“Grito de rebelión del Ideal”: the literary controversy of 1898 as a strategy for legitimizing Mexican modernism

Abstract

This essay will address the controversy of 1898 around Mexican modernism as a space for debate between intellectual groups, as a struggle for symbolic power in the cultural field to legitimize the formation of intellectual communities from a rhetorical and intellectual history perspective. Likewise, the aim is to show how the discourse of modernism vindicates Latin American and Mexican culture and language in this controversy, to incorporate them into the cultural tradition of the West. It gives them legitimacy within a political and social environment marked by criticism and the impetus for change. Modernists, then, are subjects aware of their political and cultural condition, which is why they discuss with arguments of an artistic nature, not only the cultural system, but, implicitly and relatedly, the political and social one.