Mexican Intellectuals and the Western Hemisphere Idea

The intellectual father of almost any Latin American writer on the United States, particularly its civilization, way of life, is the Uruguayan essayist Jose Enrique Rodo who in 1900 published his Ariel, a critique of materialistic life in the United States and a plea to student youth for the preservation of spiritual values in Latin America. The patterns of thought that volume established shaped the minds of virtually every serious thinker, writer, historian, in short every intellectual, real or pretended, south of the Rio Grande, either directly or through secondary influences which were nourished at Rodo's fount.