Pedro Henríquez Ureña: Utopía del silencio

Abstract

In this essay I will examine how the prestigious Dominican intellectual Pedro Henríquez Ureña developed in his most important essays a writing strategy of "silencing" the indigenous and afro cultures, as a way to litigate with his condition as a postcolonial intellectual mulatto. The study of these silences clearly reveals how through the interstices of his writings, a classist, racist and patriarchal ideology lies underneath. The silencing or negation of some aspects of the Latin-American popular culture, will direct Henríquez Ureña in an Hispanophile path, since it is not only pride but admiration what he will show for the conquest and colonization of the American continent by the Spanish Empire. His opinions about colonial Santo Domingo depict a nostalgic mode through which he attempts to link his linage with the raising of the Dominican nation, and vicariously through Spain, the country from which he was awaiting recognition. As a postcolonial mulatto intellectual, Henríquez Ureña had to fight both with the anxiety for recognition by the hegemonic "Other," and the racial indetermination of his mulatto reality. It is my thesis that these facts will produce a delusional self-image as a White, based on his surnames and social prestige, identified with an European ideal.

Pedro Henríquez Ureña y la Utopía de América: exilios, humanismo y educación

“…a lo hispanoamericano ubicado en la tensión entre lo universal, la cultura humanista, y lo particular dado en este caso por las tradiciones, costumbres e historia nacionales. 14 Fernando Valerio-Holguín lo ha caracterizado como "un mulato intelectual europeizado" en cuya obra ha sido elidido el carácter mestizo, negro, africano, antillano de su matriz cultural de origen 15. La síntesis de RodóEn el marco que estamos describiendo, los contenidos y significados inherentes de los discursos y representaciones pujaron por definir qué era la nación en la arena filosóficacultural; por otra parte, se hizo evidente en el plano político la intención de los intelectuales de cristalizar solidaridades colectivas y (re)crear una "comunidad imaginada" a través de ciertas inclusiones y exclusiones.…”