PhD Candidate in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese’s Spanish Literature Program and WGSS minor

(Graduate Resident Spring 2025)

My dissertation focuses on the figure and ideas of Dominican intellectual Pedro Henríquez Ureña, recognized for widely influencing literary and cultural circles across Latin America, and his significance for influencing young intellectual masculinities within the Ateneo de la Juventud Mexicana (1909-1914). This group was one of the most important athenaeums of that time, formed by young intellectuals that later would come to be fundamental to the construction of Mexico’s Post-revolutionary period. Considering this, I propose that the Mexican intellectual projects during the 20th century cannot be understood outside of a Caribbean tradition of intellectual homosocial space carried on by Henríquez Ureña. I consider how he functioned as a mentor figure, in a way that guided them into the creation of a men-centered relation space. By examining correspondence, essays, the Ateneo’s posters, and programs, I also research how this influence over them survived in their writings and lives even after the Ateneo’s disappearance. I propose that homosociality did not only work as a patriarchal emphasis on who controls knowledge but also as an emotional circle that generated romantic friendships. Whintin I track models of male-male relationships that they followed and negotiated with, such as the platonic teacher-disciple relation, the Modernismo’s conceptualization of the “mundo interior”, the Oscar Wilde’s work and controversy, the arielismo movement by José Enrique Rodó, etc.