The problem of culture in South American countries is eminently political, in the sense that writers and artists have no choice but to decide early on where they fit in the broader context of Western civilization. During the period of the conquest, the issue could hardly arise: a politico-military order, imposed from the top, created a sharp hierarchy of values, in which proximity to the culture of the rulers—in this case, either Spanish or Portuguese—denned one’s own position in society. The coming of the Enlightenment to Latin America in the late eighteenth century upset such certainties. For the local elites, the Iberian model was successfully challenged by France, creating a permanent schism between the culture absorbed, as it were, at one’s mother’s knee, and what one now knew to be “culture” in the highest sense of the word. One of the principal frustrations of the Latin American intellectual then became—and has since remained—the lack of immediate correspondence between the cultural values imported from abroad and the raw materials—human and otherwise—immediately available at home.

Since the First World War, however, some have risen to question the value and relevance of Western culture to what are, after all, only imperfectly Western societies. This cultural nationalism holds that Western institutions and values are exotic imports which have nothing to do with what these societies are all about. In this view, the proper measure of a community’s success or failure is not its proximity to a foreign model but the degree to