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had rejected Mexico’s English-speaking, protestant, and liberal neighbor.) Actually, Sierra already considered himself a “conservative liberal.” His travel diary En tierra yanquee (On Yankee Land) reflects the balance sheet that liberal and positivist thought at the end of the century was now beginning to assemble about that country with its two contrasting faces: democracy and imperialism. And the balance was tilting toward the negative. Standing before the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., he wrote:
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    I belong to a weak people, who can pardon but should not forget the frightful injustice committed against them half a century ago; and I want to retain, in the face of the United States (that astonishing work of nature and good fortune) the proud and silent resignation, like that of my people, that has allowed us to become, with dignity, masters of our own destiny. I do not deny my admiration but I try to explain it to myself, I bow my head but it does not remain bowed; then it straightens up, better to see.
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    On the one hand suspicion, resentment before that blind mechanism of ambition and power; on the other hand admiration in the face of “the peerless labor of the Capitol . . . soaked with constitutional law down to its least little cell . . . How can we not bow before it, us, poor nameless atoms, when history itself bows before it?”
    Just as it did within the mind of Justo Sierra (who in 1894 had tried to persuade his friend “Pepe” Martí to remain in Mexico and dedicate himself to the work of education), everything changed in Latin America with the defeat of Spain in 1898 (“that splendid little war,” wrote Secretary of State John Hay, one of the first theoreticians of U.S. imperialism). The Mexican and Latin American liberals stopped “bowing their heads.” It was a moment of rupture in the history of Latin American thought. An alternative had to be created. No longer should we be like them , and even less be them . It wasn’t enough to be far from them and it seemed useless to move closer to them . A general consensus among intellectuals was that they had to be radically different from them . As Martí had foreseen, many Latin Americans refused to recognize a liberty imposed by foreign arms and the independence granted to Cuba so that it might become a protectorate.
    What had happened in Cuba clarified, to many minds, the meaning of various nineteenth-century episodes. It was the most recent chapter in an already lengthy history that included the annexation of Texas, the Mexican-American War, the “filibuster” actions of ambitious American mercenaries in Central America, and certain explicit intentions (like those of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr.) to set the Stars and Stripes waving from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego. After this collective change of consciousness, it was natural that the liberal admiration for United States democracy—though it never totally vanished—would cede the foreground to a fear of what the next blow of Teddy Roosevelt’s “big stick” might precipitate in the Caribbean and Central America. Liberal circles began to agree (in relation to the United States) with their longtime conservative rivals. It was a sea change in the history of Latin American political ideas. A new Latin American nationalism began to take clear shape. And its contours were explicitly anti-American. Ariel would become its bible, the work of a writer who never set foot in the United States, born in a small and turbulent but educated and prosperous country that felt itself to be, like its neighbor Argentina, the Europe of Latin America, the only possible bulwark against the arrogant power far to its north.
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    THE SHOCK of 1898 was more than just political. It sent a violent tremor through the whole terrain of Spanish self-confidence. It seemed to question the very meaning of Hispanic civilization. The