Speaker
Description
In late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Latin America, positivist and scientific racist discourse prescribed rigid social hierarchies based on gender, race, and ethnicity, effectively excluding women, children, and indigenous populations from formal projects of nation-building. This essay argues that the Cuban intellectual José Martí and the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral mounted a powerful literary and pedagogical challenge to this hegemonic order. Through a comparative analysis of Martí’s children’s magazine La Edad de Oro (1889) and Mistral’s essay “El tipo del indio americano” (1932), this study demonstrates how both authors reconceptualized childhood and education as foundational sites for constructing an inclusive national identity. Martí’s work, aimed directly at children, champions the child’s right to knowledge and self-formation, rejecting Eurocentric models. Decades later, Mistral’s pedagogical proposal explicitly advocates for the recognition of racial and cultural diversity as the very core of American teaching. By rereading these texts together, this research presents an alternative intellectual tradition that contested adult-centric and exclusionary ideologies. It ultimately reveals how Mistral and Martí pioneered a poetics of childhood that reimagined cultural transmission as a process attentive to the entire life cycle and rooted in anti-racist and pluralistic ideals.
| Principal domain of study | Translation studies |
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