Alfonso Reyes y el Brasil (review)

Alfonso Reyes y el Brasil. By FRED P. ELLISON. Mexico City: CONACULTA, 2000. Notes. Bibliography. 267 pp. Paper.

There is no better way to ease into the Mexican mind than to read Alfonso Reyes's Obras completas, a processual feast of chaos theory and quantum creation. Along with Antonio Caso and José Vasconcelos, Reyes formed part of the Ateneo de la Juventud, which between l906 and l914 tilted Mexico away from an older, restrictive Positivism toward a more open, humanistic frame of reference. Reyes had emerged as a poet and prose writer by l913, when he went into exile in France. This is where Fred P. Ellison, Professor Emeritus of Spanish and Portuguese and an early mover in Brazilian Studies, picks him up in this finely researched and compelling book. From Paris Reyes migrated to Madrid, where Ortega y Gasset asked him to write a column in El Sol on historical geography. Later he became head of the Mexican legations in Madrid and Paris and after a depressing stint as ambassador to Argentina, he was appointed to the top diplomatic post in Brazil in 1930.

Reyes knew Brazilian civilization was coming of age. In Paris he had seen the exhibition of avant-garde painter Tarsila do Amaral in l926, and the Hispanic publishing event of 1925 was José Vasconcelos's La raza cósmica, based in part on the Mexican intellectual's pathbreaking trip to Brazil in 1922 and his futuristic concept of miscegenation and cultural hybridity. In the 1920s Mexican-Brazilian relations had become severely strained, primarily on account of postrevolutionary anticlericalism. Reyes (a nonbeliever) had dealt with the Catholic Right in France, and the Mexican government wanted him to do the same in Brazil. Once there he faced the revolution of 1930, giving refuge to participants on both sides, after collecting their revolvers.

In the polarized decade of the thirties "americanismo," in one form or another, was the most common thread among Latin Americans, and Reyes's Rio circle included Renato Almeida, Alceu Amoroso Lima, Manuel Bandeira, Emiliano di Cavalcanti, Ronald de Carvalho, Ribeiro Cuoto, Gilberto Freyre, Carlos Lacerda, and Cecília Meireles. The affable, affirming Reyes, Ellison explains, became the prototype of a new Latin American, the Cordial Person, a concept Sérgio Buarque de Holanda elaborated in Raízes do Brasil (1976).

Reyes's creative output in Brazil ranged from a natural history of the street he lived on to an account of a Colombian-Peruvian border dispute. Ellison's book suggests that Reyes's writings are a goldmine for historians in the way he ferrets out themes, contexts, connections, peripheral meanings, and alternative paths. The real significance of Ellison's study is that it points to the one remaining frontier in Mexicanist historiography—the history of interiority. Ellison makes conceptual and narrative use of interviews and Reyes's correspondence and unpublished diary. He does not indicate whether or not he consulted the Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores (SRE) archive. He might have placed his study in Reyes's larger "americanería andante," more fully understood with the presence of Arciniegas and Borges. This book is profitably read against Misión diplomática, II: Alfonso Reyes (2001).

Reyes, the universalist Mexican, was a success in universalist Brazil and helped put Brazil on the Mexican cognitive map. In Brazil he operated in a global/local mode and envisioned a Latin America with more open borders. Diplomatically, he improved Mexico-Brazil relations and opened Brazil to Mexican oil. Literarily, his writings matched the cosmic Brazilian culture from the early chronicles to the aural spaces of Villa-Lobos. Before leaving Brazil in 1936 he placed a small statue of Xochipilli in the Jardim Botânico, his favorite spot in Rio de Janeiro. Upon his departure, President Vargas bade him farewell on the radio. He was Brazilianized, but, as he wrote to his friend Carlos Pellicer, "Al fin somos mexicanos: O ruinas o monumentos" (p. 29). Fortunately, as Ellison demonstrates, Reyes was neither...