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Notes
1 Princess Catherine of the Mosquito Kingdom conceived the photographer Castellón on her wedding night. The bridegroom, Francisco Castellón, president of Nicaragua between 1854 and 1855, married Catherine to cement a political agreement with the Mosquito Kingdom. Yet, there was never a proper wedding, and the narrator describes the sexual encounter as an act of rape.
2 In a previous novel, Margarita, está linda la mar (1998; Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea, 2007), Ramírez demystifies Darío as Nicaragua’s national hero, intertwining Darío’s visit to Nicaragua in 1907 and the assassination of the dictator Anastasio Somoza, in 1956.
3 In his speech after receiving the Cervantes Prize in 2017, Ramírez celebrates Darío as the greatest reformer of modern poetry: “His labor has not ceased and will not cease; those who were once hostile to him today understand that we continue his labor. We should call him ‘the liberator,’ just as Borges described him.”
4 Mostly written from Paris for the Argentinian newspaper La Nación, between 1901 and 1902.
5 On Darío’s Pan-Hispanism as the “lived experience of a cultural linguistic identity” in El canto errante (1907), see Zavala (71).
6 According to Alejandro Mejías-López, Modernismo carried out an “inverted conquest” and challenged the myth of Latin America’s exceptionality within the larger frame of Western modernity.
7 U.S. interventionism in Central America and the Caribbean became more glaring with the implementation of the Dollar Diplomacy and the involvement of the United States in the construction of a trans-isthmian canal in the first decade of the twentieth century. “La cuestión de los canales” (La caravana pasa, 4:79-102) tackles the history of imperial interests on the canal, when Nicaragua was still an option.
8 The chronicles in España contemporánea and Peregrinaciones were originally published in La Nación, between 1898 and 1900.
9 French representations recalled the haunting memory of the Paris Commune, particularly fearful in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, who perceived working-class Paris as an uninhabitable place of degradation. In Harvey’s words, “Fearfully recalling the Reign of Terror, it seems the bourgeoisie built images and representations to justify launching its own preemptive terror against the other Paris” (281).
10 La caravana pasa, 1:69-78.
11 Edward Said’s well-known argument in Orientalism, that the radical othering of the Orient was integral to the violent, civilizing mission of the West, justifies Harvey’s argument regarding the repression that the French state carried out against the working-class revolutionaries after 1848 and 1871. This repression found justification in the moral superiority of the “civilized” against the revolutionaries, depicted as savages (272).
12 La caravana pasa, 2:111-128.
13 La caravana pasa, 1:79-98.
14 Madagascar became a French protectorate in 1890, after France reached an agreement with Britain over their colonial interests in Africa. In the early summer of 1901, the ex-queen was allowed to leave Algiers (where she was sent into exile) and visit France.
15 Darío also resorts to the archive of Orientalist literature through ironic references to Pierre Mille’s exotic descriptions of Madagascar, disclosing the complicities of this type of literature with the colonial enterprise.
16 The conditions of production brought about by technological speed and mechanical reproduction were fundamental determinants for the textual irreducibility (the constant deferral of stable signification) of the Modernista crónica, as Andrew Reynolds writes, “The crónica founds Modernismo as an irreducible sphere; a fragmentary foundation of repetition that complicates yet does not negate the aesthetic production of Modernista writers” (68).
17 In his edition of La caravana pasa, Günther Schmigalle provides substantial information on Darío’s primary sources.
18 In “Ludus,” for instance, Darío tackles the effects of the automobile on social habits and the impact of speed on human perception (La caravana pasa, 1:151-170).
19 “Los modernos Ícaros” (La caravana pasa, 3:143-156), Darío’s eyewitness account of the explosion of the steerable balloon Pax and the dreadful deaths of its crew, recalls Paul Virilio’s ideas on dromological progress as being irremediably bound to a series of inevitable crashes (Speed and Politics).
20 On Darío’s confrontation with technology in this magazine, see Pineda.
21 Mundial Magazine, 40:368
22 The poem recalls the image of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of war. In 1914, the Mexican revolutionaries led by Villa and Zapata seized Mexico City.
23 Mundial Magazine, 32:107-113.
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Adela Pineda Franco
Adela Pineda Franco is a Professor of Latin American literature and film at Boston University. She is the author of Geopolíticas de la cultura finisecular en Buenos Aires, París y México: las revistas literarias y el Modernismo (2006), Steinbeck y Mexico. Una mirada cinematográfica en la era de la hegemonía estadounidense (2018), and The Mexican Revolution on the World Stage: Intellectuals and Film in the Twentieth Century (forthcoming).