Our America

The vain villager believes the whole world is his village, and as long as he stays mayor, or gets to humiliate the rival who stole his sweetheart, or sees his savings grow in the money box, he takes the order of the universe for good, knowing nothing of the giants in seven-league boots who can put their boot on him, nor of the battle of the comets in the sky, which travel through the sleeping air swallowing worlds. Whatever is left of the village in America must wake up. These are not times to go to bed with a kerchief on our heads, but with weapons for a pillow, like the men of Juan de Castellanos: the weapons of judgement, which defeat the others. Trenches of ideas are worth more than trenches of stone.

There is no prow that can cut through a cloud of ideas. A forceful idea, waved in time before the world, stops a squadron of ironclads, like the mystic banner of the last judgement. Peoples who do not know one another must hurry to know one another, like those who are about to fight side by side. Those who shake their fists at each other, like jealous brothers who both want the same land, or the one in the small house who envies the one in the better house, must fit together, so that the two hands become one. Those who, sheltered by a criminal tradition, cut off with a sword stained in the blood of their own veins the land of the defeated brother, the brother punished beyond his faults, if they do not want the people to call them thieves, let them give the brother back his land. The honourable man does not collect debts of honour in money, at so much per slap. We can no longer be a people of leaves, living in the air, our crown heavy with flowers, crackling or humming as the whim of the light caresses it, or as the storms beat and fell it; the trees must stand in line, so that the giant in seven-league boots cannot pass! It is the hour of the reckoning and of the united march, and we must go forward in close ranks, like the silver in the roots of the Andes.

Only courage will be lacking in those born before their time. Those who have no faith in their land are men born at seven months. Because they lack courage, they deny it to others. Their puny arm, the arm with painted nails and a bracelet, the arm of Madrid or Paris, cannot reach the difficult tree, and so they say the tree cannot be reached. The ships should be loaded with these harmful insects that gnaw the bones of the homeland that feeds them. If they are Parisians or Madrilenians, let them go to the Prado, under the lamps, or to Tortoni's, for sorbets. These carpenter's sons who are ashamed that their father is a carpenter! These people born in America who are ashamed, because she wears an Indian apron, of the mother who raised them, and who disown, the scoundrels, their sick mother, and leave her alone on her sickbed! Then who is the man: the one who stays with his mother to nurse her illness, or the one who puts her to work where no one can see her, and lives off her keep in rotten lands, with a worm for a necktie, cursing the breast that carried him, parading the sign of the traitor on the back of his paper coat? These sons of our America, which must save itself with its Indians, and is going from less to more; these deserters who ask for a rifle in the armies of North America, which drowns its Indians in blood, and is going from more to less! These delicate creatures who are men and do not want to do men's work! Did the Washington who made their land for them go off to live with the English, to live with the English in the years when he saw them coming against his own land? These "incredibles" of honour, who drag it through foreign soil, as the Incroyables of the French Revolution, dancing and smacking their lips, dragged their r's!

José Martí, 1891. An excerpt, translated for Zeitzung from the Spanish text at Ciudad Seva. Public domain.