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"Irritating, insufferable, admirable, stimulating, disappointing Rodó: . . . you are part of our family quarrels, and must bear with your disrespectful, equally disappointed, intuitive, incomplete nephews, living in a world that you helped define for us, and offered unto our revolt." —from the Prologue by Carlos Fuentes

First published in 1900 Uruguay, Ariel is Latin America's most famous essay on esthetic and philosophical sensibility, as well as its most discussed treatise on hemispheric relations. Though Rodó protested the interpretation, his allegorical conflict between Ariel, the lover of beauty and truth, and Caliban, the evil spirit of materialism and positivism, has come to be regarded as a metaphor for the conflicts and cultural differences between Latin America and the United States. Generations of statesmen, intellectuals, and literary figures have been formed by this book, either in championing its teachings or in reacting against them. This edition of Ariel, prepared especially with teachers and students in mind, contains a reader's guide to names, places, and important movements, as well as notes and a comprehensive annotated English/Spanish bibliography.

Centenary Subjects examines the ideological debates and didactic exercises in subject formation during the centenary era of independence (the decade of the 1910s)—the peak of arielismo—and proposes a new reading of the arielista archive that brings into focus the racial anxieties, epistemological and spiritual fissures, and iconoclastic agendas that structure, and at times smother, the ethos of that era.

Arielismo takes its name from José Enrique Rodó’s foundational essay Ariel (1900), a wide‑ranging gospel dedicated to Latin American youth that incited a cultural awakening under the banner of the spirit throughout the Americas at an ominous juncture—when the US co-opted the Cuban War of Independence in 1898, effectively rebranding it as the Spanish‑American War. Rodó’s optimistic message of transcendence as an antidote to the encroaching empire quickly became one of the most pervasive and malleable paradigms of regional empowerment, reverberating throughout a range of Latin Americanist projects in the twentieth and twenty‑first centuries.

Centenary Subjects recovers a series of important but understudied essays penned by arielista writers, radicals, pedagogues, prophets, and politicians of diverse stripes in the early twentieth century, and analyzes how, under the auspices of the arielista platform, young people emerged as historical subjects invested with unprecedented cultural capital, increasing political power, and an urgent mandate to break with the past and transform the sociopolitical and cultural landscape of their countries. But their respective designs harbor racial, epistemological, aesthetic, and anarchistic strains that bring into sharper relief the conflicting signals that the centenary subject had to parse with respect to race, reason, and rupture.