Introduction

In May of 1892, the Cuban exile Nestor Ponce de León (1837–99) delivered a lecture titled “Los primeros poetas de Cuba” (1892, 385) (The First Cuban Poets) at a meeting of the Sociedad de Literatura Hispano-Americana in New York City. Despite the name of the society and the ostensible focus of Ponce de León’s talk, this meeting was not simply a gathering of friends and visiting authors from Latin America who found themselves in the vicinity of New York and who happened to love Cuban literature and the wider culture of belle lettres in the Americas. Ponce de León was surrounded by fellow exiles planning revolution. In the audience sat one of the founders and a former president of the Sociedad, José Martí (1853–95), who had stepped down from leading the New York literary society in order to organize the Partido Revolucionario Cubano. As was so often the case among nineteenth-century Latina/o intellectuals (and their Latin American counterparts), literary and political practices were mutually informing and hard to separate into neat categories of their own....