When Mexican Poets Come to Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

The Brazilian poems of Carlos Pellicer and the Mexican poems of Ronald de Carvalho marked the beginning of a more sustained tradition of travel literature within Latin America. In these cases Latin Americans took advantage of an increase in contacts through the establishments of embassies and consulates and initiatives of cultural diplomacy to establish an important, if overlooked, line of contact between them. It only helped that several important Latin Americans worked in diplomacy and the consummate example of the multiple possibilities of such a situation is Alfonso Reyes’s large literary output in Brazil, ranging from essays such as “Mexico en una nuez” to some of his best poems and short stories and even the detailed, shrewd political analyses in his diplomatic reports.1 This production is considered eccentric only because it does not take place in Paris, the quintessential meeting place for Latin Americans in the knowledge or at least curious about cultures or languages relegated to the margins of the so-called World Republic of Letters.