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Tracing Dominican Identity The Writings of Pedro
Henrà quez Ureà a 1st Edition Juan R. Valdez Digital
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Author(s): Juan R. Valdez
ISBN(s): 0230109373
Edition: 1
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Year: 2011
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 Tracing Dominican Identity

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 Tracing Dominican Identity

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The Writings of Pedro Henríquez Ureña

Juan R. Valdez

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 TRACING DOMINICAN IDENTITY
Copyright © Juan R. Valdez, 2011.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the

United States - a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue,

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New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies

and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,

the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 978–0–230–10937–7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Valdez, Juan R.
Tracing Dominican identity : the writings of Pedro Henríquez Ureña /
Juan R. Valdez.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978–0–230–10937–7 (alk. paper)
1. Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, 1884–1946—Criticism and interpretation.
2. Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, 1884–1946—Knowledge—Spanish language.
3. Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, 1884–1946—Knowledge—Dominican
Republic. 4. National characteristics, Dominican, in literature.
5. Dominican Republic—In literature. 6. Spanish language—
Dominican Republic. 7. Language and culture—Dominican
Republic. I. Title.
PQ7409.H4Z94 2011
868 .6209—dc22 2010029868

Design by Integra Software Services

First edition: February 2011

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America.

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 En memoria de mi querida madre, Melba Núñez

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 Contents

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Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 Pedro Henríquez Ureña: The Making of a Latinamericanist 7
2 Linguistic Ideologies and the History of Linguistic Ideas 33
3 Nationalism and Hispanoamericanism in the Dominican
Republic and Latin America 63
4 Pedro Henríquez Ureña in Hispanic Linguistics 95
5 Pedro Henríquez Ureña and the Whitening of Dominican
Identity 131
Conclusion 165
Notes 169
References 201
Index 223

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 Acknowledgments

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I was able to begin and complete this book with the encouragement and
support of a select group of individuals and academic institutions. My debt
to José Del Valle includes his crucial guidance and tireless encouragement
throughout my career as a doctoral student and since the beginning of this
research project at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. His
unique approach to the sociology of language and the political history of
Spanish as well as his generosity and personal charisma have been an inspi-
ration for this present work. I am most grateful for his friendship. Ricardo
Otheguy helped to lay the foundation for my advanced sociolinguistic
studies and also motivated my work on Pedro Henríquez Ureña with pro-
foundly critical questions, constantly reminding me of the importance of
rigorous research. Like Don Pedro, I also thank los maestros y los sabios,
those wise teachers who inspired me and helped to create the right con-
ditions for learning and exploring linguistic, political, and personal phe-
nomena: Bonnie Urciouli, Carol Rupprecht, Isaías Lerner, Eugenio Suárez
Galbán, Rick Werner, Ana Celia Zentella, and Guadalupe Valdés. Julio
Ramos was kind enough to read the manuscript and offered me the benefit
of his insights and erudition. I wish to thank the anonymous reader of the
manuscript, whose enthusiasm and critical comments helped to further
advance this project and Robyn Curtis of Palgrave Macmillan for facilitat-
ing and moving things forward. CUNY’s Doctoral Student Research Grant
Program and the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños provided funds for
initial research and participation in key conferences. Thanks to my friends
and family, who at some point provided some form of assistance, cama-
raderie, or helpful hint, especially: Louis, the coolest cat in Berkeley; Marco
Aponte; Laura Villa; Rafay Salim; Herbert Seignoret; Fernando Valerio-
Holguín; Danny Mendez; Amir Farooq; Paul Nissler; Gregory M. Hodge;
Antonio Giménez; Franklin Figueroa; Wendy Valdez; Ana Hall Valdez;
Jonathan Valdez; and Landers Hall. Finally, this work could not have been
completed without the loving support, input, wit, feedback, criticism,
patience, smile, laughter, charm, and wonderful company of Katherine,
siempre, ¡mi sol de abril!

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 Introduction

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I nvocations such as “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the
Earth” or “Once upon a time” exercise a majestic power over mem-
ory and imagination. Beginnings and stories about beginnings are hard
to resist, as the cultural critic Edward Said pointed out, because they estab-
lish priorities and convey greater explanatory power than other forms of
analysis and explorations of history.1 The Spanish word principios is syn-
onymous with “beginnings,” “first notions,” and “established theoretical
and moral criteria” and eloquently expresses these functions. A beginning
is a set of principles that guides the effort to establish an unquestionable
foundation for human behavior, social institutions, tradition, culture, and
language. Guided by a sense of loss (of precious heritage, oral traditions,
idiosyncrasies, or birthright), inquiry into the past becomes part of a pro-
cess of restoration during which a great deal of work is done to recapture a
language that best expresses our identity and indicates the definite place to
which we belong in this world.
Certain transformations occur in the process of establishing beginnings
and rooting ourselves. As a teenager in a South Bronx immigrant com-
munity, I remember trading my chemistry classes for merengue parties,
trodden sneakers for pointy dress shoes, a short crop haircut for “Jheri”
curls, homegrown humility for tigueraje (street savvy), and my recently
acquired conversational English for the latest Dominican slang, all for the
sake of solidifying my Dominicanness. This was much to the chagrin of
one concerned and mortified teacher, who, for a minute, saw me going
down the slippery slope of high school truancy and delinquency. As almost
happened in my case, the present and the future can often be damaged or
betrayed by a reconstruction of the past.
Arcadio Díaz Quiñones (2006) reminds us that, for the Latin American
intellectual Pedro Henríquez Ureña, beginnings were vital. His work on
the Spanish language and Latin American culture aimed to recreate a clear
and historiographically solid foundation for Latin American societies. For
example, Henríquez Ureña designated Christopher Columbus’s Diary as

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2 TRACING DOMINICAN IDENTITY

the first expression of Dominican letters: “Columbus’s Diary, selected and

preserved by Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, contains the pages with which
we rightfully open up our literary history. The praise for our island com-
bined with his general description of the Antilles created the defining image
of America for Europeans.”2 The implication is clear: history begins at the
designated point and not before.

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Henríquez Ureña’s views on Dominican beginnings converge with a
classic historiographical theory in Dominican scholarship to which we
can tentatively refer as “the theory of firstness.” This theory proposes that
most Dominican social phenomena can be explained with reference to the
first permanent European settlement in the New World and its subsequent
development. It goes something like this: the Dominican Republic was the
site of the first colonial village, the first cathedral, the first convent, the first
university, and so on. This theory goes beyond simply utilizing history and
memory in order to understand the present; it seeks instead to reconfigure
the present and the future on the basis of the model offered by a recon-
structed and uncontested past. Traditionally, Dominican intellectuals have
systematically applied this theory to a wide range of phenomena, including
the status and history of Spanish in the Dominican Republic. For example,
Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi (1975) wrote:

According to Columbus, with Anacaona, Caonabo, and Enriquillo, the

smooth and polished tongue, the world’s sweetest, disappeared. And just like
vanishing stars, whose fading light seems to dissipate during dawn’s first
glimmer—to use Zorilla de San Martín’s beautiful expression—so did the
primitive languages of America vanish before the splendid beginning of
the Spanish language which had already become a national body . . . It was
precisely at that time that the Spanish language was becoming organized,
developing norms, trading instability for precision, making a larger tran-
sition from the Middle Ages to the splendid Renaissance . . . From that
moment on, Spanish became the only language in the island, before which
only a few indigenous names in our toponymy, barely worth mentioning,
and a few scarce African words remain.3

In other words, Dominican history began with the absence of indige-

nous elements and in the splendid presence of Spanish. Both Rodríguez
Demorizi (1975) and Manuel Núñez (1990 and 2004) begin their reflec-
tions on the status of Dominican Spanish by alluding to the Spaniards’
rather effortless conquest over the indigenous groups, in particular their
attempt to maintain “linguistic order.” In varying fashion, both authors
utilize the “firstness” theory to argue that, in the Dominican Republic,
Spanish is, above all, a homogeneous entity that both diachronichally and
synchronically reflects the nature, past and present, of the nation.

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 INTRODUCTION 3

These authors belong to the Dominican scholarly tradition that has

produced a number of foundational texts about language, race, and
identity that significantly contributed to the homogenizing ideologies of
Dominican national identity (García 1878, Lugo 1952, Peña Batlle 1968,
Sánchez Valverde 1785). They argue that Spanish was imposed quickly,
thus creating a linguistically homogeneous colony. For example, in narrat-

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ing the monumental history of Spanish and the Dominican nation, then
President Joaquín Balaguer (1991) stated:

It must be affirmed that the survival of Hispaniola, Columbus’s favorite, is a

miracle that can only be explained by the strong vitality of our race and the
persistent place which we occupy within the Spanish language, the founda-
tion of our national being during the colony, still today, the principal basis
of our development as an independent nation.4

Almost invariably, Dominican intellectuals and politicians identify the

start of their nation’s history with the arrival of the Spanish language.
In other words, with Spanish, the Spaniards planted the seeds of the
Dominican nation. Its quick spread and dominance established the homo-
geneity that would characterize the country throughout its history to the
present time.
In contrast with the simplifying and commonly held belief that the
Dominican Republic is a monolingual Spanish-speaking country, recent
linguistic research has produced a more nuanced view of this territory as a
complex speech community with a number of vibrant contact zones (Alba
2004, Jiménez Sabater 1975, Núñez Cedeño 1980, Toribio 2005). Yet, as
I will show in Chapter 1, scholars do not give sufficient attention to the
fact that the study of linguistic phenomena in the Dominican Republic
must undergo a postcolonial framing. Considering the origin and evolu-
tion of these contact zones, we must shine a new light on the inflexible
philological images of the past that prevail in Dominican scholarship and
the Dominican imaginary.
In this endeavor, it will be crucial to understand exactly how represen-
tations of language and linguistic history are related, to a large degree, to
a dynamic process that involves perceiving or creating similarity. From
Plato to Charles Sanders Peirce, this phenomenon has occupied philoso-
phers and writers for centuries. Scholars who study different aspects of
this phenomenon call it iconicity. For semioticians, iconicity refers to the
construction and interpretation of signs motivated by some degree of simi-
larity, or by a perceived connection between words and the world, between
language and reality. Iconists insist that language, to a large degree, is a
reflection of reality. Naturally, for those who hold these views, language

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4 TRACING DOMINICAN IDENTITY

should also reflect the order of things in society. In Chapter 2, we elaborate

and expand this concept under the label iconization, taking into account its
ideological component, in order to understand the extralinguistic mean-
ing that is created as a result of these semiotic processes and how it is
related to issues of power. Here, I provide a number of essential refer-
ence points without which we could not identify the mechanisms nor

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understand the functions of language ideologies. This chapter lays out,
on the basis of a perceived connection between speech patterns and racial
or ethnic attributes of Dominican identity, the theoretical ground to ana-
lyze how Henríquez Ureña’s linguistic texts constitute a representation of
Dominican Spanish.5
In dealing with linguistic texts or representations of language in which
identity and history intersect, it is essential to adopt an interdisciplinary
approach. As Chapters 3 and 4 will make clear, representations of language
cannot be fully understood without delineating the particular intellectual
context and climate of opinion in which they emerge. This kind of analyt-
ical work requires an interdisciplinary effort that goes beyond my primary
formalist training in the field of linguistics and delves into other diverse
yet related fields of knowledge that include history, sociology, and anthro-
pology. The purpose of this book is to approach Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s
linguistic work on Dominican Spanish by situating it in the intellectual cli-
mate and political context in which it emerged. Of particular interest is the
role that Hispanism has played as a formative force in both the politics of
identity in the Spanish-speaking world and the field of language studies.
Throughout, I advance the argument that, in Henríquez Ureña’s linguistic
writings, Spanish stands as an object of discourse in which issues related
to the nation’s identity and racial composition are debated. Specifically,
in Chapter 5, I analyze the two main semiotic strategies (iconization and
erasure) that surface throughout Henríquez Ureña’s description of Spanish
in the Dominican Republic and the manner in which they are related to
the construction of Dominican national identity, a linguistic project of
the state, and the strategic sociopolitical formation some (Calvet 2005,
Errington 2008) have called imperial or colonial.
While Pedro Henríquez Ureña remains a unifying figure for latin-
americanists, his writings often drive a wedge between students of his
work. Inevitably, opposition surfaces around the superficial question of
whether his silence on the subject of Afro-Dominicans reveals racism. We,
instead, will confront Henríquez Ureña’s writings on Spanish and Latin
American identities with more probing questions such as, Does this partic-
ular approach to culture and history, which constantly highlights and gives
priority to the colonial beginnings of New World societies, emerge from

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 INTRODUCTION 5

fear of the untidy and changing circumstances of Latin American societies

during the first half of the twentieth century? How often is the scrutiny of
beginnings motivated by a need to reconsider the present order of things or
driven by fear of an uncertain future? Initially, at least, we cannot escape a
reflection on our subject’s own beginnings as an intellectual and a linguist
before we proceed to scrutinize and interrogate his texts.

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 1

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Pedro Henríquez Ureña: The
Making of a Latinamericanist

M any outstanding scholars and talented writers have examined Pedro

Henríquez Ureña’s (1884–1946) writings, leaving us with a fixed
image of his life and work. Yet, we still do not have a clear intellectual
and political profile of him. He is undoubtedly a pivotal figure in the
study of the Hispanic world, especially for students of Latinamericanism.
Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s name is closely linked with the critical concept
of Latin America. He is a key figure in the intellectual history of the
Dominican Republic and in Latin American history as a whole. Essayist,
critic, philologist, linguist, historian, humanist, and educator, Henríquez
Ureña taught and worked in the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Spain,
and the Dominican Republic.
For the Latin American intelligentsia of previous and current genera-
tions, Henríquez Ureña’s singular contribution can be summed up in his
own words: “we will undertake critical work, assigning each country to its
corresponding place in the grand concert of scientific and artistic produc-
tion, and according to each Nation, the influence of each writer. This shall
be our enterprise.”1 Henríquez Ureña’s work primarily endeavored to con-
vene and organize the necessary intellectual resources and discourses, “a
system of knowledge,” for the cultural and scientific advancement of Latin
American countries. His intentions, methods, strategies, and call to action
on behalf of and for the benefit of Latin American countries resonated with
many of his contemporaries, including Alfonso Reyes, José Vasconcelos,
and Antonio Caso, and were closely followed or scrutinized by succeed-
ing generations of Latinamericanists such as Enrique Anderson Imbert,
José Arrom, Diony Durán, Jean Franco, Roberto González Echevarría, and
Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot. Following Henríquez Ureña’s own genealogical
approach, but hopefully avoiding its pitfalls, we can—by briefly examining

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8 TRACING DOMINICAN IDENTITY

his origins, development, and impact as well as scholarly interpretations

of his life and work—get a sense of why and how he influenced these
generations of scholars.
Literature and patriotism (inherited from his mother, Salomé Ureña)
and science and worldly cosmopolitanism (mediated by his father,
Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal) are four elements that are relevant to

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understanding Henríquez Ureña’s intellectual development. The distin-
guished Henríquez and Ureña families’ rise to social prominence coincided
with the beginning of historically significant social changes. Once united,
the Henríquez Ureñas became one of the most intellectually elite, cultur-
ally prominent, and celebrated families in Santo Domingo. Pedro’s father
Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal (1859–1935), a doctor, lawyer, essayist, and
diplomat, became the country’s provisional President (1916–1917) after a
long and active participation in Dominican politics. Even before Francisco
achieved fame in Dominican scientific, intellectual, and political circles,
his wife Salomé Ureña (1850–1897) was already a celebrated national
poet. Later, as a disciple of Eugenio María de Hostos (1839–1903), she
became a pioneering educator. Hostos, a Latin American social philoso-
pher, educator, and writer, who we will discuss shortly, was an immensely
influential person in Dominican history and had a particularly great
impact on the thinking of several of the Henríquez Ureña generations.
Henríquez Ureña’s intellectual lineage also included his maternal grand-
father, Nicolás Ureña de Mendoza (1822–1875), lawyer, politician, and
poet, who founded the newspaper El Progreso (1853). His uncle, Federico
Henríquez y Carvajal, publisher and writer, became famous for his pro-
Cuban and Puerto Rican independence campaigns and friendships with
the Cuban independence leader José Martí (1853–1895) and Martí’s Puerto
Rican counterpart, Ramón E. Betances (1827–1898). Federico was the
editor of Letras y Ciencias (1892–1899), a leading publication in Santo
Domingo that was essential reading material for young Pedro and his
siblings.2 Many diverse influences shaped the intellectual pedigree of this
family.
In Santo Domingo during the 1880s, the Henríquez Ureña home was
the hub of political and intellectual activity. Henríquez Ureña’s parents
were actively involved in their children’s intellectual development. Their
mistrust of Dominican parochial schools persuaded them, avowed pos-
itivists, to confine the children’s education to their home environment,
which already housed the Instituto de Señoritas (1891), Salomé’s school
for women and a teacher training center.3 Benefiting from his mother’s
effective instructional methods and also his own diligent application
and inquisitiveness, young Pedro quickly learned to read and took his
home studies very seriously. His mother, amazed at the child’s exceptional

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 UREÑA: THE MAKING OF A LATINAMERICANIST 9

educational development, facilitated some of his first literary activities.

From the beginning, Salomé became young Pedro’s “spiritual guide,”
whom he “consulted every minute.”4 According to his biographers (Mateo
2001, Piña-Contreras 2001), the 12 years he spent next to her had a direct
and decisive influence in Henríquez Ureña’s personal and academic devel-
opment. The son wrote in one of his letters: “only one woman could have

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been my mother.”5
His father, on the other hand, would have a more indirect influence.
His brother Max Henríquez Ureña (1885–1968), who became an impor-
tant intellectual in his own right, wrote: “from the first moment, Pedro
and I understood that he was a guide and a mentor of great author-
ity. His commanding voice made a deep impression on us.”6 Although a
very busy person and absent from their home for many years at a time,
their father, “the man of science,” imparted specific instructions as to the
content and methods of his children’s education and would send them
the most up-to-date science books from Paris. After Salomé’s death in
1897, despite young Pedro’s constant inclination toward literary studies,
Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal was very adamant that Pedro study sci-
ence. This insistence resulted in a personal conflict between father and son,
which would eventually resolve itself thanks to Pedro’s taste for erudition.
Together, mother and father as well as the other distinguished members
of the family, planted the seeds of a broad-ranging intellect, but, more
importantly, passed down values and ideas inherited from the Enlighten-
ment ideology that was characteristic of the foundational phase of Latin
American societies.
The Henríquez Ureña home often hosted readings, discussions, and
debates. For young Pedro, there were plenty of role models, some of whom
became his intellectual interlocutors.7 As their interest in literary affairs
grew, Pedro and his brother Max began to produce publications of their
own, including a newspaper called La Patria (1896).8 This rudimentary
literary journal about Dominican poetry and literary criticism received
praise from some of their parents’ distinguished guests and marked the
beginning of Henríquez Ureña’s illustrious intellectual career.
Henríquez Ureña’s career began in Santo Domingo at the turn of the
century. He was recognized as the most talented of young Dominican intel-
lectuals not only by his peers but also the established intelligentsia. Accord-
ing to the Dominican sociologist and chronicler Enrique Deschamps
(1906):

This [previous] generation was succeeded by a select group of young intel-

lectuals . . . among them we will find some that are not just merely promising
but already effective agents in the enhancement of national culture. Pedro

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10 TRACING DOMINICAN IDENTITY

Henríquez Ureña, one of the youngest, presides over this select group. He
has been ordained by his peers and others as a critic and a writer.9

Following this intellectual coronation, Henríquez Ureña visited New York

with his father, who was there to negotiate the terms of his country’s
national debt. After the negotiations concluded, Henríquez Ureña stayed in

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New York (1901–1904), to be joined later by Max. Life in New York brought
him in contact with an assortment of Latin American immigrants, expatri-
ates, intellectuals, and artists, as well as North American families, North
American modernity, educational and cultural institutions, the English
language, and Panamericanism (the political vision of a united American
continent under the tutelage of the United States). In his memoirs and in
documents collected by Alfredo Roggiano (1961), we learn that the intel-
lectual fervor of the city was quite stimulating for the young Henríquez
Ureña. Roggiano notes, for example, that listening to Yeats discussing Irish
modernism moved Henríquez Ureña to inquire about similar currents in
Spanish poetry.
The engaging days of intellectual activity and cultural discovery turned
unpleasant when, because of political turmoil in the Dominican Republic
and a subsequent change of fortune, Henríquez Ureña’s father could no
longer support him or his brother and they had to find work.10 Without
ceasing to read or write, Henríquez Ureña continued to fully experience
life in New York and suspiciously observe the process of “americaniza-
tion” to which the increasing number of Dominican and other Latin
American immigrants were subjected. These formative experiences col-
ored his early writings and determined the direction of some of his later
scholarly investigations.
When living conditions in New York became too harsh, and at the
behest of his father, Henríquez Ureña briefly traveled to Cuba (1905),
where the rest of the family now lived in exile and where he published
his first book, Ensayos críticos, in 1905, a collection that includes essays
on Dominican poets, Hostos, and Rodó, as well as D’Annunzio, Wilde,
and Shaw. According to Guillermo Piña-Contreras (2001), this publication
signals Henríquez Ureña’s temporary exodus from the family’s prevailing
sphere of influence.11 Ten years later, Henríquez Ureña would briefly return
to the Northeast United States as a foreign correspondent for the Cuban
newspaper Heraldo de Cuba and a contributor to the New York Spanish
weekly, Las Novedades. In this new post, he closely followed the cultural
and political events in Washington, D.C. and New York. His descriptions of
these events reveal a keen awareness of the political and cultural differences
that defined American North-South relations. For example, in his account
of Woodrow Wilson’s keynote speech at the Panamerican conference in

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 UREÑA: THE MAKING OF A LATINAMERICANIST 11

1915, Henríquez Ureña contrasts the U.S. president’s progressive speech

regarding the continental spiritual and material cooperation with some of
the Latin American delegates’ suspicious reception.12 In these chronicles
we learn about some of the economic, social, and political circumstances
under which a number of important players came together to discuss
and celebrate Hispanic culture, such as Archer Huntington, founder

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of the Hispanic Society, who headed the group that Henríquez Ureña
described as “North American lovers of Hispanic culture.”13 In short, these
intense linguistic and cultural contacts in the United States were signifi-
cant influences in Henríquez Ureña’s overall vision and interpretation of
Hispanic-American culture.
While in the United States, Henríquez Ureña forged excellent relations
with North American Hispanists such as J. D. M. Ford, who recommended
him for a lectureship at the University of Minnesota. Ford recounted
details of his recommendation in a note full of admiration and respect for
Henríquez Ureña:

When the Mexican tyrant and moron, Carranza, drove out the staff of the
University of Mexico, Pedro turned to me, and I was fortunate to learn of
an opportunity for him at the University of Minnesota. He was accepted
there immediately and not only gave a good account himself as [a] teacher,
but proceeded energetically to the acquisition of the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy.14

His excellent scholarship and pedagogical effectiveness earned him the

high regard of his colleagues and students and caught the attention of the
local press. The Minnesota Daily published the following comments:

The Spanish classes have an unusually large attendance this year. The first
few days, even standing room was scarce. Mr. Henríquez found it neces-
sary to highly praise the Italian language. He told his pupils that for those
[intending] to go into business, Spanish was the language to study; for those
taking Medical, Dental or English work, Italian had the greatest advantages.
In spite of all his efforts, no one was willing to change.15

Henríquez Ureña’s record as a teacher and scholar is impressive. Among

his most important contributions, officials at the University of Minnesota
highlighted the following: Henríquez Ureña’s discovery of a new type of
versos endecásilabos (11-syllable verse) in classical Spanish poetry, estab-
lishing the facts regarding the oldest book published by a writer born in
the New World, creating the first complete bibliography of the works of
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz for the Revue Hispanique, and writing the first
history of colonial culture in Santo Domingo.16 Henríquez Ureña was a

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12 TRACING DOMINICAN IDENTITY

crucial resource in the advancement of Hispanic-American scholarship in

the United States. His crowning achievement as a scholar in the United
States came when he was appointed to the Charles Eliot Norton lecture-
ship at Harvard University. Ford, again, gives an account of the origins of
this prestigious honor: “Not long ago when the Committee on the Charles
Eliot Norton foundation at Harvard was looking for an annual lecturer,

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I had the privilege of calling attention to Pedro. His fame was such that
he commended himself to all concerned and he was appointed.”17 Newspa-
pers in the United States and Latin America highlighted the fact that for the
first time Harvard had selected someone from the Spanish-speaking world
for this prestigious lectureship.18 The series of Harvard lectures resulted in
his most well-known work, Literary Currents in Hispanic America (1945).
In his memoirs, Henríquez Ureña declared that he had come to the United
States in order to absorb the influence of a superior civilization, but, in fact,
he was quite influential himself. Thanks to his brilliant contributions, more
U.S. universities began to open their doors to students and teachers from
Latin America. Henríquez Ureña helped to advance a more interesting and
dynamic dialogue on Hispanoamericanism and promote a contact zone
where North and South could inquire about each other. This improvement
was not achieved, however, without raising a series of critical questions and
suspicions regarding the political foundations of the relationship between
Latin American and North American societies.
Mexico was another country where Henríquez Ureña’s talents con-
tributed to an intellectual renewal. Henríquez Ureña first arrived there
in early 1906. After a brief stay in the city of Veracruz, he settled in
Mexico City, where he worked as a newspaper editor and began to estab-
lish relations with the Mexican intelligentsia, consisting of young and
promising writers and artists. His intellectual acumen and activities quickly
earned him the respect and affection of his peers and the nickname
“Socrates.” Among the group of young Mexican intellectuals, he instantly
connected with Alfonso Reyes (1889–1959), a promising writer and bud-
ding philologist, who became his most cherished colleague and a lifelong
friend. The genealogy and scope of this fraternal and intellectual friend-
ship can be traced in their epistolary and essays about one another. The
Mexican cultural critic Victor Barrera Enderle (2006) wrote an essay on
how the friendship and association between Henríquez Ureña and Reyes
unlocked a network of intellectual relationships that had a direct impact
on the Mexican community and the larger Latin American context.
One of the most intensely productive stages of Henríquez Ureña’s
career, from 1906 to 1914, coincided with a period of cultural and polit-
ical upheaval in Mexico. Henríquez Ureña joined the group of young
Mexican intellectuals involved in a movement that became known as the

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 UREÑA: THE MAKING OF A LATINAMERICANIST 13

“Cultural Revolution,” which was the preamble to the Mexican Revolution

(1910–1920). The militaristic overtones of Henríquez Ureña’s descrip-
tion of the period reveal how high the stakes were for this new group of
intellectuals:

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While war ravaged the country and even groups of intellectually inclined
men were becoming soldiers, our disorganized effort to spiritually renovate
the culture was gaining ground. The fruits of our philosophical, literary and
aesthetic revolution were gradually taking shape.19

These intellectuals were affiliated through the Ateneo de la Juventud de

México (Atheneum of Mexican Youth, 1909), an intellectual society that,
surrounded by the revolutionary violence and ideological fervor, sought
to dismantle the Cientificos’s20 institutional network and its monopoly
on education and culture in Mexico. The Ateneo’s founding members
included Alfonso Reyes, Antonio Caso (1883–1946), José Vasconcelos
(1882–1959), and Henríquez Ureña. Amidst a swarm of intellectual activ-
ity and growing political fear and insecurity, Henríquez Ureña published
another book, Horas de estudio (1910). This book, a record of his own
intellectual evolution up to this point, was published in Paris and received
praise from many intellectuals. For example, the reigning man of Hispanic
letters, Spanish literary historian Menéndez Pelayo, commented how the
book reflected “an exquisite intellectual education begun during early
childhood and reinforced by exposure to the best books.”21 Literary success
and all, Henríquez Ureña tried to abstain from getting directly involved in
political matters, but his relationships with members of different political
factions and the strong ties to Alfonso Reyes forced him to proceed with
extreme caution. The streets of Mexico City were teeming with fear and
hostility. During these times, Henríquez Ureña endured personal economic
hardships. He was also the object of personal attacks by some jealous local
journalists: “They have attacked me by calling me ‘Menox,’ in order to cre-
ate a less flattering contrast between my name and my brother’s, ‘Max.’ ”22
In Spanish, the juxtaposition of “Max” and “Menox” create the phonetic
homonyms más and menos, which literally translate to “more” and “less.”
He attributed these initial attacks to the insecurities of those who envied
his prestigious position within the Ateneo:

I have been informed that Núñez y Domínguez is particularly resentful

because he was not invited to join the Ateneo and blames me for the omis-
sion. While commenting on the foundation of the society in the newspaper
El Heraldo, he insulted me publicly, by referring to me as Menox and as a
Haitian author.23

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14 TRACING DOMINICAN IDENTITY

Henríquez Ureña’s racial profile was the object of attacks first in Mexico
and later in Argentina.24 It must be noted that many Dominicans con-
sider being called “Haitian” one of the worst possible insults. Using the
term “Haitian,” his attackers questioned Henríquez Ureña’s national ori-
gin and targeted his mulatto profile. As the revolutionary situation in
Mexico grew more violent, the risk of physical danger for individuals like

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Henríquez Ureña became more acute. In 1913, Alfonso Reyes’s father,
General Bernardo Reyes, was assassinated. In 1914, Henríquez Ureña left
Mexico and, after another brief stay in Cuba, returned to the United States,
where he worked as a journalist, among other things.
After traveling and working in the United States, Spain, and Mexico
again (1921–1924), Henríquez Ureña settled down in Argentina. In 1924,
he arrived in Buenos Aires with his Mexican wife, Isabel, and his first-born
daughter, Natacha. That same year, he joined the faculty of the Colegio
Nacional de la Universidad de la Plata and began to work on a series of aca-
demic projects and new intellectual endeavors. It is during this period of
his life that Henríquez Ureña began to amass his linguistic and philological
oeuvre. In 1931, he briefly fulfilled his wish of returning to Dominican
soil, assuming the role of national superintendent of education in Santo
Domingo during the Trujillo regime. However, frustrated with the lim-
itations of his position, as well as disillusioned with and in fear of the
Dominican political landscape, he returned to Buenos Aires and contin-
ued teaching, investigating, writing, and publishing for the next 13 years.
Along with Amado Alonso, he helped develop the institutional base for the
discipline of Hispanic linguistics in Latin America. In 1946, at the age of 62,
while he was grading and correcting students’ work, Henríquez Ureña died
suddenly aboard the train on his daily commute from Buenos Aires to
La Plata.
Considering his roles in developing knowledge of classical humanism
and Spanish-American literary tradition and in forging a critical con-
sciousness in Latin America, Alfonso Reyes declared that our intellectual
debt to Henríquez Ureña was immeasurable: “Educator by nature, he stirs
up the spirit of his interlocutors, by teaching them how to listen, see, and
think. He fittingly rewards all his followers by instilling in them a deep
appreciation of culture and a serious desire to work.”25 Samuel Ramos
(1946), another Mexican disciple, added: “Henríquez Ureña was an exam-
ple of how Latin Americans must modestly assimilate European culture.
A humanist by training, he cultivated Spanish letters, but he merged his
interests in these areas with his interest in the study of Latin America’s liter-
ary production and linguistic realities.”26 The flood of panegyrics following
Henríquez Ureña’s death is vast. It culminates in the year of his cente-
nary with a significant homage, the two-volume El libro jubilar de Pedro
Henríquez Ureña, edited by Julio Jaime Julia (1984). These texts reveal the

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 UREÑA: THE MAKING OF A LATINAMERICANIST 15

high degree of reverence many Latin American intellectuals and scholars

had for Henríquez Ureña because of his vast contributions to the collective
knowledge and understanding of Latin America’s cultural, linguistic, and
literary history.
Henríquez Ureña, and his work, has been the object of numerous stud-
ies, most of them, naturally, laudatory. For over half a century, a host of

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researchers, who can be described as former friends, former colleagues,
admirers, and students, have produced an extensive body of literature on
Henríquez Ureña, which, while informative, mostly celebrates his charis-
matic personality and serious commitment to teaching. Enrique Zuleta
Álvarez27 (1998) has discussed how many of the critics who knew or dealt
with Henríquez Ureña based their judgments of his intellectual produc-
tion solely on his personal appeal and his leading role in key episodes of
twentieth-century Latin American political and cultural history. Generally,
Henríquez Ureña scholars can be divided into the following five groups:
Latin American literary critics and intellectual historians; Dominican his-
toriographers; Hispanic linguists, most of whom highlight Henríquez
Ureña’s role in the debate over the Andalusian nature of American Spanish
(andalucismo) and in developing dialectology as a field of inquiry in Latin
America; Dominican linguists who utilize and revise some of his data on
Dominican Spanish; and a small but diverse group of scholars who, in
varying degrees, problematize Henríquez Ureña’s work. Despite this spe-
cialization on different facets of his work, Henríquez Ureña’s oeuvre has
not been appropriately contextualized (Pérez Guerra 2004, Sarlo 1998) and
such lack of contextualization is most evident in the studies that approach
his linguistic production.
Often classified by their country of origin, Henríquez Ureña spe-
cialists are far from homogeneous. However, their different theoretical
concerns and ideological attitudes at times intersect. We can attribute
to them the following five basic characterizations of Henríquez Ureña:
(i) Henríquez Ureña as the primary advocate of a school of thought known
as americanismo (Latinamericanism), (ii) Henríquez Ureña as an exem-
plar of patriotism and Dominicanness, (iii) Henríquez Ureña as an exiled
intellectual, (iv) Henríquez Ureña as a linguist whose unique approach
to Spanish in the Americas resulted in a wealth of dialectal observations,
and (v) Henríquez Ureña as an intellectual whose rich and complex oeuvre
demands critical attention.

The Advocate of Americanismo

The view of Henríquez Ureña as the primary advocate of americanismo is

mostly advanced by Latin American literary critics (Álvarez 1981, Carilla

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16 TRACING DOMINICAN IDENTITY

1988, Durán 1994, Febres 1989, Gutiérrez Girardot 1978, Zuleta Álvarez
1999). To them, Henríquez Ureña represents one of the greatest Latin
American intellectuals of the twentieth century, comparable to nineteenth-
century intellectuals such as Andrés Bello, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento,
José Martí, and Eugenio María de Hostos, all of whom had a profound
vision of the originality and value of Latin American culture. The sig-

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nificance of Henríquez Ureña’s work, according to these specific scholars,
resides in his search for the essence of Hispanic-American culture and its
Hispanic roots. Enrique Zuleta Álvarez notes that, for some critics, “the
sense of unity in Henríquez Ureña’s writings emanates from his search for
the manifestation of the spirit of Spanish American culture whose Hispanic
roots were vitally important.”28 Scholars such as Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot,
another unabashed admirer of Henríquez Ureña, affirm that Henríquez
Ureña’s oeuvre constitutes “an enlargement of the historical, spiritual, and
cultural horizon which would clarify and facilitate the process of finding
and expressing Our America.”29 Above all, Americanists find in Henríquez
Ureña’s oeuvre the best effort to combine knowledge of literature, history,
and society in order to design, from the Hispanic base, the instruments and
the proper continental vision that will lead to unity, solidarity, progress,
and prosperity in Latin America.
The studies that emphasize Henríquez Ureña’s americanismo are best
illustrated by the words of the Dominican essayist Soledad Álvarez (1981):

We hope to approximate Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s Americanist thought. The

“Great Motherland,” as [Henríquez Ureña] called our America, constituted
the Dominican intellectual’s main concern. It came into full view in his
work. Yet, sudden death interrupted the progression of these Americanist
ideas, which were inching closer to our current interpretation of our
reality.30

Soledad Álvarez explains Henríquez Ureña’s americanismo as a contin-

uum between conceptualizations of Latin America’s history and culture
expressed by progressives such as Simon Bolivar and José Martí and
Marxist thinkers such as José Carlos Mariátegui.31 Gutiérrez Girardot
expressed similar ideas by characterizing Henríquez Ureña’s political and
scientific agenda as a Bolivarian and Martian vision that is radical and
utopian but, nonetheless, historically founded.32 These scholars situate
Henríquez Ureña (the man and his work) within the paradigm of rev-
olutionary thinking that was aimed at liberating and empowering Latin
America. Sergio Pitol (2002) best summarizes how scholars regularly iden-
tify Henríquez Ureña’s character and work with a series of Latin American
ideals:

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 UREÑA: THE MAKING OF A LATINAMERICANIST 17

We identify Henríquez Ureña with specifically Spanish American ideals.

What we call our “American Utopia” was the core of his intellectual life.
To this passionate cause he attracted the likes of Alfonso Reyes, Ernesto
Sábato, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Enrique Anderson Imbert, as well as a
host of other friends and disciples.33

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In general, Henríquez Ureña scholars regard his oeuvre as one of the pil-
lars of contemporary Latin American thought. Their primary concerns,
evident from their writings, have been to ensure his international recogni-
tion as an intellectual authority and to highlight his extraordinary effort in
the description and interpretation of Latin American realities.

The Icon of the Dominican Intelligentsia

The second perspective belongs to Dominican intellectuals who believe

that Henríquez Ureña’s life and oeuvre were primarily dedicated to the
glorification of his nation. For example, Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi
(2001) and Juan Jacobo de Lara (1975 and 1982) suggest that Henríquez
Ureña’s Dominicanism trumps his Americanism. Consequently, no
greater homage can be paid to the “premier man of letters of the
Dominican Republic” than the proper appraisal of his dominicanidad
(Dominicanness).34 According to Rodríguez Demorizi, more than his wis-
dom and intellectual virtuosity, we ought to praise Henríquez Ureña’s
fervent Dominicanness. That is the best homage we can pay to “that spirit
that resides in the lofty mansion of the just,” because, quite simply, he loved
his fatherland above all else.35 Lara (1982) echoed this sentiment when
he wrote: “Henríquez Ureña was a great patriot and a great americanist.
His Americanism, however, never overshadowed his Dominicanism. He
was a good Dominican who never changed his nationality and died a
Dominican.”36 Lara (1975) also noted that “his Americanism does not
represent the foundation of his unique talents.”37 With a few excep-
tions (Jimenes Grullón 1969, Piña-Contreras 2001, Soledad Álvarez 1998),
Dominican scholars tend to see Henríquez Ureña as a messianic figure
who, through his work as a teacher and his personality, instilled in others
a passionate love for local cultures in Latin America, which he particularly
exemplified through his Dominican oeuvre (especially his classic texts, El
español en Santo Domingo and La cultura y las letras coloniales en Santo
Domingo). Even though he spent most of his life abroad, Henríquez Ureña’s
exile is considered to be nothing more than a journey toward the fulfill-
ment of his Dominican destiny. Carlos Federico Pérez y Pérez (1984) claims
that Henríquez Ureña’s love of Dominican culture and nationalism dom-
inates his entire intellectual production.38 According to the view adopted

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18 TRACING DOMINICAN IDENTITY

by most Dominican analysts, Henríquez Ureña’s entire oeuvre has to be

understood in relation to his departure from and his longing to return
to his birthplace, Santo Domingo. There is a belief that his entire oeuvre
constitutes an attempt to recreate what he left behind: the glories, ideals,
symbols, and values of a nation built by generations steeped in Hispanic
tradition.

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Soledad Álvarez and Piña-Contreras are two Dominican scholars who
slightly diverge from this line of thinking. Soledad Álvarez (1998), on
the one hand, begins by noting that Henríquez Ureña’s Dominicanness
was reaffirmed while abroad and that, perhaps, his errant life can only
be properly understood by Dominicans and by those Latin Americans
who have been forced to emigrate and to develop culture in foreign
soil.39 Here, she echoes Rodríguez Demorizi (2001). However, she does
not stop there. She does not make Henríquez Ureña’s life and work a
simple function of his national and biological kinship to one of the
most enlightened and patriotic Dominican families. She further exam-
ines the specific sociohistorical factors that allowed Henríquez Ureña to
achieve distinction and popularity among the historians of Latin American
and Dominican cultures. Similarly, Piña-Contreras (2001), concentrat-
ing on details about his childhood and adolescence, explores in more
detail the familial conditions and relationships that shaped Henríquez
Ureña’s character and perception as a Dominican citizen and as a bud-
ding intellectual. Therefore, these two authors only slightly depart from
the traditional view that Henríquez Ureña’s entire oeuvre can be explained
in terms of his nationality and patriotism. Generally, Dominican scholars’
analyses of his works, with the state’s blessing, have contributed to making
Henríquez Ureña a sacred and ubiquitous cultural icon40 in the Dominican
Republic.

An Outsider in Exile and Politics

With Henríquez Ureña in mind, Alfonso Reyes sketched a portrait of the

modern intellectual: “Living in perpetual crisis, being a critic means being
a guest in every city and a citizen of none. This condition constitutes a grave
offense to the political meaning of life.”41 Studies that take into account
Henríquez Ureña’s status as an outsider, forced into exile in Mexico, the
United States, Spain, and Argentina, comprise the third perspective on
him. This is a view that troubles many who maintain the centrality of
Henríquez Ureña’s contributions to Hispanic studies. Nevertheless, his
marginal condition in some contexts is increasingly attracting the atten-
tion of some Henríquez Ureña scholars42 and leading to what Arcadio
Díaz Quiñones (1994) calls “the renewal of Henríquez Ureña.”43 This

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 UREÑA: THE MAKING OF A LATINAMERICANIST 19

trend originated with the Mexican historian Enrique Krauze (1985). In his
analysis of Henríquez Ureña’s intellectual development and vision, Krauze
paid careful attention to the relation between Henríquez Ureña’s personal
circumstances abroad and the persistent image appearing throughout
Henríquez Ureña’s work of a paradise lost incarnated by the “privileged”
history of his native country. Krauze wrote: “The image of a paradise lost

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always pervaded Henríquez Ureña’s mind. The Caribbean island where
he was born had been the novelty of the New World, the ‘most beautiful
place’ . . . ‘green and most fertile,’ in the words of Christopher Columbus,
who baptized it as La Española.”44 Krauze found an intricate connection
between Henríquez Ureña’s utopian vision, elaborated in his multiple texts,
and his condition as an exiled intellectual from the Dominican Republic.
According to Krauze, his utopias are a product of an exile’s skepticism and
melancholy for his origins.45 Furthermore, contrary to critics who insisted
on Henríquez Ureña’s apolitical nature, Krauze believed that it is precisely
this condition of exile that shaped his political attitudes and motivated his
political writings, which appeared in several Latin American newspapers.
While Néstor Rodríguez (2007) recently commented on Henríquez Ureña’s
political profile, the Latin American historian Tulio Halperín Donghi
(1999) brought attention to some of his lesser-known political affiliations:
“It is relevant to mention that during his whole life this discreet and mea-
sured humanist felt a quiet, unlike José Ingenieros, yet firm solidarity with
the Soviet experience.”46
Previously, there was a tendency among some scholars to focus on the
question of whether Henríquez Ureña could be classified as a philoso-
pher. For instance, the Argentinean critic Eugenio Pucciarelli47 (1984)
claimed that Henríquez Ureña belonged among Platonist philosophers
by birthright and because of his love of beauty and passion for jus-
tice. These scholars were inclined to believe that the best way to fully
appreciate Henríquez Ureña’s significance as an intellectual was by deriv-
ing his thought from philosophical issues and Platonic ideas regarding
the importance of reason in human affairs. This frequent association of
Henríquez Ureña with philosophical currents neglects his intervention in
political matters. Defining the position against this philosophical tendency,
Liliana Weinberg (2002) stated that such considerations can only lead to
an impasse and to endless, sterile polemics.48 Weinberg centered on the
relationship between exile and what others (Anderson Imbert 2001, Pérez
de la Cruz 2003, Pucciarelli 1984) have labeled “philosophical thought”
in Henríquez Ureña’s oeuvre. She found that Henríquez Ureña was torn
between the centripetal force emanating from the intellectual elite to which
he belonged and the centrifugal force of alienating exile. As a result of this
tension, he sought to root his life, personality, studies, and vision in the
world of high culture.49

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20 TRACING DOMINICAN IDENTITY

The image of Henríquez Ureña as member of an exiled diaspora is also

the point of departure for Díaz Quiñones’s studies (1994 and 2006). He
proposes a reading of Henríquez Ureña’s Hispanic-American oeuvre that
takes into account exile as a persistent condition, the elaboration of cul-
ture as a type of order, and the redefinition of the colonial experience as
a response to separatist nationalisms. Díaz Quiñones raises the following

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important questions with respect to the relationship between modernity,
diaspora, and the construction of identities: How was Henríquez Ureña
affected by his condition as a marginal, displaced figure, ultimately con-
sidered an outsider, in the countries where he lived and worked? What
effect did the racial prejudice he encountered in Mexico and the United
States have on his intellectual development? Was Henríquez Ureña’s exclu-
sion of Afro-Caribbean cultures a product of his effort to fully belong to
a specific group and find a place for people of his intellectual pedigree in
universal (i.e., European) culture? While exploring these and other sim-
ilar questions, Díaz Quiñones finds in Henríquez Ureña an intellectual
who experienced the tension of being an “outsider” and who proceeded
to build traditions between what he perceived as the opposing forces of
order and anarchy. According to Díaz Quiñones, “Henríquez Ureña was
a marginal player seeking to play a central role.”50 Furthermore, with
respect to the Dominican author’s cultural representations, Díaz Quiñones
notes:

It was a project that allowed multiple traditions, provided that they could
be integrated into the literate culture, which was not the case of that uncom-
fortable Afro-Caribbean world, a ghost that complicates their texts. Painfully
and restlessly, national identity emerges with this exclusion, and perhaps,
with deep and bitter overtones, so does the problem of these intellectuals’
own identities.51

There is, in Díaz Quiñones’s studies, an attempt to identify the various

contexts or different perspectives surrounding Henríquez Ureña’s intellec-
tual enterprises. Díaz Quiñones examines the Dominican author’s major
cultural texts as well as a few of his linguistic texts in relation to the con-
struction of a Dominican national tradition, the condition of the exiled
intellectual in the modern world, and the practice of modernity defined in
terms of order as an alternative to anarchy.

Linguist or Philologist?

Henríquez Ureña’s visions of Latin America, his patriotic feelings toward

his homeland, and the personal circumstances surrounding his elaboration

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 UREÑA: THE MAKING OF A LATINAMERICANIST 21

of the texts in which he expressed his corresponding thoughts and feelings

have been abundantly studied. In stark contrast, his linguistic produc-
tion has received much less attention. Still, there are a handful of scholars
who have examined Henríquez Ureña’s linguistic texts (such as Ghiano
(1976) in the prologue to the Argentinean edition of Henríquez Ureña’s
Observaciones sobre el español en América), examining their relationship to

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the body of his cultural and historiographical production and often tak-
ing positions either supporting or criticizing the Dominican’s views on
American Spanish.
Along with the Colombian Rufino José Cuervo, Henríquez Ureña is
considered to be, especially by Latin American dialectologists (Álvarez
Martínez 1998, Vaquero 1997), the founder of the linguistic discipline
in Latin America. For instance, Juan Lope Blanch (1989) highlights
Henríquez Ureña’s pioneering role in determining the regional and dialec-
tal origins of the New World colonizers.52 In addition to explaining his
theories on American Spanish, Hispanic linguists have been concerned
with vindicating Henríquez Ureña’s reputation as a linguist. There has
never been a consensus among scholars as to whether to label him a lin-
guist or a philologist. Scholars such as Lope Blanch (1989) are sometimes
ambivalent:

Concerning the Dominican philologist’s extraordinary accomplishments as

the initiator of modern Latin American dialectology at that time, I have
already expressed my opinions on many occasions. But I should really
highlight his role in Hispanic philology, giving the term “philology” its
broad and generous original meaning of science that studies the spirit
of a people through their linguistic manifestations—in both popular and
folk-literary terms—and within the historical context which explains and
conditions such manifestations. Like Menéndez Pidal, Henríquez Ureña was
a true philologist, directing his scientific effort to the three domains of true
philology: the linguistic, literary, and historical.53

Contrary to Lope Blanch, other Hispanic linguists disagree that Henríquez

Ureña’s language studies are fundamentally philological in nature. The
Dominican linguist Carlisle González Tapia (1998), for example, dedicated
an entire book to proving that Henríquez Ureña was, first and foremost, a
linguist.
Until now, González Tapia’s book El pensamiento lingüístico de Pedro
Henríquez Ureña (1998) was the only full-length study that focuses solely
on Henríquez Ureña’s linguistic production. In the first chapter, González
Tapia presents his main thesis: “Contrary to the view that Pedro Henríquez
Ureña was a great philologist or that his language studies were philological
in nature, we maintain that Don Pedro was primarily a linguist and

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22 TRACING DOMINICAN IDENTITY

therefore his language studies are essentially linguistic.”54 According to

González Tapia, the majority of scholars who discuss Henríquez Ureña’s
language studies tend to situate them within the practice of philology.55
He attributes this tendency to the nineteenth-century tradition of believ-
ing that philology was capable of encapsulating everything that had to do
with language through the analysis of written texts. This notion, in varying

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degrees, persists today. González Tapia, however, insists that the object of
Henríquez Ureña’s language studies proper was oral speech, as exemplified
in El español en Santo Domingo.56 Furthermore, González Tapia insists that
Henríquez Ureña can be perfectly situated in the field of structural dialec-
tology because he approached the study of dialects from a structuralist
point of view.57
González Tapia classifies Henríquez Ureña’s entire linguistic production
into the following four categories: dialectological-sociolinguistic, lexico-
semantic, linguistic theory, and applied linguistics. The author provides a
chronological commentary and brief analyses of Henríquez Ureña’s con-
tributions to each field. Cataloguing each text, González Tapia broadly
reviews Henríquez Ureña’s data, highlighting his major arguments or
claims and, in some cases, raising questions as to their validity. In a sim-
ilarly swift manner, González Tapia sums up Henríquez Ureña’s striking
position on the possibility, or lack thereof, of African linguistic influ-
ences on Dominican Spanish and gives his own evaluation. With respect
to this and other major assertions of Henríquez Ureña on Dominican
Spanish, González Tapia contends that the author’s wide generalizations
were a result of the impressionistic and subjective methodology that was
the prevalent practice at the time. This practice consisted of generaliz-
ing a particular fact without sufficient empirical or statistical evidence.
According to González Tapia, “a couple of words uttered by a single speaker
were sufficient for the linguist to make definitive statements about a spe-
cific dialectal feature or to account for a particular speech phenomenon.”58
He characterizes this methodology as “linguistic impressionism.” Nonethe-
less, González Tapia continues, “Don Pedro’s excellent study [El idioma
español y la historia política en Santo Domingo (1937)] presents a more
accurate portrayal of 1930s Dominican Spanish, more real than fictitious,
more objective than subjective.”59 González Tapia concludes by pointing
out that Henríquez Ureña’s notion of linguistic purism and his thoughts
on the role of Spanish in the emergence of the Dominican state were some-
what misguided and influenced by traditional, and possibly racist, views.60
This is a pertinent but brief observation. Yet, González Tapia does not pro-
vide a full discussion of some of the contradictions that Henríquez Ureña
incurred while exploring the link between language and race. In this book,

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 UREÑA: THE MAKING OF A LATINAMERICANIST 23

I fully flesh out the racial implications of Henríquez Ureña’s thoughts on

language.
In short, González Tapia’s study constitutes a brief chronological com-
mentary of Henríquez Ureña’s linguistic texts. He provides a general
synthesis of Henríquez Ureña’s major linguistic descriptions and assertions
in order to reject the classification of Henríquez Ureña as a philologist.

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González Tapia insists that his work must be classified within a particular
strand of modern linguistics: structural dialectology. This debate is typical
in the scholarship on Henríquez Ureña, a tireless effort to enshrine him in
the pantheon of this or that discipline. But more important is our under-
standing of his work in and relationship to each of those disciplines. The
fact is that, within the context of his times, Henríquez Ureña was both a
linguist and a philologist. Of particular interest is his work in philology,
a discipline that, as Edward Said commented in Orientalism,61 gave its
practitioners an aura of power. As we will see in Chapter 3, philology
was particularly vital for its practitioners because it made possible for
them, among other things, the establishment and deployment of a text’s
schematic authority.

Zones of American Spanish

Within the field of Latin American dialectology, María Vaquero (1997)

and María Ángeles Álvarez Martínez (1998) are two other researchers
who have attempted to cement Henríquez Ureña’s reputation as a pio-
neer dialectologist and theoretician of American Spanish. For example,
Álvarez Martínez62 (1998) highlights Observaciones sobre el español de
América as groundbreaking work in Hispanic dialectology. Vaquero (1997)
is even more emphatic when underscoring Henríquez Ureña’s contri-
butions to Spanish linguistics. According to Vaquero, for the first time
in 1921, Pedro Henríquez Ureña formulated the problems of American
Spanish.63 He raised questions that we still continue to discuss: Is American
Spanish the result of uniformity or variation? Is American Spanish an
Andalusian offshoot? Are the features it shares with the Andalusian dialect
the result of parallel development? Were its distinctive features shaped
by external causes or internal evolution? Similarly, Lope Blanch (1989)
acknowledged Henríquez Ureña’s pioneering work: “The important thing
is that Henríquez Ureña opened the door for this type of research,
while raising serious questions about simplistic notions of the unity of
Spanish.”64 However, Lope Blanch also recognized that there was some crit-
icism of Henríquez Ureña’s efforts to divide American Spanish into five
zones based on geographical, historical, and cultural factors. Charles Kany

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24 TRACING DOMINICAN IDENTITY

(1951), for example, identified Henríquez Ureña’s tendency to outweigh

indigenous linguistic influences in American Spanish and to make broad
generalizations based on insufficient facts.65
Lope Blanch’s acknowledgment of the limitations of Henríquez Ureña’s
dialectal division notwithstanding, Hispanic linguists locate Henríquez
Ureña’s linguistic ideas within the school of thought that postulates a

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diverse yet unified speech community grounded in the Spanish language.
In this regard, they resemble the group of scholars who focus on Henríquez
Ureña’s account of America as a cultural unit. Álvarez Martínez and
Vaquero situate Henríquez Ureña’s linguistic work within the collaborative
effort to scientifically prove Spanish America as a cultural and linguistic
unit derived from a Hispanic base. In general, these Hispanic linguists con-
centrate on Henríquez Ureña’s dialectal observations and dialectological
arguments that allow them to establish, advance, or question the concept
of “American Spanish.”

Spanish and Linguists in Santo Domingo

Orlando Alba (1990), Max Jiménez Sabater (1975), Carlisle González Tapia
(1998), and Irene Pérez Guerra (1992, 2003, and 2004) represent the group
of Dominican researchers who have attempted to characterize Henríquez
Ureña’s work on Dominican Spanish. Pérez Guerra (2004) laments the
scarcity of studies dedicated to Henríquez Ureña’s linguistic production,
especially in comparison with his literary and cultural work. Like other
analysts, Dominican scholars (Lara 1975 and 1982, Rosario Candelier
1990) who focus on Henríquez Ureña’s linguistic production generally
hesitate to go beyond the exaltation of his contributions. Max Jiménez
Sabater (1975) made a similar observation in reference to the prevalent
attitude among Dominican analysts: “It is time for us to shake off that
fetishistic attitude, typical of some Dominican language specialists and
intellectuals, towards the scholars that represented the best of our national
talent.”66 In more recent decades, however, some have attempted to over-
come that attitude and further explore Henríquez Ureña’s perspective on
Dominican Spanish. One of the first Dominican linguists who scrutinized
Henríquez Ureña’s data on this topic was Jiménez Sabater (1975 and 1981).
This linguist found some of Henríquez Ureña’s characterizations of the
Dominican speech community to be problematic, in that they suggested
that Henríquez Ureña erroneously presumed that the Dominican Republic
had remained the most isolated country in the Hispanic world:

If we just look at Henríquez Ureña’s lexical data, we would be forced to con-

clude that Dominican Republic has experienced much more isolation from

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 UREÑA: THE MAKING OF A LATINAMERICANIST 25

the rest of the world than any other country in Latin America, as if time
had stopped for us alone and kept us at a remote distance for five hundred
years.67

For their part, Alba (1990) and Pérez Guerra (2003 and 2004) have
approached Henríquez Ureña’s classic El español de Santo Domingo by

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explaining the value of the work as the first systematic coherent study of
Spanish in the Dominican Republic. These researchers also highlight how
the author’s central idea, the linguistic archaism of Dominican Spanish,
dictates the overall structure of the text, each individual chapter, as well as
the collection and selection of data. They have, however, differing opinions
with respect to the currency in Dominican Spanish of the archaic lexemes
collected by Henríquez Ureña. Alba believes that archaic lexemes do not
constitute a distinctive feature of this dialect. Alba explains that, while these
archaisms could have been prevalent in the 1930s Dominican Republic,
now a substantial number of them are not even part of Dominicans’ passive
vocabulary.68 Moreover, Alba points out that the preservation of archaic
forms is not exclusive of the Dominican Republic and can be found in other
areas of Spanish-speaking Caribbean and in parts of Spain.69 Alba pro-
vides a brief overview of the historical period in which Henríquez Ureña’s
El español en Santo Domingo emerged and ascribes its inaccuracies with
respect to the features that Henríquez Ureña exclusively attributed to this
dialect to the infancy of dialectology as a field of research. Alba also reit-
erates Hispanic linguists’ and philologists’ views regarding the immense
value of the Dominican’s pioneering work in the field of dialectology
and its limitations. In addition, Alba cites Henríquez Ureña’s prolonged
absence from the Dominican Republic as a reason for the shortcomings
of his research on Spanish in the Dominican Republic. Considering such
circumstances, Alba argues, we can identify a possible explanation for the
discrepancies between Henríquez Ureña’s linguistic description and our
current understanding of Dominican linguistic realities.70 According to
Alba, however, the empirical value and theoretical contribution of the work
overshadow any problems inherent in the text.
Pérez Guerra (2004) also examined Henríquez Ureña’s other linguis-
tic texts and highlighted their special significance within his intellectual
production. Her study, focuses primarily on the works that comprise
Henríquez Ureña’s Latin American dialectology, his take on la expre-
sión Americana (unique American expressions), and the defense of the
autonomy of Spanish in the Americas.71 Pérez Guerra believes that the
subject of Latin American linguistic unity is one of the keys to under-
standing his linguistic production. In contrast to Alba’s assessment of
lexical archaisms in the Dominican Republic, Pérez Guerra (1992) accepts
Henríquez Ureña’s characterization of Dominican Spanish, in spite of

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26 TRACING DOMINICAN IDENTITY

what she calls his “methodological apriorism.” She argues that Henríquez
Urena’s fundamental position with respect to the nature of Dominican
Spanish is basically correct. His characterization of Dominican archaic
vocabulary is still valid despite the social changes that have occurred since
1961, especially in the Dominican Republic.72 Going beyond the lexico-
semantic level, Pérez Guerra (1992) finds evidence in Dominican Spanish

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of archaic forms at the morpho-syntactic level. Among the evidence she
highlights are double negation (nadie no vino (no one did not come)) and
the use of the indefinite article plus possessive plus noun (un mi amigo (one
my friend)).73 While comparing Henríquez Ureña’s linguistic claims with
similar cultural claims he made in his La Antigua sociedad patriarcal de las
Antillas: modalidades arcaicas de la vida en Santo Domingo durante el siglo
XIX (1932), Pérez Guerra affirms that Henríquez Ureña’s conclusions are
also substantiated by some of the facts of nineteenth-century Dominican
history.
The debate continues, mostly along the lines of whether Henríquez
Ureña was correct regarding the linguistic archaism of Spanish in the
Dominican context and whether his conclusions are valid today. Pérez
Guerra diverges from Alba and insists that the relative density and fre-
quency with which the phenomenon occurs in different Dominican
regions is presently high enough to resemble previous stages of the dialect
and to resist comparisons with other Caribbean dialects of Spanish, such
as the one spoken in Puerto Rico.74
Bent on solely establishing the facts, these linguists shy away from
exploring the sociological issues embedded in Henríquez Ureña’s linguistic
texts. This debate must evolve, and much more work is necessary in order
to provide a fuller explanation of his linguistic ideas and conclusions with
respect to Spanish in the Dominican Republic. The inquiry needs to go
beyond questioning the validity of his claims or the currency of linguistic
archaism in this dialect and move toward questions concerning the cir-
cumstances and ideological issues surrounding his characterization of the
Dominican speech community. In fact, some scholars have suggested the
need for problematizing the work of Henríquez Ureña. These are the ones
who take the view that his work, while rich in many ways, demands critical
attention.

Critically Reading Pedro Henríquez Ureña

Juan Isidro Jimenes Grullón (1903–1983), a historian and important

Dominican political figure, was the first scholar to formally formulate the
need for a more critical approach to Henríquez Ureña’s work. Jimenes

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 UREÑA: THE MAKING OF A LATINAMERICANIST 27

Grullón was the first Dominican analyst to go beyond rendering homage

and to seriously take issue with several of Henríquez Ureña’s arguments:
“Both in Spain and in Latin America Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s intellectual
prominence is widely recognized. But in what has been written about him,
we often only find emotionally and ideologically charged judgments rather
than balanced and in-depth assessments.”75 According to Jimenes Grullón,

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Henríquez Ureña was an excellent writer who skillfully cultivated the field
of literary criticism and also excelled as a linguist and a philologist. Jimenes
Grullón examined Henríquez Ureña’s oeuvre in order to assess his charac-
terization of colonial history, the construction of Latin American identities,
the role of the intellectual in Latin American history, and the sociocultural
configuration of the Dominican Republic. Recognizing the intrinsic value
of Henríquez Ureña’s scholarship, Jimenes Grullón was not deterred from
detecting the ideological underpinnings of some of Henríquez Ureña’s rep-
resentations: “It cannot go unnoticed . . . his exalted concept of Hispanism
on which he founded his Americanism.”76 In addition, Jimenes Grullón
noted that, while in many of his writings Henríquez Ureña advocated for
universal justice, he alienated certain groups of people who did not fit into
his description of Dominican realities, namely, those of African descent
and those from low economic classes. Jimenes Grullón found examples of
this type of alienation in several of Henríquez Ureña’s discussions on early
colonial cultural processes:

[Henríquez Ureña] claimed that this [music] was not indigenous . . . even
though the new soil soon modified it, giving it an unmistakable aroma, for
him, it was still European music. We can accept that European music arrived
in our American continent, but should we assume from this fact that indige-
nous or African people renounced their music? We would think not. But
Henríquez Ureña’s Hispanist alienation tacitly but definitively led him to
embrace the opposite conclusion.77

According to Jimenes Grullón, this considerable process of alienation can

be attributed not only to his Hispanism but also to Henríquez Ureña’s par-
ticular concept of history: “There is a tendency in Henríquez Ureña to view
history as a process led by the privileged social class and its most notable
figures, not as the work of a whole community driven, from beginning
to end, by the class struggle.”78 It is not surprising that Jimenes Grullón
made the most forceful statement in relation to the ideological dimen-
sion of Henríquez Ureña’s oeuvre. This Marxist intellectual, founder of
the Dominican socialist party (1961), sought to analyze many myths in
his quest to dismantle, what he considered to be, within a classical Marxist
framework, “the false consciousness” of Dominican society. Accordingly,

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28 TRACING DOMINICAN IDENTITY

he concluded, “Henríquez Ureña, driven by Hispanic fervor, lost his sense

of reality.”79 From statements such as these, we get the sense that Jimenes
Grullón adhered to a strict traditional Marxist perspective on ideologies.
As we will discuss in the next chapter, standard Marxist theory uncritically
associates ideology with false consciousness elaborated by power structures
working to mask their existence.

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The linguists Guillermo Guitarte (1958a) and Elvira N. de Arnoux
(2001) have also paid attention to the ideological dimension of a portion of
Henríquez Ureña’s linguistic work. Arnoux (2001) analyzed the secondary
role he played in the polemic surrounding the appearance of his Gramática
castellana (1938), coauthored with Amado Alonso, in Argentina and the
Spaniard’s negative characterization of Porteño speech as plebeyismo (ple-
beian in nature). Arnoux’s study is relevant because it highlights important
and particularly political linguistic debates that were taking place during
the period in which Henríquez Ureña was living, teaching, and writing in
Buenos Aires. Arnoux characterized Henríquez Ureña and Amado Alonso’s
collaborative effort to promote a Latin American identity that would be
built over the Hispanic linguistic base. She referred to this endeavor in
the following terms: “This perspective amounts to a political culture that
supports the spiritual unity of the Hispanic world as a way to defend a spe-
cific identity.”80 Arnoux highlighted the discursive strategies used in their
grammar and other linguistic texts to impose a specific order on students’
linguistic practices as well on the ways in which ordinary people should
approach and think about the use of language. Arnoux’s study intro-
duces us to some of the specific language ideological issues that engaged
Henríquez Ureña while he worked in the Buenos Aires of the 1930s.
Guillermo Guitarte (1958a) was the first scholar to coherently argue
that Henríquez Ureña’s important contributions to the emerging field
of Spanish linguistics and his role in the andalucismo debate had to be
problematized and understood in the precise context of their emergence.
Guitarte emphasized the need to revise Henríquez Ureña’s theoretical con-
tributions using the critical tools of analysis that we have available today:

Let us be clear. I am not saying that Alonso’s and Henríquez Ureña’s work is
outdated simply because we have new techniques available or because new
findings have forced us to modify their knowledge base. Clearly, this has
occurred, but simply stating it is not sufficient . . . What we need is not to
solve the problems they raised and according to their terms, but, taking into
account our new situation and, from it, reformulate these problems in our
own terms.81

Not only did Guitarte articulate the need to reconceptualize the work of
philologists and linguists such as Henríquez Ureña, but he also insisted

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 UREÑA: THE MAKING OF A LATINAMERICANIST 29

on the need to focus less on the particular solutions that they intrepidly
advanced with respect to certain linguistic and cultural problems and pay
more attention to the principles that guided their work.
Apart from this line of inquiry by Jimenes Grullón, Arnoux, and
Guitarte, most attempts to criticize Henríquez Ureña’s work have been
relatively genteel. The criticism is generally limited to pointing out that

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there are contradictions in Henríquez Ureña’s analyses and interpretation
of Latin American cultural and linguistic realities. Traditional authors do
not actually analyze these contradictions in depth or the specific circum-
stances surrounding them. For the most part, analysts neglect the task of
critically reading Henríquez Ureña’s texts. Beatriz Sarlo (1998) catalogued
the implications and tasks that are involved in a critical analysis:

Reading Henríquez Ureña today involves a temporal displacement through

which we counter the inevitable rhetoric imprinted on his texts by his times.
Reading against time does not imply a charitable interpretation, always ready
to justify differences as the result of cultural and historical distance. Rather,
I would like to mean, in this case, bracketing the hallmarks of his writings in
order to articulate certain aspects of his discourse which speak to our current
concerns.82

Almost three decades ago, Soledad Álvarez (1981) remarked how critics
had failed to scrutinize the depths of Henríquez Ureña’s work. She pointed
out several reasons why we needed critical approaches to the work of
Henríquez Ureña:

The question of his Americanism has been raised very often, but, para-
doxically, we cannot find an insightful analysis of his ideas regarding Latin
America. With regard to his anti-imperialism, the literature is non-existent.
The broad range of issues present in the Dominican scholar’s writings
exposes the limitations of our narrow approach.83

Clearly, there is still a serious need for critical studies on Henríquez

Ureña, especially with respect to his linguistic production. As noted even
by devoted admirers such as Soledad Álvarez, rarely do we find anal-
yses or reflections of the problems and contradictions that are present
in Henríquez Ureña’s cultural texts or, most relevant to this book, his
linguistic production.

Knowledge and Ideology

The dominant tradition in Pedro Henríquez Ureña scholarship focuses

on the reconstruction of his vision of Spanish America, which is known
as Americanism. Within this tradition, scholars mostly expound on the

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30 TRACING DOMINICAN IDENTITY

Dominican’s intellectual brilliance, wealth of knowledge, and effort to

develop and defend high culture in Latin America. Among Dominican
analysts, the tendency is to extol Henríquez Ureña’s Dominicanness or his
symbolic value within the country’s intellectual tradition and nationalism.
With some exceptions, these trends are, in varying degrees, reproduced by
those few analysts who focus on his linguistic work. Critically inclined ana-

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lysts lament the limitations of highly evocative perspectives and the absence
of detailed studies on Henríquez Ureña. Most studies attend to aspects of
his personality and pedagogical practice and ignore the complexity of his
ideas. A survey of studies on Pedro Henríquez Ureña, such as the one devel-
oped in the present chapter, reveals a dearth of critical approaches to his
work. To focus solely on Henríquez Ureña’s Americanism or his role in the
andalucismo debate profoundly limits our appreciation and understanding
of his work.
The most apparent limitation of the scholarship on Henríquez Ureña is
the lack of studies that take into full consideration the significant impact of
political and cultural ideology and context on his work. The few available
critical approaches barely skim the surface of the ideological dimension of
Henríquez Ureña’s writings. For the most part, Henríquez Ureña scholars
believe that he was able to reject ideological forces and concentrate on a
“spiritual-like” search for knowledge. There is even a tendency to reduce
the impact of ideological forces on Henríquez Ureña only to a mere pre-
occupation with philosophical problems of the “purely” epistemological
kind. According to this perspective, ideology could not play a role in the
intellectual activity of a man many consider incorruptible and impervi-
ous to politics of any kind. Nevertheless, as Jimenes Grullón and Guitarte
argued, it is necessary to study Henríquez Ureña’s oeuvre without forget-
ting that even brilliant thinkers such as Henríquez Ureña must adapt and
respond to external pressures that ultimately manifest themselves in their
work. Yet, despite some insightful studies on Henríquez Ureña’s array of
ideas on Spanish America, the majority of studies on his Americanism tend
to focus on the aesthetic dimension of his oeuvre, and ignore its ideological
dimension.
A primary apprehension among Henríquez Ureña specialists is that
criticism can lead to a denial and radical rejection of the scholar’s achieve-
ments. Additionally, there is the belief that the generational gap between
Henríquez Ureña and us is now far too great for us to grasp the significance
and implications of his work. Jean Franco (1998) suggested that the gulf
that separates our generation from Henríquez Ureña’s stems from a rup-
ture with the past or a radical rejection of the idea that a powerful current,
a human thread, runs through all great works.84 However, Franco insists
that we can accept the task of demystifying our humanist predecessors

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 UREÑA: THE MAKING OF A LATINAMERICANIST 31

without necessarily trying to invalidate them. As Franco suggests, there is a

need to develop a critical distance with respect to the works of the previous
generation of “men of letters.” This critical distance implies, first, acknowl-
edging that it is insufficient to simply measure the quantity of knowledge
that Henríquez Ureña accumulated and, second, understanding the condi-
tions that allowed the acquisition and production of that knowledge in the

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first place.

Filling the Gap: A Language Ideological Approach

Some analysts attribute Henríquez Ureña’s problematic assumptions, with

respect to language and identity, to dialectology’s relatively undevel-
oped methodology (“linguistic impressionism”) in the early twentieth
century, while others contend that some of his questionable claims are
simply “insignificant” when compared with his achievements. Krauze,
Díaz Quiñones, Jimenes Grullón, with their respective approaches, and
Guitarte and Arnoux, with their metalinguistic approaches, represent a
major departure from this tradition. Their analyses emphasize the need
to adopt a more critical attitude toward Henríquez Ureña’s ideas and even
survey some specific problems that are present in his texts. Despite these
calls for more in-depth analyses, the ideological implications and specific
problems in his writings have not been fully considered. By and large, stud-
ies that have dealt with Henríquez Ureña’s description of Spanish America
as a cultural and linguistic unit say very little with respect to the spe-
cific strategies used by him in order to link language and identity in his
construction of “Spanish America.” This is a crucial limitation because it
overlooks Henríquez Ureña’s Dominicanness and Hispanoamericanism as
two key ideological sites that articulate his work’s discursive and textual
realization. In this book, I take a specific language ideological approach
that overcomes this limitation. Like Jimenes Grullón and Guitarte, I main-
tain that ideology was a powerful force in Henríquez Ureña’s work and
thought. Going a step further, I do not seek to simply identify which
aspects of Latin American and Dominican cultural realities were distorted
by Henríquez Ureña. Instead, I approach the problems of representation
that surface in his work by examining specific semiotic and ideological
processes as well as the degree to which these were triggered by specific
conditions of production.
For this analysis, I critically examine the entire corpus of Henríquez
Ureña’s available linguistic texts.85 In order to fully understand his linguis-
tic production, I argue that it is necessary to read it in several contexts.
First, Henríquez Ureña must be read in the context of the development

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32 TRACING DOMINICAN IDENTITY

of language studies in the Hispanic tradition, a tradition in which he

grounded his own professional and intellectual development. Second, we
must explore the context of the dialogue that Henríquez Ureña established
between his linguistic production and the Dominican cultural and political
field. Third, we must read his linguistic work in the context of the complex
and contested construction of Dominican and Latin American identities.

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Confronting these contexts allows us a better glimpse into the issues and
challenges that Henríquez Ureña attempted to resolve. On the one hand,
by affirming the autonomy of American Spanish, he attempted to demon-
strate the cultural unity and independence of Latin America. On the other
hand, adopting a radically different perspective, he classified Dominican
Spanish within the northern Iberian dialect continuum in order to settle
the question of Dominican national identity. To some extent, it is perfectly
clear that these linguistic representations respond to the sociopolitical cir-
cumstances that they attempt to articulate. However, we must understand
the degree to which these linguistic representations, developed around the
facts, naturalized these same sociopolitical circumstances under the cloak
of science, thus constituting linguistic ideologies.

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 2

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Linguistic Ideologies and the
History of Linguistic Ideas

T he concept of ideology and its epistemological status is a complex

topic whose discussion involves many disciplines and theories. Terry
Eagleton1 (1991) provides 16 definitions of ideology, which reflect the
different epistemological attitudes and theoretical commitments of the
concept’s proponents. Most of these definitions fall within two broad intel-
lectual traditions. On the one hand, the philosophical tradition deals with
the falsity and truthfulness of ideas and relates them to matters of cogni-
tion, reality, illusion, distortion, and mythmaking. On the other, there is
a sociological tradition that deals with the functions of ideas in social life.
The anthropologist Kathryn Woolard2 (1998) explains that those that come
from the philosophical tradition tend to highlight the representational-
conceptual character of ideology (idea-ology), while those that come from
the sociological tradition highlight issues of power and public and pri-
vate conflict between social groups (id-ology). In this chapter, I review
the history of ideology, examine the major approaches to the concept,
and highlight the main characteristics of ideological phenomena in order
to produce the most appropriate conceptualization for the study of the
ideological dimension of Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s linguistic texts.
The concept of ideology has some antecedents in the work of Francis
Bacon (1561–1626). Regarded as the originator of the phrase “knowledge
is power,” Bacon advocated against what he called “idols,” or bad habits of
the mind that distort human thinking and prevent people from acquiring
accurate knowledge of natural phenomena.3 According to Bacon, debunk-
ing these idols was an important step in eliminating inadequate knowledge
that was tied to special interest groups (e.g., the clergy). His main con-
cern was how certain modes of interpretations (i.e., superstitions) impeded
free thought while benefiting members of the church.4 Bacon’s critique

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34 TRACING DOMINICAN IDENTITY

constituted an attempt to comprehend ecclesiastical views of nature and

relate them to the social conditions in which they emerged and the specific
interest groups that, because of their social positions, were able to impose
their views and modes of thinking on the rest of society.
French Enlightenment philosophers (Holbach, Condillac, Helvetius,
and de Tracy, among others) adopted Bacon’s ideas, which were gener-

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ally about developing better methods for the study of nature, and applied
them to knowledge of society, its structure, inequalities, and injustices. The
goal of these philosophers was to develop methods of rational thinking and
organization that could limit the arbitrary expansion and abuse of power
and lead to a more rational organization of society. The scientist’s task con-
sisted of exposing social prejudice under the light of reason in order to
reveal the nature of social institutions. It is in this context that the concept
of ideology initially emerged. Toward the end of the eighteenth century,
Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) coined the term “ideology” while attempt-
ing to establish a “science” for the systematic and empirical study of ideas.
According to de Tracy, ideas had to be broken down into their original
elements in order for “one to ascertain everything that occurs when one
thinks, speaks, and argues.”5 De Tracy considered the analysis of ideas the
best method for achieving this task and progressively improving society
and human life. The proponents of this theory were called “ideologues”
and their objectives were not only theoretical but also political. Eventually,
the antiauthoritarian position of the ideologues clashed with Napoleon
Bonaparte, who had given up revolutionary idealism for absolutist preten-
sions. This political confrontation caused a rift between the ideologues and
Napoleon, who had by then turned to conservative and religious groups
for political support. Napoleon publicly attacked the ideologues, accusing
them of being deluded theoreticians who were ignorant of the real issues
and problems of the world of politics: “You ideologues destroy all illu-
sions, and the age of illusions is for individuals as for peoples the age of
happiness.”6 Consequently, Napoleon successfully diverted attention away
from the original meaning of the word “ideologue” and infused it with
negative connotations. Nevertheless, the concept of ideology emerged as
a theoretical instrument that articulates political conflict and class war-
fare in a social arena. We can see in the ideologues’ early formulations the
basic lines of our current conceptualization of ideology as a discourse that
naturalizes a context.
The point of departure for Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (1845)
was a reformulation of Napoleon’s condemnation of ideology, initially
directed as an attack on their German contemporaries. Ideology became
a polemical label for the kind of thinking that did not take into account
material, social, and historical processes, including human consciousness.

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[Inhoud]

[1]

[Inhoud]

☞ Elke aflevering bevat een volledig verhaal. ☜

UITGAVE VAN DEN „ROMAN-BOEKHANDEL VOORHEEN A. EICHLER”, SINGEL 236,
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[Inhoud]
DE DIAMANTEN VAN DEN HERTOG VAN
NORFOLK.
EERSTE HOOFDSTUK.
 EEN KRANIG STUKJE.
„Ben je er wel heel zeker van, dat je het geheime wachtwoord bezit?”
vroeg Charly Brand zijn vriend, lord Lister, die zich juist door zijn
bediende liet helpen bij het aantrekken van zijn zware pelsjas.

De lord lachte.

„Maak je maar niet ongerust, Charly! Het zaakje is in orde! Doordat ik

des nachts mijn telefoondraad aansloot op de hoofdlijn en daardoor
een tusschenverbinding tot stand bracht, ben ik al veertien dagen
lang in de gelegenheid geweest om de gesprekken met de
Londensche en de Zuid-West Bank af te luisteren en vooral die welke
de directie van het hoofdkantoor hield met de bijkantoren.”

„En heb je het wachtwoord gehoord?”

„Well, my boy.”

„En hoe is het verder gegaan? Ik brand gewoonweg van

nieuwsgierigheid!”

Lord Lister streek zich eens door de donkere snor.

„Ik heb naar de verschillende directies van dertien bijkantoren

geschreven, dat een bedrag van vijfhonderd pond voor zekeren
Samuel Rottwell op hun bank is ingeschreven. Deze brieven heb ik
onderteekend met den naam van den directeur der depositobank.”

„En geloof je niet, dat een der bankdirecteuren achterdocht zal

koesteren?”
„Geen kwestie van, Charly. Je weet, dat ik in dergelijke zaken met
pijnlijke nauwgezetheid handel. Het opschrift der firma, het stempel,
alles is all right! En al mag bij een enkelen bankdirecteur ook eenige
twijfel rijzen, dan zal dadelijk het wachtwoord dien twijfel weer doen
verdwijnen!”

Een lakei verscheen.

„Wenscht u een chauffeur?” vroeg de man. [2]

Charly Brand maakte een afwerende beweging met de hand.

„Niet noodig! Ik zal zelf sturen!”

De lakei boog diep en verliet het vertrek.

Charly Brand trok nu een lange automobieljas aan, waarvan het bont
naar buiten was gekeerd, zoodat hij veel geleek op een ijsbeer.

Zijn gezicht was bijna geheel bedekt door de groote automobielpet.

Hij ging de trap af, gevolgd door lord Lister en bracht de roode,
elegante automobiel in orde.

Langzaam bewoog de fraaie kar zich voorwaarts en tufte door het

drukste deel van Londen.

Voor de depositobank in Vauxhall hield het voertuig het allereerst stil.

Lord Lister stapte uit met onverschillig gebaar.

De portier van de Bank deed de deur open en boog diep.

Lord Lister ging binnen en begaf zich naar de kassa.

„Mijn naam is Samuel Rottwell,” stelde hij zich voor.

De hoofdkassier haalde gauw het kasboek te voorschijn, waarin de
handteekeningen geplaatst moesten worden.

In groote, duidelijke letters schreef hij de woorden:

Fred Harry Rolph Samuel Rottwell.

Toen schreef hij, met een handigheid alsof hij duizendmaal die
handteekening had geplaatst, een bijna onleesbaren krabbel.

De ambtenaar keek even met onderzoekenden blik naar een en

ander, knikte, wierp toen een vluchtigen blik naar den voornamen
jongen man en overhandigde daarop den nieuwen klant een chêque-
boek.

Mr. Rottwell vulde dadelijk een der bladen voor een bedrag van
honderd pond in.

„Ge wilt zeker wel zoo vriendelijk zijn, mij negentig pond in
banknoten en tien pond in goudgeld uit te betalen, mijnheer,” sprak
hij tot den eersten boekhouder, die met beleefd gebaar aan het
verzoek voldeed.

De bezoeker groette beleefd, stapte weer in zijn automobiel en reed

weg.

Charly Brand lachte in zijn vuistje, toen hij zijn vriend uit de Bank zag
komen.

Dezelfde geschiedenis herhaalde zich aan de depositobank in

Clapham.

Daar was de eerste boekhouder echter nieuwsgieriger.

„Ge zijt zeker groote dingen van plan, mr. Rottwell?” vroeg hij.
„Wel,” antwoordde lord Lister glimlachend, „ik ga naar de slederennen
in Windsor. Ik geloof, dat het daar heel interessant zal zijn, want er
worden groote sommen verwed.”

„Zóó!” antwoordde de boekhouder en hij schoof mr. Rottwell honderd

pond toe.

Lord Lister nam weer plaats in zijn auto.

En zoo ging het van Bank tot Bank, naar Belham, Streatham,
enzoovoorts.

Voordat er twee uren voorbij waren, had lord Lister negen

depositobanken bezocht en bij alle hetzelfde stukje uitgehaald.

Toen hij het tiende bijkantoor was binnengegaan, zette Charly Brand
den motor op rust, stak een sigaret aan en wachtte.

„Tien keer honderd pond is duizend pond,” rekende hij uit. „All right,
dat is voorloopig genoeg voor het plan, dat lord Lister beoogt. Als hij
niet altijd weer zijn geld aan de armen gaf, zou hij niet elk oogenblik
in geldverlegenheid zitten, waardoor zulke gevaarlijke spelletjes op
touw moeten worden gezet.”

Juist toen Charly Brand zijn alleenspraak had geëindigd, draaide hij
zich verbluft om.

Iemand had hem de hand op den schouder gelegd en toen hij

onwillig opkeek, zag hij in het gelaat van iemand, die in uniform
gekleed was en een helm droeg.

„Inspecteur Baxter!” ontsnapte het Charly’s mond.

Van louter schrik liet hij zijn sigaret vallen en keek den gevreesden
beambte vlak in het gezicht. [3]
„Ja, dat ben ik,” antwoordde de politie-inspecteur op gemoedelijken
toon, „ge schijnt mij reeds te kennen? Vertel mij eens, wien behoort
die mooie kar?”

„Die is van mijn meester,” antwoordde Charly, thans weder volkomen

op zijn gemak.

„Zoo, zoo! En wie is uw meester?”

„Dat is de eigenaar van dezen automobiel, mijnheer de inspecteur!”

„Drommels! Jij bent een grappige chauffeur. Maar opdat wij wat
verder zullen komen, wil ik je in vertrouwen vertellen, dat de
directeur van het hoofdkantoor der depositobanken een half uur
geleden tot de ontdekking is gekomen, dat aan alle bijkantoren
honderd pond is uitbetaald aan zekeren mister Rottwell.

„Toen hij inderhaast zijn boeken nasloeg, kwam hij tot de ontdekking,
dat iemand van dien naam daarin heelemaal niet voorkomt.—Wie zou
zoo’n boevenstreek wel hebben uitgehaald? Zeg, is deze auto niet
van John Raffles?”

Charly Brand haalde de schouders op.

„Raffles? Dien ken ik niet, inspecteur. Als ge echter Raffles, den

Grooten Onbekende, meent, dan moet ik u tot mijn spijt zeggen— —”

Maar Baxter begreep volkomen het doel van den chauffeur.

Hij wilde Baxter aan den praat houden en hem door zijn praatjes
verhinderen, maatregelen te nemen, opdat lord Lister, als deze uit het
Bankgebouw kwam en Baxter zou zien, alle gelegenheid tot
ontvluchten had.

„’t Is goed!” sprak Baxter en hij wenkte twee agenten.

Deze hadden Charly al heel gauw van zijn chauffeursplaats gehaald
en duwden hem een gang binnen.

Daar werd hen zijn mooie ijsberenjas afgenomen, evenals zijn

automobielpet en bril.

„Dien vogel hebben wij al eens meer in de kooi gehad,” zei Baxter,
toen hij den secretaris van den Grooten Onbekende aankeek. „Houdt
hem vast, wij moeten eens zien, in welke zonderlinge verhouding
deze jonge man tot Raffles staat!”

Terwijl Charly Brand werd weggebracht, deed Baxter diens jas aan,
drukte de pet diep in de oogen, zette den bril op en ging op Charly’s
chauffeursplaats zitten.

Juist kwam lord Lister uit het Bankgebouw.

Hij was in een uitstekenden luim, stak een sigaret aan, en, zonder
eenige notitie te nemen van den chauffeur, beval hij op korten toon:

„Taftord.”

Inspecteur Baxter knikte.

Een breede grijns vertrok zijn mond.

„Well.”

Hij zette den motor in beweging.

Maar verstandig was het niet van hem geweest, dat hij zijn mond niet
had kunnen houden en hij bemerkte niet, dat lord Lister één
oogenblik het portier van de auto in de hand hield en zijn
wenkbrauwen hoog optrok, toen hij dit „well” hoorde.

Toen glimlachte hij en stapte in de auto.

Inspecteur Baxter begon nu te racen. In razende vaart joeg hij de
stad door en het was tot zijn geluk, dat hij zoo’n goed automobilist
was.

Hem gebeurde niets anders dan dat hij drie keer tegen een equipage
botste, één paard dood reed, een half dozijn melkkarren overhoop
reed en zeven-en-twintig keer door agenten werd opgeschreven.

Maar wat kon hem dat schelen?

Inspecteur Baxter lag gewoonweg dubbel gevouwen over het

stuurrad en zijn gezicht grijnsde van pleizier.

Hij zou met alle liefde nog een dozijn paarden hebben doodgereden.

Hij had Raffles immers! De Groote Onbekende was in zijn macht!

Raffles leunde intusschen doodkalm in de kussens achterover!

Als de motor niet zoo’n vervaarlijk geweld had gemaakt, [4]zou

inspecteur Baxter het spotlachje hebben gehoord, dat lord Lister
uitstiet.

Aan afspringen van de auto was natuurlijk niet te denken bij zoo’n
razende vaart.

Lord Lister zou dan hals en beenen hebben gebroken.

Achtervolgd door fietsende agenten, die deze onbesuisde auto in

beslag wilden nemen, joeg Baxter naar Scotland Yard.

Daar doemde het groote gebouw al op in de verte.

De inspecteur hield met een ruk stil, sprong van den bok, rukte de
deur open, stak zijn revolver vooruit en beval:
„Uitstappen, Raffles! Ge zijt mijn arrestant!”

De laatste woorden bleven den inspecteur bijna in de keel steken.

De agenten, die om de auto waren komen heenstaan, deinsden

achteruit en hielden den neus dicht.

In de auto was niets dan rook! Rook!

Dikke, gele rook, die zoo’n stank verspreidde, dat Baxter nauwelijks
kon ademhalen.

Hij viel op de sneeuw neer en schreeuwde luid:

„Lucht! Lucht! Ik stik!”

Baxter had den agenten nog niet kunnen vertellen, wat er gebeurd
was en deze trokken zich terug om eerst dien rookwalm te laten
wegtrekken.

Eindelijk dunde de rook.

Baxter vond weer de kracht om op te staan en vloog nu in de auto.

Maar alles wat hij bemachtigde, was een reusachtige sigaar, die bij
zoo lang was als een bovenarm. De sigaar was van staal en daaruit
stroomde de rook, die zoo’n verpestenden stank verbreidde.

Maar Raffles was verdwenen en inderhaast vertelde Baxter, hoe hij

den meesterdief had gevangen.

„Maar dan heeft hij zich in rook opgelost, inspecteur,” lachten de

agenten, die weer naderbij waren gekomen.

Baxter vloekte.

Maar wat gaf dat?

Raffles was weg.

Deze had zich geen oogenblik bezorgd gemaakt, toen hij zag, dat de
auto in duizelingwekkende snelheid Scotland Yard naderde.

Voor zulke gelegenheden had hij altijd een van de sigaren bij zich, die
met een pas uitgevonden poeder, dat aromale heette, gevuld waren.

Als een lucifer of een brandende sigaar hierbij wordt gehouden,

vervliegt het poeder in dichten rook en wie dezen rook langen tijd
inademt, wordt bewusteloos.

En terwijl Baxter de auto opende en terugdeinsde voor den

verstikkenden damp, was Raffles doodkalm aan den anderen kant
uitgestapt en weggewandeld, door niemand gehinderd.

Een kwartier later had hij een anderen automobiel en reed naar
Bromley, naar het elfde bijkantoor.

Hij was namelijk van meening, dat Baxter slechts door een toeval
langs het Bankgebouw was gekomen, waar hij de auto herkend had.
Misschien ook had Charly zich door een of andere onvoorzichtigheid
verraden. Hij wist niet wat Baxter aan Charly had verteld, die zich op
weg naar het politiebureau uit de handen der agenten had losgerukt
en nu in het huis van lord Lister met hevige hartklopping wachtte of
zijn vriend niet spoedig zou terugkomen.

Lord Lister was iemand, die niet gauw zijn plannen opgaf.

Hij had het zich nu eens in het hoofd gezet, ook de beide laatste
bijkantoren te bezoeken en zelfs door het groote gevaar, waaraan hij
ternauwernood ontsnapt was, liet hij zich daarvan niet terughouden.

Hij trad dus het Bankgebouw binnen, deed den kraag van zijn pels
neer, ging naar de kas en zei:
„Mijn naam is Samuel Rottwell.”

Maar zijn overmoed zou duur gestraft worden.

Nauwelijks had hij dezen naam uitgesproken, of de boekhouder

schreeuwde uit alle macht:

„Help! Help! Moord en doodslag! Hier staat Raffles!” [5]

In een oogenblik hadden de portiers de deuren gesloten en hun

revolvers getrokken. Alles liep verward dooreen. Niemand wist
eigenlijk, wat er gebeurd was, terwijl lord Lister doodkalm de hal
verliet en een wanhopige poging deed om nog een der uitgangen te
bereiken.

Maar de portier hield hem de revolver onder den neus en zei:

„Niemand mag naar buiten, mijnheer!”

„Alle drommels! Kan een fatsoenlijk mensch dan in Londen geen

Bank meer binnengaan, zonder dat hem een revolver onder den neus
wordt geduwd?”

Maar de portier gaf niet toe.

„Ik heb strenge bevelen, mijnheer! Maar ik weet, dat inspecteur

Baxter met zes agenten binnen een minuut al hier is. Die zal u zeker
spoedig uw vrijheid teruggeven!”

Daar kwam Baxter al.

„Heb je hem?” vroeg hij gretig.

„Nog niet! Maar hij is hier! De boekhouder heeft hem herkend!”

Raffles ging achteruit om niet door Baxter gezien te worden.

Hij zat nu toch wel degelijk in gevaar. Hij stormde de trappen op om
zich boven ergens te verbergen, toen hij zich plotseling door een half
dozijn beambten van de Bank zag omsingeld.

Het werd een formeel gebrul.

„Hier is Raffles! Raffles is hier!! Raffles!!! Raffles!!!! Raffles!!!!!”

Zij hadden zeker het woord nog een dozijn keeren herhaald, als
Raffles niet plotseling naar links en rechts vuistslagen had uitgedeeld,
zoodat de beambten als muggen door elkaar vlogen.

In het volgende oogenblik vloog de Groote Onbekende een lange

gang door, die zich voor hem uitstrekte.

Hij hoorde, dat Baxter het bevel gaf, Raffles liever dood uit te
leveren, dan hem te laten ontsnappen.

Plotseling, toen lord Lister bijna het eind van de gang had bereikt,
dook voor hem een lange, magere gedaante op met gerimpeld
gelaat, slaphangende wangen en wijd uitpuilende oogen.

„Terug! Terug! Hier mag geen sterveling meer door!”

Raffles, die nu geen tijd meer had om beleefd te zijn, hield zijn beide
vuisten als buffers voor zich uit en vloog als ’t ware over den man
heen. In het volgende oogenblik had hij een deur bereikt—maar zij
was gesloten.

Nu zat hij toch inderdaad leelijk in de knel.

„Wat doet ge?” kermde de man op den grond. „Ga gauw terug, heel
gauw! Ik beveel het u! Ik ben de directeur van de Bank!”

„All right! Dat is mij heel aangenaam,” antwoordde Raffles, pakte den
man beet, keerde hem om en doorzocht zijn zakken. Al gauw vond
hij een sleutelbos. Toen rende hij terug naar de gesloten deur en had
deze juist geopend, toen inspecteur Baxter met zijn mannen in de
gang kwam.

Raffles deed de deur op slot en ontstak een kleine, electrische

zaklantaarn.

Hij keek om zich heen en zag, dat hij voor een lange trap stond, die
naar een keldergewelf leidde. Zoo vlug als de duisternis het hem
toeliet, vloog hij naar beneden en kwam in een tamelijk groote
ruimte, waar hij zocht naar een schuilhoek.

Hij liep vooruit, maar struikelde en viel op den grond neer. Toen hij
om zich heen tastte, greep zijn hand in een weeke massa.

Verschrikt sprong hij op, drukte op de lantaarn en liet het schijnsel

over den grond vallen,

Daar lag het vreeselijk verminkte lijk van een man.

Bijna op hetzelfde oogenblik, dat Raffles deze afschuwelijke

ontdekking deed, liet inspecteur Baxter een bijl brengen om de
kelderdeur in te slaan.

Het duurde drie minuten, voordat de deur toegaf.

Plotseling staakten de agenten hun werk. [6]

„Inspecteur, hebt ge niets gehoord?”

Inderdaad!

Ook Baxter had daar beneden een schot hooren vallen.

„Er is geschoten!” fluisterde hij.

Met vereende krachten werd nu de deur opengemaakt en toen klonk
den mannen een rochelende gil tegen. Daarna was alles stil.

Baxter bleef een oogenblik staan.

„Daar beneden is het niet in den haak!” mompelde hij. Ook de

agenten waren bleek om den neus geworden. Zij hadden allen het
reutelen van een stervende gehoord, die op gewelddadige wijze om
het leven was gebracht.

De Bankdirecteur, die bij de agenten stond, wischte zich het klamme

zweet van het voorhoofd en fluisterde:

„Daar is — — daar is — — een misdaad — — — gepleegd!”

„Vooruit! Wij moeten het fijne van de zaak weten!” beval Baxter en
sprong de trap af, gevolgd door zijn mannen.

Toen de electrische lampen der agenten de kelderruimte verlichtten,

zagen zij in het midden een doode liggen. De Bankdirecteur stiet een
kreet uit en tuimelde als ’t ware vooruit.

„Wat—wat—is dat? Maar dat is—dat is—heksenwerk!”

Baxter was naast den doode neergeknield.

Het was Raffles.

Naast hem lag een groote bloedplas. De pelsjas dreef in het roode
vocht. Raffles’ handen en zijn gelaat waren met bloed bevlekt en men
zag duidelijk op de plaats, waar het haar was vastgekleefd, dat een
kogel in het hoofd was gedrongen.

Hier was geen vergissing mogelijk. Inspecteur Baxter lichtte den

doode in het gelaat.
„Het is Raffles!” sprak hij.

„Wel inspecteur, het is Raffles,” echo-den de agenten hem na.

Het was inderdaad de Groote Onbekende. Voor zoover men het door
het bloed kon onderscheiden, was zijn gelaat doodsbleek. De lippen
waren vastgesloten, evenals de oogen, die diep in hunne kassen
waren teruggezonken.

Inspecteur Baxter keek om zich heen.

Toen nam hij langzaam de uniformpet af en zei:

„God zij zijn arme zondige ziel genadig!”

„Amen” sprak een der agenten.

Toen voegde hij er bij:

„Daar ligt nog iemand, inspecteur!”

Als een tijger sprong Baxter op het tweede lijk toe.

Inderdaad. Hier lag nog iemand. Iemand, wiens gelaat en lichaam

afschuwelijk verminkt was. Zeker twintig messteken hadden hem
getroffen. Hij lag in een hoek en inspecteur Baxter onderzocht of
geen stukje papier eenige aanwijzing zou kunnen geven.

De directeur der Bank was sprakeloos, maar na eenigen tijd hijgde hij
met moeite:

„Ge moet dadelijk een scherp onderzoek instellen, inspecteur. Dat is

vreeselijk! Afschuwelijk! Wat moet er nu gebeuren?”

Baxter schudde het hoofd.

„Geef ons een kamer, directeur, waar wij de lijken zoolang kunnen
bergen tot den avond. Ik zal ze dan laten weghalen!”

Een der agenten had intusschen een dokter gehaald. Deze boog zich
even over den doode, die door messteken verwond was en zei toen:

„Afgeloopen!”

Toen keek hij naar Raffles en zei:

„Ook gedaan! Een mooie geschiedenis! Wat is hier feitelijk

voorgevallen?”

„Als ik dat wist, dokter, gaf ik tien jaren van mijn leven!” zei de
wanhopige politie-inspecteur. „Zoo iets heb ik nog nooit bijgewoond!
De duivel in eigen persoon is hier in het spel! Maar natuurlijk—Raffles
is er ook weer bij!” [7]

Nogmaals doorzocht hij den kelder—wederom schudde hij het hoofd.

„Niets—heelemaal niets!”

Hier waren twee misdaden begaan, waarbij het menschelijke

verstand stil stond.

Met behulp der agenten werden nu de beide lijken naar een kamer
gebracht, die de Bankdirecteur te zijner beschikking had. Een der
mannen bleef de wacht houden, tot de lijken zouden worden gehaald

Des avonds deelden alle Londensche bladen het opzienbarende

bericht mede, dat Raffles, de Groote Onbekende, dood was.

Alleen zij, die tot lord Lister in onaangename verhouding hadden

gestaan, juichten over dat bericht. Maar zij, die veel aan zijn groote
goedheid hadden te danken, wijdden eenige tranen aan zijn
nagedachtenis. [8]
[Inhoud]
TWEEDE HOOFDSTUK.
 DE GROOTE ONBEKENDE IS ONSTERFELIJK.
Daar lag Raffles nu op een houten bank in een achterkamer.

De tijd verstreek, de klok wees tien minuten vóór vieren, waarop de

Bank werd gesloten voor het publiek.

De agent, die de wacht hield, liep ongeduldig heen en weer.

Plotseling, toen hij zich weer omdraaide, bleef hij als vastgenageld
staan. Hij opende den mond om te schreeuwen, zijn haren rezen ten
berge, zijn oogen puilden uit hun kassen en zoo bleef hij een paar
seconden onbewegelijk staan.

Een der beide dooden had zich bewogen. Het was Raffles. De agent
wilde het eerst niet gelooven. Hij keek nog eens scherper toe en—ja
—daar bewoog Raffles zich alweer!

Hij leunde met zijn elleboog op de bank, waarop hij lag en richtte
zich halverwege op. En zijn groote, glanzende oogen, die oogen,
waarvoor allen zoo bang waren, omdat er een bovennatuurlijke
kracht van uitstraalde, zij richtten zich groot en doordringend op den
agent.

Dat was te veel voor den politieman van Scotland Yard. Hij stiet een
luiden schreeuw uit en rende weg.

Raffles lachte—lachte zóó luid, dat het schalde door het vertrek.

Langzaam stond lord Lister op en liep een paar keer de kamer op en

neer, om weer wat beweging te krijgen in zijn stijve ledematen. Het
bloed was hem verstijfd en vloeide nog maar traag door zijn aderen.
Eindelijk was hij weer wat op krachten gekomen.

Hij richtte zich hoog op, opende de deur en trad naar buiten.

Het was leeg in de gang. Het publiek was heengegaan en slechts

enkele beambten waren nog aanwezig. In de groote zaal was alleen
nog de eerste boekhouder, die dien dag de aanhouding van Raffles
had bewerkstelligd.

Hij zat over zijn werk gebogen, toen plotseling een der vleugeldeuren
openging en een met bloed bevlekt lijk binnentrad.

„Wel, zijt ge nog aan den arbeid?” vroeg Raffles met een grafstem.

Bij de eerste woorden had de boekhouder van zijn werk opgekeken.

Hij keek als een gek en schreeuwde toen uit:

„Om ’s hemels wil—wie zijt ge?”

„Ik? Ik ben Raffles!”

„Raffles? Maar ge zijt immers dood?”

„Wel! Nu leef ik weer!”

„Maar dat kan niet!” gilde de boekhouder.

„En toch is het zoo, waarde heer! Neen, neen! Blijf kalm zitten! Doe
geen moeite! Ik zal wel een plaatsje vinden! Er is ruimte genoeg in
deze groote zaal! Hoeveel hebt ge vandaag ontvangen?” [9]

„Niets! Heelemaal niets!” brulde de doodsbenauwde man.

„Dat is al een heel klein beetje voor een filiaal van de Londensche en
de Zuidwest Bank!”
Toen ging hij achter een lessenaar, deed een lade open met een der
sleutels van den directeur en keek erin.

„Alle „drommels”! Honderd—duizend—vijfduizend—tienduizend—

veertigduizend pond!—Dat is een heel aardig bedrag, mister! Ik denk,
dat de Bank niet kijkt op een twintigduizend pond!”

Met deze woorden nam Raffles 20,000 pond uit de lade, stak ze in
den zak en zei:

„’t Is nu vier uur! Vóór vijf uur moogt ge niet kikken, begrepen?”

De man bleef stom.

„Hebt ge mij verstaan?” donderde Raffles. „Een uur lang moogt ge

niet kikken. Dan kunt ge zoo hard schreeuwen als ge maar wilt!”

De boekhouder knikte.

Inderdaad, het was hem onmogelijk, eenig geluid voort te brengen!

Raffles verliet de groote zaal.

Hij liep de gang door en hoorde eensklaps twee stemmen.

Hij sloeg er niet de minste acht op, toen hem de woorden in het oor
klonken:

„De diamanten van den hertog van Norfolk.”

Hij bleef nu staan en luisterde met het oor tegen de deur geleund,
waarachter vandaan het geluid kwam.

„Ik zal de bewaking van de diamanten van den hertog op mij

nemen,” hoorde lord Lister zeggen. „Waar worden ze heengebracht?”
„Naar het groote tentoonstellingsgebouw in Regentstreet. Ge moet ze
vannacht halen en morgen weer terug brengen!”

„All right!”

Het was nu een poosje stil.

Lord Lister dacht na. Toen, nadat hij tien seconden had gepeinsd, liep
hij de gang verder door, ging bij een der fonteintjes, die hier en daar
voor het personeel waren aangebracht, het bloed van zijn gelaat
wasschen en verliet het Bankgebouw, zonder verder door iemand te
worden lastig gevallen.

Een half uur later betrad hij een van zijn woningen. Deze lag in St.
James Street en bestond uit een apartement van zes kamers.

Binnen werd een deur opengedaan en Charly Brand keek de gang in.

„Ben jij het?”

„Zooals je ziet!”

„Lieve tijd, wat heb ik een angsten om je uitgestaan!”

„Ik om jou niet minder, beste Charly!”

Deze keek Raffles eens van ter zijde aan en zei toen:

„Wat zie je bleek, John! Scheelt je wat?”

„Neen, wat zou mij schelen, kerel? Ik heb daar juist iets beleefd, wat
je niet in je kouwe kleeren gaat zitten!”

„Verklaar je toch wat nader, John! Vertel me toch eens, hoe alle
kranten je doodstijding konden brengen? Wil je het lezen?”
„Natuurlijk, my boy! Dat interesseert mij buitengewoon!”

Charly Brand haalde de Times en reikte ze zijn vriend.

Deze las:

„Londen haalt verruimd adem! Raffles is dood!

„De groote Onbekende, genaamd Raffles, heeft vandaag in het elfde

bijkantoor van de Londensche en Zuidwest Bank een plotselingen
dood gevonden! Toen de beambten, die hem vervolgden, in den
kelder drongen, waarheen hij gevlucht was, vonden ze zijn lijk! Een
schotwonde aan het hoofd bewees, hoe Raffles aan zijn eind was
gekomen. Het meest raadselachtige van deze geschiedenis is, dat
men nergens het wapen heeft gevonden, waarmee Raffles is
doodgeschoten. Vlak bij het lijk van Raffles lag nog een ander lijk;
[10]dat van een tot nog toe onbekend gebleven persoon. Ook van den
moordenaar is tot nog toe geen spoor ontdekt.”

„Uitstekend!” fluisterde Raffles.

„Is het allemaal zoo gebeurd, zooals het hier staat?” vroeg Charly
Brand.

„Precies zoo!”

„Maar men heeft je toch onderzocht? Hoe kon je je dan dood

houden? Maar nu zie ik ook dat je gewond bent! Boven je
rechterslaap zit je haar vol bloed!”

Raffles stond op, ging naar den spiegel, wiesch de wonde uit, die hij
inderdaad op deze plek had, plakte er een groote pleister op en ging
weer zitten.

„Wie heeft je verwond, John?”