ALFONSO REYES’S LETRAS DE LA NUEVA ESPAÑA:

AMERICANIST KEYS AND GLIMPSES OF A CULTURAL HISTORY

Abstract

This article analyzes Alfonso Reyes’s Letras de la Nueva España as a foundational exercise in cultural history, integral to his Americanist intellectual project. Against readings that seek to subsume his work under a Hispanist lens, it argues that Reyes constructs a historical ontology of the American subject in which the New Spanish Baroque acts as a matrix for a differentiated consciousness. Methodologically, the study combines textual hermeneutics, intellectual history, and cultural theory to demonstrate that Reyes, by historicizing the sensibilities embodied in literature, anticipates central concerns of cultural history. The analysis of figures such as Balbuena, Alarcón, and Sor Juana reveals that Reyes’s narrative operates on a dual register: as a political refutation of Hispanism and as a foundation for American intellectual autonomy. Thus, Letras de la Nueva España stands not only as a cornerstone of critical Americanism but also as a proposal that conceived history as an interpretive construction and letters as the symbolic archive where a community imagines and affirms its difference.