Abstract
“Helen Hunt Jackson … ha escrito quizás en Ramona nuestra novela” (In Ramona, Helen Hunt Jackson perhaps has written our novel) (Martí, Ramona 204).1 José Martí proposed this idea in 1887 upon the publication of his translation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s best-selling 1884 novel of race and culture clash in the U.S. Southwest, now a classic of Western American literature. However, there is no doubt that the great Cuban poet and independence activist already had in mind the notion of “nuestra América” (our America) as a strategy of Latin American resistance to mounting U.S. imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, though he would not articulate the concept until his classic essay “Nuestra América” was published in 1891.
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© 2009 Reginald Dyck and Cheli Reutter
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Irwin, R.M. (2009). Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona: A Transnational Reading of the Old West. In: Dyck, R., Reutter, C. (eds) Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230619548_9
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