Gorica Majstorovic is As-sistant Professor of Spanish at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. Her areas of expertise include late nineteenth and twenti-eth-century Latin American literature, particularly in the context of migration and national identity. Her publications have appeared in Latin American Research Review, Profemina, and her current book manuscript is entitled Cosmopolitanism and the Nation in Argentine Literature (1920-1940): Reading the Tower of Babel and Babylon Tropes.

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 9, 2005Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 9, 2005Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

An American Place:Victoria Ocampo’s Editorial Politics, the Foundation of Sur, Sur, Surand Hemispheric Alliances

In 1927, Argentine painter Xul Solar paints “Otro horóscopo Victoria (Ocampo).” This canvas depicts four encircled spaces. The fi rst space depicts a shape

that resembles the map of South America. The second space frames a face with the Argentine fl ag coming out of it. The third space contains another face, which overlaps the previous one. The fourth space resembles a profi le, next to which is written “Victoria.” I invoke Solar’s painting at the beginning of this essay for it visually prefi gures the merging of Argentine and continental perspectives that will be announced as programmatic in the fi rst issue of Victoria Ocampo’s literary journal. For Ocampo and Solar, as well as for Jorge Luis Borges’s early works, national criollismo(manifested in Solar’s painting through the representation of the Argentine fl ag) and internationalism are not opposed notions. In fact, they merge in the paradoxical union to which Beatriz Sarlo has referred as “national universal-ism” (Argentinaism” (Argentinaism” ( ).

At the beginning of 1931, three years after Solar’s painting was made, Victoria Ocampo founded Sur, a lite-rary journal that lasted 45 years and ran for 340 issues. It published Spanish American works and disseminated for-eign texts in translation throughout Latin America and the world. Translation, in fact, was one of Ocampo’s lifelong interests, to such a degree that Beatriz Sarlo has referred to the whole production of Ocampo’s literary magazine Sur as Sur as Sur“a translation machine” (La máquina 93–195). Translation is a survival of the living after and beyond the life of the original text, as Walter Benjamin writes in his 1926 seminal

Gorica Majstorovic

essay on the task of a translator. It is to be understood, Bella Brodzki points out, “not as an extension of life but as an infusion, a transfusion, of otherness” (207).

Since the foundation of Sur, Victo-ria Ocampo was not only the main agent of this kind of “transfusion” into Latin America, but also a constructor of the cos-mopolitan “bridge” between the Argentine literary production and that of the world. Sur greatly informed Latin American cul-Sur greatly informed Latin American cul-Surtural circuits about literatura universal, as literatura universal, as literatura universalworld literature is called in Spanish. The most celebrated Latin American writers of the so-called “Boom” unanimously recog-nize that their key literary infl uences were those they had read about fi rst in the pages of Sur. Julio Cortázar thus reads Sur as a Sur as a Sursignifi cant component of the patriotism in one of his Argentine characters. That one country’s cultural patriotism could so signifi cantly rely on a literary magazine is not an insignifi cant accomplishment on Victoria Ocampo’s part. In the story “Lucas, su patriotismo,” Cortázar recalls “la lectura de Sur en los años dulcemente ingenuos” (232). Despite the comment’s slightly ironic connotations, it clearly ac-knowledges Sur’s capital importance for the intellectual formation of Cortázar’s generation of writers. No other literary journal in Spanish America, not even Vuelta, edited in Mexico by Octavio Paz, has ever reached the scope of infl uence Surhad generated. Paz himself acknowledged in 1962 that what Ocampo accomplished had never before been achieved in Latin America (279–80).

The preparations for the launch-ing of Sur consumed a number of years. Sur consumed a number of years. SurThroughout this period, Ocampo per-sistently consulted fellow intellectuals in Europe and North America about the

risks involved in publishing a new literary journal. The feedback she received was mostly supportive, but getting involved in publishing was a courageous project for a woman of her time and social class. At the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s, not surprisingly, Ocampo’s own fa-ther was arguably the strongest opponent to her project. When she informed him of her plans to use the family’s economic means to publish the journal, he replied sternly: “Estás abocada a la catástrofe, a la ruina” (Ayerza de Castilho 132).1

Despite her father’s objections, Ocampo decided to persevere and launch Sur. At its foundational moment, however, Ocampo’s otherwise wide cosmopolitan reaching out to the world (she had written on the Tower of Babel trope and on Dante) was more modest in scope. At the begin-ning of the 1930s, it was the ideals of a continental union—represented visually in Solar’s painting—together with the desire to forge ties with North American culture that provided the main inspiration for the fi rst issue of Sur.

In 1929, Ocampo visited the United States for the fi rst time. There she engaged in conversations with the North American writer Waldo Frank, whom she had met in Buenos Aires. Frank was already im-mersed in making plans for publishing a new literary journal with another Argen-tine intellectual, Samuel Glusberg. John King points out that Frank and Glusberg immediately “began discussing a maga-zine to be called ‘Nuestra América,’ which would have a Pan-American, continental perspective” (42).2 Glusberg, who later in his literary career adopted the pseud-onym Enrique Espinoza, had published the Spanish translation of Waldo Frank’s Our America.3 Glusberg also sponsored

66 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

Waldo Frank’s lectures in Buenos Aires (1929–1930). These were the lectures that had provided Ocampo with the opportu-nity to meet Frank, who then subsequently offered much needed support for the cre-ation of Sur. However, Ocampo was not interested at all in working with Glusberg “whom she had found ideologically and socially unacceptable” (qtd. in King 42).

Despite the diffi culties, the journal was launched. Following Glusberg’s and Frank’s initial idea for Nuestra América, Ocampo initiated a similar quest for an “America of secret treasures.” This quest was to be at the core of the fi rst four issues of her journal. She expressed the neces-sity for such a quest in a letter to Frank. In homage to the North American writer, Ocampo wrote Frank a letter. She then published this letter as the opening essay of Sur. This gesture of conversion—of private affairs into public matters—exem-plifi es a whole set of Ocampo’s personal alliances turned public. If cosmopolitan-ism is defi ned as reaching out to the world, then Ocampo’s version of it is certainly a personal enterprise, aggrandized as a set of affairs of communal, if not of national and continental, importance. It is in the same vein that Waldo Frank writes his 1919 book Our America to friends. In doing so, Our America to friends. In doing so, Our Americahe writes it for himself and for America: “So it is, my friends, that writing this book for France, I write it for America” (4–5). He goes on to explain America, fi rst to a French reading public and then to an American audience. In a 1929 Spanish translation, he addresses a South Ameri-can public as well. Frank’s defi nition of America reads as follows:

America is a turmoiled giant who cannot speak. The giant’s eyes wander about the clouds: his feet

are sunk in the quicksands of racial and material passion. One hand grasps the mountains, and the other falls bruised and limp upon the lowlands of the world. His need is great, and what moves across his eyes is universal. But his tongue is tied [...]. The problem is not to force America to speech [...]. The problem is rather to lift America into self-knowledge that shall be luminous so that she may shine, vibrant so that she may be articulate. (4-5)

Frank’s thoughts, not different from those of many other intellectuals of the time, both Latin American and foreign, resonate with what Spivak calls “the imperialist project which had to assume that the earth that is territorialized was in fact previously uninscribed” (1). This is not to say that Waldo Frank, a renowned leftist, exempli-fi es an imperialist ideology in this passage. However, it is worth pointing out the way in which the gender of Frank’s America undergoes a signifi cant shift. When Frank fi rst envisions America as a giant, he por-trays it as male: it is a giant and therefore masculine, although mute. Subsequently, Frank’s America does not appear as a male giant but rather as a feminized body in need of major improvements. This feminized America can only become ar-ticulate by feeding her giant mouth with words of interpretation. And this process of “feeding” can only be achieved on the condition that the intellectuals of Frank’s time assume the responsibility to follow his prophecy.

Victoria Ocampo is one of the fi rst South American intellectuals to respond to Frank’s prophetic call. The impact of Frank’s proposal on Ocampo reads from the fi rst pages of Sur:

Gorica Majstorovic 67

Ha querido usted explicar a sus amigos por qué es América un gigante inquieto pero todavía sin palabras, y ha escrito un libro. Surtestimonia su admiración por esa obra, mi absoluta adhesión a lo que la inspiró [...]. Cada uno, según las fuerzas respectivas, nos pondremos a la búsqueda de América, de esa América del oculto tesoro. (1-4)

Frank’s passage and his crucial infl uence on Ocampo to start publishing an Ameri-canist literary journal are in many ways paradigmatic of other intellectual efforts of the time to establish hemispheric alli-ances. Sur is founded in 1931, the year that Sur is founded in 1931, the year that Surthe celebration of the Pan-American Day takes place throughout the Americas.

Following Ocampo’s opening letter to Waldo Frank, the fi rst issue of Sur contains Sur contains SurFrank’s own essay, “La selva,” about his travels in Brazil. Jules Supervielle’s essay “Notas de viaje a Ouro Preto” is also set in Brazil. The fi rst issue is illustrated with the photographs of Tierra del Fuego, the Cata-ratas de Iguazú, El Tupungato, “Paisaje de las Pampas,” and “Paisaje de Brasil,” among others. The photographs of “Inscripciones de carros” in Buenos Aires accompany Borges’ note “Séneca en las orillas.” This note is a part of Borges’ 1930 book on the turn-of-the-century Argentine poet Evaristo Carriego. Borges had read Evaristo Carriego’s poems while he lived in Geneva (1914-1918). Inter-estingly, during that time, Joyce and Lenin (as Piglia remarks the interdependency between the aesthetic and the ideological) walked the same streets. Carriego would remain a strong infl uence on Borges’s works in the 1920s.

The American photographs included in the fi rst four issues of Sur are of a Sur are of a Surparadoxical nature in that they incorporate both acts of approximation and of separa-

tion. While their incorporation into the pages of Sur claims an approximation to Sur claims an approximation to Surthe “authenticity” of American identity through the portrayal of the indigenous, the ideological position between those who select the photographs and those being photographed, is, in fact, further separated. Hence, the photographic gaze and its conditioning in the fi rst issues of Sur underscore a parallel distance to that Sur underscore a parallel distance to that Surwhich foreign travelers to America ex-perienced at the time. Sur’s editors thus perpetuate an ideological distance they themselves were often subjected to, as Alfonso Reyes remarked, in the course of their own travel through Europe (119).

The third essay in the journal’s fi rst issue, “Carta a unos desconocidos,” be-longs to the French writer, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. In contrast to other writer/travel-ers of the journal’s fi rst issue, he declares himself an anti-traveler. In his letter to the desconocidos of South America, La Rochelle desconocidos of South America, La Rochelle desconocidosfeels that he does not have to travel since everyone comes to Paris, where his own writing takes place. And yet, La Rochelle engages in an imaginary visit to the south of the South American continent. La Rochelle’s essay could thus be positioned within, as Clifford put it, the writing of “traveling in dwelling” (99). Ricardo Güiraldes’s text “De un epistolario,” in a letter dated April 22, 1921, contains a note indicating that Xaimaca (his travel-Xaimaca (his travel-Xaimacaogue to Jamaica) is almost fi nished. “De un epistolario” also announces that Don Segundo Sombra, a celebrated novel that Güiraldes would publish in 1926, “va a entrar en período de actividad” (Sur 119).Sur 119).Sur

Waldo Frank is certainly not alone in his attempt to articulate America. His effort is, in fact, only a part of a series of texts invested in feeding “the giant’s mouth” with words of interpretation.

68 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

Oswald Spengler’s 1917 Th e Fall of the Occident is the fi rst book that turns to America as a continent of salvation from the European malaise after World War I. Keyserling follows this ideological line of thought in his essay “Perspectivas sud-americanas.”4 Ocampo chooses it as the opening essay of the second issue of Sur. Keyserling’s larger work on the subject, Meditaciones sudamericanas, published in 1932 and soon thereafter translated into Spanish, is yet one more example of ideo-logical and rhetorical strategies that Carlos

Alonso has called “master narratives of futurity” (8). Writing about America as “the narrative of newness” in the period of the Spanish imperial expansion, Alonso later replaced it by “a narrative paradigm in which America occupied a position of futurity vis-à-vis the Old World” (8). The rhetorical strategies being employed thus created conditions for a permanent exoticization of the New World: “Safely enclosed in an always postponed future,” Carlos Alonso points out, “America could become the object of a ceaselessly regen-erating discourse of mystification and perpetual promise” (8).

The perpetual promise of America is not only read as mute and inarticulate, as in Frank’s view, but also as blind, as is stated in Keyserling’s observations. Eduardo Mallea in his 1935 essay “Conocimiento y expresión de la Argentina” shares Frank’s interpretation in that his main objection to Keyserling is precisely “hacer de un conti-nente mudo un continente ciego” (Mallea 70). Furthermore, Mallea’s theory of an autochthonous destiny for the New World fi ts Waldo Frank’s view of the Americas as a new continent that should not imitate the respective Anglo-Saxon or Hispanic-Mediterranean cultures. Mallea’s “Co-

nocimiento y expresión de la Argentina” was one of the fi rst works to be published by Sur. Victoria Ocampo also founded a publishing house with the same name as her journal: Sur. She initiated this project following fellow editor Ortega y Gasset’s advice on advancing fi nancial prosperity for the journal through book publishing.

Sur’s second issue contains three poems by the American poet of the Har-lem Renaissance, Langston Hughes. The poems are translated into Spanish by Jorge Luis Borges and published bilingually. Langston Hughes’s poem “I, too” reads as follows:

I, too, sing America.I am the darker brotherThey send me to eat in the kitchenWhen company comes.But I laughAnd eat wellAnd grow strong.Tomorrow I’ll eat at the tableWhen company comes.Nobody’ll dareSay to me“Eat in the kitchen”Then.Besides they’ll see how beautiful I amAnd be ashamed—I, too, am America. (164)

The publication of Hughes’s poems in Suris also paradigmatic—in its expression of claims of inclusion—into both the politics of representation and the politics of cultur-al alliances. Unlike Langston Hughes and his position in North American dominant literary circles, Sur’s collaborators were by no means “subaltern” in relationship to the Argentine national milieu, but they were indeed so with regard to European culture.

Gorica Majstorovic 69

As many European and other foreign writers visited Argentina in the fi rst half of the twentieth century, Latin American writers, too, continuously traveled to Europe and to other parts of the world. While abroad and upon their return, their interconnected textual histories of travel and displacement engage in the making of what James Clifford has termed “traveling cultures” (97). Twentieth-century ethnog-raphy and, by extension, its literature, “has become increasingly wary of certain localizing strategies in the construction and representation of cultures” (Clifford 97). Alfonso Reyes’s essay published in the second issue of Sur reacts precisely to Sur reacts precisely to Surthese “localizing strategies” by examin-ing the permanent exoticization of Latin American writers in Paris. In this essay, Reyes objects to the fact that in Paris and in other parts of Western Europe “el verdadero problema de la literatura hispa-noamericana […] se reducía a esto: allá sólo piden al hispanoamericano que sea pintoresco y exótico” (Sur 150).Sur 150).Sur 5

Victoria Ocampo’s essay “La aven-tura del mueble” recounts yet another travel experience: her visit to New York and the invitation to Stieglitz’s Manhat-tan apartment. On the apartment’s door is written “An American place.” Ocampo is eager here to reunite her vision of the hemispheric cultural alliances with the pronounced “Americanness” that is in-scribed on the celebrated photographer’s door. Clifford’s examination of “intercon-nected cosmopolitanisms” is pertinent here in the light of these bonding and celebratory tendencies between South and North America that, following Clifford’s analysis, may be called interconnected Americanisms. The Mexican review Cuadernos Americanos grew out of a similar Cuadernos Americanos grew out of a similar Cuadernos Americanos

spirit of Americanism, but unlike Sur’s later, wider set of cosmopolitan alliances, Cuadernos Americanos remained more fo-Cuadernos Americanos remained more fo-Cuadernos Americanoscused on Latin America.

Unlike the straightforward an-nouncement of Americanness inscribed on the door of Stieglitz’s apartment, Ocampo’s later declarations of American-ness are based on an inherent paradox. In one instance, she conveys this paradox in the following terms:

Hombres y mujeres que sufrimos del destierro de América porque llevamos todavía en nosotros Europa, y que sufrimos del ahogo de Europa porque llevamos ya en nosotros América. Desterrados de Europa en América; desterrados de América en Europa. (Testimo-nios 56)nios 56)nios

The ambivalence of Ocampo’s standpoint is clearly undermined by class privilege, and in her specifi c case, that of belonging to a family of Argentina’s national found-ers. In the families of her social status, French was the language of daily com-munication. It is in this light that Ocampo announces her “homecoming” to Spanish and to Latin America, in an essay titled “Palabras francesas.” This essay was fi rst published in Sur, in which a red arrow on the magazine’s cover page pointed directly toward the South of the two con-tinents. Europe and America converge again (if uncomfortably) in this essay as they embody the paradox of American/European exile announced in Ocampo’s text on her visit to Stieglitz’s apartment. Furthermore, the exile she writes about is confounded on two levels. On the one hand, the exile from Europe refers to both her Spanish colonial and thus criollo ances-

70 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

try (as opposed to the newly arrived poor European immigrants to Argentina), and to her French upbringing, common in her social class. On the other, the American exile implies objections to the exoticiza-tion of Latin Americans in Europe in the same vein as expressed in Alfonso Reyes’s essay. But this type of exile also resonates with Ocampo’s class and ethnicity mark-ers that, in contrast to those of American indigenous populations, do not possess the same levels of desired “authenticity.”

As we have seen in the passage on the ideological decoding of American photographs in the fi rst issues of Sur, even though Latin American writers in many instances undergo an exoticization in Europe, they in turn apply the same exoti-cizing strategies to the indigenous peoples of America. One aspect of Ocampo’s American exile may thus refer to this very distance a person of her social class would perceive with regard to the indigenous and therefore more “authentic” peoples. It seemed as if someone of her social class had no exit but to be exiled from America “back to” Europe. This was to become one of Ocampo’s constant preoc-cupations throughout the ten volumes of her Testimonios.

The fi rst of Ocampo’s Testimoniosappears in 1935. It is published by Revista de occidente, a prestigious journal edited in Madrid by the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset. In Testimonios: 1920–1934,Ocampo’s essay “Palabras francesas,” written in 1931 and included in the third issue of Sur precedes “Babel,” which was Sur precedes “Babel,” which was Surwritten much earlier, in 1920. Ocampo’s strategic transposition of texts, with “Babel” and “Palabras francesas” play-ing a signifi cant part in this process, is especially important in order to highlight

ideological strategies through which this transposition inscribes itself, and in do-ing so, infl ects Americanism and other universalist tendencies of the time.

“Palabras francesas” is an essayistic account of the curious mix of Ocampo’s French upbringing and her American-ism. Here the Argentine writer and editor fears that if she manages to extract all the French words from her memory, she would also extract her most beloved im-ages, those that are the most authentic and the most American that she possesses (33). Furthermore, she highlights her estrange-ment with Spanish while comparing her use of this language in Argentina to that of foreign travelers, who resort to it at railway stations or in hotels.

The American images in Ocampo are thus fi rst born in a foreign language: French. But it is only through the use of her transitory Spanish that Ocampo will be allowed to trespass into the spheres of American “authenticity.” Moreover, this trespassing gesture is signifi cantly rebellious, as writing in French was both expected of and socially acceptable for a woman of her time and social status will-ing to write in Argentina. Paul Groussac, a French intellectual and the director of the Argentine National Library at the time, advised Ocampo to write in Spanish, and only on personal matters. Groussac’s ad-vice to Ocampo is exemplary not only of the underestimation that a Latin American writer (especially a woman) was subjected to, but also of the male hegemony involved in every cultural matter of the period.

Another example of Ocampo’s tres-passing gesture from writing in French to writing in Spanish, manifested later in the translation practices of Sur, can be found in the account of her fi rst en-

Gorica Majstorovic 71

counter with Ortega y Gasset: “Sólo en 1916, cuando el primer viaje de Ortega, después de haber conversado largamente con él, advertí mi tontería [...]. Pero este descubrimiento llegaba demasiado tarde. Hacía ya mucho tiempo que era prisionera del francés” (19). A captive of French, she only expresses repentance and experiences release when she fi rst encounters Ortega y Gasset’s use of Spanish. Ocampo thus ascribes the need to explain herself for her Americanness, and her choice of lan-guage, to her social class.

Although inter-American alliances stopped being at the forefront of Ocam-po’s journal, they continued to provide provocative perspectives on the political and aesthetic agenda in the 1930s and es-pecially in the 1940s. In fact, Sur returned Sur returned Surto Americanism once again, although now within a context of the pressing political issues during World War II. In issue 86, the editors raised a debate around the question: “¿Tienen las Américas una historia común?” The following issue, published in December 1941, came out in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack. In that issue, titled “Guerra en América,” Ocampo and her editorial board declared their support for the United States and for its concept of Pan-Americanism. In the spirit of antifascism, which had been Sur’s forceful orientation throughout the 1930s, Ocampo announced from the pages of Sur’s issue 87: “América, por primera vez desde que la soñó Bolívar, empieza a sentirse indivisible, desde el estrecho de Behring hasta el Cabo de Hornos” (7-9). John King points out that “at a time when Sur discovered hemispheric solidarity, Sur discovered hemispheric solidarity, Surthe geopolitical planners in the Argentine army feared Brazilian aggression in the Southern hemisphere” (107).6 The editors

of Sur reacted to this threat by publishing Sur reacted to this threat by publishing Sur“a speech by Vargas on Brazil’s entry into the Second World War exhorting the American continent to stand together against a common threat” (King 107).

As both an artistic and ideological tendency of the time, Americanism con-tinued its active participation in search of new cultural alliances not only for Argen-tine but also for many other Latin Ameri-can intellectuals and artists. In 1934, in neighboring Uruguay, celebrated painter Joaquín Torres-García, upon his return from Europe to Montevideo claims: “Our North is the South. For us there must not be a North, except in opposition to our South” (Bazzano Nelson 72-86).7 This claim is visually represented in Torres-García’s well-known image of the inverted map of South America. Interestingly, Torres-Gar-cía is studied in art history as a representa-tive of universalism. In fact, “universalismo constructivo” is the term he chooses to refer to his art. In another universalist vein (al-though never detached from the “national universal” paradox), Xul Solar, who once walked the streets of Paris dressed in an Argentine fl ag, will later depart from his 1927 Americanism in search of more “universal” approaches.8 From 1939 to 1940, Diego Rivera painted in San Fran-cisco a mural that he calls “Pan-American Unity.”9 Eight years prior, Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s essay “Riverismo” appeared in the second issue of Sur. This essay, which acknowledges Rivera’s growing fame, is accompanied by photographs of Rivera’s murals from the Mexican Sec-retaría de la Educación Pública. Also in 1939, Ocampo co-founded, with Catalan Antonio López Llausás, the Sudamericana publishing house, which was to publish in 1967 Gabriel García Marquez’s Cien años

72 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

de soledad.de soledad.de soledad 10 Shortly after the foundation ofSudamericana, Ocampo left this publish-ing house but she continued publishing books at her own Editorial Sur.11

Although Americanism stopped being at the core of Ocampo’s literary journal, as the main editor at Sur she Sur she Surremained strongly interested in North American literature, selections of which she later had translated into Spanish and incorporated in Sur. The journal also pre-sented critical essays on North American art and literature. Lewis Mumford’s “El arte en los Estados Unidos,” and Gorham Munson’s “La novela norteamericana de post-guerra,” which appeared in the third and fourth issues of the journal, mark the inauguration of this long-lasting interest.

Notes1 Ayerza de Castilho’s book offers an

exhaustive study of the preparations for the publication of Sur.

2 King’s study provided inspiration for this essay in innumerable ways. The only shortcoming of King’s book may arguably be found in its assessment of Sur in the 1960s. Sur in the 1960s. SurIt seems as if King announced a “premature death” of Sur, when, in fact, it continued to be a crucial literary journal in Latin America throughout the 1960s.

3 Soon after the foundation of Sur, Glus-berg (the main editor at the publishing house Babel and one of the founders of SADE, Sociedad Argentina de Escritores) left Argentina for Chile.

4 For a discussion of Keyserling’s confl ic-tive presence in the pages of Sur and of other Sur and of other Suraspects of Americanism, see chapter 4, “La problemática americana” (91-139) in Maria Cristina Parodi Lisi’s El proyecto cultural de la revista ‘Sur.’

5 For a discussion of Alfonso Reyes’s Americanism, see Robert T. Conn’s “Ameri-canismo Andante.”

6 For a discussion of Sur’s special issue in September 1942 entitled “Homenaje a Brasil,” see John King’s Sur (107–10).

7 The quotation from Torres-García’s Universalismo constructivo (2 vols. Buenos Aires: Editorial Poseidón, 1944) comes from Florencia Bazzano Nelson’s article “Joaquín Torres-García and the Tradition of Construc-tive Art.”

8 See Mario H. Gradowczyk’s “El univer-so de Xul Solar.”

9 For an analysis of the political implica-tions of Rivera’s Pan-American mural, see Elizabeth Fuentes Rojas.

10 On Sudamericana’s affiliation with the German editorial group Bertelsmann, see Matilde Sánchez.

11 The name for Sur was initially going to Sur was initially going to Surbe “Nuestra América.” Whose America was it going to be, and whose Sudamericana it was to Sudamericana it was to Sudamericanabecome, are different questions altogether.

Gorica Majstorovic 73

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