One a liberal, the other a Marxist, José Enrique Rodó and José Carlos Mariátegui each advocated for a reenchantment of Latin American life to counter a secular, materialist, and utilitarian culture emanating from North America and Europe.
Modernity is a category that retains a largely Western connotation. This is to say, the great majority of theorists to whom we look for clarification on the idea of modernity come from a common Western intellectual tradition. Yet, this intellectual tradition is itself rife with contrasting genealogies of modernity—all of which are contested.1 Regardless of where different scholars locate the beginnings of modernity, what can be generally agreed upon is that it is a Western phenomenon with global ramifications. Those of us who study regions on the periphery of Europe are faced with a particular challenge when it comes to the subject of modernity. Do we study the effects of (Western) modernity to analyze the ways in which they took root in different geographical and historical contexts? Or do we suggest that these regions with their respective histories and developments, within which Europe’s influence was only one of many features, generated their own modernity; thereby opening the possibility of multiple modernities? Alternatively, might the experience of modernity in these peripheral regions possess a mixture of these two possibilities?
As a region with a long and complex history with Europe, Latin America offers a germane case study for this subject, particularly between the 19th and 20th centuries. The immediate aftermath of the wars of independence with Spain (1810–1826) waned, yet their legacy continued to influence the work of statesmen, politicians, and intellectuals during this period of nation building. The middle of the 19th century was a difficult period of social and political transition where the projects for national consolidation devolved into civil wars, yet it was also a period of high intellectual activity. New challenges emerged internationally as European powers took interest in the affairs of the newly independent Latin American nation-states and as their neighbor to the north, the United States, grew in global influence. To wit, this was a period of flux, but one that produced compelling analyses of this enigmatic concept we call modernity.
The purpose of this essay is to revisit the concept of modernity in the Latin American context. My intention is not to argue for a definitive moment in Latin American history—social, political, economic, or intellectual—in which modernity “took place.”2 It is my view that modernity in Latin America did not occur at a single moment (the same can be said about Europe). Modernity, applied to the Latin American context, rather describes a general experience, a collective sentiment, that swelled over the course of several centuries as the region transitioned from colonies to independent nation-states. During this process, Latin America became part of a global commercial, industrial, and technological complex while still grappling with socio-cultural challenges remaining from the colonial period. This experience is not confined to social history; it can also be illuminated through the region’s intellectual history.
In what follows, I will introduce the thinking of two of Latin America’s foremost intellectuals of the late-19th and early-20th centuries who were theorists of modernity in their own right. These are the Uruguayan thinker José Enrique Rodó (1871–1917) and the Peruvian thinker José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930). Both figures analyzed the leading ethical paradigm of their age, liberalism, and the leading economic paradigm, capitalism, to draw out the meaning, impact, and implications of modernity and its relationship to their region. One a liberal, the other a Marxist, Rodó and Mariátegui differed in their philosophical commitments. Still, they both sought to identify the problems of the modern age and to situate Latin America within this global reality. Their understanding of Latin American culture influenced their interest in the role of “spirit” (for Rodó) and of “myth” (for Mariátegui) in society, and these elements were influential in their more overt political writings that discussed questions such as public displays of religion, the political reality of Indigenous peoples, civic education, international relations, and national identity. They each advocated for a reenchantment of modernity to renew Latin American intellectual, cultural, and political life in the 20th century through their emphases on spirit and myth, positioned against what they considered to be an increasingly secular, materialist, and utilitarian culture that was primarily emanating from North America and Europe.
Latin America’s challenge: To be or not to be modern?
Before introducing the thought of Rodó and Mariátegui, it is worth considering the stakes of their contributions to modernity studies. Latin America’s position within this subject has always been fraught. Referred to by the Brazilian sociologist José Merquior as “the other West,” Latin America’s history, namely its colonial entanglements with Spain, produced the general sentiment in scholarly and policy circles of the 20th century that Latin America had only an “infant modernity” because its economic, political, and intellectual development lagged behind that of Europe and the United States at least by a century.3 As Merquior related, the traditional arguments raised by historians of Latin America in the 20th century—most of whom were from the United States or Europe—was that the region’s Spanish inheritance produced a general predilection for patrimonialism and traditionalism, rendering it decidedly unmodern. This claim was not merely descriptive; it was also used by Western critics of modernity, such as the scholar Richard Morse (1922–2001), who relied on Latin America to challenge several of modernity’s premises regarding individualism, capitalism, and secularism.4 Merquior criticized such manipulative (and disparaging) analyses of Latin America. Paraphrasing Morse’s arguments, Merquior wrote the following:
By rejecting both modern revolutions, the religious and the scientific, the Iberian world was immune against the logical results, utilitarianism and individualism, which were internalized everywhere in the West . . . To put it bluntly: our Iberian ethos goes on being pre-modern—and so much the better . . . for Iberoamerica has thus escaped the sad disenchanted world, the moral wasteland of high modernity. What a flattering conclusion for us Iberoamericans! ‘Barbarians’ in the modern era, we are told not to worry; if it is so, it is because we have stayed human.5
Merquior’s essay on the manipulated historical position of Latin America was intended to criticize scholars who saw in Latin America’s history an alternative to modernity by reducing its social and intellectual history to one of reactionary resistance to the rest of the modern world (i.e., Europe and the United States). Morse’s scholarship also relied on a religious argument that claimed that Latin America’s education in scholasticism and committed Thomism similarly contrasted with the Western Protestant ethic. This Merquior also refuted. What is important about Merquior’s influential essay, “The Other West,” is not only his criticism of the type of scholarship about Latin America in the 20th century (of which Morse was particularly emblematic) that painted Latin America as a romantic, albeit backwards, haven from the ills of modernity. Equally significant is the assumption—implicit in the essay but often explicit in discourses about Latin America—that discussions about modernity in Latin America must refer in one way or another to the region’s historic Catholicism, whether religious, cultural, or both.
Neither Rodó (whom Merquior cites frequently in his essay) nor Mariátegui are conventional thinkers in discussing the subject of religion. Neither of them, to my knowledge, were practicing Catholics, or even believers. Yet they acknowledged the importance of metaphysical or transcendental elements in life and in history. This might strike us as a secularized form of religion—perhaps it is—but it offers us some insight into the different ways in which thinkers from Latin America understood the relationship between religion and modernity. Neither saw Latin America as a reactionary, traditionalist and therefore stagnant region that would “reject” modernity, but they were critics of modernity and envisioned supplementary recourses to correct what they considered its most problematic features.
History, faith, and freedom: Rodó on spirit
.jpg)
Rodó was a liberal thinker who attempted to reconcile liberalism, as a political and ethical system, with religion. He opposed the broader implications of Western industrialization, which he believed were promoting a materialist, secular, positivist, and utilitarian ethos to the masses; but he also rejected the more radical forms of liberalism that deemed all sources of religion to be anathema in civic life. Although the separation of church and state was generally accepted in Uruguay during his time, Rodó defended public displays of religion and advocated for the spiritual dimension of social life. His essay “Liberalism and Jacobinism” (1906) and his work Ariel (1900) convey these views, respectively; the former elucidates Rodó’s views on liberalism and religion, while the latter represents his vision for the role of spirit in Latin American society and his assessment of modernity.
“Liberalism and Jacobinism” (1906) is made up of a series of newspaper articles regarding the expulsion of crucifixes in schools and hospitals. To the dismay of his liberal contemporaries, Rodó supported the display of crucifixes in these public places. To defend this view, he put forth an understanding of modernity that aimed to correct the “widespread moral and historical incomprehension” regarding liberalism. Liberalism represented for Rodó “the most decided love of liberty,” which was tied to two supporting tenets: “the defense of a great human tradition” and “a high concept of freedom.”6 The idea of a “human tradition” was the misunderstood feature of liberty that his society ignored by attempting to ban crucifixes. Rodó understood “human tradition” as the collective, historical proof that the progress of society contains vital cultural features that convey important principles for its development. He understood freedom as a religious sentiment: that is, as an aspiration and faith. These two qualities (human tradition and freedom) were manifested through the symbolic image of the crucifix, Rodó claimed.
The argument in Rodó’s essay can be generalized into two points. The first is that the fervor with which liberals in his society wished to eradicate all forms of religious symbolism and religious practice was illiberal in spirit; that is, fanatical and absolutist to the point of becoming a form of “Jacobinism” akin to the variety that incited the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution of 1789. The second, which is the more interesting for my analysis, is that the crucifix was not only a religious symbol, but it was also a moral and historical symbol of charity, a quality worthy of remaining in public buildings such as schools or hospitals as an extension of the state’s own ethical values. Rodó’s views on religion and liberalism had a direct political motive. He was writing during a moment when most liberals were staunchly anti-Catholic. Throughout Uruguay, secularizing programs were being promoted, which Rodó saw as oppressive and contradictory to liberal principles.
Rodó understood modernity as deeply embedded in a sense of history.
Although Rodó insisted in “Liberalism and Jacobinism” that his argument was entirely secular and non-confessional, the centrality of the Christ figure in his essay betrays an element of Rodó’s theory of modernity—one that brings history (human tradition) and faith (freedom) together—which is the continuity of moral doctrines. A nation, Rodó argued, needed “faith in the same tradition . . . and above all, the community of spirit that comes from collective remembering, because it is through the cult of tradition and models, rather than in the affected formulations of manifestos, that the faith in principles and the vivifying inspirations of action are conveyed.”7 The crucifix was just one example of a symbol that conveyed the common principles and aspirations of a society. For Rodó, the image of Christ and the debate over crucifixes in public spaces provided an opportunity to communicate his broader philosophy regarding liberalism. His defense of the public display of crucifixes expressed his view that this symbol was part of a greater tradition that could not be easily eradicated by liberals who wished to make Uruguay a modern, secular nation. For Rodó, being modern was not synonymous with being ahistorical; put another way, modernity did not entail rejecting the principles and aspirations conveyed in the earlier belief systems of that same community. On the contrary, Rodó understood modernity as being deeply embedded in a sense of history and building up from it.
Many of Rodó’s arguments in “Liberalism and Jacobinism” were spelled out in his earlier work, Ariel.8 In this text, he described modernity as a process where “a sense of materialism and comfort” produced a “single-faceted culture.” He warned against the global domination of Western material and utilitarian culture. Although Rodó accepted that some of the political and ethical philosophies that emerged from modernity, such as liberalism, were generally advantageous and more reasonable than earlier paradigms, he was skeptical about the new conviction, which he commonly saw in his fellow liberal colleagues, that all sources of supernatural faith were therefore outdated, oppressive, and unnecessary in the modern age. On the contrary, he thought, symbols and models, such as those offered by religion or philosophy, presented societies with lasting ideals because of their non-material and non-rational qualities which were woven into history and culture. Rodó thus dually opposed the dogmatism of contemporary liberals who wished to remove all religious symbols from public life for their illiberality and for their inability to understand the spiritual elements that made up much of civic (that is, political and social) life.
Rodó offers, therefore, a theory about how moral doctrines remain embodied in modernity through their historical and spiritual force. Although modernity for Rodó is a process of secularization, he nevertheless emphasizes the importance of shared symbols, traditions, and memory. Liberalism, for this reason, may have been Rodó’s preferred ethical and political philosophy, but he understood that it needed to be supplemented by existing traditions. Liberalism alone lacked the emotional and symbolic history to meaningfully embed itself in culture. Rodó’s liberalism, then, needed to be tethered to a sense of “human tradition” as much as it needed to be tethered to the ideal of “freedom.” The two must go together in his framework. Even if religious belief was waning, or even if an individual was not inclined towards religious belief, this did not mean that metaphysics and transcendence had left the sphere of public reason. This is where Rodó’s concept of “spirit” comes in.
Rodó’s concept of spirit was connected to an irrational and supernatural dimension of theism.9 It described, in other words, a form of thinking and perceiving the world that opened itself to transcendental elements of life. Spirit offered an alternative to what he called the “barbarism” of North America and Europe, which had rejected everything metaphysical, creative, and supernatural for the sake of that which was material, utilitarian, and secular. In this respect, Ariel was Rodó’s response to modernity. As he phrased it, “everything that is civilization is something more than an element of material superiority and economic prosperity.” Civilization, in Rodó’s conception of it, is an intellectual project where the refinement of “spirit” replaces a modern “mediated” world of efficacy and immediacy. Spirit, then, represented a type of imaginative faculty that, if left abandoned, ran the risk of being lost in modern society. It is for this reason that Ariel is written as a sermon of sorts directed at Uruguay’s youth (and Latin America’s broader youth); he aimed to convey to his readers, ideally young ones, the importance of retaining and cultivating this spiritual element for their creative development in a world increasingly motivated by economic and material gain. His solution was to prioritize the role of culture—of art, music, literature, philosophy—to retain spirit as an integral component of society.
Revolution, land, and community: Mariátegui on myth
We can now supplement Rodó’s observations on spirit with Mariátegui’s writings on myth. Mariátegui differed from Rodó in that he was a committed, albeit heterodox, Marxist. He responded more directly to the historical condition of Latin America as a post-colonial society that was still struggling to reconcile a colonial legacy—consisting of fraught social relations between classes—with the exogenous influences of capitalism that, he believed, would exacerbate these lingering tensions. Although scholars often perceive his “prescient awareness of the dialectical entanglement of coloniality and modernity,” however, they nonetheless leave out the mystic elements of his thought.10 Similar to Rodó, Mariátegui understood modernity as a historical movement that had transformed ideas of nature, society, and culture once society elevated reason, technology, and science over other sources of knowledge. One of the consequences of modernity, therefore, had been its critical undermining of sacred and metaphysical belief.
Mariátegui believed that spiritual revolution was just as important as political revolution.
Mariátegui, however, believed that spiritual revolution was just as important as political revolution.11 He understood the human person as possessing a deep, metaphysical longing for something infinite and transcendent, which he called “myth,” that modern reason and science could not replace. “Western man,” he wrote “has placed reason and science atop the altar of the dead gods. But neither reason nor science can satisfy the need for the infinite that lies in man. Reason has taken it upon itself to demonstrate to men that she is not enough for them. That only myth possesses the previous virtue of filling man with the most profound sense of self.”12 The challenge of modern society as Mariátegui conceived it was to retain the elements that would be conducive to spiritual revolution amidst the rapid urbanization and economic development taking place in Latin America. His emphasis on the role of myth to execute the goal of a socialist revolution, therefore, led him to critique the strong economic determinism of fellow Marxists who argued that Latin American nations like Peru would necessarily have to undergo a capitalist period in order to produce a socialist period.
Mariátegui’s essay “Man and Myth” (1925) concisely articulates how he understood the role of myth playing out in civilizations as a response to modernity’s crisis. He argued that myth is what moves man along history, and that without myth man’s existence lacks historical sense. History, after all, is made by peoples guided by a higher belief. This belief, moreover, could not be something as simplistic as material wealth. This was the mistake that promoters of capitalism had made. What Mariátegui called the “crisis of bourgeois civilization” had emerged from “the instant in which this civilization admitted its lack of a myth.”13 Once bourgeois civilization rejected the importance of myth, Mariátegui wrote, social life was reduced to the dialectical battle between two souls: the “enchanted” and “disenchanted.” Only the enchanted soul, however, could form a new society according to Mariátegui since “the strength of revolutionaries is not in their science; it is in their faith, in their passion, in their will. It is a religious, mystical, spiritual force. It is the force of myth.” Myth was such a central element for Mariátegui that it replaced the role of traditional Marxist historicism (i.e., determinism) to explain societal change.
Mariátegui’s emphasis on myth had a direct connection to the political reality of Peru. He aimed to empower the Peruvian rural and Indigenous populations at a moment in which they were being exploited. What Mariátegui called “the problem of the Indian” and “the problem of the land”14 in his contemporary Peru was framed as a critical historical study of Peruvian development. In Mariátegui’s analysis, Peru’s “development” had been merely illusory: The independence movement that freed Peru from Spain, the subsequent formation of a republic, and, in his day, the interest in economic development through export-driven capitalism were all political and economic steps that never truly transformed Peruvian society. Many of the feudal systems implemented by Spanish conquistadors remained insofar as social relations were still dictated by elitism and aristocratic notions of land ownership. Economic production was exclusive to landowners (latifundia) who lived off the indentured servitude of rural and Indigenous populations. The bourgeois class, Mariátegui argued, were the legitimate ruling class in 20th-century Peru.
In his essay “The Problem of the Land,” Mariátegui explained how the prevalence of a lasting Indigenous spirit—what he described as a “Communist spirit”—helped to offset the harmful effects of modernity, namely individualism, by keeping social cooperation as a central feature of their communities. Land allocation for Indigenous communities—something that Mariátegui favored—would help improve their social condition, but of even greater importance for his analysis of modernity was the implication of the ways in which these Indigenous communities organized themselves. It demonstrated to him the persistence of ancient customs, even in a different political reality. Mariátegui wrote:
The Indian, in spite of one hundred years of republican legislation, has not become an individualist. And this is not because he resists progress, as is claimed by his detractors. Rather, it is because individualism under a feudal system does not find the necessary conditions to gain strength and develop. On the other hand, communism has continued to be the Indian’s only defense. Individualism cannot flourish or even exist effectively outside a system of free competition. And the Indian has never felt less free than when he has felt alone. Therefore, in Indian villages where families are grouped together that have lost the bonds of their ancestral heritage and community work, hardy and stubborn habits of cooperation and solidarity still survive that are the empirical expression of a communist spirit. The “community” is the instrument of this spirit.15
Mariátegui’s central criticism of individualism is that it cannot thrive outside of the conditions of “free competition.” Hence, it was precisely the fact that Indigenous communities were being exploited in his contemporary Peru that contributed to the persistence of their communist spirit. Because Indigenous peoples had been excluded from partaking in the new forms of social organization (free competition) but forced to remain in the old (feudal system), individualism never took hold in their communities. The very idea of “community,” Mariátegui insisted, served as an “empirical expression” of the force of this communist spirit for keeping subjugated peoples together.
Mariátegui’s Marxism, then, may be evident in his analyses and critiques of the socioeconomic reality of Peru, but his emphasis on myth, both as a “subjective aspect of reality” and as proof of the “psychological basis for political change,”16 shows that his analysis of politics was deeply informed by his understanding of modernity. For Mariátegui, modernity was a phenomenon whose systems did not account for those immaterial social elements that motivate the human spirit. Human beings, Mariátegui believed, function through their belief in myth. For this reason, modernity in Mariátegui’s framework entailed the revival of traditional beliefs and practices without reducing such an act to a rejection of the present. The purpose of the socialist myth was to work within modernity towards a new reality.
—
Rodó and Mariátegui’s conceptions of spirit and myth are not explicitly connected to a Catholic intellectual tradition, yet they offer insight into the relationship between modernity and religion as it pertains to the phenomenon of secularism, famously addressed by philosophers like Charles Taylor.17 Although they were not religious, their discussions on modernity revealed a lingering acceptance, even embrace, of metaphysics through which they criticized and also offered alternatives to features of modernity that they deemed inadequate for their society’s progress. Their thought helped form broader intellectual movements in Latin America that were, in their own respect, responses to modernity.
Rodó, for example, became an influential figure in the literary movement in Latin America called modernismo, which strove to create a new aesthetic for Latin America that prioritized beauty and criticized materialism. His emphasis on the importance of spiritual renewal for elevating aesthetic experience and belief that the human spirit was something that needed to be nurtured to retain beauty and ideals in everyday life became strong influences for key writers, such as the poet and founder of modernismo, Rubén Darío (1867–1916). Rodó’s conviction that progress needed to be spiritual and not only material and his rooting of that spiritual progress in Latin America’s rich cultural heritage also made him a key figure in the construction of Latin American identity.
Apart from being known as one of the earliest Latin American Marxists, Mariátegui is also considered an indirect intellectual predecessor of liberation theology for his emphasis on Indigenous rights, concern for the poor, and spiritual revolution. Uncoincidentally, the founder of liberation theology, Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928–2024) was familiar with Mariátegui’s works (Gutiérrez went to school with Mariátegui’s son.) When Gutiérrez taught at the Catholic University of Peru, he designed the first course dedicated to the thought of Mariátegui.18 Mariátegui during his own time also created cultural spaces for Peru’s artists, intellectuals, and literary writers, founding the magazine Amauta in 1926.
The intent to include Rodó and Mariátegui in our discussions of modernity and religion has been twofold. For one, it incorporates the thought of two figures from Latin America who theorized significantly on this topic, rendering the concept more global. Additionally, it contextualizes the idea of modernity to a specific time and place, offering an opportunity to clarify this concept by tying it to a particular discursive tradition. Their thought conveys the Latin American dual experience of modernity: as an exogenous force on the one hand, pertaining to economic and industrial development; and as an endogenous force on the other hand, that strove to create an alternate system, be it through spirit or myth, that would produce a different society. For Rodó, this society would prioritize intellectual and cultural production and emphasize a form of education that would encourage creativity; for Mariátegui, this society would remove social inequalities and revive traditional Indigenous belief systems and incorporate them into modern society. Together, their thought offers a nuanced response to the experience of modernity in Latin America, one that challenges assumptions about the region’s alleged resistance to modernity but also showcases the diversity of its intellectual tradition.
Nayeli L. Riano is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at Georgetown University. Her dissertation analyzes the conceptual impact and reconstruction of Enlightenment political discourses on “civilization” and “barbarism” in Latin American political thought during the long 19th century. Her research broadly integrates the region’s historical stages of colonialism, wars of independence, nation building, and industrialization with its social and political thought.
This article appears in the fall 2025 issue of the American Catholic Studies Newsletter.
Notes
1 A good book that interrogates this question of the many roads to modernity is Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
2 The practice of pinpointing a specific moment in history that a region became “modern” strikes me as an outdated practice that often betrays the interests of a particular researcher or ideology rather than elucidate the actual history of a region. That said, Spanish America had several moments in which “new” ideas, namely European ideas, entered the colonies. The late 18th century is one such period in which key texts from the European Enlightenment, mostly from France and England, circulated throughout the Spanish American viceroyalties and helped to propagate a discourse in intellectual circles regarding rights, popular sovereignty, and reason. Traditional scholarship claimed that these ideas spurred the independence movements of the 19th century. This claim has been widely refuted, and more importance has been granted (rightly, I’d add) to Spanish intellectuals who aimed to reform the Spanish Empire. Scholarship around the “Spanish Enlightenment” now supplements the scholarship on “the” Enlightenment that played an important role in 18th-century Spanish America. The 19th century, as a period of industrialization, urbanization, commercial expansion, and constitutional/institutional change is another moment that can be studied under the broad banner of modernity. The 20th century, finally, is another period in which cultural movements (literary, artistic, musical, etc.) expressed the sense of being “modern.”
3 José Guilherme Merquior, “The Other West: On the Historical Position of Latin America,” International Sociology 6, no. 2 (1991): 149–164.
4 Merquior directed his essay specifically to Richard Morse and his famous essay “The Heritage of Latin America” (1964). He also cites, as another example of this thesis regarding Latin America’s alleged challenge to modernity, Morse’s book, Prospero’s Mirror (1982).
5 Merquior, “The Other West,” 152.
6 José Enrique Rodó, Liberalismo y Jacobinismo (Montevideo: La Anticuaria, 1906), 5–21.
7 Quoted in Gustavo San Román, A Companion to José Enrique Rodó (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2018), 197.
8 See José Enrique Rodó, Margaret Sayers Peden (trans.), Ariel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008). One of the most notably hostile relationships in Shakespeare’s The Tempest is that between Prospero and Caliban—the banished Duke of Milan who has arrived on a new island and the native “savage” whom he has enslaved. Prospero takes pride in his books, but uses his knowledge to manipulate nature. Caliban, though crude, recognizes a more peaceful time on his island before Prospero arrived. In this sense, Prospero and Caliban can be seen as representing a type of dialectic between the two concepts of civilization and barbarism. This play, moreover, was deeply influential in Latin America, and was readapted by Rodó in Ariel, although Rodó also borrowed from Ernest Renan’s own continuation, Caliban: Suite de La Tempête, drame philosophique (1878).
9 San Román, A Companion, 201.
10 Jaime Hanneken, “José Carlos Mariátegui and the Time of Myth,” Cultural Critique 81 (2012): 2. Hanneken’s comments are worth quoting here: “The relative silence surrounding this cornerstone of Mariátegui’s thought [i.e., his emphasis on myth], especially where it is aligned with assertions of his relevance for postcolonial contexts, can be seen as symptomatic of the broader discomfort of postcolonialism’s dominant reading paradigms with the irrational or the religious, betraying a tacit submission that the Mariátegui best suited to reintegrate Marxist Latin American and poststructural metropolitan insights to postcoloniality is a figure that showcases his historical materialist acumen and bears no traces of mysticism.”
11 Juan E. De Castro, Bread and Beauty: The Cultural Politics of José Carlos Mariátegui. (Boston: Brill, 2021), 55.
12 Jose Carlos Mariátegui, “El hombre y el mito,” in El Alma Matinal. Lima: Amauta, 1925, 1. Translation and emphasis mine.
13 Mariátegui, “El hombre y el mito,” 1–5.
14 Jose Carlos Mariátegui, Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971).
16 De Castro, Bread and Beauty, 54.
17 Cf. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), and Taylor, A Catholic Modernity? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
18 Gustavo Gutiérrez’s syllabus for his course on the thought of Mariátegui is available online, www.mariategui.org/2024/11/25/gustavo-gutierrez-y-el-pensamiento-de-jose-carlos-mariategui/.