, closely related to the time that the poet and cuban independence.