All the documents in this chapter were penned during the export boom. Each documents attempts to make sense of said boom in such way that it draws moral conclusions about the sort of political and economical transformations taking place in Latin America during that period of time. Even though all documents tackled the same issue, they all offer a different account, or different point of view of what happened.

The poem “To Roosevelt” by Ruben Dario is a reaction to the involvement of the United States during the separation of Panama from Colombia. The title refers to Theodore Roosevelt an ‘American’ president who represented the US incursions into Latin America that outraged in this case, even a nonpolitical nicaraguan poet such as Ruben Dario. Roosevelt supported a 1903 revolution in Panama, which resulted in the annexation by the U.S. of territory for the Panama Canal. Latin America came to fear the bullying of the northern neighbor. Dario uses the poem to ‘tip’ USA assumptions of their own superiority. The poem is a criticism and rejection towards the actions of the ‘all-powerful’ United States. What I liked the most about the poem is that in it, it is Latin America who as Dawson says “posses virtue, spirit, and a glorious civilization”, which is rare when comparing to North America. The second document, EL Plan de Ayala was a documented by the revolutionary leader Emilia Zapata during the mexican revolution. It was a political proclamation in which he criticizes the government of Francisco I. Madero, whom he accuses and denounces for betraying the “causas campesinas” the revolutionary ideals. Though El Plan de Ayala was much more practical than Dario’s poem, it’s larger insight was no less profound. The penultimate document was ‘The Cosmic Race’ an essay written by the mexican philosopher Jose Vasconcelos, written in the aftermath of the previous document, in which he expresses his ideology of a future whit a “fifth race” in the Americas. He describes it as an agglomeration of all races in the world with no respect to colour or number to erect a new civilization, he calls its Universópolis. Vasconcelos tackles the issue of colonization by addressing the race problem. From this document what called the most my attention was Vasconcelos drive, his desire to reconstitute and celebrate a country torn apart by years of fratricidal violence. And finally, the last document was by Mariategui a Peruvian journalist, political philosopher and activist; and also considered one of the most influential Latin American socialist of the 20th century. We focus on an excerpt of his most famous work Siete Ensayos de Interpretacion de la Realidad Peruana, and the representation of Marxism, which curiously instead of focusing on emerging working class, he looks to Peru’s indigenous people as the “source of an organic Peruvian form of communism” as Dawson explains. He believed that it wasn’t the modern proletariat that would defeat capitalism in Peru, but rather the communist Indian.